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Desperately Seeking Sully/Isn't It Romantic?

Harlequin Enterprises Ltd.

Chapter One

The office receptionist stared out beseechingly from under her thick false lashes and tucked a long strand of hair - blond this week - behind her ear.

"You have a thing for snakes?" Maggie Sanders teased, knowing perfectly well why Rayanne wanted her to hire the acting student with smoky-gray eyes and thick coal-black hair curling on his shoulders. He'd caught Maggie's eye, too, when she'd ushered out the previous applicant she'd interviewed.

"I loathe anything that crawls on its belly! Okay, I admit the rubber reptile is a silly prop, but he'd be perfect to pose as the author of the Extreme Adventure guides."

"It's how he sounds, not just how he looks," Maggie said. "So far I've only interviewed two applicants. How many more are there? A dozen or so?"

"Closer to thirty," the receptionist admitted. "Some are lined up in the hall. They've practically crowded me out of my space. If that guy in the bush jacket doesn't get his beefy buns off my desk, I'm getting my staple gun. How many signs did you post for the job?"

"Just a couple. I put them where the dramatic arts students at Carnegie Mellon would see them," Maggie said, surprised herself by the big turnout.

"Oh, they saw, all right!"

"Send in the next one, please."

Rayanne was the third young woman to have Maggie's old job as receptionist, and Maggie enjoyed her enthusiasm and sense of humor - most of the time. Maggie had been working for the Pittsburgh-based Granville Publishing Company since she'd graduated from West Virginia University nearly six years ago, but Rayanne had been hired last June, almost a year ago. They'd hit it off and were good friends, sometimes sharing rides home since they'd both grown up in small towns not too far apart across the border in West Virginia.

Maggie loved working at the small publishing company, mostly because Mr. Granville was a great employer. He'd hired her as a temp at the reception desk with the promise of "something better" when the opportunity arose. After only a few months he'd made her an assistant editor, but her big chance had come when he let her write Granville Publishing's first Extreme Adventure Guide. The first edition exceeded his expectations and was followed by three more, all wildly successful. Maggie had written them all doing the research on her trusty computer.

Until the Adventure Guide series, Granville Publishing had been a modestly successful small publisher specializing in local history, bed-and-breakfast guides and poetry. The firm occupied the top two floors of an old, narrow three-story brick building in downtown Pittsburgh, not far from the Carnegie Museum of Natural History. Mr. Granville's spacious office occupied the third floor along with a storage area. Everything else was crowded on the second, and the outer office across from the antiquated elevator was far too small for the thundering herd Maggie had to interview. She belatedly wished she'd insisted on appointments instead of inviting eager young acting students to show up anytime that afternoon.

The next applicant who came into her office was dressed in jeans and a black Pirates T-shirt, refreshingly ordinary compared to the safari jackets and camouflage outfits crowding the outer office. One job- seeker had even showed up as a jungle boy in a fake leopard-skin loincloth. She'd interviewed him first and quickly sent him on his way when he started calling her Jane.

Maggie sighed and asked the pinched-face blond boy now in front of her the first question on her prepared list.

"Are you free to do publishing tours and book signings whenever needed?"

"You can be sure of it, mate." He elaborated on his availability in the worst imitation of an Australian accent she'd ever heard.

She groaned inwardly and managed to shoo him out after a few agonizing minutes.

The office was a zoo, and it was all because the Extreme Adventure guides she'd written were so successful. They'd boosted the profits of Granville Publishing and given Mr. Granville an opportunity to sell out to the Pierpont Corporation. Maggie's boss was approaching seventy and wanted to retire without liquidating the firm his grandfather had founded. When the deal was finalized, though, he'd agreed to stay on as a consultant for up to a year during the transition period.

There was one little thing Mr. Granville had neglected to mention to the prospective new owner. M. S. Stevens, the pseudonym she used on the adventure guides, was really a five foot two, hundred-andten pound female whose total wilderness experience was one disastrous week at Girl Scout camp as a kid. There she'd managed to get lost in the woods, burn mulligan stew over a campfire and get poison ivy on her butt in a way she preferred to forget.

She looked around her cozy little office, the gray steel desk, swivel chair and computer softened by bits and pieces of home. Her parents and sisters - Annie, a year older and recently married to an air force pilot whose adventurous nature matched hers, and Laurie, three years younger and still finding herself - smiled out from a family photo in an ornate gilded gesso frame Grandma Sanders had given her. A huge bouquet of Mom's homemade silk flowers was squeezed between books on one of the wall shelves, and Maggie's collection of ceramic elephants, which were each an inch to two feet high and in a rainbow of colors, made themselves at home wherever there was space.

Granville Publishing was a low-key house that had depended on local sales and word of mouth until the Extreme Adventure guides became surprise big sellers nationwide, mostly through web sales. It hadn't mattered that Maggie quietly researched and wrote them from her little office until the soon-to-be-new owner, Peter Pierpont, dropped his bombshell: M. S. Stevens was going on the road.

Pierpont wanted to promote the guides with an author tour of the eastern seaboard, and that was only the beginning. He wanted to make M. S. Stevens a publicity sensation with maximum media coverage. He didn't have a clue that the star of his new acquisition was a twenty-eightyear-old computer addict who thought a walk in the park was enough of a wilderness trek. Worse, Maggie loathed public speaking, had an absolute horror of microphones and tended to freeze up when she was the center of attention.

It was one of life's little jokes that she was so successful telling other people how to be adventurous. She was a travel agent's nightmare. If Maggie booked a flight, the plane was sure to be held up by a blizzard, hurricane or engine trouble. Her parents loved family vacations, but their big trip west when Maggie was eleven almost put them off travel for life. She got lost at Disneyland, came down with chicken pox the next day and discovered she was allergic to bee stings. This was before the transmission in their station wagon died in Trinidad, Colorado, and Maggie's pox-marked face was so violently red she couldn't leave their motel room for the three days it took to get the wagon fixed. And that was one of her more successful expeditions.

A fifty-mile trip home to Beaumont, West Virginia, was her equivalent of going into battle.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from Desperately Seeking Sully/Isn't It Romantic? by Jennifer Drew Copyright © 2003 by Harlequin Enterprises Ltd.. Excerpted by permission.
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