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

diggers the way men do. Men don't care why a woman is attracted to them, so long as the woman is attracted. Women care about the whys."

"Yeah, go figure."

"Women want to be wanted not because they're wealthy," she continued, ignoring him, "but because they're desirable as women. And anyway, how can you say you're using How to Trap a Tycoon in your quest? It's in chapter one, for heaven's sake, that Lauren Grable-Monroe discusses the importance of looking good. And you look much more handsome—not to mention successful—in that suit than you do wearing those silly cartoon neckties you usually wear."

He turned to gaze at her with clear surprise. "You don't like my neckties? How can you not like my neckties? I have excellent taste in neckties."

Edie rolled her eyes. "Oh, please. You have no taste in neckties. You have one with the Scooby Gang on it."

He gaped at her. "Hey, the Scooby Gang is hot right now, I'll have you know. An old Scooby Doo lunch box just like the one I used to carry to school went for more than two hundred bucks on eBay not too long ago."

Strangely, Edie didn't find this information particularly impressive. Go figure. "You carried a Scooby Doo lunch box to school?" she asked, battling a smile, but not very hard.

This time Lucas was the one to blush. "Yeah. Well. It was a hand-me-down from my older sister, okay?" he defended himself. Then he quickly turned the tables. "What kind of lunch box did you carry? I'm guessing Barbie. Pink and purple plastic, am I right?"

"Actually," she said, "I attended a school where the lunch was covered by the tuition, so I never carried a lunch box at all."

"You went to a private school?" Lucas asked, his interest obviously piqued—and quite a bit more than she would have suspected, too.

Damn . She really hadn't meant to give him any details about her past, but the words were out of her mouth before she'd realized she meant to say them. Resigned to the fact that he wouldn't let up until he had the answers he wanted—she'd seen for herself that he could be tenacious when his curiosity was roused—she reluctantly nodded. "Yeah, I went to private school," she told him.

"Catholic school?" he asked. "'Cause you know, I have a real fondness for those uniforms, with their little plaid skirts and those shirts with the little round collars and those knee socks and—"

She held up a hand to cut him off before he started to drool. "Not Catholic school," she told him. "But we did wear a uniform."

He wiggled his eyebrows playfully. "Plaid?" he asked hopefully.

She shook her head. "Navy blue."

"Little round collars?"

She sighed with much resignation. "Yes."

"Knee socks?"

"Yes."

"I bet you were on the field hockey team, weren't you?"

"Well, if you must know—"

"Oh, I must."

"Yes. I was on the field hockey team. We were undefeated my sophomore year."

He said nothing for a moment, but a look came over his face that was positively sublime. Finally, "Oh, I would have liked to see that," he said softly. "You running around a field in one of those short skirts, all sweaty and intense. I bet every boy in school was after you."

"There were no boys at my school," she told him. "Just girls."

He squeezed his eyes shut tight in what she could only liken to sheer ecstasy. "Oh, stop," he murmured. "You're killin' me. I'm not gonna get a wink of sleep tonight."

"But then, we were talking about you," she said suddenly, turning the tables again. Something about the ecstatic look on Lucas's face wreaked havoc on her system, made her heart trip-hammer erratically behind her ribs, made her entire body hum with something she figured it really shouldn't be humming with. Not in mixed and polite company, at any rate.

Lucas eyed her with much interest for a moment more, then replied, "Yeah, we were talking about how I've always been way ahead of my time when it comes to fashion."

She rolled her eyes again. "Oh, please," she said. "You're a walking, talking Fashion Don't. I can't imagine how you've made it through life this long with your taste. Or lack thereof. Then again," she added, not a little maliciously, "you haven't made it, have you? Not lately, anyway. And certainly not with a tycoon."

He gazed at her mildly. "There's no need to be crass, Edie."

She ignored that comment, too, and continued blithely, "That's why you've had to enlist my help tonight."

He smiled lasciviously. "You're going to make it with me? Why, Edie, I wish I'd known. I would have worn clean underwear."

She frowned at him. "That's not what I meant, and you know it."

"What I know is that there's something in your voice when you talk about my making it with a tycoon…" He arched his pale-blond eyebrows with much speculation. "Could it be jealousy?" he asked smoothly.

A funny little shimmer of heat went dancing down her spine at the glint of frank appraisal that lit his eyes. "Don't be ridiculous," she told him. But her voice came out sounding thin and uncertain, even to her own ears. "Why on earth would I be jealous of you?"

"Not jealous of me," he said. "Jealous over me."

"I have no idea what you're talking about."

His smile turned knowing, and that funny little shimmer of heat slipped deeper inside her, simmering in her belly. "Don't you?" he asked. "Your lips say no, but your eyes…"

"My eyes say, 'Stuff it,'" she told him. "Why would I ever feel jealous over you?"

"Just a shot in the dark here, Edie, but maybe because … you like me?"

His question didn't even bear commenting on, so she turned her back on him and sipped her champagne and pretended to be taken with the painting closest to where they stood, a spatter of purple and gray against a background of dark blue that was actually… Wow. Really, really cool. Beautiful, even. Just for the heck of it, she bent forward to check the price of the