LITMIR.BIZ

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front with one foot, connected with his chest and sent him sprawling on his back on top of Bertha M. Pierce, 1917-2003, beloved wife of Henry.

      Yanking open the back of the camera, Jolie ripped out the film, exposing it to the sun, and then pulled back her arm, ready to throw the camera in the photographer’s face. She knew the other photographers and video cameramen were having a field day from their vantage point across the road, but she didn’t care. She’d needed a target for all her anger, her grief, her frustration, and this bozo had volunteered for the job.

      And then she heard the scream.

      Turning, with the camera still in midair, Jolie saw the interchangeable great-aunts ten yards behind her.

      One of them—Aunt Marie; or maybe it was Aunt Theresa—had her right leg jammed up to the knee in a hole in the ground. She wasn’t screaming, even though her mouth was open and moving. She was white-faced with terror.

      “Help! Help!” the other aunt, the screamer, cried hysterically. “Somebody’s trying to pull her down!”

      Jolie let the camera fall to the ground as Jade and Jessica joined her, the three of them now staring at the aunts. “What in hell…?”

      “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

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