Secret under the Stars: Lucky Stars Series Book 3 Read online

  He watched as the bookstore gobbled up Marcy, unable to stop the smile that curled his lips. They’d run into each other from time to time at Barton’s when they were kids, and even more often at the library, as both of them were relentless bookworms. So often, when he’d gone to the Hanlons’ to work, she’d be sitting poolside reading something. A couple of times, Max had actually stoked up enough courage to ask her about her book, and the two of them would begin a nice chat about it. Until one of her parents or brothers came out the back door to remind Max he wasn’t there for a book club and to get back to work.

  It was a fair cop. But the real reason the Hanlons had chased him off had nothing to do with his landscaping obligations and everything to do with keeping him away from Marcy. The Hanlons were nowhere around now, though. None of them had ever returned to Endicott after they left. Max could talk to Marcy all he wanted, provided she was up for a chat, too.

  Decision made, he headed up the street.

  * * *

  Marcy Hanlon pushed her gigantic sunglasses to the top of her head, gazed at the tall stack of hardbacks on the table in Barton’s Bookstore and tried not to cry. Marcella Robillard’s most recent mystery novel, The Devil You Say, had a reasonably good title and a cover that was absolutely gorgeous—an art-deco-style drawing of a flapper in profile, her heavily lined eyes closed, her red lips parted over a long cigarette holder. The novel had been given Marcella’s biggest print run yet, Marcy knew, and the publisher had put buckets of money into promoting it. It had been in the front window of every bookstore the week of its release, and, at this point, it still should have been face out in the mystery section of the store. In some reviews, Marcella Robillard had been compared to Agatha Christie and Dorothy L. Sayers. Her latest cozy should have shot straight to the top of every bestseller list out there. Both she and her new book should still be performing extremely well.

  Instead, barely six months after its release, it sat veiled in dust on a remainder table at the back of the store. It hadn’t even sold a quarter of its printing, and the only top-ten list it had appeared on, at number ten, had been one for a tiny weekly paper in a tiny coastal town in Maine, where Marcella had bought her first—tiny—summer cottage with the advance from her second novel. And that had only been because the elderly owner of the town’s only bookstore had a crush on Marcella and insisted that everyone who entered his store buy her books whenever they were released.

  Marcy knew all that, too. She knew, because she was Marcella Robillard. Almost as if to prove that to herself, she picked up a copy of the book and turned it over. Yep. There she was on the back cover, looking all successful and confident, happily seated at her Renaissance-era writing desk in her office at the castle—yes, castle—where she used to live. Behind her, the windows had been thrown open to showcase the rolling vineyards of southern France beneath a bright blue sky filled with puffy clouds. The famous Robillard vineyards, producer of some of the best cabernet sauvignon in the world.

  Marcella Robillard wasn’t just some glamorous pen name Marcy had chosen for herself. It was her actual, legal name. She’d been born Marcella Genevieve Hanlon and became Madame la Comtesse de Robillard after marrying Monsieur le Comte de Robillard—aka Olivier, aka Ollie—six years ago. Though, now that her divorce was settled, she could go back to her own name anytime—at least in her personal life. Not that the name Marcella Robillard was any great shakes in the literary community these days. It might behoove Marcy to start writing under another name, anyway.

  If she could ever crawl out from under the writer’s block that had been plaguing her. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d been able to wring more than a couple of pages out of herself in one sitting—and those pages were never any good. Who knew if she even had another story in her?

  She was about to put her book—her book, she reminded herself, one of seven that had her name on it, so she must have another in her somewhere, if only she could find it—back on the table. But the bell above the front door of the bookstore jangled merrily to announce another customer, and she automatically looked up to see who it might be.

  And immediately wished she hadn’t.

  Oh, crap. Max Travers. Who she was totally not prepared to run into. Not until she could work the situation from the playbook she’d rehearsed in her head a couple of billion times before returning.

  Be cool, she told herself as she watched him stride aimlessly to the new-fiction table. It wasn’t like this was any kind of big, unfamiliar experience for her. Barton’s Bookstore had been a fixture in Endicott since before she was born. She and Max had bumped into each other here a million times when they were kids. He was the only person in town who’d read as much as she did. Though he hadn’t much cared for The Scarlet Letter, she recalled, thinking about the paper they’d had to write together in ninth grade. He’d had some excellent opinions and insights on it, though, which had vaulted their project to an A from what would have been a solid B if she’d had to write it alone.

  Funny, that, she thought now. Every one of her books had topped a hundred thousand words, and nearly every one of them had made an appearance on the New York Times bestseller list, three of them breaking the top ten. But she’d needed Max’s help in ninth grade to finish a five-page essay on a book that had already been written.

  She’d needed his help with other things, too, back then, she recalled now, the memories pushing to the front of her brain before she could stop them. She’d needed his kindness and his sweetness and his shy little smiles in the hallway. He had no idea how much those smiles had meant to her on days when everything in the world seemed like it was crumbling to gravel at her feet.

  How could he have betrayed her the way he did back then?

