How to Trap a Tycoon

  Contents:

  1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17

  Epilogue

  * * *

  Chapter 1

  ^ »

  T he fourth time it happened, it really got Dorsey's attention.

  The first time, she put it down to coincidence, because, after all, it was bound to happen sooner or later. The second time, naturally, she shrugged it off as a fluke. The third time came as no surprise at all, because, as the saying goes, things come in threes. However, by that fourth time, Dorsey MacGuinness realized that she was clean out of explanations. There was just no good way to account for that fourth time, so it really got her attention.

  The coincidental first occurrence, um … occurred … shortly after she began her lecture in her eight o'clock Intro to Sociology class. Dorsey wasn't happy to be teaching as many intro classes as she was, but that was what teaching assistants like her were for, weren't they? To baby-sit the students taking sociology as an elective and keep them off the streets, where they might otherwise get into trouble. Only real professors got to teach sociology to real sociology students. So Dorsey would just have to settle for being a pretend professor until after she defended her doctoral dissertation in six months.

  Soc. 101 classes were always, in a word, uncooperative. Except, of course, for eight o'clock Soc. 101 classes, which were always, in a word, unconscious. Today was no exception. Dorsey faced the twenty odd—"odd," being a term of more than one definition here—students in her class, and was in no way surprised to find a good half of them dozing.

  What she was surprised to find was that one of them was quite wide awake.

  In the very back of the room, a female student—which was redundant, really, because all the students at Severn College were female, was not just very much awake, but also very much focused on her studies. Unfortunately, those studies did not include sociology. Not the kind of sociology Dorsey was trying to teach in this particular class, at any rate.

  "Ms. Jennings," she called out in her best teaching assistant voice. It held a tone that gave even the best—real—professor voice a run for its money.

  But Ms. Tiffany Jennings was not impressed by Dorsey's best teaching assistant-almost-doctor voice. Because Ms. Tiffany Jennings offered no indication whatsoever that she had even heard Dorsey summon her by name. She was far too wrapped up in the book that she held open before her face. Not her fat Soc. 101 textbook, but a slim paperback. A slim paperback titled How to Trap a Tycoon, authored by the undoubtedly pseudonymous—and utterly ridiculous—Lauren Grable-Monroe.

  "Ms. Jennings," Dorsey tried again.

  This time, the voice worked a trifle better, because two or three of the dozing students pried open their eyes. Ms. Tiffany Jennings, however, only continued to read.

  With a resigned sigh, Dorsey tossed her stubby piece of chalk into the tray and strode forward, adjusting her oval, wire-rimmed glasses as she went and raking both hands through the rioting, dark-auburn curls that tumbled past her shoulders. As she covered the dozen or so steps between the blackboard and her uninterested student, she tugged her baggy, oatmeal-colored sweater down over faded Levi's.

  Severn College was a tiny, tony women's liberal arts college situated in the tiny, tony Chicago suburb of Oak Brook, but staff and student body alike had long ago succumbed to a casual atmosphere. It was only one of the things Dorsey liked so much about both studying and teaching here. The school itself had been founded more than a century before, and the building where Dorsey did the bulk of her teaching and learning attested to that fact.

  The scarred wood floors softened the sound of her rubber-soled hiking boots, so that Ms. Tiffany Jennings neither heard nor saw Dorsey's arrival beside her desk.

  Not until Dorsey snatched the book right out of her hands.

  "Hey!" the student then exclaimed, "I was just getting to chapter seven, the one everybody says has all the good stuff."

  Dorsey closed the book and read the title aloud. "How to Trap a Tycoon, Ms. Jennings?" she asked. "Are you really interested in trying?"

  The girl nodded her head with much enthusiasm. "You bet. Who wouldn't be?"

  Dorsey could think of a few people off the top of her head—she herself, of course, would be in the number one spot—but declined comment. Instead, she opened the book to the table of contents and perused the offerings held within.

