Hollywood Wedding

Table of Contents

Cover Page

Dear Reader

Title Page

Prologue

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Copyright

Dear Reader,

Welcome to the exciting world of the Landons, and to the legacy that changes the lives of an entire family.

The idea of these books came to me when a friend and I met for lunch at a restaurant in New York. While we were waiting to be served, I overheard some women talking at the next table. They were discussing what makes a man exciting. “He has to be gorgeous,” said one. “And a rebel,” said another. “And not the least bit interested in being tamed,” said a third. The next thing I knew, Cade, Grant and Zach Landon sprang to life inside my head. They were certainly handsome, rebellious and untamable, and when I wonder what kind of women could possibly put up with them, their beautiful sister Kyra materialized and said, well, she’d always loved them, even if they were impossible!

This month I’m delighted to introduce Zach Landon in Hollywood Wedding. Zach thinks he’s got no worlds left to conquer…until his world is turned upside down by the exquisite Eve Palmer, a woman who’s not afraid to tell any man where to get off.

So settle back and enjoy four months of love, laughter and tears as you discover the full meaning of the Landon Legacy.

With my very warmest regards,

Sandra Marton

ALSO AVAILABLE FROM HARLEQUIN PRESENTS

LANDON’S LEGACY

1808—AN INDECENT PROPOSAL

1813—GUARDIAN GROOM

Hollywood Wedding
Sandra Marton

www.millsandboon.co.uk

PROLOGUE

ZACH hadn’t been sure which he wanted most, the woman or the mountain.

The woman had been watching him last night, sitting at a corner table in the inn’s lounge and giving him long, slow looks from under her lashes. There’d been no mistaking the message, but after a minute Zach knew it was no contest.

She was beautiful, but the world was full of beautiful women. The mountain was the challenge, all seven thousand, snow-covered feet of it. It would come first.

So he’d smiled back, told the bartender to send her a drink and lifted his glass to her before finishing the last of his brandy. Then he’d strolled toward the door, pausing beside her table.

“Here for the weekend?” he’d asked and when she’d nodded in assent, he’d smiled. “Alone?”

Her tongue had slicked across her lips. “No,” she’d murmured, “but that won’t stop you, will it?”

Zach had felt his body tighten in anticipation.

“Tomorrow evening,” he’d said softly, and then he’d gone to his room, taken a long, cold shower and turned his thoughts to the next day.

Now, as he undid his bindings and stepped out of his skis, he knew he’d made the right choice. His hands were numb with the cold that had managed to seep through his Gore-Tex gloves, his lungs cried out for more oxygen, and every muscle in his body ached.

He felt terrific.

A smile eased across his face, softening the hard, handsome angles and chiseled features.

He could see the copter approaching, skimming up the windswept Himalayan valley like a prehistoric bird, and he pumped a fist high into the air as it began its descent.

The Valley of the Gods had turned out to be perfect, exactly as Elise had promised. Zach grinned, remembering the conversation with his travel agent the week before.

He’d phoned her from the chartered jet, halfway between a dull breakfast meeting at the Boston Club and a duller luncheon appointment at Windows on the World atop the towering World Trade Center in New York.

“I want to get away for a couple of days,” he’d said without preamble. His administrative assistant had shoved a stack of papers under his nose. Zach had switched the phone to his other ear while he scrawled his initials on the pages. “Got any suggestions?”

Elise, who’d been dealing with Zach long enough to know exactly what the question meant, had instantly offered several in the British accent she still cultivated after better than forty years in the States.

What did he think of rock climbing in Yosemite? Rafting in Idaho? Sky diving in British Columbia?

“No,” Zach had said to each idea, “no, no. I want— I want…Just keep on going,” he’d said in exasperation.

Elise had rattled off more proposals while the jet banked over Manhattan’s narrow canyons. Zach had listened, frowning as he gazed out the window, picturing himself in an hour’s time seated at a table with half a dozen men twenty years his senior who’d pretend they’d really choose grilled tuna and braised radicchio over the rare steaks and butter-dripping baked potatoes their highpriced cardiologists had made them swear off forever, who’d talk stocks and bonds and investments with the appetite and passion most men reserved for women.

Something had knotted in Zach’s flat belly.