  She needed more time before she was ready to talk to him. She needed to better prepare herself. It was only her first full day back in town. She’d hoped to have a couple of days, at least, to reacclimate herself to the place where she’d grown up before she had to face him. It had just been so long since she was in Endicott, so long since she’d been Marcy Hanlon. She wasn’t sure she even knew how to be Marcy Hanlon anymore. Unfortunately, he was standing between her and the exit, and by the leisureliness of his movements, he didn’t look as if he was going anywhere anytime soon.

  He’d always been like that when they were kids, never seeming to have a care in the world. She used to sneak peeks at him out her bedroom window whenever he was there with Mr. Bartok to take care of the garden. He’d taken his time with the plants, appearing to have a soft spot for each one of them, but he’d always managed to finish his work on time. At school, he was always the last to rise from his desk at the end of class and would amble casually to the next one. He never wolfed down his lunch like the other boys. Ironically, he’d lettered in track and always made the state finals, but not because he was a runner. He’d been their discus thrower and shot-putter, always taking his time to ready his shots, and often winning as a result. Max had just been a thoughtful, gentle, decent kid.

  Which had made it all the more shocking when she learned the truth about him. That Max Travers was nothing but a common thief.

  Be cool, she told herself again as she watched him move casually from one table to the next. He couldn’t find out yet that she knew what he’d done to her family. She had a four-step plan in place, and she would execute it perfectly. Step one: pretend nothing between her and Max had changed since they were kids, save those things that were an inevitable and normal part of growing up. Step two: lull him into a false sense of security that everything between them was ju-u-ust fi-i-i-ine and see how much she could get him to inadvertently admit what he’d done fifteen years ago. Step three: once she had him where she wanted him, smack him hard with the revelation that she knew he was the one who’d stolen a fortune’s worth of jewelry and documents from their home. And step four...

  Okay, so she hadn’t quite figured out step four yet. She supposed it
depended on his reaction to her revelation. First things first. Step one. Nothing had changed since they were kids. However, as she watched Max step into a splash of sunlight streaming through the front window of Barton’s, she realized a lot had changed since they were kids. At least where he was concerned. As handsome as he’d been as a boy, as a man... He was staggering. His hair was longer on top, thick coils of black falling carelessly over his forehead and temples. The late-afternoon light streamed over his brown skin, gilding his luscious cheekbones and the biceps that strained against his polo shirt. He’d always had great arms, thanks to the physicality of his job. But he’d been pretty lean otherwise when they were kids, and not much taller than her. He’d grown at least a half foot since then, and biceps weren’t the only muscles straining against his shirt. Broad shoulders tapered to a slim waist, all of it solid rock.

  She remembered how much she’d always wanted to run a hand over the length of his arms and shoulders when they were kids, because the bumps and curves of muscle were so different from her own scrawny frame. But she hadn’t braved even the smallest touch. There had been something about Max that made her feel like, if she touched him, even once, she’d never want to be separated from him, never want to be her individual self again, at a time when she didn’t even know yet who her individual self was.

  She bit back a derisive chuckle. As if she knew who her individual self was now. She’d reinvented herself so many times since leaving Endicott that she was more foreign to herself than ever.

  Max looked up then, his gaze immediately connecting with hers when he saw that she was staring at him. Then he smiled. Oh, god. He smiled one of those sweet, gentle smiles he’d gifted her with in the hallways at school. In an instant, Marcy was fifteen again. But only the good parts of being fifteen. The fun of shopping for earrings at the mall or eating school lunch outside when the weather turned warm. The delight of choosing an outfit for the next day or downloading new music. The breathless excitement of wondering what adventures would come on any given day. And the absolute, joyful ignorance of how the world really worked and how the people living in it truly were.

  Max lifted a hand in silent greeting, and something inside Marcy exploded into glitter and cotton candy. Oh, she was so not ready to see him yet. She closed her eyes, inhaled a deep, calming breath and reminded herself that he was not the boy she’d crushed on as a teenager. More to the point, she was no longer the girl who trusted and saw the best in everyone she met.

  When she opened her eyes again, Max was making his way toward her. Her heart hammered hard in her chest, and she hoped like hell he couldn’t hear it pounding in his ears the way she heard it in hers. Instinctively, she pressed the book she was still holding against herself firmly, as if that might keep in all the wild emotions that wanted to escape.

  Be cool, she told herself for a third time, hoping it would indeed be a charm. Thankfully, she did manage to regain some sense of herself before he stopped a mere breath away. But when she saw the shimmer of affection lighting his eyes, the same slate-blue of his polo, she nearly melted into a heap of ruined womanhood at his feet.

  He’s a thief, she reminded herself. He’s the reason so much went so wrong in your life. Oddly, though, this moment somehow felt like the first thing to go right in a very long time.

  “Hey there, Marcy Hanlon,” he said in a voice that was deeper and richer than the one she remembered. Had she been writing about him, she would have called his voice velvety. There was a time when she would have shunned a word like that in her writing, thinking it too flowery. But for Max Travers, it was perfect.

