“Two dollars says he gets a hit.”
Stacy Lanham propped her feet on a soft-drink crate and leaned back to watch the Atlanta Braves play the Dodgers.
“You’re on, girl.” Lonnie Short dragged up a stool and sat down, pulling a grease-stained cloth from his coveralls and wiping his bald head.
The pinch hitter stood in, shifting his feet as the pitcher went into his delivery. One pitch, and the ball careened through the diving infielders as if it had eyes.
As the batter pulled up on third, Stacy turned and held out her hand. “Pay up, Lonnie.”
Lonnie shook his head and unfolded a crumpled mass of bills, peeling out two and handing them to the grinning girl.
“If you’d been playing shortstop, the ball wouldn’t have gotten through and I’d still have my money, not to mention the ownership of this garage, which your father promised to sell me on his deathbed.”
“Now, Lonnie, you know that Daddy didn’t promise you any such thing, and the Braves don’t draft women.”
“Well, you’d be a lot more use to them than you are to me,” he grumbled as he came to his feet and moseyed out of the small office that adjoined the empty work bays.
Stacy stood. “Let’s go home. The dispatcher’ll call if there’s trouble. I want to watch the game in color.”
“You just don’t want to take a chance on me winning that two dollars back, Stacy.”
“Poo! You know I’ll win.” Stacy followed him, ready to continue the argument that had become an ongoing pastime in the last year. “Besides, grumpy, I’m almost as good a mechanic as you are, and I drive these trucks a whole lot better.”
“Fine,” Lonnie agreed, “then drive one of them out to Vegas and see if you can pick up some money to pay some of our bills. At least you’d have to put on a dress in a casino. Just look at you. Grease on your face and under your fingernails, your hair going every way but Sunday. A girl like you ought to be out having fun, finding a man and getting married.”
Lonnie the Matchmaker was at work again. “A minute ago you thought I ought to be playing shortstop for the Braves. Besides, I’m not a serious gambler.”
“I don’t understand why not. You always win, which is more than your daddy could say.”
“You know I have a ten-dollar limit, and I never gamble on anything that matters. If I did, I’d lose—just like Daddy did.”
“How would you know? You’ve never tried.”
“That’s right, and I’m not going to. I saw Lucky take a fortune and gamble it away. It killed my mother and turned us into grease monkeys.”
“At least in Vegas you might meet one of those millionaires, for all the good that would do. You don’t know diddley about vamping a man.”
“I know all I need to know,” she protested. “I just don’t want to. I like my life the way it is, safe and sane.”
“And dull. I’ll bet you if an interested man walked through the door, you wouldn’t have the wildest idea of how to catch his attention.”
“And you’d be wrong.”
“Anastasia Lanham, you’re chicken. I’ll make you a wager you can’t refuse. You vamp the next man who comes into the shop. If you fail, you’ll clean out the grease pit. If you win, I’ll clean it, and you can forget my week’s pay.”
Stacy grinned at her oldest and dearest friend. She knew he worried about her. Running a trucking garage wasn’t normally a woman’s job. It hadn’t been her father’s either, as he’d quickly discovered. Lucky Lanham had been a baseball player whose knees had gone bad. During his winning years, he’d bought up small moving companies and garages with the idea that after he retired he could be his own boss.
Nobody but she and Lonnie knew about her father’s later addiction to gambling, or how his coast-to-coast fleet of semis and garages had dwindled down to one. And nobody had believed that she’d take over running the garage when her father had died six years earlier. But it had been something he’d always expected she’d do. What he could never have expected was that she would become the natural gambler that he’d never been. Lucky had always lost. Stacy never did.
Stacy had been worried all day about where Lonnie’s pay would come from this week. Every mail brought more bills and fewer checks. She couldn’t really withhold his pay, but the bet might give her a few days’ grace period. Besides, she knew every eligible man in the county.
More in fun than anything else, Stacy began planning her strategy. She wasn’t above a little bet rigging, if it would stop Lonnie’s matchmaking. “Your check and the grease pit, if I succeed?”
“That’s right.”
“Agreed.”
“Ah, sweet justice. I’m about to be a wealthy—clean man.” Lonnie looked past her, a smile stretching across his cheerful face. “Prepare to wade in grease, Stacy, here comes the next interested man.”
What Lonnie didn’t say was that the interested man had called earlier. He was interested all right, but in buying the garage, not in its owner. And he was eligible. Lonnie had determined that from their conversation.
