Taking Over the Tycoon Read online

  Kristy shrugged off the praise and continued painting. “It’s Jack Granger you should be thanking,” she said softly. “Jack’s the one who helped her get her life back together.”

  Connor knew that, too. Jack and Daisy were not just married, they were crazy in love. The way he wanted to be someday. If he ever met the right woman, that was. One who wasn’t the least bit interested in his blue blood or his wealth. Thus far, he had yet to meet a woman who loved him more than his pedigree or bank account. Connor looped his jacket over the railing that edged the piazza and removed his tie. “I understand you’re a widow.” Losing a spouse was something they had in common…

  Kristy turned to give him a frosty look.

  So she didn’t want to talk about that, Connor noted.

  Moving on. “You have twins.” Who would likely be needing college funds. And many other things that money from the sale of Paradise Resort would provide. If he could get her to sell it, that was.

  Kristy regarded him with exasperation. “Did you ever hear the expression about wearing out one’s welcome? Well—” She broke off when she heard the sound of a car in the parking lot on the other side of the lodge.

  “Expecting someone?” Connor said, aware that the place wasn’t slated to reopen for another week or so.

  “No,” Kristy admitted as the car motor shut off. She set down her paintbrush and regarded Connor smugly. “But then I wasn’t expecting you, either.”

  Touché.

  Connor followed her around the building and down the walk that led to the parking lot. When she spotted the two people inside a late-model station wagon, she released her breath in a low hiss and muttered a most unladylike phrase.

  “Problem?” Connor asked. He was surprised because up to now, Kristy had seemed so cool, calm and collected. Now she looked anything but.

  “My mother and brother.” More color swept into her cheeks.

  “You don’t look very happy to see them.”

  Kristy released an unsteady breath. Dread filled her dark brown eyes. “That’s because I’m not.”

  Connor knew all about unpleasant family situations. He had grown up with them. He started to put on his jacket.

  Kristy wrapped her fingers around his forearm and gave it an imploring squeeze. “Please stay. They’ll be less likely to go on the attack if you’re here.”

  Connor always had been a sucker for a damsel in distress. And to have Kristy Neumeyer looking at him so imploringly…

  “Kristy! Hello, dear!” A woman emerged from the driver’s side of the car, just as a big guy got out of the passenger side. Both resembled Kristy in looks and were also dressed casually in jeans, sneakers and shirts.

  Kristy’s smile looked frozen as she exchanged hugs with her mother and brother. “What brings you to this part of the world?” she asked cheerfully.

  Her mother removed her sunglasses and placed them atop her soft gray curls. “A medical conference on the latest in ultrasound techniques at Hilton Head. We’re on our way down.” Unlike Kristy, though, her mother and brother looked genuinely happy to see her, Connor noted.

  Her slender shoulders relaxing slightly, Kristy turned to Connor. Urging him forward, she made introductions. “Mom, Doug, this is Connor Templeton. Connor, this is my mother, Maude Griffin, and my brother, Doug. They’re both obstetricians. They practice in Raleigh, North Carolina.”

  “Nice to meet you.” Connor shook hands with both. As the silence strung out awkwardly, he began to regret staying. Clearly, there was something that needed to be said here….

  Kristy latched on to his arm in a way that seemed to indicate the two of them were very close. “I wish I’d known you were coming,” she said. “I would have cleared my schedule.”

  “Or been out,” Doug said dryly.

  Kristy gave him a tolerant smile that didn’t reach her eyes. “But the twins are still in school,” she continued, as if her older brother had not spoken.

  Maude beamed. “Darling, we’re spending the night!”

  Kristy blinked. Obviously, Connor thought, this was not in Kristy’s game plan.

  “Here?” she said.

  “Well, yes. It’s not as if you don’t have plenty of room.” Maude gestured expansively at the lodge and the dozen or so cottages fronting the beach. “There are…how many cottages here?”

  “A dozen,” Kristy admitted reluctantly.

