The Billionaire’s Handler

Chapter Five

He meant it. The crazy man actually meant it. Carolina remembered the lists he’d made her create, that somewhere she’d mentioned wanting to sleep in a real castle, something else about wanting a spa weekend. At the time, she’d thought the whole thing was a joke. Nothing anyone would take seriously.

Yet the green mud completely slathering her body was unquestionably real.

And so was the castle.

“You’re not too cold, mam’selle? Too warm?”

“I’m perfect,” Carolina assured the tall Amazon with the serene blue eyes and hands of steel.

“Are you thirsty? Would you care for a drink?”

The last time she’d admitted to thirst, Greta had given her some god-awful herbal concoction that made her eyes sting and her tongue pucker. It wasn’t safe around here to admit wanting or needing anything.

“I’m fine,” she said.

“All right. Now, you close your eyes. I’ll be back in thirty minutes, after the clay has set.”

The mud-clay had already started setting. She was increasingly feeling like a naked mummy. A naked green mummy. The castle was located in the Alps-whether Swiss or French or Italian, she had no idea. But it was perched on a cliff top, accessible only via helicopter, and the once-classic structure had been turned into an elegantly exotic spa. The place had a great room draped with impossibly tall silk tapestries. The fireplaces in half the rooms were bigger than she was. The floors were all stone or marble, but heated beneath the floor, so it was warm walking around, even in bare feet. Fountains decorated almost all the rooms, as did candles. The view outside was of treacherously tall mountains, draped with a white ermine cape of snow. Inside was luxury, pampering, softness, gentle music.

“You’re surviving in there, Cee?”

She heard him. Maguire’s sexy tenor was unmistakable. He was in the next room-sort of an anteroom he’d turned into a makeshift office. It had a laptop, printer, fax, all the usual office suspects, although she hadn’t once heard a telephone ring. She concluded Maguire had forbidden telephones anywhere near her.

He’d disappeared from physical sight, once the Amazonian Greta had shown up to slather her in mud and seaweed. He was just within calling distance, and asked how she was doing on a regular basis.

He hadn’t looked. Not the whole time she’d been stripped down, gooped up, smoothed, encased in oils and warm towels and then this clay-mud thing. It was more than a little weird, being naked with strangers. But enticingly weird, knowing Maguire was in the next room, always close enough to call for him.

It was impossible not to be aware that she was naked. That he knew it.

Of course, she was coated in green slime, so heaven knew why sex was on her mind. Probably he’d run for the hills if he saw her.

“Doing good. You getting business done in there?”

“Yeah. Funny world today. It doesn’t really matter where you are, it’s not that hard to communicate with anyone at any time from any place.”

“Maguire.”

“Yeah?”

“You set this up because it was on my list.”

“Well, yeah. It was an easy twofer. You wanted to sleep in a castle. And do the spa thing.”

“I want my list back.”

“Nope.”

“I thought it was a game. Just something silly. I don’t want or expect anything else from that list.”

“Uh-huh. Damn, I seem to have a fax coming in, and need to do some business here for a while…”

Right. She believed the moon was made of cheese, too. Maguire somehow never answered questions he didn’t want to answer. And even though she’d spent long days with him now, she still didn’t know where he lived, or what he did with his time.

If he had a woman in his life.

Or what he’d thought of those kisses they’d shared a few days ago. She really wanted to know if they’d haunted him the way they were haunting her.

Temporarily, there was no possible way to address the idea. Greta showed up again, did more terrifying things. It took ages to rinse off all the mud, and then she was coated with warm spicy oils and rubbed down. After that, her feet and hands were encased in warm packs, and her hair coated with something that looked like mayonnaise and smelled like vanilla.

By the time she was starting to feel like a recipe, Greta let her shower the whole thing off. Her hair was dried, her toes and nails pampered. She was snuggled into a black, whisper-satin gown like the kind movie stars wore in the forties, warned that she’d need a good long nap after all the treatments, and put in a wrought-iron elevator.

Their suite was on the third floor. Carolina had no idea how many others were enjoying the spa, but so far she’d only seen staff-and Maguire. The suite took her breath the first time she saw it.

His-and-her bedrooms both had their own bathrooms. The central living area between held a fireplace, a medieval round table and a wall tapestry that concealed a minifridge with snacks and drinks. Her bed was on a pedestal, with velvet drapes and hand-embroidered pillows. Greta had told her the truth. She barely made it inside before folding up on the bed and sleeping hard and deep.

