Dial M for Mischief

“Gopher hole,” the undertaker explained quietly as he walked past the girls. “Happens a couple of times every summer, and they always think one of the dearly departed is reaching up to get them. I’ll dig her out. I keep a shovel in the hearse.”

Jolie forgot about the cameras, forgot about the reporters, even forgot her anger. She involuntarily drew in her breath, air sucking in so long and so hard she thought she might have forgotten how to exhale. And then, when she believed she might faint, something inside of her released. She let loose with a fountain of laughter that had built up inside her and now exploded from her, totally beyond her control.

She laughed until she had to bend over, brace her hands on her knees. And still she laughed.

She laughed until the laughter turned to tears. Hard, racking sobs that sent her down to her knees, because Teddy would have loved the gopher hole so much and then later woven the incident into a huge story twice as funny as what had actually happened.

“Come on, baby, showtime’s over.”

Jolie stiffened at the touch of hands closing around her shoulders, pulling her to her feet. She turned around slowly…to look up into a face she hadn’t seen in five long years.

“Sam? Oh, God…Sam…”

“Yeah, Sam. We’ve got that covered,” Sam Becket said as he slid a protective arm around her shoulders and guided her away from the limousine and toward a sleek black Mercedes parked at the bend of the macadam road. “Your sisters can manage, but we’ve got to get you out of here.”

Jolie tried to slow her steps, but Sam kept a strong grip on her as he hastened her across the grass. “I can’t just leave them to—”

“You can, you are, and for once in your big, independent life you’re going to let someone else take care of you, damn it,” he told her. He opened the passenger door and all but folded her in half to shove her into the front seat as the bottom-feeders stampeded in their direction, cameras flashing and whirring. They plastered their cameras against the side window and windshield, and Jolie covered her face with her hands.

Sam opened the driver’s-side door, pausing a moment to say, “You’ve got three seconds to back off, people. Move it or lose it.”

One of the reporters, microphone in hand now, pushed even closer. The guy had bottle-blond hair, an indoor tan and too-white capped teeth that might make him look good on television but up close and personal he looked a little like a beaver. “Oh, yeah?” he yelled the challenge. “And who are you? Who the hell are you!’

“Me? Well, I’ll tell you, Bucky—I’m the guy who’s leaving now. Two seconds. Which one of you losers wants to be my new hood ornament?”

“You won’t do that. We have a right to—”

Sam’s door slammed. He shoved the key in the ignition and put the transmission into Drive. One quick warning tap on the horn and the large car moved forward.

“Sam, you can’t just run them down,” Jolie warned him, at last realizing what she’d done. “I shouldn’t have snapped like that. I know the drill, I know what they are. I—Sam, don’t!

Outside the car, someone yowled in pain and the rest of the barracudas scurried to safety.

“Oops. Guess I might have rolled over a foot or two, huh?” Sam said, smiling at her. “Yeah, well, it wasn’t as if they weren’t warned. Duck your head, Jolie, we’re almost out of range.”

“My publicist is either going to hug you or shoot you. Me, too, come to think about it,” Jolie said as the Mercedes came to a halt just past the wrought-iron gates, then turned out onto the highway.

“Do you care?”

She looked at him, seriously considering the question. “No, I don’t think I do.” She searched in her pocket and came out with a wad of tissues to wipe at her eyes. “Thank you, Sam. You didn’t have to do this.”

“What can I say? Underdog to the rescue?” He flashed a quick grin at her, and Jolie’s stomach executed a small but powerful flip. How did men do it? Women just got older—and quickly, especially in Hollywood. But men? Men aged, like wine. Sam Becket, she should have realized, could be considered nothing less than the finest vintage.

“All the superheroes to choose from, and you chose Underdog?”

“I guess I’m just a sucker for long, floppy ears.”

“Oh, my gosh—Rockne! I let go of his leash!”

“Jade has him,” Sam said as he moved into the passing lane, one eye on the rearview mirror. “Hold on, we’ve got a tail.”

“No, you have a tail. You’re Underdog, remember?” Jolie turned around on the seat and looked out the rear window. “So can this thing outrun a news van with a honking-huge satellite dish on top?”

