by Tamie Dearen
“I have a daughter. One I barely see, as it is—”
“You and Ellie would have your privacy inside the estate. There’s an entire empty wing where you could hide, along with your nanny.” His voice dripped sarcasm. “You could keep your precious time away from me.”
She bit her lip to keep from crying, glad he couldn’t see her face. All this time she’d resisted his offer to live at his mansion complex, for fear of becoming even more dependent on him. But the past few months, the medical bills had increased to the point she was seriously considering moving in to relieve the financial pressure. Now she didn’t know what she was going to do.
“It doesn’t matter now. Your new wife wouldn’t want another woman living in her house.”
“There are dozens of people who live on the grounds. She wouldn’t even notice you. And it doesn’t matter what she thinks, anyway.
“I think her opinion matters. You’re getting married.”
“Nothing will change. My life will continue as always.”
“You’ve got to be kidding. Of course your life will be different. You’ll have a wife. And some day, you’ll probably have children, right?”
“Children?” Why did he sound like her suggestion was outrageous? He was only thirty-two years old, and he loved kids. He’d poured millions into charity work for children. “We haven’t had time to work out these details,” he muttered, sounding disgruntled.
“You’ve been dating for a year.”
“Exactly.” He gave a sharp nod. “After a year, why were you so shocked we got engaged?”
She gaped at him, unbelieving. “Maybe because you never said you were in love with her.”
His mouth opened and then closed, as if he was debating what to say. “No. I didn’t tell you.”
They both jumped when the library door clattered open. A man wearing a tuxedo and a cowboy hat stepped inside, flipping on the light. “There they are.” A broad smile creased his face as he pointed toward them, the ice clinking in the glass grasped in his fingers. A blond-haired man pushed his way past the first, while another, with swarthy features, followed behind, moving with a slight limp.
Bran groaned, scrunching up his face. “Come,” he ordered, grabbing Stephanie’s hand and dragging her behind him as he strode toward the door like a madman trying to escape an asylum.
“Oh no, you don’t.” The blond stepped in front of him, barring the way, while the first man shut the door.
Stephanie couldn’t help the grin that slipped onto her lips. She knew exactly who the men were. She’d been dying to meet them since she’d learned of their existence, but Bran had always given her time off when this group got together. For some unknown reason, he didn’t want her to mingle with his three close friends and business partners.
“You must be the mysterious Stephanie.” The blond man spoke with a slight English accent. He stepped forward, lifting her free hand to gallantly brush his lips across the back of her fingers, like something out of a movie. On her other hand, Bran’s grip tightened like a vise.
She felt her cheeks heat. “I’m hardly mysterious.”
“Yes, you are.” His brows bobbed up and down. “Bran’s been hiding you for two years, and that makes you a mystery.”
“We need to get back to the guests,” Bran spoke between gritted teeth.
“Go back to your party,” said the cowboy, swooping around Bran to wrap his arm across Stephanie’s shoulder and wrench her away from her boss. “We’ll stay in here and get acquainted with Stephanie.” He took off his hat. “I hope that’s all right with you, ma’am. My name is Cole.”
“Not happening.” Bran’s voice sounded like grinding gears.
Stephanie ignored his growl, addressing Cole with a wry smile. “Yes, I know who you are, Mr. Miller. In fact, I recognize all three of you from your pictures. I know all about you.
“You know all about us? Even how we met?” The dark-haired man tilted his head, glancing at Bran from the corner of his eye.
“Yes, I know you’re Jarrett Alvarez from Denver.” Then she addressed the other two. “Cole Miller from Texas. And Finn Anderson, from New York. I know how you met and what you all have in common, besides the corporation.”
“And what do we all have in common?”
She flinched at the sharp edge in Cole’s voice.
“Unless I’m mistaken, you all have a love for kids with disabilities, and that’s why you started Limitless, to help those kids.” She lifted her chin, refusing to be intimidated by Cole’s towering stature or the wealth and power he represented as one of the four kingpins in Phantom Enterprises. After all, she dealt with his equal on a daily basis.
