Just Another Pretty Face (HT 459) Read online

  "I know several effective ways of disabling a man."

  "Do you?" Pierce asked, bending his head to take her mouth with his.

  Shock held Nikki stock-still for a long, delicious moment. Then the heat of his mouth got through to her, his casual expertise and unmistakable, instinctive carnality touching a deeply buried nerve, and she felt herself begin to respond. Panicked, she slid her booted foot behind his bare ankle and pushed against his chest with both hands.

  He went down like a running back who'd been sandwiched between two opposing players coming in opposite directions.

  "I told you not to—" Nikki began hotly, and then she shrieked as he scissored his feet around her legs and brought her tumbling down to join him on the floor. She felt his arms lock around her, pinning hers to her sides as he rolled on top of her. Obviously, the martial arts moves he displayed onscreen weren't all for show. She cursed and struggled.

  "Is that the best you can do?" he inquired politely, his eyes twinkling with amusement— and arousal.

  Nikki glared at him. "If I wasn't afraid of doing some permanent damage to that twelve-million-dollar hide of yours," she hissed, "I'd show you what I can do."

  Just Another Pretty Face

  by Candace Schuler

  Hollywood Dynasty #2

  Dear Reader,

  LIGHTS, CAMERA, ACTION!

  Join with Temptation as the drama continues to unfold in popular author Candace Schuler's Hollywood Dynasty. Meet the Kingston family—box-office legends in front of and behind the cameras. Share in the revelation of intimate secrets and the struggle for success in this behind-the-scenes blockbusting mini-series.

  Meet film star and sex symbol Pierce Kingston this month as he vetoes his overprotective sister's idea that he needs a bodyguard, despite the threatening letters he's been receiving. What need could he have for his new "shadow"—a tall, incredibly gorgeous brunette!

  Look out for THE RIGHT DIRECTION—a coming attraction in October 1994.

  The Editor

  Mills & Boon Temptation

  Eton House

  18-24 Paradise Road

  Richmond

  Surrey

  TW91SR

  1

  "AW, COME ON, Claire. A bodyguard?" Pierce Kingston, his six feet, three inches of muscled masculine pulchritude sprawled across an overstuffed red chintz sofa in the garden room of his Beverly Hills mansion, looked up at his sister with an expression of mild distaste on his classically handsome face. "Isn't that a little extreme? It's only a few weird fan letters. I've had weird fan letters before."

  "Not this weird," Claire said, gesturing toward the half-a-dozen letters spread out on the free-form cy-press-and-glass coffee table. They looked innocuous enough. The lined notepaper was pale blue. The ink was aqua. The flowing feminine script was full of fancy curlicues and swirls. Claire sighed heavily. "I know they look as if they were written by some love-struck little teenager—"

  "I don't know," said Pierce, wrinkling his nose at the musky exotic scent that wafted up from the pastel notepaper. "That perfume is kind of heavy for anyone much under thirty-five to wear."

  "—but they were written by someone with an unbalanced mind," Claire continued, ignoring his interruption. "Someone who's completely lost her grasp on reality."

  "That doesn't mean it still couldn't be a teenager." Gage, the third and eldest Kingston sibling, spoke up from his seat on the arm of one of the other chintz sofas. "Lots of teenagers have unbalanced minds."

  Claire gave him a cool, narrow-eyed look, the one that had caused the tabloids to christen her the Ice Queen of Hollywood when she was barely twenty-one years old.

  "Well, they do," he insisted. "Have you listened to what passes for love songs these days among the high-school crowd? Some of it's sick stuff." He shook his head mournfully. "Very sick."

  Claire turned her gaze to the lovely strawberry blonde sitting with Gage's arm draped around her shoulders. "Make him behave," she said to her brother's wife.

  Tara Charming-Kingston put a slender hand on her husband's knee. "Behave," she ordered sternly, turning her head to smile up at him as she said it.

  Gage smiled back at her. "For you—" he lifted his hand from her shoulder to brush his fingers through her hair "—anything," he said, and bent to kiss her.

