Peggy Nicholson - Her Bodyguard

“And you can see what a good job she’s been doing,” said Trace, nodding at the boxes lined along one wall.

A dozen boxes at least, Gillian estimated, filled with—“Yikes! Is that all—”

“Fan mail,” Lara said with a look of comic guilt. “Still want the job?”

“Well, yes.” More than ever. Lara wasn’t like anything she’d expected. There was some mystery here that needed unraveling. “Who’s afraid of a little fan mail?” And now was probably not the time to admit that she had suffered all her life from mild—okay, moderate—dyslexia. Reading required intense concentration and exacted fierce headaches. “Am I looking at a week’s worth of mail or—”

“Oh, just today’s,” Trace assured her blandly.

Lara elbowed him in the ribs. “Sit down and hush up before you scare Gillian off the job, you brute!”

“Your wish, oh heart, is my...” Trace retired obediently to a window seat. He selected a catalog from a pile arranged on the coffee table, opened it, and seemed instantly absorbed.

Lara turned back to Gillian with a smile. “It’s six months’ or more accumulation. Joya fell behind some time before last Christmas and the poor darling never caught up again.”

“Though she tried valiantly,” Trace murmured without looking up. He turned a page.

“She was only working part-time,” Lara defended her stepdaughter. “She and Toby—her brother—were attending college here in town, at Salve Regina...”

A brother, as well! Gillian’s stepbrother, also, or was Toby Lara and Richard Corday’s son? Which would mean that he was Gillian’s half brother. She found herself hoping keenly for the second alternative. Her own adoptive brother had been plucked from her daily life with her parents’ divorce. She would have liked a full-time sibling or two.

“What with her midterms and a paper she had to write...” murmured Lara, still defending the absent Joya. Trace rustled his catalog too loudly. Lara shrugged. “Anyway, all these letters need answering. So here’s how you go about it.”

She selected a letter from the last box in line along the wall, opened it and pulled out a printed get-well card featuring a doleful rabbit on crutches, his ears bent, his head bandaged. She laughed to herself and held it out to Gillian. “They’re filming the fall season’s episodes of Searching for Sarah already. Since I won’t be returning for another six months or so, the scriptwriters have written me out of the story. They’ve decided that I had a dreadful accident while skiing in Switzerland, and no one knows if I’ll ever walk again—art imitating life, but not too closely, thank God.”

She lifted the card from Gillian’s fingers. “Anyway, somehow Soap Opera Digest got wind of that plot twist and ran it as their lead story last month. Ever since it came out, half my mail is get-well cards and the other half is outraged complaints.”

Either way, Gillian’s job was to respond. Lara switched on the computer on the desk and showed her the various form letters. As time and inspiration permitted, she should add a sentence or two to customize the form letter, thus making the fan feel she was receiving a personal response. “I wish there were time to send each of them an answer from scratch, but there just isn’t. Still I’m really grateful for their concern. For their...loyalty. Some of them have been writing me for years. Which reminds me—”

Lara showed Gillian how to check to see if the fan was new—in which case the name was to be added to a database Lara maintained, along with a code that showed which form letter she’d received—or if the fan was an old one, then Gillian should review the file to make sure a repeat response didn’t get sent.

Autographed photos of Lara were stored in this drawer, prestamped envelopes in that. “And that’s about it for the fan mail,” Lara said at last. “Except for the...special cases.”

“The reality impaired,” Trace murmured.

Lara rounded on him fiercely. “They’re not all—”

“There?” he supplied gently. “Any woman who thinks she might be Sarah? A fictional long-lost daughter of a fictional Dr. Daley, star of a prime-time soap opera? Anyone who believes that isn’t playing with a full deck, Lara.”

Gillian had wondered herself, of course. Dr. Laura Daley was fiction. Lara’s maiden name was Laura Bailey. Both women, the fictional one and the factual, had sold their babies—one for the money to go to med school, the other for a red sports car. And it was Lara’s own husband who’d created the Dr. Daley character. Why? The story was just too juicy to pass up? But how could Lara have allowed Corday to use her own life as fodder for a soap opera?

On the other hand, people did it all the time, selling their real-life tragedies or scandals to TV, to be dramatized as a movie of the week. So why couldn’t Lara sell her own story—sell me—all over again?

“They’re a little confused,” Lara admitted, regaining her good temper. “So we try to straighten them out gently, pointing out that Searching for Sarah isn’t based on reality.”

Except that it is. Almost. Gillian found herself nodding to hide her confusion.

“I have a form letter for the special cases,” Lara went on, “but those I handle personally. If you run across any letter where the fan thinks she might be Sarah, you bring that right to me and I’ll deal with it, okay?”

Straightening them out gently, she’d said. Except that when Gillian had written Lara a year ago to say that maybe, just maybe, she might be Lara’s birth daughter, Sarah Scott, Lara’s response had been ferocious, not gentle: If I didn’t want you when you were born, why would I want you now?

“Laaaara. Lara-darling?” The owner of that caroling soprano paused in the office doorway. Gillian recognized the blonde in the Range Rover, who had coolly nodded her through the gates on the day of her interview. This morning she radiated warmth. “Oh, there you are, darling!” Her blue eyes switched to Gillian and widened. “And you must be my poor, poor replacement!”

“Gillian, this is my daughter Joya,” Lara said, and completed the introductions while the girl glided across the hardwood floors to offer her hand. Her palm was marshmallow soft, her grip fashionably limp; her inch-long mauve fingernails made shaking hands a bit of a hazard. Gillian could see why she’d gotten behind in her paperwork.

“Did you need something, sweetie?” Lara asked.

The girl turned a dazzling smile upon her. “Just your car for a little bitty while? Stupid Toby took the Range Rover back to the dealer. He says it’s lost its new-car smell and the dealer should have some sort of spray to make it smell new again. I mean, I ask you, so it smells like it’s three months old instead of three days? Who cares? Anyway, I told Duffy and Pooh I’d meet them for lunch out at Bailey’s Beach, so could I pretty, pretty please take your—”

“No,” said Trace from the window seat. “I may need it.”

Sunshine gave way to storm clouds in the blink of an eye, as Joya whirled to face him. “Well, too bad! I asked first!” She glanced over her shoulder at Lara. “Didn’t I, darling?”

Lara bit her lip, glancing from one to the other. Trace shook his head slowly and Joya caught the movement from the corner of her eye. Her head snapped around.

“You stay out of this, Trace! It’s none of your business.”

“We could drive you, I suppose,” Lara said. She put a soothing hand on the girl’s arm.

Joya shook it off and backed away. “I don’t want to be driven to lunch like a snot-nosed child. I—”

“Then stop acting like one,” suggested Trace.

Joya stamped her foot. “You shut up!”

Gillian drifted back a step...another, then turned. If there had been some way to creep out of the room she’d have taken it gladly. Next best option was to act as though this ugly little scene wasn’t happening, go about her business. She stooped by the last box in line and examined its contents.