How to Trap a Tycoon by Elizabeth Bevarly

honor of the opening of football season, Mitzi had worn her jayvee cheerleader uniform to school. The one with the microscopic red skirt. And the skintight yellow sweater. And those little cotton socks that to this day he found so inexplicably erotic.
    Man, that had been a great day. And an incredible feeling Adam had never thought to feel again. But suddenly, right in the middle of Borders Books and Music on
Michigan Avenue
, he was reliving that same hormonal, almost narcotic, surge.
    He told himself it was only because he'd been anticipating this event for more than a month, ever since Man's Life had received a press release from Rockcastle Books that announced the great coming-out party of the illustrious Lauren Grable-Monroe. It wasn't the press release, however, that had most captured Adam's attention, teeming though it was with interesting—in a rabid, overblown, sensationalistic kind of way—tidbits about the author of How to Trap a Freakin' Tycoon .
    Lauren Grable-Monroe, it seemed, was a resident of this very city, a factoid that had settled in the pit of his stomach like a piece of badly cooked veal. Rockcastle Books made no bones about the fact that the moniker Lauren Grable-Monroe was a pseudonym flagrantly lifted from the three actresses who had starred in the film How to Marry a Millionaire . However, they had made bones—really big ones, too—about divulging who, exactly, had adopted the pseudonym. They had insisted that to divulge Ms. Grable-Monroe's true identity would endanger her position in the social community she loved, not to mention open them up to defamation suits.
    According to her bio, whoever Lauren Grable-Monroe was, she had grown up on Chicago 's Gold Coast, the only child of a wealthy commodities broker and his socialite wife. Her parents had, however, lost their fortune some years ago after a hushed-up scandal, the details of which, at least in the press release, were sketchy, at best. Thus their daughter, a former debutante, had made her way in the world by "making herself available" to numerous and sundry tycoons whose fancy she had captured along the way. And now that her parents were no longer alive—and, presumably, couldn't be embarrassed by her antics—she was hoping to recoup her family's financial losses by offering professional tips in a runaway best-seller.
    Adam, of course, knew her entire biography was a lot of hooey. He'd grown up on the Gold Coast, too, and although he'd never troubled himself with idle gossip—or even active gossip—he would have heard about any scandal that had left anyone broke. More than that, though, he would have known about a socialite daughter making herself available the way Ms. Grable-Monroe claimed to have made herself available. Because Adam had always enjoyed available debutantes. Had her story been true, Lauren Grable-Monroe, whoever she was, would have been his—at least for a while.
    But even the outright phony details of her life hadn't been what had captured Adam's eye when he'd received Rockcastle's press release. No, what had caught his eye—among other body parts—was the publicity photo that had been included with it. Because it had been the kind of photo that could make a man lose sleep. And lots of it. In her glossy picture, Lauren Grable-Monroe evoked an image of a fabulous forties film star, all posh glamour and sex appeal. A fall of shoulder-length, platinum blond hair swept down over one eye in a pretty effective
Veronica
Lake
"do." Her brown eyes were at half-mast, heavily shadowed and lushly lashed. And her mouth…
    God, her mouth.
    Her full, ripe lips were painted red, red, red. Her chin was resting on her hand, and she clutched a slender cigarette holder between two fingers tipped in crimson lacquer. But what Adam had noted most of all was that, judging by the expression on her face, she appeared to be this close to a shattering orgasm.
    And it didn't stop there. Her voice, he knew, thanks to repeated television