  "Gawd, isn't that just too sweet for words?" Pierce drawled, pretending to be offended by his brother and sister-in-law's unselfconscious display of affection. "Haven't you two been married long enough to stop playing kissy-face in public?" He glanced over at his sister. "It's no wonder she's pregnant again," he said, and shook his head. "And little Beau barely a year old."

  "You're just jealous," Gage said complacently, settling his arm back around his wife's shoulders.

  "Jealous?" Pierce scoffed. "Ha! The day I'm jealous of a poor ol' married geezer like you is—"

  "Do you mind?" Claire said in a carefully measured voice. "I'm trying to discuss something serious here."

  Both brothers sobered instantly. They knew that tone. It was her annoyed producer's voice, the one their younger sister used to quell arguments from recalcitrant directors and fractious actors. She'd inherited it directly from their formidable mother. "Sorry," they mumbled in unison.

  "Can I go on now?"

  "Yes, of course." Pierce made a graceful, placating gesture with one hand. "Please continue."

  "Thank you. Now, as I was saying, whoever wrote those letters knows entirely too much about your movements for my peace of mind. Her last letter makes it clear that she knew all about the AIDS benefit Elizabeth Taylor hosted last week."

  "It was very well publicized," Pierce pointed out. "That was the whole idea."

  "She knew about the dinner you hosted at Spago beforehand, too."

  "Spago is a public place. Anyone could have seen me there. With Alanna Fairchild," he added, referring to the model he was currently dating in an effort to forestall his sister's next argument.

  "She also knew you brought Alanna back here after the benefit for a private party of your own," Claire reminded him. "And that wasn't in any paper that I know of."

  "It was an easy enough assumption to make, though. Alanna and I have been seeing each other off and on for—what?—three months now?"

  "Not quite one month," Claire said. "But that's beside the point."

  "Just one month?" It seemed longer to him, somehow. "Are you sure?"

  "Positive," Claire said dryly. "Can we get on with this?"

  "I don't see that there's anything to get on with."

  Claire sighed in exasperation. "Pierce."

  "Well, I don't," he insisted. "Those letters are from some poor deluded woman who thinks she's in love with the man she sees on the movie screen. And she thinks I'm that man. It's sad, I'll admit, and a little creepy, but you've got to admit that it isn't unusual. I get weird stuff in the mail all the time. Besides," he added, "this woman's been writing to me for at least a year and you never said anything about a bodyguard before."

  "Damn it, Pierce, that 'poor deluded woman' threatened to kill you in her last letter," Claire said, picking up a sheet of pale blue paper to shake at him. "And a bodyguard just might keep her from getting close enough to do it."

  There was a moment of silence as they pondered her words.

  "Aren't you overreacting just a little?" Pierce suggested, trying to soothe his sister. "She didn't actually say anything about killing me."

  "I know the other women don't really mean anything to you," Claire said in answer, reading aloud from the letter she held. "I know that, deep in your heart of hearts, I am your one and only true love but I just can't bear the pain of another empty betrayal. I'll do anything I hav
e to do to stop it from happening again. Anything. Even if it means losing you forever." She looked up at her brother. "That certainly sounds like a threat to me."

  "She sounds like a scorned lover," Tara said to no one in particular. "As if she knows Pierce—or has known him—intimately."

  "Well, hell," Gage said, "if you're going to use Pierce's love life as a starting place..." He snorted in amused disgust. "Half the women in Hollywood have known him intimately."

  "Not half," Pierce demurred modestly, doing his part to make light of the situation and erase the twin expressions of concern from his sister and sister-in-law's faces. "All right, maybe half," he conceded with a lopsided grin. "But most of them are still friends and none of them ever had any illusions about being my 'one and only true love,'" he added, looking completely, comically horrified at the prospect.

  The two women ignored their menfolk's efforts to shelter them. "Have you talked to the police about this?" Tara asked her sister-in-law.

  Claire shook her head. "I've made a few discreet inquiries, of course," she said, "but there's nothing the police can do at this point. Even if we knew who she is—which, of course, we don't—they couldn't do anything. Not unless she did something first. And there were witnesses or they caught her at it."

