All in the Game Read online

  “I’m Not Thinking About Your Twin Or The Game Or The Money, Shannen.”

  He cupped her cheek with his hand.

  Reflexively Shannen closed her eyes and leaned into his hand, letting the warmth of his palm envelop her. If she intended to tell him to leave, this was the time to do it, a small voice inside her head counseled.

  “How can I think of anything else but you?” His voice was a low, seductive growl. He curved his other hand over her hip in a firm, possessive grasp.

  Shannen’s eyes stayed closed. She didn’t want him to go, she achingly admitted to herself.

  “Everything is so…unfinished between us, Ty,” she whispered.

  “I think it’s time we altered that, don’t you?” Ty trailed kisses along the curve of her jaw. When his mouth finally, lightly brushed hers, she exhaled with a hushed whimper. It was all the invitation he needed to deepen the kiss. Shannen felt desire and urgency erupt inside her with breathtaking speed….

  Dear Reader,

  Wondering what to put on your holiday wish list? How about six passionate, powerful and provocative new love stories from Silhouette Desire!

  This month, bestselling author Barbara Boswell returns to Desire with our MAN OF THE MONTH, SD #1471, All in the Game, featuring a TV reality-show contestant who rekindles an off-screen romance with the chief cameraman while her identical twin wonders what’s going on.

  In SD #1472, Expecting…and In Danger by Eileen Wilks, a Connelly hero tries to protect and win the trust of a secretive, pregnant lover. It’s the latest episode in the DYNASTIES: THE CONNELLYS series—the saga of a wealthy Chicago-based clan.

  A desert prince loses his heart to a feisty intern in SD #1473, Delaney’s Desert Sheikh by award-winning author Brenda Jackson. This title marks Jackson’s debut as a Desire author. In SD #1474, Taming the Prince by Elizabeth Bevarly, a blue-collar bachelor trades his hard hat for a crown…and a wedding ring? This is the second Desire installment in the exciting CROWN AND GLORY series.

  Matchmaking relatives unite an unlikely couple in SD #1475, A Lawman in Her Stocking by Kathie DeNosky. And SD #1476, Do You Take This Enemy? by reader favorite Sara Orwig, is a marriage-of-convenience story featuring a pregnant heroine whose groom is from a feuding family. This title is the first in Orwig’s compelling STALLION PASS miniseries.

  Make sure you get all six of Silhouette Desire’s hot November romances.

  Enjoy!

  Joan Marlow Golan

  Senior Editor, Silhouette Desire

  All in the Game

  BARBARA BOSWELL

  To Irene Goodman and Joan Marlow Golan,

  whom I’d never vote off the island.

  Books by Barbara Boswell

  Silhouette Desire

  Rule Breaker #558

  Another Whirlwind Courtship #583

  The Bridal Price #609

  The Baby Track #651

  License To Love #685

  Double Trouble #749

  Triple Treat #787

  The Best Revenge #821

  Family Feud #877

  The Engagement Party #932

  The Wilde Bunch #943

  Who’s the Boss? #1069

  The Brennan Baby #1123

  That Marriageable Man! #1147

  Forever Flint #1243

  Bachelor Doctor #1303

  Irresistible You #1333

  All in the Game #1471

  Silhouette Books

  Fortune’s Children

  Stand-In Bride

  A Fortune’s Children Wedding:

  The Hoodwinked Bride

  Fortune’s Children Christmas 1998

  “A Home for Christmas”

  Jingle Bells, Wedding Bells

  “A Very Merry Step-Christmas”

  Gifts of Fortune

  “The Holiday Heir”

  BARBARA BOSWELL

  loves writing about families. “I guess family has been a big influence on my writing,” she says. “I particularly enjoy writing about how my characters’ family relationships affect them.”

  When Barbara isn’t writing and reading, she’s spending time with her own family—her husband, three daughters and three cats, whom she concedes are the true bosses of their home! She has lived in Europe, but now makes her home in Pennsylvania. She collects miniatures and holiday ornaments, tries to avoid exercise and has somehow found the time to write over twenty category romances.

  Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  One

  “Everybody ready to shoot another day in paradise?”

  Tynan Hale, chief cameraman for the reality game show Victorious, assembled his crew for their daily briefing before heading from their camp across the island to the contestants’ camp.

  “Paradise? Come on, Ty, no need to sugarcoat things for us. We all know what we’re really shooting is the seventh circle of hell,” kidded Reggie Ellis, a junior cameraman.

  The crew snickered appreciatively. Ty grinned, too, though he guessed he probably shouldn’t encourage such irreverence toward the show and its contestants.

  The Powers That Be—the network suits, the show’s creator, the sponsors, virtually everybody connected with Victorious—viewed their project with a seriousness usually reserved for nuclear weapons. No jokes or humor there.

  Ty found the job of trailing around contestants on an island, hour after hour, filming their every word and action, to be sometimes interesting and/or irritating and/or dull, but hardly a matter of the gravest concern.

  No wonder he would never be a member of The Powers That Be. Not only was his attitude all wrong, his family already had been there, done that.

