A Dream to Cling To Page 21

  She stared at him for a moment. “You’re going to be a pain in the tush about this, aren’t you, Mr. Carter?”

  “Dallas.” He smiled. “I hate the word no.”

  “Well, Dallas,” she said, smiling sweetly in return. “I can’t imagine the meal conversation’s being about anything other than Marks & Lindley Lingerie. While I do happen to own some M & L stock, I’ve never been involved in the operations of the company, and I’ve never wanted to be. How many lace and satin slips M & L sells is up to you, not me. Personally, I buy all mine at K-Mart.”

  Dallas glanced down at her beautifully rounded breasts and smothered a sigh. It seemed a sin to encase them in anything less than pure French

  “Like I said, you talk and I eat. You can even pick the topic.” He waved a hand. “You can tell me about this store, WinterLand. By the way, why specialize in only Christmas items at a summer resort?”

  She smiled. “Because it’s something unusual at this time of year, and the novelty of it is what makes it work.”

  He glanced around the now-empty store and out the large display window facing the highway. “This isn’t exactly prime beach-front location, is it?”

  Resting her elbows on the counter, she cocked her head. “You do that very well, you know.”

  “What do I do very well?”

  “Make assessments and catalog information. Obviously, you think specializing in Christmas items at a small shore town and, worse, being located miles from the beach is based on poor business judgment.”

  “Maybe I was just curious. After all, you’re still in business,” he pointed out, while cursing under his breath at her perceptiveness. He’d have to be more careful with her.

  “That I’m still in business should tell you something about the ironies of location and merchandising. It also proves my point about dining with you.”

  He frowned. “We weren’t talking about M & L. We were talking about WinterLand.”

  She straightened, and said, “It was still business. You don’t strike me as a man who knows how to talk about anything but business. Any business.”

  “I’ll make a deal with you,” he said. “Absolutely no business talk of any kind, if you’ll have lunch, dinner, breakfast—” He grinned. “Skip breakfast. I wouldn’t want you to think I’m easy. Where was I? Oh, yes. No business discussions at all about anything, if you will eat food at some ritualistic time with me.”

  A pink flush colored her cheeks. “Fine. Better brush up on your popes. We’ll be talking about canon law.”

  Dallas slid behind the wheel of his BMW and grinned to himself. His first meeting with Cass Lindley had gone very well—despite a few unexpected turns. If the rest of his plan went smoothly, Cass Lindley would be in for the surprise of her life.

  Late that afternoon, Cass parked her Jeep under the overhang of her beach house. Pilings supported the modern redwood-and-glass structure that rose high above the ground to minimize storm tide damage. The pilings and the cement foundation made for a natural carport

  She climbed out of the vehicle and slammed the door. The frothy waves crashing on her front “yard” beckoned, and she flipped off her high-heeled sandals and strolled across the island’s only major road and onto the cream-colored sand. She stopped at the edge of the water and stared sightlessly out at the placid ocean, all the while roundly cursing herself.

  Dallas Carter wanted something more than lunch tomorrow, and she knew it. She’d read about him in the Wall Street Journal. He was probably the only free-lance corporate president in the country—if not the world. He had a reputation on Wall Street for turning companies in trouble around and ruthlessly winning every corporate raid he’d ever instigated. Companies hired him for fabulous sums of money to do exactly that. M & L had hired him because the company wanted to increase its profit margin. Funny, but she never would have imagined he was an executive, not with that body. She’d always thought company presidents would be much older and have a paunch—

  Don’t look at the man, she sternly told herself. instead look at the way he’d hustled her into a lunch date. That was a minor point. The problem was what he was hustling for, and she had a very good hunch about that: her M & L stock.

  Besides the family name on the company logo, the stock she owned was her only connection with M & L. Marks and Lindley sold lingerie to exclusive department stores all over the world and had their own boutiques in New York, San Francisco, and Palm Beach. Her grandfather, the original Lindley, had left her the stock when she’d been eighteen. She’d always known “Pop” had never expected her to take an active role in the business. Her own father had sold his shares back to the company long ago to demonstrate his preference for horses and women. Not necessarily in that order, she thought with a smile as she remembered her six—so far—beautiful stepmothers. She also had a stepsister she barely knew.

