The Stranger: The Heroes of Heyday (Harlequin Superromance No. 1266) by Kathleen O`Brien Read Free Book Online

agitated she almost drove her Volkswagen into the faux-marble haunchesof one of the zebra statues that stood guard over the winding, green-bordered entry.
    A caddy working the seventh hole glared at her, shocked that anyone would disrupt the pastoral harmony of this elite club.
    But Mallory didn’t care. She almost wished she had hit them. Those zebra statues were stupid.
    Not as stupid, however, as she was.
    Yessir, Mallory Rackham took the blue ribbon in Abject Stupidity.
    She shook her head, muttering to herself as she guided the car more carefully up toward the clubhouse. What fantasy world had she been living in? Had she really believed the blackmailer would just send her a nice thank-you note for the thousand-dollar payment and then scratch her off his list? Hadn’t she ever read a detective novel, or watched a crime show on TV? Heck, a five-year-old could probably tell you that, once you paid a blackmailer, he’d just keep coming back for more.
    But not Mallory. Idiot that she was, she’d actually been stunned to hear the man’s electronic voice on her telephone again this afternoon.
    He’d told her he wanted another thousand dollars. Only two weeks after the first payment.
    When she’d asked him where he thought a small-town, small-business owner was going to get that kind of money, he had laughed—that horrible, tinny laugh she remembered so well.
    Maybe, he’d said, she should consider taking upwhere Mindy had left off. Mallory might not be a teenager anymore, but she was still a good-looking woman. Did she know how to handle a whip?
    Without thinking, Mallory had slammed down the phone, too furious to calculate the wisdom of such a move. But almost instantly she regretted it. During the long two or three minutes she’d waited to see if he’d call back, she was racked with fear that he might not, that the next call he made might be to Freddy Earnshaw.
    Or what if he’d heard that Tyler Balfour was writing a book? How much, she wondered, would Tyler pay for juicy information like this?
    Finally, the phone had run again. She picked it up, her fingers trembling. The metallic voice was colder and harder than ever. That little insult had cost her, he’d said slowly. Double the pain. This time he wanted two thousand dollars. Tomorrow.
    But she didn’t have two thousand dollars. And, because she was a shortsighted fool, she hadn’t made any provisions for getting it. She could have taken another loan on the business, maybe, if she could persuade Doug Metzler at the bank to stretch the income/debt ratios a little. Or she could have accepted one of the offers for credit cards that clogged her mailbox daily. She could have sold some of her own collection of antique books—well, all her collection, probably.
    But the point was, if she hadn’t been such an idiot, she could have done something.
    Instead, she was going to have to get desperate.She was going to have to borrow the money from Roddy.
    Not that Roddy cared. Roddy had been born middle-class, with a curious mind that got him into a ton of trouble as a child but had made him several million dollars as an adult. Roddy was always inventing things—things that weren’t necessarily sensible enough to make it to the market, but which were just interesting enough to bring in huge option purchases from big businesses.
    His latest idea had been a “flip-flop clip,” which kept the cuff of your slacks from tucking under when you wore sandals. Even his best friend, Kieran McClintock, had laughed at that one, but when a major beachwear company had paid him a hundred thousand dollars for it, Roddy had thrown a bikini-beach party at the country club and invited the entire town of Heyday.
    So, after running around mentally like a rat in a maze for a couple of hours, she’d finally called Roddy on his cell, taken a deep breath, and asked if she could borrow two thousand dollars.