Leslie Kelly - Here Comes Trouble

Well, that cinched it, didn’t it? His family had been in banking for a hundred years. It was how the Potts family had made their fortune. Which had provided Mortimer with a comfortable inheritance that he’d parlayed into millions through prudent investing and a bit of international intrigue.

Destiny. He was a sheikh. He had the money. He loved trouble. And he would, most assuredly, love Trouble.

“About the boy…”

Mortimer set the paper down. “Is it serious?”

“It may be. He will likely need to do some reevaluating.”

There wasn’t anything Mortimer Potts wouldn’t do for his grandsons. And it suddenly occurred to him that the purchase of his own little Pennsylvania town could help in that respect, too. “You are aware that if I proceed with this, my grandsons are certain to come try to rescue me from my folly.”

Roderick nodded ever so slightly.

“Morgan is preparing to fly off on some assignment for Time magazine. And Michael is doing something quite mysterious, which he referred to as ‘deep undercover’ work.”

That left Max. The rascal. Who would, without doubt, come to Trouble determined to save his grandfather.

Instead, Mortimer hoped, Max would be saving himself.

PILOTING A TWIN-ENGINE Cessna Citation CJ2+ out of Long Beach Airport in California, Max Taylor was prepared for a lot of things. Bad weather, low visibility, turbulence. He’d dealt with the wind shear off a low-flying commercial airliner. Equipment failure. Hell, even the odd seagull going splat on the windshield or getting sucked up into an engine.

But not this. Not a scene straight out of a bad porn movie. Nothing in his wildest dreams—or darkest nightmares—could have prepared him for a seventy-year-old passenger bursting into his cockpit. Naked. Completely, shockingly naked. “Wha—”

“Mr. Taylor, induct me into the mile-high club!” the gray-haired woman exclaimed, her arms wide, emphasizing the, uh, length of her bustline.

Max’s first thought was to dive back below five thousand feet so they wouldn’t be a mile up. His second was to think that all her millions hadn’t managed to make Mrs. Rudolph Coltrane look as young from the neck down as it had managed to deal with her tightly Botoxed face. And his third was to realize that he was being attacked in his own plane. By a woman old enough to be his grandmother.

“Mrs. Coltrane, what do you think you’re doing?” he asked, somehow managing to keep his voice steady, his hands on the controls and his gaze straight ahead. Not that it was going to do much good—he’d already gotten an eyeful.

Still in shock, Max suspected he was going to have nightmares tonight. Nightmares about the unattractiveness of breast implants going south, and sags that couldn’t be lifted by a crane, much less the best plastic surgeon in L.A.

“I was going to wait until we were higher up, but I can’t,” the woman said. “I’ve waited too long as it is. I know you’re used to a slightly younger woman…”

Decades.

“…but we’re alone now and I’m willing and a man with your…appetites probably can’t go for long without giving in to his carnal urges.”

Currently, Max’s only urge was to jump out of the plane.

“I’ve paid good money for this trip, and I fully expect you to be my in-flight entertainment.”

“That’s what the DVD player is for,” he whispered, shaking his head in bewilderment.

This couldn’t be happening. Not along with all the other weird crap he’d been experiencing lately. A constant stream of women had been driving him nuts for weeks, almost sending him into hiding. He seemed to be the latest fad among the “ladies who lunch” of southern California.

Max had always enjoyed relationships with his fair share of females. Probably the next guy’s fair share, too. He certainly wasn’t going to apologize for liking women.

And he did. Oh, he really did. He liked how they smelled and how they looked. Liked the tender bit of skin at the nape of a lovely neck and the feel of soft hair against his bare chest. Liked tangled sheets, steamy nights and slow, deep kisses.

Careful not to get snagged in any commitment nets—not after his one disastrous experience with marriage and the major screw-up he’d made of his life following his divorce—he only got involved with women who were looking for the same things he was. Intelligent conversation, a few nice meals and, occasionally, scream-like-a-banshee sex. No strings.

Which meant, he supposed, that the strange abundance of propositions coming his way the past few weeks should have been a good thing.

It wasn’t.

Because Max had become much more careful and circumspect about his sex life in recent years. Besides, he had always been the pursuer, not the pursued. He liked flirtation and seduction. A shared glance and the not-completely-innocent brush of a hand against a soft female arm. Charming his way into the good graces of even the most cool and unattainable ice queen gave him a great deal of satisfaction, whether sex was involved or not.

Lately, though, he’d been like a lame zebra being stalked by a pride of hungry lionesses.

He was being felt up by women in line at the bank, and having notes and drinks delivered to him in restaurants. One brunette with about ten carats of diamonds glittering from her fingers had been sitting on the hood of his Porsche last week. He’d been so concerned about possible dents in his car that at first the woman’s lack of panties beneath her short dress hadn’t registered. Once it did, his only reaction had been annoyance that he was also going to have to get the car washed.

“It’s gotta be the cologne,” he muttered, wondering if he was the subject of a secret scientific experiment. Maybe Calvin Klein was slipping some kind of animal secretion into his aftershave. Something that made Max give off irresistible pheromones that turned women into sex-starved vixens.

“Mr. Taylor…”

Or sex-starved bovines.

“Return to your seat,” he said from between clenched teeth. He didn’t look around, focusing instead on the blue sky spread in a brilliant panorama outside the windshield. Not on the age-spotted lady in the doorway spread in an Eve-old invitation. “Get dressed and sit down or I’ll return to the airport.”

“You can’t mean to tell me you’re refusing.” The spoiled, rich socialite wasn’t used to being told no. And as the owner of a young private charter company that was still struggling under last year’s expansion from a four-jet fleet to a six-jet one, he wasn’t used to saying it—not when it came to business.

Max had worked his ass off in the past three years, determined to get himself out of the quagmire his life had become after he’d left the Air Force. After a brief, yearlong bout of drunkenness during his divorce, he’d pulled his shit together and had launched his small, regional airline. It was something he’d dreamed of doing since his teenage years when he first learned to fly over the African desert, taught by one of his grandfather’s cronies.

Since then, his airline had become one of the fastest-growing private carriers in Orange County. Especially with customers like Mrs. Rudolph Coltrane, who freely shelled out major dollars to grab a ride to Vail or down to Cancún.

Of course, he’d always thought he’d be living this life after he finished a career as an Air Force pilot. That hadn’t exactly gone as planned. Don’t go there, he silently reminded himself.

“Look, I’m willing to fly you wherever you want to go,” he said, trying to sound reasonable. “As long as it’s within the safety parameters of the aircraft. And sex in the cockpit is not.”

He didn’t go into the whole “I’d rather poke my liver out with a burning pogo stick than have sex with you” bit. Hopefully the woman cared enough for her own skin to sit down.