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Keeping Secrets
Fiona Brand
Damon wants two things: his child…And Zara back in his bedBillionaire Damon Smith knows a marriage of convenient will keep fiery former assistant Zara, and their secret child, in his life. But does he truly know the woman he wants to wed?
Damon wants two things: his child...
And Zara back in his bed
Billionaire Damon Smith doesn’t like a double cross. First, his lover and trusted assistant, Zara Westlake, disappeared. Now he’s discovered she gave birth to a baby. Their baby. A marriage of convenience will keep the child—and fiery, irresistible Zara—in his life. But does he truly know the woman he wants to wed? Because Zara’s been hiding more from him than just their daughter...
FIONA BRAND lives in the sunny Bay of Islands, New Zealand. Aside from writing books and gardening, Fiona hosts international students. After a life-changing time in which she met Christ, Fiona has undertaken study for a bachelor of theology, is active in Christ’s healing ministry and has become an ordained priest in the Anglican Church.
Also by Fiona Brand (#u54f2a3e7-bc56-56ba-baf4-665b4e1173bb)
The Pearl House miniseries
A Breathless Bride
A Tangled Affair
A Perfect Husband
The FiancГ©e Charade
Just One More Night
Needed: One Convenient Husband
Billionaires and Babies miniseries
Keeping Secrets
Discover more at millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk).
Keeping Secrets
Fiona Brand
www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
ISBN: 978-1-474-07672-2
KEEPING SECRETS
В© 2018 Fiona Gillibrand
Published in Great Britain 2018
by Mills & Boon, an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 1 London Bridge Street, London, SE1 9GF
All rights reserved including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form. This edition is published by arrangement with Harlequin Books S.A.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, locations and incidents are purely fictional and bear no relationship to any real life individuals, living or dead, or to any actual places, business establishments, locations, events or incidents. Any resemblance is entirely coincidental.
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www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
To the Lord, who says, “Come to me,
all you who are weary and burdened,
and I will give you rest...for I am gentle and humble
in heart, and you will find rest for your souls.”
—Matthew 11:28–29
Many thanks to Stacy Boyd and Charles Griemsman.
Contents
Cover (#ufcc34cac-2a54-594d-ba51-319007e6ebda)
Back Cover Text (#u10ae0576-f15d-5936-848a-6fc51d9379f4)
About the Author (#u260a7c66-e615-5fe1-b538-6527bffd095d)
Booklist (#ufd8b4371-5322-54f3-87a8-19e62a372876)
Title Page (#u4efed508-3acd-5936-8032-149f455ed5f4)
Copyright (#ub42843c0-bddf-5230-8f83-05f5364aed63)
Dedication (#u42e3e385-a894-5ba0-b63e-9c92fe4e095a)
One (#u544061bf-d43c-53a3-96d7-bd3f9c30f227)
Two (#ucabbe691-aae1-51cd-827a-37ef51701b3c)
Three (#ua73e6d28-58c3-5ae1-8b75-94a94abf9704)
Four (#u9ea14e30-4c50-59e2-ba3f-d5b014dd4be5)
Five (#litres_trial_promo)
Six (#litres_trial_promo)
Seven (#litres_trial_promo)
Eight (#litres_trial_promo)
Nine (#litres_trial_promo)
Ten (#litres_trial_promo)
Eleven (#litres_trial_promo)
Twelve (#litres_trial_promo)
Extract (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
One (#u54f2a3e7-bc56-56ba-baf4-665b4e1173bb)
The discreet vibration of his cell interrupted Damon Smith’s stride as he jogged the hard-packed sand of his private island in New Zealand’s Hauraki Gulf.
The conversation was to the point. His younger brother, Ben, was quitting. He would not be in the office tomorrow, or in the foreseeable future.
Reason? He had run off with Damon’s pretty blonde personal assistant.
Jaw locked, Damon turned his back on the glare of the setting sun. An icy breeze cooled his overheated skin and flattened his damp T-shirt against the tense muscles of his back, but he barely noticed. For an odd moment sensory perception seemed to fall away and Damon was spun back in time. Almost a year to the day, when another PA, Zara Westlake, had run out on him, leaving her job and his bed.
Zara. Damon frowned at the image that instantly surfaced. Dark hair, direct blue eyes, finely molded cheekbones made more intriguing by a scattering of freckles. A faintly tip-tilted nose and a firm jaw, all softened by a quirky, generous mouth, which added a fascinating, mercurial depth to a face that was somehow infinitely more riveting than conventional prettiness.
The wind gusted more strongly, the chill registering, as an old wound in his shoulder and another at his hip—both courtesy of his time in the military—stiffened and began to ache. Grimly, Damon dismissed the memories of Zara, annoyed that they still had the power to stop him in his tracks, despite his attempts to put the brief fling in its proper perspective.
After all, their involvement had lasted barely a month. On a scale of one to ten, given that he had once been married for seven years, it shouldn’t have registered. Especially since Zara herself, with her usual trademark efficiency, had made it crystal clear she had only ever been interested in a short, very private affair.
“We’re in love,” Ben helpfully supplied now.
The words in love made Damon’s jaw tighten. They echoed through a childhood he preferred to forget, one Ben had no knowledge of because he had been lucky enough to be born after the untimely death of their father. Ben had never been around to experience Guy Smith’s infidelities or his corrosive temper, the long nights when Damon and his mother had borne the brunt of that temper, and the scars.
“In love.” He tried to keep the distaste out of his voice, and failed.
The words dredged up memories of the beautiful women who had hung at the edges of his father’s life, expensive women who had demanded diamonds, exotic holidays and credit cards with dizzying limits that had eaten away at the family fortune. Guy Smith had claimed to be “in love” a number of times despite his marriage. When the money had finally run out, his latest mistress had left him. He had ended up in a bar, drunk enough to make the mistake of picking a fight with someone who could hit back. He had been found unconscious on the street the next morning, and had died of a fractured skull on the way to hospital.
When Adeline Smith had gotten the news of her husband’s death, she had broken down and cried, but the tears had been ones of relief. Damon, at ten years old, nursing two cracked ribs and a broken jaw courtesy of his attempt to protect his mother from Guy’s red-faced fury when he’d discovered they were broke, hadn’t shed so much as a tear. Life had been gray and drained of hope. In the instant he heard his father had died, it had felt like stepping out of the shadows into blazing light. Six months later, Ben had been born.
Now, as Ben’s only close family, Damon had to tread carefully. His brother hadn’t endured the experiences that had shaped Damon. Ben didn’t understand how destructive out-of-control emotions could be, and he carelessly fell in and out of love on a regular basis. In a way, Ben’s cavalier approach to relationships was an uncomfortable reminder of their father. Although, thankfully, Ben had none of their father’s meanness.
Flexing his stiffening shoulder, Damon paced the hard-packed sand of the curving bay, which was punctuated by dark drifts of rock at each end. He forced himself to concentrate on his brother’s latest crisis, which this time impacted Damon directly.
For the past eighteen months he had been training Ben to help run their family’s sprawling security empire. The one his mother, with the help of her brother, Tyler McCall—Damon’s uncle—had pulled from the financial fires of near bankruptcy. Unfortunately, like their father, Ben had proven to be spectacularly disinterested in Magnum Security. It was a fact that Damon would have gotten a great deal more done if Ben had not been in the office. His assistant, Emily, however, had been smart, intuitive and almost as efficient as Zara.