When she wakened, though, the sensation of luxurious pampering and contentment was gone. Her head was thudding, her heart pounding. The long, whisper-satin gown still felt embarrassingly sexy against her skin, the heap of Swiss feather bed no less fabulous, but she headed into the main room, knelt down on the stone hearth.

This whole week had been disturbing and tantalizing and scary and wonderful, and above all, distracting.

But she had a life in shambles back home. It hadn’t disappeared. Maybe she’d desperately needed a break. Maybe she could be excused for hiding out for a few days. But she’d done that now, and the crushing weight of decisions and problems was still waiting for her.

She had to push the stop button. She couldn’t keep falling for a man who wasn’t for her, living a fantasy life that wasn’t hers…behaving like a woman she couldn’t be.

Maguire disconnected from all electronics, locked down his business and headed upstairs. The staff claimed Carolina would likely take a solid two-hour nap, but he hadn’t checked on her in a while now. He didn’t want to make further plans for the day until he evaluated what she felt up to.

As the elevator let him out on the third floor, he considered that he wouldn’t mind a serious nap himself. His neck creaked, and a sharp headache threatened around his eyes. He was used to lack of sleep, but he’d been pouring on work hours on top of time changes and travel.

Adding Carolina to his life had created all kinds of complications. Some, he’d expected. Some were mightily confounding him.

The door to their suite was an oval-shaped piece of carved wood-very cool and castle-like-but it was darned hard to unlock the door without making a sound. Still, he tried, let himself in, and then immediately stopped dead.

“Hey,” he said, but he thought, Hell. Hell times ten.

Carolina wasn’t sleeping the way she was supposed to be, but sitting on the hearth rug, her head on her knees, kind of rocking back and forth. Her toes peeked out of a gown that couldn’t be legal in public. God knew every inch of her was covered-except for pale pink toenails. But the slinky-slidey material revealed every hint of curve. Her nipples. Her adorableness.

And he’d have been happy to concentrate on that, but it was downright impossible to miss her disconsolate posture. She had that look in her eyes again. The lost-waif look. The why-would-you-kick-my-puppy look.

“Hey,” he said again, trying for his most blustery voice. Wary of making anything worse, he moved closer, crouched down next to her. “This isn’t how the story’s supposed to go. You were supposed to love all this. Sleeping in the cool old castle. All the history crud. The spa thing.”

“I did. I do. But, Maguire, I just can’t keep playing. I have to go home!”

Here he’d expected Armageddon from those anxiety-drenched eyes. Instead, this was nothing more than a little crisis. “Of course you’re going home,” he said, and leaned forward, to poke a long fork into the flames, push at the logs, creating a fireworks of sparks shooting up the giant chimney-and a spray of light that glowed on her skin. “Just not quite this minute. See, back home, you have all those people who want to bite off a piece of you. That’s what happens when you inherit serious money. It brings out the vultures in people, even normally good people. And you know the real problem with that?”

“Everything.”

“No.” He hooked an arm around her shoulder-not too close-no fingers touching what they shouldn’t. Just a hug-hook. Nothing more. “The real problem is that you got lost in that picture. All you’ve been hearing is what everyone else wants, what everyone else expects. We’ve got to switch that back, and make it about you. The money’s a chance for you to say…what do you want from your life? What really matters to you? So we work on that stuff. We don’t go back home until you know exactly what you want to do from here. You go back strong. You go back feeling good about yourself, your life, what you want. And until then, you get to hide out, and let Maguire-that’s me-take care of all the crappy details.”

“You’re a goofy man, Maguire.”

“I’ve been insulted worse. Trust me.” He looked around, too damn aware of her warm skin, the scents surrounding her, that tousled brush of silvery-blond hair.

“I don’t want to be…beholden to you. You don’t owe me anything, much less all the time you’ve been taking-”

“This isn’t about owing. It’s about understanding. I know exactly what that inheritance did to your life because I know exactly what it did to my own family. It’s been sabotaging everything you could do or be. But I can stop that from happening to you. I can help you make it work.”

“No, you can’t.”

“Actually, I can, Carolina. I can teach you to be tough. I can show you how to handle this, the way no one else can, because you know positively that I don’t need or want anything from you.”

She frowned. “You always sound so logical when you start talking. Only, what I’m saying is logical, too. No matter what I do, people are going to be unhappy with me.”

“And that’s a big deal, huh?”