Stacy turned around. Her eyes fell on the man entering the shop. He was a meet-me-after-dark, lean, mean, good-looking stranger. There was only one problem. It wasn’t dark, and she didn’t think that he’d be open to a little flimflam. He was definitely a long shot.
Stacy sighed. She’d really gone out on a limb. But she wasn’t the daughter of Lucky Lanham for nothing. He’d never been a welsher and neither was she. A bet is a bet, she told herself confidently as she caught sight of Lonnie’s pleased expression and searched wildly for a way out.
There was none. Lonnie had obviously set this up. She’d been outfoxed. She had to vamp this man—or make Lonnie think she had.
She’d maneuvered herself into a corner. Perversely she considered her options. She read the tabloids, about the escapades of women like Madonna and Cher. Vamping a man ought not to be too difficult. But after Lonnie’s crack about the way she looked, she had to find a surefire way to get the man’s immediate attention.
Just as the stranger reached the rack, Stacy stepped forward, closed her eyes, and gave a tug to the zipper of her coveralls, announcing with firm resolve, “I’m twenty-six years old. I’m not a virgin, but I’m available. If you’re interested, state your terms, stranger.”
The man stopped short and took in the woman who was turning from a caterpillar into a butterfly before his eyes. Beneath the gray coveralls she was wearing a soft, peach-color man’s style old-fashioned ribbed undershirt and a matching pair of boxer shorts. Her soft brown hair, pulled up in a saucy ponytail only moments before, was unleashed and caught the late-afternoon sunlight, turning the color of fine brandy as it fell across her shoulders.
Peaches and cream, he thought crazily, feeling his lips relax and his tension release. Warm, spiced, cinnamony peaches and cream. She was like a pleasant balm that soaked up his tension. It took real effort not to curl his lips into a smile, and say, “Yum.”
“I’m looking for Stacy Lanham.” Gavin felt his pulse tap-dancing like raindrops on a tin roof.
“You’re looking at her,” Lonnie commented dryly, “at least a good part of her.”
Stacy tried not to hear the amusement in Lonnie’s voice. She only heard the pounding of her heart. The stranger was eyeing her quizzically. Had he said something? Was she expected to say something in return?
The stranger took a step closer.
She finally took a deep breath and blurted out, “So you want to deal?”
“Definitely. The name’s Magadan, and my terms are either an outright sale or a merger.” His mouth was spouting business phrases, but his eyes were sending messages that didn’t bear translation into words.
“The name’s Lanham. Let’s get serious.”
“Let’s. I think I’m going to like the way you negotiate. Beats the hell out of either a chew of tobacco or lawyers and a conference room any day of the week.”
On closer examination Stacy decided that she’d made a grave error. Clint Eastwood, move over. This was no ordinary man, no truck driver with a problem. Lonnie had really stacked the deck. The man was staring at her as if he were a bank robber and she were a role of greenbacks.
Beneath incredibly long brown lashes were the most intriguing pair of green eyes she’d ever seen. His dark hair was too long and too unruly to have been styled by a barber. With a speculative gleam he stared at her, appraising her leisurely. But it wasn’t just the way he looked at her that stunned her, it was the way he dressed. Not many men came into the garage sporting a George Hamilton tan and a white polo shirt and white cotton pants. Not in Hiram, Georgia, in mid-July.
She knew that if she looked outside, she’d see a sports car—a long, sleek, white sports car—with a tennis racket tossed into the back and a workout bag on the seat.
He might belong on Rodeo Drive, maybe. Or in Hyannis Port, or at the Cherokee Country Club in nearby Atlanta. But not two blocks from the city dumpster, next door to Cecil’s Farm Supply store, in the section just outside of Atlanta labeled redneck by one of the leading national magazines.
Gavin Magadan felt a rising admiration for the woman who wasn’t a virgin but was available for a price. It was not quite the reception he’d anticipated when he’d come to buy her business. But Lonnie, the man he’d talked to on the phone earlier, had warned him that Stacy had a mind of her own and wasn’t likely to give him the time of day. Gavin had had stranger offers and made deals that often contained peculiar conditions. This one, however, would be a first.
“Eh … eh, howdy,” the bald-headed mechanic standing beside the girl interrupted belatedly. “I should have known better than to challenge Stacy. She’s just like her daddy, he’d do anything to win a bet. Lonnie Short, here. Mr. Magadan, was it?”
