Lady With A Past. Ryanne Corey
head, white teeth flashing in his California-tan face. “No, it was absolutely my fault. Are you all right?”
She laughed, low and throaty, fitting the cowboy hat firmly on her head. “I’m hardy. I’ll survive.”
“Well, as long as I’ve got your attention…” Connor held out his photograph, noticing that the edges were becoming dog-eared. “I’m looking for this woman. Do you remember ever seeing her around town?”
“She’s famous, Maxie,” the clerk put in, shamelessly eavesdropping. “Remember that model who disappeared a couple of years ago? That’s her.”
The woman studied the picture for several seconds, then scratched her sunburned nose and shrugged. “Sorry I can’t help you. I’ll tell you,” she added, her voice tinged with the lilting western twang Connor was becoming familiar with, “someone like that wouldn’t go unnoticed for long in this town. Robby, I need three bags of fertilizer. Put it on my account and I’ll pull the truck around back to load it.”
Connor touched her elbow as she turned to walk away. “You’re sure? Someone thought they saw her at the tri-county fair last month.”
“Everybody goes to the fair,” she replied dismissively. “I was there, and I didn’t see any famous faces in the crowds.”
“Miss Rodeo Wyoming was there,” Robby said hopefully, as if offering a substitute. “I saw her…she was real pretty.”
“If I was looking for Miss Rodeo Wyoming,” Connor replied flatly, “that news would make me the happiest of men.”
The young woman chuckled on her way out the door. “I don’t hold out much hope for you, buddy, but good luck just the same. See you ’round the back, Robby.”
The muscles in Connor’s shoulders were bunched with tension. He was tired. He was frustrated. Somewhere in the background he could hear Robby offer him five bucks for Glitter Baby’s picture. Connor advised him to get a life and walked out into the parking lot. It looked like rain again, and the wind was picking up. He was so discouraged he was seriously considering calling Morris and telling him to track down Alan Greenspan. Lord knew he would be easier to find than one Frances Calhoon.
A dusty white pickup pulled out of the parking lot, tires spitting gravel. The brunette named Maxie, Connor thought absently, was in a hurry. She must be looking forward to getting that fertilizer home and doing whatever it was country people did with fertilizer.
Except…
Connor’s flesh started prickling, from his toes to his scalp. A dawning realization kicked his heart into double time. Except Maxie hadn’t driven around the back to load her fertilizer. She had sped out of the parking lot as if all the hounds in hell were after her.
Connor sat down abruptly, right there on the front steps of the store. His mind was spinning. He brought Glitter Baby’s picture out of his jacket pocket and stared with fierce concentration. The chin, that stubborn chin was less angular in Maxie’s face, but still similar. They were both of the same height. Frances Calhoon was a blonde and Maxie a brunette, but that meant nothing. The sultry waif in the photograph looked to be little more than a hundred pounds. Maxie had filled out her jeans with a mature woman’s figure. Still….
Connor had another memory, an echo of something only his subconscious had registered at the time. He recalled seeing a split-second flash of Maxie’s eyes before she’d replaced her hat, his subconscious noting an unusual color. Not brown, not hazel…
Violet. Glitter Baby’s trademark, soul-stabbing violet eyes that rendered even the most jaded arbiters of beauty completely smitten. Connor had studied a hundred photographs, screened hours of videotapes. He knew her eyes better than his own, was intensely familiar with every mood, every subtle, sensual nuance they could project. He was no more immune to her powerful charisma than any other red-blooded man. One look from her eyes and the world stopped, shifted, and began spinning in a new orbit.
Maxie had those eyes.
“Hot damn,” he whispered, the ghost of a smile touching his mouth.
Busted.
The important thing was not to panic. She panicked anyway. Frances Maxine Calhoon paced her front porch from one end to the other and back again, wringing her hands and whimpering. Her dog Boo, an enormous black lab who preferred naps to exercise, waddled loyally behind, now and then offering sympathetic whining and struggling for air. Boo had never seen his owner in a state of extreme agitation. Maxie hadn’t been in a state of extreme agitation for two years. It had been blissful, wonderful, healing, therapeutic…and she was terrified it was over.
This little ranch in the middle of Nowhere, Wyoming, had been her refuge, her heaven-sent second chance. She knew without a shadow of a doubt it had saved her life. Two years ago she had weighed ninety seven pounds, smoked incessantly and slept less than an hour or two a night. She had debilitating migraines, her hands shook dreadfully and she neglected to eat for days at a time. Her agent sent her to a series of doctors who prescribed sleeping pills, tranquilizers and anti-depressants. Her trainer advised colon-cleansing, aromatherapies and a nicotine patch. Her friends borrowed her clothes and her pills and her money and always made sure they were standing next to her when tabloid photographers closed in for yet another shot. After eight years in the glare of the spotlight, Maxie was spent, coming apart at the seams, and no one seemed to realize or care how close she was to a complete breakdown. It was almost too late before she realized the creation known as Glitter Baby was first, last and always a stepping stone for others’ interests. If she was to survive, she had to save herself.
She had been twenty-two-years old.
At the time, her widowed mother had started a new life in Oakley, Wyoming, running an antique shop in the nondescript little town. It was the perfect place for the runaway supermodel to start over, to learn to breathe and sleep and hope again. She retired without warning, used her savings to buy out her endorsement contracts and disappeared without a trace. She’d exchanged her first name for her middle name and become Maxie Calhoon. She had never looked back.
Until today. She hadn’t realized the stranger in the feed store was Connor Garrett of television fame until he had spoken directly to her. She knew at that instant, even before she had looked at Glitter Baby’s photograph, that the jig was up. This man was from the world she used to inhabit, a world she knew only too well. If he could benefit from publicizing her whereabouts, he would.
She became conscious of poor Boo’s exhausted wheezing and stopped her frenzied pacing. Sweet dog, he had no idea the sky was falling in on them. He only knew he’d missed his mid-morning nap and his mistress had suddenly gone crazy. Maxie sat on the porch swing and scratched Boo under the chin until his big brown eyes began to droop. “That’s it, sweetheart,” she whispered. “Go to sleep and dream about big fat kitty cats…that’s right, lie down.”
Boo was asthmatic, overweight and incurably lazy, but he was her first true friend. She had confided in him all the regrets and mistakes of the past, and together they had celebrated her little accomplishments, such as learning to eat without guilt. Boo was a very good listener and fine company, particularly if she shared her SpaghettiOs with him. He didn’t know or care who she had been in her previous life.
Heaven help her, she didn’t want to lose it all now. Connor Garrett could so easily put an end to her peaceful exile. Maxie wasn’t at all sure she had fooled him with her careless indifference, either. There had been something in his dark eyes when he looked at her, a burning intensity that contrasted with his boyish baseball cap and casual L.A. Lakers sweatshirt. Sooner or later he was bound to put one and one together. For Maxie, that would mean the beginning of the end.
She gazed out at her sunwashed pasture, her eyes growing misty as she watched the newest addition to her fledgling herd of Holsteins frolic through the dandelions. Glitter Baby, that naughty darling of the high-fashion set, was raising cows. She fed them, milked them and read endless books about them. Granted, her new career put her in a much lower tax bracket than when she’d been modeling. Much, much lower. Fortunately, it looked like her struggling