“Maybe it wouldn’t be for you. And I’m not trying to win a popularity contest like a thirteen-year-old kid, Maguire. I’m just trying to live a decent life. Do the things that matter to me.”

Somewhere around here, there had to be some liquid refreshment that didn’t involve sour-tasting herbs or mystery gray stuff that was “good for you.” He got up, prowled around the various cupboards and shelves, found a carafe, sterling goblets, plain old bottled water. “I want you to think for a minute,” he said.

“I am thinking.” She also took the goblet of simple cool water and gulped it down.

“Back when you became a special ed teacher, you were influenced by what you believed you could do. That affected where you could go to college, the goals you had then, the places you applied for work. Essentially you established boundaries that worked for your life then-but now, you can take all that fencing away. Imagine, if you could have gone to any university on the planet, would you still have chosen the school you went to?”

She sipped more water. “That’s impossible to know.”

“Nope. That’s the point. What was impossible before could be totally possible for you now. If you wanted-and still want-to do things for kids with special needs, you have a whole basketful of options to pick from these days. You can still teach, if that’s what you want. But you could also start your own school for kids with special needs, if you wanted that. Or you could get a group of experts together, come up with entirely new program ideas for special-needs kids. There’s no limit to where you could take just this one part of your life.”

She frowned. “You’re messing with my head, Maguire.”

“And that’s exactly what I want to do for a couple weeks. Mess with your head. Show you how to use that money instead of it using you. Help you get what you want.”

“Maguire? What if I want something that you don’t agree with.”

“That’s easy. This isn’t about me. I don’t have to agree with anything. If you want it, then we’ll find a way to help you go for it.” He thought the whole talk was going pretty well. Very well, in fact, but there was something in her expression that changed. She faced him, her soft eyes glued on his, studying, examining. Thinking. Thinking too much. It was obvious she was the kind of woman who got in trouble if she spent too much time thinking. “What?” he said impatiently.

“I could want to go after something, no holds barred, risk everything, that you’d really have a problem with.”

“Like what?”

“Like what if I wanted you, Maguire? What if all I wanted was to fall in love with you?”

Her voice was softer than melted butter. He almost had a heart attack, but thank God, the phone vibrated in his pocket. He grabbed for it with a palm that was wet with sudden sweat-shock sweat-and could barely manage a coherent conversation.

The call only lasted a minute. By that time, he’d managed to shoot to the other side of the room, with a massive old medieval table between them, which had to weigh five hundred pounds. Not that he was afraid of her. The waif? How could he possibly be afraid of the waif? He just felt more…secure…with a little distance between them. At least until he recovered from the words she’d blurted out. Especially that one word. The four-letter one.

“We can talk seriously. And nonseriously. About a lot of things.” That was a promise. “But right now, there are some people coming up here.”

“Wait a minute. What people? Why?”

Thank God they got here. Initially he’d been wary of setting up the Shoe Project, wary that Carolina wasn’t ready for any commotion yet. But “Italian shoes” had been high on her wish list, and rather than spend time actually shopping in Rome or Milan-not his favorite pastime, for sure-he figured it’d be more time efficient to bring the products to her. It wasn’t as if her shoe size had been hard to find out ahead of time.

He sprang up when he heard the first knock on the door, and then the parade began. Almost all the vendors were men, carrying boxes and carts, with labels like JP Tod, Miu Miu, Fendi, Versace, Casadei.

Carolina-the precariously fragile woman he’d found curled in a hospital bed in a fetal position-started shrieking like a child on a playground.

The scene deteriorated from awful to worse. Maguire hiked to the bar, grabbed a malt liquor and hastily retreated to a corner, out of harm’s way. It only took minutes for their serene living space to turn into Armageddon. Boxes were opened, splayed. Carolina was fitted, argued over, and encouraged to walk up and down the room in various shoes.

He had no idea that shoes had their own language, but he kept hearing terms he’d never heard before, like “Dorsay pumps” and “kidskin with a Swarovski buckle” and “burgundy strapper.” One Miu Miu was defined as a “feather shoe,” which is exactly what it looked like-a bunch of silly feathers-so Maguire was confounded how the pair could cost five thousand bucks. A lavender sandal from Versace almost made Carolina drool-she was groaning like a woman in the throes of orgasm-and then came something identified as a red patent-leather lace-up. One look at that pair and she started giggling. And dancing around the room with the swagger of a goofy drunk.

