How to Trap a Tycoon by Elizabeth Bevarly (thriller books to read txt) 📕

She sighed fitfully and shoved a handful of curls off her forehead as she propped an elbow on the back of the couch. It really was much too late to get into this tonight. She should just go home and forget about how nice it felt to be with Adam again. Forget about how much she had missed being with him this way, just talking. Forget about how much she wanted to be with him in another way, too. Forget about how wonderful it would be to sit here all night with him, just talking. Or … something.

Instead of forgetting all that, though, she heard herself saying, "You know my mother, of course."

Adam nodded. "She's a charming woman."

"Yes, Carlotta is that," Dorsey agreed.

He considered her with much interest. "Why do you call her Carlotta?" he asked.

"Oh, gee, I don't know," she replied mildly. "Maybe because that's her name?"

He chuckled. "No, I mean, why don't you call her Mom?"

She grinned. "Does Carlotta honestly seem like a Mom to you?"

He thought about that for a moment. "Well, no, now that you mention it, I suppose not. But it's still kind of unusual."

"Maybe. But I've never called her anything else. I guess she just always referred to herself as Carlotta when I was a very young child, so I learned to call her that, too. But we digress," she said pointedly.

"Yes, we were talking about how charming your mother is."

Dorsey nodded. "That's because being charming is Carlotta's life's work."

"And why is that?" he asked.

She sighed heavily, set her drink on the end table beside her, and dropped her hand into her lap. "Because being charming—among other things—is pretty much how my mother makes her living."

A flare of bewilderment crossed Adam's face. "What do you mean?"

Dorsey inhaled deeply again before continuing very carefully, "My mother has … made her way in the world by … being kept. By whatever man will have her, whatever man can afford to keep her for any length of time."

"Kept," Adam repeated, his expression clouding a bit more. "I'm not sure I follow you."

Dorsey smiled benignly. "Oh, I bet you do. You're a smart guy. Think about it."

He opened his mouth to speak, said nothing for a moment, then ventured, "Are you saying that your mother has spent her life as a man's mistress?"

Dorsey smiled again, though it wasn't as happily as before. "Actually, I think Carlotta prefers to think of herself as a courtesan, and she's actually been more than one man's mistress, but… Yes. For the most part, my mother"—she adopted her best Blanche Dubois, crushed-magnolia voice—"has always depended on the kindness of strangers."

Adam said nothing for a moment, just seemed to mull that over for a bit before continuing. Dorsey let him mull, because she knew it wasn't every day that a man found himself chatting with the product of an illicit love affair. If, of course, one could call Carlotta's relationships love affairs. Which, of course, Dorsey didn't. Had there been love involved in any of them, neither she nor her mother would be alone these days. Carlotta's relationships had been founded for economic reasons, at least on her part. As to why her benefactors had entered into the union, well…

Dorsey still wasn't quite sure what they'd gotten from the arrangement, other than the obvious—sex. They certainly hadn't entered into the relationships out of love.

"Your mother mentioned that night at your house that she had never been married," Adam said, stirring her thoughts.

"No, she hasn't been," Dorsey agreed.

He hesitated a moment before continuing, "Even so, I assumed that she and your father…" But he left the statement unfinished.

Not that it needed finishing, she thought. She had known this was coming, had set herself up for it. It made sense that Adam would be curious about such a thing, and neither Dorsey nor her mother had ever tried to hide the circumstances surrounding her birth, though they never named Reginald Dorsey specifically as her father.

And it wasn't like this was the first time Dorsey had had to explain to someone the absence of a father in her life. Ever since she was six years old—the last time she'd spoken a word to her father—she had been spinning one tale or another to explain why he wasn't around. First for her friends, then for herself. Somewhere along the line, though, she'd forgotten which of those tales was true and which were wishful thinking.

What it all boiled down to was that Reginald Dorsey had been one of her mother's patrons for almost ten years. It was evidently as close to a love affair as Carlotta had ever come. During that time, she had become pregnant with Dorsey. Reginald had been attentive enough to his daughter those first six years—when he'd been around—but once he'd tired of Carlotta, he had, of necessity, shed his daughter, too. Since then, Dorsey hadn't exchanged a single word with him.

Oh, she knew quite a bit about him, and not just through Carlotta's recounting of the past. He was a prominent local businessman who had been happily—to the outside world, at least—married until his wife's death more than a year ago. He claimed three grown legitimate children, all older than Dorsey, and lived alone now save the servants in a big, beautiful Tudor mansion in Hinsdale .

In fact, since he and Carlotta traveled in the same social circle, her mother still ran into him from time to time. On those occasions, according to Carlotta, the two of them would exchange polite conversation for as little time as they could manage. Rarely, though, did he ask about his—other—daughter.

Dorsey's social circle was considerably less affluent than Reginald's and Carlotta's was, so she never ran into the man. Nor did she ever ask after him, either. Carlotta had forgiven him for his abandonment of her two decades ago, ascribing it to hazards of the job. Dorsey, however, had never been employed by Reginald. Therefore, she