  “And how many rooms in the lodge itself?” Doug inquired.

  “One hundred. But only one of the four wings is open, and those rooms are still undergoing renovation,” Kristy warned. “None of those rooms are ready for guests.”

  “So, we don’t mind roughing it as long as we get a chance to see you and the twins and have dinner together this evening. Do we, Doug?”

  “Not in the slightest, Mother.”

  Kristy looked at Connor as if somehow expecting him to bail her out. No way was he going to do that. If there was a family problem—and it looked like there was—then it wouldn’t help any of them to sweep it under the rug. As his family had for so many years. No, they needed to deal with it, like it or not, and if the rest of Kristy’s family was ready to do so… “I think it’s great your mother and brother are here,” he said kindly.

  “Would you like to join us for dinner then?” Kristy replied, just as sweetly. “Good!” she exclaimed before Connor had a chance to reply. “We’ll eat at seven, in the dining hall. And in the meantime…” she gestured for everyone to follow her around to the lobby entrance “…I’m going to have to send you and Mother to the market, Doug, because I wasn’t planning on feeding quite so many people this evening.”

  CONNOR WATCHED as Kristy quickly wrote out a grocery list, produced some cash—which was summarily rejected by both her mother and brother—and then waved them off, with directions to the closest food store.

  “A little rude, weren’t you?” Connor said dryly, as the station wagon moved through the palmetto trees and disappeared down Folly Beach Road.

  Kristy scowled and sat down in one of the green wooden rocking chairs on the piazza. She leaned forward, her paint-stained hands clasped between her knees. “You don’t know them.”

  True, Connor thought, as he sat down in the chair beside her. He turned it so they were sitting knee to knee, then he leaned forward and looked into her eyes. “It sounds as if I’m going to get to know them, though.”

  “I’m sorry about that. I…” Kristy floundered, for the first time that afternoon looking regretful. “I was desperate.”

  Connor had seen that, and for that reason, his heart went out to her. He knew what it was like to want to connect closely with family, and be unable to do so. For years he had not been as close as he wanted to be to anyone in his family. Since his parents’ acknowledgment of their problems, that had changed. But he still regretted all the years when he and his mother and father and two sisters hadn’t been able to talk. Or even spend any meaningful time together.

  He took one of Kristy’s hands in his. “Why are they here?” he asked.

  A demoralized expression on her face, she pulled away. “The same reason you are. To talk me into giving up the ghost, so to speak, and sell the place to a high roller like you.”

  Connor sat back in his chair, began to rock. “But you’re not about to take the money and run, are you?”

  “Nope.” Kristy pushed against the floor with the toe of her shoe. “I love this place. I know it’s still a work in progress,” she confessed as she rocked gently back and forth, “but I am determined to return it to its former glory and then some.”

  Connor was beginning to see that. Which, of course, made his own mission all the harder. “You have a history here?” he asked.

  She nodded. “My siblings and I visited here every summer when we were kids,” she told him, oblivious to the way she was sitting, giving him an unobstructed view of her fabulous body.

  She turned to look at him, a mix of subdued temper and sentimentality glowing in her dark eyes. “When
we got older, I worked here in the summers while my brother and sister were off at science camp, or volunteering at the hospitals in Raleigh, in hopes of getting into medical school.”

  “Which they did,” Connor guessed.

  “Oh, yes.” Kristy squared her shoulders, took a deep, regretful breath. “Both my brother and sister followed in our parents’ footsteps.”

  Connor took a moment to consider what that must be like. “Everyone in your family is a doctor?”

  Kristy nodded. “Except me. My father is a lung transplant surgeon and my sister is a pediatric oncologist. My late husband was a pediatric heart surgeon. I’m the only one who didn’t choose medicine as a career.”

  “Wow.”

  “Yeah,” Kristy said dryly, rolling her eyes at his reaction. “Wow.”