With effort, he shook off a further raft of memories and refocused on the problem at hand: saving Ben from himself and retrieving Damon’s assistant. Emily was significantly involved in a crucial deal he was working on. At this juncture, it would be nearly impossible to replace her.
“Walk me through this. I didn’t think you even liked Emily.”
“How would you know? You’ve had your head buried in the McCall takeover for weeks.”
Damon could feel his blood pressure rising. “So has Emily. If you will recall she’s my PA.”
Although, to put a fine point on it, he had never appointed her to the position. Emily was a temp, the third temp he had employed over the past year while continuing to interview numerous candidates, both male and female, some with impressive degrees. Unfortunately, not one of them had possessed the exacting qualities required for the position. Qualities that had been oddly defined in Zara and which he had not realized he needed until she left him.
“Uh, not any longer. Check your email and you’ll find Emily’s resignation.”
A boarding call echoed through the phone, informing Damon that Ben and Emily were already at the airport.
Damon kept a lid on his frustration. He could live with the inconvenience of losing Emily. What really worried him was what was happening to Ben. The partying and dating aside, he was becoming immersed in the darker, undisciplined passions that had overtaken their father. Passions that had even extended to Tyler McCall, who had become the CEO of Magnum Security and the boys’ guardian following Adeline’s death from cancer when Damon was fourteen and Ben just four. As stable as Tyler, an ex-SEAL and intelligence expert had seemed, in his late forties he had fallen for a spectacularly beautiful model, then died along with her in a car accident on the romantic Mediterranean island of Medinos.
Damon’s chest tightened at the memory of the loss that, four years ago, had hit him hard. Tyler had been the father Guy Smith should have been. He had been a safe haven for both Damon and Ben until he had been ensnared by Petra Hunt, an aging model turned A-list party girl.
To lose Tyler, whose watchwords had been reliability and common sense, to the kind of liaison that had gone hand in glove with Damon’s father’s degenerate lifestyle... It had, to put it mildly, shaken Damon.
Damned if he’d let Ben fall into the same trap.
Damon’s fingers tightened on the phone. Technically, Ben had not run off with Emily yet; they were both still at the airport. There was a chance to nip the relationship in the bud if Damon kept his cool. “Don’t board the flight. I can be at the airport in an hour—we can talk this through.”
“There’s nothing to talk about,” Ben said curtly. “Emily and I have been seeing each other for the past month. Long enough to decide that this is something special.”
“You’re only twenty—”
“Old enough to make my own decisions. Last I heard, I could go to war at eighteen if I wanted. You were younger when you married Lily.”
Damon’s brows jerked together at the mention of his ex-wife. “The two situations don’t equate.”
“Why? Because Lily left you?”
For a vibrating moment Damon was confronted by a past he took great pains to avoid thinking about, because it highlighted the singular difficulty he had with relationships. There hadn’t been one thing wrong with Lily. She had been beautiful, intelligent and sweet-natured and he had liked her, all good reasons to choose her as his wife. Unfortunately, he had never been able to give Lily the two things she had decided she wanted from him after the wedding. First, that he would fall in love with her. Second, that he would give her the children she had decided were now a deal breaker.
There was a loaded pause. “Or is it because you slept with your assistant last year,” Ben asked softly, “and you’ve suddenly decided that’s a forbidden sin?”
Damon stopped dead in his tracks. Flashes of the stark, heated passion Zara had unlocked in him, and which he had constantly failed to control, rushed back at him, making his chest tighten. “How could you know about that?”
Zara had insisted they keep the liaison secret. She had made it clear she couldn’t work for him if people knew they were involved. Damon had complied even though he hadn’t liked the condition. It had smacked of his father’s illicit affairs. Emotion might be a no-go area, but Damon preferred to keep his sexual relationships straightforward and aboveboard.
Ben’s tone was impatient. “Zara is Emily’s agent. Emily put two and two together.”
Damon’s stomach tensed as more memories of Zara surfaced. In every way, Zara was his ex-wife’s polar opposite. Exactly the kind of woman he usually took care to avoid, because of the subtle, locked-down sensuality that was just a little too interesting. Zara had been dark and curvaceous, where Lily had been blonde, athletic and slender. The differences hadn’t stopped at physical appearance. From the first moment, Zara had been a vivid, fascinating mixture of efficiency, quirky humor and unexpected passion.
Their connection had blindsided them both.
“The two situations are not the same.”
“Right on to that. What Emily and I share is more than just convenient sex.”
An image of Zara lying in bed, dark satiny hair spread over the pillow, blue eyes veiled with mysteries and secrets, assaulted him. Convenient sex? There had been nothing convenient about it. The words that sprang to mind were more along the lines of hot, reckless.
Addictive.
The same brand of intense, unruly passion that had ruined his father and Tyler and which had kept Damon awake nights because he had vowed it would never control him.
A clarifying thought that made sense of Ben and Emily’s elopement suddenly occurred to Damon. He could kick himself for not thinking of it before. “Emily’s pregnant.”
Ben made a sound of disbelief. “Emily’s not the one who got pregnant.”
Not the one who got pregnant.
The words seemed to hang in the air. Suddenly, like a piece of a puzzle falling neatly into place, Zara’s abrupt exit from Damon’s life, her disappearance for months, made perfect sense.
She had left because she had been pregnant. With his child.
Damon sucked in a deep breath and tried to think, tried to orient himself. He felt like he’d been kicked in the chest.
If Zara had had a baby—and by now, over a year on, the baby would be four months old—why hadn’t she told him?
Admittedly, they hadn’t known each other long, six weeks in total.
Long enough to get messily involved and for Damon to break a whole list of personal rules.
Long enough that he’d had trouble forgetting her. That he’d broken his last intact rule, a rule that should have been inviolable. Instead of letting Zara go and regaining his equilibrium, his distance, when she left town, he had gone after her.
He had tracked her to a small cottage in the South Island city of Dunedin. On the verge of knocking on her front door, he had abruptly come to his senses. He had known that if he walked through that door they would be in bed within minutes. Added to that, if he continued an affair that had become dangerously irresistible, he risked becoming engaged to and marrying a woman who was the exact opposite of the kind of wife he needed. A passionate, addictive, unpredictable lover who had made it clear she had no interest in a committed relationship.
Disgusted with the obsession that had clearly gotten an unhealthy grip on him, he had walked away. The only problem was, he had not been able to stay away. Months later, when he had discovered Zara had opened her own employment agency in town, instead of steering clear, he had requested that his office manager ditch the large, established firm that usually fulfilled their employment needs and start using Zara’s agency.
His fingers tightened on the cell. “How long have you known that Zara had a baby?”
Ben made an exasperated sound. “Right at this moment I’m not sure if you’re burying your head in the sand out on that fortress island of yours or if you really didn’t know. If Emily was expecting my child, I wouldn’t be afraid of fatherhood.”
Fatherhood.
Damon stared bleakly at the misty line where sky met sea. Unwittingly, Ben had gone straight for the jugular, exposing a truth Damon had no wish to confront. The whole issue of fatherhood was something he usually avoided, because it entailed facing a past he had gone to a great deal of trouble to bury and forget. It meant coming to grips with another relationship for which he was not ready or equipped.
Lily’s words when she had stormed out of their apartment came back to haunt him. I must have been out of my mind thinking I could live with a man who approaches marriage as if it’s some kind of business contract and who doesn’t want kids, ever!
