Hollywood Wedding

The recruiter had shrugged and shoved a stack of papers across his desk.

“Read ’em, sign ’em, and we’re in business.” As Zach had reached for the papers, the man’s callused hand slapped down hard on his wrist. “Just be sure you know what you’re doing, son.”

Zach had pulled his hand loose and looked up, his eyes suddenly the color of a storm-tossed ocean.

“I’m not anybody’s son,” he’d said coldly, “and I know exactly what I’m doing.”

But, Zach thought now, he hadn’t known a damn. He smiled ruefully as he began dressing. Boot camp and Parris Island had seemed a worse hell than the one he’d escaped—except that at the end of it, the Corps had welcomed him to its bosom in a way his father never had.

For the first time in his young life, Zach had found a home.

By the time he left the Marines four years later, he had a sense of discipline, a yearning for success and a twenty-thousand-dollar stake. On two continents and in half a dozen Corps barracks, his take-no-prisoners attitude, coupled with his head for numbers, had turned him into a steady winner at high-stakes poker.

After that, it was easy. The money had seen him through a couple of years of college, where his finance courses had taught him two things.

The first was that he knew more by instinct about stocks and bonds and market shares than his professors.

The second was that playing poker wasn’t all that different from playing the markets, it was just that the markets paid off bigger.

At twenty-three, Zach had left school. He’d dabbled in arbitrage for a year, in high-risk corporate takeovers for another. At twenty-five, with a couple of million dollars under his belt, he’d decided to settle down. He’d bought himself a seat on the Exchange.

Now, at thirty, he was head of his own firm, one of the most successful young stockbrokers in America.

And one of the most bored.

Zach frowned and paused with his hand on the hanger that held one of the three almost identical dark blue suits he’d had Howell express here from Boston. It was the truth. He was bored out of his mind. It was terrible to admit, but if there’d been one benefit to this last week, it was that it had, at least, ripped him away from the unvarying routine of his days.

He shook his head. What was the matter with him? He’d come here straight from the Himalayas, where he’d been anything but bored, skiing a mountain that pierced the clouds and making it—well, almost making it— with…with whatever her name had been.

What he needed was to get back to work. He had to get back to work. There were fat-cat clients to wine and dine, a dozen dull meetings to chair…

“Hell,” he said, under his breath, and he reached quickly past the three suits, hanging shoulder to shoulder like the three Marx Brothers, pulled out the Harris tweed jacket he’d taken with him to the Himalayas and strode from the bedroom.

The house was quiet, just as it had always been. Even when he and Cade and Grant were kids, they’d tried not to make any noise here, automatically saving their rough-and-tumble for the stables or the endless lawns and pastures. There was something about the Landon mansion, Zach thought as he made his way down the wide staircase, that didn’t inspire the sound of childish voices lifted in glee.

It didn’t inspire the sound of voices at all, he thought, his mouth tightening. The dozens of guests who’d come back here after the funeral had stood around whispering to each other, and there’d been no doubt in Zach’s mind that it was the house they were deferring to and not the occasion.

What an incredible circus the funeral had been! Judges, politicos, bankers, CEOs and board presidents from damned near all the Fortune 500 companies in the West had shown up, all of them looking solemn—and all of them trying to figure out which Landon son was the one who was going to take Charles’s place.

A smile tugged at Zach’s lips as he followed the wonderful aroma of Stella’s coffee toward the dining room. What would all those bigwigs say when they learned that they wouldn’t have the chance to genuflect to any of the Landons? Yesterday, after the reading of their father’s will, the brothers had taken all of two minutes to agree that not a one of them wanted any part of Landon Enterprises.

Zach would check out Landon’s corporate worth and put a price on its head. Grant would handle the legal end. Cade would decide which lost and forgotten, poverty-stricken dots on the map were most in need of hospitals and schools, courtesy of the sale.

And that would be the end of it. Charles Landon’s gift to his sons would go the way of the dodo bird, a fate it surely deserved. Zach and his brothers would be free; only Kyra would keep any ties to the old man, but that was as it should be.

His face softened as he thought of his sister. She was a sweetheart, the light of all their lives. He could hear her voice now, soft and musical, drifting from the dining room.

