"A nice piece," Lucas repeated flatly. "I'm not even going to touch that comment."
"Hey, you don't have to touch anything you don't want to. No reason to get tawdry. Just get me a good story out of this," Adam reiterated. "One that will appeal to our readership."
"Oh, I can definitely do that. It should be really interesting," Lucas said blandly. "And, gosh, really fun, too. And, whoa, very educational. And it should put to rest once and for all my father's theory that it's as easy to fall in love with a rich woman as it is with a poor one. Would that he had followed his own advice," he added in a voice that prohibited further probing.
"You say that because you don't believe in love, period," Adam said.
Lucas tilted his head to the side. "Excuse me, but I'm only a twenty-four-year-old bachelor, unlike the thirty-nine-year-old bachelor who is also sitting at this bar. Is it just me, or does this seem like an odd statement for the old guy to be making to the young guy in such a situation?"
Adam ignored the comment, thinking he was getting pretty good at ignoring Lucas. Now, if he could just be as effective in getting the kid to shut up in the first place, he'd be okay. Of course, the fact that Lucas refused to be shut up was probably what made him such a good journalist to begin with.
Damn, Adam hated these catch-22s. But he did love the way Lucas worked.
"I'd still like to expose Lauren Grable-Monroe," his hotshot writer said. "How about I write an exposé on her as a companion piece to this story?"
Adam opened his mouth to tell Lucas no, to state quite adamantly that such an exposé had no place in Man's Life magazine. And when he did, the oddest thing came out instead.
"No way, Lucas," he told him.
"Why not?"
Unbidden, a feral little smile curled Adam's lips. "Because," he said, "Lauren Grable-Monroe is mine.
Chapter 3
« ^ »
"What do you think, Dorsey? The blue or the green?"
Dorsey heard her mother's question and told herself it would be polite to answer. Unfortunately, she was far too busy doing other things—things like, oh, panicking, reeling from shock, quaking with fear, choking on terror—to form an adequate reply. She couldn't even bring herself to glance up from where she had buried her face in her hands after collapsing onto the edge of Carlotta MacGuinness's pink-satin-covered, king-sized bed. Because one terrible, terrible sentence kept echoing and spinning through her brain.
Lauren Grable-Monroe is mine.
Adam Darien's proclamation still made Dorsey shudder when she replayed it, even though a full weekend had passed since she'd heard him utter it aloud. She'd spent the entirety of that weekend trying to convince herself that she was worrying over nothing. That there was no way the two men could possibly uncover Lauren's true identity. That her editor and publisher were more than capable of maintaining her anonymity—they had, after all, promised. That her life, as she knew it, was going to be just fine.
And now, on this bright, sunny, cheerful Monday afternoon, she realized she had wasted her entire weekend. Because she knew she was lying through her teeth.
She'd spent the bulk of Friday evening listening to Adam Darien and his trained python, Lucas Conaway, as they'd gleefully outlined the downfall of Lauren Grable-Monroe. And because both men had been completely clueless that they were unfolding their plans in the company of their very quarry, they had been quite vivid—and inventive—in completing their plotting.
And oh, what plotting it had been.
Between the two of them, by evening's end, they'd had Lauren stripped naked and covered in honey, staked out spread-eagle beneath a blazing desert sun, with a big ol' "Come 'n' get it!" sign posted for a nearby platoon of hungry army ants. And although she'd had to admit that the naked and covered with honey part had held a certain, odd, oh … allure … in its initial state when Adam Darien had proposed it—she hadn't even minded the staked out spread-eagle part, really—Lucas's introduction of carnivorous insects had pretty much spoiled the fantasy.
They were going to expose her. They were going to investigate Lauren Grable-Monroe and find out that she was really Dorsey MacGuinness, almost Ph.D., sociology professor wannabe at utterly respectable Severn College . That, she decided, was a given. It was only a matter now of how long she could hold them off and what damage it would do to her credibility in the academic community—and in every other aspect of her life—once it happened.
Dorsey had read Man's Life magazine, in spite of its elitist, sexist snobbery, and she knew that Adam Darien and Lucas Conaway, when left to their individual devices, could be formidable. Combined, however… She didn't even want to think about what they could achieve.
All in all, it had made for a rather gloomy weekend.
And the mood had carried over to today, because Dorsey had walked home from Severn to catch a late lunch before going to work at Drake's only to find that she had absolutely no appetite whatsoever. The unmitigated terror that filled her belly at being exposed by Adam Darien left little room for something as mundane as ham and cheese on whole wheat.
Her mother, of course, didn't suffer from so grave a condition as fearing for one's way of life. After all, nobody was threatening to expose her. Nobody was going to stake her out naked under a burning desert sun, oh no. Because she wasn't the author of How to Trap a Tycoon, was she?
No, Carlotta MacGuinness was only the driving force behind it. The impetus. The genesis. The reason for its very existence. That was all she was.
Therefore, the only condition plaguing Carlotta this crisp autumn afternoon was whether to wear the blue or the green. Forcing her hands away from her face, Dorsey made herself look up at her mother's reflection in the bedroom mirror, if not at her
