But it was two days later that Eli called a meeting for the two of them in Sherwood Forest, their name for her father’s garden. Chelsea had never seen such a light in his eyes before. It was almost as though he had a fever.
“What’s wrong?” she whispered, knowing it had to be something awful.
When he handed her a newspaper clipping, his hand was shaking. Having no idea what to expect, she read it, then knew less than she did before she’d started. It was a small clipping from a magazine about a man named Franklin Taggert, one of the major heads of Montgomery-Taggert Enterprises. He’d been involved in a small accident and his right arm had been broken in two places. Because he had chosen to seclude himself in a cabin hidden in the Rocky Mountains until his arm healed, several meetings and contract finalizations had been postponed.
When Chelsea finished reading, she looked up at Eli in puzzlement. “So?”
“He’s my friend,” Eli said in a voice filled with such awe that Chelsea felt a wave of jealousy shoot through her.
“Your billionaire?” she asked disdainfully.
Eli didn’t seem to notice her reaction as he began to pace in front of her. “It was your idea,” he said. “Sometimes, Chelsea, I forget that you are as much a female as my mother.”
Chelsea was not sure whether or not she liked that statement.
“You said I should find her a husband, that I should find her a rich man to take care of her. But how can I trust the care of my mother to just any man? He must be a man of insight as well as money.”
Chelsea’s eyebrows had risen to high up in her hairline. This was a whole new Eli she was seeing.
“The logical problem has been how to introduce my mother to a wealthy man. She is a nurse, and twenty-one percent of all romance novels at one point or another have a wounded hero and a heroine who nurses him back to health, with true love always following. So it follows that her being a nurse would give her an introduction to rich, wounded men. But since she works at a public hospital and rich men tend to hire private nurses, she has not met them.”
“So now you plan to get your mother the job of nursing this man? But Eli,” she said gently, “how do you get this man to hire your mother? And how do you know he’s a good man, not just a wealthy one? And if they do meet, how do you know they’ll fall in love? I think falling in love has to do with physical vibrations.” She’d read this last somewhere, and it seemed to explain what her dopey sisters were always talking about.
Eli raised one eyebrow. “How could any man not fall in love with my mother? My problem has been keeping men away from her, not the other way around.”
Chelsea knew better than to comment on that. Making Eli see his mother as a normal human being was impossible. He seemed to think she had a golden glow around her. “Then how . . .” She hesitated, then smiled. “Robin and Marian Les Jeunes?”
“Yes. I think Mr. Taggert is at the cabin alone. We have to find out where it is, send my mother a letter hiring her, give her directions, then get her up there. They will fall in love and he’ll take care of her. He is a proper man.”
Chelsea blinked at him for a moment. “A ‘proper man’?” She could see that Eli wasn’t going to tell her another word, but she knew how to handle him. “If you don’t tell me how you know this man, I won’t help you. I won’t do a thing. You’ll be all alone.”
Eli knew that she was bluffing. Chelsea had too much curiosity not to go along with any of his projects, but he did want to tell her how he’d met Frank Taggert. “You remember two years ago when my class went on a field trip to see Montgomery-Taggert Enterprises?”
She didn’t remember, but she nodded anyway.
“I wasn’t going to go, but at the last moment I decided it might be interesting, so I went.”
“For the stationery,” Chelsea said.
He smiled at her, glad of her understanding. “Yes, of course. We didn’t have any from the Montgomery-Taggert industries, and I wanted to be prepared in case we needed it.”
He told her how when he was standing there, bored, with a condescending secretary asking the children if they would like to play with the paper clips, Eli looked across the room to see a man sitting on the edge of a desk talking on the telephone. He had on a denim shirt, jeans, and cowboy boots. Maybe he was dressed like the janitor, but to Eli the man radiated power, like a fire generating heat waves.
Quietly moving about the room, Eli got behind him so the man couldn’t see him, then listened to his telephone conversation. It took Eli a moment to realize that the man was making a multimillion-dollar deal. When he talked of “five and twenty,” he was talking of five million and twenty million. Dollars.
When the man hung up, Eli started to move away.
“Hear what you wanted to, kid?”
Eli froze in his tracks, his breath held. He couldn’t believe the man knew he was there. Most people paid no attention to kids. How had this man seen him?
“Are you too cowardly to face me?”
Eli stood straighter, then walked to stand in front of the man.
“Tell me what you heard.”
Since adults seemed to like to think that children could hear only what the adults wanted them to, Eli usually found it expedient to lie. But he didn’t lie to this man. He told him everything: numbers, names, places. He repeated whatever he could remember of the phone conversation he’d just heard.
As the man looked at Eli, his face had no discernible expression. “I saw you skulking about the office. What were you looking for?”
Eli took a deep breath. He and Chelsea had never told an adult about their collection of letterheads, much less what they did with them. But he told this man the truth.
The man’s eyes bore into Eli’s. “You know that what you’re doing is illegal, don’t you?”
Eli looked hard back at him. “Yes, sir, I do. But we only write letters to people who are hurting others or ignoring their responsibilities. We’ve written a number of letters to fathers who don’t pay the child support they owe.”