“…still can’t believe Father left the place to me,” she was saying.

Zach smiled as he stepped into the room.

“Why wouldn’t he have?” He dropped a kiss on the top of her head and made his way toward the coffee urn. “You adore this place, baby. It would have been wrong if he’d left it to anyone else.”

Kyra looked up and smiled. “Well,” she said, “don’t you look handsome this morning.”

Zach smiled back at her, even if it wasn’t easy to do. Of all the gloomy rooms in the house, he’d always disliked this one the most. He’d suffered through endless inquisitions and endless criticisms at that big mahogany table.

It suddenly seemed like old timesthe dark furniture, the sideboard overladen with food no one would eat. Lord, he couldn’t wait to get out of this place.

He looked at Cade, who was seated at the table with a cup of coffee in his hands.

“Where’s Grant?” Zach shot back his cuff and looked at his watch. “I thought he’d be back from that meeting with the old man’s administrative assistant by now.”

Cade cocked an eyebrow and got to his feet. “And a charming good morning to you, too.”

“It’s late, in case you hadn’t noticed. I’ve got an eleven o’clock flight to Boston.”

“And you’re going to make it out of uniform?” Cade shook his head. “I thought all you banker types signed a pledge that said you had to go around in pinstripes.”

“I’m not a banker, I’m a stockbroker. And go ahead, pal. Laugh all you want. Just remember that in a couple of days you’ll be smiling prettily at an English version of me, trying to convince him to invest in your latest search for maybe-it-exists-and-maybe-it-doesn’t oil in— where’d you say you were going this time?”

“The North Sea,” Cade said. “And there’s no maybe about it, my friend. It’s at least as sure a bet as those investments you push.”

Zach smiled at the familiar banter.

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. And I suspect that if your fat-cat clients knew I could still beat you arm wrestling without breaking a sweat——”

“Still? What do you mean, still? You never beat me, not once.”

“Prove it.”

“My pleasure. Just let me take off my jacket

and——”

“Dammit, what is this? Are we kids or adults?”

The Landons all swung toward the door. Grant was standing just inside the room, glaring balefully.

“Grant?” Kyra said. “What’s wrong?”

Grant tossed a manila folder on the table, strode to the sideboard and poured himself a cup of coffee.

“Nothing’s wrong.”

A lie if ever I heard one, Zach thought. Grant looked like a man who’d just had the ground cut out from under him.

“Well?” Cade asked. “What did Bayliss want to talk about?”

Grant’s lips compressed. “Trouble.”

“Trouble?” Zach frowned. “What sort of trouble?”

“This sort,” Grant said.

He took the folder from the table, drew two stacks of papers from it and handed one to each of his brothers. Kyra looked at him as if she was waiting for him to hand her something, too. When he didn’t, she turned away and walked slowly to the window.

The minutes passed while Zach and Cade leafed through the papers Grant had given them. Finally, Cade looked up.

“What is this crap?”

“Exactly what it seems to be. Father bought an oil company in Dallas——”

“You mean, he bought a disaster.” Cade tossed the papers he’d been reading on the table. “And he let it go from bad to worse. Now it’s damned near bankrupt.”

Zach looked up and frowned. “Oil company? Hell, man, what are you talking about? What I’ve got here is an acquisitions profile on some two-bit Hollywood production company named Triad. The old man saddled Landon Enterprises with it, and now it’s about to sink like a stone.”

“You’ve each got different reports drawn up by Bayliss, but the bottom line’s the same. Father bought these companies not long before he took ill, and they seem to have gotten lost in the shuffle”

“Yeah,” Zach said, “well, when this Triad outfit goes down for the third time, it’s going to take lots of Landon dough with it.”

“The same for Gordon Oil,” Cade said. “Landon’s gonna take a nasty hit when it dies.”

Grant’s expression grew even more grim. “Terrific,” he snarled. “Landon went into the two firms to bail them out. Instead, we seem to have made them worse.”

Cade’s brows rose. “What do you mean, ‘we’, big brother?”

“Exactly what I said. As of yesterday, we are Landon Enterprises. And we will be, until we find a buyer.”

Zach looked at Grant, then at the papers he’d dumped on the table.

“Hell,” he muttered, as he gathered them up.

