Читать книгу The Millionaire's Proposition - Natalie Patrick - Страница 8

Chapter One

Why don’t you just come home to Woodbridge, Indiana, meet a nice fellow, get married get a mortgage, a minivan, and have a couple terrific kids? Becky Taylor could just hear her older brother Matt’s very sensible and very predictable advice. And she wasn’t taking it!

No, when she came home to Indiana, it would be in triumph. Even Matt could appreciate her need for that. Growing up—he the oldest, Becky the baby—in one of the poorest families in town, they knew what it meant to go hungry, to not know what crisis they would face next, to be scared often and sometimes angry. But they’d also known a lot of love and had been raised to believe they could do better for themselves. A lot of folks around town doubted that, but Matt had proved them wrong and so had her other brothers and sisters—now it was her turn.

No, she certainly would not go slinking back with her tail between her legs after only five months in Chicago. She would not go through the struggle just to end up in another low-paying dead-end job, about the only kind a town as small as Woodbridge could provide a girl without a degree and her limited work experience.

And how could she go back and face her old boyfriend after telling him she’d outgrown the town, the life-style and most especially her puppy love/first attraction for him? The last was certainly true and had been true for most of the year they’d dated. But then how hard was it to outgrow a guy who thought buying you a microwave burrito at his father’s gas station was taking you out to eat?

A guy who thought all women should be barefoot and pregnant—except when they put on their steeltoed boots to go to work at the local factory? A guy who had never understood, much less supported, her quest for self-improvement, her plans to go back to college, her longing for something more?

She shuddered. If she never saw the likes of Frankie McWurter again, it would be too soon. And if she never took her brother’s typical Midwestern male advice, then...

She fingered the two tiny silver baby booties on her charm-laden bracelet, one for each of Matt’s children, her niece and nephew. Thinking of her brother and his wife, Dani, and those adorable toddlers did make her think twice about never taking her brother’s imagined advice. Actually, she did want to get married eventually and have those babies. In fact, she counted on it.

Marriage, after all, was what girls in Woodbridge, Indiana, were raised to do best—even enlightened, educated girls, um, women of the so-caded “Generation X.” And babies? Becky loved babies, their tiny toes and fat tummies, the way they smelled, the way they cooed and laughed. The very idea of having one of her own someday radiated through her like sunshine through the dreariness of her day.

Becky absolutely wanted to get married and have a baby—with the right guy, at the right time and under the right circumstances. A triple threat, her sister-in-law would tease her and tell her the odds were stacked against realizing all three of her goals at the same time.

“Find Mr. Right,” Dani would say, “and the rest suddenly won’t matter quite so much.”

“Find Mr. Right?” Becky muttered, clutching her thin all-weather coat close to her body. Right now she’d be happy to bump into Mr. Coffee. She stopped by the glass front of a chaotic little coffee shop on the first floor of an elegant skyscraper.

The aroma of the exotic blends, the rich lattes, the freshly ground beans all enticed her. She shut her eyes, tipped up her nose and savored it. Since savoring was all she could afford, why not enjoy the very best? she thought.

She’d checked her budget again this morning, trying to find just enough extra to allow her to replace the contact lens she’d lost the night before. She glanced at the image of herself reflected in the huge plate-glass window before her. Even her best perfectpink job interview suit didn’t make up for the pair of bent wire-framed glasses perched on her nose or the still-damp mass of golden-brown curls glommed on top of her head. If only her roommate hadn’t moved out last week and taken the blow dryer along with her half of the living expenses, her hair at least might be presentable, Becky thought.

No, her budget would not budge for contacts or coffee. When she’d lost her job last week, she’d stocked the fridge and paid the rent and figured out the total cost of utilities, necessities and buying a paper every day for job-hunting purposes. Luxuries like latte did not fit in the picture.

She gazed longingly at the hot steaming cups set down by the waitress. Even the half-empty ones, which got whisked away almost before the patrons had left the premises, didn’t look bad to Becky today. She fought off a yawn and moved her bedraggled umbrella from one shoulder to the other. In the shop, two women in stark business attire got up from their seats, their cups still brimming, and left the coffee disregarded as lightly as the cast-off newspaper one tossed onto the counter.

Of course! Becky brightened. If she spent her allotted money for a plain, small cup of coffee and lingered over it long enough, she could gather up someone’s unwanted paper for free. Not only could she get the want ads that way but she wouldn’t go through the day feeling like some job-hunting zombie.