He took another deep breath but, even so, when he spoke his voice was raspy. “The baby’s...all right?”
Ben said something short and flat. “You really didn’t know. Well, that takes the cake. You’re a security guru. You wrote the book on surveillance techniques and you produce software for half a dozen governments, and you don’t know when your ex-girlfriend has your child? I thought you didn’t want to know, because you don’t want kids. Lily said enough about the sub—”
“Don’t bring Lily into this.” The response was automatic, because every thought was blasted away by the fact that Zara had given birth to his child.
The one outcome he had taken care to avoid, except on one notable occasion, had happened.
He was a father.
A final boarding call echoed down the phone.
“I’ve gotta go,” Ben muttered. “Look, I’m sorry about breaking the news about Zara and the baby like this. The fact was, I thought you did know but were...you know, avoiding the whole issue.” There was a rustling sound as if Ben was holding the phone awkwardly jammed to his ear as he surrendered his boarding pass. “Emily was fairly sure you didn’t know. She seemed to think it was more that you lack emotional intelligence...whatever that means.”
There was a feminine yelp in the background along with a further rustling noise as if Ben had jammed the phone against his chest to muffle the sound for a few seconds.
Ben’s voice came back, loud and clear. “Anyway, I think we both know that trying to turn me into an executive wasn’t working. I told you right from the start that the kind of locked-down life you lead isn’t for me. I want to travel and do something with my fine arts degree. Anything but add up soulless numbers all day and stare at computer code, which, by the way, I will never understand. Don’t try to find us. I’ll send a postcard...eventually.”
A click signaled the call had been terminated.
Damon slipped the phone back into the pocket of his sweatpants. There was no point in running after Ben now. The boarding calls meant that whatever flight Ben and Emily had booked, they would be airborne before he could pull the strings needed to either detain them or delay the flight. That was no doubt the reason Ben had rung just before the flight left. Damon guessed he was lucky that Ben, who had been kicking against Damon’s authority for the past year, had called at all.
Feeling like an automaton, Damon went back over the conversation. Ben’s crack about his lack of emotional intelligence grated. Apparently, he had missed two major cues in his life, Ben’s utter lack of interest in Magnum Security and the fact that Damon had fathered a child, despite Zara assuring him there was no chance of a pregnancy.
He tried to remember the exact words Zara had used immediately after they’d had crazy, passionate, unprotected sex. She had dragged on a robe and escaped to the bathroom, pausing to send him an irritatingly neutral smile, before assuring him that he had no need to worry.
He had taken that to mean Zara had taken care of contraception. But now he knew it could also have meant that his assistant, in her usual brisk, efficient way, had been stating her intention to take full responsibility if there was a pregnancy.
Cold water splashed his ankles and Damon became aware that the tide had advanced and water was now surging around his shoes. Still absorbed with his thoughts, he strolled up the beach and headed for his house. Perched on a headland, the large multilevel house seemed to grow from the dark cliffs, stark and spare and a little forbidding. Built of stone, it reminded him of the medieval fortress Tyler had owned on the Mediterranean island of Medinos and which Damon had spent his adolescence exploring.
Fatherhood. The realization sank in a little deeper.
Damon turned to stare across the water in the direction of Auckland’s cityscape, the first glimmer of evening lights visible in the distance. Somewhere across the water existed a child who, in a profound, unassailable way, belonged to him.
Just beyond the breaking waves a sleek gannet arrowed into the water, then surfaced with a silvery fish in its beak. Damon drew in a lungful of cold air as he struggled with imperatives that were as opposite as black and white. He had long ago decided that fatherhood was not for him, but fate had intervened and he was caught and held as fast as the small, flapping fish. He could not turn his back on his child.
The sun was sinking fast, the last burnished glow infusing the clear winter air with rose and gold. The sea breeze had dropped, leaving the water glassily smooth.
He did not understand why Zara had chosen to cut him out of his child’s life, but that would soon change. In the methodical way of his mind, Damon began to formulate a plan to meet with Zara and discover what he could about the child. Although the practical to-do list seemed cold and antiseptic when he considered exactly what it meant—confronting his ex-lover about the child they had made together. And he knew exactly when that had happened—the first time they had made love.
As Damon climbed the steep cliff path to his house, memories flickered, vivid and irresistible.
Torrential rain pounding down as he held his jacket over Zara’s head to shelter her as he dropped her home after a late business dinner. He shook out the wet jacket in the dimness of her porch. She laughed as she swept soaked hair back from her forehead. With her dark hair gleaming with moisture, her cheeks flushed, suddenly she was quite startlingly beautiful.
There was a moment when he bent his head, a split second before their mouths touched, when she could have stepped away and didn’t. Instead, her breath hitched, her fingers closed on the lapels of his jacket and she lifted up on her toes for his kiss.
He caught the scent of her skin and desire closed around him like heated manacles. Sensation shuddered through him in waves as they kissed for long, spellbinding minutes. They made it to her bedroom, just.
He used a condom the first and even the second time, but in the hour before dawn, waking to Zara making slow, exquisite love to him, and caught in that strange halfway state between dream and reality, he did not.
The unprotected lovemaking had happened with blinding speed, over almost before he realized it, but that did not negate his responsibility. Zara’s pregnancy had been his fault.
Damon climbed the steps to his house and paused in the shelter of the heavy stone portico, which protected the entryway from the wind. Peeling out of his wet shoes, he pushed open the heavy, ancient door made of thick oak and bands of iron that he had imported from Medinos and headed for his shower. After drying off, he pulled on soft, faded jeans with the fluid economy of movement he had learned during his years with the military in Afghanistan and the Middle East.
Not bothering with a shirt, Damon padded into his cavernous bedroom, found his laptop and keyed in the GPS program his firm used as a security measure for the company’s top executives. He typed in his brother’s phone number. Instantly a map materialized along with a tracking icon, which indicated that Ben was over the Pacific Ocean, just northeast of Auckland. It was somehow typical that Ben, with his utter disinterest in all things to do with Magnum Security, had been careless enough to forget that his phone could be tracked.
Damon checked the time then rang Walter, his head of security and one of his most trusted employees. Minutes later, Ben’s flight details were confirmed. He was headed for the island of Medinos, and would, no doubt, be staying in the clifftop fortress Tyler had left to him and Ben jointly.
Retrieving his cell, he found the only number for Zara that he had, her employment agency. After a moment of hesitation, he dialed. In the past two months, ever since he had discovered that Zara had opened her own agency, apart from picking up his initial call, he had invariably found himself shunted through to her answering service. His jaw compressed when, as usual, the call went straight through to voice mail. He left a terse message and set the phone down on his bedside table.
Stepping out onto his balcony, he studied the gray clouds building overhead, blotting out the first scattering of stars. Ben had been right in pointing out the irony that Damon specialized in designing hardware and software to collect, unlock and decode information, and yet he could not unlock the mystery of the woman who had shared his bed and then attempted to disappear with all the skill of a master spy.
Cold droplets spattered Damon’s broad shoulders as he turned from the darkening view, strolled through to the kitchen and lifted the lid on the casserole Walter’s wife, Margot, had left for him. Not for the first time, he was keenly aware of the utter emptiness of his house.
For years he had been living in a kind of deep freeze. Just over a year ago, when Zara had strolled into his office in a beige jacket and skirt that on most women would have looked shapeless and boring, but on her had somehow looked sexy, the thaw had been instant and profound.