  “Hey there, Max Travers,” she managed to reply in a voice that sounded steady and confident and nothing at all like how she felt.

  For a moment, neither said anything more, only studied each other in silence as if taking stock of all the ways they’d each matured. Marcy had changed—physically, anyway—as much as Max had. Living for five years in the Côtes de Provence had burnished her once-pasty skin, and she’d been dyeing and perming her hair and keeping it shorter since college. She was a bit taller, too, and living in a French vineyard with a Cordon-Bleu-trained chef had filled out her formerly lanky build. She’d lived the kind of life as an adult she never would have dreamed she could have had as a kid, one filled with glamour and adventure and passion. Her experiences, both good and bad, had made her much more accomplished, but also much more complicated.

  Usually, she liked herself well enough these days, even if she didn’t like where life had landed her. But there were times when she wished she could go back to being that skinny, awkward kid. Not just because those had been simpler times. But because there were so many choices she’d made since then that she now wished she could go back and undo.

  Funny, but she would have thought one of those choices she could have made differently would have been falling for Max Travers. But looking at him now, feeling the way she was just by being close to him...

  No. She still would have chosen differently back then, she told herself, had she known what she knew about him now.

  “It’s good to see you, Marcy,” he said. “I was wondering if you’d be back in town for Bob’s return.”

  “Wouldn’t miss it for the world,” she replied.

  And she wouldn’t. Like Max, she was born in a year of the comet. Like every kid her age the last time the comet came around—including Max, she was certain—she’d made a wish when she was fifteen. It was a wish she desperately needed to come true now. Wild horses couldn’t have kept her away from Endicott.

  Another awkward moment passed in which they only continued to eye each other with much interest...and not a little confusion. Then Max asked, “So what have you been up to for the last fifteen years?”

  Marcy nearly dropped the book she was still holding. Had he asked that sarcastically? Or did he really not know what she’d been doing for the last fifteen years, in spite of a good many of those years being covered in just about every tabloid out there? Not that Max was the type to read tabloids. But unless things had changed, one of Endicott’s favorite pastimes was gossiping, so she was confident there had been at least some talk about her here. Hadn’t there been? Surely, there had. How could Max not know about her literary successes—um, at least until her most recent book or two—and her wildly scandalized marriage? Even before meeting Ollie, her party-hearty ways had been documented everywhere from The New York Times “Society” page to Radar Online. How had he not heard about her sensationally disastrous dating history and her husband’s philandering and profligacy? For a minute, she honestly wondered if maybe she had somehow gone back in time.

  Then she looked down at the book in her hands that she still clutched to her chest, cover side out. No, she was firmly standing in the present, more’s the pity. Immediately, she set the book down on the table, her publicity photo on the back hidden. Then, just for good measure, she moved to stand in front of it. Max honestly didn’t seem to know about her history, she realized with a mix of both amazement and relief. He thought she was still just Marcy Hanlon, coming back to the town where she grew up, for The Welcome Back, Bob, Comet Festival that had been the highlight of their youth.

  “Well, let’s see,” she began, struggling to figure out how she could be honest without telling him the truth. The last thing she wanted him to know about was what a failure she had been at...oh, everything. “I, um, I majored in English at Barnard and then, after graduation, I, ah, worked a lot of different jobs.”

  Which was true. Let no one ever say a degree in English made a person unemployable. Before selling her first book, Marcy waited tables, tended bar, worked in a lingerie boutique and did some freelance copyediting. She’d had a lot of jobs.

  “And then,” she continued quickly, “I lived in Europe for a little while.”

  His beautiful blue-gray eyes widened at that. “Wow. That’s pretty cool. What did you do there?”

  Agai
n, she struggled to find the right words. No wonder she had writer’s block. She couldn’t even craft an effective evasion, let alone a novel. “Well,” she said again, “I, um, I did a lot of things.”

  Also true. She had traveled extensively. She had partied with the rich and famous. She had spent more money than anyone should be allowed to have on things no ordinary person needed. And she had watched her entire life go up in flames.

  Finally, she said, “Mostly, I worked at a vineyard.”

  Again, true. She just didn’t mention the work she did while working there was writing, not stomping grapes. Marcy hadn’t had anything to do with the operation of Robillard Vineyards. That had all been left to her husband. Which went a long way toward explaining why Robillard Vineyards had gone bankrupt in the first place.

  Max looked impressed nonetheless. “Boy, you’ve done a lot more with your time since high school than I have.”

  Maybe she had. But she’d bet dollars to doughnuts his time had been spent a lot more wisely.

  “So how have you been doing since high school?” she quickly interjected, grateful for the opportunity to change the subject.

  He lifted one shoulder and let it drop, making the snug cuff of his polo hitch higher. The gesture revealed the hint of a tattoo beneath, another surprise that made her want to know more about his current self. But only because the more information she had about him, the better placed she’d be to take him down. That was the only reason she was curious about his biceps and triceps. And his deltoids and pectorals. And his trapeziuses. Trapezii? Anyway, whatever the muscles in the neck were called. All of them. Because, like she said, the more info she had, the better.