Change of Heart (3 page)

When Miranda remained tight-lipped in silence, he knew he’d hit the amount exactly on the head. Later, he’d tell Chelsea and allow her to congratulate him on his insight.

Eli uttered a curse word under his breath.

“Eli!” Miranda said sternly. “I will not allow you to call your father such names.” Her face softened. “Sweetheart, you’re too young to be so cynical. You must believe in people. I worry that you’ve been traumatized by your father leaving you without male guidance. And I know you’re hiding your true feelings: I know you miss him very much.”

Eli, looking very much like an old man, said, “You must be watching TV talk shows again. I do not miss him; I never saw him when you were married to him. My father is a self-centered, selfish bastard.”

Miranda’s mouth tightened into a line that was a mirror of her son’s. “Whether that is true or not is irrelevant. He
is
your father.”

Eli’s expression didn’t change. “I’m sure it is too much to hope that you were unfaithful to him and that my real father is actually the king of a small but rich European country.”

As always, Miranda’s face lost its stern look and she laughed. She was as unable to remain angry with Eli as she was to resist the whining and pleading of her ex-husband. She knew Eli would hate for her to say this, but he was very much like his father. Both of them always went after whatever they wanted and allowed nothing to stop them.

No, Eli wouldn’t appreciate such an observation in the least.

Eli was so annoyed with his mother for once again allowing Leslie Harcourt to con her out of paying the child support that he couldn’t say another word, but turned away and went to his room. At this moment his father owed six months in back child support. Instead of paying it, he’d come to Miranda and shed a few tears, telling her how broke he was, knowing he could get Miranda to give him money. Eli knew that his father liked to test his ability to sell at every opportunity. Seeing if he could con Miranda was an exercise in salesmanship.

The truth—a truth Miranda didn’t know—was that Leslie had recently purchased a sixty-thousand-dollar Mercedes, and the payments on that car were indeed stretching him financially. (Eli and Chelsea had been able to tap into a few credit-report data banks and find out all sorts of “confidential” information about people.)

Eli spent thirty minutes in his room, stewing over the perfidy of his father, but when he saw that his mother was outside tending her roses, he went back to the living room and called the man who was his father.

Eli didn’t waste time with greetings. “If you don’t pay three months’ support within twenty-four hours and another three months’ within thirty days, I’ll put sugar in the gas tank of your new car.” He then hung up the phone.

Twenty-two hours later, Leslie appeared at the door of Miranda’s house with the money. As Eli stood behind his mother, he had to listen to his father give a long, syrupy speech about the goodness of people, about how some people were willing to believe in others, while others had no loyalty in their souls.

Eli stood it for a few minutes, then he looked around his mother and glared at his father until the man quickly left, after loudly telling Miranda that he’d have the other three months’ support within thirty days. Eli restrained himself from calling out that within thirty days he’d owe not three months’ support but four.

When Leslie was gone, Miranda turned to her son and smiled. “See, Eli, honey, you must believe in people. I told you your father would come through, and he did. Now, where shall we go for dinner?”

Ten minutes later, Eli was on the phone to Chelsea. “I
cannot
go to Princeton,” he said softly. “I cannot leave my mother unprotected.”

Chelsea didn’t hesitate. “Get here fast! We’ll meet in Sherwood Forest.”

“What are we going to do?” Chelsea whispered. They were sitting side by side on a swing glider in the garden on her parents’ twenty-acre estate. It was prime real estate, close to the heart of Denver. Her father had bought four houses and torn down three of them to give himself the acreage. Not that he was ever there to enjoy the land, but he got a lot of joy out of telling people he had twenty acres in the city of Denver.

“I don’t know,” Eli said. “I can’t leave her. I know that. If I weren’t there to protect her, she’d give everything she owned to my father.”

After the story Eli had just told her, Chelsea had no doubt of this. And this wasn’t the first time Leslie Harcourt had pulled a scam on his sweet ex-wife. “I wish . . .” She trailed off, then stood up and looked down at Eli. His head was bent low as he contemplated what he was giving up by not taking this offer from Princeton. She knew he hated the idea of high school almost as much as he loved the idea of getting on with his computer research.

“I wish we could find a husband for her.”

Eli gave a snort. “We’ve tried, remember? She only likes men like my father, the ones she says ‘need’ her. They need her tendency to forgive them for everything they do.”

“I know, but wouldn’t it be nice if we could make one of those books she loves so much come true? She would meet a tall, dark billionaire, and he’d—”

“A
billionaire
?”

“Yes,” Chelsea said sagely. “My father says that, what with inflation as it is, a millionaire—even a multimillionaire—isn’t worth very much.”

Sometimes Eli was vividly reminded of how he and Chelsea differed on money. To him and his mother two hundred dollars was a great deal, but the woman who cut Chelsea’s hair charged three hundred dollars a visit.

Chelsea smiled. “You don’t happen to know any single billionaires, do you?”

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?”

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?”