The Billionaire’s Handler

Chapter Three

Maguire was quite a piece of work, Carolina mused. She needed to understand him, but figuring the man out was no easy task. Some of the puzzle pieces were definitely jagged fits. He was tough. He took charge and wanted everything his own way, and wasn’t big on democracy in a household. He spelled “high-maintenance guy” in any language.

On the surface, he wasn’t a man she’d normally like, much less be attracted to.

Carolina turned the page on her book. The office/library-no surprise-had whole shelves of books on birth defects related to brain function. Tommy had been one of those. And the room, like everything else in the lodge, was fabulous…three walls of fruit-wood bookshelves, a semicircular desk, little ladders to get to the top of the bookshelves, a couch and chair to sit in-and an old-fashioned fainting couch. The fainting couch was in a thick, suedey kind of fabric, and Carolina had taken one look and claimed it the minute she walked in here.

Nobody was getting her off that couch. Not Maguire. Not the army. No one or nothing. She was in love, and that was that.

In the meantime, dusk had already fallen. The day had passed amazingly fast-Maguire did some kind of work, but he’d left her upstairs with a pile of packages to sort through. Clothes. Not hers, but her size, nothing formal or fancy, just jeans and sweatshirts and socks, that kind of thing. And she’d napped. How on earth she could need more rest was beyond her, but apparently her body wanted to zone out every few hours, and there was nothing she could do about it.

Late afternoon, Maguire had pawed through the freezer, and come through with a gourmet French stew that just needed unthawing and heating to be savored. While he’d done that, she’d made her lists, but after dinner, she’d taken great pleasure in doing the dishes-primarily to give Maguire another fit. Apparently she wasn’t supposed to do a thing for herself.

And after all that, they’d both settled in. She’d pounced on her fainting couch with a book on special ed kids, while Maguire had taken the long couch, cocked his stocking feet on the trunk coffee table and was penciling through her lists. Initially he’d done so quietly, but Maguire being Maguire, eventually had to get a pen, a legal pad, to make notes and comments, and eventually he started muttering to himself. Probably because he still thought she couldn’t hear.

“Lobster. Crab. Lobster. Scallops. Hmm. I’m sensing a common theme on your food list. Salmon from Alaska, only really from Alaska. Fresh sweet corn straight from a farmer’s field. Blueberries right off a bush…for Pete’s sake. Has no one ever fed you, girl…?”

He jotted some more scribbles on his legal pad. The last she’d peeked-less than a minute ago-no one had a prayer of reading his writing, including him.

“…Grape leaves. Stuffed, you know, the way the real Greeks do it. Actually, I don’t know, tiger, but I get it that you want authentic. If you’re going to be this easy to please, though, we’re not going to have any fun. This isn’t even challenging. And yeah, I know you can’t hear me. But it’s interesting, having a one-way conversation with a woman who can’t talk back. Kind of every guy’s favorite fantasy…well. Favorite fantasy separate from sex, of course…”

She could hear. Seeing Tommy’s photo had jolted something that morning…but not consistently. Her hearing, the volume of it, had gone in and out for hours now. It was only since dinner that she’d been able to hear anything consistently.

Once he’d hurled himself on the couch with her lists and started muttering, though, she’d heard every word.

She could have confessed that her hearing was back. She intended to come clean, eventually. Even little lies had always bugged her. But since she was distinctly at the most vulnerable disadvantage in this twosome, Carolina figured it was fair to find out what she could-any way she could. And there was an extraordinarily terrific side benefit to her deceit.

His voice.

Hearing the sound of his voice was like a powerful, free turn-on pill, with no risk and no side effects-beyond a tickle of her hormones. The pitch was low, not a bass, but definitely a low tenor, with a roll and timbre to his accent that put a shiver down her spine now and then. Sexy. He was just so altogether hopelessly, helplessly sexy. Those lethally blue eyes. Those all-guy bones of his, the overall look of him, the way he thought, the way he moved. It all came through in his voice. I am man, hear me roar.

