Mary McBride - The Magnate's Takeover - The Magnate's Takeover

“I don’t know. Let’s just go somewhere, anywhere. We’ll just hold hands and wander. We’ll be kids on our very first date.”

She laughed, and the sound was practically delicious. “I’ll have you know,” she said, “I sprained my ankle on my very first date.”

“No problem. I’ll carry you.” David smiled in the darkness, imagining her in his arms. “Where should we go?” he asked her. “What about the zoo?”

“Been there.”

“The art museum?”

She let out a long sigh. “Been there, too.”

“How about the Arch?”

“Done that.”

David, at a loss now, said, “Well, pick someplace. Anyplace. It doesn’t have to be in St. Louis.”

She was quiet a moment and then she said, “I know. Let’s go to Hannibal.”

“Hannibal?” David scratched his head. “You mean Hannibal, as in Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn?”

“Uh-huh. That’s exactly what I mean. I haven’t been there since I was a kid, and it’s only an hour and a half or so away. I’ll even drive if you’d like.”

“Wait. I’ve got a better idea. Can you be ready to go by ten tomorrow morning?”

“Sure. I’m pretty sure I can get all my work out of the way by ten. Definitely by ten-thirty.”

“Great. I’ll send someone to pick you up then. Sleep well, darlin’. I’ll see you at ten-thirty.”

Then he closed his phone and, like a contented little boy who’d just had his warm milk and chocolate-chip cookies, David at long last drifted off to sleep.

On her side of the highway, Libby finally slept well, too.

Early the next morning Libby taped a sign to the office door. Closed for renovations. She wasn’t kidding herself that half a dozen or more cars would suddenly be turning into the motel’s drive in search of accommodations, but the sign made her feel better anyway knowing her aunt Elizabeth would approve of properly informing the public. Libby was sure she could count on Doug to pass along the news when he visited her in the rehab facility.

The crew of young ponytailed painters from the Marquis had returned bright and early. Two of the cabins were already finished with their fresh coats of cream and deep green paint and they didn’t look all that bad in Libby’s admittedly biased opinion. After admiring them, she called a roofing company to arrange for an inspection of the damage she’d seen from the penthouse the night before. It wouldn’t do any good to have brand-new décor, she figured, only to have it ruined by a leaky roof.

What else hadn’t she considered? Libby wondered, when she’d budgeted her fifty-thousand-dollar gift? At the moment, she didn’t even want to think about all the structural problems she might have breezily overlooked while concentrating on the place’s worn and outdated décor. Strange and horrible visions of wood rot and mildew and termites began to tumble around in her brain, threatening yet another headache, something she certainly didn’t need this morning.

She looked at her watch and realized she had a little less than half an hour before she’d be swept off to the Marquis once again. Libby sighed, silently acknowledging that her time would be better spent here, going over and adjusting renovation plans, than in Hannibal where she merely intended to have fun with a gorgeous guy.

It had been several years since she’d had the least bit of interest in a man, and now—faced with her fifty-thousand-dollar motel makeover challenge—along came David, who actually made her heart flutter while he gave her the impression that his own heart might be fluttering a little bit, too. How was that for terrible timing?

She showered, dressed and was ready to go without a moment to spare when the hotel’s black limousine pulled into the drive. Jeff, the young man who had driven the limo the night before, opened the rear door for her. She thanked him, and then once he was settled up in front behind the wheel, she asked him, “How do you like working at the Marquis?”

“I love it,” he said, his chin jutting over his shoulder in her direction. “It’s a great place. Well, I guess you already know that.”

“I do,” Libby responded. “It’s a beautiful building. Mr. Halstrom certainly hired the right architect.”

“For sure. That Japanese team is tops.”

Libby frowned. She had no idea that David was affiliated with an overseas company. He’d never mentioned it, and she had simply assumed he was a one-man operation, and a local one at that. It was probably a naive assumption in this day and age when everything and everyone seemed to operate on a global basis.

And then she wondered if David’s permanent residence was in Japan, and, if so, just how soon he would be returning there. But then she decided she didn’t want to know the answer to that particular question, at least not right now when she was looking so forward to their day in Hannibal, not to mention the night that might follow it.

Well, a girl could hope, couldn’t she? She sank back into the luxurious leather upholstery. She didn’t want to think about anything except the day ahead and the pleasure it might bring.

What she’d never anticipated, though, and never would have in a million years, was that David would have a helicopter on the roof of the Marquis, waiting to whisk them north along the Mississippi River.

“I’ve never been in a helicopter,” she said more than a bit nervously as David boosted her inside it.

The rotors overhead were beginning to whirl and roar so he had to shout back. “Well, I’ve never been to Hannibal, Libby, so I guess that makes us even.” He settled himself inside, then held her hand tightly as they lifted off into the bright blue sky. It wasn’t much more than a minute or two before the big hotel appeared as just a shiny speck in the distance behind them.

The trip that would normally have taken them an hour and a half by car took them a mere thirty minutes in the air. The river town was busy, apparently preparing for a Huckleberry Finn festival, but since it was a weekday the tourists weren’t exactly overrunning the place as they might have on a weekend. By a little past one o’clock, Libby and David had visited Mark Twain’s boyhood home, ogled Tom Sawyer’s whitewashed fence and done a quick, fun trek through the museum, all the while holding hands like a couple of goofy kids. Like Tom and Becky, Libby thought.

For lunch they ordered hot dogs and fries from a street vendor, then carried their goodies down to the riverbank where they sat for an hour talking, watching as the Mighty Mississippi rolled by. As before, it was mostly Libby who talked up a storm while David listened and tended to deflect most of her questions back to her.

“Where were you born?” she asked him.

“Texas,” he answered, raising his hand to dab a bit of mustard from a corner of her mouth. “What about you?”

“Here,” she said. “Missouri.” Then Libby spent a while talking about her parents’ deaths, growing up at the Haven View and her aunt Elizabeth and Doug. As far as life stories went, hers wasn’t very exotic. It wasn’t even very interesting.

“Why did you want to be an architect?” she asked.

His answer was barely more than a shrug, followed by, “Why did you decide to be a photographer?”

Of course, having been asked about her favorite subject, she went into the whole story about her very first camera, her work at the St. Louis newspaper, and on and on.

She snapped pictures all the while—of the wharf, of the riverbank and the river—but hard as she tried, she wasn’t able to capture David’s face in a single frame. The man had an uncanny knack of turning, bending or lifting his hand at the exact moment she took the shot. She was almost beginning to believe he had some sort of camera phobia, and she so desperately wanted a picture of him, especially since he might be going to Japan at any time and she’d never see him again.