“Helicopter skiing,” he’d said into the phone, cutting short Elise’s description of windsurfing in the Caribbean. “Yeah, I know I’ve done it before, but that was in the Canadian Rockies or maybe it was Alaska. Where? The Himalayas?” For the first time in days, Zach had smiled. “Okay, babe,” he’d said, “that sounds good. Let’s go for it.”

Now here he was, on the far side of the world with a glacier and a mountain all to himself. With half a dozen glaciers and mountains all to himself, and nothing to remind him of the world he’d left behind, the telephones and fax machines and computers, the fat cats and fatter corporations that increasingly demanded his expertise and his time in a game that had grown dull.

Zach puffed out his breath. Here he was, as free as he’d been seven years ago, before he’d let the world suck him in, before he’d traded risk for wealth and freedom for the disaster that had been his marriage, and it felt damned wonderful.

Two hundreds yards away, the copter was settling to the earth in a whirling blizzard of rotor-driven snow. The pilot would probably want to take off right away, considering the lateness of the hour, the bitter cold and the omnipresent danger of avalanche.

Zach knew he’d pushed things to the edge as it was, fast-talking the guy into leaving him on the top of the mountain with nothing but his equipment, an avalanche transceiver, a flask of hot coffee and a couple of thick sandwiches for company.

“I dunno,” the pilot had said, scratching his head, “most people go up there with a guide.”

But Zach had persisted. The day he couldn’t talk his way into or out of a situation hadn’t dawned yet. He’d presented his skiing credentials as he would have presented a block of blue-chip stocks for the president of a multibillion-dollar bank and finally the man had shrugged, muttered something about it being Zach’s neck, not his, revved the engine, increased the pitch of the blades and left him to the gods and the mountain.

The day had been incredible. And, Zach thought with a start of surprise as he scrambled into the copter, it wasn’t over yet.

Someone was waiting for him. It was the woman from last night, dressed in a skintight spandex ski suit that showed off every inch of her lush body.

Zach smiled as he sat down beside her and put his lips to her ear so he could be heard over the noise of the copter.

“What a pleasant surprise.”

She smiled back “I thought it would be.”

At least that was what he thought she said. It was impossible to hear, but then, what did a man really need to hear when he was gazing into a pair of thickly fringed amber eyes set above a deliciously turned-up nose and a pouting mouth?

She moved closer, lay a scarlet-tipped hand on his arm and brought her lips to within a breath of his ear.

“I hope you don’t mind. I talked your pilot into taking me along while he collected you.”

Zach’s smile tilted as her thigh settled gently against his.

“Mind? Hell, no. I’m delighted.” The helicopter rose into the air and Zach leaned closer. “My name is—”

“You’re Zachary Landon. I know.” She smiled. “I’m Keri.”

Zach drew back so he could look at the soft, smiling mouth that promised paradise, at the high thrust of the breasts that made a man’s hands ache to touch them. A surge of desire flooded through him and he pulled the woman into his arms and kissed her.

A man would have to be crazy to turn down a woman like this. She was beautiful and she would sleep with him simply because she enjoyed it. She wasn’t like his ex-wife, who used sex for gain. And if she didn’t believe in fidelity any more than the former Mrs. Landon had, at least she hadn’t taken any vows pretending she did.

Keri’s hand began to trace a path up his thigh. Zach caught her fingers in his, and she gave him a slow, dazzling smile before she arched toward him and put her lips to his ear again. Her breath danced along his skin.

“He’s gone,” she said. “I sent him away.”

There was no need to ask who, or what, she was talking about. Zach smiled as he brushed his lips against hers.

“Good,” he said, his mouth against the pink shell of her ear, “just so long as you understand that I’ll be gone, too, in a week.”

Her smile was sexy, her fingers cool as she clasped his face in her hands and drew it close to hers.

“But what a memorable week it’s going to be,” she said.

Zach kissed her again, more deeply this time, and then he drew her close and gazed out the open door as the helicopter swept across the valley.

Today, he had claimed the mountain. Tonight, he would claim the woman. And if he was lucky, he would not tire of either until it was time to return to the real world. He would go back to Boston, to the house on Beacon Hill and to the brokerage firm that bore his name.

