Mad About The Man

H
E WANTED EVERYTHING

Jacques Ledan was the King of Candy, the man whose passionate sweets were indescribable sensations. He was also a conqueror, whose next conquest was to wake up
the sleepy town of Goldstrike…
and seduce his adversary, Gaby MacGregor.

Jacques was certain the tiny Sierra Nevada town would soon erect a statue in his honor. And even more certain that Gaby would swoon at his foolproof tools of seduction. How could one person be so wrong?

Goldstrike's fiery leader had launched her own attack. Gaby was good a
t strategy…
but even she wasn't prepared for Jacques's secret weapon!

Prologue

"
T
aste it, Jacques,
taste
it."

"Convince me I want to."

Rita laughed and leaned closer. "Let your tongue convince you, dar
ling. We both know what a volup
tuary you are."

"Mmm. Voluptuaries enjoy being persuaded." He
watched her fingers move—slender, clever fingers practiced in the small nuances of temptation. "Show me how good you are. Make me want what you're offering so badly it hurts."

Her subtle scent reached him—summer roses.
Jacques let his eyelids drift down a fraction. Creamy
roses. Curving petals that begged to be cupped, just
as the velvet fullness of a passionate woman's breasts
begged to be cupped by a lover's hands.

Soft breath touched his face. She was very near. "I
can make you want this, Jacques. Open your mouth."

"You haven't convinced me."

"But I
have
aroused your jaded appetites, haven't I? Go with me, Jacques. Let me lead you. Let me
seduce
you."

"I've always made a better leader than a fol
lower."

Her smile was lazy. "I've never met a sensual man
who couldn't be turned on by a little female mastery.
Forced seduction, Jacques. Come on, don't tell me it'll be the first time you were taken rather than the taker."

"You could be right. Why don't you tell me ex
actly how you intend to do it, sweetheart? Guide me
through, step by step."

"My pleasure."
Moistening her lips with the
pointed tip of her pink tongue, Rita rested a forearm
on his thighs. "First we do a little touching."

"Do we?"

"Oh, yes. Textures excite, Jacques. You know that.
Sensation is everything."

Oh, yeah.
"I'm bored, Rita. Can you give me sensations that'll help me forget just how bored I am?"

"Guaranteed. Relax." Her fingertips stroked little
circles. "I guess I missed a step. Before we can touch
we have to get rid of the wrappings. To touch, we need
naked,
Jacques, naked things the tongue wants to curl around."

"Naked is one of my favorite words."

Now Rita held her tongue between her teeth and went to her knees between his legs. "I'm going to loosen this, Jacques—it'll help you get deeper into
the mood. Aah
…
" She tossed back her hair and those
nimble fingers went to work again. "Better? Do I have your attention now?"

"I'm only human," he murmured and shifted in
his seat. "How long is this going to take?"

"In a hurry now?"

"Let's just say I feel something's going to present itself at any second and I'm not going to be able to avoid dealing with it."

"Ah, Jacques—you do live up to your reputation.
Always ready to go. I'm ready, too, darling. Open your mouth."

"Why?"

"Because I've got something you're going to want
to fill it with." She peeled away satiny red and silken
white. "See. Can you tell me these aren't perfect
enough to make a man hungry?"

"Rita—"

"Open your mouth."

Sighing, he did as she asked.

"Come on. Draw it in.
Yes. Yes!
Oh,
yes!
That's the way."

Jacques closed his eyes.

"Ah, ah, ah. Slowly, darling, slowly. Make it last.
Roll your ton
gue around it and over it and…
Yes!
Tell
me you like it, Jacques. Tell me you can't get enough
of it. Sweetheart, there's plenty more where that came
from."

He swallowed and looked into her flushed face.
"Nice try, Rita. You gave it your best shot. If anyone
could breath
e
some life into me, it's you."

"But?" With a thump, she sat on her heels.
"But,
Jacques? Don't do this to me. I can't stand it."

"You're going to have to. I just can't get it up
anymore—the enthusiasm is gone. It's been gone for
a long time. I'm bored with the whole process."

"You can't be." She pouted.

"Oh, but I can. Watch my lips while I make the words, sweetheart."

Frowning, Rita crossed her arms. "I'm watching."

"If I ever have to taste another candy I'm going to
puke."

1

"
N
o
! He's not getting away with it!"

"Gaby, Gaby, don't
do
this to yourself." Char Brown, elderly, graying and oozing creative talent, trotted in Gaby McGregor's wake.

"Take
one
man, add
too
much money and not
enough to do with it—or with his time—and what
d'
you have?"

"Gaby—"

"I'll tell you what you have.
Trouble.
Trouble with
a capital
T."

Char edged rapidly around Gaby and faced her in the window of the millinery workroom. "Forget
Jacques Ledan. Forget the whole issue. You can't stop
a man like him."