En route, he accidentally noticed that he’d vastly underestimated her legs before. Maybe she was generally built on the scrappy side, but her ankles and calves and thighs… there was nothing wrong with those legs. They were toned, shaped perfectly, an erotic dream for a guy who had a leg fetish.

When his thoughts strayed in that direction, Maguire pulled those reins tight. This wasn’t about him. In fact, Carolina acting like a giddy, happy schoolgirl highlighted exactly what the real issues were about. She had a serious character flaw. That flaw was that she was a serious, hard-core, possibly unfixable softie. As far as he could tell, she was forever giving, always thinking of others, always looking to help others.

The world was going to kill her-particularly now that she had money-unless Maguire found ways to toughen her up. Her guileless warning that she could fall in love with him only echoed his own conscience. She had no defenses, not against feelings of the heart.

Only a manipulative user of a man would take advantage of that. He had to keep his hands off her.

Which was, temporarily, relatively easy.

“Maguire!” she shrieked. “What do you think?”

She paraded closer, lifting her robe to knee length so he had a better view of her right foot-in a purple crocodile heel-and her left foot, in a shiny red sandal thing.

“I think you’re gonna kill yourself,” he said gruffly. Both heels were four inches high or more. No one could walk in those things and live.

“Don’t you think they’re beautiful?”

“Oh, yeah.” Maybe he hadn’t seen it in the beginning, but now it was so obvious. When she smiled, she had an aura that lit up a whole room, a radiance that glowed from the inside out. He kept getting glimpses of how Carolina had been before the crippling inheritance-a happy-on-the-inside woman, a giggler, a joyful, uninhibited fun lover. He’d bet the bank she sang at the top of her lungs when she was alone in a car.

She teetered back to the shoe gurus, and tried on another pair…when something abruptly went wrong. He couldn’t hear what was said over the commotion, but she abruptly put down a shoe and her face went blank. He crossed the room at a breakneck pace, asked casually, “Did some kind of problem come up?”

Her eyes shot to his. “That pair of suede pumps…” She motioned.

“The purple ones?”

“Yeah. Maguire.” She put a hand on her heart. “I asked how much they were-$843! Holy kamoly. Holy moly. Holy smokes. Holy-”

He got it. Apparently she’d originally thought of Italian shoes as a luxury, but she never expected them to be this much of a luxury. “You can afford it,” he said.

“That’s not the point. I-”

He swiftly hooked an arm around her, so they could at least have the privacy of a conversation away from the hot-eyed vendors. Good grief, she was trembling. Flushed.

“One pair would pay for two months of groceries. That’s ridiculous, Maguire. It’s a stupid use of money. Especially for something this…selfish. Something I don’t remotely need. Look, when I put Italian shoes on the list, it was because I tried on these flats that a friend had-they were Italian, and they fit like a soft glove, and I never forgot how wonderful they felt. But that’s all it was. A fantasy. And I’d never actually priced them before, because-”

Easy enough to guess the end of that line. “Because it never occurred to you to spend money on yourself.”

“Well, of course I spend money on myself. But a ten-buck pair of earrings on sale at Kohl’s is just a whole different world than this-”

He could feel the warmth of her skin, under his arm, the surge of protective instincts of a man for his mate, the instant strike of an erection just from being this close. Damn it. He said firmly, “Carolina. Buy one pair.”

“I can’t.”

“Yes, you can. I dare you. Prove to yourself that the world will not end if you have a frivolous moment-”

“But-”

“I’ll buy you two pairs-if you don’t stand up for what you want yourself. That’s wasting double the money.”

Her jaw dropped in alarm. “Don’t do that, Maguire! Don’t buy me anything. There’s no reason-”

He gestured back to the numerous shoe boxes. “Well, then pick a pair yourself. Or two. You can do it. I promise, it won’t kill you.”

“But, Maguire-”

“Go. Be strong. Be tough. Be mean.”

“But Maguire-”

“The cost of two pairs of shoes is not going to solve world hunger. You’re going to have lots of chances to do serious things with your money. But that has to start with you, giving yourself permission to make choices. That includes permission to smile, to have some fun. Permission to make choices that have nothing to do with anyone else’s opinion.”

Her shoulders sagged. “I hate it when you handle me. You’re exhausting, Maguire.”

Yeah, yeah. Getting that woman to do something selfish was like getting a nun to try mud wrestling. It took bullying and cheerleading and taunting and threats.

And after that, the whole situation only got worse.