Change of Heart p.3 Read online

  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?”

  “With your mind, you’re going to study everything,” Frank said as he got off the desk and turned away, then disappeared through a doorway.

  Eli stared after him, but in that moment, with those few words, he felt that his future had been decided. He knew where he was going and how he was going to get there. And for the first time in his life, Eli had a hero.

  “And then what?” Chelsea asked.

  “He sent the copies of the letterheads—you’ve seen them—I wrote to thank him and he wrote back. And we became friends.”

  Part of Chelsea wanted to scream that he had betrayed her by not telling her of this. Two years! He had kept this from her for two whole years. But she’d learned that it was no good berating Eli. He kept secrets if he wanted to and seemed to think nothing of it.

  “So you want your mother to marry this man? Why did you just come up with this idea now?” She meant her words to be rather spiteful, to get him back for hiding something so interesting from her, but she knew the answer as s