His Illegitimate Heir

by Sarah M. Anderson

  But she wanted him to be different in other ways, too. She felt stupid because she knew that, on at least one level, this was nothing but her own fault. The man had specifically asked her to tell him what she wanted—and she hadn’t. Men, in her long and illustrious experience of being surrounded by them, were not mind readers. Never had been, never would be. So for her to have expected that Zeb would somehow magically guess what she needed was to feel gorgeous and beautiful and sultry—without her telling him—was unfair to both of them.

  She didn’t understand what was wrong with her. Why couldn’t she ask for what she wanted? Why was it so hard to say that she wanted to be seduced with sweet nothings whispered in her ear? That instead of rough and dirty sex all the time, she wanted candlelight and silky negligees and—yes—bottles of champagne instead of beer? She wanted beautiful things. She wanted to be beautiful.

  Well, one thing was clear. She was never going to get it if she didn’t ask for it. Let this be a lesson, she decided. Next time a man said, Tell me what you want, she was going to tell him. It would be awkward and weird—but then, so was not getting what she wanted.

  Next time, then. Not with her boss.

  Casey wasn’t sure what she expected from Zeb, but he seemed to be keeping his distance, as well. It wasn’t that she wanted flowers or even a sweet little note...

  Okay, that was another lie—she totally wanted flowers and the kind of love letter that she could hang on to during the long, dark winter nights. But the risk that came with any of those things showing up on her desk at work was too great. No one had ever sent her flowers at work before. If anything even remotely romantic showed up on her desk, the gossip would be vicious. Everyone would know something was up and there were always those few people in the office who wouldn’t rest until they knew what they thought was the truth. And she knew damned well that if they couldn’t get to the truth, they’d make up their own.

  So it was fine that she avoided Zeb and he avoided her and they both apparently pretended that nothing had happened.

  It was a week and a half later when she got the first email from him.

  Ms. Johnson,

  Status report?

  Casey couldn’t help but stare at her computer, her lips twisted in a grimace of displeasure. She knew she wasn’t the kind of girl who got a lot of romance in her life, but really? He hadn’t even signed the email, for God’s sake. Four simple words that didn’t seem very simple at all.

  So she wrote back.

  Mr. Richards, I’ve hired six new employees. Please see attached for their résumés. The new test beers are in process. Tank fifteen is still off-line. Further updates as events warrant.

  And because she was still apparently mentally twelve, she didn’t sign her email, either.

  It was another day before Zeb replied.

  Timeline on test beers?

  Casey frowned at her email for the second time in as many days. Was he on a strict four-word diet or was she imagining things? This time, she hadn’t even gotten the courtesy of a salutation.

  This was fine, right? This was maintaining a professional distance with no repercussions from their one indiscretion.

  Didn’t feel any less awkward, though.

  Still testing, she wrote back. It’s going to be another few weeks before I know if I have anything.

  The next day she got an even shorter email from him.

  Status report?

  Two words. Two stinking words and they drove her nuts. She was half-tempted to ask one of the other department heads if they got the same terse emails every day or so—but she didn’t want to draw any attention to her relationship with Zeb, especially if that wasn’t how he treated his other employees.

  It was clear that he regretted their evening. In all reality, she should have been thankful she still had her job, because so far, she hadn’t managed to handle herself as a professional around him yet. She was either yelling at him or throwing herself at him. Neither was good.

  So she replied to his two-word emails that came every other day with the briefest summary she could.

  Test beers still fermenting. Tank fifteen still not working. Hired a new employee—another woman.

  But...

  There were days when she looked at those short messages and wondered if maybe he wasn’t asking something else. All she ever told him about was the beer. What if he was really asking about her?

  What if Status report? was his really terrible way of asking, How are you?

  What if he thought about her like she thought about him? Did he lie awake at night, remembering the feel of her hands on his body, like she remembered his? Did he think about the way he had fit against her, in her? Did he toss and turn until the frustration was too much and he had to take himself in hand—just like she had to stroke herself until a pale imitation of the climax he’d given her took the edge off?

  Ridiculous, she decided. Of course he wasn’t thinking about her. He’d made his position clear. They’d had a good time together once and once was enough. That was just how this went. She knew that. She was fun for a little while, but she was not the kind of woman men could see themselves in a relationship with. And to think that such a thing might be percolating just under the surface of the world’s shortest emails was delusional at best. To convince herself that Zeb might actually care for her was nothing but heartache waiting to happen.

  So she kept her mouth shut and went about her job, training her new employees, trying to beat tank fifteen into submission and tinkering with her new recipes. She caught evening games with her dad and added to her bobblehead collection and did her best to forget about one evening of wild abandon in Zeb Richards’s arms.

  Everything had gone back to normal.

  * * *

  Oh, no.

  Casey stared down at the pack of birth control pills with a dawning sense of horror. Something was wrong. She hadn’t been paying attention—but she was at the end of this pack. Which meant that five days ago, she should’ve started her period. What the hell? Why had she skipped her period?