“And how we met?” Finn Anderson asked in his charming accent, though his brows drew together with suspicion.
“You met at the computer camp you all went to every year from age thirteen on,” she announced, triumphant in her knowledge.
“Computer camp?” Finn glanced over his shoulder where Bran’s shoulders drooped as if he were resigned to the death chamber.
“It was computer camp,” Branson defended.
“For kids with disabilities,” Finn clarified.
With great difficulty, she stopped her jaw from dropping open, but her eyes must have gone wide. Unbidden, her gaze darted to the three, surreptitiously searching for their hidden flaws. Each one was drop-dead handsome in his own way, though none of the others held a candle to Bran. She’d noticed Jarrett limping earlier, but she forced her eyes away from his feet.
“I can’t believe you never told her the truth.” Cole aimed an ineffectual glare at her sullen boss.
“It’s not like she doesn’t know I’m blind. I had no reason to give her details about the three of you—especially you, Cole.” She saw a tell-tale twitch on Bran’s lips, and suspected he was holding back a grin. “I always said we shouldn’t have let you in the group. You’re only missing your left hand. And you have a prosthetic replacement that works better than the original. Hardly counts.”
Her furtive glance at his hand didn’t expose any clue that it was anything but natural. She almost wrote off Bran’s comment as a jest.
“It counts.” The impatience in Cole’s voice told her they’d repeated this argument a thousand times. He turned and gave Stephanie a knowing look, extending his hand for examination. “This one is fairly useless… just for looks. I prefer my other one. It looks like a colorful robot arm, but the function is impressive.”
She marveled at the realistic prosthesis, though close inspection revealed its artificial nature. “Why not wear the other all the time, if you like it better?”
“Social settings. It makes people uncomfortable.” Cole used his elbow to push her boss back when he tried to edge around him. “Bran, I see you’ve been trying to keep her sympathy all to yourself. Too bad, buddy.”
“Sympathy?” She let her disbelief show. “He gets no sympathy from me.”
“Good. He doesn’t need it.” Jarrett lifted his pant leg to show a metal prosthesis with a dress shoe. “I’m the one with the fake leg. Osteosarcoma. I lost it when I was thirteen.”
“I see.” She plastered a smile on her face and nodded, all the while, thinking of the trauma that must have been involved in fighting childhood cancer, and secretly wondering what his longevity might be.
“It’s cystic fibrosis for me,” Finn said. “I guess I’m the least disabled. I don’t struggle with anything but breathing. But I’m thirty-two and living on borrowed time.”
Steph felt a sting in the back of her eyes and blinked fast to keep tears from spilling out. She understood cystic fibrosis all too well.
“Shut up, Finn.” Jarrett gave his shoulder a friendly shove. “You’ll probably outlive all of us.”
“It makes sense, now.” Steph tucked her head down, to hide her trembling chin. “I mean, I get why you’re all so determined to do something for those kids out there. Limitless is an awesome organization.”
“Yeah, but that’s not why we want to ta
lk to you.” Finn herded her toward the couch and settled her onto the buttery soft leather, where she found herself flanked by him and Jarrett. “Tell us all Carina Parker’s dirty secrets, so we can stop this disastrous marriage.”
“Leave it…” Bran’s voice gurgled a warning. The only time she’d ever seen him this emotional was when he got off the phone with his father. “This isn’t your business.”
“Of course it’s our business.” With his arms crossed and shoulders squared, Cole faced Branson. “You’re one quarter of Phantom Enterprises. You’re risking everything, marrying this woman we don’t even know.”
“It doesn’t matter,” Branson retorted. “She’ll sign a pre-nup. And we don’t need to discuss this in front of Stephanie. She has nothing to do with my personal life.”
His careless words hurt more than she expected, and her anger flared again. “I’m afraid he’s right, guys. He didn’t even bother to tell me they were serious, much less on the verge of engagement and marriage.”