He had wanted her. If he was ruthlessly honest, that was also the reason he had reconnected with Zara again when he found out she had opened her own employment agency. To date, he had resisted what he’d come to view as a fatal attraction, but that was about to change. The knowledge that Zara had had his child had kicked away some invisible barrier. They were linked in the most primal, intimate way a man and woman could be linked and he was no longer prepared to tolerate the distance she seemed to prefer.
From now on, they were playing by his rules.
He had not forgotten Ben. As Ben’s only close relative and the trustee of Ben’s inheritance, Damon’s course of action was clear. He needed to retrieve his brother before Ben did something completely irresponsible, like get married to a woman he had only known for a few weeks.
The retrieval of Ben, as luck would have it, dovetailed with Damon’s need to gain access to his child. Zara Westlake stood at the center of both issues, which meant that, whether she liked it or not, she would have to meet with him face-to-face.
Out of the murk of the first two objectives, a third emerged. Despite Zara’s betrayal, despite the grip the past still had on his life, he needed one more thing.
Zara Westlake back in his bed.
Two (#u54f2a3e7-bc56-56ba-baf4-665b4e1173bb)
A soft chime, indicating that a much-needed client had just opened the door of Zara’s fledgling employment agency, diverted her attention from her four-month-old baby, Rosie. Thankfully, after a marathon effort to get Rosie to nap, her tiny daughter had finally drifted into a restless slumber.
Anxious to snag her client before he or she lost interest and decided to take their very valuable business elsewhere, Zara tiptoed out of the smallest interview room, which today doubled as Rosie’s makeshift nursery. Makeshift, because normally, when Zara was working, Rosie was in day care. But, because Rosie had been a little off-color, the center hadn’t wanted to take her, so Zara had planned to work from home while she kept an eye on her daughter. However, that arrangement had crashed and burned when her assistant, Molly, had called in sick at the last minute, meaning that Zara had been forced to bring Rosie to the office.
It wasn’t until she had gently closed the door behind her that Zara realized she had left her high heels, which she had slipped out of while she had fed and changed Rosie, behind her desk. Added to that, her hair, once smoothed into an immaculate French pleat, was now disheveled from the playful grip of Rosie’s fingers.
Pinning a smoothly professional smile on her face, she turned to her client. In that instant, the room seemed to whirl, reminding her of the last month of pregnancy when bouts of dizziness would hit out of the blue.
Disbelief froze her in place as Zara’s gaze traveled from the rock-solid shape of a masculine jaw, with the hint of a five o’clock shadow, to the scar that sliced across one cheekbone, a fascinating counterpart to the damaged line of a once-aquiline nose. Her own jaw taut, she braced herself for the impact of the magnetic silvery gaze, which had always put her in mind of that of a very large, very focused wolf.
Her heart slammed against the wall of her chest. A complicated mix of panic, edged with another purely feminine reaction she refused to acknowledge.
He had found her.
Damon Smith.
Six foot two inches of scarred, muscular, reclusive billionaire standing in her tiny office, taking all the air, his sleek shoulders broad enough that they stretched the dark fabric of a very expensive black coat.
A stomach-churning anxiety kicked in as she wondered why he was here. Damon Smith had the kind of wealth and power that meant he did not have to leave his private island or his penthouse office unless he chose to do so. There was a small army of devoted, ex-military employees who had been with him for years and who were ready and willing to do his slightest bidding.
Damon turning up in her office was significant.
* * *
Cold air gusted, shaking the windows. Predictably, her door, which had a malfunctioning catch, flung open. Damon caught the door before it could bang against the wall, his dark coat swirling like a mantle as he did so, cloaking its owner in the shadows and secrets that permeated his life. Public secrets due to his work. Private secrets, which she was privy to and wished she wasn’t, because they also scored her life.
He closed the door and tested it to make sure the catch had engaged. His gaze, now distinctly irritable, pinned her again. “You need to get that fixed.”
“It’s on my list.”
Along with fixing the leaky tap in the tiny bathroom and replacing some of the light fittings, which looked like they had been salvaged from a Second World War junk sale. Knowing her landlord, they probably had.
Keeping a neutral smile fixed firmly in place, Zara girded herself to hold Damon’s gaze with the equanimity she had learned in an elite finishing school in Switzerland, all paid for by her gorgeous, restless, jet-setting supermodel mother, Petra Atrides, who had been known in the fashion and media worlds as Petra Hunt. A practiced composure, which had been put to the test by the paparazzi when Petra had plunged to her death along with her new fiancé—Damon’s uncle Tyler McCall.
Not that Damon knew any of that, which was the way she wanted to keep it. There was no way Damon would believe she had not known who he was when she accepted the job as his personal assistant and then practically flung herself into his bed. Not when he discovered she was Petra Hunt’s daughter and had given birth to his child.
The wind buffeted the front door again, the force of it actually making the lights flicker, but this time the door held.
Damon took in her small office in one sweeping glance. “So this is where you’ve been hiding out.”
“What do you mean, �hiding out’?”
Although the fact that she had been in hiding for the past thirteen months, hiding a pregnancy and now a baby, put an annoying blush on her cheeks.
Damon’s expression was deceptively mild. “You haven’t been answering your phone or returning calls, and the address you gave me over the phone a couple of months ago is incorrect. I’ve spent the past half hour walking the streets and questioning shop owners who had never heard of you. It wasn’t until I went online and checked your social media site that I managed to get your real address.”
Zara struggled to control another surge of heat to her cheeks. Weeks ago, when Damon had contacted her out of the blue, she hadn’t meant to give him incorrect information. In a moment of panic, thinking that he had somehow found out about Rosie, the transposed figures had just tumbled out of her. But neither should he, a CEO, have been even remotely interested in the whereabouts of her office. When she had agreed to take on Magnum Security as a client, she had only done so because she had desperately needed the money and on the condition that all of her dealings were with Damon’s dry-as-dust business manager, Howard Prosser. In theory she should never have had to deal with Damon, period.
She stiffened at the image of the extraordinarily wealthy and private Damon Smith walking the streets and questioning shop owners.
Hunting her.
A sharp little thrill shot down her spine. Instantly, her jaw firmed. That was the kind of feminine reaction toward Damon that she had never been able to afford, because he was, literally, the one man she should not want and could not have in her life.
Aside from being a link to a past she was determined to leave behind, she had found out that Damon was also the trustee of his uncle’s estate. He had requested, through his lawyers, that she, as Angel Atrides—her name before she had legally changed it to Zara Westlake—sign a legal document relinquishing any claim on Tyler’s estate in exchange for a one-off, extremely offensive cash offer.
Raw with grief, insulted and hurt, Zara had refused the offer and had refused to sign the horrible legal agreement. She had been sickened by the tactics of a family who had obviously bought into the media hype around her mother as a model who was past her prime and who had inveigled her way into Tyler’s über-rich, normally sensible life. No doubt Damon believed that Angel Atrides was just as trashy and opportunistic, and that a chunk of cash and a legal agreement was a necessary insurance against her ever darkening his doorstep or, horror of horrors, trying to make a claim on Tyler’s fortune.
Once again, the calculated risk of accepting Magnum as a client made her heart pound. Her chest seized on a sudden thought. Could Damon know about Rosie?
Last night he had left a message on her answering service, a terse command to call him back. It was something she had deliberately left for Molly to attend to.