  "'Chapter Seven. Keeping the Tycoon in the Bedroom.' Yes, I can see where the concentration of good stuff, as you call it, Ms. Jennings, would most certainly be in that chapter. One can only shiver with delicious anticipation at the prospect of bedding a man whose entire focus in life is adding more dollar signs to his name." She peered at Ms. Jennings from over the tops of her glasses. "While you're doing all the work, he'll be mentally undressing his board of directors in the hope of figuring out what makes them tick. And, naturally, looking at all those boxer shorts and black socks would make any tycoon feel randy, wouldn't it?"

  Since the question really required no answer, Dorsey returned her attention to the top of the table of contents. "'Chapter One,'" she read. "'The Best Tycoon Bait.'"

  "That one's about how to give yourself a makeover that would make you more attractive to tycoons."

  "Oh, my," Dorsey remarked. "How have I made it through twenty-seven years of life without having this information at my fingertips?" She flipped to the chapter in question and quickly scanned a few pages. "According to this, if I want to trap myself a tycoon, I should rush right out and spend a small fortune—which, of course, I don't have, seeing as how I have yet to trap myself a tycoon, a development that rather negates the entire premise of the book, doesn't it?—on a wardrobe full of … what does it say here?"

  She lifted her glasses to the top of her head and squinted at the paragraph in question. "'Sporty separates, cute little Chanel suits, seductive peignoirs, and diaphanous gowns.'" She glanced back up at Ms. Jennings. "Do they even make diaphanous gowns anymore?" she asked the girl. When Ms. Jennings only shrugged, Dorsey turned to the rest of the class. "Anyone?"

  "I saw some diaphanous gowns in Better Dresses at the Marshall Fields on Michigan Avenue

  ," one of the students offered.

  Dorsey and Ms. Jennings both eyed the girl intently, the former with much disappointment, the latter with much hope.

  "Thirty percent off," the other girl added. "But only through Sunday."

  At the announcement, everyone in the classroom opened her notebook—for the first time that morning, Dorsey couldn't help but realize—and hastily jotted down the information. As Dorsey studied the student offering up shopping tips, her attention inescapably fell to the open backpack leaning against the student's desk. Sure enough, stuck haphazardly in the side pocket was a copy of How to Trap a Tycoon. Dorsey bit back an exasperated sigh and glanced once again at the copy she held in her hands, contemplating the chapter headings in the table of contents.

  "'Identifying the Tycoon's Lair,'" she read aloud. "'Stalking the Wild Tycoon. Keeping the Tycoon in Captivity.' Goodness," she added, "one would expect a chapter on 'Stuffing and Mounting the Tycoon,' so clear is the author's intent to have every rich man in America taken to the taxidermist and turned into a trophy for whichever desperate female most perseveres in the hunt."

  She closed the book, then pretended to study its cover with great interest. "You know," she said, "the fact that the author clearly took a pseudonym should tell you everything you need to know. For example… Oh, I don't know… Maybe the fact that she's ashamed to admit she's responsible for writing such tripe."

  "Nuh-uh," Ms. Tiffany Jennings countered. "She's a career mistress, and she's spilling trade secrets. And she's afraid she'll be sued if she writes under her own name. She's been w
ith a lot of tycoons. It's all there in the introduction. That's why she took the fake name. She just doesn't want anyone coming after her."

  "She took the pseudonym," Dorsey corrected the girl, "because she knows that what she's penned here is sensationalistic claptrap that panders to the masses."

  "Yeah, and she's gonna make a fortune off it, too," Ms. Jennings said, "because every woman on campus is reading that book. You can't log on the Internet anymore without seeing it mentioned a dozen times. Every chat room I've been in lately, sooner or later, the conversation turns to How to Trap a Tycoon. Even my mom wants to read it after I'm done."

  Dorsey digested the information with a response that was rather mixed. And with results that were rather mixed, too, seeing as how her stomach pitched and rolled upon hearing it.

  She closed the book, handed it back to Ms. Jennings, and replied, "Yes, well, do please try to keep your tycoon hunting for after class. That shouldn't be a problem, seeing as how Severn is just swarming with them, after all."