It was that kind of voice. A baby-you’re-gonna-love-how-I-kiss voice. A you-can’t-imagine-how-much-trouble-I-can-get-you-into kind of voice.

It was mighty stupid, she knew, to travel even for a minute down that silly road. As sporadically as her hearing was returning, her memory seemed to be resurfacing the same way. Everything wasn’t clear. But she’d recalled enough to make her want to curl up in a closet again, go back to where she’d become so agitated she couldn’t keep food down, couldn’t sleep, couldn’t rest, couldn’t escape. Anywhere.

So maybe it was irresponsible and downright dumb to dwell on Maguire’s voice…but temporarily, it felt like self-preservation. Just listening to him allowed her to push her real life away for a little longer. It was hard to feel too guilty. Nothing was waiting for her in real life but more unsolvable problems and anxiety.

“Okay,” Maguire mumbled. “Moving away from the food list and onto the major life wishes list. And right off the bat, cookie, I can see this list has more potential to be challenging…” He was still obviously talking to himself. He hadn’t lifted his head from the legal pad. “You want to have dinner in a tree house. A real tree house. Hmm. You want fifteen pairs of Italian shoes. No surprise there-the shopping gene was bound to surface sooner or later. You want to sleep in a castle. A real castle. You’d like a weekend at a spa. Now you’re talking. You want to ride in an old MG, like a ’53, one of those ‘darling ones’ with running boards and all. You want…well, hey. Are you actually listening to this monologue, Carolina?”

Maguire had abruptly looked up. Looked straight at her.

He’d caught her. There was nothing she could do but fess up, so she nodded. “My hearing’s coming back. I can’t make it stay, but I’ve been listening to you talk. And I can hear my own voice. My hearing just seems to fade in and out. It’s not consistent. I don’t understand it.”

“I do. The doctors all explained it the same way. You stopped hearing because your life had become an overwhelming pressure cooker. Remove the pressure, and there was every reason to believe you’d get your hearing back again.”

“But nothing’s changed.” Anxiety nipped at her nerves, then took a serious raw bite. “The pressure and problems are all there, all real. In fact, I have to go home. I have to get up. I have to-”

When she made a move to push off the couch, he interrupted. His voice was quiet, calm. “I’ve got a deal for you.”

“I’m not a make-a-deal kind of person, Maguire. There is no deal. As crazy as it sounds, I haven’t minded being kidnapped, but now…it’s all coming back. I don’t have time to mess around. I have to go home-”

“Hold it, hold it. This is a deal that’s going to work for you. I promise. You want to know how I happened to bring you here, don’t you? So I’ll fill in all the missing information. All you have to do is give me a chance to do that.”

She hesitated. She did want to understand-fiercely-how this whole crazy thing had happened. But she wanted to hear about it right away, with no interruptions.

She should have known better. Everything had to be his way. He came through with a man’s parka and hat and gloves for her, dragged her outside again. Early evening, the last color was just purpling the snow on the mountaintops. Not a breath of wind stirred. He helped her into an old Adirondack chair, buried in down blankets, but mittens out-so she could hold a glass of wine. Maguire started building a fire in a copper pit by the chairs.

It only took a few minutes before a blaze of golden sparks lit up the night. Wood smoke whiskered off in the valley, mingling with the pungent scent of pine. Maguire, wearing a leather jacket so old Goodwill would probably reject it, took the chair next to her, but his attention was on hunching over, stirring the fire, keeping it heaped up and hot.

And then he finally started talking. “Once upon a time,” he said, “there was a man named Gerald who had three sons. Gerald’s daddy had invented something so fantastic that he made millions, then billions, and Gerald inherited it all. He devoted his life to buying anything he wanted… That wine okay with you?”

