Crazy for Cornelia (19 page)

She studied the insert on the screen, a very old man with skin like carved mahogany, wiry hair, and alert eyes. The image
danced with large pixels, like something pulled off the Internet.

“This man says,” Tucker paused for effect, “that he worked on a Tesla Tower in South America.”

Her pulse fluttered as she stared at the screen. She was more shocked than if Tucker had shown up in a tutu and offered to
perform
Swan Lake
for her. But her curiosity about the image on the video screen overwhelmed her.

“Does he say the tower works?” she asked slowly.

“He says it should. According to him, they cracked the code for broadcasting electricity from the tower. It’s just like radio
waves.”

“Tucker, just how do you know about all this?”

Tucker stretched out, taking his time. “There’s nothing in this world I can’t find out in a couple of hours. I put my team
on it, this is what they came back with. Give me a little credit, okay? So here’s where the old guy says the Tesla Tower is,
deep in the jungle…”

She listened distractedly while Tucker talked logistics. Where to land rented helicopters. How to continue a journey on foot.
Could the old man be for real?

She looked around at Tucker’s bustling young executives. Such an aura of sweaty work and dedication. She saw nothing phony
about
their zeal to do whatever Tucker told them. But could someone as grounded as Tucker be driven by faith in Nikola Tesla?

Of course not. What mattered to Tucker was an objective, a result. Clearly he was doing all this for her. To impress her.
So how impressed should she be?

She stood up and walked to the mountain of large boxes and crates piled in orderly fashion on the floor, picked one and ripped
open the lid. She stuck her hands inside, displacing a thousand Styro-foam peanuts, and pulled out a shiny device that looked
like a tiny satellite dish, with its own built-in power supply and some digital gauges. She threw the switch and a gauge read,
“Set Coordinates.”

“That’s a remote tracking device,” Tucker said, startling her, standing right behind her back. “We can use it to find bursts
of electrical energy in the jungle. Assuming there really is a tower.”

She looked around at the hangar activity, moving around her like a fast carousel.

“You actually went out and bought all this stuff?” Her voice sounded small, more like Cornelia’s than the Electric Girl’s.

“I was a Boy Scout.” Tucker shrugged. “Be prepared.”

“Prepared for what?”

Tucker suddenly turned his head and yelled, “Hey!” That made the people scurrying around the hangar freeze. “Give us ten minutes.”

Tucker’s team clogged the doorway leaving. She and Tucker were left alone with the provisions and the plane, and ghostly air
that was suddenly too quiet.

He followed her as she paced, then suddenly moved close. She stepped back unconsciously and almost fell into a box until he
grabbed her hands.

“Corny, remember at the bar when I told you I wasn’t good at talking about my feelings?”

“Through a bit of a mist,” she admitted.

“Well, I’ve had feelings about you…”

Uh oh
. She heard the Electric Girl’s metallic warning voice.

“… but I didn’t want to share them with you because I’m not big on losing.”

“Losing what?”

“You.”

“Me?”

He almost stammered, which disarmed her. “My hopes about you, I guess.”

“Tucker, what
is
it?”

“Please. Sit down.”

She perched tensely on the folding chair. He sat on a director’s chair beside her and moved, squeaking on the floor, inches
away. One of his knees lightly touched hers.

“I can only tell you that nothing in my whole life has mattered as much to me as what I’m going to ask you. If you say yes,
you’ll make me whole. If you say no, I’ll be missing out on what I’ve always wanted for myself.”

Leaning in toward her, he looked so earnest and sincere again. So far as she could tell.

“Maybe you’d better ask me,” she said.

Tucker tapped a key on his laptop. The big video screen lit up with four words: “WILL YOU MARRY ME?”

Cornelia felt the bright letters burning up and down on the back of her eyes. Her bewilderment began as a numb feeling in
her hair follicles and traveled down her nervous system all the way to her toes. She could think of nothing to say.

“What do you think?” he finally prodded.

She tried to overcome her numbness. It made a certain sense that they were sitting in an airplane hangar, given the sudden
velocity of Tucker’s proposal. But his words made no sense at all. She needed to organize and try to reflect on them.

“Um, I like the typeface,” she allowed.