Summoning a smooth smile, and trying to control her racing pulse, Zara made it to the safe haven of her desk. “I’m sorry you had trouble finding me.”
Feeling pinned by his gaze, she opened a drawer on the pretext that she wanted to check the address on her business cards. Although, she knew there was nothing wrong with her cards. Her mother might have been a creative, artistic personality who resisted being organized and hated dealing with numbers, but Zara was her polar opposite. A perfectionist and a details person, she preferred to lead, not follow, and she liked to get things right.
The flush on her cheeks seemed to grow more heated as she jerkily closed the drawer on her stack of perfectly aligned, perfectly correct business cards. “I’m sorry you somehow ended up with the wrong address.”
Grim amusement flickered at the corners of Damon’s mouth. “The number was reversed. But something tells me you already knew that.”
Her chin jerked up. “What are you insinuating?”
Damon shrugged. “Thirteen months ago, you quit your job and disappeared. For the past couple of months, ever since I discovered you had opened up your own employment agency, apart from picking up my first call, you’ve consistently failed to return my calls—”
“You know I prefer to work via email. Besides, all the correspondence and contracts go through Howard.”
He glanced around her office again, his gaze briefly settling on the door of the interview room where Rosie was sleeping. “Maybe the address you gave me was a genuine mistake.”
But his tone told her he didn’t believe that.
His gaze shifted thoughtfully back to the door of the interview room and a sharp jolt of adrenaline made her heart pound.
She was suddenly certain that he knew.
A little feverishly, she straightened piles of paper that did not need straightening. The only way Damon could have found out about Rosie was through Emily, although her contact with Emily had been minimal, two interviews and a couple of phone updates. She was not even sure Emily was aware that Zara had a baby. Of course, there were other ways he could have pried into her life. Given that he was in the security and surveillance business and had once been some kind of Special Forces agent in the military, she was certain he could find out whatever he wanted.
Damon’s gaze skimmed her neatly arranged office and Zara did her best to conceal her relief that he was no longer concentrated on the door to the interview room in which Rosie was sleeping. When it came to Damon, usually, she erred on the side of fighting, but today running was at the top of the list—with Rosie tucked invisibly under one arm so he would not uncover that particular guilty secret.
Shockingly, his gaze touched on hers before shifting and she realized he had noticed her hair. She took a calming breath and willed her heart rate to slow. There was nothing wrong with messy hair. It was a windy day. Her hair could have gotten disheveled when she’d gone out for coffee.
A weird part of her acknowledged that she had always known this could happen, that one day her most lucrative client, who also happened to be the father of her child, would walk into her office and she would have to deal with him face-to-face. But, not now, not today, when she was struggling from lack of sleep and with Rosie just feet away in the next room.
The last thing either of them needed was to be inescapably linked by Rosie. A small shudder went through Zara at the thought of the media attention that would erupt once it was found out that Petra Hunt’s daughter, using a new identity, had had a child with Tyler McCall’s nephew. They would come after her; they would come after Rosie. And Damon, apart from making it crystal clear that Zara was not welcome in his life, would hate that she had fooled him.
On cue, a small, snuffling sound came from the interview room. Zara’s heart sped up. Lately, Rosie, who was usually a very good sleeper, was waking up after just a few minutes of restless slumber. A little desperately, she reached for a random file and slapped it down on the desk, trying to make enough noise that Damon would not hear Rosie. “So, now that you’ve found me, what can I do for you? Is there a problem with one of the employees I sent to you? Troy? Or Harold?”
Troy was young, just eighteen, with tattoos and a brow piercing, but he was bright and earnest. Zara had thought he would be perfect for Damon’s IT team. Harold had been an older public servant who had failed to find a job through other employment agencies, owing to a rather unfortunate skin condition, and in desperation had come to Zara. She had found a place for him in Damon’s accounts department.
Damon frowned slightly, as if he didn’t know who either Troy or Harold were, then his face cleared. “They’re fine, as far as I know. This is the problem.”
He dropped the tabloid newspaper, which he had been carrying under one arm, on her desk. It was folded open at a tacky gossip columnist’s page.
She drew a calming breath and forced herself to study a grainy black-and-white photo of Damon’s younger brother, Ben, who had his arm flung around Emily’s slim waist. The blaring caption, Magnum Security Heir’s Hot Affair with Blonde Temp, practically leaped off the page.
Snatching up the paper, she skimmed the story—which was the stuff of her nightmares—with growing horror. Thankfully, the detail was minimal. To her relief, the name of her employment agency had not been mentioned...yet.
She took a closer look at the photograph. Details she had not noticed first off finally registered. Emily’s hair seemed longer and curlier. Gone were the subtle makeup and low-key suits, the crisp blouses that had seemed to summarize Zara’s star temp as sensible, trustworthy and professional. Emily looked younger and a touch bohemian. She certainly no longer looked like the poster girl for Westlake Employment Agency.
Zara quickly read the sketchy article. Of course, the journalist had painted Emily as a fortune-hunting employee and Ben as the kind of high-powered playboy businessman who was only interested in a quick fling and who would not be easily caught by a mere office girl.
Compassion for Emily mixed with a surge of outrage and a fierce desire to protect her protГ©gГ©. Just because Emily had fallen for Ben and decided to make the best of herself did not make her a cheap, trashy opportunist. Zara had lost count of the times the papers had portrayed her mother as cheap and on the make, when the truth was that her mother had been so gorgeous she had literally had to fend off men. And yes, some of those men had been breathtakingly rich.
When Petra died, the behavior of the tabloids and women’s magazines had worsened. They had smeared her reputation even more before turning their malicious spotlight on Zara. Although, luckily, Petra had always made sure Zara was hidden from the media, so their store of background information had been meager. Most of the photos they’d had were blurred shots of Zara as a child or as a plump teenager taken through telephoto lenses.
Horrified and frightened by the relentless pursuit of the media, Zara had ditched her degree and disappeared. Angel Atrides, the fictional spoiled party girl the media seemed intent on creating, had become the ordinary, invisible person she longed to be—Zara Westlake. Zara had been her paternal grandmother’s name, Westlake her maternal grandmother’s maiden name.
Her mother’s cousin Phoebe Westlake, a sharp-edged accountant who was ill with leukemia, had provided the hideout Zara needed in the South Island city of Dunedin while she had painstakingly reinvented her life. Which had made it all the more frustrating when, almost three years later, with a new name and a degree in business management—in effect a new life—Phoebe’s last act before she had died had been to secure Zara a job interview with the nephew of Tyler McCall.
Not that Zara had made that connection until after she had taken the job, because Damon’s surname, Smith, was so neutral and ordinary that she hadn’t suspected the link. To further muddy the waters, Damon was reclusive by nature, avoiding the media. It hadn’t been until two weeks into her job and after she had made the mistake of sleeping with Damon, that he had handed her a takeover bid for Tyler McCall’s electric company.
She had finally understood exactly who Damon was.
As much as she needed to sit down now, Zara remained standing. Once again, the desire to run was uppermost, but she instantly dismissed that option. In setting up her business after Rosie was born she had made a stand. She was over running.
She was tired of giving up things that were important, like home and friendships and career choices, and having to start fresh somewhere else. Having to be someone else. If she ran now, she would have to give up her cozy rented cottage, which was just a twenty-minute commute from her office. She would have to abandon her business, which she loved with passion, because, finally, all of her study and hard work had paid off and she had something of substance that was hers. Plus, if she walked away now she would be deeply in debt, with no way to repay it.
