How to Trap a Tycoon (40 page)

Chapter 16

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E
die Mulholland's neighborhood was sort of middle everything, Lucas noted, as he sat in his car outside her apartment building, watching the sun dip low in the sky. Middle class, middle
America
, middle age, middle ground, middle-of-the-road. There wasn't much to remark about the area except that it was totally unremarkable. And somehow, he got the feeling that Edie lived here for that very reason—it would be easy to fade into the landscape.

A week had passed since she had told him to go away and leave her alone, and Lucas had done his best to abide by her wishes. He'd avoided Drake's during the hours she normally worked. He had curbed his urge to go hang out on the
Severn
campus. He hadn't dialed her number once when he'd picked up the phone. He'd respected her wishes, had left her alone.

And what had he gotten in return?

He'd gotten frustrated. He'd gotten annoyed. He'd gotten irritable. He'd gotten lonely.

There were just too many unanswered questions about Edie Mulholland, and there was one glaring fact about her that he didn't like at all. She'd been mistreated at some point in her past. Enough to keep her scared and uneasy in her present. Enough to prevent her from seeking a future with anyone who might want to get close to her. Lucas, for whatever reason—and God knew he'd tried to figure out what that reason might be—wanted to get close to her. Close enough to touch her. Close enough to hold her. Close enough to understand her.

Why? He had no idea. All this time, he'd been thinking of her as Mulholland of Sunnybrook Farm, a woman who was all sweetness and light, with no shadows or sharp edges to her at all. He'd been certain she was the perfect product of a perfect union in a perfect place, a woman incapable of knowing what it was like to feel pain or experience the cold bite of reality. To Lucas, Edie Mulholland had always been a one-dimensional icon of all that was good in the world.

With last week's episode, however, he had been forced to acknowledge that there were indeed some shadows in her life. There were sharp edges. Badness had soiled her goodness. Darkness had dimmed her light. Bitterness had tainted her sweetness. And that didn't seem fair at all.

Which was laughable, really, because Lucas Conaway was always the first one to eagerly opine that Life Is Not Fair. It was the banner behind which he stoically marched, the standard he held aloft for all to see. Life Is Not Fair, he gleefully proclaimed to anyone who would listen—and even to those who wouldn't. And that was always followed immediately by his other heartfelt declaration: Deal With It.

But he hadn't dealt with it. Not this time. Not with Edie. And hell, it wasn't even his life that wasn't fair these days. Sure, he'd had his setbacks in the past, too. Poverty, abandonment, despair. But then, life is not fair. He had dealt with it. In his own life, at any rate. Somehow, though, he couldn't accept it for Edie's.

Because with Edie, it just wasn't fair.

He pushed open his car door and unfolded himself from inside, then slowly approached her building. Normally, he'd be home by now, home to his empty apartment, his empty life. Normally, about this time, he'd be sitting down alone to eat dinner, wondering what to do by himself with the long, lonely night ahead. But he'd broken his vow to Edie and stopped by Drake's earlier in the day, only to find that she hadn't shown up for her shift.

Illness, Lindy had told him.

Right, Lucas had replied.

And then he'd gotten worried about her, so he'd decided to swing by her place on the way home to see if she needed anything. Chicken soup. Cuppa tea. Bitter blond guy who missed her.

He hesitated only a moment before rapping hard three times on her front door. He waited a minute before trying again, then another minute before trying a third time. He was about to give up, was about to turn away, when a muffled sound on the other side of the door caught his attention. That was followed by a soft swoosh of something brushing against the door on the other side, and then total silence.

"I know you're in there, Edie," he said, gazing directly at the peephole. "I can hear you breathing."

More silence was his only reply.

"Okay, so now you're holding your breath," he said. "I can wait. Bet you can't."

For another long moment, there was only silence. Then the soft
thump-clunk
of a deadbolt being slowly and reluctantly rotated. Little by little the front door eased inward until Edie's face appeared in the opening. She had obviously just risen from bed. Her hair was a tumble of blond curls that cascaded over her shoulders, and her eyes were rimmed with red and shadowed by dark circles. As she pulled the door open a bit more, Lucas saw that she was dressed in a silky robe that fell to her ankles in a riot of color, a purple background patterned with palm trees and volcanoes and words that seemed to spell out Aloha from Waikiki.

All in all, she looked to him like a fading thirties film star, blond and pale and tragic. And he really wished he knew what to say or do that would make everything in Edie Mulholland's life perfect.

She sighed with much defeat and took one more step backward. "If you're not going to go away, then you might as well come in. I don't want the neighbors gossiping."

"About you?" he asked. "Get real. If the neighbors gossip about you, it's only to talk about what a sweet, decent, courteous, nice, kind, polite, blond do-gooder you are."

She muttered a sound of dubious origin. "Yeah, well, you got the blond part right, anyway."

She closed the door behind him, then gestured vaguely toward the interior in what he guessed was meant to be an invitation. Whatever. He'd take what he could get.

"Look, I know you told me to leave you alone," he said as he followed her, "and you have to admit that I've done a pretty good job of it."

She paused just inside the living room and folded her arms over her midsection a bit self-consciously. "Yeah, you have," she agreed with what sounded like—dare he hope?—disappointment. Then, furthering his hopes, she added, with what was clearly not disappointment, "But you're here now, aren't you?"

