Lifestyles of the Witch & Famous Read Free Page A

Tyler jerked to a halt on the door’s threshold. Shit. He’d been refusing her calls all week. Couldn’t she take a hint? He didn’t want to talk to her. What was the point?
    After meeting her, Gladys Patton had advised by phone that she considered Leigh to be unstable, a bad influence on the boys. Dangerous even. Patton said the woman was involved in some sort of occult crap, and the sooner Tyler removed his nephews from her care, the better they’d be.
    The handwritten faxed report he’d gotten from his private investigator, George Farrell, backed up Patton’s assessment. Farrell hadn’t exactly deemed Leigh dangerous – but Farrell wouldn’t, of course, being a little on the shady side himself. You could trust the guy’s facts, but not his opinion.
    And the facts said that Molly Leigh was a real flaky-cake, just the sort of new-agey tree-hugger that poor head-in-the-clouds Steve would have been involved with. Whereas feet-firmly-on-the-ground Tyler had zero tolerance for that sort. There could be only one reason for her pigheaded persistence. She wanted more money – and he’d offered her quite enough as it was. Six hundred thousand dollars! A hundred thousand a year for her six years of service.
    Hell, legally he wasn’t obligated to give her a dime, but it seemed the decent thing to do. Regardless of what some said, he usually did try to do the decent thing, especially where woman were concerned. None of his ex-wives had complained about their settlements. So why should a chick he’d never met? And didn’t intend to.
    Still, if it would shut her up…
    “Tell her I’m unavailable,” he said. “But you can inform her that if she’ll stop calling, I’ll up the offer. Make it a million.”
    Why not? He could afford it.
    “Um, Ty…” Barry hesitated, a suspicious twitching at the corners of his mouth and a wicked glint in his eye.
    The kind of glint that always made Tyler feel there was a whoopee cushion hidden somewhere in the room, and he was about to sit on it.
    He braced himself. “What?”
    “I don’t think she wants more money. I’m not sure she wants any money. I think she just wants to see you – to discuss the kids. She seems to really care about them.”
    “And I don’t?” Tyler bristled. They were his nephews, damn it, the only family he had left. The woman had absolutely no claim on them, and from what he’d heard of her, he didn’t want her anywhere near them. Gladys Patton might be a tight-ass, but she was the kind of tight-ass Tyler understood. Proper. Orderly.
    If Patton said Leigh was a dangerous influence, he’d accept her word on that. Especially since it matched his own intuition. For some reason just the name “Molly Leigh” set off warning bells inside him. Why, he didn’t know. But he wasn’t taking any chances.
    “Well, I don’t want to see her,” he said. “And if she calls anymore, I don’t even want to know about it. Tell her to just take the damn money and…and go hug a tree!”
    Fuming, he stepped through the door. A firm hand on his shoulder stopped him and spun him around. It was Barry’s turn to bristle apparently. Tyler had sometimes suspected the man had a few “tree-hugging” inclinations of his own, but he’d avoided asking since they always had plenty of other things to argue about. He quirked an eyebrow at his assistant’s tight-lipped expression, then felt a prickle of apprehension as those lips curled into a merciless grin.
    “Tell her yourself,” Barry said. “She ought to be in the poolroom by now with the boys. Waiting for you.”
     
     
     
     
    Chapter 2
     
    Pool? You could float a yacht on that thing!
    Molly tightened her grip on the struggling tomcat as she stepped through an archway into a high glass-domed courtyard that looked bigger than the Astrodome. Hell, it might be bigger than the Superdome.
    Three small boys and a large dog pressed in behind her, all hanging close, all of them stunned silent – except Fluffy who