  Still, even her grandfather had been a silent partner at M & L; he’d had the money and Elias Marks had had the manufacturing know-how. The shares had been a gift to her, and she didn’t believe in selling a gift, so she’d kept them. But she had also kept up the Lindley tradition of non-involvement, and had signed a proxy for her voting block that allowed first the son, David, and then the grandson, Ned, to vote for her only when she was absent from board meetings. Her grandfather’s lawyer had insisted on that restriction when he’d drawn up the agreement for her.

  As the rising tide began to lap over her bare feet, Cass admitted that she had never known what to do with the damn stock. Selling lingerie was a bit like selling respectable sex, and if she had wanted to sell sex she’d be selling lingerie. Still, she felt that there ought to be a Lindley somewhere in Marks and Lindley. Signing over the proxy had seemed like the best solution to her dilemma.

  But Dallas Carter had come looking for her.

  Remembering his charming smile and the way his assessing eyes had settled on her with open appreciation, Cass shook her head to rid herself of his image. So he was attractive. So what? She’d met attractive men before, but she’d had several hard lessons with men that had taught her to see beyond the facade. A little voice inside her protested, though, that she’d never met a man quite as attractive as Dallas Carter before. She forced the notion away. She had to keep in mind that he wasn’t the friendly president he seemed.

  Walking back toward the house, Cass decided that lunch with Dallas Carter might not be such a bad idea after all. It might be a definite advantage to find out exactly what he was up to. Thinking of her initial physical response to him, she swallowed back a flutter. He was an attractive man, but she had handled attractive men before. She could handle this one.

  When she reached the bottom of the flight of open wood stairs that led to her front deck, she was grateful to have no packages to carry today. The view from the front deck was terrific, she admitted, but the stairs were a killer on shopping day.

  Grateful that she had just her purse and sandals, which were dangling from one hand, she slowly climbed the weathered steps, letting her free hand glide lightly up the wood railing. The long day and the tension she’d experienced earlier had finally taken their toll, and she felt drained of energy. First a good, relaxing dinner, she decided as she thought of the crab salad chilling in her refrigerator. Then an even more relaxing bath.

  The fourth step from the top gave its usual loud protest, then, to her horror, suddenly broke out from under her. She grabbed wildly at the rail with both hands to catch her balance at the same moment that she felt a hot fire rake her right calf. She managed to scramble up to the next, very solid step. Panting for breath, she stared down at the broken edges of the step just below. She realized she was no longer holding her purse and sandals when she saw them lying on the concrete carport. Better them than a broken bone or worse, she thought, shivering.

  “Cass! Are you all right?”

  She swallowed, then turned a wide-eyed gaze toward the voice coming from next door. Her neighbor, Verna Colson, was leaning over her deck railing, her ex
pression showing the concern she felt.

  “I’m okay,” Cass said, glancing down at the jagged bleeding scrape along her right calf. Her leg must actually have gone through the step and dragged against the split wood before she’d saved herself. She hoped there weren’t any splinters. She hated splinters. It took nerves of steel and a wealth of patience to work them out. “It’s just a scratch.”

  “You sure, honey?”

  She nodded. “I’m sure. The step must have rotted through.”

  “Just as long as you’re not hurt,” Verna said. “That’s the important thing.”

  Yet bet your bippy, Cass thought as her heart rate slowly returned to normal. She remembered that the step had been creaking lately. It was her own fault for not paying more attention to the warning signal. The continual moisture in the air wreaked havoc with the wood in the homes here. She should have had enough sense to realize that her place was no more immune than anyone else’s. She decided she’d call someone out to inspect the entire house for wood rot.

  And it beat the heck out of falling through the bathroom floor to find out a checkup was definitely overdue.