  That last was added dryly, of course, because in addition to there being no men among the student body at Severn , there were few tycoons to be had there. Or any tycoons, for that matter. Virtually all the students were here on academic scholarship, and few of them would have been able to afford a similar education elsewhere.

  Dorsey was like any other Severn student. It was her brain that had landed her in her current position. She had no background or money—or even family, unless she counted her mother, which she only did on days when her mother wasn't driving her crazy, which meant that today, as usual, Dorsey had no family to speak of.

  Even after returning the book to Ms. Jennings, she was left feeling a bit troubled by the episode. Shrugging off her anxiety as best she could, Dorsey continued with her class—and her day—in the usual fashion. She taught dozing, uninterested students things they would remember only long enough to record them in a blue book come midterm—if they remembered them at all. And, eventually, she really did stop dwelling upon the episode with the tycoon book.

  Until the second time.

  Which came when Dorsey was standing in line at the Severn College bookstore, waiting to pay for her lunch—a mondo-sized Snickers bar and a Diet Pepsi. How to Trap a Tycoon was displayed in an enormous cardboard contraption at the front of the campus bookstore, and the enormous sign on top of the enormous cardboard contraption fairly shrieked its presence in enormous red letters. And three Severn students were gathered about the enormous thing, perusing the book in question with much—dare she say enormous?—interest.

  Honestly, Dorsey thought, there was no accounting for tastes. She shook her head with disbelief as, after a few moments of animated conversation and giggling, all three of those students took their copies of the book to the cash register and plunked down good money for them.

  The third, charmed, event likewise took place that day, while Dorsey was riding the El to her second job. She glanced up from a new biography of Ghandi, which she had been anticipating for months, only to find herself staring at yet another copy of How to Trap a Tycoon. The reader was, yet again, a young woman of college age, and she was reading the book hungrily, as if it offered answers to the darkest mysteries of the universe.

  Dorsey sighed in bemusement, swallowed what tasted very much like fear, and went back to reading about nonviolent passive resistance. However, she was beginning to feel anything but nonviolent or passive or even resistant, for that matter. No, what she was beginning to feel was homicidal. Or perhaps suicidal. She hadn't quite decided yet who she wanted to kill—Lauren Grable-Monroe or herself.

  It was a quandary that continued to bother her right up until the fourth, and attention-getting, episode.

  After alighting from the El inside the Loop , Dorsey hustled into an impressive glass-and-steel high-rise, rode the elevator to the sixteenth floor, then hurried down a hall to the employees' entrance for Drake's. As quickly as she could, she tugged off her glasses and hiking boots and shrugged off her sweater and jeans, then tossed them, along with her backpack, into her locker. At the same time, she withdrew a white man-style shirt and black man-style trousers.

  Within minutes, she had donned those, along with the black man-style shoes and the brightly patterned necktie that completed her bartender's uniform. And then she was standing at the sink, gazing into a badly lit mirror, trying to weave her unruly, shoulder-length tresses into a fat French braid. Not having quite mastered the procedure yet—she only bound her hair when she worked at Drake's, and only then because it was a requirement of the job—a few of the dark-auburn tresses … or maybe several … or perhaps dozens … oh, all right, hundreds liberated themselves from the rest, scattering like a pack of rioting teamsters.

  Dorsey watched with dismay as they unfurled in loose corkscrew curls around her face. Her boss, Lindy, would no doubt write her up for looking so unkempt, but she didn't have time to mess with her hair right now, because, as had become her habit of late, Dorsey was late. So, waving a hand in surrender at her reflection, she returned to her locker for the final accessory that would complete her bartender's uniform.

  Her wedding ring.

  When she'd purchased the simple gold band at a pawn-shop six years ago, it had only set her back twenty dollars, but it was one of the best investments she had ever made. Shortly after she'd started tending bar, she'd discovered that when it came to female bartenders, men were constantly searching for more than the perfect martini. And her wedding ring—even if she'd never had a husband to go with it—was the best defense she'd found to ward off untoward advances.

  And if her tips had always been a bit lighter because her customers thought she was married, well, that was just the price she had to pay. She made less than the blond bartenders, too, but that hadn't made her want to color her hair. And anyway, she wasn't working at Drake's because she needed the money, was she?