“Gavin Magadan.” Gavin shook the mechanic’s hand, his gaze continuing to drift over the girl who brought the picture of peaches and cream to mind.
“Well, what about it, are you interested?” Stacy asked, waiting for Lonnie to admit his guilt and stop the bet.
“Absolutely,” the stranger answered, and moved a step closer.
“Would you say that I’m vamping you?”
“I’d say you’re making an attempt.”
“What will it take to make it an all-out, state-of-the-art accomplished done deed?”
“Vamping me?”
“Vamping you. Lonnie bet me that I couldn’t. I’m supposed to prove that he’s wrong, Gatsby.”
Gatsby? Not only was she nothing like what he’d expected, she had a sense of humor. This was becoming more and more intriguing. “More than you can accomplish in a garage with an audience,” he answered, willing to go along with whatever fantasy the woman was creating.
“Will you sign a statement to the effect that I’ve succeeded?”
“If you’ll consider what I’m offering in return.”
“Done. Good night, Lonnie.”
“But, Stacy,” the old man argued, “I was only teasing. I don’t know if he’s really eligible. I really don’t know him. He only came to talk about—”
“I’m eligible,” Gavin said, silencing Lonnie effectively.
“You don’t have to go through with it,” Lonnie continued to argue. “We’ll forget the bet. Forget about my week’s pay.”
“No way, Lonnie Short. Prepare to wade in grease. A Lanham never welshes on a bet. Besides, there isn’t enough money in the checking account to pay you. This will make us even.”
“But—but—” Lonnie protested in vain.
“Good night, Lonnie,” Stacy said, stepping out of her coveralls and offering her hand to the stranger. “Let’s go, Gatsby, if we still have a deal.”
“We definitely have a deal. Where to?”
She opened the door to the battered wrecker and held it, wondering if he dared to plant those white pants on the smudged red vinyl seat inside. “To a baseball game. Get in, Gatsby, I don’t want to miss the end.”
Gavin had been vamped in a lot of places, but a ballpark wasn’t one of them. But then nothing about this deal was following the usual pattern. He’d expected to sit around awhile, chew the fat so to speak. Then he’d be asked to identify himself, where he was from, what his daddy did, and what kind of hunting dogs he had. Then, sooner or later, the dealing would commence. Buying this piece of property was going to be a different ball of wax.
Gavin looked at her confident smile and grinned in return, crawling inside the cab of the truck and pulling the door closed with a slam. “I’m all yours, darling.”
Stacy moved around to the other side, climbed inside. “Lock up, Lonnie. See you tomorrow.”
“Don’t you want to know why I came?” her passenger asked curiously.
“Not really. If Lonnie had anything to do with it, I already know. Besides, everybody in Hiram saw you drive up. Your car will be locked up in my lot, and every move we make will be watched. Try anything, and the townspeople would have you strung up to the nearest tree before you could get past the county line.”
Gavin gulped. He didn’t doubt her words for a moment. “So, what do you have in mind?”
She started the engine. “All I want is your signature.”
“I’m afraid that it comes with a price.”
“Are you expensive?”
“Very.”
“I never doubted it for a moment.”
Stacy backed the wrecker out of the garage, taking in the car parked outside. She’d been wrong. It wasn’t white, it was red, bright red, and it wasn’t a sports car, it was a classic 1952 Cadillac convertible. Ah, well, Gatsby in the nineties, she decided, and looked at her passenger.
He already sported a streak of grease on the knee of his white pants, and he’d planted his arm squarely on the window where Lonnie usually draped his sweat-wiping rags. She was beginning to feel a little sorry for Gavin Magadan. He’d been a good sport about playing along with the joke.
Her reason for driving off with him was a bit harder to justify. She and Lonnie were always playing jokes on each other, making outlandish bets which they went to great lengths to win, but this was the first time either of them had taken one to the extreme. She stole a glance at her victim and drew in a short grasp. He was staring at her. Against her will her gaze focused on his determined chin and strong mouth. There was something reckless about him. She’d known that the minute he’d allowed his devil-may-care answers to get him involved in Lonnie’s bet.
Stacy had never seen a man more handsome, more out of place. Still, there was something about him that she understood, a carefree quality that she could identify with. He could give as good as he got. Bold, that was the explanation, she decided, that’s what was making her pulse race and her skin feel as if she’d jumped into a vat of battery acid.
