The Tycoon's Proposal Read online

  Besides, if she’d coldly refused to give him the information he wanted, he might have started to wonder why. No, this way was better—he wouldn’t call, and so he would never have reason to question why the woman in the cloakroom was immune to his charm. He’d probably never give her a second thought.

  Her long evening shut up in the cloakroom should have meant plenty of time to finish reviewing her notes for the next morning’s political science final. Of course it hadn’t quite happened that way. Despite her best efforts, she hadn’t been able to concentrate. A dozen times she’d started to study, only to find herself straining to listen to the speeches coming from the ballroom instead.

  Well, it was too late to go to the library. She’d walk straight home instead, look over her notes again, then get some sleep. And once her last exam was past, and she had worked her only remaining dining room shift tomorrow, the semester would officially be over and she would have no other obligations until after January first.

  No obligations—but also no income. For with school out of session the student union would close as well.

  Lissa bit her lip. She had enough cash tucked back to survive two weeks without a paycheck—and the idea of two weeks of freedom, with no timeclock to punch, no boss to answer to, was sheer heaven.

  A crash made her jump and look toward the banquet room. Another of the dining room attendants had misjudged and rammed a cart loaded with the last debris of the banquet—coffee cups, water glasses, crumpled linens, and a few odd baskets of dinner rolls—into the edge of the door. An awkward stack of half-empty glass dessert plates wobbled on the corner of the cart.

  Lissa swung herself up onto the cloakroom counter and across, jumping off just as the stack of dishes overbalanced. She slapped her hand down on the top plate, stopping the disaster but splashing leftover creme caramel over the front of her own white shirt and the waitress’s. “Sorry about making such a mess, Connie.”

  “No problem. I’d rather wash out a shirt than clean glass shards out of the carpet. I think that stack will stay in place now.”

  “Now that I’ve squashed the plates together and spread dessert all over the foyer, you mean?” Lissa cautiously lifted her hand. Caramel and custard oozed between her fingers. “Maybe I should just lick it off.”

  “I wouldn’t advise it—those things never taste as good as they look.”

  Lissa reached for a crumpled napkin and tried without much success to wipe the sticky sauce off her fingers.

  Their supervisor appeared from the banquet room. “What’s the holdup, girls? And why aren’t you in the cloakroom, Ms Morgan?”

  “There are only two coats left, and no one seems likely to claim them at this hour,” Lissa said. “So I was giving Connie a hand with the cart.” She didn’t climb over the counter this time; she very properly went through the door and back into the cloakroom.

  “Connie needs to learn to manage on her own.” The supervisor eyed the glass tip jar. “You seem to have done rather well this evening. The contributions of young men, by any chance? Perhaps I should make it clear, Ms Morgan, that the cloakroom is not a dating service. If I hear again about you giving out your phone number….”

  “Yes, ma’am.” Lissa didn’t bother to explain. She suspected her boss would not see the humor in Winnipeg’s time and temperature. And right now she didn’t even want to think about how the supervisor might have heard about the whole thing.

  “All the guests have gone. Lock up the rest of the coats, and then you may punch out,” the supervisor said.

  Lissa was relieved to be outside, away from the overheated and stale atmosphere of the banquet room. Now that traffic had died down the snow was getting very deep—though she could see a pair of plows running up the nearest main street, trying to keep the center lanes clear. She slung her backpack over her shoulder, took a deep breath of crisp air, let a snowflake melt on her tongue, and started for home.

  Though it was only a few blocks, it took her almost half an hour to struggle through the snow, and by the time she reached the house she was cold and wet. There were still lights on upstairs, but the main level was mercifully dark and relatively quiet. With a sigh of relief she unlocked the sliding door which separated her tiny studio apartment—which in better days had been the back parlor of a once-stately home—from the main hallway.

