She was teasing, but Eli didn’t smile. “Actually, I do. He . . . he’s my best friend. Male friend, that is.”
At that Chelsea’s eyes opened wide. One of the things she loved best about Eli was that he always had the ability to surprise her. No matter how much she thought she knew about him, it wasn’t all there was to know. “Where did you meet a billionaire and how did he get to be your friend?”
Eli just looked at her and said nothing, and when he had that expression on his face, she knew she was not going to get another word out of him. Eli had an unbreakable ability to keep secrets.
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?”