The Fiance Thief (2 page)

“Really, Claire, what can I do? He’s my boss, after all.” Alec saw Claire roll her eyes. “And even though you’ve
just been working here a few months, you know what this would mean to him.”

Now his curiosity was really piqued. Lissa, as he knew she would, told the story in her dramatic, drawn-out way. There was no use rushing her, so he simply listened.

“Have you read Miranda Craig’s autobiography?” Lissa asked.

It was with a sinking feeling that he answered no. The name Miranda Craig meant nothing but trouble to him. The biggest female box-office draw in the country just happened to be from their town. That ought to give the papers there a right to an exclusive or two, right? Some kind of hometown indulgence? But because of a bad review she’d gotten from the daily paper as the lead in a college play, she’d refused to deal with any local media, and had also forbidden her family to talk to them. Even the relatives who regularly spilled to the tabloids refused to talk to Alec, or his boss, publisher Mick Regan. It wasn’t fair, considering that their paper, a weekly, hadn’t even been around when Miranda Craig was giving her legendary hammy performance in
Uncle Vanya.

“In the unlikely event that Miranda Craig agrees to an interview, I’ll read her book. I don’t have to put myself through that torture otherwise.”

“Well,” Lissa said, clearly warming to her subject. “Our Claire gets a good bit of space in Miranda Craig’s book.”

“Claire?” When Alec turned to her, she had taken her glasses off and was shaking her chestnut hair loose from its ponytail. For a split second, Claire struck him as someone who could hold her own with the hottest female star on the planet. Then she put her glasses back on, pushed her hair back behind her ears and slumped her shoulders again.

“Missy Craig, as I knew her, was my best friend.”

He sputtered a little as he spoke. “Miranda, or whatever the hell her name was, was your best friend, and you never told me?”

She shrugged. Not, he decided, very apologetically.

“Do you know how much getting that interview would mean for this paper’s clout?” He started to pace, his body tense and his blood rushing in his ears. He might have thought he was coming down with a bad case of the weekend flu if these sensations didn’t have a tinge of familiarity. He’d felt like this often when he’d been a reporter for a large daily in Atlanta. His beat was small but he covered it well, and he learned there to feel the rightness of a story. When Mick, his college journalism professor and mentor, had offered him the editorship of the weekly he’d bought, he’d come back to Ridgeville expecting there would be lots of days when he felt like this. Could he have ever guessed then that he, the man who was going to be Woodward and Bernstein rolled together, would be salivating at the thought of interviewing an actress? His loss of cool was not only out of character, it was decidedly unprofessional. He snapped his mouth shut.

He couldn’t quite decipher the look Claire gave him. “Are you finished?” she asked. When he nodded, she said, “I didn’t tell you about my friendship with Missy because it isn’t relevant.”

“Isn’t relevant?” So much for playing it cool. “You played Barbie dolls with the most powerful woman in Hollywood, and you don’t think that’s relevant?” He shook a finger at her. “That’s the trouble with you, Claire. You don’t think like a reporter.”

“I think like a reporter, all right,” she said, her cheeks flushing again and her voice rising a notch. “The trouble is, you don’t think of me as a reporter.”

He didn’t have time to deny the undeniable truth of that statement before Lissa, not used to losing an audience, moved to regain their attention by holding up one manicured
hand. “Back to the subject, please. What Claire is trying to tell you, Alec, is that she isn’t speaking to Miranda.”

“You aren’t speaking to her?” he asked Claire. “Not the other way around?”

Lissa went on, in a voice fit for narrating the toniest of television documentaries. “Claire’s refusal to forgive her is one of the great regrets of Miranda’s life. She lost her best friend over some worthless young man. To be more specific, Claire’s fiancé.”

“You had a fiancé?” It didn’t fit the picture Alec had of Claire.

“Claire had a few fiancés,” Lissa said.

“He doesn’t need to know that,” Claire said, as Alec turned to stare at her with renewed interest.

“Claire.” Lissa sighed her impatience. “Miranda’s book went to number three on the paperback bestseller list before a string of miracle diet books knocked it off. It’s not like the whole world doesn’t already know.”

“I don’t know,” Alec said. “Enlighten me.”