Any man not satisfied with all that was nothing but a fool.

Thirteen hours and another world away, Eve Palmer yawned as she made her way across the dark, silent courtyard of her Los Angeles apartment complex to her front door.

It was two in the morning and she was tired to the bone.

She had risen before six, fought the freeway traffic in her beautiful but ailing sports car and taken the first of a day’s worth of meetings at eight. Ten hours later, she’d grabbed a sandwich while she viewed the dailies of Triad’s current movie-in-progress, a dog of a film she’d inherited from her predecessor.

At nine o’clock she’d fixed her makeup, slapped a smile on her face and gone to a cocktail party. At eleven, she’d let Dex Burton, Hollywood’s newest up-and-coming macho male lead, whisk her off for a late-night supper so they could talk business. At least, that was what Dex had claimed.

Eve made a face as she jabbed her key into the lock of the front door and stepped into her tiny living room. But the only business Dex had wanted to do was in bed.

“You give a little, you get a little, lover,” he’d said, flashing her a toothy grin.

It had infuriated her but it hadn’t surprised her. She’d learned the lesson early, that men saw nothing wrong in trading power for sex. If it was more obvious in Hollywood than it had been in foster homes back in Minnesota, it was only because Hollywood had more powerful men and beautiful women per square mile than any other place on the planet.

Eve had managed to keep smiling, to pretend she didn’t understand Dex’s sleazy message. But when his hand had slipped under the table and slid casually up her thigh, her self-control had vanished. She’d told Dex what he could do with his charm and his nonexistent talent, and now here she was, still without a lead for Hollywood Wedding, the film that would determine the course of Triad’s future, and hers.

The apartment was warm and stuffy. Eve kicked off her shoes and headed straight for the air conditioner, sighing as the first cool blast came sweeping through the vents.

A shower, then bed, she thought as she took off her jacket. It wasn’t just the long day that had tired her, it had been standing around at that cocktail party, putting on a bright face to convince the world that rumors of Trident’s imminent demise were exaggerated.

At least the other rumors had eased off, the ones that had plagued her after fate had brought Triad into her life.

No. That wasn’t quite accurate, Eve thought as she undressed. It wasn’t fate that had handed her the top spot at Triad. It was Charles Landon, and that was why the rumors had flown.

Struggling film-production companies were as common as crabgrass, but for a multimillionaire to put a woman at the head of such a company when she had never held that kind of job before—that wasn’t common at all.

That Charles had done it on little more than a whim was something the rumormongers couldn’t comprehend. In her better moments, Eve had to admit it was hard to blame them. She’d had trouble comprehending it herself, she thought as she pulled the clips from her hair.

Her chin lifted in an unconscious gesture of defiance as a cascade of pale golden curls tumbled down her back.

But her relationship with Charles had been strictly business. She had not wangled responsibility for Triad from an old man in some cheap game played out between satin sheets. She had simply been in the right place at the right time, and Charles had taken it from there.

Sometimes she’d been tempted to stand up in a place like Spago’s, bang on a water glass and announce that to the world.

But she never had.

One of life’s most painful lessons was that denying a lie sometimes only gave it the aura of truth.

Eve had learned that at seventeen, when her foster father had tried to molest her. After months of complaining, someone had finally believed her. Eve had almost wept with relief, but it had been short-lived. Her foster father had pointed an accusing finger at her and convinced his wife and the social worker that it was Eve who’d come on to him.

No, Eve thought as she switched on the bathroom light, no, there was no point in denying the rumors about Charles and her. Ignoring them had been the right thing. The whispers had faded, then died—to be replaced by whispers about Triad and speculation about how long the company would take to fail.

But it wasn’t going to fail. She wouldn’t let it. Hollywood Wedding would save Triad, Eve was sure of it. All she needed was the right cast and location…

The breath sighed from her lungs. All, she thought with a little laugh, all.

Eve lifted her head and looked into the bathroom mirror. Her weary smile faded as she met her own cooleyed gaze. She could do it. She would do it. Charles Landon had handed her a once-in-a-lifetime chance, and she wasn’t going to let it slip away.

Absolutely nothing, and no one, was going to keep her from succeeding.

Deep in the Himalayas, Zach and Keri entered the inn.