His forthright expression didn’t change, but a tiny muscle in his forehead twitched.

“I mean about my proposal.”

Could she be imagining this? No. She had slammed into an unseen wall of Tucker and been knocked down. That was all. She tried
to return to terra firma.

“You’re allergic to monkfish,” she pointed out.

“Huh?”

“That’s the most personal thing I know about you, Tucker, even
though we’ve been going out to parties together for almost a year. Why do you want to get married all of a sudden?”

“Not all of a sudden, Corny. I’ve thought this through for a while.” His eyes burned with apparent honesty again. “I guess
I just never knew exactly the right time to ask you. Because of who you are,” he added. “You’re smart. You’re beautiful. And
you’re a Lord.”

“And what does that mean? That I’m a Lord?”

“It means that our lives are intertwined.”

She thought that over. “Our lives or our fortunes?”

“Both.” He held up his palms in a gesture of rationality. “Then there’s the noblesse oblige part.”

“Part of what?”

“Part of being a Lord,” he intoned silently. “You have a duty.”

“A duty?”

He lowered his head and pinched the top of his nose with his fingers, as though her question hurt his sinuses.

He said finally, “I thought your father would have told you, but I guess he wanted to spare you the worry.”

“Told me what?”

“A third party, somebody who we deal with closely, is secretly buying up voting stock in the company. They’re planning a hostile
takeover.”

“Who?”

“Han Koi.”

She tried to remember all she had ever known about Han and his son, Han Koi, Jr., whom she had seen socially over the years.
At her eighteenth birthday in Southampton, Han Senior had beamed at her and given her a gift. It was so ridiculous, a hot
pink boombox, she had found it oddly touching. While Han Koi, Sr., was a gleefully rich merchant, his son reminded her of
a not-terribly-nice otter. Sleek and well manicured in Savile Row suits, the younger Han had always seemed mildly contemptuous
of her and even her father.

“What would he gain by taking over our company?” she asked.

“Prestige,” said Tucker. “Lord & Company is one hundred years old with deep American roots and blue-chip clients.”

“Tucker”—she remembered—“weren’t you the one who talked Chester into becoming partners with Han Koi?”

“Yes, I was.” He nodded, slightly sheepish but also irritated. “And at the time it was the right decision. They were big
and hungry for a U.S. alliance. Times change. Now Han Koi is still hungry, but what he wants to eat is us. He’s been buying
up Lord & Company voting stock. Look.”

Tucker tapped a flurry of buttons and Cornelia saw the columns of corporate names and stock lots marching down the big video
screen.

“That’s the voting stock that’s not owned by you or Chester,” Tucker explained grimly. “The Kois are using dummy corporations
to buy it. They already own 20 percent.”

She stared at the screen, like a traffic accident.

“Tucker, they’re wasting their money. I own 25 percent of the voting stock. Between us, Chester and I own 51 percent, and
that I believe is called a majority because nobody can outvote us. Isn’t that true?”

“Technically. But the Kois have been… encouraged to think they could pull off a takeover anyway.”

“My father encouraged them?”

“Of course not. Chester’s a proud man. He’s not going to lose the company it took your family a century to build.”

She felt like screaming. Trying to pull information out of Tucker was like trying to pull something up from the earth’s core.
She grabbed his wrist and startled him.

“Then how could the Kois get enough voting stock, Tucker?”

Tucker held his breath and blew it out. His square face seemed to collapse, as though he had tried to keep something awful
from her that now hovered over her head.

“Corny, I don’t like to think how many times I’ve taken you off bartops, pulled you out of fountains, with some sleazy photographer
around.”

“I’ve seen the pictures. So?”

“So it’s not weird the Kois think you’re the weak link.”

An awful feeling roiled in the pit of her stomach. To think she had acted so badly that business pirates would crank up the
Jolly Roger and use her to try to steal her family’s company. But how could they if she didn’t help them?

“For God’s sake, Tucker, I’m not selling my father out.”

“I know that, you know that, and Chester knows that,” Tucker told her solemnly. “But if the Kois decide to go public with
a takeover attempt, they may not have to win you over for Lord & Company to lose.”

She squeezed her fists together. “What do you mean?”