"Yeah, well, I was kind of under the impression that your instructions carried an expiration date, even if you didn't say what it was."

"No, they don't," she said halfheartedly. "They don't expire at all. I want you to leave me alone forever."

Liar
, he thought. Aloud, though, he said, "See, now that's going to be a problem for me."

"Why?"

"Because I can't stop thinking about you."

She opened her mouth to reply, but no words came out. So she snapped it shut again, turned her back on Lucas, and made her way silently toward the windows on the other side of the room.

Her apartment was small but tidy, an eclectic mix of secondhand castoffs and make-do pieces that combined to achieve a surprisingly pleasant effect. The sofa was actually a futon in a basic wooden frame, the mattress cover decorated with moons and stars. It was accessorized by an old steamer trunk tipped on its side to serve as a coffee table, and wooden crates plastered with paintings of fruit made up end tables on either side of the futon. The hardwood floors were bare, the walls painted a functional beige. They were brightened, however, by Art Institute posters advertising various exhibits and offerings. She seemed to like Paul Klee and Gustav Klimt a lot.

"You have a nice place, Edie," he said as he folded himself onto the futon.

"Thanks," she replied as she pulled aside a lace curtain to gaze down at the street. When she dropped it again and turned to face Lucas, she seemed a bit distracted somehow. "It's not much, but I call it home."

It felt like a home, he thought. Whereas his own place was artfully arranged and decorated—thanks to a friend of a friend who did that kind of thing for a living—it didn't feel or look much like a home. Edie's place, for all its lack of sophistication, was warm and comfortable and lived in. Plants tumbled from bookcases near the windows, throw pillows had been cast onto the floor, magazines spilled across the steamer trunk, and framed photographs were scattered about everywhere. Whereas Lucas's apartment looked like something from a magazine, Edie's looked like something from real life. It was yet another indication that she did indeed have a nodding acquaintance with reality.

"So how come you missed your shift at Drake's this afternoon?" he asked in as offhand a manner as he could manage.

She didn't answer right away, but he knew it wasn't because she hadn't heard him. She did offer a response in the form of another one of those heavy, resigned sighs. Then she sat down in a bentwood rocker near the window—a solid ten feet from where Lucas had seated himself—and said, "I missed my shift because I haven't gotten much sleep this week, and today it just all caught up with me."

When she sat, her robe fell open above her knees, exposing bare calves and feet beneath. Lucas tried really hard—okay, maybe not so hard—not to notice. "Not, uh, not sleeping, huh?" he echoed—sort of. "Seems to be a lot of that going around. I've been having a rough time of it myself in the sleep department lately." He held her gaze levelly as he added, "I can't imagine why."

Her expression remained impassive as she told him, "Not sleeping usually isn't a problem for me."

"Me, neither," he agreed. "I generally sleep like a rock."

"No, I mean not sleeping doesn't usually bother me," she clarified. "I've always been a bad sleeper. This week, though, for some reason, it's just taken a toll."

He eyed her thoughtfully as he asked, "How come you're a bad sleeper?"

She eyed him not at all as she replied, "I just don't like to sleep, that's all."

"Why not?"

"It's a waste of time."

"Mm."

"You, uh, you're not going to leave me alone until I tell you why I reacted the way I did last week, are you?" she asked pointedly.

No reason to dance around that one, Lucas thought. So, "Nope," he told her frankly. "I'm not going to leave you alone."

She nodded. "Okay, fine. It's not like it's any big secret, anyway. Even Lindy knows about my past. I felt obligated to tell her about my arrest record when she hired me. It was the decent thing to do."

Well, that certainly got Lucas's attention. "You have an arrest record?" he asked, not bothering to mask his surprise. "For what? Jay walking? Double parking? Failing to curb your dog?"

She shook her head, but her expression was inscrutable as she told him, "For prostitution. Burglary. And trafficking in controlled substances."

Lucas's jaw dropped open at her admission. He knew he must look foolish, but it was the only reaction that seemed appropriate. Mulholland of Sunnybrook Farm was suddenly the estrogen-producing half of Edie and
Clyde
. And
that
was a crime against nature.

Taking advantage of his silence, Edie jumped right to her story. "We talked once, you and I, about having a lousy childhood. You remember that?"

He nodded. And somehow found the wherewithal to finally close his mouth.

"So why was yours so … unfulfilling?" she asked. Before he could object to the question, she added, "Hey, if I'm going to spill my guts to you, the least you could do is return the favor."

Okay, so she had a point. Reluctantly, and as quickly as he could, Lucas said, "I grew up on a dairy farm in
Wisconsin
that never quite turned a profit. Or broke even, for that matter. My father was a dairyman who spent every waking hour trying to eke out a living that never materialized. My mother was an alcoholic who spent every waking hour complaining about her rotten life. She was a mean mom when she was drinking," he said with eloquent understatement, "but my father was never in the house often enough to intercede. One day, when I was eleven, just when I was getting big enough to fight back, she took off and never came back—said she was going to find a man who could afford to keep her. She died three years later—alone—in a
Detroit
hospital. A few years after that, my father collapsed in one of the barns after a heart attack. The
United States
government took everything that was left for back taxes. And then my older sister and I pretty much took care of ourselves. Mostly by going hungry in our struggle to survive.