Lissa started to speak, but Claire interrupted her, her voice uncharacteristically steady and strong. “I was sort of engaged a couple of times in high school and college, although I think Missy exaggerates the number in her book. Missy always came up with schemes for getting rid of these guys for me, sometimes by making them fall for her instead, then breaking their hearts. Then I met Scott, and he asked me to marry him.” She paused and stared out the window for a second, her eyes centered somewhere far away. “So Missy decided I needed to be rescued from Scott, too, and she scurried off to New York with him. The next thing I know, she’s a big star, she’s left Scott, and she wants to make up with me.”

Intrigued as he was by her story, Alec wanted to know how it tied in with the letter Claire was holding, still taunting him from its shelter in the envelope. When she
had finished, he asked, “And so is this a letter from Miranda Craig?”

Lissa took up the narrative again. “Christine Colby is filming a one-hour special on Miranda next weekend, and it’s going to be released just in time for Miranda’s next picture,
A Woman’s Heart.
It’s a real you’ll-laugh-you’llcry sort of movie, and so they want to play up this sweet image for Miranda to go with it. They’re filming at the house Miranda bought her parents on the lake in Loudon,” she said, mentioning a town about twenty-five miles away. “They want her closest family and friends to join her for a weekend there, and share their memories of her. That letter is from Christine Colby’s production company, begging Claire to come.”

His response was immediate. “I’m coming with you,” he told Claire.

He didn’t know whether the shocked look on her face was caused by his audacity or by the prospect of spending a weekend with him. Finally she said, “But you don’t think I’m actually going?”

“Of course you’re going. And I’m going with you. We’re writing a story about it.” He gave her what he hoped was a good-natured smile. “Well, I’ll be writing the story, but you’ll help. There may be things she’ll say to you that she won’t say to me.”

Claire was shaking her head. “She won’t be saying anything to either of us, because I’m not going. If I were going, I wouldn’t take you. And even if you were there, what makes you think she’d talk to you? She’s not going to spill her secrets to some reporter I drag along.”

“A, I’m an editor.” He cleared his throat. “If you don’t mind. B, I won’t be there as a reporter. I’ll be there as your fiancé.”

All three of his writers stared at him. Claire and Lissa were openmouthed, and even the unflappable Hank seemed a little shaken. “Don’t you see the beauty in this?”

he asked them. They shook their heads in unison. “Have you been engaged since this…um…whatever his name was?”

“Scott,” she said. “If it’s any of your business.”

“So you haven’t,” he said. “You bring me, your fiancé, to this shindig to show your friend Missy/Miranda that all is forgiven. After all, if she had let you marry that Scott creep, you never would have stumbled on terrific me.”

If it wasn’t his imagination, the glare she gave him held a tiny bit of admiration. “That’s the most despicable thing I’ve ever heard,” she said. “I can’t agree to it.”

He saw that his ingenious plan had captured Lissa’s imagination at least. “Why not?” Lissa asked. “Be a sport.”

Claire didn’t say anything, merely took the letter back to her desk and stuck it in her purse. Imagining that she was about to crack under their relentless enthusiasm, Alec stepped up his campaign, chatting to Claire as she ignored him.

“Claire, the only good players are team players. I see I was wrong to think you were one. We would have had a lot of fun scooping the daily paper, but since you aren’t willing to go that extra distance for us, that isn’t going to be possible.” He stretched his arms a little, yawning as he did so. “That’s the news business. Not much of a way to make a living. It just keeps food on our tables and gives Mick a hole into which to pour his money.” Alec peeked at her to see how she was taking his lecture.

“Mick,” she said. “Did you ask Mick about my story? The one about how Carbine Industries is illegally dumping toxic waste in South Ridgeville?”

In fact, he’d forgotten all about it, but before he had a chance to confess, she continued, “Harlan Edwards, a community activist—”

“Harlan Edwards is a professional crank,” Alec interrupted. “And professional cranks make bad copy.”

At that moment, the door to a small room off the side of the office opened and Mick Regan stumbled out. He walked past the group, saying a terse one word, “Lunch,” to them as he passed.

“Alec was just quoting you,” Hank told him. “Your feelings on career scofflaws.”

“One of my better ones,” Mick said, his hand on the door.

“I was just telling Alec,” Claire said, her voice rising a bit to catch Mick’s attention, “I had an interview with Harlan Edwards earlier this morning.”