  And failed spectacularly. The family downfall had been such a public sensation that not a day went by without Ty Hale pausing to relish his current anonymity.

  He paused to relish it now, while he and the crew loaded their equipment onto the boat to take them to the Victorious contestants’ camp. Here he was, Ty Hale, chief cameraman, good at his job but essentially a nonentity. It wasn’t the standard dream come true, especially in the entertainment industry, but it was certainly his.

  And it was the name Hale that made it all possible. Changing his surname seven years ago—unofficially, though not legally, because that would’ve drawn attention to it—was the smartest move he’d ever made.

  If anyone in the media were to know that he was actually Tynan Howe, son of the notorious former congressman Addison Howe, a member of the infamous Howe clan…

  It wouldn’t happen, Ty assured himself, for possibly the millionth time. The contestants were the attraction and sole focus of fan and media attention. Nobody knew the names of the camera and editing crews, nobody was interested enough to learn who they were. Why should they? To the fans of Victorious, he was as invisible as his camera.

  And he wouldn’t have it any other way.

  Every morning, as close to dawn as possible, the Victorious crew arrived by boat on the side of the island where the contestants dwelled in their makeshift camp. There was a shorter, more direct route through the jungle forest, but it was never used by the crew. That might’ve tipped off the contestants, who weren’t permitted to know how close they really were to the amenities of civilization in the crew’s camp. Plus, lugging all the equipment on foot via jungle pathways was impractical.

  Ty eyed the contestants’ camp, a familiar sight to him after filming it all this time. It would’ve been considered a squalid setting if it weren’t located on a gorgeous island in t
he Pacific—and if the inhabitants weren’t in a voluntary contest to win a million dollars.

  Those factors turned “squalid” into something else entirely, Ty had remarked—innocuously enough, he’d thought—to the show’s executive producer, Clark Garrett, who had coldly ordered him to “can the laughter.”

  So much for small talk with the brass, Ty told his crew later. He hadn’t even been trying for laughs.

  But though he mocked it, Ty did understand the network obsession with Victorious. After all, when the number of reality shows had proliferated on all the networks a few years ago, the TV-viewing public had tired of them. Audiences began tuning out in droves and ratings plummeted. Companies would no longer pay the exorbitant rates charged for advertising spots throughout the shows.

  No advertising revenue meant no profits, the networks’ worst nightmare.

  Eventually all the shows were canceled, no new ones were developed and the reality-TV craze was officially pronounced dead.

  And then, one of the networks decided to resurrect the concept to schedule in the moribund Saturday-evening time slot. Ty knew that television executives assumed that nobody under ninety was actually at home watching network TV on Saturday night, but airing a test pattern was not acceptable, and even the worst sitcoms or dramas were expensive to produce.

  So the new show Victorious was born. With a few variations, it was still pretty much a shameless clone of the original reality game show that had started it all. And with no star salaries and writers to pay, even the million-dollar prize money was deemed cheap.

  Just right for Saturday-night television.

  When Ty landed the job, he’d learned that Victorious was to be filmed and edited on location, a deserted island in the Pacific, for sixty-three days. Within the same week of shooting, the footage would be edited into a one-hour episode and then broadcast.

  “It’s ‘truly live television,’” proclaimed executive producer Clark Garrett. “Or fairly close to it.” Clark hyped the fact that nobody, not even he, would know who won the million-dollar prize until just before the last show aired.

  The sixteen participants, divided into two tribes of eight each and flown to the gorgeous tropical island, were all telegenic in their own way, some more than others. Currently, the cast was trimmed to six, after combining the survivors of the original two tribes into a single one.

  Ty and the crew assembled their equipment while waiting for the remaining six contestants to straggle out of the mosquito netting and bamboo posts that served as their sleeping quarters. The contestants called it a tent, though Ty thought it looked more like a shredded parachute that had fallen out of the sky and landed on some random sticks of bamboo. He wisely declined to share this observation with the ever-testy Clark Garrett.

  As usual, the crew filmed each contestant emerging from the tent, from earliest risers to sleep-in slackers. The order never varied from day to day. The Cullen twins, Shannen and Lauren, were always the first up and out; Jed was always last. Rico, Cortnee and Konrad, in varying order, appeared sometime after the twins and well before Jed.

  The six had all been members of the same tribe initially and formed an unlikely but ultimately unbeatable alliance, always voting as a block and never against each other. They’d survived while everybody else was voted off the island.

  With the crew’s camp Internet access, satellite dish and daily newspaper drops, Ty knew that the Final Six had become subjects for water-cooler discussions in offices on Monday morning all over the country. Watching Victorious before going out on Saturday night had become the newest fad in the coveted eighteen-to-thirty-four demographic age group, and the network execs were giddy with joy.

  He was also aware that the contestants had no clue that ratings for the show had skyrocketed, and the media buzz about each participant was in high gear. The six were isolated from any contact with the outside world and unaware of their new fame.

  Ty wondered how much the exposure would affect them, how they would change when back in the real world. He’d wager that it would and they would. He’d learned that lesson only too well from the glare of the Howes’ media coverage.