"He wants to turn Goldstrike into some sort of des
tination tourist trap." Frustration boiled in Gaby. "Char, he's
buying
this town. He plans to form one great big club and we're all getting a membership whether we like it or not. It's going to be 'join or leave.' I'm not leaving, and I'm not giving up on this without a fight."

"Let it go. Who buys what in this town and what they do with it isn't your problem."

"It
is
my problem. It's a problem for every one of us who lives here. Things may be financially de
pressed, but we're used to that. Great as Knott's Berry
Farm is, we don't want to become California's next down-home fun spot."

"Gaby, this isn't something you can change."

"The hell it isn't! I live here. My best friends live
here. Hell, my
daughter
lives here!" And for the first time in her life, Gaby really liked where she was and
who she was with.

"Gaby, what's happened to your language?"

"Once the rot gets in it spreads. First he bought up
the old schoolhouse
. Then Bartlett's Feed Store…
I'm not the only one who thinks they'd have held on if he hadn't made an offer they couldn't refuse. Next
it'll be the abandoned fire station. He'll gobble up any
little businesses that go under—" she paused for breath "—and on and on until Goldstrike looks like Carmel, only tackier."

"You're getting carried away." Char's dark eyes were bright with worry. "He'll never make it work,
anyway. And a lot of people think Ca
rm
el's cute. It's
got Clint Eastwood. But this
isn't
Ca
rm
el. We don't
have
an ocean to run to. This is central California and
it's dirt, yellow, plain—and everyone knows it."

"The
hell—I
happen to like the way this little town
looks." In fact, she loved it, had adored it from that
first day, almost six years ago, when she'd been on a
trip going nowhere, coming from nowhere she wanted
to go back to, and had stopped for gas. The radiator in her old Chevy station wagon had chosen that moment to spring a leak, and a gas stop turned into an overnight stay that led to a permanent address change—for Gaby and her then
one
year-old daughter, Mae.

And Gaby
loved
the place.

"I like Goldstrike, too," Char said quietly. She
jabbed a pin repeatedly into the cushion she wore on
a band around her wrist—a sure sign she was more
upset than she wanted Gaby to guess. "Forget
Jacques Ledan and his megaresort plans. Think fruit.
Keep your mind on fruit. This is the year of the fruit
theme at Gaby's. Fruit is great." She snatched up a
black velvet pillbox-shaped hat and coiled a spray of
silk strawberries on the crown.

For a moment the only sound in the room was the
whir of wooden blades in the overhead fans.

"The fruit is great?" Gaby said carefully, narrowing eyes she'd been told, usually by people not destined to be great friends, could resemble green drill bits.

"Great," Char repeated. "Absolutely." She nod
ded the mass of wiry, gray-peppered dark curls that reached her shoulders.

Gaby settled a hat on her head and pulled the
straight brim far down over her eyes. The black straw
matador number had a band fashioned from a string of miniature wax bananas. "Yesterday," she said de
liberately, "yesterday the fruit stank. Today it's great.
Did you get a brain transplant since you stepped out
of here last night, or what?"

Char hunched her thin shoulders. "I thought it through, okay?"

"Not okay." Giving the hat brim an added downward tilt, Gaby dropped into a chair. She had made
wearing her own creations a trademark. Every day a
different hat. She pointed at Char. "I know diversion tactics when I see them. They won't work. Ooh, wait
till I get my hands on this bozo."

"He owns Ledan Confectionery and he's no bozo.
You can't call a multimillionaire a bozo."

Gaby raised her jaw. She knew the hat suited her. With her long, straight black hair drawn back from a
finely boned face dominated by great green eyes and
a full mouth, her inner eye told her exactly the picture
she made: dramatically elegant. She wasn't vain, just savvy. If customers liked what they saw on her, they
wanted to duplicate the effect for themselves. That
sold hats and that was her business. Goldstrike was a small town, once a gold-panning settlement, that had
been dying for longer than any of the current inhabitants remembered. Fruit farmers and the handful of
businesses needed to support them; that's what Gold
strike was about. These people didn't need fancy hats.
But there were women among them who needed and
wanted the work Gaby's one-woman whirlwind op
eration could provide, and the whole town benefited
from the people who traveled long distances just to buy and own a genuine "Gaby." Those customers came, spent enough money to be of slight help to Goldstrike's economy and left. And they didn't stay long enough to change anything the natives didn't want disturbed.

"I think," Gaby said after consideration, "that there's absolutely no reason I can't call some idiot
from Los Angeles a bozo just because he's got a gold-
plated rear."

Char tossed aside the black velvet and grabbed her
iced tea. "You're going downhill, my girl. Your losing it. Gold-plated rear?"