There was no point in arguing with Grant’s assessment. He was right, and the three of them knew it. If the Hollywood outfit and that Dallas company went belly up, they’d leave a blotch of red ink on Landon Enterprises’ ledgers big enough to scare off any potential buyer.

Something had to be done, and quickly.

“Okay,” Cade said, “tell Bayliss——”

“Bayliss retired, as of this morning.” Grant smiled at the looks on his brothers’ faces. “He said he was too old to face another Colorado winter. He bought himself a house in the Virgin Islands. He’s going to spend the rest of his days on the beach, sipping pina coladas.”

Zach cleared his throat. “I’ll phone Goodwin, then. Bayliss’s second in command. He can——”

“Goodwin’s tied up with a dozen other things.”

Cade tossed the Gordon Oil report onto the table. “Terrific,” he snapped. “What are we supposed to do now?”

“Oh, for heaven’s sake!” The men swung around. Kyra was glaring at them as if she couldn’t believe what she’d been hearing. “What’s the matter with you guys? Are you dumb, or what?” She shook her head. “And don’t waste your breath telling me I don’t know what I’m talking about. A child could figure this mess out!”

“Kyra,” Zach said gently, “baby——”

“You’re the financial whiz in this family,” Kyra said, stabbing a finger in his direction. “You could fly out to the coast, take a look at Triad’s books and decide what can be done to help it.”

“Me? Don’t be silly. I’ve got people waiting for me in Boston. I can’t just——”

“And you,” she said to Cade, “the genius who knows all about oil…Would it be too much to hope that maybe, just maybe, you might be the one to check things out in Dallas?”

“Impossible! I’ve business in London. I can’t——”

“She’s right,” Grant said. “You two could get a handle on things faster than anybody else.”

There was a moment’s silence. Cade and Zach looked at each other, and then Zach threw up his arms in defeat.

“Two days,” he snapped, “and not a second more.”

Cade blew out his breath. “Yeah. Two days, and then…Wait just a minute.” He swung toward Grant. “What about you? Don’t tell me you’re the only one of us who gets to walk away from this mess?”

Color rose in Grant’s cheeks. “Not exactly. It seems a friend of Father’s named him guardian of his kid a couple of years ago.”

Zach and Cade began to smile. “Don’t tell me,” Cade said.

“Listen, we can change jobs, if you want. The twelve-year-old for the oil company or the Hollywood studio…?”

“No,” Zach said quickly, “no, that’s okay, pal. I’ll deal with Hollywood, Cade’ll handle Dallas” His lips twitched. “And I bet you’re going to make one hell of a terrific baby-sitter.”

Cade tried not to laugh, but a sound burst from his lips. Grant swung toward him.

“This is not funny,” he choked.

But it was, and they all knew it. The brothers began to laugh, and then they moved into a tight circle, clapped each other on the back and joined right hands as they had when they were boys.

“To the Deadeye Defenders,” they said solemnly. They grinned happily at each other, and then Cade sighed.

“Time to get started.”

Zach nodded. “Yeah. I’ll see you guys before I leave.”

He punched Grant lightly in the shoulder, snapped an imaginary right hook at Cade’s chin, blew a kiss to Kyra and made his way to his room to pack.

It was going on ten o’clock. If he was going to make that eleven o’clock flight to Boston…

Actually, it made more sense to fly straight out to California. He was halfway there already; besides, if he went to Boston, he’d only get tied up in a dozen things. And this mess the old man had created had to be dealt with now, not next week or next month.

With a sigh, he sank down on the edge of his bed and scanned the report again. Triad had been privately owned by a man named Tolland. It had never made any real money, although it had at least been able to keep its head above water. About three years ago, its puny profits had finally turned to losses.

Charles had bought the company some months ago. As for who was running it for him…Zach frowned. It was a woman named Eve Palmer, and she had to be doing a piss-poor job because Triad was in its death struggles.

Zach stuffed the report into his suitcase, locked it and reached for the phone. He’d call the office, ask for more detailed info to be delivered by courier to the airport.

While he was at it, he’d make a couple of other calls, including one to Howell telling him to pack something besides those damned dark blue suits and express them to L.A. as soon as he had his hotel arrangements squared away. And his portable computer—he’d need that, too. It was obvious, now that he’d read the report more carefully, that two days on the coast was optimistic.

