See Jane Fall (2 page)

***

Jane Mays looked out the window of the
taxiing Boeing 757, still groggy from the nap she’d taken from
Chicago to Bozeman. Leaving LaGuardia Airport in New York at 7:00
a.m. meant arriving at the airport at 5:30 a.m. That meant leaving
her apartment in midtown at 4:45 a.m., being downstairs for the
luggage pickup at 4:30 a.m., after waking up at 4:00 a.m.

And since Jane was the furthest possible
thing from a morning person, now it meant she was feeling crabby
and sluggish, even after her catnap.

It didn’t help that Jane had left her
favorite camera at her cousin’s downtown loft last night while she
was there packing her cousin’s things for the trip, which meant
going back to get it at one o’clock in the morning. But there was
no way Jane was going to spend a week in glorious Montana without
her camera. Returning to her apartment, she had packed until about
two-thirty and then fell asleep for ninety minutes draped across
her kitchen table before the alarm on her phone buzzed her
awake.

Turning toward the small airplane window,
she rubbed her eyes, noting snow-capped mountains in the distance.
The window didn’t afford a good view of the mountains, but she
admired them as best she could through the scratched, cloudy
plexiglass. She hoped to have some time to get some good shots in
before Samara came to town on Tuesday, but there was so much to do
between now and then, she probably wouldn’t have the chance.

In the five years since Jane had graduated
college and been pressured into taking on the job as her cousin’s
assistant and location coordinator, Sara, er, um,
Samara
had
progressively become more demanding, more needy, never fully
satisfied with anything. And Jane, who had developed the skill of
tuning out Samara’s over-the-top drama, abusive language and absurd
demands, was once again reaching her breaking point. It happened
cyclically. Jane would have just about enough of Samara’s attitude
and share with her uncle her intent to quit. But then between Uncle
Mays cajoling Jane to give it another month and Samara choosing to
behave herself, Jane wouldn’t walk away.

There was something about her uncle, the
identical twin of her deceased father, beseeching her with her
father’s face that made Jane’s gumption fold and crumble every
time. The words “Something is better than nothing” circled in her
head, and quite simply, her uncle was all she had.

Jane turned on her phone and waited for it
to boot up as they reached the gate. She couldn’t remember the name
of the tour operator she should be looking for.
Trend
’s
travel department had made all of the ground arrangements and Jane
had been assured that all of her instructions pertaining to
Samara’s needs had been passed along.

Her phone buzzed noisily, downloading
messages, as she put on a beat-up Red Sox cap and tossed her chic
Coach backpack over her shoulder. Five messages from Samara: two
calls and three texts—even though her cousin knew good and well
that Jane was flying—and it was all nonsense:
Make sure there’s
Burt’s Bees lip gloss on my bedside table
;
Did you pack my
fave slippers?
and
What did I get my Daddy for his
birthday?

Jane had packed a dozen Burt’s Bees lip
glosses for Samara, had purchased an extra pair of her favorite
slippers for Yellowstone so that she wouldn’t have to be without
them in New York for even one day, and had sent her uncle Patriots
season tickets, signing the card from both girls.

Jane had taken a small measure of
satisfaction in signing her own name first—she had, in fact,
purchased
the tickets and card with her own money—sure that
Samara wouldn’t remember his birthday anyway. If Samara hadn’t read
the e-mail Jane sent advising Samara of the gift, that was
her
problem.

There was a voice mail from Samara’s agent,
Sebastian, who would be traveling with her on Tuesday morning, as
well as two calls from Samara’s trainer, and a text from her makeup
artist, Ray, which simply read:
Wow! 3 days to u-self, girl. U
deserve it. Enjoy. xo

Jane smiled at that text, shoving her phone
back in her pocket as she made her way down the Jetway and into the
airport.
I
do
deserve it.
And damn it, if she had to
spend a week in the same house with Samara, the least she could do
was to enjoy a little time to herself before her cousin
arrived.