The man lifted one eyebrow, studied Eli for a moment, then turned to a passing secretary. “Get this young man’s name and send him a complete packet of stationery from all Montgomery-Taggert Enterprises. Get them from Maine and Colorado and Washington State.” He looked back at Eli. “And call the foreign offices too. London, Cairo, all of them.”
“Yes, sir, Mr. Taggert,” the secretary said, looking in wonder at Eli. All the employees were terrified of Frank Taggert, yet this child had done something to merit his special consideration.
When Eli got over his momentary shock, he managed to say, “Thank you.”
Frank put out his hand to the boy. “My name is Franklin Taggert. Come see me when you graduate from a university and I’ll give you a job.”
Shaking his hand, Eli managed to say hoarsely, “What should I study?”
“With your mind, you’re going to study everything,” Frank said as he got off the desk and turned away, then disappeared through a doorway.
Eli stared after him, but in that moment, with those few words, he felt that his future had been decided. He knew where he was going and how he was going to get there. And for the first time in his life, Eli had a hero.
“And then what?” Chelsea asked.
“He sent the copies of the letterheads—you’ve seen them—I wrote to thank him and he wrote back. And we became friends.”
Part of Chelsea wanted to scream that he had betrayed her by not telling her of this. Two years! He had kept this from her for two whole years. But she’d learned that it was no good berating Eli. He kept secrets if he wanted to and seemed to think nothing of it.
“So you want your mother to marry this man? Why did you just come up with this idea now?” She meant her words to be rather spiteful, to get him back for hiding something so interesting from her, but she knew the answer as s
oon as she asked. Until now Eli had wanted his beloved mother to himself. Her eyes widened. If Eli was willing to turn his mother over to the care of this man, he must . . .
“Do you really and truly like him?”
“He is like a father to me,” Eli said softly.
“Have you told him about me?”
The way Eli said “Of course” mollified her temper somewhat. “Okay, so how do we get them together? Where is this cabin of his?” She didn’t have to ask how they would get his mother up there. All they had to do was write her a letter on Montgomery-Taggert stationery and offer her a nursing job.
“I don’t know,” Eli answered, “but I’m sure we can figure it out.”
Three weeks later, Chelsea was ready to give up. “Eli,” she said in exasperation, “you have to give up. We can’t find him.”
Eli set his mouth tighter, his head propped in his hands in despair. They’d spent three weeks sending faxes and writing letters to people, hinting that they needed to know where Frank Taggert was. Either people didn’t know or they weren’t telling.
“I don’t know what else we can do,” Chelsea said. “It’s getting closer to Christmas and it’s getting colder in the mountains. He’ll leave soon, and she won’t get to meet him.”
The first week she’d asked him why he didn’t just introduce his mother to Mr. Taggert, and Eli had looked at her as though she were crazy. “They will be polite to each other because of me, but what can they have in common unless they meet on equal ground? Have you learned nothing from my mother’s books? The rich duke meets the governess in a place where they are forced to be together.”
But they had tried everything and still couldn’t get his mother together with Mr. Taggert. “There is one thing we haven’t tried yet,” Chelsea said.
Eli didn’t take his head out of his hands. “There is nothing. I’ve thought of everything.”
“We haven’t tried the truth.”
Turning, Eli looked at her. “What truth?”
“My parents were nearly dying for my sister to get married. My mother said my sister was losing her chances because she was getting old. She was nearly thirty. So if this Mr. Taggert is forty, maybe his family is dying to get him married too.”
Eli gave her a completely puzzled look.
“Let’s make an appointment with one of his brothers and tell him we have a wife for Mr. Taggert and see if he will help us.”
When Eli didn’t respond, Chelsea frowned. “It’s worth a try, isn’t it? Come on, stop moping and tell me the name of one of his brothers here in Denver.”
“Michael,” Eli said. “Michael Taggert.”
“Okay, let’s make an appointment with him and tell him what’s going on.”
After a moment’s hesitation, Eli turned to his keyboard. “Yes, let’s try.”
Michael Taggert looked up from his desk to see his secretary, Kathy, at the door wearing a mischievous grin.
“Remember the letter you received from Mr. Elijah J. Harcourt requesting a meeting today?”
Frowning, Mike gave a curt nod. In thirty minutes, he was to meet his wife for lunch, and from the look on Kathy’s face there might be some complications that would hold him up. “Yes?”
“He brought his secretary with him,” Kathy said, breaking into a wide smile.
Mike couldn’t see why a man and his secretary would cause such merriment, but then Kathy stepped aside and Mike saw two kids, both about twelve years old, enter the room behind her. The boy was tall, thin, with huge glasses and eyes so intense he reminded Mike of a hawk. The girl, even taller, had the easy confidence of what promised to be beauty and, unless he missed his guess, money.
I don’t have time for this, Mike thought, and wondered who’d put these kids up to this visit. Silently, he motioned for them to take a seat.
“You’re busy and so are we, so I’ll get right to the point,” Eli said.
Mike had to repress a smile. The boy’s manner was surprisingly adult, and he reminded him of someone but Mike couldn’t think who.