But five days would surely do it. Triad was dying, and he had dealt with dying companies before, back in the early days when he’d made fast money by moving in and administering the coup de grace.

Zach picked up his suitcase, walked briskly to the door and stepped out into the hallway.

By this time next week, Triad Productions would be history.

CHAPTER TWO

IT WAS the kind of day that made people happy they lived in southern California. The sky was blue, the sun was bright, and the temperature hovered in the gentle seventies.

“Fantastic,” said the tourists outside Disneyland.

“Terrific,” said the roller bladers on Ocean Front Walk.

“Awesome,” agreed the surfers at Redondo Beach.

“Rats,” muttered Eve Palmer as she sat trapped in bumper-to-bumper traffic. Her car had not moved a mile in the past twenty minutes. The only thing moving was her temper, and it was rising as rapidly as the temperature inside the car.

Whatever had happened to simple things, like windows you rolled up and down at will? Her old Chevy had had them; you could let in air with a crank of the wrist. But this car that Charles had insisted on buying for her did not. Eve had not wanted it. She didn’t need a silver car that looked like a Batmobile, she’d told him, but Charles had disagreed.

“The head of Triad must look prosperous,” he’d said, as he’d handed her the keys to a vintage Jaguar.

The car had, at first, won her over with its simple but elegant styling. But it was also a money-eating monster, as she’d discovered last week, when the windows, air-conditioning and engine had all begun to malfunction.

A white-coated technician named Hans, looking more like a surgeon than a mechanic, had poked and prodded at its innards. Finally, in hushed tones, he’d pronounced the patient ill but repairable—to the tune of three thousand dollars and three weeks in the shop.

Fortunately for Eve, he’d misinterpreted her sudden pallor.

“If doing without your automobile will be a hardship, Miss Palmer, we can provide you with a temporary replacement.”

Eve had opened her mouth, ready to tell him that the hardship would be coming up with three thousand bucks in this lifetime, but then she’d remembered the second thing that Charles had taught her.

“Never let ’em see you sweat,” he’d said.

So she’d smiled, shoved her oversize sunglasses off the bridge of her small, straight nose and up into her blond hair and said that it just wouldn’t do, not when she was about to begin filming Hollywood Wedding.

“With Dex Burton,” she’d added, because that was an axiom she’d figured out herself. You got publicity wherever you could, and the fact that she hadn’t yet signed Dex—and probably never would—was no one’s business but her own.

Hans had almost clicked his heels with respect.

“I suppose it sounds silly,” she’d said in a way that made it clear she didn’t think it silly at all, “but the car’s my lucky charm. The repairs will have to wait until we’re done shooting.”

Hans, who’d dealt with Hollywood’s finest for years, knew they were as superstitious as his Gypsy forebears. Still, he’d permitted himself an upraised eyebrow.

“Of course, Miss Palmer. But you understand that the car will not work dependably until repairs are made?”

“Certainly,” Eve had said and driven off jauntily, as if she’d always longed to pilot a motorized sauna.

Now here she sat, the AC barely wheezing, the windows only willing to open an inch, the engine giving an ominous shudder every few minutes. Her hair was damp, her silk suit was plastered to her skin—and that wasn’t the worst of it.

This was the last day of filming The Ghost Stallion, the hideous movie she’d inherited from her predecessor. She ought to be out on location, making certain nothing else went wrong. Instead, she was going to be trapped in her office while Zachary Landon, Charles’s son, peered into cabinets, counted paper clips and tsk-tsked over every dime she’d spent.

It had been shock enough to learn of Charles’s death, but to find out that his son was flying in to check up on her…

His accountant son, the one Charles had mentioned when Eve had tried to explain how East Coast bankers had almost destroyed Triad. She hadn’t been sure a man like Charles would understand, but he had.

“Some money men have no imagination at all,” he’d said.

Eve had sighed with relief. “Exactly. Filmmaking is a unique business, Mr. Landon. Mr. Tolland tried explaining that to the bank’s accountants, but——”

“Call me Charles, please. Yes, I can imagine what you went through with the bean counters. Hell, when I think that my own son is one of them…”

“An accountant?”