Once upon a time the cousins, who were only
a year apart in age, had been best friends. Both only children, the
girls spent every holiday and school vacation together—at Jane’s
house in San Francisco or Sara’s house in Boston, at Disney World
over spring break and in Cape Cod for two weeks every summer. But
when Jane’s parents had been killed in a car crash a few weeks
after her tenth birthday, she’d been sent to live with her Aunt and
Uncle Mays permanently. Her sudden presence in the Mays family had
upset the careful balance that had pre-existed her. Spectacularly
beautiful nine-year-old Sara, who was unaccustomed to sharing her
parents—her father, especially—had quickly come to regard her older
cousin Jane as an interloper, and whatever friendship that had once
flourished between the cousins met a hasty demise.

Jane sighed, shaking herself out of her
reverie. Distracted by the barrage of texts, she had forgotten to
look for the name of the tour operator who would be meeting her
flight. As the escalator gently lowered her to the ground floor,
Jane dug into her back pocket to find her phone. She tapped on her
e-mail and scrolled through the messages filed under Yellowstone
Trend
Shoot, looking for ground details. Ah-ha.
Lindstrom
& Sons. Lars Lindstrom will be waiting to collect you from
baggage claim…

She looked up as she stepped off the
escalator and realized she needn’t have bothered looking him up
since she couldn’t have possibly missed him. Aside from the fact
that Bozeman Yellowstone International Airport was one of the
least
bustling places she had ever touched down, making him
a standalone figure at the bottom of the escalator holding a sign
reading
Jane Mays
, he was, hands down—and Jane had seen the
best-looking men in the world up close and personal—the most
jaw-droppingly handsome man she had ever seen.

Not that it could possibly matter for Plain
Jane Mays.

***

There weren’t a whole lot of people arriving
from Chicago, and without the benefit of a photo, Lars just assumed
that the assistant of Samara Amaya would be a fashionable woman.
She would also sit in first class, thus be one of the first to
deplane, but as he watched the passengers step onto the escalator,
no one fit the bill. There was an older couple, two businessmen, a
middle-aged lady struggling with a rambunctious toddler, and a
teenage kid in jeans and a sweatshirt with a baseball cap pulled
low over her eyes, the curls escaping over her ears his only real
clue to her sex.

The couple, the men and the lady made their
way to baggage claim without giving Lars a second glance. The kid
in the baseball cap got off the escalator and walked purposely
toward Lars, who expected she needed directions or help finding her
folks.

But as she walked closer, Lars realized that
she wasn’t the teenager he originally assumed, but a young woman in
baggy clothes draped over her body. His glance flicked to the strap
of her backpack. He could tell it was real leather, and it looked
expensive. Flipping his gaze back to her face, he saw diamond studs
glistening in her ears. Suddenly she was in front of him, and with
a huge measure of relief, Lars realized just in time that
this
must be Jane Mays, the woman for whom he was
waiting.

“Miss Mays?” he asked, hoping she didn’t
notice the surprise in his voice or on his face.

She looked up from under the brim of her
beat-up cap and grinned. “Mr. Lindstrom?”

“Lars, yeah.”

“Well, Lars-Yeah, thanks for picking me
up.”

Her voice. Oh man, her voice. It was
distinctly low and gravelly, like Demi Moore or Kathleen Turner,
and he wondered if she was recovering from a cold or if she always
sounded that way. The way she said
picking me up
made him
double take, though her body language read friendly, not
flirtatious.

“Just Lars,” he clarified.

“Okay. Over this way, Just-Lars?” She
gestured to the baggage claim area where the battered carousel had
just started to make its first lazy rotation.

“Lars.”

“Yeah, I know. I’m just—” She half smiled,
about to say something, then turned and walked over to the conveyor
belt, speaking over her shoulder. “Hope you brought a big car,
Lars. This could be ugly.”

Lars stared after her, feeling
discombobulated. She dressed like a teenager and was low-talking,
playful and dry. In short, she was throwing him and women
never
threw Lars.

“U-ugly?” he asked.

“Ms. Amaya doesn’t travel light.”

“Ms. Amaya didn’t travel.”

“Touché, Just-Lars. Nicely done.” Her green
eyes twinkled as she shoved her hands in her back pockets. “What I
mean to say is that Ms. Amaya’s luggage generally precedes her. It
all came with me so that I could unpack for her. I think it was
eight bags. Maybe nine. Maybe eighty-six thousand and twenty-four.
I can’t remember.”

