Home by the Sea Read online

  From New York Times bestselling author JoAnn Ross comes a fan favorite story about a hero for hire!

  Lucas Kincaid is done with being a bodyguard—or so he thought. He was just about to leave for a long overdue vacation to Alaska on his boat, except he’s pulled back for one last assignment. Bestselling romance author Grace Fairfield is in desperate need of help, and that means hiring Lucas. Somebody at the romance writers’ conference wants to hurt Grace, so Lucas must guard her day and night. He quickly realizes that he’s willing to risk anything to keep the lovely Grace safe—and willing to risk even more for a future together…

  Originally published as 1-800-Hero in 1998.

  Home by the Sea

  JoAnn Ross

  CONTENTS

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  CHAPTER 1

  LATER, WHEN IT WAS all over, Lucas Kincaid would decide the entire adventure was proof that the gods did, indeed, laugh whenever men planned. In the beginning, however, he foolishly believed himself capable of controlling his destiny.

  It was D-Day. Departure Day. This time tomorrow, he’d be cruising through the Pacific’s blue water, headed for Alaska. There was no longer any reason to stay here in San Francisco. He’d successfully wrapped up his final case last night, when he’d put the English movie star back on the British Air jet to London. The past ten days spent dodging seduction attempts while accompanying the spoiled, sex-crazed actress on a publicity tour for her upcoming film had only confirmed Lucas’s decision that he didn’t belong in the bodyguard business.

  He simply didn’t have the people skills for the work. Part of the problem was that, despite his Southern upbringing, he’d inherited his grandmother Fancy’s penchant for plain speaking. During his midshipman days at the naval academy, such outspokenness had resulted in being put on report for insubordination more times than he cared to count.

  Another problem was his impatience with prima donna types. There’d been several occasions during this latest gig when Lucas had been tempted to spank the redhead, whose off-screen antics were even more outrageous than her sex-bomb movie roles.

  “She probably would have enjoyed it,” he muttered, thinking back on a few of the actress’s kinkier sexual suggestions.

  He finished emptying his desk, then stood at the window, took in the always riveting sight of the wide blue bay and the orange spans of Golden Gate Bridge, and contemplated leaving early. Since everyone had already taken off for the holiday weekend, the office was uncharacteristically as quiet as a Bible Belt whorehouse on Sunday morning. If he left now, he might be able cruise up the coast, dock at Petaluma and spend a lazy weekend enjoying the historic old town that had put arm wrestling on the map.

  The phone rang. Lucas ignored it. He didn’t need ESP to know it meant trouble. When it continued to ring, he felt the heavy yoke of responsibility—another damn Fancy inheritance—settle over his shoulders. He picked up the receiver.

  “Kincaid.”

  “I was hoping I’d find you there.”

  He bit back a curse, glared out at the enticing span of San Francisco Bay gleaming in the late afternoon sun and once again considered escape. Then, surrendering to the inevitable, he threw himself into the leather chair and put his booted feet up on the desk.

  “Well, hey there, darlin’.” His friendly tone belied his aggravation. “Are you calling’ to congratulate me on wrapping up the case of the British bimbette?”

  “Good try, Kincaid,” the female voice on the other end of the phone countered. “But you’re not going to duck the issue.”

  “Well now, I can’t rightly recall ever ducking anything in my life.” There had been that bullet in Hawaii when the winsome hotel-dinner-show hula dancer had forgotten to mention a husband, but Lucas didn’t figure that was relevant to this conversation.

  “The issue, as you damn well know, is you trying to quit on me.”

  “But I have quit,” he reminded her patiently. S. J. Slade was determined to keep him from leaving. Just as he was determined to leave. The battle of wills had been going on for the past month, despite the fact that he’d flat out told her there was no way he was changing his mind. “Our deal was that as soon as I put that redheaded barracuda on the plane, I was sailing off into the sunset.”

  “That was your deal, hotshot. Not mine.”