  "Do you think one bodyguard will be enough?"

  "The one I've hired is highly qualified, but that doesn't mean I've ruled out the need for a full security staff if it looks like it's necessary."

  His sister's words brought Pierce out of his casual slouch. "Wait just a minute here," he said, sitting up and planting his bare feet on the floor. "I thought you called this family powwow to decide whether there was any need for a bodyguard, not to announce that you'd already hired one."

  "Those—" she gestured at the letters again "—have already established the need."

  "So you just went ahead and hired a bodyguard without even talking to me about it first?"

  "I'm talking to you about it now."

  "After the fact."

  "You wouldn't have agreed with me before the fact, would you?"

  "Which doesn't justify your going behind my back and-"

  Claire held up a slender hand to stop him. "Just listen to me for a minute, all right? If you don't agree with me after I've had my say, then I'll agree to fire the bodyguard and let you handle this however you want," she said mendaciously. "Okay?"

  Pierce hesitated, suspicious of such an easy capitulation on his sister's part. She usually put up more of a fight before she gave in. If she gave in. Bulldog stubbornness was another thing she'd inherited from their mother. "Okay," he said finally, his blue eyes wary. "Talk."

  "If someone had written fan letters like these to Tara, what would you do?"

  Pierce's outraged expression answered for him.

  "Exactly," Claire said, before he could express his reaction in words. "You'd take immediate steps to protect her."

  "Tara's a woman."

  Claire lifted a perfectly arched eyebrow. "So?"

  "So, she'd be more vulnerable in a situation like this."

  "And you're invulnerable, is that it? The big strong macho man impervious to the very same things that would spell mortal danger to a mere woman?"

  "Now, don't try to make this some kind of women's liberation issue, Claire. It doesn't have anything to do with equal rights."

  His sister snorted inelegantly. "Then you must be beginning to believe your publicity."

  "It has nothing to do with my publicity, either, damn it. And you know it. It has to do with the basic, inescapable physical differences between men and women."

  Her eyebrow rose higher.

  Pierce shot a glance at his brother. "Help me out here, Gage. You know what I mean."

  "Uh-uh. I'm not getting into this argument," Gage said, shaking his head. He glanced down at his wife. "I have no desire to sleep in my own guest room."

  "Coward," Pierce said scornfully, and turned back to his sister with the put-upon air of a man trying to be reasonable under extremely trying circumstances. "A woman is more vulnerable in a situation like this because the person writing the letters would be a man," he said, as if he were explaining the mysteries of the universe to a backward child. "And the inescapable fact is, men are bigger than women. And stronger. It's not the same when it's the other way around. There's less of a threat. Hell," he said, speaking with the easy assurance of a man bigger, stronger and more physically fit than most other men, "in most cases, I'd say the threat is practically nonexistent."

  "Unless the woman has a gun."

  "Those letters didn't say anything about a gun," Pierce snapped, exasperated with her.

  "I'm sure Rebecca Schaeffer's murderer didn't say anything about a gun in his fan letters, either," Claire shot back, equally exasperated with him. "But that doesn't make her any less dead."

  Brother and sister glared at each other for a full ten seconds.

  "Aw, jeez, Claire," Pierce said finally, deciding to take another tack. "Have you thought of what the tabloids will say if some no-neck sumo wrestler in a bad suit starts following me around with a .357 Magnum strapped to his hip?"

  She fixed her brother with a gimlet stare. "Since when have you started caring about what the tabloids say?"

  "Since never," Pierce said airily. "But as one of the head honchos at Kingston Productions, you certainly should—because what they'll say is that I've wimped out and hired a baby-sitter." A crafty light entered what the press liked to call his 'laserlike baby blues.' "The Devil's Game will be premiering next month," he said, referring to his latest movie. "Think what effect that kind of negative publicity could have on the box office."

  "I have thought about it," Claire said.

  "Aha," he crowed, sensing victory. "I knew I could make you see reason."