“The wine’s fine,” she said impatiently. It was better than fine. It was some kind of fancy Pinot Noir, rich and dry and deep as the night. “Don’t trying diverting me, Maguire. Keep talking.”

“Okay, okay. Well, Gerald’s first son was named Jay. Jay never worked, and probably never will. From the time he was sixteen, he was going through drugs and women, smashing fast cars, getting into every kind of trouble he could think of. He sounds rotten, but I swear you’d like him. Everyone does. He’s a charmer.”

Maguire checked her glass, saw she’d only had a sip or two, poured himself some, then went on. “Gerald went through that wife, then another. Eventually he had a second son. They got along like a snake and a mongoose. About the time Second Son was in college, he had a huge fight with his father because Gerald made a manslaughter charge against Jay disappear. Jay happened to be driving drunk, and hit an old man. The guy was homeless, so he didn’t matter, right? No one knew him. No one missed him. The father couldn’t figure out why his second son got his Jockeys in such a twist, but that was the last time Second Son spoke directly to his father.”

Maguire paused for breath, but Carolina didn’t comment. She’d stopped breathing altogether. For the first time in months, she easily put aside her own life and problems. It didn’t take rocket science to figure out that Maguire was the second son, that he was talking about himself.

“A wife or two later, a third son came into the picture. Tommy was a complete surprise. Unfortunately, when Gerald’s wife was eight months pregnant, he thought she’d enjoy taking a hang-glider ride. Apparently, they both did enjoy it, until the glider crashed. Gerald wasn’t hurt, but his wife went into premature labor. She never made it out of the delivery room, lots of complications. Tommy lived, but he was born weeks too soon, was never right.

“Gerald solved the problem of Tommy like he did everything else. Threw money at it. The kid had full-time help at home, every toy ever made, was dragged to the best medical specialists on a regular basis. Since all the records pointed to the premature birth, the lack of oxygen-and maybe to the recreational drugs Gerald and his wife enjoyed-no one really expected to find miracles for Tommy. But at least there was no fear he wouldn’t always be well taken care of.”

Carolina watched him. He was restless now, couldn’t sit still, had to fuss with the coals again, even though the fire was vibrantly shooting gold sparks into the night sky. “Last summer, Gerald put Tommy in a special place. He’d heard there was this really unusual summer program near South Bend, a school that had fresh ideas for the range of kids who just can’t seem to progress because of their mental disabilities. Gerald wasn’t really expecting Tommy to improve, of course. He just wanted to vacation in Corfu, wanted a place to stash him.”

“Maguire.” She said his voice softly, gently. She couldn’t just let him go on, not when he was expressing so much hurt-in such a tough voice.

But he motioned her with a hand. “I know this is a long story, Carolina, but I really hate telling it. I’m almost at the end, so just let me get through it, okay?”

She nodded.

“So Tommy goes to this incredible place. And he has a seizure. Seizures aren’t unusual for someone with Tommy’s brain issues, but this teacher thinks there’s something that doesn’t make sense. So when an ambulance picks him up from the school, she goes to the hospital with him. Everybody starts getting mad at her. The doctor, the medical staff. They think she’s interfering, full of herself, doesn’t know anything. But the thing is, this teacher-by the name of Carolina Daniels-was right. All this time, there was actually a reason for a lot of Tommy’s mental and physical disabilities. He had a tumor behind one eye.

“Now Tommy still isn’t perfect. Never will be. But his life just became damn close to normal, thanks to her. Gerald, being Gerald, offers her money. This Carolina woman won’t take it. But that’s all Gerald has ever known how to do-throw money at problems-so he puts her in his will, leaves this unsuspecting teacher somewhere around fifteen million dollars. Of course, Gerald wasn’t actually planning on dying. But whatever. Gerald wanted her to have some payback, and being Gerald, he got what he wanted.”