"Yeah. He wallowed in money so long it worked
its way through his skin, and since he made his bucks
in candy, he's gotta be a taddy bit porky, which means he has to sit on his rear a lot because he's too tired to move. Gravity pulls, right?"

"Uh-huh." Char crossed her arms.

"Right. Okay. So a lot of the money in his skin
turned to gold and sank to the lowest point of gravity.
His backside is pure fourteen carat and since money
is what occupies his brain—one hundred percent—
that's where his brain is. What would
you call
a guy
who keeps his brain there?"

"All the years you lived with that wild crowd in Los Angeles spoiled you."

"Probably." They certainly caused her to marry a man because he looked good enough to eat, even
though he had nothing in common with her. But with
out Michael there wouldn't have been a Mae, so she
guessed she wouldn't change a thing about all of that.
"Don't forget it's the Los Angeles contacts who keep
us going up here. And you and I found each other in
LA. Have you met this Ledan guy?"

"No."

"Who has?"

Char frowned and shook her head.

"Someone must have. He's been all over town try
ing to buy up real estate."

"No one's mentioned actually meeting him."

Gaby sniggered. "Like I told you. He sits in his
Los Angeles office
…
or his Paris office or up there in
that great big ugly house of his
in
our
mountains—"
she indicated the nearby foothills of the Sierra Nevada
"—and that's all he does
…
sit. And think up ways to
make even more money and make our lives miserable
in the process. He can't even get out and do his own dirty work."

"
I'm
sure the man doesn't deliberately try to dream
up things we won't like."

"No. He doesn't think about us at all. We don't exist to Mr. Jacques Ledan. Ooh, I hate him. I may just go up and speak to him myself. Once he sees
what he's up against he may decide to take his resort
and
…
take it elsewhere."

Char laughed. "You are pretty terrifying."

"I may not look particularly
…
robust, but I can stand up for myself." Gaby glowered at the other woman. All her life she'd been told how fragile she
looked, and she detested being seen as a delicate, ex
otic flower of a woman. Her personality was anything
but soft.

A distant jingle sounded. The workroom was be
hind a small showroom that fronted on the street. Lo
cals came to the back entrance. The bell announced a customer.

Char looked surprised. "Another drop-in? Two in one day?" Since G
oldstrike wasn't on a main high
way, very few sales were to casual customers.

"Your turn," Gaby said quickly.

"Uh-uh." Char picked up the strawberry vine once
more. "I took the other one. This is your chance to
shine." She flipped the brilliantly striped skirt of her
loose cotton dress and sat down, tucking thin, brown
ankles around the legs of her chair.

Without another word, Gaby got up and swept be
tween empty worktables. On Saturdays she and Char
worked alone and traded off turns dealing with any buyers.

Entering the shop, her flat sandals making slapping
sounds on stone tiles, Gaby was confronted by a tall,
auburn-haired woman with penetrating brown eyes, a
full figure in a red suit, noticeably good legs all the way down to high, high-heeled red shoes
…
and a
frown that would compete with Gaby's renowned best
efforts. To the woman's left, apparently fascinated by
one of the hats in the window, stood a huskily built
blond man. A flash of sun on a tinted windshield drew
attention to a navy-blue limousine outside.

"Good morning." Gaby looked from the pointed-
crowned, claret-colored velvet evening hat the woman
balanced on a forefinger, to those piercing eyes. "Looking for something for the theater
…
the opera, perhaps?"

The claret hat featured a swathe of net veiling dotted with tiny crystal beads and discreetly edged with
shiny red currants. Gaby was very pleased with her fruit theme.

"Who on earth wears something like this around
here?" The woman's voice held no malice, only gen
uine curiosity.

Gaby hitched at the slipping shoulders of her wide-
necked overblouse. "No one around here does." She
didn't bother to add that the congresswoman who'd
ordered the hat would wear it at a gala charity concert
in Washington.

"Oh." The woman's gaze slid from Gaby to the
hat and back t
o Gaby. "I see. Are you Gaby Mc
Gregor?"

"The same."

The man, thirtyish, blue-eyed and boyishly handsome, aimed a charming smile in Gaby's direction
before settling into a black wicker chair meant more
for decoration than actual use.

"You don't look
…
Are you from Goldstrike?" the woman asked.

"Oh, yes. This is home." She didn't owe anyone her life history, particularly not some overdressed
fruitcake.

"I'm Rita Nagel." Still balancing the conical hat
on her left forefinger, the way a plate juggler would,
the woman thrust out her right hand.

Gaby shook hands, not without noting long, per
fectly manicured nails
…
and a surprisingly firm grip.
"Hi, Rita."

"How many people work for you?"

The question took Gaby aback. "Um—it varies,
depending upon the orders." She wasn't about to tell
her the exact number.