How to Trap a Tycoon(85)
Author: Elizabeth Bevarly

But this…

"Actually," he said as he nuzzled the very sensitive spot just below her ear, "there is one more thing I require of you."

Naturally , she thought. "You want me to get on my knees and beg for you," she guessed.

He pulled back again, arching a dark brow in thoughtful speculation. "Gee, I hadn’t thought about that, but now that you mention it…"

"Adam…"

"Well, maybe later," he relented. "For now, I just require that you tell me how you feel. About me. Honestly, I mean."

His uncertainty was evident in the way he was looking at her, and Dorsey couldn’t believe that he would still harbor some doubt about her feelings for him. Oh, well. She would just have to spend the rest of her life showing him exactly how she felt. In as many ways as possible. In each and every one of her incarnations. Mack would love him like a cherished friend and confidante. Lauren would love him like a passionate and eager mistress. And Dorsey would love him … well, she would love him totally. Irrevocably. Eternally.

And she summed it all up in three little words. "I love you," she told him simply. "There. That was honest."

"It was also," he told her, "very arousing."

Actually, Dorsey had already guessed that, because his arousal was palpable—mostly against her thigh.

"So," he piped up brightly when he realized that she had recognized his … palpableness. "Where do we go from here?"

"Well, since Carlotta’s home today. I guess there’s always your place," she suggested.

He smiled. "We’ll get to that soon enough," he promised. "What I actually meant was, where do you go from here?"

"Oh." She sighed, hoping her disappointment wasn’t too terribly obvious. For now, she contented herself—pretty much—with snuggling more resolutely against him. "Well, Severn has made it clear that there won’t be a job for me here. Not in the sociology department, at any rate. They might have something opening up in janitorial soon, but…" She tried to chuckle, didn’t quite manage it, and so shut up.

"You don’t think you might find something with one of the other colleges or universities?" he asked. "There are an awful lot in the area"

"Actually," she told him, "I’ve already received quite a few offers of employment to teach, both here and out of state."

He pulled back to look at her again, his expression sober. Very sober. "Out of state?" he asked. "You mean, like … Indiana ?"

She shook her head. "I mean like New England ."

" New England ?"

She nodded. "Some of the positions even come with tenure."

" New England ?"

"And good pay."

" New England ?"

"But they’re all positions teaching popular culture or media studies," she finally revealed with a grin of her own, putting him out of his misery. His answering smile was tinged with more than a little relief. "And I don’t want to teach those things," she added unnecessarily. She snuggled close to him again. "Frankly, I’ve had it with popular culture. Not to mention the media. I want to teach, yes, but I want to teach sociology. Nobody seems to think I’ll be able to do that with any sort of academic effectiveness. They really can’t seem to separate me from Lauren. I don’t know what I’m going to do for a job."

"Why don’t you write?" he asked.

She groaned. "Oh, please, Adam, that’s what got me into trouble in the first place."

"Yeah, but that’s because you were trying to keep Lauren separate from Dorsey and you had to use deceptive practices to do it. Now that everybody knows Lauren Grable-Monroe is really Dorsey MacGuinness, you could write as yourself."

"But write what?"

He pulled back again, and she tipped her head back to meet his gaze. "How about publishing your dissertation?" he said.

She laughed. "Yeah, right. Nobody wants to read a scholarly, sociological treatise on stuffy old-boy men’s clubs as microcosms for a male-dominated society."

"They would if you rewrote it and threw in some pot-boiling sensationalism and gave it a catchy title like Bottoms Up: My Secret Life as a High Society Serving Wench."

"Oh, no you don’t," she said. "I don’t want Lindy Aubrey hiring those guys from the South Side, no way."

"As long as you don’t identify anybody by name…"

"No," she said adamantly.

"You can still write about sociology," Adam said. "Just dress it up as popular nonfiction the way you did with How to Trap a Tycoon."

"But—"

"And you could still teach, too," he added enthusiastically, "in a manner of speaking. You could make public appearances the same way Lauren did."

"That wasn’t teaching," she pointed out.

"The hell it wasn’t," Adam countered. "I saw you in action as Lauren, remember. If she wasn’t up there on that stage at Northwestern giving a sociology lecture, then I don’t know what she was doing."

"Yeah, but, Adam—"

"And you’ll never convince me that a part of you didn’t like being Lauren," he barreled on. "Because you were too good at it, too convincing. And that could only be because you tapped into something inside you that had been there all along."

"Maybe," she conceded. "But still—"

"And there was something of Mack in all this Lauren business, too," he added further. "There was more than a little bartender advice and wisdom in that book and those talks."

She eyed him suspiciously. "How do you know it was in the book?’

He grinned crookedly. "I read it," he confessed with a shrug. "I thought it was really good, too. You have an interesting way of looking at the world, Dorsey, not to mention a very sharp wit. Oh, and I intend for us to get around to that crème de menthe thing very soon."

Dorsey had never thought of Lauren the way Adam had just presented her, but a lot of what he had just said made a strange sort of sense. As often as she had complained about Lauren, there had been times when she had genuinely enjoyed herself in that guise. Lauren was saucy and sassy in a way that Dorsey had never felt she should be for fear of not being taken seriously. And Mack, too, had been different from Dorsey—more social, more outgoing, more comfortable with strangers. She’d never allowed that side of herself to emerge fully, because it hadn’t seemed scholarly. But mix it all up and stir it together, and what resulted was, well … Dorsey, she supposed.