  This was not normal. She was regular. That was one of the advantages of being on the Pill. No surprises. No missed periods. No heart attacks at six fifty in the morning before she’d even had her coffee, for crying out loud.

  In a moment of terror, she tried to recall—she hadn’t skipped a dose. She had programmed a reminder into her phone. The reminder went off ten minutes after her alarm so she took a pill at exactly the same time every single day. She hadn’t been sick—no antibiotics to screw with her system. Plus, she’d been on this brand for about a year.

  Okay, so... She hadn’t exactly had a lot of sex in the last year. Actually, now that she thought about it, there hadn’t been anyone since that ballplayer a year and a half ago.

  Unexpectedly, her stomach rolled and even though she hadn’t had breakfast or her coffee, she raced for the bathroom. Which only made her more nervous. Was she barfing because she was panicking or was this morning sickness? Good Lord.

  What if this was morning sickness?

  Oh, God—what if she was...?

  No, she couldn’t even think it. Because if she was...

  Oh, God.

  What was she going to do?

  Ten

  “Anything else?” Zeb asked Daniel.

  Daniel shook his head. “The sooner we know what the new beers are going to be, the sooner we’ll be able to get started on the marketing.”

  Zeb nodded. “I’ve been getting regular status updates from Casey, but I’ll check in with her again.”

  Which wasn’t exactly the truth. He had been asking for regular status updates, and like a good employee, Casey had been replying to him. The emails were short and getting shorter all the time. He was pretty sure that the last one had been two words. Nothing ye
t. He could almost hear her sneering them. And he could definitely hear her going, What do you want from me?

  Truthfully, he wasn’t sure. Each time he sent her an email asking for a status report, he wondered if maybe he shouldn’t do something else. Ask her how she was doing, ask if things were better now that she’d hired new people.

  Ask her if she’d been to many more baseball games. If she’d caught any more foul balls.

  He wanted to know if she ever thought of him outside the context of beer and the brewery. If he ever drifted through her dreams like she did his.

  “Well, let me know. If you thought it would help,” Daniel said as he stood and began to gather his things, “I could go talk to her about the production schedule myself.”

  “No,” Zeb said too quickly. Daniel paused and shot him a hard look. “I mean, that won’t be necessary. Your time is too valuable.”

  For a long, painful moment, Daniel didn’t say anything. “Is there something I need to know?” he asked in a voice that was too silky for its own good.

  God, no. No one needed to know about that moment of insanity that still haunted him. “Absolutely not.”

  It was clear that Daniel didn’t buy this—but he also decided not to press it. “If it becomes something I need to know about, you’ll tell me, right?”

  Zeb knew that Daniel had been a political consultant, even something of a fixer—more than willing to roll around in the mud if it meant getting his opponent dirty, too. The thought of Daniel doing any digging into Casey’s life made Zeb more than a little uncomfortable. Plus, he had no desire to give Daniel anything he could hold over Zeb’s head. This was clearly one case where sharing was not caring, brotherly bonds of love be damned.

  “Certainly,” Zeb said with confidence because he was certain this was not a situation Daniel needed to know anything about. His one moment of indiscretion would remain just that—a moment.

  “Right,” Daniel said. With that, he turned and walked out of the office.

  Zeb did the same thing he’d been doing for weeks now—he sent a short email to Casey asking for a status report.

  She was exactly as she had been before their indiscretion. Terse and borderline snippy, but she got the job done and done well. He had been at the brewery for only about five weeks. And in that short amount of time, Casey had already managed to goose production up by another five hundred gallons. Imagine what she could do if she ever figured out the mystery that was apparently tank fifteen.

  Then, just like he did every time he thought about Casey and the night that hadn’t been a date, he forced himself to stop thinking about her. Really, it shouldn’t have been this hard to not think about her. Maybe it was the brewery, he reasoned. For so long, taking his rightful place as the CEO of the Beaumont Brewery had occupied his every waking thought. And now he’d achieved that goal. Clearly, his mind was just at...loose ends. That was all.

  This did not explain why when his intercom buzzed, he was pricing tickets to the next Rockies home game. The seats directly behind Casey’s were available.

  “Mr. Richards?” Delores’s voice crackled over the old-fashioned speaker.

  “Yes?” He quickly closed the browser tab.

  “Ms. Johnson is here.” There was a bit of mumbling in the background that he didn’t understand. “She says she has a status report for you.”

  Well. This was something new. It had been—what—a little over three weeks since he’d last seen her? And also, she had waited to be announced by Delores? That wasn’t like her. The Casey Johnson he knew would have stormed into this office and caught him looking at baseball tickets. She would’ve known exactly what he was thinking, too.

  So something was off. “Send her in.” And then he braced for the worst.

  Had she gotten another job? And if so...

  If she didn’t work for him anymore, would it be unethical to ask her out?

