Out of Town Bride. Kara Lennox

mother shared. The world might be crashing down around her ears, but that didn’t mean she had to take it with a shiny nose and flyaway hair.

      “Are you going to tell me what you were doing in New Orleans with your ‘sorority sister’?” McPhee asked, apparently unwilling to be ignored.

      So, he hadn’t bought her cover story. But she’d had to come up with something quickly when McPhee had tracked her down hundreds of miles away from where she was supposed to be. She’d already been caught in a bald-faced lie—for weeks she’d been telling her mother she was at a spa in Dallas, working out her prewedding jitters.

      “I was shopping in New Orleans for my trousseau,” she tried again. “Brenna’s a fashion consultant.”

      McPhee laughed out loud at that one. “Lord help us if you start dressing like her.”

      All right, so Brenna was a little avant-garde with her spiky hair, miniskirts and platform shoes.

      “Anyway,” McPhee continued, “why would a fashion consultant be wanted by the FBI? Come on, Sonya, who is she? And don’t tell me she’s an old friend. I know all your old friends.”

      “You think you know everything about me, don’t you? Well, you don’t. I met Brenna at the spa.”

      “I checked with Elizabeth Arden. You haven’t been there in over three years.”

      “I went to a different spa this time.” The lies were stacking up—and none of them were flying with McPhee.

      He didn’t respond, merely stared her down with those incongruously dark-brown eyes. His eyes had always fascinated her, so dark when his hair was blond, and so blasted knowing, as if he could see straight to her most intimate thoughts.

      She resisted the urge to squirm under his gaze. She was an adult, she reminded herself. “I have private reasons for my trip to New Orleans, and they don’t concern you.”

      “Very well, Miss Patterson,” he said in his Jeeves-the-butler voice. “Forgive me for overstepping my bounds.”

      She hated it when he accused her of acting like mistress of the manor. She wasn’t the class-conscious one around here, after all. In fact, she’d once tried to erase the social and financial barriers that separated them. McPhee was the one who had erected most of those barriers, making them more unbreachable than a twenty-foot concrete wall.

      “What are you going to do about the wedding?” McPhee asked, abruptly changing tacks. “It’s only two months away.”

      Sonya felt a hot flush at the mention of the wedding. Oh, Lord, she should have called it off a long time ago. “We’ll consider the wedding on hold until we have an idea when my mother will recover.”

      “I think that’s wise.”

      “You sound almost pleased. I thought you were looking forward to being unemployed.” Muffy had agreed that, much as it pained her, McPhee’s services would no longer be needed after Sonya was married.

      “I don’t plan to be unemployed,” McPhee said curtly. “You might want to talk to June. She’ll have to find a way to announce the wedding postponement without raising any alarms.” June was her mother’s secretary, who always dealt with anything having to do with the media.

      “Has the press been nosing around?” Sonya asked.

      “June issued a statement that Mrs. Patterson was going in for routine tests. But there’s been one persistent magazine reporter who isn’t buying it.”

      “Let me guess. Leslie Frazier?”

      “That’s the one.”

      Ugh. Leslie Frazier had a nose for scandal, and she worked for Houston Living, a gossipy society magazine. If she got wind of Sonya’s disappearing act, she’d have a field day. And when she found out the truth—that the marriage would never take place at all, followed by the truth about her purported fiancé, Marvin Carter III—she would turn Sonya into a laughingstock.

      Sonya knew she couldn’t stop the real story from coming out eventually. It was only a matter of time. But she wished she could have some control over how and when the news broke.

      The truth was, Marvin Carter III was a con man with multiple “fiancées.” Weeks earlier, Marvin had disappeared from Sonya’s life, along with her jewelry, her furs and all her money.

      Yet she hadn’t found the courage to tell her mother she’d been jilted and fleeced, and wedding plans continued like a runaway train.

      Chapter One

      Two weeks later John-Michael McPhee watched Sonya silently for a few moments. She sat at her mother’s bedside, holding Muffy’s limp hand, head bowed. Her artfully highlighted blond hair, which she usually kept pinned up in some elaborate arrangement, had long ago fallen from its confines and now hung in shimmering waves to her shoulders, reminding him of when she was a teenager.

      At first, it had seemed that Muffy would recover quickly from her heart attack. She’d been doing so well, in fact, that Sonya had felt it was okay to leave town for a couple of days to help her mysterious new friend, Brenna, out of a jam up in Dallas. But as soon as Sonya had returned, Muffy had undergone bypass surgery, and her recovery hadn’t gone well. She’d contracted a persistent infection that had kept her in Intensive Care.

      John-Michael hadn’t seen Sonya so devastated since her father’s death when she was ten. Back then, the transformation of that bright, sunny chatterbox to the thin, solemn, pale little wraith floating about the estate had nearly broken his teenage heart, and he’d tried everything in his power to make her happy again.

      Now, however, there wasn’t much he could do; she wasn’t a child to be distracted—especially not by him. He was one of her least favorite people these days.

      He cleared his throat. Sonya looked over at him, for once open and vulnerable. She hadn’t expressed that much feeling in years—not around him, anyway.

      “You really should go home and get some sleep,” John-Michael said. Sonya had been sitting by Muffy’s bedside for almost twenty-four hours.

      “But she woke up and spoke to me a few minutes ago. She said she was…sorry for getting sick so close to my wedding.” Sonya’s eyes filled with tears. “That was the first thing she wanted to say to me.”

      John-Michael felt the urge to put his arms around Sonya and comfort her. He knew she felt guilty for being gone when her mother was suddenly struck ill, and for not returning his urgent calls. And there was no one else she could turn to for comfort. Muffy and Sonya had no other family. They had no siblings in either generation.

      But Sonya would not welcome comfort from him.

      Her fiancé should be with her now, John-Michael thought with a surge of anger. But Marvin, the insensitive lout, was halfway around the globe and apparently couldn’t be bothered.

      “Your mother wouldn’t want you to wear yourself to a frazzle,” John-Michael said.

      “I’m staying,” she said stubbornly. “If you’re tired, go on home. I’ll be fine.”

      John-Michael gritted his teeth. For ten years he’d hovered over Sonya, knowing her whereabouts at all times. He’d followed her at a discreet distance whenever she dated; he’d slept in his car outside strange houses when she’d elected to spend the night away from home. He’d sat in doctors’ waiting rooms and outside college classrooms, watching as she lived her life, wondering if he would ever get to live his.

      Sonya hadn’t needed a bodyguard. She’d never been threatened or stalked, and she was in no more danger than any other wealthy young woman. But Muffy couldn’t bear to take chances with her only daughter, not after her husband had been kidnapped and killed, targeted due to his wealth. The murderers were safely in prison, but Muffy worried it could happen again.

      It wasn’t