Double Dare by Rhonda Nelson Page B

pulled a tabloid
magazine form the grocery sack he’d carried in and handed it to
her. “You’re going to have to call your father again.”
    Lou scanned the headline and
secretly cheered inside. Oh, it was better than anything she could
have hoped for! How’s that, Daddy? Lou thought smugly. She’d teach him to send the
press after her.
    Lou’s gaze strayed to the picture and she
felt herself blush. My word…she could barely tell where she ended
and Sam began. They were pressed so close together, you couldn’t
have gotten a toothpick between them with a sledgehammer. It was
scandalous! It was …wonderful.
    Regret tugged the corners of her lips down
when she thought of poor Chad. It occurred to Lo that in her zeal
to make her father pay, Chad’s humiliation had just doubled. He’d
been innocent like her, and now she’d further embarrassed him by
getting her picture on the cover of a national magazine wrapped in
an amorous embrace with another man.
    Lou absently chewed her bottom lip. Somehow
she had to make this right, and she fervently hope to make Chad
understand that these underhanded tactics she’d resorted to had
been necessary. Sam, too, for that matter.
    She scanned the article and used every trick
she knew to keep her face straight. Sam, the leader of a cult? A
bigamist with twenty-five wives and almost double that number in
children? Possessed a penis more than a foot long? She felt her
face flame again and swallowed hard.
    Sam mistook her silence and high color for
outrage. “Do you have any idea what this could potentially do to my
business?” he asked her, obviously striving for a calm he didn’t
feel. “Or my mother? If she sees this, she’s going to have a
stroke!”
    Lou blanched, realizing the true impact her
recklessness could have. As for his business, she didn’t think it
would truly suffer. After all, the paper hadn’t named him. If
someone recognized him—and considering his back was to the camera
and only a profile shot, at that-the chances of him being found out
were slim to none. People might suspect, but they wouldn’t know
unless he told them. Besides, it was possible that the speculation
might actually help his business.
    But his mother… Mercy, she hadn’t even
considered that. Dread and regret assailed her simultaneously,
making her feel fairly faint.
    Sam turned and gave her an implacable look.
“You have to call your father, Lou. You have to call him and
impress upon him the importance of calling off the press hounds.
And I want to hear you do it.”
    Lou quailed. “H-hear me?” she squeaked.
    “ Yes. Hear you.” Sam crossed
his arms over his chest. “Do you want to call him now or after we
reach the Keys?”
    “ When we reach the Keys,”
Lou told him, profoundly grateful for the brief
reprieve.
    Sam gave her a look. “I don’t want them
following us.”
    “ I don’t think they will,”
Lou replied.
    “ You don’t think? ”
    “ Well, I can’t know for
certain, Sam,” Lou replied, unreasonably nettled at this turn of
events. “Why don’t you have your assistant call her psychic and see
what she can find out?”
    Sam’s brow furrowed into a frown. “She can’t.
She’s too busy scurrying around the greater Atlanta area trying to
pull as many of these freaking tabloids off the stand as she can.
She hasn’t got time to talk to her damned psychic!”
    Oops. She’d gone too far again, Lou thought,
suddenly chagrined. None of the blame for this mess lay with Sam—it
all came back to her. And her father, Lou remembered with a bitter
smile. She couldn’t forget him.
    Well, she’d started it, now she simply had no
choice but to see it through. Lou knew if she backed off now, if
she gave her father an inch, he’d take the proverbial mile. She
sighed dejectedly and massaged the bridge of her nose.
    James Whitehorn Honeycutt would never
understand her, wouldn’t make the effort to try. What’s more, he
would keep on attempting to ruin her life the way he