The thought of defaulting on her business loan made her stomach tighten. It was a sharp reminder of exactly why she had buckled and taken on Damon as a client in the first place. It had been a huge risk, but if she hadn’t, she would have gone under. Damon, against all odds, was her most lucrative client and had taken on a staggering number of personnel, most of them temps, which meant she continued to accrue fees.
Her jaw firmed. Right now, she could not cope with another debt. It had taken her years to pay off her mother’s funeral expenses. However, not running meant she might have to face the press, and probably sooner rather than later.
The way she saw it, her only viable option was damage control. Luckily, due to her current line of work, she had become quite skilled at it. Refolding the paper so she no longer had to look at the damaging article or the gleeful smile of the gossip columnist, and utterly relieved that the situation with Ben and Emily was Damon’s reason for seeking her out, she directed a brisk glance at him. “When did they leave?”
“Last night, on a scheduled flight. Which is why the tabloids got hold of the story.”
If it had been the firm’s private jet, the press wouldn’t have gotten a look in, but Damon would have been notified. Damon had been caught by surprise, which meant Ben had kept his plans secret. That being the case, it was entirely possible, given that Zara hadn’t known about the relationship, that Damon had not, either.
Light glimmered at the end of a very long, very dark tunnel. Damon had clearly bought into the tabloid story, but there were other constructions that could apply to Ben and Emily leaving the country together—constructions that did not place the blame on either Emily or Westlake Employment.
Mind working quickly, Zara examined and discarded a number of options, finally settling on attack as the best form of defense. “It’s highly irregular that Ben has taken Emily out of the country.” She lifted her chin, but even so, in her bare feet, her gaze was only just level with Damon’s throat. She tried not to be fascinated by a very interesting pulse along the side of his jaw. “When might I expect my temp to be returned?”
Damon’s brows jerked together. “Emily was not kidnapped.”
Surreptitiously, Zara felt around with her toes for her shoes. “I didn’t say kidnapped, exactly.”
Damon crossed his arms over his chest, which only served to make him seem even larger and more ticked off. “You’re implying that she has been coerced in some way. Since Emily, at twenty-six, is older than Ben by a good six years, I doubt any coercion was involved.”
The age twenty-six hit an unexpected nerve. It was the same age she had been when she’d had the wild, silly affair with Damon. Heat surged into her cheeks. It was hard to believe it had been little more than a year ago. So much had happened it felt like centuries had passed. “You’re right, at twenty-six, she should have known better.”
Zara only wished she had.
Damon’s gaze clashed with hers. Zara dragged her gaze free, but not before her fiery irritation was replaced by other, more disturbing sensations coiling low in the pit of her stomach.
Upset and annoyed at the intense, too-familiar awareness that had hit her out of left field, as if they were still connected—still lovers—in desperation, Zara recommenced the search for her shoes. She finally located them in the shadowed recesses beneath her desk. Relieved to have a distraction, she bent down and snatched them up. Unlike her suit, which was black and neatly tailored, the shoes were a tad subversive, a gorgeous sea blue that unashamedly matched her eyes.
On the subject of eyes, she thought grimly, note to self, never look into Damon’s eyes for too long. Apparently, despite dismissing him from her life and putting a great deal of effort into forgetting about him completely, even one second was too long.
With an effort of will, Zara smoothed out her expression, but there was another tiny issue that was bugging her. “And Emily being older than Ben by several years would, of course, make her the predatory one.” She could not forget that the paparazzi had nicknamed Petra, who had been several years older than Tyler, “the Huntress.” As if Petra had been cold and calculating, and had deliberately set out to ensnare a rich lover, when Zara knew that it had been Tyler who had pursued Petra.
Damon frowned. “I wasn’t trying to imply that Emily was predatory because she’s older—”
“Good, because we both know Ben is something of a party animal.”
Damon seemed briefly riveted by the shoes, and she realized she was brandishing them in front of her like a weapon. Taking a deep breath, she placed the shoes on the floor and methodically slipped them on. The heels gave her an extra inch and half, which wasn’t nearly enough.
Damon’s gaze clashed with hers again, the hard edge tempered by something she had never seen before, something new, an intent curiosity, as if he was logging the changes in her and taking stock in a completely masculine way.
She suppressed her automatic panic that Damon would somehow equate her extra curves with motherhood. She had to keep reminding herself that Damon’s focus was on rescuing Ben from Emily; he didn’t know Zara had had his child. In any case, the obvious explanation for her more rounded shape was a whole lot simpler, that she had just put on a little weight.
Damon’s expression shuttered. “You know very well that I meant Ben couldn’t take a woman like Emily anywhere she didn’t want to go.”
In the midst of what was for Zara a stressful encounter, Damon’s flat statement informed her that he knew exactly what she was trying to achieve with her line of reasoning. It was also a reminder of just why she had fallen for him in the first place. Most people, quite rightly, viewed him as cold and formidable, even dangerous. But that had not been Zara’s experience. As an employer she had found him to be demanding but utterly straightforward. Far from being intimidated, she had found that, on a purely feminine level, she had liked his air of command and the knowledge that, in a company full of alpha males, Damon was the scariest, most alpha of them all.
Grudgingly, she conceded Damon’s point that Emily was not the type to be coerced. “Even so, this is out of character for her. If she had wanted to take time off, she would have emailed me or left a message.”
Although the instant Zara said the words she remembered that she had seen an email from Emily but hadn’t opened it because she’d been so busy with Rosie and walk-in clients.
Damon extracted his cell from his pocket, flicked the screen with his thumb, then placed the phone down on her desk so she could see Emily’s email. “Her resignation is there in black and white.”
Shocked, Zara flipped her laptop open and scrolled down her inbox to confirm that she had received almost exactly the same message. Hers, however, was peppered with apologies and assurances that Emily would ring once they got to Medinos.
Medinos. Zara tensed even further.
The island was exotic and beautiful and was popularly styled as the Mediterranean isle of romance. It had also been Zara’s home as a child while her father, Angelo Atrides, the last conte of the once-aristocratic but now-impoverished Atrides line, had been alive. But in Zara’s experience, since Angelo’s death when she was barely seven years old, the only thing that had come out of Medinos was trouble. “I don’t know why Emily would run off with Ben. They’re total opposites.”
Ben, though ridiculously handsome, was too young for Emily and a little spoiled. He hadn’t been born with a silver spoon in his mouth; it had been platinum.
While Zara had been reading, Damon had been pacing around her office, examining her walls with their job-notice boards and career displays, reminding her of nothing so much as a large wolf on the prowl. “It would seem Emily’s decided to take a break from work with Ben—”
“You think this is just a holiday?” Damon’s tone was laced with disbelief.
Still upset at the physicality of her reaction to Damon, a reaction that should have been as dead as a doornail by now, Zara snatched up the newspaper and stared at the grainy photo. “What else could you call it? I don’t see an engagement ring, so they’re not eloping—”
Damon’s gaze pinned her. “Damn right. Ben will not be marrying Emily.”
The flat denial, which somehow implied that Emily was not good enough to marry Ben, flicked Zara on the raw. “Ben should be so lucky. Emily is smart and mature. Apart from this...error of judgment, she’s an exemplary personal assistant.”
“If there’s been an error of judgment, then that also applies to Ben.”