“Why?” she asked, fighting off the burning sensation centered about where the tab of her coverall zipper would have been if she hadn’t stripped.
“Why, what?”
“Why’d you go along with Lonnie’s gag?”
Because you make me feel good, wouldn’t have made any sense, Gavin thought, even if he’d been honest enough to say it. But it was the truth. Her spontaneous smart talk had come so naturally that he’d found himself responding without hesitation. And before he’d realized what was happening he was returning quips of his own. She was fun, he decided, and fun was something he hadn’t had much of, certainly not with a girl who ran a garage for eighteen wheelers and offered herself to a stranger on a bet.
Stacy Lanham was not only intriguing, she was falling right into his hands without his having to use subterfuge. He pushed aside the thought that he was taking unfair advantage of her and slid a pair of opaque sunglasses over his eyes. He leaned back with a satisfied grin and lazily stretched out his feet.
“Look out!”
But her warning came too late. His foot plunged through the floor of the cab into space, warm, windblown space that threw him forward into the windshield and forever destroyed his Hyannis Port whites.
Gavin brought his foot back to the solid section of flooring and looked ruefully at the jagged scratches on the side of his new Loafers. So much for patting oneself on the back.
“Sorry, I should have warned you about that hole. Guess the shoes were new, huh?”
“The shoes were new.”
“Don’t worry, I’ll replace them.”
“With Lonnie’s paycheck money, the money that isn’t in the bank account anyway?”
“Don’t worry. I’m good for it.”
“I’m counting on that. I wouldn’t want to be vamped by an amateur, and lose a good pair of shoes too.”
“Uh-oh. Did I say I was an expert?” By this time Stacy was beginning to think she ought to explain it was all a joke. She should have established exactly what she’d meant by a vamping. The man who’d turned from the godfather into a character straight out of the Roaring Twenties seemed entirely too pleased with what was happening.
He was running his fingers through his carefully styled hair, and grinning. “The expertise of the vamping wasn’t a condition of the bet, just the end result. What about a little side wager, to cover the price of the shoes? Double or nothing.”
Stacy took a quick breath. If there was no money to pay Lonnie, there was certainly not enough to pay for a new pair of shoes. She had to think fast. “I never bet for more than ten bucks. What’d you have in mind?”
Gavin noticed the little twinge of worry that seemed to nag at the corner of her mouth. He wanted the advantage, but he didn’t feel good about embarrassing her. From what he’d been able to find out in his background check on her, she was just what she appeared to be—open and honest, nothing like her father.
Gambling was something Gavin did every day of his life, in dealing with people, in making business deals that could earn or lose millions. But in this rattletrap of a wrecker, he was experiencing the pure pleasure of being with a woman who had the courage to be herself. And this time, he was gambling for himself, not some corporation that could afford to lose millions if the deal fell through. Gavin laughed, tightly at first, then more deeply.
“Hell, I don’t know, we’ll settle on something. Take me to your vamping place, if you’re sure this vehicle will get us there.”
“It’ll get us there, Gatsby.”
“Call me Gavin. I don’t think I like the idea of playing Scott and Zelda. Theirs was a rather fatal attraction, don’t you think?”
“Maybe, but they really lived their lives to the hilt. Don’t you believe in taking a chance?”
Stacy didn’t know why she was talking about taking chances. She sounded like her father, trying to justify some wild scheme with impossible odds. Certainly she never took real chances, at least she hadn’t until now. She ought to turn around and drive back to the garage. But Lonnie might not have left yet, and she had no intention of letting him off the hook. For the last year he’d tried to match her up with every man from Atlanta to Hiram. Winning this bet, or making him think she’d won, ought to bring all his matchmaking to an end.
She allowed herself a big grin. Gatsby looked harmless, and she hadn’t been far wrong with her warning about his being strung up. People looked after her, sometimes too well. And with Frankenstein and Dracula at home, Gavin Magadan, whoever he was, wouldn’t be any danger to her. Besides, she had a ballgame to get to, and the only other place she could have taken him—Gene’s Diner, in the middle of Hiram, Georgia—closed at two o’clock. She drove the one block that made up the long ago abandoned downtown of Hiram and took Sudie Road.
