The Stranger: The Heroes of Heyday (Harlequin Superromance No. 1266) Read Free

Merle had called Tyler yesterday and asked for an hour to talk about the Heyday Eight, Tyler hadn’t even hesitated. Hell, yes, he had time. He’d make time. The Heyday Eight had won Tyler a Pulitzer when he broke the story a few years ago, and they were expected to make him a couple of million dollars next year, when he published his detailed hardback version of the scandal.
    He’d taken his time finding the right publisher, though several houses had been interested. He wanted to find someone who would let him tell the story straight, not just as pure exploitation. And, of course, he’d wanted a lot of money.
    It was ironic, really. Eight ditzy blond college girls who spanked grown men with toy whips, then bedded them for fun and profit, had done what a decade of serious investigative reporting couldn’t do. They had set Tyler free from the underpaid grind of life at a daily newspaper.
    No clock-punching for Tyler anymore. Mostly he worked on the upcoming book, which the publisher wanted to call Shenandoah Sex Circus, though Tylerwas fighting to keep it simple. The Heyday Eight was good enough.
    If he wrote anything else these days, he did it for magazines. In-depth and on his own schedule. In fact, his New Yorker piece should have hit the stands today. He had arranged to meet Dilday Merle in front of Bennie’s News Stand on M Street. If he hurried, he might get there early enough to grab a copy before the professor showed up.
    Bennie had been selling Tyler newspapers and magazines for more than ten years, ever since Tyler was a senior at Georgetown and working on the school paper. Back then, Tyler had bought the Washington Post the way some men might buy a lottery ticket, just holding it reverently and praying that maybe, someday, it would be his byline on the front page.
    â€œHey, there, big shot! Who’s the man? ” Bennie hailed Tyler with enthusiasm from the shadows of his crowded counter. Though it was a muggy spring day in D.C., Bennie wore his usual uniform, a pair of black sweatpants and a black sweatshirt with a hood pulled up over his balding head. He held up a copy of the New Yorker. “Who’s famous today?”
    Tyler pulled out a couple of bills and traded them for the magazine. “I believe that would be me,” he said with a smile. He leafed through the pages to his story, scanned it to make sure they hadn’t cut him too much or spelled his name wrong. Good—they’d given him great play. Six pages, with full color.
    Snapping it shut, he looked back at Bennie. “Did you read it?”
    No one ever actually ever saw Bennie reading the merchandise, but he was the best-informed man in Washington, so Tyler assumed he must be doing it on the sly.
    â€œYeah,” Bennie said. “You’re slick, man. Real slick. You did a tap dance on that oil boy. You fishing for another Pulitzer?”
    Tyler rolled up the magazine and stuffed it in his pocket. “It’s the Ellies when it’s magazines. But no, I’m not fishing for anything. I just tell the truth. I just tell it like it is.”
    Bennie stuffed a sweet-smelling slab of gum into his mouth and eyed Tyler speculatively. “So you say. But is it really as easy as that? You gonna sleep okay when oil boy’s busting rocks in the slammer?”
    Tyler thought of oil boy and his bankrupt company, his laid-off employees, his creditors who were basically screwed, and his investors who were suddenly destitute. One of them, an eighty-year-old man, had already shot himself to death rather than end up a burden to his children.
    â€œYou bet I will,” Tyler said. “Like a baby.”
    Bennie looked as if he might enjoy a good debate, but Tyler, who had, as always, been subtly scanning the other customers—just in case the vice president’s wife had chosen this spot to rendezvous with her boyfriend, or the local minister was shoplifting a copy of Penthouse —realized