“Zachary,” Charles had said, his face darkening, “in with a bunch of effete Boston jackasses instead of taking his rightful place at my side. It’s enough to send my blood pressure through the top of the tube.”

Which was pretty much what it was doing to hers now, Eve thought as she edged the car forward.

Charles had understood instinctively that it would take time, money and a few breathtaking risks to save Triad. His accountant son would not.

“Damn,” she said, and gave the steering wheel a sharp whack with her fist.

Traffic began moving and Eve slipped the car into gear and urged it forward. Somehow, she’d have to make him understand. If only she could get to the office before he began poking his ink-smudged fingertips into things.

The cellular phone in the console rang. Eve snatched it up.

It was her secretary. Eve listened, the expression on her face going from concern to dismay to despair. “Are you sure, Emma? Must I really go out there?”

Yes. She must. Eve grimaced, snapped out a few orders and slammed down the phone.

There was a problem on the set again, a disagreement between the movie’s egotistical male lead and Francis Cranshaw, its equally asinine director. She had no choice but to deal with it before she dealt with Zachary Landon.

Men, she thought in disgust, men and their damned arrogance.

An opening suddenly appeared in the next lane. Eve accelerated hard and swung into it, cutting off a black Porsche that was trying to do the same thing. The Porsche’s brakes squealed as she shot past it.

Eve glanced into her mirror as the Porsche’s horn gave a long, angry blast. She could see nothing of the other driver except mirrored sunglasses above a thinned, angry mouth and an aggressive jaw.

He said something—yelled it, probably. Eve didn’t have to hear the words to know they were not pleasant.

Too bad, she thought. With a little smile of grim pleasure, she stepped down on the gas and left the Porsche and its driver engulfed in a cloud of black smoke.

Zach let out a string of words that should have turned the air blue. It had been a woman driving the silver Jaguar—he’d just had time to see the bright gold hair before she’d left him eating dust.

His fingers tightened on the steering wheel of the Porsche. For one wild moment, he fantasized about speeding up, forcing the silver car onto the shoulder of the road, hauling out the driver and…

And what? Slugging women wasn’t his style, not even women like the one he’d spent the flight out here reading about.

Eve Palmer, he thought, and a muscle knotted in his jaw.

He sighed and loosened his white-knuckled grip on the steering wheel. This was not shaping up as a good day. Everything that could go wrong had, from the minute he’d hit the Denver airport. His plane had been late getting off the ground, the ride had been bumpy, and the much-touted in-flight telephone had worked only after the flight engineer had put in an appearance with a screwdriver and a roll of duct tape.

But the phone had worked then, well enough to bring Zach the information he’d needed to fill in the holes in the Triad file. What he’d learned had not made him happy.

Triad’s costs were up, its profits down, and it was easy to see why. His first guess had been right. The CEO, Eve Palmer, was about as qualified to head the company as she was to perform brain surgery.

“A woman CEO?” Cade had said, in the couple of minutes they’d had to compare notes this morning. His brother had grinned. “Yeah, I’ve got one to deal with in Dallas, too. When will these broads admit they don’t belong in business?”

Zach didn’t think that way. Women drivers were one thing, but he had no problem with women in the boardroom—if their ability was what had got them there.

And that was the problem. Eve Palmer had not climbed the corporate ladder, she’d scaled it on her back in a tangle of silken sheets. It was a mixed metaphor, but how else could you describe a woman who’d won her spot at Triad by becoming Charles Landon’s lover?

The facts were indisputable, starting with the file itself and some notes in his father’s hand.

“The Palmer woman is beautiful,” Charles had written. “Clever, and more than ambitious.”

Zach snorted. Calling her ambitious was understating it. The woman was twenty-five years old. She’d shown up in Hollywood in her teens, apparently from nowhere. Like a million other girls with a million other dreams, she’d been determined to become an actress. But she hadn’t figured on the endless supply of other Eves and Kims and Winonas who arrived on almost every bus.

Undeterred, she had taken other jobs.

She’d modeled. She’d waitressed. She’d sold panty hose and makeup. She’d been a secretary in an office and learned word processing, and in between, she’d even managed to land walk-ons in a couple of movies Zach had never heard of.