License to Thrill (5 page)

Charlee exited the car, just as she’d slid in, by hoisting her delectable fanny over the door frame Magnum, P.I., style. He tried to imagine Daphne alighting from an open-topped vehicle in such a blasé manner and he laughed out loud.

“What’s so funny?” She whirled around and stabbed him with her stare.

“Nothing.”

“I know what you’re thinking.”

“You do?”

“Typical white trash bar.”

“I never said that.”

“You didn’t have to. I can read you like a mail-order catalogue.”

“Hey.” He raised his palms. “Don’t assign your prejudices to me.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“You have a problem with where you’ve come from.”

She shrugged and turned away, but not before he caught the uncertain expression on her face. He’d nailed her insecurities. He hurried to open the door for her and she blasted him with a quelling glare.

“After you.” He bowed with an exaggerated flourish.

She snorted, tossed her head sassily, and trod over the threshold into the crowded, smoky tavern. The rundown bar was a far cry from his usual watering hole, the exclusive Hidden Hills Country Club in River Oaks.

The jukebox blared a Garth Brooks classic about friends in low places. The smell of beer, menthol cigarettes, and stale popcorn filled the air. A leather-clad, tattooed crowd packed the room. They sized Mason up with suspicious glances as he and Charlee made their way toward the bar.

A few people called out greetings to her. She smiled and nodded but didn’t stop to chat. She was a woman on a mission and being with her made him feel more resolute. His growing respect for her shot up a notch.

Two men on bar stools scooted over for Charlee as she bellied up to the bar but they closed ranks around her, leaving Mason standing awkwardly to one side and fending off their glares. She spoke to the bartender, but between the loud music, laughter, and hum of voices, he couldn’t hear what she said.

He tried to lean in closer, but one of the men on the bar stool jostled him with his elbow, sloshing beer over Mason’s arm. He frowned and started to say something but the guy was skunk-drunk. He wrote off the shove as an accident.

“Excuse me,” Mason said. “Could I please step up to the bar?”

“Can you?” the guy, who wore a black leather vest, chains, and a gold spike through his chin, challenged.

How tedious. Obviously the beer slosh hadn’t been an accident. Mason sighed inwardly. He didn’t have time for this crap. “Come on, mister. I don’t want any trouble.”

“Oh, yeah? Then how come you dragged your preppy ass in here?”

“Since you’ve been imbibing heavily I’m choosing to ignore that remark.”

The guy looked over at his buddy. “Did he just insult me, Leroy?”

“Yup,” Leroy, who had a cobra tattooed on his forearm, agreed. “I didn’t go to
coll-ege,
but I do believe he just insulted you, Thurgood.”

“I’m with her.” Mason nodded at Charlee. “We’ll be gone in a couple of minutes. No need to start something.”

“Hidin’ behind the skirt, are you?” Thurgood mocked Mason.

“Just move aside, please,” Mason said calmly.

“Whatcha gonna do if I do this?” Thurgood plastered a hammy palm on Charlee’s fanny.

“Hand off my ass, Thurgood,” Charlee said over her shoulder.

Not only did Thurgood not remove his hand from Charlee’s backside, but he looked at Mason and wagged his lascivious tongue.

Anger, hot and quick, shot through Mason. He slapped a hand around Thurgood’s wrist and jerked him off the bar stool.

Two seconds later, Thurgood lay flat on his back on the floor, Mason’s Italian leather loafer pressing against his windpipe.

“Hey, Thurgood, looks like the preppie’s kicking your ass.” Leroy laughed and slapped his thigh.

Charlee turned away from the bar to watch Mason with a bemused smile.

“I think you owe the lady an apology.”

“Yeooow.”

“Apologize,” Mason said, increasing the pressure on Thurgood’s Adam’s apple.

“I tworry, Charlee,” Thurgood rasped.

Charlee peered down at the man. “Maybe next time you’ll keep your hands to yourself.”

He nodded, or as much as he could manage with a shoe at his throat.

“Let’s get out of here,” Charlee said to Mason. “I got what we came for.”

“Catch you later, Thurgood.” He lifted his foot from the man’s neck and followed Charlee’s provocative fanny straight out the door.

“You’ve been holding out on me, Gentry,” she said once they were on the sidewalk. “Not quite as blue-blooded as you appear. Where’d you learn those moves?”