  Before Connor could comment further, they heard a large vehicle lumbering slowly up Folly Beach Road. Kristy glanced at her watch. “That’s the school bus!” She jumped out of her chair and headed around the lodge again, just as a big yellow bus pulled up Folly Beach Road and stopped at the entrance of the resort. Two little girls got off the bus and began walking up the palmetto-lined driveway. One had shoulder-length corkscrew curls, the same rich hue as Kristy’s, and was dressed in a pretty pink cotton smock and lacy white apron. The other’s hair was caught in two messy braids. She was wearing shorts and a striped T-shirt and sneakers. Only as they neared could Connor see, by the sameness of their charming features, that they were indeed identical twins.

  They were halfway to Kristy and Connor when the one in the smock said something to the one in shorts. The second little girl took offense, dropped her book bag onto the grass and shoved the one in the dress. She shoved back, even harder, and the next thing Connor knew, the two were down on the ground tussling and rolling.

  Kristy gaped at them as if unable to believe what she was seeing, then rushed toward them. She separated the twins, who came up kicking and screeching. “Stop it!” Kristy demanded as Connor caught up with her. “Both of you! Stop it right now!”

  The cute little girls glared at each other and Kristy tearfully. “What in the world has gotten into you?” Kristy demanded as the twins wiped the tears from their long lashes with the backs of their hands. “I’ve never seen you fight like this before!”

  “It’s all her fault!” the one in the dress yelled abruptly, her frustration with her sister apparent. “She is just so dumb sometimes!”

  “No, it’s not! It’s your fault, you big scaredy-cat!” the one in shorts shouted back.

  “All right, you two, that’s enough,” Kristy said firmly. The girls faced each other, sniffling. “Go on inside. I’ll be in directly to talk to you.”

  As the twins meandered off, still glaring at each other intermittently, Kristy turned back to Connor. “I’m sorry about that. I don’t know what’s going on.” She paused, her expression conflicted. “About dinner… Forget the invitation, okay?”

  “You’re sure?” For some reason Connor didn’t mind being used by her like that, although in any other situation, with any other person, he would have.

  “Positive,” Kristy said, smiling apologetically, as if trying to make it up to him.

  He shoved his hands in the pockets of his slacks. Now he was the one feeling bereft. “What about your mother and brother?”

  Kristy shrugged as if it were no big deal. With barely a backward glance in his direction, she strode resolutely after her girls. “I’ll tell them you couldn’t make it, after all,” she said.

  “SO SHE’S NOT GOING to sell,” Skip Wakefield said, when Connor got back to the downtown Charleston office of Wakefield-Templeton Properties.

  Connor draped his sport coat over the back of a stylish chrome-and-leather chair and dropped into the one next to it. He faced his old friend. “Not yet.”

  “Meaning what?” Skip asked, his probing green eyes alight with curiosity as he ran a hand through his close-cropped, reddish-brown hair. A risk taker with a practical streak, he was always focused on the bottom line. “You think you can change her mind?”

  Connor reached for the necktie in his coat pocket and began to put it back on. “I think it’s possible, given enough time.”

  His expression thoughtful, Skip watched as Connor buttoned the top button on his shirt and pushed the knot into place. “We don’t have a lot of time,” Skip warned as he tapped the end of a pen against his desk. “The investors we’ve rounded up to underwrite the costs of building the condo project aren’t going to wait around indefinitely. Even though suitable beachfront property is so darn hard to come by these days, and this place is ideal. If this project doesn’t come together soon, they may find another place to put their money.”

  Connor had to agree with his partner on that. It seemed everyone wanted to live at the beach, and no one wanted to sell what they had. Not a twenty-five acre parcel, the amount Skip and Connor needed, anyway.

  “Kristy Neumeyer’s property is worth waiting for.”

  “Only if she’ll sell. If she won’t—” Skip shrugged, looking unhappy again “—then she and her resort are of no use to us.”

  Speak for yourself, Connor thought. He had spent only thirty minutes or so with her, but she had definitely made an impression on him.

  Skip tilted his head. “You’re not getting sweet on her, are you?”