  Although it wasn't yet four-thirty in the afternoon, the club was bustling. Well, as much as a bunch of buttoned-down and uptight, overfed and underjoyed old guys could bustle, at any rate.

  Dorsey marveled, as she always did, that anybody could be as dry and stuffy as the pin-striped clientele of Drake's without being mummified. Then again, there were one or two who might have given Tutankhamen a run for his money—in both the gold and the shrivel departments. Honestly. A good, stiff wind would have blown some of them away like the parchment upon which they'd written the Declaration of Independence.

  Independence for men, anyway, she thought, seeing as how women had been completely excluded from the document that had made this country what it was today, by God. And if these guys had had their way—and now that Dorsey thought about it, many of them did still have their way—women would continue to be neglected possessions left at home, overseeing the polishing of the silver of generations and squeezing out heirs to inherit it.

  A healthy handful of men was scattered about the luxuriously appointed club room as Dorsey passed quickly through it. Some were seated in leather wing chairs reading newspapers and annual reports, while others relaxed on strategically arranged burgundy leather sofas. Many were murmuring into cell phones, no doubt looking to buy some stock or place a bet on the seventh race at Saratoga or line up a date with someone other than their wife.

  As questionable as she found the appeal of Drake's clientele, though, Dorsey certainly couldn't criticize the decor. Lindy Aubrey, the woman who owned and operated the place, had utterly impeccable taste and knew exactly how to make a man feel comfortable and pampered. Fine English antiques and oil paintings of hunt scenes complemented the elegant furnishings, and Persian rugs and crown molding further enhanced the mood. The effect, on the whole, was one of old money, old bloodlines, old boys.

  Other than Lindy, who was pretty much an old boy herself, the only women allowed here were the ones who served—quietly, unobtrusively, and without complaint. Frankly, that was the toughest part of the job as far as Dorsey was concerned, being obsequious and pleasant. But doing s
o suited her needs—for now, at any rate. She wasn't above—or below, for that matter—sucking up for the few more months it would be necessary. Once she had achieved her goal here, she'd happily kiss goodbye—and kiss off—the illustrious Drake's. Until then, however, like women everywhere, she was content to do what she had to do.

  The posh European decor carried from the club room into the bar, which was also filled with men, even so early in the evening. Then again, it was Friday, she recalled, and most of these guys could afford to leave work early and get a head start on the weekend. Because, by and large, these guys owned the weekend. Not to mention every other day of the week. They were the men in charge, unlike the majority of working stiffs who had to punch a time clock. And, by God, they rarely let anyone forget it.

  They sat lining the bar like thumbtacks, each affixed to his stool and nursing a drink. Dorsey noted all of the usual suspects as she passed by them, identifying each by what he drank.

  Seven-and-Seven sat next to Salty Dog, who was followed by the gin twins, Gimlet and Gibson. After them came Anchor-Steam-Draft, Heineken-in-a-Bottle, and Kir Royal.

  Kir Royal, Dorsey mused, not for the first time, as she considered the huge, hulking, dark man who cradled a delicate wine glass in his hand. Honestly. He was the CEO of a trucking company, for heaven's sake. If the guys driving the big rigs ever found out what he drank, they'd mutiny.

  Next in line came the Scotch brigade—Rob Roy, Rusty Nail, Scotch-and-Water, and Dewar's-Straight-Up. And then, at the point where the bar began to curve around, seated in his usual spot … Dorsey bit back an involuntary—and very wistful—sigh.

  Then came Oban-over-Ice.

  Oban-over-Ice was, hands down, Dorsey's favorite of her regulars, which wasn't saying much, because she didn't like any of her regulars except for Oban-over-Ice. Still, she did like him—probably more than she should.

  Outside Drake's, his name was Adam Darien, and she'd learned quite a bit about him over the course of her month-long employment at the club. He was, after all, in the bar more evenings than not, and he often ate his dinner seated right where he was now. They'd shared more than a few interesting and often animated conversations.