The three stared at Bran like he had an extra head. Jarrett was the first to recover. “You didn’t even tell your PA? Branson, you really are a jerk-wad, aren’t you?”
“I didn’t have the chance.” He sounded even more desperate to convince his friends than her. “I have my reasons, but I can’t talk about it right now.”
Carina chose that moment to glide through the door in five-inch spike heels, with the grace of a ballet dancer en pointe. “Darling… everyone’s been looking for you.”
A deep crease between his brows, Branson turned his head toward his friends and muttered from the corner of his mouth. “Are you coming with me or not?”
“What do you think?” came Finn’s glib reply.
Branson marched to the door, snatching his fiancée’s arm as he went. Pausing, he glared their direction with such ferocity in his steel blue eyes Steph could’ve sworn he actually saw his friends’ smug expressions. He flipped off the light switch and slammed the door, the thud echoing from the library shelves as her eyes once again adjusted to the dim moonlight filtering into the room.
Jarrett let out a low whistle. “Whew! Bran’s ticked off, isn’t he?”
“Yep,” Cole agreed. “Most fun we’ve had since the last Star Wars premiere.”
“Maybe even better,” said Finn.
Chapter 2
Branson woke in a foul mood. No surprise. It was Sunday—Stephanie’s only day off. And today, of all days, he needed to talk to her. His friends had grilled her for at least forty-five minutes, and he had to find out what she told them. More importantly, he worried what secrets his friends might have revealed about his past.
He gave himself a mental kick. He should’ve known it was a trick when all three of his Phantom Enterprise partners told him they weren’t coming to the annual gala. He was furious they’d found a way to gain access to Stephanie, though he wasn’t quite sure why he’d been so determined to keep them apart.
“Where are my socks and shoes?” Bran snapped, leaning from his perch on the bench at the foot of his bed to grope on the floor.
“As always, your shoes are on the shoe rack in your closet, and your socks are in your second dresser drawer,” Fordham replied, in an unperturbed tone.
“Stephanie always lays them out for me,” he complained.
“Ms. Caldwell indulges your laziness. I do not. You’re a grown man, perfectly capable of fetching your own socks and shoes.”
“I can’t be sure what color they are.” He let a petulant tone creep into his voice. “Someone could’ve put them in the wrong compartments.”
Fordham wasn’t buying it. “As you only allow Stephanie and me to put them away, you’ve the same odds, whether you’re trusting us to sort them properly or fetch them for you.”
“Remind me again, Fordham, what do I pay you to do?”
“To listen to your endless complaints, I suppose, and then remind you you’re a man and not a child. Let me know when you’re ready to forgo your tantrums. I’m certainly prepared to retire at any moment when you admit I’m no longer needed.”
“No.” Bran ground his molars together. “You know I still need you. I don’t do well with change. I need consistency.”
“So you said the last fifteen times we hired a personal assistant,” Fordham said with a yawn. If he looked as bored as he sounded he would be lying flat on his back, the gray hairs trembling on his chin as he snored. Not that Bran had seen his gray hair, but Fordham described it on a regular basis, saying he was too old to work. “And yet that didn’t stop you from firing each one the moment he or she did something to displease you. That is, until you hired Ms. Caldwell.” He added another vocal yawn at the end of his discourse.
“You seem more tired than usual. Are you okay?” Bran asked, only partially in jest. He didn’t like the sick feeling in his stomach at the thought of Fordham’s possible infirmity. As his primary caretaker, even before Bran’s mother passed away, Fordham had been the most constant fixture in his life since he could remember. During college and graduate school, it was Fordham who played the role of father, as his own was too busy traveling around the globe, checking on the resort properties that had made him a wealthy man.
Fordham answered, “I may have had a bit of indigestion last night—a consequence of too much of that decadent dessert concoction from the dinner. We had our own version back in the kitchens. So delicious. Though I suppose you didn’t taste it.”