  The fireplace no longer worked, of course, but the mantel served nicely as a display shelf for a few precious objects, and in the center she’d put her Christmas tree. It was just twelve inches tall, the top section of an artificial tree which had been discarded years ago, stuck in a makeshift stand. There were no lights, and only a half-dozen ornaments, each of them really too large for the diminutive tree. But it was a little bit of holiday cheer, a reminder of better days, a symbol of future hopes….

  She frowned and looked more closely. There had been a half-dozen ornaments that afternoon, when she’d gone off to work. Now there were five. On the rug below the mantel were a few thin shards of iridescent glass where the sixth ornament, an angel, had shattered.

  Someone must have slammed a door, she told herself, and the vibration had made the angel fall. But she knew better. The fact that there were only a few tell-tale slivers meant the ornament had not simply been broken, but the mess had been hastily swept up.

  But no one was supposed to be in her room, ever.

  Lissa’s breath froze. She spun around to the stack of plastic crates which held almost everything she owned and rummaged through the bottom one, looking for her dictionary. In the back of it, under the embroidered cover, was an envelope where she kept her spare cash. She’d tucked it there, secure in the thought that no other occupant of the house would be caught dead looking up a word even if they did invade her privacy to snoop through her room, as she had suspected some of them might be tempted to do.

  The envelope was still there, but it was empty. Someone had raided her room, searched her belongings, and walked away with her minuscule savings. All the money she had left in the world now was in her pocket—the tips she’d taken from the glass jar before she left the student union tonight.

  She had to remind herself to breathe. Her chest felt as if she was caught between a pair of elevator doors which were squeezing the life out of her.

  You’ve survived hard times before. You can do it again. There would be a check waiting for her when the union reopened after the holidays, pay for the hours she’d worked in the last two weeks.

  But in the meantime, to find herself essentially without funds and with no immediate means of earning any….

  Maybe, she thought wryly, she should have given Kurt Callahan a real phone number after all. At least then, if by some wild chance he had actually called her, she could have hit him up for a loan, for old times’ sake….

  By the next afternoon the snowstorm was over, though the wind had picked up. In the residential neighborhood where his grandmother’s three-story Dutch Colonial house stood, some of the alleys and sidestreets hadn’t yet been plowed. The driveway had been cleared—the handyman had been busy since Kurt had left that morning—but in places small drifts were beginning to form once more, shaped by the wind.

  He parked his Jaguar under the porte cochere at the side of the house and went in.

  From the kitchen, the scents of warm cinnamon and vanilla swirled around him, mixed with the crisp cold of the outside air. Christmas cookies, he’d bet. He pushed open the swinging shutters which separated the kitchen from the hallway and peered in.

  His grandmother’s all-purpose household helper was standing on a chair, digging in a top cabinet which looked as if it hadn’t been opened in years. As he watched, a stack of odd pans cascaded from the cabinet, raining past Janet’s upraised arms and clattering against the hard tile floor.

  He offered a hand to help Janet down, and started gathering up pans almost before they’d stopped banging. “Why are you climbing on a chair, anyway? I thought I bought you a ladder for this kind of thing.”

 
“It’s in the basement. Too hard to drag it up here. That’s the pan I need, the springform one.” She took it out of his hand. “Everything else can go back.”

  If only all of his store managers were as good as Janet at delegating responsibility, Kurt thought, the entire chain would run more smoothly. He gathered up the remaining dozen-odd pans and climbed up on the chair to put them back. “Is Gran home from her lunch date?”

  “Not yet. She and Miss Marian always have a lot to talk about.”

  Including, Kurt remembered ruefully, planning a tea date for him and Marian’s “little friend.” As if he couldn’t see through that for the matchmaking stunt it was. No wonder Gran had been helping to hold off the procession of women at the banquet last night…

  “There’s fresh coffee,” Janet said.

  Kurt got himself a cup and carried it and a couple of cookies into the big living room. The sun had come out, and it reflected off the brilliant whiteness outside and poured into the house. The arched panel of leaded glass at the top of the big front window shattered the light into rainbows in which a few dust motes danced like ballerinas.