“I’ll meet you in the lounge for drinks and dinner after I’ve showered,” he said, with a little smile.

Keri linked her arms around his neck.

“Wouldn’t you rather shower in my room?” she whispered “I’ll phone down for champagne, and——”

“Mr. Landon?” Zach turned. The innkeeper stood a few feet away, his expression solemn. “Sir, this just came for you over the wireless.”

Zach smiled as he took the message from the man’s outstretched hand.

“Don’t look so down in the mouth, Patel. Unless it’s my office wiring me that the market’s crashed…” His voice faded to silence as he scanned the slip of paper again. When he looked up, his smile was gone. “Hell,” he said softly.

Keri frowned. “What’s the matter?”

Zach ignored her. “I’ll need access to your wireless,” he said sharply to the innkeeper. “And I’ll expect the copter to be ready to leave in five minutes.”

“Of course, Mr. Landon. I’m terribly sorry, sir. May I offer my condolences?”

“Zach?” The woman’s voice called after him as he hurried up the stairs. “What’s happened? Where are you going?”

He paused at the top of the steps and looked down at her, his expression blank. Her name had gone clear out of his head.

“Sorry,” he said, “but I’m afraid our plans are off.”

A pout spread across her pretty face. “What do you mean, off? You said——”

“I’ve got to fly back to the States. I just got word that my old man died.”

“Oh. Oh, I’m so sorry.”

She waited. Zach knew he was supposed to show something, to feel something. But it was too late for that. It was years too late.

All there was time for now was the long journey home.

CHAPTER ONE

SOMEWHERE above the Rocky Mountains, the wild cry of a hawk rose on the early morning air. The sound awakened Zach instantly, just as it always had when he was a boy.

He lay back against the pillows. But he wasn’t a boy now, he thought wryly, he was a man, and as free as the hawk. There was no need to dream of the day he, too, could leave behind the Landon mansion and the valley it commanded.

He had done that, thirteen long years ago, and though he had returned from time to time, he had never missed this place.

With a sigh, he shoved aside the blankets, sat up and scrubbed his stubbled face lightly with his hands.

What time was it, anyway? He peered at the clock beside his bed. Six thirty-seven, said the unblinking red digital face. Zach groaned softly and put his head in his hands.

If he was at home in Boston, he’d have already been up half an hour. By now, he’d be shaved, showered and dressed; he’d be on his way downstairs to the sun room, where Howell would greet him with a polite good morning, a pot of freshly ground coffee and copies of the Boston Globe, the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal.

But he wasn’t in Boston, Zach thought as he rose to his feet and padded, naked, to the window. He was in Colorado. And getting up at six o’clock was no pleasure when you hadn’t gone to bed until someplace after two the night before.

A grin crept across Zach’s face. The evening had been terrific, though. Sitting around, talking and reminiscing with his brothers, was always great.

It never failed to amaze him just how easily he, Cade and Grant fell back into the patterns of their childhood when they got together. Though they were separated by time, by geography and by the demands of their very different professions, all they had to do was meet under the same roof and the years fell away. They were kids again, not just brothers but best buddies, joined by blood, by love—and by their determination to stand up to the common enemy. Their father.

The smile slipped from Zach’s face. The enemy was gone now. Charles had been dead almost a week, the funeral was over, and he still didn’t feel anything. Hell, you were supposed to feel something when you watched your old man’s coffin settling alongside your mother’s in the family mausoleum, weren’t you, something more than a faint sense of regret?

He shook his head as he ran his hand through his chestnut-colored hair. His brothers had been as stonyfaced as he. Kyra had been the only one of the Landon children whose eyes had glittered with tears, but then, his baby sister was as sweet and tenderhearted a soul as had ever lived. That she’d never been one of the old man’s victims, Zach thought wryly, proved that there was a merciful God. Charles’s tyrannical callousness, his authoritarian coldness, had been reserved for his sons alone.

With a sigh, Zach turned away from the window and headed for the attached bathroom. That was all in the past now, he thought as he stepped into the shower stall, and not just because the old man was gone. Charles had lost power over his sons a long time ago. Cade had escaped at twenty-one, giving up the life the old man had picked out for him for the dream of striking it rich in the oil fields. Grant hadn’t lasted that long; he’d made his move at eighteen, going off to the university of his choice instead of his father’s and making his way through it and law school on his own.