  “Heaven help me, I do love a contrary woman.” He leaned back in the chair and switched the phone to the other ear. “Why don’t you bail on the female executive gig you’ve got goin’, Samantha darlin’, and come sailing the seven seas with me?”

  “One week out to sea and we’d undoubtedly be trying to drown one another.”

  “You may just have a point,” he agreed with a chuckle. “But think of the high times we’d have for the first six days.”

  When he heard a snort he took for a smothered, reluctant laugh, Lucas figured he’d successfully defused the situation. He’d thought wrong.

  “I’ve got a case for you.”

  “Now, I told you, sugar—”

  “donut sugar me,” she retorted. “And quit talking like some uneducated Southern redneck right out of Deliverance. Don’t forget, I’ve seen your resumé. You just happen to have dual degrees in literature and mathematics.”

  “I won’t tell if you don’t.”

  “Dammit, Lucas, this is serious.”

  “You wouldn’t have called at the start of a holiday weekend if it wasn’t.” That was an out-and-out lie. The sharp-tongued owner of the bodyguard agency Lucas had been working for for the past eighteen months never allowed Sundays, holidays or even what any normal person would consider sleeping hours to stop her from contacting her operatives. “And you know I admire you greatly, darlin’, but—”

  “Why don’t you knock it off with the buts until you hear me out?” she snapped, cutting him off again. “And get your damn cowboy boots off my antique desk.”

  Although they’d never met face-to-face—indeed, Lucas didn’t know anyone at the agency who’d actually ever seen S. J. Slade in person—she knew him too well. “It’s a reproduction.”

  He crossed his feet at the ankles and admired the hand tooling on his boots. That was the only problem with boats: he couldn’t wear his beloved Tony Lamas on board because the heels scuffed the Rebel’s Reward’s teak decks. “But a very good reproduction,” he allowed, glancing around the office, which was decorated in an eclectic blend of Chippendale furniture and black-and-white movie posters.

  The office, located on the third floor of the Victorian Queen Anne building that housed the S. J. Slade Agency, definitely reflected Samantha’s fondness for 1940s detective movies. Although she’d assured him when he’d come to work for her that he could make whatever changes he wanted, Lucas hadn’t bothered, since he hadn’t planned to stay in San Francisco all that long.

  “Now you’re an antique dealer,” she grumbled.

  “Actually, that’s my mama who’s the antique dealer.”

  “Dammit, you’re doing it again. Getting me off track.”

  Despite his irritation, Lucas smiled at that idea. Samantha Slade was about as single-minded as a hound dog scratching fleas. There was very little that could get her off track. He’d always taken perverse pleasure in being able to.

  “To get back to business, since the office is technically dosed this weekend, I had my calls forwarded here,” she said.

  Lucas wasn’t surprised. Samantha’s workaholic life-style would have made the Puritans look like pikers. Fro
m what he could tell, the woman lived, slept and breathed the bodyguard business.

  “We’ve got a priority-one call on the 800 line. From the USA Today ad.”

  He knew exactly what ad she was referring to, of course. Samantha Slade advertised her business in the classifieds all over the country: Need a Hero? Call 1-800-555-Hero. Personally, he’d always thought it embarrassingly cute. But he couldn’t deny that it brought a lot of business into the agency.

  “There’s a convention in town this weekend,” she revealed, blithely ignoring his ripe curse.

  “Now there’s a surprise.”

  “It’s at the Whitfield Palace. The RNN‘s—otherwise known as the Romance Novelists Network’s—annual bash.”

  “No way.” He could see this one coming and would rather walk the plank than baby-sit some white-haired old lady swathed in pink chiffon and diamonds.

  “It’s right up your alley, sweetheart.” Lucas hated it when Samantha called him sweetheart. Or worse yet, precious. It meant she was going into coaxing mode, which was even more dangerous than her Captain Bligh routine. “Two thousand women, Lucas. Women with romance on their minds. And you. Just think of the possibilities.”

