by Dani Collins
She kept their child hidden...
Now the secret’s out!
Valentino Casale is outraged to find Kiara kept their daughter a secret from him for two years! Forever branded by his own illegitimacy, the hardened billionaire wants to do things differently...
Kiara could never regret the consequence of her one delicious night with Val. Even if he turned out to be every bit as coldhearted as their night was hot! Yet behind Val’s reputation is another man—revealed only in their passionate moments alone. Could she give that man a second chance?
Kiara was financially equipped to meet the needs of Val’s child. Nothing in his life had to change. In fact, his mother would become Kiara’s problem. The solution was elegantly simple and utterly freeing.
Yet he remained where he was, coldly enraged. His insides were gripped by a wrath that swelled his chest with the pressure of a primal yell he couldn’t release.
He could hardly pick apart why this provoked such a volcanic rise of fury in him. It had something to do with the grotesque replay of history. While he’d been married to Tina, Kiara had been having his child, sentencing an innocent to the label he’d worn like a dead albatross until he was old enough to make damned sure he deserved the slur.
No. He might not have crafted himself into the most upstanding of men, but he was decent enough to pluck a child out of a toxic spill before she was lethally poisoned and scarred forever.
“Refuse that money,” he told Kiara. “My daughter will inherit my fortune, not his.”
“A minute ago, you didn’t even want to know her name.”
“She can have mine,” he shot back. “You’re going to marry me. Today.”
Canadian Dani Collins knew in high school that she wanted to write romance for a living. Twenty-five years later, after marrying her high school sweetheart, having two kids with him, working at several generic office jobs and submitting countless manuscripts, she got The Call. Her first Harlequin novel won the Reviewers’ Choice Award for Best First in Series from RT Book Reviews. She now works in her own office, writing romance.
Books by Dani Collins
Harlequin Presents
Untouched Until Her Ultra-Rich Husband
Cinderella’s Royal Seduction
Conveniently Wed!
Claiming His Christmas Wife
Bound to the Desert King
Sheikh’s Princess of Convenience
Innocents for Billionaires
A Virgin to Redeem the Billionaire
Innocent’s Nine-Month Scandal
The Montero Baby Scandals
The Consequence He Must Claim
The Maid’s Spanish Secret
Bound by Their Nine-Month Scandal
Visit the Author Profile page at Harlequin.com for more titles.
Dani Collins
A Hidden Heir to Redeem Him
In May of 2012, my editor, Megan Haslam, phoned with an offer for my first sale to Harlequin. Eight years later, this is my thirty-fifth title. The longer I do this, the more I appreciate the entire team at Harlequin, particularly Megan. Thank you for this career, Megan. I absolutely couldn’t have done it without you.
Contents
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
EPILOGUE
EXCERPT FROM CROWNING HIS UNLIKELY PRINCESS BY MICHELLE CONDER
CHAPTER ONE
VALENTINO CASALE HAD long ago hardened himself against useless things like feelings, but he found himself irritated by the congested streets of Athens.
Traffic was his driver’s problem, not his, but he shifted restlessly, acknowledging the real pea beneath his mattress. Returning to Greece grated on him. Being sent here as a child had always felt like a punishment and still did. And to be thrust into the space between his father’s money and his mother’s grappling for it? That was the equivalent of being thrown into a cage with a hungry tiger.
So no, he was not pleased to be here.
This will be the last time, he assured himself with a grim look at the bustling midmorning streets. At least his father wasn’t here. There was a silver lining.
If he had feelings, Val supposed he would be experiencing grief or what some called “closure.” Since receiving the news that Nikolai Mylonas had died two days ago, however, he had experienced no emotions at all, not even relief. His father would be cremated and his ashes interred on his island property. In lieu of a service that no one would attend, Nikolai’s two sons and their mothers were requested to appear in person at the reading of his will.
Val had rejected any share in his father’s wealth two decades ago. He’d built his own fortune off his own oiled back, grazie. He had even supplied his mother with a healthy allowance in hopes she would quit lusting after Niko’s money, not that it had worked.
She had continued to take Niko’s occasional checks and remained convinced that her son was entitled to all of his father’s fortune. If she absolutely had to, she would settle for his receiving exactly 50 percent.
Val still didn’t want it, as he had reiterated to his father’s lawyer when the man had called to set up this meeting. Whatever he stood to inherit could be signed over to his mother if it couldn’t be refused.
There were stipulations, he had been informed, that demanded the presence of all parties before anything could proceed.
The king was dead, but his legacy of manipulation lived on.
And yes, Val’s mother was mentioned, the lawyer had hurried to state, so it was in Val’s interest to show up and keep the wheels turning.
Who cared where the money went?
Evelina Casale, that was who. She cared about Niko’s money above all things. She most especially cared how much she would receive as compared to Niko’s ex-wife, Paloma. If the other woman was bequeathed so much as one euro more, well, Val supposed he would finally meet his half brother with pistols at dawn.
