How to Trap a Tycoon, Elizabeth Bevarly [best smutty novels txt] 📗

of the department stores downtown. She'd come up from her hometown in Kentucky to look for work, because her family was large and poor and she wanted to help out." He smiled briefly. "I was enchanted from the moment she said, 'May I help you?' She had a charming voice, a beautiful smile… She was just a lovely girl all around."

"What was her name?" Edie asked a bit roughly.

"Melody," he said with a sad smile. His blue eyes, too, took on a melancholy cast. "Melody Chance. I loved her name. I loved her smile. I loved everything about her."

"So what happened?" This time, it was Lucas who voiced the question.

Davenport sighed heavily again as he set his untasted coffee on the steamer trunk and dragged a hand through his black hair. "I wasn't exactly engaged when I met your mother," he said to Edie, "but there was an understanding between my family and my wife's family that Lucinda and I would be married after we finished college. And she and I wanted to be married," he added readily. "We'd known each other since childhood, and we were very much in love. But Lucinda was in Europe that summer, touring with her grandmother and great-aunt, and I just … I don't know. I suppose I didn't see the harm in spending the time with someone else. I thought Melody would be a nice summer diversion. I had no idea I would fall in love with her, too. I know that sounds terrible, but I truly was just a boy. A selfish boy, to be sure, but…"

"And you got her pregnant," Edie said, stating the obvious.

Davenport nodded. "Yes. But I didn't know about it. Melody never told me she was expecting. Apparently, she didn't know it herself until after she returned home. But as summer came to an end, as it came closer to time for me to return to Stanford, she told me she wanted to return to Kentucky . That she missed her family, that Chicago was much too big a place for her to live, that she would rather look for work closer to home. I objected, told her I'd take care of her if she stayed, but she was adamant."

He expelled another ragged breath. "I was young," he repeated. "Torn between my obligation to and love for Lucinda, and my love for Melody. I knew my family would never forgive me if I didn't go back to school. And I knew I'd be a social pariah if I didn't marry Lucinda, as had always been assumed. But had I known Melody was pregnant…"

He stood suddenly, and Lucas jerked away from the wall, ready to… Something. But all Davenport did was pace restlessly to the opposite side of the room, so Lucas relaxed and went back to merely being suspicious. Interestingly, though, his suspicion wasn't quite as overwhelming as it had been fifteen minutes ago. Maybe it was just his imagination, but when he gazed at Edie and Davenport in profile, he did detect a certain resemblance between the two. And the other man seemed so genuinely earnest in his explanation. It was hard to stay distrustful of someone who seemed so utterly distraught.

"So where is my mother now?" Edie asked. Her voice was a little stronger now, her doubt, like Lucas's clearly wavering toward belief.

Her question brought Davenport around in a quick pivot, his lips parted as if he intended to speak. But no words emerged.

"Mr. Davenport?" she asked again.

"Look, I know it's inappropriate to ask you to call me 'Dad,' but this 'Mr. Davenport' business really does have to go." He threw her a halfhearted smile. "My first name is Russell. You could call me that, if nothing else."

But instead of addressing him thus, Edie repeated, "Where's my mother?"

Russell Davenport's smile fell. "She died last year, Edie. I'm sorry."

Edie offered no reaction whatever to the revelation, Lucas noted, only continued to gaze at Davenport in that even, almost unreal, manner.

"She had an inoperable brain tumor," he continued. "The doctors discovered it just two months before she died. It took her six weeks following the diagnosis to find me, and tell me about you. Had she not, I never would have known about you. I never would have found you. But she didn't want to die without giving me the knowledge of my daughter. And I will always be grateful to her for that."

"She's dead?" Edie finally echoed.

The other man nodded. "I'm afraid so. I'm sorry."

Davenport continued with his story after that, but Lucas could see that Edie was only half-listening. So he paid attention himself, certain she'd want to go over the details again later, when she was feeling less… Whatever it was she was feeling at the moment. Frankly, he couldn't imagine.

So he listened intently as Davenport described his bittersweet reunion with Melody Chance, and about how he hired a private investigator to find the child he didn't know he had, and about how, nearly a year later, the investigator found Edie tending bar at Drake's, not six blocks from where Russell Davenport worked. Shortly afterward, Davenport had applied for membership to the club, and had started rehearsing his speech for announcing his paternity. But he'd never quite been able to bring himself to make that announcement. He'd been fearful of how his wife and children would react, but worse, he'd been afraid Edie would reject him.

"Reject you?" she said with a gasp when he put voice to the statement, clearly fully focused now on what he was saying. "Why on earth would I reject you?"

"I don't know," Davenport said. "But I was afraid if I told you who I was you'd…"

"What?"

"You'd see me as an intruder. Someone who wanted to compromise all the fond memories you had of your childhood and the adoptive parents who raised you. I didn't want you to think I was trying to usurp their roles in your happiness."

She expelled a soft sound of disbelief. But all she said was, "That's