Her heavy charm bracelet jangled and icy water droplets splashed on her wrist and leg. She yanked and pulled and finally got her miserable pink-and-blue floral umbrella shut. She looked at the sad old thing with one rib bowed out and another bent at a forty-degree angle so that even closed it seemed as if about to burst into a rendition of “I’m a little teapot.” As soon as she got a job, that umbrella was going to go and the first thing she was going to buy was a new one, she told herself. No, make that the second thing.

She pushed through the heavy glass doors of the mammoth building, heading for the inner entrance to the shop. The first thing she would buy was a new charm for her bracelet—to mark the passage into this new, mature phase of her life. She gave her bracelet a confident shake and forged ahead, throwing herself into a throng of gray suits and shuffling wing tips.

Ping.

“My charm!” She’d felt the small object bounce against her knee moments before it hit the floor. A quick check of her bracelet told her she’d lost one of the baby booties she so cherished. Replacing it at a time like this was not an option, she thought. She had to find it!

She scanned the floor. The bright silver should stand out against the black marble, shouldn’t it?

She raised her hand to bite her fingernail and unintentionally stabbed not one, but three passersby with the tip of her crooked umbrella.

“Sorry. So sorry. I’m sorry.” She tried to meet the eyes of each of those she’d gouged.

None of them returned her gaze. She hung her head, feeling two feet tall. Of course, she thought, if she were two feet tall, at least then she might spot her charm more readily. She’d lost her job last week, her contact last night and her baby bootie moments ago, but that didn’t mean she had to lose her sense of humor or her dignity.

“Oh, my!” She gasped as something metallic winked at her just a few inches from the elevator doors. Maybe she didn’t have to lose her bootie after all. Disregarding the flash of feet and press of bodies, she dove for the tiny trinket, determined not to let it get swept inside the opening elevator doors.

Her teeth jarred as her knees hit the floor. Her fingers ached in stretching so hard to reach. Almost. Almost...

Crunch.

“Ow!” She drew back her hand, her fingertips smarting. The charm had disappeared and the man who had clomped on her fingers with it inside the elevator.

Scrambling to her feet, she jerked her head up in time to see a tall, black-haired man in a tailored suit and white shirt that set off the dark undertones of his skin dig something small and silver out of the heel of his shoe.

“That’s my charm,” she called out.

The man looked up and directly into her eyes. Her heart stopped. This was not the kind of man she normally ran into in Woodbridge or even in her usual activities around Chicago. Those kinds of men, the best of the bunch, wore power ties. This man wore power itself, raw yet refined, barely contained the way his fitted suit could not entirely temper the primitive qualities of his lean, muscular body.

His lips, pale and hard, looked like they could kiss a girl senseless, and Becky had no doubt that life provided him ample opportunity to do just that. His straight nose and dark eyebrows set off his penetrating brown eyes, which, she imagined could practically spark to telegraph underlying anger or humor or even lust.

She gulped in the damp morning air carried in on overcoats and rain hats.

Had she ever seen such compelling features, Becky thought, even in his current mild state of bewilderment? Yes, she decided with one more look, she had—in late-night movies on her thirteen-inch borrowed TV. Cary Grant, she thought. A younger, in-the-flesh version of the world’s most romantic movie star had just crushed her fingers—and taken off with her baby-bootie charm. She blinked her eyes and came back to reality.

“Hey, you! You, in the expensive suit.” She pointed at him with her umbrella. “You can’t just grab my bootie and take off like that.”

Heads turned.

She thought she heard at least one indignant huff.

She wanted to pull her coat up over her head and quietly slink away.

At the back of the elevator, the man with the Cary Grant face didn’t even blink. He gave a droll smile, cocked his head above the push of people wedging into the small cubicle and shouted back, “It was an accident, miss. Rest assured, I wouldn’t have grabbed anything of yours on purpose.”

A strange little squeaking noise gurgled in the back of her throat. Wouldn’t have grabbed anything of yours... Why that smug jerk, she thought. Of course, if he was the jerk, why was she the one who felt like running away?

She took a step backward. A lock of her already droopy hair plopped cool and wet against her scorched cheek. Her glasses wobbled. The last possible passenger stepped into the waiting elevator. The gorgeous jerk and her precious memento were about to disappear.

“I won’t forget this, you know. I am not the kind of girl who lets some man—even a man like you—take her b—” She caught herself. This was obviously an important man; she needed to rise to the occasion with class and dignity. “I am not the kind of girl who lets a strange man take advantage of a situation, then just walk away without expecting some kind of accountability.”

“Good for you,” he told her with an almost imperceptible wink. “One rarely finds a girl willing to defend her...charms so vehemently these days.”