  The enormous fir tree in front of the house swayed in the wind, and a clump of wet snow fell to the sidewalk just as a small reddish car turned the corner and pulled into the driveway. Kurt stared. That was certainly his grandmother’s car, but why she would have taken it out in weather like this—

  The side door opened and shut, and he met her in the doorway between hall and living room. “What the devil are you doing driving around in this snow?” he demanded.

  “The streets are perfectly clear now, dear. We’re used to snow in Minneapolis, and the road crews are very good at their job.”

  “It’s freezing out there, Gran. The wind chill must be—”

  “A man who climbs mountains for fun is worried about wind chill?”

  “Not for myself,” he growled. “For you. You could get stranded. You could have a fender-bender. Just last night you were telling me how much you appreciated having a good, reliable driver.”

  “Very true. It’s quite a fine idea, in fact. Would you hang up my coat, dear? And ask Janet to brew a pot of tea.” She dropped her mink carelessly on the floor and walked into the living room.

  Kurt bit his tongue and started for the kitchen. Just as he pushed open the swinging shutters to call to Janet the side door opened again, and he had to jerk back to prevent his toes from being caught under the edge. Cold wind swirled in, and a feminine voice called, “Mrs. Wilder?”

  “I’m just across the hall,” his grandmother answered from the living room. “Come on in.”

  A face appeared around the edge of the door. A heart-shaped face with very short auburn hair ruffled around the ears and cheeks reddened by the wind. The young woman from the cloakroom.

  Kurt stared at her in disbelief. “Where did you come from?”

  She didn’t answer directly. “I didn’t expect you to be here. I mean—right here. I didn’t bang the door into your nose, did I?”

  Finally things clicked. What was wrong with him that it had taken so long to make the connection? “I should have known Marian’s ‘little friend’ would turn out to be you,” he grumbled. No wonder she’d looked at him that way last night. She’d been speculating, all right—wondering what his reaction would be when he finally figured out who she was. “Is that why you pulled all that nonsense with the phone number last night? So I’d be surprised when you turned up here?”

  She flushed suddenly, violently red. “Look, I’m sorry about the phone number. It was a stupid trick, and if someone took it as a prank call—”

  “I didn’t have to dial it to figure out the joke.”

  “You didn’t? Then I honestly don’t know what you’re talking about. All I did was drive your grandmother home from the student union.”

  He rubbed the stubble on his chin. “Why?”

  His grandmother crossed the hall to the stairs. “Kurt, you said yourself just now that I shouldn’t be driving in weather like this, so Lissa drove me home.” Her voice faded as she reached the top of the staircase.

  Kurt stared at the young woman again. “You’re not the friend of Marian’s that Gran invited to tea?”

  She shook her head. “Sorry to disappoint you. Are you talking about Marian Meadows? I know who she is, but that’s all.”

  “Then what are you doing here?”

  “I’m trying to tell you, if you’ll just listen. Actually, I’m glad to find that you haven’t gone back to Seattle yet.”

  “You’ve done your homework, I see. Not that it’s hard to find out where I live.”

  Her gaze flickered, and he felt a flash of satisfaction at disconcerting her. But she didn’t explain, or defend herself. “Maybe you can convince your grandmother to see a doctor,” she went on. “I didn’t get anywhere when I tried.”

  His attention snapped back to her like a slingshot. “Doctor?”

  “She had a dizzy spell. She’d had lunch at the restaurant in the student union. Mrs. Meadows left, and Hannah—”

  “You’re on a first-name basis?”

  “Your grandmother stayed to finish her coffee. When she stood up, she almost passed out. I tried to get her to go to the emergency room, but she insisted she was fine to come home.”

  “So you grabbed the opportunity to drive her out here.”

  “She was going to drive herself,” the young woman protested.

  “Why not just put her in a cab?”

  “She didn’t want to leave her car there to be towed by the snowplow crews. Will you quit yelling at me and think about it? I’m betting that’s just like her.”

