The Vampire Affair. Livia Reasoner

the world he trusted…and sometimes he kept his distance even from them.

      He wished he had kept his distance from Charlotte. He wished that every day of his life.

      “How did the meeting go?” Max asked, and Michael was grateful for the question since it got his mind off those painful memories.

      “All right. The lawyer said his client wasn’t interested in selling, but we all know what that means.”

      Max grunted. “Everybody’s got their price. You just have to find it.”

      “Exactly.” Michael paused, then went on. “Something interesting did happen on my way out of the building.”

      “Besides having a hot lady reporter chasing you, you mean?”

      Michael tried to ignore the reference to how hot Jessie Morgan was, even though images filled his mind. Her long legs in those sleek-fitting jeans. Her breasts in that silk shirt. Her dark, intriguing eyes…especially those eyes. He forced the images away.

      “Carl Williams tried to kill me.”

      “Son of a—” The limo lurched a little as Max instinctively hit the brakes. “Williams? He’s in town?”

      “Not anymore,” Michael said. “Only his body. It’s at the bottom of an elevator shaft now.”

      “Huh.” Max shook his head as he resumed piloting the limo through Dallas traffic with sure, steady skill. “I told you I should have gone upstairs with you. I guess you handled things all right, though, or you wouldn’t be here.”

      “That’s right.” Michael fingered the tear in the leather briefcase, annoyed that he would have to replace it. He wasn’t sure why that bothered him; he could afford another briefcase, even a custom-made one like this. He could afford a thousand just like it and never even miss the money.

      Maybe it wasn’t the briefcase, or the resort deal, or the fact that his enemies were on his trail. Maybe it was the flicker of something he hadn’t felt in a long time, something he didn’t want to feel. In their brief conversation, even though he had done his best to brush her off, Jessie Morgan had roused something in him, and not just the physical stirrings of desire to which he was no more immune than any other man in the presence of a beautiful woman.

      He had wanted to talk to her, he realized now. He’d wanted to open up to her. Could be that she simply had the reporter’s knack of getting people to say more than they should.

      But just in case it was more than that, just in case she had stirred up something within him that was better left dormant, he was damned glad that he would never see her again.

      It wasn’t enough, Jessie thought. It wasn’t nearly enough. She couldn’t get even a news item out of the information she had about Michael Brandt, let alone a feature. She sat at the kitchen table in her studio apartment with her laptop open and connected to the Internet, searching for something she could add to her file about him.

      No reporter had ever been able to determine exactly where or when he had been born, leading to speculation that Michael Brandt wasn’t even his real name. The press had first noticed him in Europe about ten years earlier, when he was apparently in his early twenties. Despite his youth he had quickly made a name for himself on the Grand Prix circuit as a daring and often victorious driver. Evidently he had plenty of money to start with, because from the first he stayed in the finest hotels and squired around the loveliest young women on the Continent. His faint Midwestern accent marked him as unmistakably American, though.

      He had returned to the States and continued to race, but in addition he sought the thrills of the stock market and the financial wars. Real estate, computers, communications, other high-tech electronics—Michael Brandt had a finger in all those pies. Everything he touched seemed to turn to gold. And if that wasn’t enough, he was linked romantically with beautiful singers and Hollywood actresses and heiresses. He was the proverbial young man who had it all.

      But who was he, really? And where had he come from? Jessie was determined to find out, because her readers wanted to know. And maybe someday if she broke enough big stories—even if they were in the pages of a tabloid like Super-nova—the editors at a real newspaper would notice her, would look beyond the impoverished childhood on the reservation and the education at a junior college and a second-rate state university and see her potential as a reporter and writer.

      She might have lived up to that potential already if she had been able to accept the scholarship to Oklahoma University that had been offered to her as a senior in high school. Unfortunately, it was a private scholarship endowed by one of the local oil tycoons. Jessie’s writing on her school newspaper had caught his eye, he claimed. But it was really her looks that had caught his eye, and once she realized that the scholarship carried a high price tag, she’d turned it down flat and settled for the best education she and Nana Rose could pay for.

      She still carried that bitter disappointment around with her, though, and had never forgotten that you couldn’t trust rich people who thought they could buy whatever they wanted.

      In the meantime, her freelance work kept the bills paid—barely—and she knew how important it was to keep her editors happy, their thirst for sensationalism quenched.

      Maybe Michael Brandt was a space alien, she told herself with a wry smile. Or was possessed by the spirit of Nostradamus. Yeah, that would explain how he’d been so successful in the stock market. He could predict the future.

      Her cell phone beeped.

      She picked it up and looked at the screen then smiled as she recognized the number. She thumbed the button to answer the call and said, “Hello, Nana.”

      “Let me guess,” her grandmother said. “You’re working again when you should be out enjoying your youth.”

      “I’m working so I can pay the bills this month,” Jessie said.

      “My bills as well as yours. I feel like I’m stealing from you.”

      “Don’t be ridiculous. I could never pay back everything I owe you.”

      Nana Rose had raised her on the Cherokee reservation in Oklahoma, taking Jessie in when her father had died of complications brought on by his alcoholism and her mother had taken off…somewhere. Jessie never knew for sure where her mother had gone or what had happened to her. All she knew was that from the age of seven, the only real parent she’d had was Nana Rose, her father’s mother.

      It was Nana Rose who had worked two jobs to support them, Nana Rose who had denied many of her own needs to save the money to send Jessie to school. True, her education wasn’t going to impress anybody, but it was the best Nana Rose could afford and Jessie was determined not to let her grandmother down. She was going to fulfill her dream and be a respected, successful reporter…one of these days.

      “What are you working on now?” Nana Rose asked. She took a keen interest in Jessie’s career and had ever since Jessie left the rez and moved to Dallas. As soon as Jessie started getting assignments and making a little money, she began sending some of it back home, over Nana Rose’s emphatic objections.

      “I’m trying to write a profile of Michael Brandt.”

      “Who?”

      “He’s some ruggedly handsome, mysterious tycoon who’s supposed to be dating Angelica Boudreau.”

      “Oh, her! She goes through men like they were tissues.”

      Jessie had to laugh. “Yeah, but Brandt claims he doesn’t even know her, let alone date her. We’ll see. I haven’t given up digging for the truth just yet.”

      “No, you never gave up, even when you were a little girl. I remember a time—”

      Jessie didn’t want to be rude, but she knew her grandmother could reminisce for hours if given the chance. “Nana, did you call for a reason, or just to chat?”

      “I need a reason to talk to my granddaughter now?”