Maguire finally tried stretching out his long legs toward the fire, leaning back in the chair. “My guess is that our mysterious teacher-Carolina Daniels-was initially thrilled about the money. I mean, hey, who wouldn’t be? Isn’t that everybody’s dream, to have total financial security, financial freedom, never have to worry about money again? Only, it didn’t seem to work out quite that simple for her…” For the first time since he started talking, he shot her a glance. “You cold?”

“No, not at all.”

“We’re going inside the minute you’re cold. You hungry?”

“No.”

“More wine?”

“No. Good grief.”

“Okay then. We’re getting to the last part of the story. The awkward part. Here’s the deal. The second son was always an interfering son of a gun. Self-righteous. Thinks he knows everything. That kind of pain-in-the-neck type of character. But he happens to really love his little brother. And even though Tommy’s got a trust set up that will protect him forever financially, that second son has always been a part of Tommy’s life. So that’s how he knows about this teacher of Tommy’s. How she saved Tommy’s life. How she inherited that nest egg from Gerald.”

Carolina opened her mouth, closed it. She had to let him finish.

“Okay. So Second Son-even though he hasn’t got a legal right in the universe, even though it’s none of his business in any way, even though he doesn’t have time to mess around with a stranger’s life-tracks down this Carolina Daniels. I don’t know what you call that. Guilt? Lunacy? Trying to fix the sins of the father? Whatever. Second Son gets the impression that maybe this teacher isn’t the toughest nut on the tree. In fact, this new, fabulous fortune isn’t working at all like the fairy tale’s supposed to be. Her money’s brought out every vulture and piranha in the area. She’s never had to cope with sharks before. She’s never been trained to deal with greed at this level-or what levels people will fall to-to get a cut out of her. All that money, but she can’t get safe. She can’t…”

Carolina was still listening, but some of his monologue made her zone out. Her heart suddenly felt hugely full, brimming over. She still didn’t have all the answers she wanted, and she hadn’t had time to phrase even half the questions she wanted to. But he’d told her enough.

Her kidnapper was a good man. Better than a good man. Maguire was a true modern-day white knight who actually stepped up for damsels in distress-even if she wasn’t a damsel, much less the kind of woman who counted on a man to save her from anything. Carolina never needed saving, anyway. She’d just desperately needed two seconds to think, to put her new life together, and there hadn’t been a single stretch where she could hide from the bombardment of ceaseless pressures and demands being made of her.

“Maguire?”

“Yeah?” His voice edgy, wary now.

“You know I thought Maguire was your last name. You never once let on your real last name was Cochran.”

He answered, “Well, hell. I didn’t want you to have a negative impression right off the bat. It’s not like I had any choice over the family I was born into. Believe me, I would have chosen Smith. Or Jones.”

She got it, that he was hoping she’d laugh off the “little deceit” he’d pulled on her. But she couldn’t stop thinking. “I kept trying to understand why I felt an…instinctive trust for you. Why I wasn’t more afraid. I mean, for Pete’s sake, you were kidnapping me.”

“Borrowing,” he corrected her swiftly. “Less prison time if we use a little different term than kidnapping.”

“I had every reason to think you’d be after my money. Because everyone’s been after my money. So why would you have taken me if not for ransom? It’s the conclusion any sane person would come to, wouldn’t you think? But it just didn’t make sense in my mind. It just didn’t…fit.”

“You’ve been pretty drugged up, cookie. You shouldn’t be expecting yourself to think rationally or normally for a while yet.”

“Maybe. But I still knew. Somehow. That you weren’t going to hurt me. That this wasn’t about your wanting something from me.” She leaned forward. “Maguire, how’s Tommy?”

“Good. He’s in Seattle. I petitioned the court for custody after my dad died, but as I mentioned, Gerald and I had issues. Dad did a good job of financially protecting him, but that’s the best I can say. I see him at least twice a month, and sometimes he stays with me for weeks at a time…”

“So who is he with?”

