"Lucas."
He shoved the book back into place and sighed heavily. "Boy, you are in some state tonight," he muttered irritably to Adam.
Yeah, and it wasn't the state of Rhode Island , either, Adam thought. He couldn't remember the last time he'd felt so agitated. And all on account of a woman he had yet to even see up close and personal. Though, certainly, over the past several weeks, he had seen more than his fill of her in just about every other context.
In the past month, Lauren Grable-Monroe had appeared on all of the morning news shows, in virtually each of the weekly news and lifestyle magazines, and on too many call-in radio shows to count.
She was saturating the market more pervasively than her book was. And that was saying something. Because in the few short weeks since the author had gone public, her book had blasted into the top ten of every nonfiction best-seller list in the country. At the rate it was selling, Adam thought, it would soon shoot right to number one.
Certainly the book had staying power. Because there were millions of potential buyers for it—all those women who fell into that "more likely to be abducted by a pack of kilt-wearing, spumoni-eating, Elvis-impersonating aliens than to be married after age thirty" statistic. And doubtless each new generation of females was going to want to know the whys and wherefores of trapping their very own tycoons. It wasn't a particularly cheerful prospect, as far as Adam was concerned.
Lucas continued to scan the shelves as they waited, but evidently nothing more came close to capturing his interest, because he finally gazed around the store. "She's late."
"She's a woman," Adam reminded the other man unnecessarily.
"A late woman," Lucas concluded.
"Which is redundant," Adam remarked.
"Not that I don't share your opinion of the fairer sex," Lucas said, "but I know why I feel the way I do. What's your excuse?"
The question brought Adam up short. Not so much the question itself, or even the speculative tone of voice in which Lucas had uttered it. No, it was the fact that the other man had put voice to it at all that gave Adam pause. Lucas's was a personal question, and Adam wasn't used to getting personal with people. It was something that his acquaintances understood, and was probably why he had so few true friends and so many acquaintances. He rarely moved beyond the introduction phase of any relationship.
Lucas, it would appear, had no such qualms. Then again, Adam reminded himself, Lucas was from a brave new generation, one that had come of age in a more cooperative social environment, overrun by MTV, Nike for Women, and Mars and Venus in Every Room in the House.
Still, that didn't mean that Adam had to cross the generational line. So all he said in explanation was, "I used to be married."
"Ah," Lucas replied.
And that, evidently, was all that needed to be said. Because, surprisingly, Lucas went back to sipping his Starbucks. And Adam, in turn, went back to trying to pretend that he had no idea the impotence books were shelved right in front of him, well, would you look at that, who knew?
"I see an entourage," Lucas announced suddenly. "I do believe Lauren Grable-Monroe has entered the building."
As, indeed, she had. Somehow, Adam sensed her presence before he even saw her. A quick frisson of heat swept through him, as if someone had applied a small electrical charge to the base of his spine. But what startled him more than anything was the realization that he suddenly felt very much as if he'd just been transported back to adolescence.
To be specific, back to the first day of ninth grade, when Mitzi Moran had been assigned the desk right next to his in Biology. And in honor of the opening of football season, Mitzi had worn her jayvee cheerleader uniform to school. The one with the microscopic red skirt. And the skintight yellow sweater. And those little cotton socks that to this day he found so inexplicably erotic.
Man, that had been a great day. And an incredible feeling Adam had never thought to feel again. But suddenly, right in the middle of Borders Books and Music on Michigan Avenue , he was reliving that same hormonal, almost narcotic, surge.
He told himself it was only because he'd been anticipating this event for more than a month, ever since Man's Life had received a press release from Rockcastle Books that announced the great coming-out party of the illustrious Lauren Grable-Monroe. It wasn't the press release, however, that had most captured Adam's attention, teeming though it was with interesting—in a rabid, overblown, sensationalistic kind of way—tidbits about the author of How to Trap a Freakin' Tycoon.
Lauren Grable-Monroe, it seemed, was a resident of this very city, a factoid that had settled in the pit of his stomach like a piece of badly cooked veal. Rockcastle Books made no bones about the fact that the moniker Lauren Grable-Monroe was a pseudonym flagrantly lifted from the three actresses who had starred in the film How to Marry a Millionaire. However, they had made bones—really big ones, too—about divulging who, exactly, had adopted the pseudonym. They had insisted that to divulge Ms. Grable-Monroe's true identity would endanger her position in the social community she loved, not to mention open them up to defamation suits.
According to her bio, whoever Lauren Grable-Monroe was, she had grown up on Chicago 's Gold Coast, the only child of a wealthy commodities broker and his socialite wife. Her parents had, however, lost their fortune some years ago after a hushed-up scandal, the details of which, at least in the press release, were sketchy, at best. Thus their daughter, a former debutante, had made her way in the world by "making herself available" to numerous and sundry tycoons whose fancy she had captured along the way. And now that her parents were no
