Read Linda Lael Miller Bundle for Free Online

agreed to do the book. Rosamond Dallas’s whereabouts, long a mystery to the world in general, were now known, thanks to the thoughtless remark he’d made to Ivan. Mitch knew without being told that if he didn’t undertake the project, his agent would send another writer to do it, and unless he missed his guess, that writer would be Lucetta White, a barracuda in Gucci’s.
    Lucetta was no lover of truth, and she made it a practice to ruin at least three careers and a marriage every day before breakfast, just to stay in top form. If she got hold of Rosamond’s story, the result would be a vicious disaster of a book that would ride the major best-seller lists for months.
    “Shay’s husband was a coach or a teacher or something,” Ivy said, jolting Mitch back to reality. “He was a lot older than she was, too. Anyway, he embezzled a small fortune from a high school in Cedar Landing, that’s a little place just over the state line, in Oregon.”
    “And?”
    “And Shay was pregnant at the time. She found out at her baby shower, if you can believe it. Somebody just walked in and said, ‘guess what?’”
    “My God.”
    “There was another woman involved, naturally.”
    Mitch was making mental notes; he would wait until later to ask his sister what had prompted her to divulge all this information. For the moment, he didn’t want to chance breaking the flow. “Does anybody know where they are, Shay’s ex-husband and this woman, I mean?”
    Ivy shrugged. “Nobody cares except the police. Shay received divorce papers from somewhere in Mexico a few weeks after he left, but that was over six years ago. The creep could be anyplace by now.”
    “Who was the other woman?”
    “Are you ready for this? It was the local librarian. Everybody thought she was so prim and proper and she turned out to be a mud wrestler at heart.”
    If it hadn’t been for an aching sense of the humiliation Shay must have suffered over the incident, Mitch would have laughed at Ivy’s description of the librarian. “Appearances are deceiving,” he said.
    “Are they, Mitch?” Ivy countered immediately. “I hope not, because when I look at you, I see a person I can trust.”
    “Why did you tell me about Shay’s past, Ivy? You were dead set against it a minute ago.”
    Ivy lifted her chin and began methodically removing frilled toothpicks from the sections of her sandwich. “I just thought you should know why she’s…why she’s shy.”
    Mitch wondered if “shy” was the proper word to describe Shay Kendall. Even though she’d wept in his arms the night before, on the bench of a rickety backyard picnic table, he sensed that she had a steel core. She was clearly a survivor. Hadn’t she picked herself up after what must have been a devastating blow, found herself a good job, supported herself and her son? “Didn’t Rosamond do anything to help Shay after Kendall took off with his mud wrestler?”
    Ivy stopped chewing and swallowed, her eyes snapping. “She didn’t lift a finger. Shay makes excuses for her, but I think the illustrious Ms. Dallas must have been an egotistical, self-centered bitch.”
    Mitch considered that a distinct possibility, but he decided to reserve judgment until he had the facts.
    After they had eaten their club sandwiches, Mitch drove his sister back to Reese Motors and her job. One hand on the inside handle of the car door, she gazed at her brother with wide, frightened eyes. “All those things in your books, Mitch—did you really know all those terrible people?”
    He had hedged enough for one day, he decided. “Yes. And unless you want all those ‘terrible people’ to find out who and where I am, you’d better learn to be a little more discreet.”
    Tears sparkled in Ivy’s eyes and shimmered on her lower lashes. “If anything happened to you—”
    “Nothing is going to happen to me.” How many times had he said that to Reba, his ex-wife? In the end, words hadn’t been enough; she hadn’t been