Zara slapped the newspaper back down on the desk. “Why does it always come back to that? You know, people can simply fall in love. When my father died, it took my mother years to find—” She stopped, appalled by what she had almost given away.
There was a moment of vibrating silence. “What do you mean by �Why does it always come back to that?’”
Relieved that Damon had bypassed her comment about her mother, Zara blurted out her thoughts. “Isn’t that what rich men automatically think? That women are attracted by their wealth?”
She cringed the moment the words were out, because she didn’t actually believe that about all wealthy men.
Damon’s gaze pinned her. “Is that what you believed about me?”
Three (#u54f2a3e7-bc56-56ba-baf4-665b4e1173bb)
The soft, flat question made her chest go tight and her heart pound. Damon zeroing in on their short, secretive fling was disorienting when a moment ago they had been firmly focused on Ben and Emily.
Zara found herself once more staring at the pulse throbbing along the side of Damon’s jaw as she desperately tried to find a neutral way out of a conversation that had careered out of control.
She took a deep breath and decided on the truth. After all, what did it matter now? “Yes.”
A curious satisfaction registered in Damon’s gaze. “So that’s why you didn’t want a relationship. You thought I would think you were after my money.”
It was only part of the truth.
The whole of it was that if Damon ever found out her real identity, he wouldn’t just think she was after his money, he would be certain of it. Although, the irony was that, from the first moment she had met him, she couldn’t have cared less about his wealth.
When she had walked into the interview with Damon, his remote gaze had connected with hers and for a split second she’d had a weird premonition that everything was about to change. She could not explain exactly what the phenomenon was, just that for her, at least, it had been instant, visceral and electric. Like a piece of flotsam caught in a powerful current, she had allowed herself to be swept along and had accepted the job. Two weeks later, she had ended up in Damon’s bed.
Determined to redirect the conversation back to the situation with Emily and Ben, and hustle Damon out of the door before Rosie woke up, Zara briskly stepped around her desk and busied herself tidying piles of pamphlets that did not need tidying. “I’m sorry for the inconvenience of Emily taking an unplanned leave of absence—”
“Along with my little brother,” Damon said drily.
With effort, Zara controlled her temper. She tended to see things from another angle entirely. It was a matter of record that the men in Damon’s family were extremely good at seduction. Damon’s uncle Tyler had swept Zara’s mother off her feet; Damon had gotten Zara into bed in a matter of days. And now it seemed clear that Ben—who had routinely shambled into work around ten o’clock, taken long lunches and drifted away by four—had seduced poor Emily!
Zara moved on to another shelf of pamphlets, which was much nearer the front door, hoping Damon would take the hint. “As far as I’m concerned, Emily is outstandingly qualified and my best temp, and Ben has enticed her away. If anyone needs protection, it’s Emily.”
Damon gave Zara an incredulous look.
She checked her watch as if she was in a hurry to be somewhere. She had gotten seriously distracted by the Emily/Ben situation, but now she needed to wrap up the issue and get Damon out of her office before Rosie woke up. “I investigated Emily thoroughly before placing her on the books—she’s perfectly trustworthy.”
“Emily Harris is, but Emily Woodhouse-Harris isn’t.”
Zara froze as Damon slipped a folded sheet of paper out of his coat pocket and handed it to her. She stared at what was obviously a photocopy of a newspaper cutting depicting a more youthful Emily, the daughter of a disgraced financier who had lost all of his money, and that of the pension fund he had founded, in a financial crash. In the shot, Emily was dressed for the beach in a bikini and filmy sarong, and she was clinging to the arm of a prominent playboy businessman. One who, from the caption, had apparently dumped her in favor of marrying a socialite with her fortune intact.
Zara’s jaw tightened. Her motto for Westlake Employment Agency was Reliable, High Quality, Vetted Office Staff, Privacy and Discretion Guaranteed. In this case, the reliability part of the motto hadn’t held. Neither had the privacy or the discretion.
However, the tacky little article, far from making Zara feel disappointed in Emily, only made her feel even more fiercely protective of an employee who reminded her an awful lot of herself. Even down to the way Emily had lost everything and had been forced to invent a new life. She knew exactly how Emily was going to feel when she saw the piece.
She set the incriminating article down on her desk. “You had Emily investigated.”
Damon’s expression grew impatient. “I waited for you to call back. When you didn’t, I made some calls of my own. As it turns out, I should have done it a whole lot earlier.”
“Choosing to use one half of a double-barreled surname, and a previous relationship do not make Emily a bad risk!”
“Maybe not, but before Vitalis, Emily was involved with another wealthy businessman.”
Now that she knew Emily’s full name, the whole embarrassing scandal was coming back to her, which made her feel even sorrier for Emily. “From memory, the Woodhouse-Harrises moved in wealthy circles, so, of course, Emily would meet wealthy men.”
“The relationships wouldn’t be such a problem if Emily hadn’t tried to conceal her past.”
“Maybe she had good reasons for doing so.”
Damon crossed his arms over his chest. “Such as?”
Zara’s chin came up. She felt she was fighting on two fronts, for Emily and for herself. “For a start, it can’t have been much fun having the media hounding her.”
“Granted.”
The curtness of his reply seemed to emphasize that the bottom line for Damon was Emily’s so-called deception. “Emily happens to be very good at her job.”
“I’m not disputing that, just her motives in seeking employment with wealthy men.”
That touched a nerve, guiltily reminding Zara that if Damon found out her true identity, he would ascribe the same kind of gold-digging motivation to her. She doubted he would believe that it had been Zara’s well-connected aunt who had set up the job interview and set her up by placing her back in Damon’s orbit in the hope that she might score another cash offer. Or that Zara had zero interest in that money! “So you still think all Emily wanted was a wealthy husband?”
His expression cooled. “Or a lover. It’s not exactly an uncommon motive.”
His flat statement once again dredged up the stark memory of the legal letter she had received from Damon’s lawyers. They’d offered to pay her off so she would not go to the press, attempt to contact his family or get her sticky fingers on the family inheritance.
As if.
Zara could feel her blood pressure shooting through the roof. Before that moment, she had been able to separate Damon from the contents of that insulting letter, even though she knew he was the one who had authorized it. But now she realized how naive she had been. Damon’s contempt for her and Petra was not so different from his ruthless assessment of Emily.
“There are women who don’t give a hoot about your family’s money, and Emily is one of them. She is not predatory.”
A faint rustling sound from the interview room, as if Rosie was struggling out of her cozy blanket, sent a fresh surge of adrenaline shooting through Zara’s veins. Damon’s cool gaze fixed on the door, reminding her that not only did he possess exceptional eyesight, but that his hearing was no doubt excellent, as well. Attributes that, along with an uncanny sixth sense had, apparently, made him some kind of superspy during his time in the Special Forces. She needed to get Damon out of her office, now.
She forced a professional smile and apologized, which was more difficult than she expected. Bleakly, she realized she was still surprisingly angry with Damon. Although, she didn’t know quite why that should be, since she was the one who had left Damon and not the other way around. Plus, she was over him, and had been for months.
She directed another breezy smile in Damon’s general direction. As much as she thought Ben was at fault, it was clear the responsibility for the employment part of this disaster belonged with her. Damon’s firm paid her to supply Magnum with the temping services they required, so it was up to her to fulfill the contract. She needed to find someone else to fill Emily’s position, and fast, before Magnum took their business elsewhere.