Another silver lining—
“Stop,” he commanded, lifting his head off the back of his seat as his gaze caught the frontage of an art gallery. “Let me out here.”
As he stepped from the car, his phone dinged with another text from his mother, informing him she had arrived in the lobby.
She could wait. They all could.
He shoved his phone back into his pocket and crossed the street. Habit propelled him. For three years he had been entering every gallery he glimpsed, no matter what else was on his agenda. No matter if he’d been in the same shop days before.
Perversely, he was forever on the hunt for his own naked form and was always disappointed not to find it.
It didn’t escape him that if he had wanted to embarrass his father with public nudes, he could have taken a photo down his drawers and posted it online years ago. Hell, in his heyday Val had modeled underwear so sheer and tight he might as well have been bare-assed, so any barb in such an act was long lost. At this point an unknown artist capitalizing on his notoriety by circulating a “classy” rendition of his junk was pure, pretentious vanity—which he was probably guilty of along with a multitude of other sins.
Alas, today was one more fruitless search.
He smirked at his own joke, but his humor was quickly overshadowed by aggravation. He ought to be pleased
when he failed to find himself. Everyone used him to whatever extent they could. In this case he had blatantly given his permission to be exploited, but this one struggling artist hadn’t done so.
Why not? It could have been the break she needed. As three years passed, however, and he failed to glimpse anything like her work again, a niggling concern had begun roiling in him that something had happened to her.
Why that might bother him, he couldn’t fathom. His own father had died, and he had continued with the tennis game his mother’s call with the news had interrupted.
There had been something about that young artist, though. She’d been both mature and self-reliant, yet naive. Charmingly open with her opinions and genuinely curious of his, unafraid to challenge his assumptions or have her own views picked apart. She hadn’t taken anything from him, either. Not even the money he’d left for the sketch he’d ripped from her book and tucked into his briefcase so he wouldn’t lose or crumple it.
His phone buzzed again. His mother was worried she might run into Paloma and Javiero before Val arrived.
As if Val would allow them to hurry him along. He didn’t respond, only moved leisurely through the gallery, skimming his gaze across landscapes and abstracts, cats and fruit bowls and a view through a window that bore only the vaguest resemblance to the framed sketch hanging in his bedroom. The execution on this one wasn’t nearly as skilled, and the signature was not the KO he sought.
One of these days he would go to Ireland and poke around their galleries, see if he was hanging out there.
He smirked again at his double entendre, but his glimmer of amusement fell away as he walked the final few blocks through blistering heat into the ninth circle of hell, otherwise known as the Mylonas office tower. He hadn’t been here since, well, it must have been right before he’d flown to Venice three years ago, acting on a social media post that his father’s rival was vacationing there.
Val wondered yet again whether he might have backed out of his ill-fated marriage if he’d come back to his hotel room after that initial meeting and found his unassuming artist still in his bed, rather than finding all the cash he’d had in his wallet still in its tidy stack on the night table, her and her sketchbook gone.
She’d been guileless and refreshingly oblivious to his position and money. He’d been utterly relaxed as she sketched him. It seemed ridiculous to say he had felt “safe.” He was a powerful man with strength and position and money, rarely at a disadvantage, but it had been a surprising relief that he hadn’t felt a need to keep his guard up with her.
He hadn’t fully appreciated that until much later and to this day, he was annoyed with himself that he’d left her that morning, giving her a chance to disappear without a trace. He hadn’t caught her last name and, with his father’s ultimatum still ringing in his ears, he’d gone through with his plan to firmly divest of the old man once and for all.
That ruthless move had been the last time he’d allowed emotion to drive him. The “marry in haste” cliché had its roots in truth. He’d found no satisfaction in his marriage, only a sexless existence with a woman whose interests were not his own. At least their divorce was finalized, and he could turn the page on that chapter in his encyclopedic collection of sordid mistakes.
“Take your time,” his mother said as he came through the revolving doors. She gave him a dismayed once-over. “Would a suit have killed you?”
“A suit would have implied this meeting was important to me.”
She tsked and moved toward him from the waiting area, almost as tall as he was and still catwalk-thin at fifty-eight—though she would slay anyone who tried to claim she was a day over fifty-one. Of course, that would have made her pregnant at eighteen, when she’d been gracing the cover of swimsuit issues, but she reserved her math skills for counting calories and money.
“Good afternoon, Mr. Casale. I’m Nigel,” one of his father’s minions said. “May I escort you to the meeting room?” He waved them toward the bank of elevators.
Val turned and a megajolt of electricity shot through him as he was smacked in the eyes by the large oil behind the security desk.
“Where did that come from?” he demanded.
It hadn’t been there three years ago. He had never seen it before in his life. The seascape framed by a window was unfamiliar, although the view itself had to be Greece. The blend of colors was new to his eyes, but they were gloriously understated while providing infinite texture and depth. Something in the composition was deeply familiar to him, too. The waft of the curtain in the breeze was reminiscent of the drape of a charcoal shirt over the back of a chair.