“As odd as it sounds…with Jay’s ex-wife. One of Jay’s ex-wives. Shannon. The one thing Tommy needed that no amount of money could give him was a plain old mom. The nurturing of a mom, the warmth of a mom, the parenting relationship of a mom. He’s crazy about Shannon. So it isn’t a blood tie, but probably that’s best. The Cochrans aren’t exactly famous for their maternal or paternal judgment.”

“So she volunteered for this? She’s good with-”

From nowhere, in that quiet night, over the sparks of fire and zesty scent of pine, she suddenly heard a sound. A phone. A cell phone. Nothing more than that…but she instinctively responded as if she’d heard a rifle shot. She curled up, froze, covered her head.

“Carolina, it’s okay, it’s okay…I’ll turn it off. Hell. I forgot I even had it on me…”

But there seemed to be an invisible mute button in her head that was punched hard. She stopped hearing the phone. His voice. The crackle of fire. It was gone again. Her whole sense of hearing.

She was back in that closet of silence, where no sound seemed to penetrate and nothing got through. She could feel herself shaking, a deep trembling from her fingertips to her lips. Her heart started pounding, pounding, as if she’d been running for her life and just had no breath left, nowhere to hide, nowhere to go.

She saw Maguire leaning over her, saw his mouth move. Was fairly positive his lips framed a mighty annoyed swearword. But that was all she could figure out for some time…

Within an hour of Henry’s arrival, Maguire had the central dining table spread out with contracts, correspondence and various legal documents that supposedly required his immediate attention.

When Henry got in, he took one look at his boss’s face and headed silently for the refrigerator. After inhaling every lunch food in sight, he’d poured a coffee, located himself against the counter and was being silent as a tomb. Possibly he’d worked for Maguire long enough to sense when his boss was crabbier than a bear with a sliver.

Maguire hadn’t slept. He couldn’t imagine sleeping in the near future.

This whole plan wasn’t working. Well. Actually, it’d been working really well until Carolina heard the damn cell phone last night.

That she’d lost her hearing again wasn’t the frazzler. Two different doctors had told him that could happen, and was even likely to happen. She had to be completely removed from stress for a serious stretch of time. The phone was a trigger for her.

She’d get her hearing back. That wasn’t the problem. The problem was him. Instead of seeing her as a responsibility-a job, something he had to do-he kept feeling a pull toward those heart-big blue eyes. He touched her or tucked an arm around her, and just like that, he was harder than a teenage boy. That tangle of sizzle and rush happened every damn time they were in the same room.

He needed her to trust him. Which meant he had to earn that trust. And he sure as hell couldn’t do that if she was afraid he was going to jump her.

Which, of course, he wasn’t.

It was a matter of her never guessing that was even a remote possibility in his head.

“Where is she?” Henry risked asking a question, although he was still keeping a wary distance, still had his aviator jacket on.

“She’s upstairs. I heard the shower a little while ago.” He zoned in on the documents in front of him again-or tried to. The problem was that there were repercussions when he failed to concentrate on what mattered. If he failed to pay prompt attention to all this business, for example, he could lose a lot of money.

Unfortunately, he couldn’t seem to give two shakes about losing money. He’d learned long ago that there were far worse things.

“Henry, you need to sleep over before flying again.”

“Yes, sir.”

“About all the issues we discussed regarding Carolina’s place…”

“All done. Except that I also took the initiative of hiring a housesitter-actually, a concierge service-because I barely got to her place before there were people knocking and pounding and calling. She has some frantic relatives.”

“I’ll bet she does. Excellent judgment on getting the concierge service on board.”

“Her sister, particularly, I believe, expected to be let in. Said Carolina had some things that were hers that she was supposed to get-”

“Right.” Maguire didn’t snort. He just thought about it. “If her family has any type of medical financial need, take care of it. Or call me. Otherwise nothing gets removed from her place except for old food in her refrigerator. Her bills and personal business-any crises there?”