The best thing about her father’s downturn in fortune was his moving away from the city into the little log house he’d built as a weekend getaway by the lake in the woods. At least the property was paid for. He’d called his retreat Last Chance and had erected a log portal announcing its name at the entrance.
“Last Chance?” Gavin said as they bumped down the gravel road. “Sounds ominous. Are you sure I’m going to be safe?”
“Absolutely. I never do away with the men I plan to vamp, at least not until afterward.”
“That’s good. I’d think a woman who wears men’s boxer shorts and undershirts might be taking a chance. Say, you aren’t into kinky games, are you?”
“Definitely, Gatsby. I wear boxer shorts because they’re comfortable, and I like games.” Stacy turned up a rutted drive to a log house and pulled into its carport. “This is it—Vamp Central.”
Gavin started to crawl out of the truck, heard menacing growls of warning, and caught sight of two dogs from hell standing guard about two feet away. “Whoa!”
“Gatsby, I’d like you to meet my roommates. Stay, Frankenstein! Stay, Dracula! Now, you can get out.”
“Are you sure? I don’t mind losing the shoes, but the feet go so nicely with the rest of my body.”
“They won’t move unless I give the command.”
“And what’s the command? Just so I don’t inadvertently set off a red alert.”
“I think I’ll keep that little bit of information to myself.” She waited beside her sentries as he exited the truck, then turned into the breezeway that led from the carport to the house.”
“What kind of dogs are they?” he asked, keeping as close as he could to her.
“Rottweilers. They belonged to my father. They’re my protection.”
“I don’t guess you get many visitors.”
“No, I don’t.” She could have said that he was the first man she’d ever brought to her hideaway. But that would have called for explanations, and she simply didn’t have any, not for Gavin, or for herself.
Through the trees Gavin could see the diamond-studded water of a lake in the late-afternoon sunlight. Quiet, he thought, and safe. There were no street sounds, no people, no noise. She unlocked the back door and stepped inside, assuming that he would follow. He did.
So did Frankenstein and Dracula, carefully, menacingly, on silent feet.
She led him through a corridor into the combination kitchen and great room, then into a small room beyond which was obviously some kind of office or, on second look, a studio. From the bookshelf behind a desk she took a dictionary and opened it, running one finger down the listings.
“Here it is, vamp—a noun, short for vampire: a woman who uses her charm or wiles to seduce and exploit men. Vamp, verb: to practice seductive wiles. Well, I guess that’s pretty clear.”
“What, that you’re going to seduce me, or drink my blood?”
“That depends on your conditions for the wager. Sit, Gatsby. Let’s negotiate.”
She walked back into the main room, pulled a maple captain’s chair out from behind a round table stacked with paperback books. “Sit.”
He complied. “Do I need a stenographer to take down the terms?”
“No, but a polygraph operator to test your honesty might be in order.”
“Now, do I look like a crook?”
“No. Yes. Maybe. What does a crook look like, Gatsby?”
“The ones I deal with wear double-breasted suits and Italian shoes.”
“The crooks in my horror novels have swarthy skin, big noses and carry semi-automatic weapons. And they belong to the Family. Like the Godfather.”
“Then I’m safe. My only family is my mother and my aunt. My mother has silver hair and wears pearls, and my aunt … my aunt is a little harder to describe. Let’s just say she is sixty-six and dresses like she’s eighteen. Aunt Jane considers herself my mother’s caretaker.”
“Oh no, Jane? Baby Jane?”
He looked at the woman sitting across from him with a horrified expression on her face. “Baby?” He caught sight of the stack of Stephen King and Dean Koontz novels on the table. “Jane? Oh, as in Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? Are you a horror movie fan?”
“Sure. Next best thing to baseball. Where do you think I learned my vamping techniques?” Slowly and deliberately, Stacy moistened her lips with her tongue.
Then it hit him. Short for vampire. Frankenstein and Dracula. The woman hadn’t been kidding. For just a moment he reacted to the crazy, illogical idea that she thought she was a vampire. He stood up, pushing his chair away from the table.
“Hell!”
Stacy groaned and sprang to her feet. “No, don’t say that!”
From the hall came the ferocious growls of her protectors. He looked up as the first dog bared its teeth and lunged.
The dog’s feet hit his chest. Gavin felt a hot tongue on his face just as his head hit the floor and the lights went out. He was dead. He’d been killed by two shades from hell. And all he’d wanted to do was buy Stacy Lanham’s garage.