She could handle this, she assured herself over the squeak of her back screen door as she pulled it open. And she could handle it on her own. She did not need Ben Garrett.
Or so she thought before she found herself rather desperately needing to seek his advice less than twelve hours later.
Chapter Two
In the five minutes since Jillian had scrambled from her car into her duplex, her telephone had barely stopped ringing. It rang now as she paced behind the low moss-green sofa dividing her normally tranquil living room from her kitchen and dining area. Her teacher’s copies of the textbooks she would be using that year lay scattered over the sofa’s cushions. She’d dumped them there on her way across the room to yank closed the drapes.
Opposite the sofa, the offending instrument summoned her from the end table between two barrel chairs. In between, sat the coffee table holding a trio of lime-scented candles, the latest cooking magazines and Cosmo, and the faucet knob that had come off in the shower that morning.
She had intended to mention the broken knob to her landlady when she returned from school that afternoon. Her phone conversation a minute ago with Irene White, however, had not been about the plumbing.
Holding Ben’s business card between two fingers, she nervously flicked it with her thumb.
Had she known anyone else who would know what to do, she would call them and beg for help. She just couldn’t think of a single person who’d had any experience being followed by a pack of rabid reporters.
She paced back past the phone, nerves jumping. It was no longer possible to believe she could somehow escape recognition, or that she could handle the press alone. Hoping that the matter would simply go away had been a total waste of energy. So had been praying for a miracle. The “matter” had arrived. It was literally on her doorstep—and the only person she knew with the expertise to deal with it was the six feet of disturbing, urban masculinity that William Kendrick had sent to deal with her.
Hating the position she felt forced into, she snatched up the phone seconds after it stopped ringing and punched in the cell phone number Ben had written on the back of his card. She was staring at his handwriting, thinking that the bold, confident strokes suited his personality perfectly when he answered on the third ring.
“Ben Garrett.”
She would have recognized the deep, authoritative tones of his voice even if he hadn’t identified himself. Pacing to the window facing the street, she peeked between the heavy beige drapes she’d closed only minutes ago.
“It’s Jillian. I have a…situation.”
Over a faint crackle in the connection, he calmly asked, “What’s going on?”
“Do you want to know what’s going on now? Or what’s been going on all day?”
“You choose.”
“In that case,” she replied, more irritated at William by the minute for putting her in this position, “a gray SUV followed me to school this morning. I thought I was just being paranoid when I first saw it because of what you’d said yesterday about the press showing up, but there was a black car behind it. It followed me, too.”
She found it impossible to remain still. Nerves had her turning from the drapes to pace around the coffee table. “They both parked outside the school and both were still there when I left. In between, one of the teachers told me after lunch that a reporter was in the school office asking personal questions about me. He apparently had a picture of me and William.
“The principal asked him to leave,” she continued, feeling her grip on calm slip, “but there were more guys with telephoto lenses on their cameras hanging over the schoolyard fence when I left. I think most of them followed me home. I know the first two guys did. They’re out front with the reporters who were waiting for me when I got here.”
The muffled honk of a horn filtered over the phone line. A moment later a brushing noise made her think he must be in his car and had just switched his phone to his other ear.
“What did you say to them?”
“I didn’t say anything.”
“Nothing?”
“Not a word.” She couldn’t even recall all the queries that had been hurled at her as she’d darted from her little Beetle to the door of her carport. All she’d cared about just then was that none of the half-dozen people thrusting microphones toward her had managed to block her way to her side door.
“Look,” she continued, having paced back to peek between the drapes again. There were now television cables on her front lawn. “I have a dozen strangers outside my door, my phone has been ringing since the minute I got here, and Mrs. White is threatening to call the police because her mums are getting trampled. She tends those plants as if they were her children.”
“Who’s Mrs. White?”
“My landlady. She lives in the other half of this duplex.” Her disquiet compounded itself. A woman with a camera crew just crossed the street to knock on Hal Pederson’s door. Hal worked graveyard shift at the grocery warehouse and slept from two o’clock in the afternoon until ten. He wouldn’t appreciate being awakened after having just gone to sleep.
The two news vans at the curb in front of her house had been there when she arrived. A third van pulled up, the satellite dish on its roof already rotating to seek the strongest signal.
“CBS just got here,” she told him, identifying the logo on the side of the vehicle as someone knocked on her front door. “And there’s a woman with a microphone at the house across the street. It’s one thing to have them outside my door, but now they’re disturbing my neighbors. Should I call the police?” she asked him, her distress mounting as the knock repeated. “Or would that just make this all worse?”
“I’ll call. The police can’t stop the press from talking to your neighbors, but they’ll get them off of their lawns. And yours. I’m on my way,” he told her. “Don’t open the door until I get there. I’ll come around back.”
The line went dead before she could do much more than open her mouth. She’d been about to ask how long he would be. The address on his card indicated his office was in Washington, D.C.
Thinking it could be nearly three hours before he arrived, she hung up the phone—only for it to start ringing again.
She didn’t recognize the name on the caller ID. But then, except for Mrs. White’s, she hadn’t recognized the names or numbers of any of the other people who’d called since she’d come home, either.
Feeling besieged, needing an ally, she thought about calling Stacy Fisher. It was Stacy who’d talked her into blowing some of the money she was saving to buy a house on the week with her in Hawaii.
“You need to do something fun for yourself,” her ever-adventurous—and only single—friend had insisted. “You can buy a house when you’re married. You need to lie on a beach and drink mai tais while some buff, bronzed hunk rubs suntan lotion on your back.”
The beach and the mai tais had materialized. So had the hunks, actually. Jillian hadn’t been as receptive to them as Stacy had, though. She preferred men who could converse without staring at her chest or feeling compelled to impress her with what kind of cars they drove and how well their stocks had performed last quarter. Or without using the words dude, righteous and gnarly.
Stacy had said she just needed more practice. She’d been stuck in the Eric rut so long before she’d had the good sense to dump him, that she’d forgotten about the frog-kissing a woman had to do.
She hadn’t talked to Stacy since they’d returned from Hawaii a couple of days ago, so the fearless, bubbly blonde she’d known since college had no idea what was going on. Still, Jillian knew she could always count on her for solid, no-nonsense advice. Stacy, who now taught seventh grade at a middle