“No. I canceled a dentist appointment for next week. And she has a hair appointment next Thursday.”

“Hair.” For the first time Maguire looked up, alarmed. “You know how women are about hair.”

“Not exactly, sir.”

“Nothing puts women in a bad mood faster than a bad-hair day. I don’t even know what a bad-hair day is, exactly, but if that’s a source of stress, we have to fix it.”

“How, sir?” Henry asked.

“Damned if I know.” Maguire dived into the next stack of files. “Any men calling her?” he asked casually.

“Yes, sir, I told you-”

“I mean besides dentists and drugstores and insurance salesmen. The other kind of men. Boyfriends. Relationships.”

“I don’t think so.” Abruptly Henry tugged on an ear. “Mr. Cochran, I don’t recall you asking me to notice or collect information on anything regarding boyfriends. I wasn’t looking for that. It never crossed my mind that you wanted me to.”

“I didn’t. And of course I didn’t ask you. It’s none of my business. It just occurred to me-a little late-that I should have considered whether or not she had a man in her life. You’ve seen her. Hard to believe there aren’t man friends in that picture. And if it were my woman who disappeared from sight, I’d have raised hell and the National Guard and the Mormon Tabernacle Choir and the BBC-”

“I get your drift, sir. Possibly there just aren’t any personal relationships in her life right now.”

“Maybe.” Maguire kept thumbing through documents. “In the meantime, I have a new list of things for you to do. Some of these are going to be fun.”

“Fun,” Henry repeated, and tugged on his ear again.

“Fun,” Maguire repeated. “I need a 1953 MG Mark IV TD here seven days from now.”

“Seven days?”

“Red.”

“Oh, that’ll make it easier.”

“Then I need you to locate a tree house. Not a kid’s tree house. The kind of tree house where adults could live. I don’t care where in the world. I just need one.”

“That must be on your list of ‘more fun’ things for me to do, I suspect.” Henry inked that in his Moleskine notepad, never blinked.

“Smile, Henry. Where else could you possibly work, where you had a job with this kind of diversity?”

“Nowhere, sir. There’s no doubt in my mind.”

“All right. Now…I’ll be reachable most of next week, but primarily through my laptop. I can call you back, but I won’t have a cell phone turned on, until I’m specifically looking for messages, so connection via the internet will be more predictable. I’ll be in Europe for the next four or five days-I’m not sure of the exact stretch of time. It depends on what she’s physically up for. To start off, I want to keep her away from disruptive noise as much as I can.”

“But she can’t hear, sir.”

“Oh, yeah, she can. She hears too much. That’s the core of the problem, Henry. The point, however, is that I can’t give you a complete schedule of where I’ll be. I need to see how the next week goes with her. For her. Then some type of pattern should emerge.”

“You don’t need me for that week?”

“I need you all week. But for projects. I’ll catch a ride on the Cochran business jet.”

For the first time, Henry’s face showed expression. “You know I can fly that-”

“Yes. I know you love flying anything. But I really need someone that I can completely trust on this-someone who can keep their mouth buttoned. You’re one of the few in the universe. This is going to take some major finagling to pull off.”

“Personally, I think it takes a man who’s out of his mind, sir.”

“Yeah, that, too. You know, I’m surprised the sister didn’t threaten to sue-”

“She did, Mr. Cochran.” Henry looked alarmed. “Didn’t I already tell you that?

“You’d have gotten around to it. And there’ll be more problems like that, for darn sure. Don’t let it get your liver in an uproar.”

“I don’t drink, sir. My liver is almost never in an uproar. On the other hand-” Henry suddenly shot to an upright posture, looking in the doorway.

And there was Carolina, carrying a paperback, a blanket draped over her shoulders, barefoot, looking like a waif.

A waif.

Not a femme fatale. Not a cocky confident woman who knew her way around men and valued her own allure.

A damn waif.

Yet his pulse started slamming as if an alarm just went off.