“Fourth-degree black belt, tae kwon do.”

“No shit.” She shot him a pensive look and then smiled.

“No shit.”

“Oooh, now I’m really titillated. Cursing and everything. What would your mama say?”

“Are you making fun of me?”

“Who me?” Charlee started to slide over the door frame and into the driver’s seat.

“Wait.”

“What?”

Mason hurried over to the driver’s side and opened the door. “A lady should allow the gentleman to open the car door for her.”

Charlee shook her head. “For one thing, no one has ever accused me of being a lady, and for another, you just blew it.”

“Blew what?”

“I was actually beginning to like you and then you had to go and remind me what a pompous jackass you are.”

“What? What’d I do wrong?”

She slammed the car door shut and then climbed over the door frame with a glower. “Get in.”

Women. Who could figure them? Try to do something nice and you ended up making them mad.

“So what did you find out about our grandparents?” he asked after she started the engine.

“Maybelline did indeed meet some guy, who sounds like he could be your grandfather, at four o’clock this afternoon.”

Mason exhaled sharply. Okay. Now they were getting somewhere.

“According to the bartender, the man left with her.”

“Anything else?”

Charlee swiveled her head to look him squarely in the eyes. “I’ve never seen Maybelline cry. I mean not ever. Not at weddings, not at funerals. Not when I graduated high school. Never.”

“So?”

“Kelly claims when they left the bar, not only was your grandfather looking pretty grim but my grandmother was bawling her eyes out.”

Nolan Gentry sat beside Maybelline in the Las Vegas airport waiting for their flight to L.A. Absentmindedly he drummed the manila folder she’d given him against the metal armrest.

The contents of the file confirmed the awful news Maybelline had broken to him over the phone two days earlier. If he didn’t intervene, the financial empire his father had started and he and his older brother Harry had built into a Fortune 500 dynasty would be utterly destroyed, ruining not only Nolan but his son and grandsons as well.

And the damnable thing was he couldn’t say anything to anyone. Not yet. The necessity for silence was the reason he’d taken the five hundred thousand dollars from company funds. And because he hadn’t known what other expenses he might incur. Such as paying off a blackmailer.

What he hoped—no, what he prayed—was that the family would send Mason to find him. It had to be Mason. Only his second-born grandson would truly understand the moral dilemma facing them.

And if they didn’t send Mason?

Nolan shook his head. They would send Mason. Poor boy always shouldered the dirty work.

He peered over at Maybelline. She too had a lot invested in the outcome. If things turned out badly, her only son might end up dead.

Giving her a comforting smile, he squeezed her hand. “Everything is going to be okay.”

She nodded, but he could tell from the skepticism in her eyes she wasn’t buying his empty promise, not for a minute.

Her tears had damned near killed him back there in the bar. He’d only seen her cry one other time. The despair over discovering she was pregnant with a married man’s baby had been so strong it sent her to the top of the
HOLLYWOOD
sign with the aim of ending her life.

Thank God, he’d been there to talk her down. He’d saved her life that night and now, almost fifty years later, she was saving his.

She smiled back at him and Nolan couldn’t help wondering, What if?

What if he’d won the Oscar in 1955?

What if his father hadn’t had a heart attack when he did?

What if he had refused his dying father’s edict to come home, marry Elispeth Hunt, and mingle the nouveau riche Gentry oil-field blood with respectable old money breeding?

What if he’d stayed with Maybelline?

His old heart took an unexpected dip at the prospect. What indeed?

He gazed over at her She was still damned beautiful in his eyes, slim and sexy despite the passing years. Headstrong and feisty. That’s why her tears had frightened him so. Maybelline had never been a softie. Damn, but there were so many things he wanted to say to her. So many things he wanted to undo.

It was a useless endeavor, trying to recast the past. He’d made his choices, both good and bad. But now, the chickens had come home to roost.

She raised a hand to hide a yawn. “Long past my bedtime.”

“You always were a morning lark.”

“And you were the night owl. Remember when we shared the cottage in Venice Beach? You were usually coming to bed when I was leaving for work.”

“I remember,” he said softly. “You were three months pregnant with Elwood.”

“And you’d bring me 7UP and saltines to help with the morning sickness.”