  Guilt swept through Connor, even as he denied the possibility. “Why would you think that?” he demanded. He had never been one to mix business and pleasure. Not since Lorelai, anyway.

  “I don’t know.” Skip studied Connor. “Maybe because I haven’t seen you look that starry-eyed when talking about a woman since junior high.”

  Connor grinned. “Are you sure those aren’t dollar signs you’re seeing in my eyes?”

  Skip clasped his hands behind his head and leaned back in his chair. “I wish your main desire was to make money because if it were, our partnership would be a lot more profitable. Instead, you want everyone to like you.” He said that as if it were the worst quality on earth.

  Connor knew differently. “It helps if people don’t hate your guts when you’re trying to broker a deal between two warring parties.”

  His partner’s eyes gleamed with a cynical light. “It’s more than that, and you know it,” he scoffed. “You just can’t stand making an enemy of anyone.”

  It was true, Connor admitted to himself. Probably because he had spent so much time as a kid feeling caught up in the animosity simmering between members of his family. For years he had suspected that his parents and his older sister had secretly resented the heck out of each other, but he hadn’t understood why. Not that his younger sister, Daisy, who had been adopted as an infant, had escaped the family penchant for stifled emotions and supersecret angst. No, she had been as unhappy as all the rest, albeit more openly so. To the point that everything had finally exploded during the course of the previous summer. The truth had come out. And his parents had reluctantly ended the deception as well as their forty-eight-year marriage. Now, everyone seemed content to go on with their lives. Only Connor, it seemed, was still reeling, still trying to take it all in. Still wondering where the hell it left him.

  Aware that Skip was waiting for a response, Connor stood and moved lazily about the office. “So I don’t like fighting.”

  “I know, you just want everyone, and I do mean everyone, to get along,” Skip intoned dryly, shaking his head. “Speaking of which, that neighbor, Bruce Fitts, called here, said you weren’t doing a good job with Kristy, not at all. He suggested I go back out there myself.”

  Connor objected fiercely to that. “It was you talking to Kristy in the first place that really set her off.”

  His partner spread his hands wide. “All I did was offer her a cool five million dollars for her land and buildings.”

  “Which wouldn’t have been a problem had she been at all interested in selling.” She wasn’t.

  Skip flashed him a sly smile. “She’ll come around—if I know you.
And I think I do.”

  “I hope so, too,” Connor allowed. “But in the meantime, Skip, where Kristy’s concerned, let me do the talking.”

  His partner agreed without argument. “When are you going to see her again?”

  “Tonight.”

  Skip blinked. “You got her to agree to go to dinner?”

  “Actually, she invited me to have dinner there.” Then she had dis-invited him, but Connor figured that was beside the point.

  “Way to go, buddy!” Skip came out of his chair to high-five Connor. Grinning, he predicted, “You’ll have her seeing things our way in no time.”

  Connor hoped that was the case.

  Chapter Two

  “Kristy, dear, please come and look at this.” Maude Griffin said, pointing to the television screen mounted near the ceiling of the hotel kitchen. “This is exactly what I was talking about.”

  Kristy left the crab cakes frying in the skillet and walked over to stand beside her mother. The TV was set to the Weather Channel. “…tropical storm Imogene, with winds of sixty-five miles an hour, is gathering strength five hundred miles southeast of Bermuda….”

  “Mom,” Kristy explained patiently, “it’s October. It’s hurricane season. And thus far a very mild one. So of course there are going to be tropical storms and, yes, even hurricanes headed our way till the end of hurricane season.” Which Kristy knew was usually around November 1. “It’s a fact of life on the Atlantic Coast.”

  Maude lifted a pot from the stove, carried it to the stainless steel sink and emptied its contents into a mesh strainer. Steam rose from the cooked redskin potatoes as the boiling water ran down the drain. “Suppose Imogene hits Paradise Resort?”

  Trying not to let her mother’s worry transfer to her, Kristy handed her milk and butter. “Suppose Imogene does?”