“Oh! You...” Words simply would not do. This situation called for action—drastic, immediate action. She thrust her deformed umbrella forward between the closing doors. Unfortunately, someone inside the elevator saw it coming and batted away the protruding umbrella tip. The momentum carried it in a slow upward swing until it popped open of its own accord in all its ragged glory. As the door slid shut between herself, her charm and her living vision of masculinity and sophistication, she could only stand there looking for all the world like a pathetic Mary Poppins just flown in through a mild hurricane.

“Have you ever thought of...getting married?”

Clark Winstead glanced up from the silver bauble in his hand to his longtime confidant and generously overpaid tax accountant. Even knowing his always high-strung, slightly neurotic old pal would not appreciate the wry humor, he had to deadpan, “Why, Baxter, are you proposing?”

“Ha-ha.” Baxter Davis shoved open the door marked The Winstead Corporation, International Headquarters and held it open for Clark. “But seriously, have you?”

“You know my stand on marriage.” Just saying the word made Clark tense. Knowing even his close friend could not appreciate the depth of his feeling on the subject, the weight of the pain his own parents’ miserable marriage had laid on his shoulders, he simply shrugged and gave a flippant reply. “It’s against my principles.”

“Oh, yeah, yeah. You’re the product of divorced parents, the statistics don’t bear out the risk factor, yadda, yadda, yadda. Big yawn.” The door fell shut behind them. “But what about other advantages?”

Clark glanced around the bustling outer offices of his headquarters, his mind moving on to other things. “In this day and age, a man can avail himself of those advantages without the decided disadvantages of a marriage going sour.”

“I was thinking about children.”

The rounded toe of the small-scale baby bootie dug into the pad of Clark’s thumb. He’d love to have a child, a son to carry on the Winstead name or a daughter to hold his heart in her delicate hands. “Actually, Baxter, I’d like to have an heir, or even two, but the price of getting them—marriage—is simply not one I’m willing to pay.”

“As a wise old sage once said to me, ‘In this day and age, a man can avail himself of those advantages without the decided disadvantages of a marriage going sour.’”

“I’m not the sort to adopt and raise a child on my own, Baxter.” They moved swiftly through the maze of desks and computers and such. Clark could not ignore but neither did he acknowledge the quiet fervor that accompanied his arrival. “I’m too busy to do the job right, and why do anything, raise children above all, if you can’t give it your best?”

“You could hire someone.”

“To have my children?” The idea struck a spark in his muddled thoughts. He hired people for everything else that mattered to him—to run his businesses, tend to his homes. He even had a personal trainer to see that he kept his body in top shape, though he rarely needed the external motivation for that He hired the best and let them share in the reward as well as the responsibility. Could he simply take that concept one step further?

“I meant hire someone to raise the child.”

That, too. If he found the right woman to bear his child, wouldn’t it only follow that she would be the right one to raise it? Clear away the deadwood, get rid of everything that doesn’t contribute to growth—that was his business philosophy. Why not apply it to this more personal but every bit as significant decision? And it would be neat, too, cutting out the messiness and pain of divorce and simply skipping ahead to the inevitable last step of any marital relationship—joint custody. If he could find the right woman, it might work.

“Well, you’ve certainly given me something to think about, Baxter.” He paused outside the inner office occupied by his private secretary.

“Honestly, Clark. you’d consider lit?”

“Having a child?”

“No, marriage.”

“Marriage?” Clark gave a contemptuous snort. “Why should I?”

“For love, for companionship, and barring that, for tax purposes.” Baxter fixed his beady gaze on his friend as if watching a bug under a microscope. “Marriage and children both provide tax benefits, you know.”

Clark slid the trinket he’d been toying with into his pocket and brushed past his friend. “Haven’t you heard, Mr. Davis, CPA and so forth? The rich don’t pay taxes.”

“Oh. I know all about the rich, my friend. I’ve learned from watching you up close and I can tell you this—it’s been one fascinating study.”

“Has it now?” Clark chuckled to himself.

Entertaining as he found his friend’s long-winded observations about the misery of money and its effects on those who gamer too much of the stuff, he didn’t have time for it right now. Already this morning an unfortunate run-in had provided him with unfinished business and Clark hated unfinished business.

He held up his hand to silence Baxter’s forthcoming diatribe, then hit his secretary’s gleaming cherry desk with both palms flat, his arms braced. He narrowed his eyes to command her immediate focus.