Nolan patted her shoulder. “You can lean on me, May,” he said. “Take a nap. I’ll wake you when they start boarding the plane.”

She hesitated, and then she took off her glasses, slid them into her purse, and gingerly rested her head on his shoulder.

Nolan inhaled sharply. He hadn’t expected the weight of her against him to feel so good. Her hair smelled like ripe peaches and he remembered the day in his daddy’s oil field when he’d seen her for the very first time.

She had worn a satiny green dress with a flared skirt that twirled when she walked and black and white saddle shoes. He recalled the dress was green because it contrasted dramatically with her fiery red hair. His fingers had itched to stroke her glossy locks.

Slowly, he reached out and traced a finger over her hair. Still soft as silk. His gut clutched.

You’re too old to be feeling this way. Much too old by far.

She’d already fallen asleep, the gentle rise and fall of her chest luring him more surely than a siren’s song. She’d always possessed the knack to fall asleep as easily as a child and nothing short of a major earthquake roused her from a sound slumber. Using his free hand, he reached for the jacket he’d draped across the seat beside him and gently spread it over her shoulders.

A tenderness so strong the feeling threatened to overrun his eyes with tears had Nolan clenching his teeth. Not once in his forty-three-year marriage to Elispeth had he felt one-tenth of the tenderness he felt right now for Maybelline. Not even when Elispeth had given birth to their son, Reed.

Maybelline was everything Elispeth was not.

She was bold and brave. When he realized Maybelline had run off to Hollywood both to escape her physically abusive father and to pursue her dream of becoming a makeup artist, her burst for freedom had given him the courage to defy his own father and go into acting. Elispeth, on the other hand, had been so timid and mousy she’d never even raised her voice. No fire. No vim. No vigor.

Maybelline did things her own way, blazed her own path. She didn’t care if people gossiped about her. Elispeth followed the herd, decorating her house right down to the knickknacks exactly as they were depicted in some New York interior-decorating magazine. Elispeth had never stepped out of line. Had always done what was expected of her.

Maybelline was whip-smart and had more common sense in her pinkie than most people had in their entire bodies even though she had never finished high school. Elispeth had a masters degree from Sarah Lawrence but didn’t have the good sense to call a doctor if Reed was running a fever.

And most of all, whenever he was with Maybelline,
he
was different. She made him laugh and take risks. She had once teased him into shaking off his stuffy exterior and going skinny-dipping in a pond. She’d dared him to stretch his acting talents and try for a part he never believed he could win. She had challenged him in a hundred wonderful ways. Around her, he was more alive. More of a man.

No, that wasn’t fair. Elispeth had been a good woman. She’d done her best. He had no call comparing her to Maybelline. It wasn’t his dead wife’s fault he’d been in love with another woman when he married her.

Nolan shook his head. The scary thing was that his grandson Mason was about to stumble into the same trap he’d tripped over as a young man: marrying the wrong woman simply to appease family demands. Daphne Maxwell was a lovely girl but she was Elispeth all over again. What the boy needed was a Maybelline of his own.

To lure his mind away from thoughts he shouldn’t be having, Nolan looked up at the departure board. Their flight was delayed. Sighing, he debated what to do when they arrived in L.A. Obviously, it would be too late to go to the accounting firm straightaway. They’d have to obtain a room for the night. Make that two rooms.

He closed his eyes and had just dozed off when a hand clamped down on his shoulder.

“Mr. Nolan Gentry?”

Startled, Nolan’s eyes flew open. There, standing in front of him, was Elvis. Pudgy Elvis in his famous white rhinestone-studded jumpsuit.

He blinked. Was he dreaming? He half expected Elvis to launch into a rousing, hip-swinging rendition of “Viva Las Vegas.”

“Mr. Gentry?” Elvis repeated.

No, not
the
Elvis, but an Elvis look-alike. The town was chock-full of Elvis impersonators.

“Yes, I’m Nolan Gentry.”

“Mr. Gentry, I have a gun in my pocket. I want you to wake your companion and follow me.”

“What?”

“Do you need me to repeat what I just said?”

“You’ve got a gun? But how did you get a gun past airport security?”

Elvis snorted. “Don’t you watch nighttime news shows like
20/20
where they smuggle all kinds of weapons past the metal detectors?”