  “I’d rather not.” He might have been something of a ladies’ man during his navy days, but any guy who’d get within a block of two thousand women all gathered in one place with romance on their minds could well be risking estrogen poisoning. “Besides,” he reminded her yet again, “I’ve quit.”

  “So you keep saying. But how are you going to live with your conscience if someone knocks off romance’s most beloved author while you’re sailing into the sunset?”

  “Now who’d want to do a nasty thing like that?”

  “That’s what Roberta Grace needs you to find out.”

  “Sorry, sweetheart, but I’ve got a hot date with some killer whales.”

  “Those whales migrate up and down the coast all the time,” she murmured, in a vague way that told him she was just guessing. “You can always catch up with them later.”

  “Dammit, Samantha—”

  “I need you on this one, Lucas.” There it was again. That feminine wheedling he didn’t buy for a minute. But that didn’t make it any less effective. “This could well be a fife-and-death situation. Somebody’s been writing Roberta Grace threatening letters. This latest one said this conference would be her last.

  “Now the letters could be the work of a crank. Or not. If you’d just help me out for this weekend, I’ll double your pay, and when the conference is over and the writer leaves town without a scratch, I promise not to say another word about your foolish plan to resign.

  “In fact,” she said, with what Lucas took to be a burst of spontaneous inspiration, “if you still insist on leaving, I’ll come to the dock to wave you off. And even spring for the bubbly for the bon voyage party.”

  “Why can’t you get someone else to cover the lady? How about Val? Hell, she reads the stuff.”

  He recalled the day Eric Janzen, an agent recruited from the DEA, had made the mistake of giving Valerie Brown a bad time about the novels with the suggestive covers. The former Oakland cop had calmly put down the paperback she’d been enjoying during her lunch break, aimed her semiautomatic Beretta 9mm at a point below Eric’s belt and threatened to blow away any chances he might have for any romance in the future. After that, not a single male in the place had dared utter a word about Val’s choice of reading material.

  “Val’s up in Washington State, baby-sitting a software mogul who’s gotten more than a few people ticked off about his plot to take over the electronic world.”

  “Dean, then.” Dean Phillips came from the blue suit, starched white shirt and neatly knotted tie ranks of the FBI. Since the guy’s training had apparently included the ability to remain unrelentingly polite under stress, Lucas figured he’d be a natural for this gig.

  “Dean’s in Albuquerque on a fund-raising junket with some politician. And before you run through my entire roster of operatives, all I’m asking you to do is to run by the Whitfield Palace and meet the lady. Then, if you still want to leave, I swear I’ll find a replacement and not do a thing to stop you.”

  And pigs would sprout wings and start dive-bombing the Bay Bridge, Lucas thought.

  “You’re an angel,” she said in her brisk, staccato voice when he didn’t immediately respond. “I realize that since you’re going to be spending the next three days at the hotel, you’ll need to go home and pick up some clothes. I’ve arranged for you to meet with the client in Neptune’s Table—that’s the oyster bar off the hotel lobby—at six.”

  “How am I suppose to spot her with two thousand women roaming all over the place?”

  “You’re the professional. I have absolute faith in your ability,” Samantha said blithely. “Also, while I was talking on the phone with her, I did a quick Internet search on the other line. Her publisher is Penbrook Press, and if her photo on their web site is at all current, she’s remarkably young to have achieved such success, I’d guess about twenty-six or seven. She also appeared to be a large girl, with long, rather mousy brown hair.”

  “I doubt any other of those two thousand women fit that description,” he muttered.

  “You used to track down terrorists in jungles,” Samantha noted, reminding him of his navy SEAL days, which he’d just as soon forget. “I can’t believe you’d have that much difficulty locating one romance writer. Besides, if you can’t manage to spot the woman yourself, she’s famous enough that I’d imagine all you’d have to do is ask someone to point her out…. Have fun, precious.”

  The matter settled in her own pigheaded mind, at least, Samantha hung up before Lucas could summon up another argument.