  He didn’t get any further than that in his thinking, because the door opened and she walked in. Zeb stood, but instantly, he could see that something was wrong. Instead of the sweaty hot mess that she frequently was during work hours, she looked pale. Her eyes were huge and for some reason, he thought she looked scared. What the hell was she scared of? Not him, that much he knew. She had never once been scared of him. And it couldn’t be the last email he’d sent, either. There hadn’t been anything unusual about that—it was the same basic email he’d been sending for weeks now.

  “What’s wrong?” He said the moment the door shut behind her.

  She didn’t answer right away.

  “Casey?” He came out from around the desk and began to walk to her.

  “I have...” Her voice shook and it just worried him all the more. She swallowed and tried again. “I have a status report for you.”

  She was starting to freak him out. “Is everything okay? Was there an on-the-job accident?” He tried to smile. “Did tank fifteen finally blow up?”

  She tried to smile, too. He felt the blood drain out of his face at the sight of that awful grimace.

  “No,” she said in a voice that was a pale imitation of her normal tone. “That’s not what I have a status report about.”

  Okay. Good. Nothing had happened on the line. “Is this about the beers?”

  She shook her head, a small movement. “They’re still in process. I think the porter is going to be really good.”

  “Excellent.” He waited because there had to be a reason she was here. “Was there something else?”

  Her eyes got even wider. She swallowed again. “I—”

  And then the worst thing that could have possibly happened did—she squeezed her eyes shut tight and a single tear trickled down her left cheek.

  It was physically painful to watch that tear. He wanted to go to her and pull her into his arms and promise that whatever had happened, he’d take care of it.

  But they were at work and Delores was sitting just a few feet away. So he pushed his instincts aside. He was her boss. Nothing more. “Yes?”

  The seconds ticked by while he waited. It wasn’t like whatever she was trying to tell him was the end of the world, was it?

  And then it was.

  “I’m pregnant,” she said in a shattered voice.

  He couldn’t even blink as his brain tried to process what she had just said. “Pregnant?” he asked as if he had never heard the word before.

  She nodded. “I don’t understand... I mean, I’m on the Pill—or I was. I didn’t miss any. This isn’t supposed to happen.” Her chin quivered and another tear spilled over and ran down the side of her face.

  Pregnant. She was pregnant. “And I’m the...” He couldn’t even say it. Hell.

  She nodded again. “I hadn’t been with anyone in over a year.” She looked up at him. “You believe me, right?”

  He didn’t want to. The entire thing was unbelievable.

  What the hell did he know about fatherhood? Nothing, that’s what. Not a single damned thing. He’d been raised by a single mother, by a collective of women in a beauty shop. His male role models had been few and far between.

  He wasn’t going to be a father. Not on purpose and not by accident.

  In that moment, another flash of anger hit him—but not at her. He was furious with himself. He never lost control. He never got so carried away with a woman that he couldn’t even make sure that he followed the basic protocols of birth control. Except for one time.

  And one time was all it took, apparently.

  “You’re sure?” Because this was the sort of thing that one needed to be sure about.

  She nodded again. “I realized yesterday morning that I was at the end of my month of pills and I hadn’t had my...” She blushed. Somehow, in the midst of a discussion about one-night stands and pregnancy, she still had the ability to look
innocent. “After work yesterday, I bought a test. It was positive.” Her voice cracked on that last, important word.

  Positive.

  Of all the words in the English language that had the potential to change his life, he had never figured positive would be the one to actually do it.

  “We...” He cleared his throat. We. There was now a we. “We can’t talk about this. Here.” He looked around the office—his father’s office. The man who had gotten his mother pregnant and paid her to leave town. “During work hours.”

  She looked ill. “Right. Sorry. I didn’t mean to use work hours for personal business.”

  Dimly, he was glad to see that she still had her attitude. “We’ll...we’ll meet. Tonight. I can come to you.”

  “No,” she said quickly.

  “Right.” She didn’t want him back in her apartment, where he’d gotten carried away and gotten her into this mess. He wanted to use a less painful word—situation, predicament—but this was a straight-up mess. “Come to my place. At seven.” She already knew where he lived. Hell, her father had done work in his house at some point.

  “I don’t... Jamal,” she said weakly.

  “Come on, Casey. We have to have this conversation somewhere and I’m sure as hell not going to have it in public. Not when you look like you’re about to start sobbing and I can’t even think straight.”

  Her eyes narrowed and he instantly regretted his words. “Of course. It’s unfortunate that this upsets me,” she said in a voice that could freeze fire.

  “That’s not what I—”

  She held up her hand. “Fine. Seven, your place.” She gave him a hard look—which was undercut by her scrubbing at her face with the heel of her hand. “All I ask is that you not have Jamal around.” She turned and began to walk out of his office.

  For some reason, he couldn’t let her go. “Casey?”

  She paused, her hand on the doorknob. But she didn’t turn around. “What?”