“I want my mother to marry your brother.”
“Ah, I see,” Mike said, leaning back in his chair. “And which one of my brothers would that be?”
“The oldest one, Frank.”
Mike nearly fell out of his chair. “Frank?” he gasped. His eldest brother was a terror, as precise as a measuring device, and about as warm as Maine in February. “Frank? You want your mother to marry Frank?” He leaned forward. “Tell me, kid, you got it in for your mother or what?”
At that Eli came out of his seat, his face red. “Mr. Taggert is a very nice man, and you can’t say anything against him or my mother!”
The girl put her hand on Eli’s arm and he instantly sat down, but he turned his head away and wouldn’t look at Mike.
“Perhaps I might explain,” the girl said, and she introduced herself.
Mike was impressed with the girl as she succinctly told their story, of Eli’s offer to go to Princeton but his refusal to leave his mother alone. As she spoke, Mike kept looking at Eli, trying to piece everything together. So the kid wanted a billionaire to take care of his mother. Ambitious brat, wasn’t he?
But Mike began to have a change of heart when Eli turned to Chelsea and said, “Don’t tell him that. He doesn’t like his brother.”
“Tell me what?” Mike encouraged. “And I love my brother. It’s just that he’s sometimes hard to take. Are you sure you have the right Frank Taggert?”
At that Eli removed a worn, raggedy envelope from the folder he was carrying. Mike recognized it as Frank’s private stationery, something he reserved for the family only. It was a way the family had of distinguishing private from business mail. His family frequently joked that Frank never used family stationery for anyone who did not bear the same last name as he did. There was even a rumor that on the rare times he’d sent a note to whichever date was waiting for him at the moment, he’d used business letterhead.
Yet Frank had written this boy a letter on his private stationery.
“May I see that?” Mike asked, extending his hand.
Eli started to return the letter to his folder.
“Go on,” Chelsea urged. “This is important.” Reluctantly, Eli handed the letter to Mike.
Slowly, Mike took the single sheet of paper from the envelope and read it. It was handwritten, not typed. To Mike’s knowledge, Frank had not handwritten anything since he’d left his university.
My dear Eli,
I was so glad to receive your last letter. Your new theories on artificial intelligence sound magnificent. Yes, I’ll have someone check what’s already been done.
One of my brother’s wives had a baby, a little girl, with cheeks as red as roses. I set up a trust fund for her but told no one.
I’m glad you liked your birthday present, and I’ll wear the cuff links you sent me next time I see the president.
How are Chelsea and your mother? Let me know if your dad ever again refuses to pay child support. I know a few legal people and I also know a few thugs. Any man who isn’t grateful to have a son like you deserves to be taught a lesson.
My love and friendship to you,
Frank
Mike had to read the letter three times, and even though he was sure it was from his brother, he couldn’t believe it. When one of his siblings produced yet another child, Frank’s only comment was “Don’t any of you ever stop?” Yet here he was saying his brother’s new baby had cheeks like roses—which she did.
Mike carefully refolded the letter and inserted it back into the envelope. Eli nearly snatched it from his hands.
“Eli wants his mother to meet Mr. Frank Taggert in a place where they will be equal,” Chelsea said. “She’s a nurse, and we know Mr. Taggert’s been injured, so we thought she could go to this cabin in the mountains where he’s stayin
g. But we can’t find where it is so we can send her there.”
Mike was having difficulty believing what she was saying. He looked at his watch. “I’m to meet my wife for lunch in ten minutes. Would you two like to join us?”
Forty-five minutes later, with the help of his wife, Samantha, Mike finally understood the whole story. And more importantly, he’d figured out who Eli reminded him of. Eli was like Frank: cool exterior, intense eyes, brilliant brain, obsessive personality.
As Mike listened, he was somewhat hurt and annoyed that his elder brother had chosen a stranger’s child to love. But at least Frank’s love for Eli proved he could love.
“I think it’s all wonderfully romantic,” Samantha said.
“I think the poor woman’s going to meet Frank and be horrified,” Mike muttered, but when Samantha kicked him under the table, he shut up.
“So how do we arrange this?” Samantha asked. “And what size dress does your mother wear?”
“Twelve petite,” Chelsea said. “She’s short and f—” She didn’t have to turn to feel Eli’s glare. He wasn’t saying much, and she knew that it was because he was hostile toward Mike. “She’s, ah, round,” Chelsea finished.
“I understand,” Samantha said, getting a little notebook from her handbag.
“What difference does her dress size make?” Mike asked.
Chelsea and Samantha looked at him as though he were stupid. “She can’t very well arrive at the cabin wearing jeans and a sweatshirt, now can she? Chelsea, shall we go buy some cashmere?”
“Cashmere?!” Eli and Mike said in unison, and it made a bond between them: men versus women.
Samantha ignored her husband’s outburst. “Mike, you can write a letter to Mrs. Harcourt saying—”
“Stowe,” Eli said. “My father’s new wife wanted my mother to resume her maiden name, so she did.”
At that Samantha gave Mike a hard look, and he knew that all sense of proportion was lost. From now on, anything Eli and Chelsea wanted, they’d get.