The Tycoon's Proposal

“I didn’t have to dial it to figure out the joke.”

“You didn’t? Then I honestly don’t know what you’re talking about. All I did was drive your grandmother home from the student union.”

He rubbed the stubble on his chin. “Why?”

His grandmother crossed the hall to the stairs. “Kurt, you said yourself just now that I shouldn’t be driving in weather like this, so Lissa drove me home.” Her voice faded as she reached the top of the staircase.

Kurt stared at the young woman again. “You’re not the friend of Marian’s that Gran invited to tea?”

She shook her head. “Sorry to disappoint you. Are you talking about Marian Meadows? I know who she is, but that’s all.”

“Then what are you doing here?”

“I’m trying to tell you, if you’ll just listen. Actually, I’m glad to find that you haven’t gone back to Seattle yet.”

“You’ve done your homework, I see. Not that it’s hard to find out where I live.”

Her gaze flickered, and he felt a flash of satisfaction at disconcerting her. But she didn’t explain, or defend herself. “Maybe you can convince your grandmother to see a doctor,” she went on. “I didn’t get anywhere when I tried.”

His attention snapped back to her like a slingshot. “Doctor?”

“She had a dizzy spell. She’d had lunch at the restaurant in the student union. Mrs. Meadows left, and Hannah—”

“You’re on a first-name basis?”

“Your grandmother stayed to finish her coffee. When she stood up, she almost passed out. I tried to get her to go to the emergency room, but she insisted she was fine to come home.”

“So you grabbed the opportunity to drive her out here.”

“She was going to drive herself,” the young woman protested.

“Why not just put her in a cab?”

“She didn’t want to leave her car there to be towed by the snowplow crews. Will you quit yelling at me and think about it? I’m betting that’s just like her.”

She was right, Kurt admitted. His grandmother was perfectly capable of refusing to see a doctor, and of insisting on not leaving her car unattended, of driving when she shouldn’t. And she was behaving oddly—she didn’t normally fling her coat onto the floor.

“Thank you for bringing her home,” he said quietly. “I’ll take it from here.”

But the woman didn’t budge. She looked almost uncomfortable.

Kurt wondered why she didn’t just go. Was she waiting for some sort of payment? Or did she have something else on her mind?

He frowned as he remembered the flash of familiarity he’d felt last night. He’d dismissed that as the look of a woman on the prowl. But had it been more than that? He tipped his head to one side and looked closely. Tall, slim and straight, red hair and big brown eyes, and a smile full of magic…What had his grandmother called her?

A few random words swirled in his brain and settled into a pattern. Magic smile. Lissa. You’ve done your homework….

“Calculus class,” he said softly. “You’re Lissa Morgan.”

It was no wonder, really, that he hadn’t recognized her last night. There was nothing about this slender, vivid woman with the huge brown eyes which even resembled the lanky, awkward girl who was stored in his memory—the one with frizzy carrot-colored hair straggling to the middle of her back. The freshman frump, some of his fellow students had called her—dressed in oversized shapeless sweaters and with her face always buried in a math book.

And yet there was one thing which hadn’t changed. He’d seen it last night when she’d smiled, and that was why she’d looked familiar, despite all the surface changes. Because the only other time that she’d ever smiled at him….

That was long ago, he told himself. Another lifetime, in fact.

Still, no wonder he’d been itchy around her last night. No wonder he’d picked at her, egged her on, found fault with everything she did. His subconscious mind must have recognized her, despite all the changes in her looks.

“So you’re still hanging around the university?” he said. “I figured by now you’d be head actuary for some big pension fund or insurance company or national bank. Or an engineer somewhere in the space program. Or—no, I have it. You must be working undercover at the student union, checking for fraud. Because I’m sure a woman with the brainpower you’ve got would never be satisfied with just running a cloakroom.”

Her jaw tightened, and he thought for a second she was going to take a swing at him.

“She’s not running a cloakroom,” his grandmother said from the stairway landing. “Not anymore. Kurt, Lissa is my new driver. Only I’m going to call her my personal assistant, because it sounds so much nicer. Don’t you agree?”