“Miss Harriman, call the coffee shop downstairs right away and ask them if anyone there saw a young lady—” he straightened, making use of all his faculties to get an unerring description “—about this tall.” He slashed his hand at his own chin level. “With a great mop of curly hair sort of stuck up on one side of her head.”

Baxter scowled.

“A pair of lopsided glasses, carrying a badly bent umbrella and wearing a...what’s it called?” He pointed to his wrist, then the answer hit him and he snapped his fingers. “Wearing a silver charm bracelet”

Miss Harriman, trained to act fast and not ask questions, already had the receiver in one hand and was tugging a pencil from behind her ear with the other.

“Find out if they know anything at all about her. Does she come here often? Work in this building? If nothing else, find out if anyone saw which way she went.”

“Yes, sir,” Miss Harriman said, and began jabbing numbers on the phone with the pencil eraser.

“Oh, and if the coffee shop doesn’t have any answers, try the newsstand in the lobby.”

“Yes, sir.”

“And if that doesn’t pan out, you might go down and see what you can learn from Henry, the fellow who gives the shoe shines.”

“I will, sir. Whatever you say.”

“Find her and there’s a big bonus in it for you, Miss Harriman.” He wrapped his knuckles on her desk and pivoted to head into his own expansive office.

“It always comes down to money with you, doesn’t it?” Baxter practically nipped at his heels through the door, their footsteps dramatically hushed by the plush carpet as they entered the private sanctum of Clark’s immense business domain.

“I have no idea what you’re talking about, Baxter,” Clark said, rolling the miniature baby bootie in his pocket between his thumb and forefinger.

“You’ve seen some woman, undoubtedly the object of your next conquest—”

“Conquest?” Clark smirked to himself at the outdated and ridiculous term. “You make it sound like I plan to climb on top of her, plant my flag and claim her as my personal territory.”

“Well, you do, don’t you? All possible sexual metaphors aside—”

“Yes, that’s how I prefer my sexual metaphors, actually. On the side.” Clark plunked down on his chair, the leather sighing as he settled in. He withdrew the small charm that had started the day’s turmoil.

Baxter ignored the joke, which came as no surprise to Clark whatsoever. “When you see anything you want, whether it’s another business or a new opportunity or a person, you’ve come to expect that all you have to do to get what you want is to throw money at it or them or him...or her. And once you’ve got them, you seal the deal with more money. Then you plant your flag, my friend. You plant it deep and you plant it good.”

Clark cocked his eyebrow. “I had no idea my reputation for that kind of thing was so renowned.”

Again, Baxter ignored the innuendo. “In business, you do it with your company name, your emphasis on employee empowerment and your fancy benefits packages.”

“I should be shot.”

“With your friends, you do it with loyalty and generosity, and don’t forget jobs.”

“I wouldn’t dream of it.”

“More than one poor sucker who happened to have grown up in your neighborhood or went to college with you or even some kid who used to deliver your paper, you’ve rewarded with a high-paying job and fat expense account, myself included.” Baxter began to pace, his long, gangly legs taking him swiftly from one end of the room to the other. “You do it with charities, too. You buy them equipment and hand out grants. Why, just this week you’re launching a scholarship program at our old university.”

“That? I just want to give back some of the opportunities that helped me succeed. It’s my way of coming full circle, of wrapping things up in a neat little package.” He sat forward in his chair and pressed the buzzer on the office intercom. “Miss Harriman, any luck yet?”

“No, sir, not yet,” the voice crackled back at him.

“Well, buzz me as soon as you find out anything.”

“Yes, sir.”

Where was that girl? How could she have just vanished like that?

“And women, too,” Baxter raved on. “You do it with women. You most certainly do.”

“I can’t help it. I happen to like women.” He sat back in his chair, glanced at Baxter and smiled. “That kind of thing is genetic, they say.”

Baxter didn’t even crack a smile.

Clark didn’t care. His mind was elsewhere—with that girl. He could still see the look of stupefied innocence and outrage in her sparkling eyes, the tinge of red flushed over her peaches-and-cream complexion.

He glanced down at the charm. A baby bootie. A token representing her own child? He thought not. No woman who had become someone’s mother would allow herself to get so easily flustered by a seductive wordplay and a predatory glance by a stranger.

Besides, a mother who’d lost a sentimental token like that would have waited there by the elevators for him to bring it back to her. He’d tried, gotten off at the next floor and come back down, but she’d already taken off. Maybe it didn’t mean as much to her as she wanted him to think. Maybe she’d expected him to offer a large remittance for damage to the trinket and when he did not offer that instantly...