Zach smiled tightly as he turned his face up to the water. But he’d had less patience than either of his brothers. At seventeen, he’d walked away from this place and…

He laughed. Hell, no. He hadn’t walked away, he’d driven—in his father’s Porsche. Taking off in the hundred-thousand-dollar car had been his final act of defiance, a kind of in-your-face present from him to Charles as if to prove he was every inch the no-good punk the old man said he was.

Actually, by then, a punk was exactly what he’d become. His grades—except for science, which he loved, and math, which he could do without thinking—were in the toilet. He’d been running with a fast and loose crowd, and it had only been a matter of time before he’d have gotten in trouble with the law.

His smile faded as he stepped out of the shower. Even at seventeen, he’d hated himself for what he was turning into, but he couldn’t seem to stop.

Nothing he did was good enough to please his father. His As in math and science didn’t make up for the Bs (and occasional Cs) he got in dull subjects like social studies and languages. His position on the football team as a grunting, hurt-in-the-dirt lineman was nothing compared to the flash and dash he’d have had as a running back or a wide receiver. And his friends were the wrong ones, local boys instead of snot-nosed brats from the exclusive school the old man insisted he attend in Denver.

By the time Zach had reached the age of seventeen, it was as if he’d become determined to live down to each of Charles’s expectations.

“You’ll never amount to anything,” Charles had said, for as long as Zach could remember.

Looking back now, Zach had to admit that it might have been true. He never would have amounted to anything, not if he’d stayed in this house.

But the last angry blowup had tipped the scales. It had started over some flippant remark he’d made and quickly escalated to a summary of all Zach’s sins. At the end of it, Charles had given him an ultimatum.

“Either you live by my rules or you’ll get out,” he’d shouted.

Zach hadn’t hesitated. Seconds later, he was out the door and in the Porsche, burning rubber as he roared down the driveway and onto the narrow road that led off the estate, driving hell-bent-for-leather into Denver, never stopping until he pulled up at the Army recruitment office.

A smile twisted across his mouth as he recalled the way the scowling recruiting sergeant had looked him up and down, sucked in his cheeks and asked how old he was.

“Eighteen,” Zach said, without blinking.

“Eighteen, huh?” The sergeant smiled. “Tell you what, kid. You bring me your birth certificate and we’ll talk about enlistment.”

The Marine recruiter down the street wasn’t as picky, especially because Zach, wiser if still not older, had paused just long enough to get his hands on a doctored driver’s license before he put in an appearance.

The Marine had looked at Zach, then at the license.

“You got a birth certificate to back this up, son?” he’d drawled.

“Yes, sir,” Zach had answered. It wasn’t a lie, not when you considered that his order for the certificate was already in the works.

“And you’ll produce it tomorrow?”

“Yes, sir,” Zach had said again, his posture erect and his green eyes firmly fixed on the wall just beyond the Marine’s head.

The recruiter had shrugged and shoved a stack of papers across his desk.

“Read ’em, sign ’em, and we’re in business.” As Zach had reached for the papers, the man’s callused hand slapped down hard on his wrist. “Just be sure you know what you’re doing, son.”

Zach had pulled his hand loose and looked up, his eyes suddenly the color of a storm-tossed ocean.

“I’m not anybody’s son,” he’d said coldly, “and I know exactly what I’m doing.”

But, Zach thought now, he hadn’t known a damn. He smiled ruefully as he began dressing. Boot camp and Parris Island had seemed a worse hell than the one he’d escaped—except that at the end of it, the Corps had welcomed him to its bosom in a way his father never had.

For the first time in his young life, Zach had found a home.

By the time he left the Marines four years later, he had a sense of discipline, a yearning for success and a twenty-thousand-dollar stake. On two continents and in half a dozen Corps barracks, his take-no-prisoners attitude, coupled with his head for numbers, had turned him into a steady winner at high-stakes poker.

After that, it was easy. The money had seen him through a couple of years of college, where his finance courses had taught him two things.

The first was that he knew more by instinct about stocks and bonds and market shares than his professors.