CHAPTER TWO

IF HANNAH WILDER had pulled the stair railing loose and hit her grandson over the head with it, Kurt couldn’t have looked more dazed. Under other circumstances, Lissa thought, she might have enjoyed watching him turn green. She wondered whether it was Hannah’s announcement or his past coming back to haunt him which had caused Kurt’s reaction.

Then she almost snorted at the idea. As if Lissa Morgan popping back into his life after all this time could have any such stunning effect on him. Frankly, she was surprised that even her name had jolted his memory loose. Any guy who would make a bet with his buddies on whether he could get the most unpopular girl in the class to believe that he was interested in her—and prove it in the most intimate of ways—just so they could all laugh at her for the rest of the semester because she’d been taken in by his charm, wouldn’t bother to remember the details six years later.

Unless she’d been an even funnier joke to him than she’d realized. Unless she’d been an even easier conquest than he’d hoped for.

Which, of course, she had been. Stupid—that was the only word for her back then.

He’d been a senior in college, taking advanced math for the second time to fill out his requirements, struggling to get his grade point far enough above the danger level so he could graduate in a couple of months. So when he’d asked her—only a freshman, but the most advanced student in the class nevertheless—to tutor him, there had been no reason for Lissa to think he might not be telling the truth about his motives….

Stop it, she thought. That was all over. Her days as the frump were long past. If anything, she should thank Kurt Callahan, because in a convoluted way he’d inspired her to lose the frizzy hair and the bulky sweaters and make herself into an entirely new woman….

Yeah, right, she thought dryly. Keep talking, Lissa, and maybe you’ll convince yourself that a one-night stand with him was a good thing.

Still, she wasn’t about to let herself overreact now; she was bigger than that, and running into him again wasn’t going to change anything.

So what if he was even better-looking now than he’d been in college, with his crisp black hair and unusual blue-gray eyes, his youthful arrogance mellowed by time and success into something more like self-confidence? It didn’t matter to her anymore.

But why couldn’t that encounter last night have been the end of it? She’d been proud of the way she’d handled herself in the cloakroom standoff. She hadn’t lost her temper or embarrassed herself. She hadn’t even needed to publicly rub his nose in the facts in order to feel good about telling him to get lost. But now that she was face to face with him once more…. Now that he had remembered her….

Hannah’s offer had seemed so simple on the drive from the student union to her house. And it was so perfectly logical. You need a job, Hannah had said. And I need some help for a while. We can be a team. What difference did it make whether the woman offering to hire her was Kurt Callahan’s grandmother? He wouldn’t know anything about it.

Only here he was—in the flesh. And what nice flesh it was, too, Lissa thought. Today he wasn’t wearing a suit, but khakis and a polo shirt, and the clothing showed him off nicely. He was tanned and athletic without being showy—no overdone bulges of biceps. In fact, he was perfectly proportioned, without a flaw anywhere to draw the eye. He might be a little more muscular than he’d been six years ago, a little more imposing. But even then he’d been pretty much perfect—strong and hard and clean and intoxicatingly attractive.

In short, she admitted, he’d been simply intoxicating. He’d acted on her senses like a rich old brandy, sweeping away every inhibition, every fragment of common sense…. He’d used his charm, he’d used her, just so he could win a bet.

What a shame it was that Kurt Callahan’s flaws were on the inside. He hadn’t had a conscience six years ago, and she doubted very much that he’d grown one since.

Well, she’d just have to work around him, that was all. Surely he wouldn’t be staying in Minneapolis for long—a man with his responsibilities? And Hannah’s plan was not only simple, logical and sensible, it was the best deal Lissa was likely to find.

How it had come about, however, was nothing short of fantastic, when Lissa stopped to think about it. She’d simply been doing her job, taking care of two elderly lunch patrons. She’d seen them many times before in the union’s dining room—they were simply Mrs. Wilder and Mrs. Meadows, and she treated them as she did every other patron.

Then Mrs. Meadows had left, and Hannah Wilder had sat still a little longer, drinking her coffee and chatting as Lissa cleared the table and brought her receipt. And then she’d got up from her chair, reeled, and almost fallen….