“Was he sober?” Mick asked.

Claire favored him with a slow smile. “That’s funny. People always ask me the same thing about you.”

Alec sucked his breath in at that, as did Hank and Lissa, but Mick merely laughed and adjusted his hat. “Kid, you’ll get some spunk yet. But that doesn’t mean you’ll be able to build a story off what one crank tells you.”

They watched him go out the door and board the elevator. Alec and Hank, both former students of his, looked after him admiringly. “He was a genius in his day,” Alec said.

“And what a short twenty-four hours it was,” Claire countered, half under her breath. Alec grinned a little before he caught himself.

“Claire, I’m surprised at you,” he said. He watched her stuff a paperback in her oversize purse and hoist the bag onto her shoulder. “Where are you going?”

“Lunch.”

He stood in front of her, blocking her way. “Not until you give me a decision on this Miranda Craig thing.”

She ducked around him, whopping him in his midsection with her purse as she passed. “I gave you a decision,” she said. “My decision was no.”

Alec, wincing from the hit, made sure he could speak in something lower than a soprano before he addressed Claire again. “Think it over at lunch,” he said, as she crossed the room to the stairwell.

“I don’t have to,” she said. “I’m not changing my mind.”

Alec had sent her to microwave oven demonstrations. Future Farmers of America meetings. A recital given by preschoolers who had not quite grasped the musical instruction provided to them. She had gone anywhere, without complaint. Now was a hell of a time to get a backbone.

“Then maybe you shouldn’t come back from lunch,” he said. “Unless you’re ready to say yes to this story.”

Hank and Lissa looked up, alarmed.
“Alec,”
Lissa said, glaring at him. “Claire, he doesn’t mean it. He used to give me ultimatums like that all the time. You just pretend not to hear them, and he’ll figure out they don’t work.”

Alec turned to her, frowning. “Will you be quiet?” he rasped. When he turned back to the door, Claire was gone. The two reporters stared at him accusingly.

“She’ll be back,” Alec told Lissa, who ignored him. “Trust me,” he told Hank, who clucked his tongue at Alec and resumed typing. “I know psychology,” he said to no one in particular.

He walked to his own desk and took out a stack of current magazines and regional newspapers. “I’ve got all this reading to catch up on,” he told them. “So I’m just going to sit here and read, do a little trend-spotting, till Claire comes back.”

Lissa flicked off her computer and stood. “I’ll leave a note for the cleaning service to dust you off when they come.”

“Claire will be back,” he said. “She needs this job.” Even as he said it, he realized he didn’t know if it were true. Finding out about her friendship with Miranda Craig made
him realize he didn’t know anything about Claire. Nothing except that until a few minutes ago, she had shaken like a leaf every time he spoke to her. He missed that reaction already.

“You’re not going to lunch, too, are you?” he asked Lissa.

“People eat, Alec. They don’t all live on venom like you do.”

“Why didn’t you tell me about Claire before? If you knew about the book?”

Lissa shrugged. “Until I read…umm…”

“Until the contents of that letter were accidentally revealed to you,” Alec supplied.

“Yes, exactly,” Lissa said. “Until then, I didn’t have any idea it was the same Claire Morgan. I didn’t even know Claire was from here.”

“You wouldn’t still have your copy, would you?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” Lissa said, heading out the door for the elevator. “I think I may have left it around here somewhere.”

As the doors swished shut behind her, Alec stepped into the hallway and watched the numbers track the elevator’s movement, waiting until Lissa had landed safely in the lobby before making a mad dash for her desk.

S
O
M
ICK THOUGHT
she’d get spunk someday, huh? As if spunk were something you could throw into your grocery cart with your yogurt and peanut butter. As though it were a muscle you could develop with exercise, like power abs in ten minutes a day.

She knew it was wrong to be annoyed with Mick. He was basically harmless, famously tactless and spent his days in an ineffectual muddle. But as Alec and Hank often pointed out, somewhere in his brain were the long-buried secrets of a great newspaperman. Lissa had told Claire that Mick had spent years living off stories from his journalistic
heyday, but when he’d inherited some money, he’d had enough of the old newsman’s fever to buy the equipment from a sinking paper and crank out his own weekly. Making it almost profitable was something else. That was Alec’s doing.