Her Montana Millionaire

Instead, she reasserted her smile. “You can take my mind off what I’m missing.”

She waited for him to give her his number, but it didn’t happen. He merely slid into his expensive car, shaking his head, muttering, “Incredible.”

Maybe he’d forgotten to return the gesture in kind, but it didn’t matter. Him not being attracted to her wasn’t even a possibility. Men loved her as much as she loved them.

She sighed as he drove away. He’d call, all right. Not that she’d be waiting.

Life had too much to offer for her to be lounging by the phone.

Damned long legs.

As Max Cantrell drove down Logan Street, back to his estate, he tried to cleanse all impure thoughts from his mind.

Gams. A French starlet mouth pouted with red lipstick. A svelte figure covered by an elegant black-and-white dress suit. An Audrey Hepburn half smile and sunglasses covering a face with high cheekbones and pale skin, making him itch to see what she really looked like beneath the shade of her glamorous hat.

Where had Jinni Fairchild come from, for God’s sake? Did New York really grow women who were that out of the ordinary?

For about the thirteenth time since leaving the parking lot, he looked at her name and number, clutched in the same hand that guided his steering wheel. He’d thought about throwing it out the window, but Max didn’t take too kindly to anyone—even himself—ruining the beauty of the fence-studded grass, the pines and cottonwoods lining a stream that ran parallel to a massive iron gate that announced his driveway.

In the distance, the Crazy Mountains loomed over the top of his mansion, a Tuscan-styled wonder of architecture with its multileveled, beige-bricked pile of rooms resembling a quaint, meandering village he’d visited in Italy during his honeymoon. He’d been such a damned sucker for romance when he’d built it. Eloise, his ex-wife, had requested the style, back when she’d almost loved him.

Ah, what good did it do to think about Eloise, especially now, after she’d left him and their now fourteen-year-old son, Michael, so many years ago?

Max crumpled Jinni’s number, letting it fall from his fingers to the carpeted floor of the Benz. He didn’t need to bother with another woman. Even one whose attractive figure had just about socked him in the gut with all the inactive hormones he’d been keeping under his thumb.

Max sped up his driveway, zipping past the twenty head of cattle, the few ranch-hand houses he kept on his artesian well-irrigated ninety acres. It was almost as if he was driving like a demon to get away from MonMart and the confrontation he’d had with that crazy New York woman.

Hell, he’d even jumped straight into his car, deciding to forget his plans to pick up some steaks for dinner. Running into that lady inside the store would’ve sent him over the edge for certain, and the last thing he needed was more grief in his life.

After parking the Benz in his spacious garage between the Rolls-Royce and the Hummer, Max headed into his mansion through the massive, echoing kitchen.

“Hello, sir,” said Bently. His right-hand man—one of the reasons Max had become a multimillionaire by the age of thirty—was garbed in a full-length apron, slicing vegetables at the enormous cutting block in the room’s center. “No steaks tonight?”

“Bently, I am not a sir. Not even when I’m seventy will I be a sir. What’s cooking?”

“Vegetables julienne, sir.” The elderly man’s mustache, which he’d spent years growing, was waxed up into slim handlebars, defying the laws of gravity. “MonMart is rarely out of meat, so I assume something hindered your steak hunt?”

Talking about that woman was out of the question. He wouldn’t do it. “Where’s Michael?”

“In the driving simulator room.” Chop, chop, chop. “I suppose we shall merely pretend to eat a good portion of beef tonight, then?”

“How clever you are, Bently, especially in light of my brother’s invisibility rumors.”

“An old man knows when you’re distracted. Even when you were a young boy I could determine your moods. For example, when that reporter—Brittney Anthony, I believe it was—wrote about you in Time, hailing you as a child prodigy, it bothered you. Sullen for weeks, you were, sitting in your room, staring at the blank walls. When I asked, you told me you didn’t like to be labeled. You only wanted to go about your business and solve the world’s overpopulation problems using that special form of calculus I taught you. Noble child, if I do say so myself.”

Bently went back to his culinary tasks. “It never hurts to ask if something’s eating at my employer.”

Uh-uh. He wasn’t going to say a word about legs or sultry voices or…

“I got tangled up with this woman today at MonMart’s parking lot.” Max grabbed a shred of carrot from Bently’s growing pile.

“That’s all?”

“Hey,” Max said, putting back the vegetable after absently inspecting it, “don’t take that tone.”

“What tone, sir?”

“That yippee-he’s-interested-in-a-woman tone. Because it’s no big deal. Is that clear?”

Bently tightened his lips, his mustache quivering. “Sharply.”

“It’s just…” Max walked by the island, lightly slapping at the tiles with a fist. “It’s just that she screeched into the parking place I wanted and acted like it was no big to-do.”

“Shocking times in Rumor.”

“Tell me about it. A stranger, taking over the town. Next thing you know, she’ll be nosing in on Guy and making things worse than they already are. She was asking questions about him, you know, wondering about the so-called murders, digging into my business. I don’t take kindly to being inspected and analyzed.”

“Everyone has questions.”

From above their heads, a thump sounded, just as if a heavy weight had been dropped on the floor.

Bently clicked his tongue. “Raccoons?”

“Please, not another thing to deal with. If it’s not my software company, it’s Michael. If it’s not Guy and his disappearing act, it’s—” He cut himself off before he could say something stupid like, “beautiful strangers in movie-star dress suits and pumps.”

As Bently crossed to the stove, he said, “Don’t concern yourself. Those sounds have been escalating for the past couple of weeks. I’ll get to it.”

Oil sizzled in a sautée pan, sending the aroma of garlic through the room.

“Thanks, Bently.” Max started to leave. “Sorry about the steaks.”

“We’ve got red snapper waiting in the wings.”

Max grinned at the older man, then left, knowing he’d lucked out when his parents had hired Bently to tutor him as a five-year-old. Regular schooling hadn’t been challenging enough for Max and Guy, so with Bently’s guidance, they’d explored new academic territories, conquered new ideas. Even when he’d reached the age of twenty, riding the beginning wave of software companies, Bently had advised him, encouraged him.

Damn, he only wished the old man had all the answers. When it came to Michael, Max had no clue how to handle matters.

He passed through the parlor, passed a couple of game rooms with different virtual reality set-ups housed in them, passed his in-home movie theater, passed his train room, with old memorabilia and photos of railway wrecks.

Finally, he reached the driving simulator, where the teenage Michael sat behind the wheel of a car shell, driving over a computer-generated road.

Max switched off the mechanism, a prototype his company was developing to train drivers. The censure earned one of his son’s practiced glowers.

“I was almost done with this scenario, Dad.”

“When did I say you were allowed back on any of the games?”

Michael hefted out a dramatic sigh. “In another two weeks.”