The second was that playing poker wasn’t all that different from playing the markets, it was just that the markets paid off bigger.

At twenty-three, Zach had left school. He’d dabbled in arbitrage for a year, in high-risk corporate takeovers for another. At twenty-five, with a couple of million dollars under his belt, he’d decided to settle down. He’d bought himself a seat on the Exchange.

Now, at thirty, he was head of his own firm, one of the most successful young stockbrokers in America.

And one of the most bored.

Zach frowned and paused with his hand on the hanger that held one of the three almost identical dark blue suits he’d had Howell express here from Boston. It was the truth. He was bored out of his mind. It was terrible to admit, but if there’d been one benefit to this last week, it was that it had, at least, ripped him away from the unvarying routine of his days.

He shook his head. What was the matter with him? He’d come here straight from the Himalayas, where he’d been anything but bored, skiing a mountain that pierced the clouds and making it—well, almost making it— with…with whatever her name had been.

What he needed was to get back to work. He had to get back to work. There were fat-cat clients to wine and dine, a dozen dull meetings to chair…

“Hell,” he said, under his breath, and he reached quickly past the three suits, hanging shoulder to shoulder like the three Marx Brothers, pulled out the Harris tweed jacket he’d taken with him to the Himalayas and strode from the bedroom.

The house was quiet, just as it had always been. Even when he and Cade and Grant were kids, they’d tried not to make any noise here, automatically saving their rough-and-tumble for the stables or the endless lawns and pastures. There was something about the Landon mansion, Zach thought as he made his way down the wide staircase, that didn’t inspire the sound of childish voices lifted in glee.

It didn’t inspire the sound of voices at all, he thought, his mouth tightening. The dozens of guests who’d come back here after the funeral had stood around whispering to each other, and there’d been no doubt in Zach’s mind that it was the house they were deferring to and not the occasion.

What an incredible circus the funeral had been! Judges, politicos, bankers, CEOs and board presidents from damned near all the Fortune 500 companies in the West had shown up, all of them looking solemn—and all of them trying to figure out which Landon son was the one who was going to take Charles’s place.

A smile tugged at Zach’s lips as he followed the wonderful aroma of Stella’s coffee toward the dining room. What would all those bigwigs say when they learned that they wouldn’t have the chance to genuflect to any of the Landons? Yesterday, after the reading of their father’s will, the brothers had taken all of two minutes to agree that not a one of them wanted any part of Landon Enterprises.

Zach would check out Landon’s corporate worth and put a price on its head. Grant would handle the legal end. Cade would decide which lost and forgotten, poverty-stricken dots on the map were most in need of hospitals and schools, courtesy of the sale.

And that would be the end of it. Charles Landon’s gift to his sons would go the way of the dodo bird, a fate it surely deserved. Zach and his brothers would be free; only Kyra would keep any ties to the old man, but that was as it should be.

His face softened as he thought of his sister. She was a sweetheart, the light of all their lives. He could hear her voice now, soft and musical, drifting from the dining room.

“…still can’t believe Father left the place to me,” she was saying.

Zach smiled as he stepped into the room.

“Why wouldn’t he have?” He dropped a kiss on the top of her head and made his way toward the coffee urn. “You adore this place, baby. It would have been wrong if he’d left it to anyone else.”

Kyra looked up and smiled. “Well,” she said, “don’t you look handsome this morning.”

Zach smiled back at her, even if it wasn’t easy to do. Of all the gloomy rooms in the house, he’d always disliked this one the most. He’d suffered through endless inquisitions and endless criticisms at that big mahogany table.

It suddenly seemed like old timesthe dark furniture, the sideboard overladen with food no one would eat. Lord, he couldn’t wait to get out of this place.

He looked at Cade, who was seated at the table with a cup of coffee in his hands.

“Where’s Grant?” Zach shot back his cuff and looked at his watch. “I thought he’d be back from that meeting with the old man’s administrative assistant by now.”

Cade cocked an eyebrow and got to his feet. “And a charming good morning to you, too.”

“It’s late, in case you hadn’t noticed. I’ve got an eleven o’clock flight to Boston.”

“And you’re going to make it out of uniform?” Cade shook his head. “I thought all you banker types signed a pledge that said you had to go around in pinstripes.”