  "That's why I hired a woman."

  Pierce's mouth fell open. "A woman! You hired a woman bodyguard?"

  "Careful there," Gage murmured, but Pierce ignored him.

  "Just what's wrong with a woman bodyguard?" Claire demanded.

  "If I needed protection—which I'm not saying I do," Pierce said. "But if I needed protection, just how good do you think a woman would be at providing it?"

  "This particular woman is highly qualified," Claire informed him. "She was an MP in the marines for four years. The last eight months of which were spent in the Persian Gulf helping to keep the peace among who-knows-how-many battalions of homesick, horny soldiers."

  "She ought to be able to handle Pierce, then," Gage said, aiming a sly grin at his brother.

  Tara put her hand on her husband's knee, silently shushing him, and shook her head at her brother-in-law, quelling whatever response he had been about to make. "Listen to Claire," she ordered softly.

  "She's also an expert pistol shot," Claire went on, regally ignoring the byplay, "and she has a black belt in karate. Bill Bender couldn't praise her enough," she added, referring to a former stuntman who'd been running a very successful and very discreet personal security business ever since he got too old and sore to fall out of buildings for a living. "He says she's as tough as they come."

  "Oh, my God." Pierce moaned, falling against the back of the sofa as if he'd been shot. He covered his face with his hands. "You're siccing a female Rambo on me," he accused from behind his splayed fingers. "A no-neck ex-Marine sumo wrestler in a skirt and combat boots!"

  "I'm providing you with some much-needed protection," Claire corrected calmly, ignoring his theatrics with the ease of long practice. "And if you refuse to cooperate with me, then I will sic a female Rambo on you." She smiled slightly as she played her trump card. "I'll call Mom home from Italy."

  Pierce lowered his hands from in front of his face. "You wouldn't," he said, aghast at the very thought.

  "I would."

  "But she's working," he said, trying to appeal to his sister's overdeveloped work ethic. "The old man's running amok over there with his leading lady—"

  "So?" Claire said, letting
him know he wasn't going to distract her with that sorry old chestnut.

  All four of them knew—all of Hollywood knew— that Elise Gage had stopped concerning herself with her ex-husband's affairs a good fifteen years ago, when she'd finally filed for their second divorce. The only time she paid any attention to his love life now was when it threatened to interfere with the smooth operation of Kingston Productions.

  Which was exactly what Pierce was getting at.

  "Now, don't look at me like that, Claire," he said. "It's no secret that Dad's latest romance is interfering with business. He's behind schedule and way over budget on Mafioso. Not to mention the scandal he's creating." He glanced over at his brother and sister-in-law to solicit their support, seeming to have suddenly forgotten that he'd been the focus of more than one scandal himself. "Francesca Soleri is only twenty," he told them, feigning shocked dismay at his father's outrageous behavior, "and I read somewhere that she'd been living in a convent before Dad discovered her."

  "Oh, please." Claire rolled her eyes. "She's twenty-three going on thirty-five and the closest she's ever been to a convent is driving by one on the way to some illicit assignation."

  "Well, you know how the Italian paparazzi are," Pierce said, undeterred by the soundness of her argument. "Much worse than the American press when they get their teeth into a story. No telling how much damage has already been done." He looked up at his sister with an expression of extreme reasonableness. "You wouldn't want to call Mom home before she's got everything straightened out over there, would you?" he asked, gifting her with his most sincere and sweetly persuasive smile, the one that never failed to get him what he wanted from most women. "Think what it could do to the bottom line."

  He'd forgotten that Claire wasn't most women. She was his sister, comfortably familiar with his devastating charm. And she'd been an actress herself not so many years ago—one of the most accomplished child stars in the business before she'd decided she preferred working behind the cameras. She sat down next to her brother and put her hand on his arm.

  "Do you really think the bottom line is more important to Mom—to me—than your safety?" she asked softly, lifting her gaze to his as she spoke. Her eyes were the same piercing blue as his own, the irises large and jewel bright beneath a film of unshed tears.