“You’ve got it all figured out with women, too.” Baxter created a flourish with his hand. “You lavish the women in your life with gifts and take them on luxurious trips and pamper and spoil them—”

“The poor dears, and I practically have to force them to accept.”

“And when it’s all over, do they want to scratch your eyes out? Write tell-all books about their horrific experiences? Slap you with palimony lawsuits?”

Clark started to push the intercom button again, then curled his fingers into a fist. Someone had to have seen that girl. Her appearance alone drew enough attention to her to insure that, and the scene she’d made, not to mention her last threat to him...

“No, any woman you’ve tangled with always wants to stay friends. They actually still like you even after you’ve treated them like goddesses and given them their every desire!”

“Imagine that. They must be deluded.”

“Yes, they are, and the sad fact is they don’t even know it.”

“If you were deluded and you knew it, you wouldn’t exactly be deluded, not in the strictest sense, would you?”

“They think they’re happy!”

“But they’re not?”

“No! How could they be? They’ve all been run through the Clark Winstead patented self-integrity shredder.”

Clark frowned. “Which one of my companies makes that one?”

“Make fun if you want. But I’m telling you the truth. Look out this window.” Baxter swiveled Clark’s chair around so that he had a view of the street below. “Any other person would look at all those people there and see the pride and accomplishments, boredom and despair, the little joys and deep-seated depressions that are all part of the human condition.”

Clark gazed at the smudges of color through the rain-speckled glass. She was out there, somewhere. A wounded kitten who thought her claws made her a tiger. How was he going to find her?

“But does Clark Winstead see those things? No, he does not!”

Clark scanned the bustling crowd, wondering if he might be able to pick her out from this distance.

“Clark Winstead sees every human being with a price tag on them.” Baxter straightened up, his neck lengthened, his chin up. He gave his head a shake like a rooster getting ready to crow. “And if he likes what he sees, he has no problem meeting that price to get his way.”

Clark blinked, then twisted his head toward his friend. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“It means that all of us, every employee who takes a frivolous bonus or accepts a bigger salary than they earnestly merit, every woman wearing a piece of jewelry given by you—and not a one of them a wedding or engagement ring in all your thirty-nine years, I might add—”

“The first few of those thirty-nine years they had to settle for candy necklaces, I’m afraid.”

“Every charity that names a Clark Winstead scholarship winner or dedicates a Clark Winstead memorial wing,” Baxter went on with dogged determination to finish, “every friend who takes a handout and company that gets treated to one of your affable takeovers, we’re all walking around with your flag blazing over us—planted right square in our backs—like the proverbial dagger.”

“I’ll have to see if our insurance covers that kind of thing.”

“We all know, deep down, that you’ve got us. We’re bought and paid for and we owe you. As much as we like you, we do owe you. We’ve sold out, and no man—or woman—can be truly happy knowing that about themselves.”

Clark considered that a moment.

“That’s why I think you’ve never married, my friend.”

“I’ve never married—I never intend to marry—because I do not personally believe in the institution. I saw how it destroyed my parents and I want no part of it.” He started to turn his attention back toward the window.

“Had!”

Clark gawked at Baxter.

“You’ve never married, Clark Winstead, ol’ pal, because you know what I just said is true. You know that you could have any woman you want, but you don’t want any woman you could have because in your heart you’d know it was just another sellout. Ironical, isn’t it?”

“What’s that?”

“That good ol’ Clark Winstead is trapped in the same illusion as he’s created for the rest of us. He thinks he’s happy, but because of who he is and what he’s got, he can’t be—”

“Then I’m content in my anguish,” he lied, feeling all but content in his impotence at finding this girl with the wayward charm.

“Ha!”

“What is your point, Baxter? What?” he finally snapped. Baxter had it all wrong about him. He really did bear the scars of a terrible childhood. Watching his parents squabble and then drag him into the middle of the fray made him vow that he would never go through that again. Most of all, he would never put another child through it. To hear his hidden pain made light of on top of the incident with the girl did not put him in a sterling mood. “listening to you, a person might think I’m some kind of devil.”

“Worse.”

“Worse than a devil?”

“Yes, much worse because you’re not just a devil...”

Suddenly, a splash of blue and pink out the window caught his eye, then the outline of an umbrella shaped like a squatty teapot. Her! She was standing there on the street corner, her head bent over her cupped palm.

“...you, Clark Winstead, are the worst kind of devil. You are a decent man.”

“Hold that thought, will you?” Clark stood so fast his chair spun halfway around and slammed against his leg. In two long strides he was at his office door.

“Hey, where are you going?”

Clark grinned and gave the door a mighty push. “Off to corrupt another soul.”