Remember.
The low rumble of her voice
made the word sound unaccountably sexy, which was momentarily
distracting, and he stared at her. A millisecond later he shook his
head, focusing on her words instead of the way she was saying them,
and rolled his eyes inwardly at this news. Another spoiled famous
person who couldn’t make do with a duffel and a backpack like a
normal person. He looked down at Jane beside him, intrigued by her,
which surprised him because, physically, she was not his type at
all.

She was several inches shorter than he was,
maybe five-foot-five, and she really wasn’t much to look at. Her
figure wasn’t jumping out at him from under her oversized Boston
College sweatshirt. The worn-out, loose, faded jeans that pooled
around her expensive loafers didn’t do much for her either. Her
face was partially hidden under her cap, and she wore
tortoiseshell-framed glasses. The combination basically obscured
the top half of her face. Her hair escaped from under the cap in
soft, little waves which framed her face in a sort of appealingly
old-fashioned way, but from what he could see, her face was
unremarkable…well, wait,
mostly
unremarkable. There was
something about her eyes when she grinned…
Hm
, he
reconsidered.
Yes. There’s something about her smile.
A
little mischief, maybe.

“Ready to go to work, Just-Lars?”

Just-Lars.
And that voice. It was—by
far—the most distracting thing about her. It didn’t match her
appearance at all; it belonged to a woman much taller, more
voluptuous, with heavy-lidded eyes, oozing sex appeal. He didn’t
believe she was a smoker; he didn’t smell a whiff of tobacco while
standing beside her. But, her voice was low and raspy
like
a
smoker’s, like Jessica Rabbit’s, like the voice of a lounge singer
or the
femme fatale
from a black-and-white movie. Like
Lauren Bacall telling Humphrey Bogart to put his lips together and
blow. And she had that smart-ass sort of confidence going for her
too. He sensed that she wasn’t purposely suggestive, but he
couldn’t help wondering about the subtext he’d add to a voice like
that…
Yeah, I’m wearing a baggy sweatshirt, but I’ll bet you’re
wondering what’s under it, aren’t you, you bad, bad boy?…
And he
didn’t want to wonder, really, and it confused him that that’s
where his mind headed every time she uttered a word. Man, her voice
was something. Honestly, it made the hairs on his arm stand up; it
was so sexy and so damn unexpected.

“
Voila. Numero uno
,” she said,
gesturing to a large Gucci suitcase, black with a distinctive red
and green decorative belt.

Lars stepped forward and grabbed the bag off
the belt with ease just as Jane reached out to grab the one
after.

“Hey, let me do that.”

“I don’t mind helping,” she said.

“It’s my job.” Plus, he just wasn’t
comfortable watching a woman heft heavy luggage. “You stay with the
bags and I’ll bring them over. Do they all look like this?”

Jane nodded, sitting down gingerly on
numero uno
, watching as Lars went back to the belt again and
again until she was surrounded by eleven almost-identical Gucci
suitcases and four black garment bags.

“Is this it?” he asked Jane, who was
counting the bags, and comparing the claim numbers against the
collection she had stapled to her boarding pass.

“Uh—,” she replied, “One more…”

She jumped up and hurried to the belt,
picking up a simple leather duffel bag. The most unassuming bag
circling the belt, it had clearly done its fair share of traveling
and had the scars to prove it. She hefted it onto her shoulder and
returned to Lars.

“Mine.”

The way she purred
mine
while she
grinned at him made his throat go dry. He swallowed and tried to
smile back at her but couldn’t help staring at her lips. He dropped
his eyes quickly, and they rested, inadvertently, on the front of
her sweatshirt…precisely the spot where her breasts would be
under
her sweatshirt
.
Suddenly recognizing the
inappropriateness of his gaze, he snapped his eyes back up to her
face, and she raised an eyebrow at him, surprised and amused.

He cleared his throat nervously and made
himself useful, reaching out to loosen the beat-up leather bag from
her shoulder and toss it on the mountain of Samara’s luggage. He
wasn’t the sort to get flustered around women in general, let alone
someone as average-looking as Jane. That damn voice of hers was
making him crazy.