To answer her question, Sam put the pedal to the metal, so that Jade had to hold on as she tried to turn around in her seat once more and buckle herself in tight. “How could I have forgotten what a show-off you are?” she asked him, leaning her head back against the headrest as he cut in and out of traffic, the speedometer edging past eighty in the thankfully thin late-morning traffic.

He was all concentration now, and Jolie took the opportunity to look at him more closely. His profile was still sharp, his nose straight and perfect, his cheekbones high, his brow smooth and unlined, his chin rock-solid as he edged past the sunny side of thirty. Thirty-three? Thirty-four? She should probably remember that, but she didn’t.

What she remembered was the thick, dirty-blond hair he wore shorter than the last time she’d seen him, and rather tousled—the kind of tousled that probably cost two hundred bucks a haircut. His fine, unblemished skin was a golden tan, although his right hand was a bit more pale, proving that he’d found time to get in a few rounds of golf while running Becket Imports, one of the many holdings of the embarrassingly rich Becket family.

Mostly what she remembered was how her body fit so well against Sam’s long, lean frame, the top of her head coming up to his chin, when she seemed to tower over most men. The way his hands had moved over her skin, the taste of his mouth, the intense, soul-exploding look in his green eyes as their two bodies merged…

“Where…uh, where are we going?”

“It would be rather senseless to lose the press and then go straight back to your father’s house, don’t you think?”

She nodded, biting her bottom lip. “True. So where are we going?”

“My place,” he said, dipping his head and looking across at her above the silver rims of his sunglasses. “Do you mind?”

Jolie shook her head, ignoring another quick stomach flip. “I don’t think I’m ready to go back home yet, so, no, I don’t mind. You know, I was so busy trying not to look at anybody that I didn’t even see you this morning. Were you at the church?”

“Sorry, no. I was out of the country until late last night and only saw the newspaper clippings my secretary put on my desk when I got to the office this morning. And since I haven’t said it yet, I’m really sorry about Teddy. He was a hell of a guy.”

“He always liked you,” Jolie said, blinking back tears again.

“Not always.”

She turned to look at him. “Excuse me? It was always Sam this and Sam that and ‘Sam is a helluva guy, Jolie.’”

“That probably was before he warned me to stay away from you or he’d rearrange my face.”

“He—oh, he did not. Did he? Omigod, he did! When did he do that?”

Sam looked at her, doing that head-dip thing again so he could hit her with those green eyes of his above the sunglasses. “Do we really want to go into ancient history right now, when we’re getting along so well?”

“No, I suppose not,” she said as she slid down onto the base of her spine and watched the scenery that consisted mostly of enormous cement sound barriers erected to protect the mansions on the other side from the sights and sounds of the highway.

Ten uncomfortably silent minutes later Sam eased onto the Valley Forge exit, and she knew they were now only minutes away from his home in Villanova. Too soon, he turned onto the familiar long, winding lane leading toward his house. His mansion. His humungo—ridiculously humungo for one person, in any case—house that stood at the rear of a cul-de-sac, behind high stone walls, huge wrought-iron gates. And a gatehouse, for crying out loud. Sam’s house made ninety-nine percent of the mansions in Beverly Hills look both insubstantial and faintly tacky.

That was one of the differences, Jolie had decided, between old money and new money. New money shouted. Old money whispered.

“Again, I’m sorry I got to the cemetery so late, although it turned out I got to park close enough to do my Underdog-to-the-rescue bit. I’d expected more of a crowd.”

Jolie was grateful for the change of subject. “There was a crowd, lookie-lous outside of the church. But only the press followed us to the cemetery. And,” she added, sighing, “I guess you really know who your friends are when you’re accused of murder. I can think of at least two dozen faces I should have seen there today and didn’t. They’ll not be welcome once Jade and Jess and I figure out who killed Teddy and that woman, let me tell you.”

He stopped in front of the closed gates. “You’re kidding, right?”

She looked at him levelly, which wasn’t easy to do as she’d raised her chin a good three inches higher into the air. “Do I look like I’m kidding?”