Bran ignored Fordham’s jibe about his aversion to sweets and all things he considered unhealthy. “You could’ve joined the main party. It’s not like you aren’t invited every year.”
“But I’ve nothing in common with those people.” He said the word like it tasted bad.
“Because they’re rich? Privileged? Snobby?”
“Because most of your rich friends have nothing of interest going on inside their brains but to fabricate lies to impress others who, like them, have nothing of interest inside their brains.”
A hearty laugh slipped out before Bran could stop it. “Is that how you see me, too? What about Cole and Finn and Jarrett?”
“None of you four fit in with that group, and I can’t conceive why you’d want to. It was a lucky thing your friends showed up and saved Stephanie from either a slow and painful death of boredom or being skewered to death by judgmental stares.”
“I guess you were in on that surprise visit, huh? Not sure where your loyalty lies these days.”
“Your friends don’t need my help to plan their pranks. But that didn’t stop them from bragging about their success when I showed them to their rooms last night. Quizzed me about your reasons for keeping them away from Stephanie. And why you didn’t tell anyone you were getting engaged.”
“And what did you say?”
“The truth.” Fordham let his statement ride in the silence that followed, as Bran wondered at his meaning, his stomach churning.
“I thought I could trust you, Fordham.”
Fordham made an exasperated sound. “The truth is I have no more idea than anyone else why you do what you do. But thanks for letting me know what you think of me after all these years.”
Bran hadn’t meant to hurt his feelings. He groaned in frustration. “You know better. You’re family to me, more than my own father.”
“Then explain it to me. Why’ve you kept Stephanie away from your friends for two years? When you announced your engagement to Carina Parker, it blew away my longstanding theory.”
“What theory?”
“That you were secretly in love with Stephanie Caldwell.”
Bran’s chest tightened. Though he originally chose Stephanie from fifteen other candidates because he’d discovered her child had cystic fibrosis, his feelings for her now were confusing at best. Yet he knew he was incapable of love, just as he knew no one would ever love him. Women didn’t see him as a man. They saw him as someone to be pitied. And used. His value lay, not in who he was, but what he had. Money.
“You know
I picked Stephanie because she needed my help.”
“Because of the medical bills. Yes, I know what you said.”
“And I’ve tried to talk her into moving to the estate, but she won’t do it. I can’t understand why.”
“I imagine your reputation for firing your assistants preceded you. Or perhaps she simply resented your attempts to control every aspect of her life.”
Bran grunted. “I’m not that bad.”
“Keep telling yourself that,” Fordham needled. “But only last week, she approached me about the possibility of moving in. She might be changing her mind.”
Hope bloomed in his chest. “Really? She didn’t say anything to me about it. I mentioned it again last night.”
“Last night? Was that before or after your engagement announcement?”
“My engagement has nothing to do with this.”
“Whatever you say, Master Knight.”
Fordham’s voice drizzled even more sarcasm than usual, and Bran decided to change the subject. He hoped he could persuade her to move to the complex. Because I like order in my life. It’s not that I have feelings for her.
“You’re really not going to bring me my socks and shoes, are you?” Without waiting for an answer, Bran padded his way to his closet, the plush carpet making his progress silent. Emerging with his running shoes and a pair of athletic socks, he went back to the bench to put them on.
“How did Carina’s father respond when you announced your engagement?”
“With enthusiasm. I got a pat on the back and a hearty handshake. My fingers are still numb.” He worked to tie his shoe, his nimble fingers having no difficulty with the task.
“Sounds like he’s glad to be rid of her,” Fordham remarked.
“Ha! You may be right.” Carina could certainly be a handful. “I’d call the party a success. After I announced the merger, Kingsley and Johnson pulled me aside to talk about investing. Soon, our resorts will be the largest chain in the world.” Larger than dad’s. He’ll be furious. The thought brought a grin to his face.
“Bully for you. You’ve done an excellent job fitting into the group. You’re more like your father every day.”