“Lord & Company lives by its reputation.” Tucker averted his eyes. “The Kois can use all the news stories about you to make
Chester look weak. You can figure out their spin yourself: ‘He can’t even control his own daughter, how can he run Lord &
Company?’”

Yes. She could see that. The social vultures had already made up their minds about her. It didn’t take much to imagine the
same thing happening with the business vultures who hovered over Wall Street.

She sighed miserably. “And that’s why you’re asking me to marry you now. You want to circle the wagons.”

He smiled approvingly, a teacher with a bright pupil. “We’d beat the Kois to the media. A big wedding. News stories like,
‘Deb’s Crazy Days Are Over’… or whatever. But the point is, they’d see us as a united family. They’d have to pull back.”

“Why can’t you just issue a press release?”

“Corny.” Tucker shook his handsome head. “Talk is cheap. Look, I know I’ve been wrapped up with Lord & Company. It’s taken
a lot out of me, your father…” He waved his hand and let it go. “So what do you think?”

“I think this is a dream,” she said.
And not a good one
. She shivered, from the cold inside the hangar and the enormity of what she had to decide.

Tucker Fisk?

She tried to turn him into a personal ad in the back of
New York
magazine. It could read,
“Mogul, 28, full of himself, seeks boss’s daughter/heiress for self-interest.”
Or she might be taking a simplistic view of him, exactly what she hated about others who judged her behavior. To be fair
about it, the ad could just as easily have said,
“Mogul, 28, with intelligence, ambition, and firm grasp on reality seeks flightier partner for fun and profit.”
At this moment he appeared humbled, as much as someone like Tucker could be, by what seemed a very real desire to marry her.
And there was the trip to South America.

His gift of the Tesla adventure could just be Tucker’s version of a
young man who hides an engagement ring in a Dunkin’ Donut to give his girlfriend, to let her squeal with surprise if she
doesn’t chip her tooth. In fact, his gesture could be viewed as even more touching. Totally un-Tucker-like. He had done considerable
homework about something that mattered to her. Could the Tucker she’d known, that enigma in an Armani suit, turn so easily
into this bashful puppy?

Hard to tell. But the Koi takeover attempt, that looked real as acid rain.

She saw a sad, bedraggled image of her father. Sitting at home in his study with disheveled copies of the
Wall Street Journal
and
Barron’s
strewn over the floor. Rummaging through snipped articles about the Kois’ brutal takeover of Lord & Company, still in a bathrobe
and unshaven at cocktail hour, then walking out on the terrace and gazing down over the edge of the balcony.

Enough. This had all been her fault. Not only hadn’t she tried harder to reach her father, but she had publicly become a crazed
media Ophelia.

“Tucker, why didn’t my father just ask for my help?”

He shrugged. “He didn’t want to make you feel guilty.”

She wiped absently at her eyes with the sleeve of her black sweater. “Okay. I’ll cancel my flight.”

“I knew you’d say yes.”

Tucker moved toward her and she reflexively pushed him away.

“But why do we have to get married? Can’t we just get engaged? We’ll
look
like we’re going to get married and convince old Han Koi.”

He seemed crestfallen. “Do you hate me, Corny?” His brow crunched up and the overbite of his large front teeth gnawed at his
lower lip while he waited for her answer.

“Of course I don’t hate you.”

“There’s a concept called ‘propinquity.’” He seemed proud to have pulled that out of a long-forgotten prep school education,
although he mispronounced the word. “If you spend enough time with a person and you don’t hate him, you start to like him.”

“I think the concept you’re referring to is called ‘arranged marriage.’”

He smirked. “Don’t knock it, it’s kept a lot of families together. Look at the Medicis.”

“We’re not Italian, and I’m not going to carry on traditions that were dead before I was born. Tucker, you don’t have a…”

“A what?” He waited patiently.

“You don’t have a corona,” she blurted out.

That befuddled him. “You smoke cigars?”

She felt boxed in, tiny as she was in this vast space almost the size of the Tesla Museum.

What if she just agreed to the engagement? She could always change her mind, after she helped Chester and he no longer felt
threatened over losing his business. And he would be so grateful to her, surely this could be the beginning of a thaw in the
awful, icy tundra between them.