Leslie Kelly - Play with Me

“You’re not so old I can’t box your ears.”

A grin tugged at his mouth. “The one time you boxed my ears as a kid, I put frogs in your punch bowl right before a party.”

An amused gleam lit her eyes. “So do it again.”

Reese’s brow furrowed. “Excuse me?”

“Be wild. Do something fun. Chuck this cautious-businessman gig and be the bad-ass rebel you once were.”

Bad-ass rebel? Him? The guy most recently voted Young Businessman of the Year? “Yeah, right.”

He didn’t know which sounded more strange—him being that person, or his elderly great-aunt using the term bad-ass rebel. Then again, she had just asked him when he’d last gotten laid—a question he didn’t even want to contemplate in his own mind.

She fixed a pointed stare at his face. “Don’t think I’ve forgotten who I had to bail out of jail one spring break. Which young fellow it was who ended up taking two girls to the prom. Or who hired a stripper to show up at the principal’s house.”

Oh. That bad-ass rebel. Reese had forgotten all about him.

“The world was your playground once. Go play in it again.”

Play? Be unencumbered, free from responsibilities?

Reese looked at the files on his desk. There was a mountain of order forms, requisitions, payroll checks, ad copy, legal paperwork—all needing his attention. His signature. His time.

Then there was his personal calendar, filled with family obligations, fixing his sister’s car, talking to his brother’s coach … doing father stuff that he hadn’t envisioned undertaking for another decade at least.

All his responsibility. Not in a decade. Now.

It wasn’t the life he’d envisioned for himself. But it was the life he had. And there wasn’t a thing he could do about it.

“I’ve forgotten how,” he muttered.

She didn’t say anything for a long moment, then the elderly woman, whose energy level so belied her years, laughed softly. There was a note in that laugh, both secretive and sneaky.

“Whatever it is you’re thinking about doing, forget it.”

She feigned a look of hurt. “Me? What could I possibly do?”

He knew better than to be fooled by the nice-old-lady routine. She’d been playing that card for as long as he could remember and it had been the downfall of many a more gullible family member. “I’m going to leave a note that if I am kidnapped by a troupe of circus clowns, the police should talk to you.”

She tsked. “Oh, my boy, circus clowns? Is that the best you can come up with? I’m wounded—you’ve underestimated me.”

“Aunt Jean …”

Ignoring him, she turned toward the door. Before she exited, however, she glanced back. “I have the utmost confidence in you, dear. I have no doubt that when the right moment presents itself, you will rise to the occasion.”

With a quickly blown kiss and a jangle of expensive bracelets decorating her skinny arm, she slipped out. Reese was free to get back to work. But instead, he spent a few minutes thinking about what Great-Aunt Jean had said.

He didn’t doubt she was right about the fact that he was bored. Stifled. Suffocating. But her solution—to go a little crazy—wasn’t the answer. Not for the life he was living now. Not when so many people counted on him. His family. His employees. His late father.

Besides, it didn’t matter. No opportunity to play, as she put it, had come his way for a long time. Not in more than two years. The word wasn’t even in his vocabulary anymore.

And frankly, Reese didn’t see that changing anytime soon.

Halloween

IT SHOULD HAVE BEEN a routine flight.

Pittsburgh to Chicago was about as simple an itinerary as Clear-Blue Airlines ever flew. In the LearJet 60, travel time would be under an hour. The weather was perfect, the sky like something out of a kid’s Crayola artwork display. Blue as a robin’s egg, with a few puffy white clouds to set the scene and not a drop of moisture in the air. Crisp, not cold, it was about the most beautiful autumn day they’d had this year.

The guys in the tower were cheerful, the Lear impeccably maintained and a joy to handle. Amanda Bauer’s mood was good, especially since it was one of her favorite holidays. Halloween.

She should have known something was going to screw it up.

“What do you mean Mrs. Rush canceled?” she asked, frowning as she held the cell phone tightly to her ear. Standing in the shadow of the jet on the tarmac, she edged in beside the fold-down steps. She covered her other ear with her hand to drown out the noises of nearby aircraft. “Are you sure? She’s been talking about this trip for ages.”

“Sorry, kiddo, you’re going to have to do without your senior sisters meeting this month,” said Ginny Tate, the backbone of Clear-Blue. The middle-aged woman did everything from scheduling appointments, to bookkeeping, to ordering parts, to maintaining the company Web site. Ginny was just as good at arguing with airport honchos who wanted to obsess over every flight plan as she was at making sure Uncle Frank, who had founded the airline, took his cholesterol medication every day.

In short, Ginny was the one who kept the business running so all Amanda and Uncle Frank—now 60-40 partners in the airline—had to do was fly.

Which was just fine with them.

“Mrs. Rush said one of her friends has the flu and she doesn’t want to go away in case she comes down with it, too.”

“Oh, that bites,” Amanda muttered, really regretting the news. Because she had been looking forward to seeing the group of zany older women again. Mrs. Rush, an elderly widow and heir to a steel fortune, was one of her regular clients.

The wealthy woman and her “gal pals,” who ranged in age from fifty to eighty, took girls-weekend trips every couple of months. They always requested Amanda as their pilot, having almost adopted her into the group. She’d flown them to Vegas for some gambling. To Reno for some gambling. To the Caribbean for some gambling. With a few spa destinations thrown in between.

Amanda had no idea what the group had planned for Halloween in Chicago, but she was sure it would have been entertaining.

“She asked me to tell you she’s sorry, and says if she has to, she’ll invent a trip in a few weeks so you two can catch up.”

“You do realize she’s not kidding.”

“I know,” said Ginny. “Money doesn’t stand a chance in her wallet, does it? The hundred-dollar bills have springs attached—she puts them in and they start trying to bounce right out.”

Pretty accurate. Since losing her husband, the woman had made it her mission to go through as much of his fortune as possible. Mr. Rush hadn’t lived long enough to enjoy the full fruits of his labors, so in his memory, his widow was going to pluck every plum and wring every bit of juice she could out of the rest of her life. No regrets, that was her M.O.

Mrs. Rush was about as different from the people Amanda had grown up with as a person could be. Her own family back in Stubing, Ohio, epitomized the small-town, hard-work, wholesome, nose-to-the-grindston-’til-the-day-you-die mentality.

They had never quite known what to make of her.

Amanda had started rebelling by first grade, when she’d led a student revolt against lima beans in school lunches. Things had only gone downhill from there. By the time she hit seventh grade, her parents were looking into boarding schools … which they couldn’t possibly afford. And when she graduated high school with a disciplinary record matched only by a guy who’d ended up in prison, they’d pretty much given up on her for good.

She couldn’t say why she’d gone out of her way to find trouble. Maybe it was because trouble was such a bad word in her house. The forbidden path was always so much more exciting than the straight-and-narrow one.