Cover to Covers (15 page)

“It will work out,” he
avowed, bolstering his confidence. Then, he remembered Clark and the young man’s optimistic attitude toward life. “As long as I keep breathing, everything will be just fine.”

Chapter
11

The travel clock on his night table read well after one in the morning when Tyler bolted upright in the queen-sized bed. He rubbed his eyes and glanced down at the iPad next to him. He remembered going through some e-mails and had decided to close his eyes for a few minutes. That had been over three hours ago.

Swinging his legs around to the side of the trundle bed, he sat up and stretched out the kink in his neck. Standing up, he
gazed about the room, and then the rumbling of his stomach reminded him that he had not eaten anything since grabbing a bagel at Love Field before boarding the jet for New Orleans.

As he walked across the bedroom, the floorboards moaned
. Would he be able to sneak down the stairs to the kitchen without having the creaking floors alert Monique and her sidekick, the ugly Bart, to his presence? Another insistent gurgle from his stomach made him decide he would risk it in order to be able to get back to sleep.

In
the almost pitch-black hallway, Tyler had to practically feel his way toward the stairs. Checking beneath Monique’s bedroom door, he was relieved to see that there was no light peeking through. He quickened his pace and eventually got down the steps with only a few resistant groans coming from the old walnut staircase.

On the first floor, the
streetlights outside the front windows afforded him a better view of the hallway heading toward the back of the house. At the end of the hallway, he found a pair of open double white doors that led to a wide kitchen. After flipping on the lights, he was pleasantly surprised by a spacious kitchen with a built-in refrigerator, island cooktop, double-oven, and a black granite countertop set beneath light oak cabinets that went all the way up to the eighteen-foot ceiling. Recessed lighting behind the top of the cabinets gave the room a warm glow, while spotlights beneath the cabinets made the stainless appliances shine.  

Nodding his head with approval, Tyler worked his way across the kitchen to the refrigerator.
He hunted through the shelves filled with cold cuts, fresh fruits, and an assortment of cheeses. Settling on sliced turkey, some grapes, melon chunks, and crackers he found on the countertop, Tyler took his plate to a square kitchen table set against the wall, ready to enjoy his midnight snack.

He was piling
a portion of turkey onto a cracker when he heard a gentle tip, tip, tip coming toward the kitchen from down the hall. Seconds later, Bart came trotting in through the open kitchen doors.

“Hey,
Ugly.”

Bart ignored him and
went to a spot where a bright blue bowl of water and a matching blue bowl of dry food had been placed on the floor.

Tyler
pointed his finger at the dog. “I think you and I need to have a serious man-to-man talk.”

B
art lapped noisily at his water, only stopping every now and then to cough.

“Won’t be much of a man-to-man talk,”
Monique voiced from the kitchen doorway, “considering he was neutered a few years back.”

Resting her shoulder against the door frame, h
er arms were folded across her short red nightshirt. Tyler’s eyes roamed over her toned legs and his hunger for food abated as a more pressing need arose within him.

“I thought you didn’t like animals
, Ty.”

He sat back in his chair as she
ambled to the refrigerator. “I like them fine, but they don’t like me.”

“You never had pets growing up?” She opened the refrigerator door and peeked inside
, making her nightshirt cling to her round butt.

“
We couldn’t afford them. My mother was a single parent and worked in a department store. It was all she could do to keep food on the table for my brother and me. So pets were not an option.”

“I forgot about Peter.” She stood back from the refrigerator. “Have you ever heard from him?”

“No.” Tyler picked up the paper napkin beside his plate. “My mother has given up completely on ever finding him. After I took over Propel, I hired a private investigator to track him down, but with no luck.”

“
I’m sorry to hear that. I know how much you admired him.”

He
wiped his hands on the napkin. “Admired may be the wrong word.”

“No, it’s not. I remember the way you spoke of him. You admired him a great deal.”

“It doesn’t matter now.” He threw the napkin back on the table.

“Must be hard not knowing what happened to him,” she continued.

“I’m over it. I was fourteen when Peter packed up all the clothes he could carry on his motorcycle and left.” Tyler could still picture his brother’s bike heading down the street outside the crappy little house they had lived in before his mother had met the fabulously wealthy Gary Leesburg. “When my mother remarried, she seemed to push Peter out of her mind and focus all of her efforts on me. In some ways, I hate Peter for leaving me at Barbara’s mercy.”

She came closer to the table. “I know if I had lost my brother, Jake, around the
age you lost Peter, I might have turned out different. Perhaps I would have been just as mistrusting, and just as doubting about the intentions of others as you. I would also have felt guilty as hell, and stuck by my mother’s side to spare her the agony of losing yet another child.”

“Don’t analyze me, Moe. I hated when you did that.” He
loaded a slice of turkey on a cracker. “If I am mistrusting and doubtful it is more a result of the nature of others, and not because of my past mishaps.”

She took a seat in the chair next to his. “Yeah, I guess being a big oil executive makes you the target of a lot of plots and conspiracies.”

“Would you stop saying it like that?”

She
stole the turkey from his plate. “Saying what?”

“The way you say ‘oil executive,’ you make it sound something akin to executioner.”

She munched on the turkey. “I guess to some environmentalists it could sound like one in the same.”

He pulled his plate to him. “Go get
your own turkey, Greenpeace.”

She giggled and Tyler’s heart damn near lifted out of his chest. “Yours tastes better.” She snuck another slice of turkey from his plate. “What about your business? Don’t you have to get back to your oil wells?”

