How to Trap a Tycoon(12)
Author: Elizabeth Bevarly

"Yes, Lars," Carlotta said before Dorsey could come up with anything that might sidetrack her. "I once knew a lumberjack named Lars. Randy as a bear he was, too. Really, his name should have been Bjorn. Bjorn is Swedish for ‘bear.’ Did you know that, Dorsey? I don’t know what Lars is Swedish for. Probably ‘flannel shirt.’ I couldn’t get him to wear anything else. Of course, sometimes, that was rather nice—the not wearing anything else part, I mean—but other times, well… Come to think of it, maybe he should have been named Randy instead of—"

"Carlotta," Dorsey interjected as discreetly as she could.

Her mother glanced up, her face etched with surprise at the interruption. "What?" she asked.

"Um, we were talking about something else, I think?"

Thankfully, Carlotta nodded and moved on. "So we were. We were talking about you putting on that green dress and coming with me tonight."

Dorsey shook her head. "No, we were talking about how that dress"—she pointed toward the garment in question—"was not going to work on this body." This time she pointed at herself.

Her mother smiled. "Dorsey, you put that dress on, there wouldn’t be any work involved, I assure you."

Dorsey ignored the comment. "It’s not my style," she said simply.

"Oh, pooh. You’ve got an incredible figure," Carlotta told her daughter, "and cheekbones that cost other women thousands of dollars. Not to mention those amazing green eyes and that auburn hair you inherited from your father."

And it went without saying, her eyes and hair were the only things she would be inheriting from her father. But Dorsey didn’t say that—it did, after all, go without saying—and neither did Carlotta. Reginald Dorsey was persona non grata around the MacGuinness household. That was because he was also in absentia. And, at least as far as Dorsey was concerned, he was non compos mentis, too. Et cetera.

"It’s only your … deportment … that needs work," Carlotta added.

Dorsey laughed. My, but her mother was being uncharacteristically charitable today. "In other words, if I change everything about myself, I have a chance of what? Trapping myself a tycoon? Thanks, but I’ll stick to working on my dissertation."

Her mother’s normally full mouth flattened into a thin line. "Dissertations don’t put food in a hungry belly, Dorsey."

"Maybe not," Dorsey agreed, "but they feed other things that need just as much nourishment."

Carlotta arched an elegant blond eyebrow in speculation. "You come to Hollis’s party with me tonight in that green dress," she said, nodding toward the tiny garment on the bed, "and I guarantee you that you’ll catch every male eye in the place. By evening’s end, you’ll be set for life."

Oh, now, that, Dorsey decided, was open to debate. Not just because her idea of set for life and her mother’s idea of set for life were crashingly at odds, but also because, as much as Carlotta resisted specifics, no man had ever set her for more than a few years. And even Dorsey’s father, Reginald, had kept Carlotta—and Dorsey—for less than a decade before moving on to his next female acquisition.

"Thanks, Carlotta," she said magnanimously, "but I have to work at Drake’s tonight. Besides," she added before her mother had a chance to go off yet again about how Drake’s was the biggest pond for fishing and how could Dorsey refuse to even sink a lure. "I don’t think Hollis Barnett would be too happy about an uninvited guest showing up at her party."

"Oh, Hollis wouldn’t mind a gate-crasher," Carlotta said. "That’s how she met Mr. Barnett, by crashing his first wife’s birthday party." She hesitated, then added thoughtfully, "Come to think of it, that’s how I met Mr. Barnett, too." She shrugged the memory off quite literally and contemplated her choice of dresses once again. "But he ended up married to Hollis, didn’t he?"

"Obviously," Dorsey replied obediently.

"It’s just as well," her mother said with a quick wave of her bejeweled fingers. "He had terrible breath. I don’t know how Hollis has managed all these years. She must have invested quite heavily in Binaca stock."

Dorsey chuckled. She was about to offer further commentary when the telephone on the nightstand purred with a delicate whir. Everything about Carlotta’s room was delicate, from the rose-trellis wallpaper to the pink, poofy canopy bed, to the fringed ivory chaise longue, to the crystal lamps, to the floral, pastel rug. No one would ever accuse Carlotta MacGuinness of having anything even remotely resembling a Y chromosome, that was for sure. She was the very definition of femininity. Dorsey often wondered how they could possibly share the same strands of DNA.

Her mind still focused on the conundrum, she leaned over to answer the phone, muttering a perfunctory greeting as she pressed the receiver to her ear.

"Dorsey! Hi! It’s Anita!"

Instinctively, Dorsey reacted as she always did when she heard Lauren Grable-Monroe’s editor’s voice coming through the phone line. First she shivered as cold fingers of terror began clawing at the back of her throat. Then she swallowed that terror until it ran amok as a cyclone of panic and discontent in the pit of her stomach. Then she battled a cloud of black foreboding and clung desperately with brittle fingers to what little composure she had left.

Then she told herself to stop being so melodramatic—unless she planned to have her option book be a Gothic romance—and switched on the speaker phone. Conversations with Anita Dixon, after all, always included Carlotta, too.

"It’s Anita," she told her mother as she completed the action.

"Hallooo, Anita," Carlotta sang out as she reached again for the two dresses on the bed. She turned toward the mirror and held the green up before herself once more, her expression contemplative. "The last time you called," she said over her shoulder, "it was to tell us that How to Trap a Tycoon was going into its third printing. What delicious news do you have for us today?"

Dorsey could envision Anita Dixon sitting at her desk, a dark-haired, energetic waif furiously smoking a cigarette, having completed her lunch of Twinkies and espresso. She’d never met her editor in person and had no idea why she pictured Anita in such a way. The other woman simply sounded young, hyper, and brunette.

"Two words," Anita announced. "Book tour."

Book tour? Dorsey thought. Book tour? Oh, no. No, no, no, no, no. "I don’t like those words," she told the editor. "Choose two more. Like ‘good’ and ‘bye.’"

"How about ‘network’ and ‘television’?" came Anita’s response.