The painting was so bizarrely evocative of her, she might as well have stood next to him, whispering in his ear, telling him that she felt safe in here, but the wildness beyond called to her. This painting was a threshold of sorts, as she contemplated moving into a new world filled with uncertainty, but also with vast and glorious new experiences.
“You can’t come back here, sir.”
He brushed past the security guard and examined the signature. Not the KO on his own sketch, but Kiara. His skin tightened all over his body.
“Where did you get this? I want to speak to this artist.” He didn’t ask himself why, but when the security guard only gave a baffled shrug, Val wanted to punch him.
“Um, sir?” Nigel the minion offered a perplexed look. “Miss O’Neill is upstairs. She arrived for your meeting ten minutes ago.”
“For the reading of my father’s will?” His scalp prickled. The sensation kept going, lifting a sharp tingle along the sides of his neck and running the length of his spine. His gut knotted and his groin twitched. His skin felt too tight for the heat that was suddenly pressurizing inside him, crystalizing the carbon in his body tissue to diamond hardness.
“Who is she?” his mother asked at a distance.
Val barely heard her over his harsh laugh of outraged, gallows humor.
“Someone who worked for Dad.” How had he missed that? Blinded by his own libido, he supposed. Cursing himself, he said, “Yes. By all means. Take me to her. I. Can’t. Wait.”
* * *
Kiara O’Neill could tell that Niko’s lawyer, Davin, was trying to put her at ease with his incessant small talk, but it wasn’t working. Maybe he thought he was charming her? They’d met several times in the past three years and he had invited her to dinner more than once, but her priorities were always her daughter and her art, in that order. If she squeezed in an evening of wine and a rom-com with her best friend, Scarlett, she considered her life complete.
Trying to fit a man into her narrow world would only complicate her to-do list. Besides, the last time she’d gone on a date, she’d wound up pregnant.
And the man in question would enter this boardroom any second.
Her whole body was soaked in a clammy sweat, her mind incapable of holding a sensible thought, let alone a conversation. Her belted dress and flowing kimono jacket, chosen so carefully to be unobtrusive and comfortable while offering an impression of quiet confidence, felt constrictive. Her unsettled stomach was full of snakes, and the feminist inside her who had happily told men to talk to her hand for three years was wringing said hands like an adolescent girl when the grad ball was announced. The cute boy was coming down the corridor and she didn’t know if she wanted him to notice her or not.
She kept thinking she should have done something different with her hair. Straightened it, maybe. She should have worn more makeup, to disguise her apprehension. Or maybe not so much, so she didn’t look so...polished. Niko had liked her to look and sound and act a certain way and she’d gone along with it because, ugh, reasons, but this wasn’t who she was.
Deep down she was still a mixed race orphan from Cork’s dodgiest neighborhood. Scarlett would point out she was actually a mother and an artist, but Kiara was faking her way through both of those things so she wasn’t s
ure they counted.
Val Casale had seemed like a smart man. She suspected he would see straight through to the fraud she was, no matter how she presented herself.
Although, he had seemed to think her work had genuine merit. When she had demurred, he’d said, “You really don’t know who I am, do you?”
She hadn’t. Not until much later.
It was all coming home to roost now, though.
She concentrated on not licking the lipstick off her mouth. Her throat was dry, making it impossible to swallow. All morning her heart rate had been picking up to a panicked speed, then petering out in a cold flush, leaving her light-headed and vaguely exhausted. She worried she would faint any second and reminded herself yet again to breathe. She didn’t want to be stroked out on the floor when Val walked in.
She wanted to text Scarlett to hurry back from the ladies’ room, but she had already set her phone to silent and tucked it into her clutch. Pulling it out midconversation would be rude.
With a stiff smile she fought to keep in place, she waited for Davin to pause in his rattling on, planning to say something about checking on Scarlett. Scarlett was heavily pregnant. It wasn’t strange that she pretty much lived in the ladies’ room these days, but she was taking a long time. Had she bumped into some of their guests? Was today’s meeting taking place out there without her?
Had Val already heard the news and walked away, before he’d laid eyes on her or offered her a chance to explain? Given everything she’d heard about him since, that was probably for the best, but her heart twisted in anguish on behalf of—
The door opened and the air changed in a subtle rush. A thrust of tense energy came in with the three people who entered.
“Signor and Signora Casale,” Nigel announced, glancing at his tablet as it dinged. “The other party has arrived. I’ll return with them shortly.” He melted away, closing the door.
“Davin.” Val’s mother, Evelina, sounded as frosty and cultured as she had the one time Kiara had spoken to her three years ago. In person, Evelina was the epitome of what fashion magazines deemed sexy and attractive, nearly six foot and wispy. She had ivory skin and lustrous brunette hair that shimmered as she floated down the far side of the table. Her clothes were designer, her neck and ears and fingers bedecked in glittering jewels. She greeted Davin with perfunctory air kisses.