  She was right, Kurt admitted. His grandmother was perfectly capable of refusing to see a doctor, and of insisting on not leaving her car unattended, of driving when she shouldn’t. And she was behaving oddly—she didn’t normally fling her coat onto the floor.

  “Thank you for bringing her home,” he said quietly. “I’ll take it from here.”

  But the woman didn’t budge. She looked almost uncomfortable.

  Kurt wondered why she didn’t just go. Was she waiting for some sort of payment? Or did she have something else on her mind?

  He frowned as he remembered the flash of familiarity he’d felt last night. He’d dismissed that as the look of a woman on the prowl. But had it been more than that? He tipped his head to one side and looked closely. Tall, slim and straight, red hair and big brown eyes, and a smile full of magic…What had his grandmother called her?

  A few random words swirled in his brain and settled into a pattern. Magic smile. Lissa. You’ve done your homework….

  “Calculus class,” he said softly. “You’re Lissa Morgan.”

  It was no wonder, really, that he hadn’t recognized her last night. There was nothing about this slender, vivid woman with the huge brown eyes which even resembled the lanky, awkward girl who was stored in his memory—the one with frizzy carrot-colored hair straggling to the middle of her back. The freshman frump, some of his fellow students had called her—dressed in oversized shapeless sweaters and with her face always buried in a math book.

  And yet there was one thing which hadn’t changed. He’d seen it last night when she’d smiled, and that was why she’d looked familiar, despite all the surface changes. Because the only other time that she’d ever smiled at him….

  That was long ago, he told himself. Another lifetime, in fact.

  Still, no wonder he’d been itchy around her last night. No wonder he’d picked at her, egged her on, found fault with everything she did. His subconscious mind must have recognized her, despite all the changes in her looks.

  “So you’re still hanging around the university?” he said. “I figured by now you’d be head actuary for some big pension fund or insurance company or national bank. Or an engineer somewhere in the space program. Or—no, I have it. You must be working undercover at the student union, checking for fraud. Because I’m sure a woman with the brainpower you’ve go
t would never be satisfied with just running a cloakroom.”

  Her jaw tightened, and he thought for a second she was going to take a swing at him.

  “She’s not running a cloakroom,” his grandmother said from the stairway landing. “Not anymore. Kurt, Lissa is my new driver. Only I’m going to call her my personal assistant, because it sounds so much nicer. Don’t you agree?”

  CHAPTER TWO

  IF HANNAH WILDER had pulled the stair railing loose and hit her grandson over the head with it, Kurt couldn’t have looked more dazed. Under other circumstances, Lissa thought, she might have enjoyed watching him turn green. She wondered whether it was Hannah’s announcement or his past coming back to haunt him which had caused Kurt’s reaction.

  Then she almost snorted at the idea. As if Lissa Morgan popping back into his life after all this time could have any such stunning effect on him. Frankly, she was surprised that even her name had jolted his memory loose. Any guy who would make a bet with his buddies on whether he could get the most unpopular girl in the class to believe that he was interested in her—and prove it in the most intimate of ways—just so they could all laugh at her for the rest of the semester because she’d been taken in by his charm, wouldn’t bother to remember the details six years later.

  Unless she’d been an even funnier joke to him than she’d realized. Unless she’d been an even easier conquest than he’d hoped for.

  Which, of course, she had been. Stupid—that was the only word for her back then.

  He’d been a senior in college, taking advanced math for the second time to fill out his requirements, struggling to get his grade point far enough above the danger level so he could graduate in a couple of months. So when he’d asked her—only a freshman, but the most advanced student in the class nevertheless—to tutor him, there had been no reason for Lissa to think he might not be telling the truth about his motives….

  Stop it, she thought. That was all over. Her days as the frump were long past. If anything, she should thank Kurt Callahan, because in a convoluted way he’d inspired her to lose the frizzy hair and the bulky sweaters and make herself into an entirely new woman….