“As luck would have it, I’ve got a temp on the books who might do to replace Emily. She’s a little older, but extremely efficient—”
“No.”
Zara blinked and plowed on. “Harriet has a long work record and an extremely good skill set—”
“I don’t want Harriet,” he said in a flat, cool voice. “I want you.”
A pang of heat shot clear to Zara’s toes, despite the fact that she knew Damon could only be referring to his need for an assistant. Even so, memories flickered, vivid and earthy, drawing every muscle of her body tight. She swallowed against a coiling tension that should not exist and desperately willed her body to return to normal. “Why?”
Damon’s darkened gaze locked with hers for a piercing moment, and the reason she’d succumbed to a wild, irresponsible fling with him when she had known it was a huge mistake to sleep with the boss was suddenly crystal clear: chemistry. It shimmered in the air and ran through her veins like liquid fire, the pressure of it banding her chest, making it hard to breathe. For some unknown reason Damon had wanted her and, against all common sense, she had wanted him too.
Damon frowned and dragged lean fingers through his hair and she received the indelible impression that for a long, stretched-out moment he had actually forgotten what he was going to say. “Uh, the McCall takeover. Before you disappeared, you did a lot of the groundwork—”
She stiffened at the mention of the McCall takeover. McCall Electrical being the company that had belonged to Tyler McCall. If there was ever a project she did not want to work on, it would be that one!
“I didn’t disappear—I resigned without notice.” Then she had disappeared. She’d had to get out of town quickly, because she had known that if she had tried to have a normal, aboveboard relationship with Damon, the press would have become interested in her. Even though they had no clue what Angel Atrides looked like, it would only have been a matter of time before her true identity was uncovered, then all the careful work she had done to invent a normal life and career would have been for nothing.
“Resignation?” he muttered in a low growl. “You sent a text.”
Warmth rose in her cheeks. “But I did resign.”
She knew she shouldn’t belabor the point, but a combination of her anxiety over Damon walking into her office and her extreme physical response to him were having a bad effect on her. She couldn’t seem to stop arguing with him, which was counterproductive. She needed to concentrate on getting rid of him before Rosie woke up.
Swallowing the exhilarating desire to argue some more, she reached for calm. “I agree that texting was not the ideal way to finish.” It had just been necessary at the time, because she had not wanted Damon to have her private email address. Email addresses opened too many online doors, some of which led back to her old life, and she knew how adept Damon was at utilizing those sorts of opportunities.
Damon’s thoughtful gaze seemed to burn right through her. “Whatever. Before you left without any notice or forwarding address, you did the groundwork for the McCall takeover. Despite a hitch in the proceedings, I’m now on the point of closing the deal, so I would prefer to have someone who knows their way around the issues.”
Zara had the sudden, suffocating sense of being entangled in a sticky web from which she could not escape. “I had thought you would have completed that months ago.”
“There’s been an unexpected complication, a missing block of voters’ shares that could jeopardize the takeover. And I’ve had...other things that have needed attention.”
A picture of the gorgeous blonde he’d been dating lately, heiress to a media empire, Caroline Grant, flashed into Zara’s mind. That image was instantly followed by a snapshot of the reed-slim redhead he had started seeing on a regular basis not long after Zara had left. Another hot dart of anger unsettled her further.
She did not want to admit that the anger could be linked with the fact that Damon had started dating less than a month after she left his bed. Wining and dining beautiful women while she had been hiding out in her aunt’s country cottage, feeling exhausted and nauseous in the first trimester of her pregnancy. Because, if she was angry, that meant Damon was still important to her, or worse, that she was jealous.
Another small sound drew Damon’s attention back to the door of the interview room. Zara’s heart rate increased another notch. Rosie was definitely awake.
The vibration of a cell, thankfully, distracted Damon. Despite her clear need to get rid of Damon fast, a sudden intense curiosity manifested itself as he extracted the phone from his coat pocket and checked the screen.
Jaw taut, she watched as he slipped the phone back into his pocket. She wondered if the call had been from Caroline Grant, and suddenly her mind was made up.
“No. Working for you is out of the question, I have—”
“I realize you have a business to run,” Damon cut in smoothly. “But I only need you for three weeks, four at most, until the negotiations are completed. And you do have a part-time assistant who could fill in for you.”
Damon offered a fee that was so generous it would cover her agency costs for the next year. More, she would finally be able to afford to fly to Medinos to check out a mysterious safe-deposit box she had recently discovered her mother had obtained not long before she died.
But, as tempting as the money was, as much as she needed it, she could not risk being that close to Damon. As it was, she was kicking herself that she had allowed financial desperation to hold sway when she had accepted him as a client.
“I’m sorry. I can’t work for you.”
Walking briskly to her front door, she yanked it open. She had to get Damon out of her office before he discovered Rosie. He would take one look at her coal-black hair and eyes that were changing by the day to look eerily like his and would instantly know she was his daughter.
Cold, damp air flowed in, making Zara shiver, but instead of taking the hint and walking through the door, Damon paused and she made the fatal mistake of looking into his eyes.
Long, tense seconds later, Damon’s gaze dropped to her mouth and the heady tension she had so far failed to control tightened another notch.
“Damn,” he muttered, “I promised myself I wasn’t going to do this.”
Zara froze as he cupped her jaw, unwillingly riveted by the tingling heat that radiated out from that one point of contact, the unbearably familiar masculine scents of soap and skin. Despite the cold air, she could feel herself growing warmer by the second. Damon’s touch was featherlight; all she needed to do was step away, so why couldn’t she do that one simple thing?
It was a bad time to discover that, despite everything that had happened, the heady excitement that had been her downfall a year ago was still just as potent, just as seductive.
It shouldn’t be, she thought a little desperately. She had changed; she had moved on. When she did decide to allow a man back into her life it would not be because of an off-the-register sexual attraction. This time she would choose carefully. She needed steady and reliable, not—
Damon’s mouth slanted across hers and any idea that the day was cold was blasted away by a torrent of heat. Her heart pounded so hard she found it difficult to breathe and her legs suddenly felt as limp as noodles.
This was why she had made “the mistake,” she thought dimly. Her palms slid up over Damon’s chest; her fingers convulsively gripped the lapels of his coat, as a familiar, guilty pleasure flooded her. Damon’s hands settled at her waist, molding her more firmly against him and she found herself responding with an automatic, mindless pleasure, lifting up on her toes as she pressed into the kiss, clutching at his shoulders as if she couldn’t get enough of him.
It was moth-to-the-flame stuff, irresistible and utterly dangerous, because it was abruptly clear to her that Damon was nothing short of an intoxicating addiction. When he was in the room she couldn’t think; worse, she didn’t want to think. As emancipated and independent as she was, as determined as she was to run her life in a practical, logical way, she had never been able to resist him.
Long, drugging seconds later Damon lifted his head. “Before I go, I have one more question.”
A thin, high cry pierced the air. Zara’s stomach sank. With a convulsive movement, she released her grip on Damon’s coat.
Damon’s gaze turned wintry. “Question answered.”
With a sense of fatalism, undergirded by the sudden wrenching suspicion that Damon had known all along that there was a baby, Zara watched as he reached the door to the interview room in two gliding strides and pushed the door open wide.
Four (#u54f2a3e7-bc56-56ba-baf4-665b4e1173bb)
Damon stared at the baby in the bassinet.
He thought he had been prepared for this moment, but the reality of the tiny baby literally flipped his world upside down in the space of a moment.
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