He popped a grape into his mouth. “It’s taken care of.”

“For how long?”
she challenged.

“For a while
,” he evasively responded.

She
tilted forward in her chair. “It won’t work, you know.”

W
antonly, his eyes lingered over her red nightshirt. “What won’t work?”

“Coming here and trying to win me over, or whatever it is you’re doing. It won’t help, Ty. What we had is behind us. One night in a hotel room—”

“One very hot night in a hotel room,” he interjected.

She blushed and sat back in her chair. “Yeah, well, we were just living out our youthful passions…we’re different people now.”

“You might like to think that, Moe, but we both know that’s not true. Look at us. This is just how we were twenty-one years ago. We could stay up all night and talk about silly things, important things, but we could talk to each other. I don’t know about you, but it’s been a really long time since I’ve felt this comfortable with anyone.”

She snuck his last slice of turkey from his plate. “You’re good. I could almost hear the violins playing in the background, but I won’t budge on this. You’re outta here in the morning, Mr. Moore.” She stuffed the turkey in her mouth and stood from the chair. “Enjoy your snack.”

Monique padded out of the kitchen, and just after she rounded the double doors, the white fluff ball that was Bart ran after her.

Tyler listened to Bart’s feet ticking down the hallway. Reaching for a piece of melon, he plotted what to do next. He had time on his side
; sooner or later, he would get her to lower her defenses, and then he would make sure he never let her walk away again.

Chapter 1
2

The smell of coffee roused Tyler out of a sound sleep, and then the sound of Bart’s yapping compelled him from his bed. The sun was climbing in through a blue stained glass window as he walked into the bathroom and heard the traffic on Prytania Street outside.

After running some cold water over his face, checking his five o’clock shadow in the mirror, and making a mental note to shave later, he
wrestled a fresh, long-sleeved shirt from its hanger. He put on his jeans from the night before and scrambled for the bedroom door, desperate for coffee. When he opened his door, Bart was sitting outside of his room with his tongue hanging from the side of his mouth.

“Son of a….” Tyler
grabbed at his chest. “You scared the hell out of me, you little shit.”

Seemingly satisfied that he had done exactly what he set out to do, Bart turned and trotted for the stairs.

“We’re going to have a serious talk about privacy, Bart,” Tyler called after him.

Closing his bedroom door,
he unsuccessfully tried to suppress a loud yawn and then slowly walked toward the stairs. When he hit the first floor landing, the smell of bacon made him quicken his step. But at the kitchen doors, he came to a grinding halt the instant he saw Monique at the island cooktop.

She was
flipping slices of french toast with a spatula in one hand and drinking from her mug with another. Wearing baggy jeans and a loose fitting T-shirt, she appeared more like a little girl than a grown woman. Her dirty-blonde hair was pulled back in a messy ponytail and she had not a touch of makeup on her face. At that moment, Tyler had never seen her look more beautiful. He found it odd that he had been with so many women who had primped and painted into what he had thought was the epitome of beauty, only to discover that they could not hold a candle to Monique.

“Hey, you’re up,” she said when she
cast her eyes the doorway. “I made us some breakfast, and then I figured you could call a few hotels and find a room.”

“You’re still eager to get rid of me?”

“Absolutely. I need to work, and I can’t have you hanging around here…disturbing me.”

He folded his arms over his chest as he came up to the cooktop. “Dist
urbing you? I thought it was the other way around.”

Growling erupted from the corner of the kitchen and Tyler turned to see Bart glaring at him from his food bowl.

“Your rabid mongrel scared the hell out of me when I walked out of my bedroom.”

Monique nodded to Bart. “He parked outside of your door from the moment he left my room this morning. He’s not used to strangers staying in the house.”

Tyler motioned to the dog. “Perhaps you should tell him I’m not a stranger.”

“Wouldn’t help.” She scooped the slices of
battered toast onto two plates. “If it makes you feel any better, he hates it when Chris stays here, too. He follows him all over the house, growling.”

The thought of Chris sharing Monique’s home infuriated Tyler.
“When does Chris stay here?”

She shrugged
, ignoring his unpleasant tone. “When he is in town,” she informed him, and picked up the plates.

Tyler followed her as she took the plates to the
kitchen table. “How often does he come in town?”

Putting the plates down,
Monique took a seat at the table and then reached for a tray of bacon across from her. “He comes in when he needs to see me, or whenever we have an event here.” After placing two slices of bacon on her plate, she passed the tray to Tyler.

Tyler took
the tray of bacon and whacked it down on the table. “I’ll repeat the question, Moe. How often does he come in town and stay with you?” Waiting for an answer, he leaned over the table, and glared at her.

She sat back in her chair. “You want coffee?”

“Moe!”

“All right. He comes in town once a month.”

“Are you sleeping with him?”

“Jesus!
What is your problem?” She sprang from her chair and headed across the kitchen to the coffeemaker. 

“You are sleeping with him, aren’t you?
” he hollered. “That’s why he wanted to rip my head off back in Dallas.”

“
I told you last night, I’m not sleeping with him. He wants a relationship with me…he told me so, but I said no.”

“When was this?”

Monique came back to the table with the coffeepot. “It was a little while after he started as my manager. I had been lonely since my divorce and I never dated anyone because I was too busy writing. Chris was there for me. He became my friend, manager, confidant….”

“Do you care for him?”
Tyler pulled out his chair and had a seat.