  Although there were those who might argue the point, Lucas had always considered himself a levelheaded man. He did not believe in ghosts, vampires, aliens or Bigfoot. He considered the Loch Ness monster an ingenious tourism ploy, hadn’t had any reason to think about the Tooth Fairy since he’d lost his last baby molar during a scuffle on the baseball field two weeks before his eleventh birthday, and the jury was still out on the existence of his guardian angel.

  However, as he walked into the gilded lobby of the San Francisco Whitfield Palace Hotel, Lucas decided he must have somehow passed through a curtain in time and space. Or else he’d gotten some bad pepperoni on the pizza he’d had for lunch today.

  Women dressed in hoopskirts the diameter of the Liberty Bell were gathered in small groups, chatting pleasantly with kohl-eyed vampires, Stetson-clad cowgirls, Pocahontas look-alikes and at least two women dressed in what appeared to be filmy white nightgowns with huge, white-feathered wings extending from the back of their shoulders. Those feathers, combined with all the female voices chirping at the same time, gave him the feeling of walking into an aviary on some alien planet.

  He checked in at the desk, requesting a room next to Roberta Grace. Fortunately, the agency put most of their out-of-town clients in the hotel, which gave him clout. Although it took a bit of finagling and some fast talking, adjoining rooms were arranged. After being assured by the manager that the bell captain would have his garment bag taken upstairs to his room, Lucas went in search of Roberta Grace.

  He was still trying to decide whether to escape while he had the chance, or attempt to wade through the feminine throng to the oyster bar, when a woman leaped out from behind a marble pillar and grabbed his arm. She was wearing a low-cut, blue silk gown, a towering powdered wig and enough fake jewelry to ensure death by drowning if she were unfortunate enough to trip into the lobby fountain.

  “Thank heavens! Where on earth have you been?”

  “In Sausalito.” Lucas decided that if this was the woman he’d come here to meet, the deal was off.

  “You were supposed to be here ages ago.”

  “Hey, I figured if I was going to have to work this shindig, you’d want me to take time to pick up the appropriate clothes.”

  She was looking at him as if h
e were the strange one. “That doesn’t explain why you weren’t here as promised. Two hours ago.”

  The badge pinned to her breast revealed her to be Marianne Tyler, a member of the conference coordinating committee. There were enough multicolored ribbons attached to the badge to suggest she’d just won Best of Show.

  “Look, I think we must have our wires crossed here—”

  “I’ll say we do!” The furrows in her brow deepened. “If you think I’m paying your entire agency fee, when you’re so horrendously late, you can think again, young man. And you’re not in costume.” She eyed him with frustration. “Where’s your cutlass? Your agent promised you’d have a cutlass.”

  “I’m sorry, ma’am. But I don’t have any idea what you’re talking about.”

  “You’re not my pirate?”

  “No, ma’am. I’m not.”

  “Oh.” Her lips drew into a tight line as she gave him a long silent perusal from the top of his dark head down to his boots. Then back up again. “It was probably your hair that threw me off,” she decided. “Most normal men are wearing it short these days.”

  Lucas wasn’t about to get into a discussion about normalcy with a woman who appeared to take fashion tips from Marie Antoinette. “That and the fact that I seem to be the only man in the hotel,” he suggested helpfully.

  “Women are always in the majority at these things. Which is why a good-looking male is such a draw.” She continued to gaze up at him. “You know,” she said speculatively, “since my pirate still hasn’t shown up, perhaps you’d like to fill in.”

  Lucas had been shot at on more than one occasion. He’d fought hand-to-hand for his life in a South American jungle while nearly delirious with malaria. In his former life as a SEAL, he’d swam from a bone-chilling sea onto a distant shore on a moonless night with a knife between his teeth prepared for the worst. But the speculative gleam in this woman’s pale blue eyes was the most frightening thing he’d ever witnessed.

  “Now there’s an idea,” he drawled. “But I’m afraid, since I have a previous engagement, I’m going to have to decline.”