  He pointed his camera at the twin sisters splashing water on their faces in their morning wake-up ritual at the small freshwater spring, an idyllic spot where the beach blended into the jungle opening. He was well aware that the twins had found the spring themselves while exploring the island in the first few hours after their arrival, making them heroines to their tribe. Fans speculated that the game-winning alliance had begun then and there.

  “Who’s your favorite contestant?” asked Heidi, the young production assistant, who stood beside Ty as he was filming.

  She asked that question every day or two, more to alleviate boredom than from any real desire to know, Ty suspected. Still, he wasn’t about to give out that information, not to anyone.

  He said what he always said, remaining scrupulously neutral. “They all have their good and bad days.”

  “Well, my favorites are the twins,” said Heidi.

  “You and a lot of others.” Ty remained noncommittal, as usual.

  “Identical twins are a novelty on any show,” Heidi pointed out, not for the first time. “And according to TV Guide Online, these two are incredibly identical. Wow, like, how true! We’ve been filming them for weeks, and nobody here can tell them apart yet. Naturally, the viewers can’t, either.”

  “Naturally,” Ty echoed dryly. It was true, though. Twenty-six-year-old Shannen and Lauren Cullen were virtual mirror images.

  “What would it be like to look like that? And be in duplicate?” Heidi wondered aloud. “They’re so pretty,” she added matter-of-factly.

  What could he do but nod in agreement?

  The Cullen twins were pretty. Very pretty. Striking brunettes with thick, shoulder-length dark hair and big blue eyes fringed with black lashes. With their youth, their fair skin and delicate bone structure, they had no need for makeup. An application of sunscreen, a quick swipe of the brush through their hair, and the twins were ready to face the day—and the camera crew and the challenges to stay on the island till the end and win the million-dollar prize.

  That only one person could win, and that perhaps one twin might have to vote against the other, was an observation made frequently by the program’s host, Bobby Dixon, often referred to as Slick Bobby by the Victorious contestants. To his face. But while on camera, Bobby’s deep-dimpled smile never faltered.

  Ty filmed the next contestant who crawled out from the tent. It was Cortnee, a self-described “aspiring superstar,” who was using her stint on Victorious as a showcase for her singing and dancing talents. At twenty-two, blond, curvaceous Cortnee was the youngest contestant on the island.

  Next came Rico, charismatic, energetic and twenty-five, who also aspired to stardom. His singing and dancing talents equaled Cortnee’s. Often the pair entertained their fellow contestants with impromptu duets and dances.

  And for those viewers not enthralled by the performances, there was always Shannen’s stare of irritable impatience to look forward to. Ty always turned his camera on her during a spontaneous Rico and Cortnee number and lingered on her scowl.

  Her exasperated mutter, “On no, not again!” was on its way to becoming as much of a highlight as the act itself.

  The “evil twin,” “the cranky one,” Shannen was dubbed on the Web sites devoted to dissecting each episode and each person on the island. Lauren was the “good twin,” the nice, sweet one. Not that anybody could tell the sisters apart physically. But “Spitfire Shannen” distinguished herself from “Lady Lauren” every time she raised one dark brow, enhancing the power of her steely signature glare.

  Then there was muscular, handsome Jed, twenty-eight, who boasted a résumé including adventure guide, which he proved by excelling in every physical challenge. He spent most of the time in a minimum of clothing, keeping his sculpted body well oiled with the bottle of emollient he’d chosen to bring as his luxury ite
m.

  And finally there was Konrad, the oldest of the group at thirty, a former convicted felon who’d arrived on the island sporting a shaved head with a tattoo of a snarling wolf spanning his back. He had other tattoos, on his chest and both arms, all of vicious animals or birds of prey. Konrad spoke in a growl and had never smiled once during the episodes filmed.

  His first remark in the first episode—“I paid my debt to society and I want to go straight. If I win, I will. But if I lose, well, I learned plenty in prison to become a world-class burglar. Good skills to fall back on”—had been widely quoted on the Internet discussion boards, drawing both disapproving and admiring responses.

  Ty withheld judgment, wondering if Konrad was actually serious. Was the burglary remark a threat? Or was he merely playing to the audience like Rico and Cortnee, though in a very different way?

  Everyone, including the crew, agreed that these contestants shared a definite chemistry. Viewers speculated endlessly about the off-camera goings-on based on the contestants’ on-screen behavior.

  Had the twins and/or Cortnee slept with Rico and/or Jed? Had Rico and Jed slept together? It was unanimously concluded that no one would get physical with Konrad.

  The crew did their own speculating about such matters, Ty sometimes joining in, striving for an air of nonchalance about the whole thing. His name was enough of a secret to keep around here; there was certainly no need to introduce his other secret, which would be even more significant to the Victorious crew.

  However, there was one person right here on the island who knew both his secrets.

  One word while the cameras rolled—while he made them roll!—and the horrible media circus that had propelled the Howes into the worst kind of fame could start all over again.

  And one word about his previous relationship with Shannen Cullen could probably get him fired.