The CEO's Accidental Bride

by Barbara Dunlop

  Not that she looked anything remotely like a child.

  She wore sexy, high-heeled sandals and a pair of snug black pants. They were topped with a metallic thread tank that shimmered under the lights. While she moved, she reached up, raking her loose hair back with her fingers. It shone, and she shone, and he couldn’t wait to hold her in his arms.

  A member of the staff was working the sound system, and strains of “Stardust” came up to flow around them from a dozen speakers.

  Ginny, Dylan and Lindsay arrived, laughing and joking as they spilled onto the polished floor.

  “You need a partner, Auntie,” Dylan declared, snagging her hand. It was obvious to Zach that Dylan knew exactly what his aunt was up to.

  “Oh, don’t you be silly,” a blushing Ginny said, then slapped his hand away. “I’m far too old to dance.”

  Zach moved toward Kaitlin. She was definitely the one he’d be dancing with tonight. He took her easily into his arms, and moved them both to the music, swirling them away from the others.

  “It’s been a while since we did this,” he murmured, as her body settled tentatively against his.

  “And the last time didn’t end so well,” she pointed out. But she picked up the rhythm and ever so slowly relaxed into his lead as he stepped them toward the bank of windows.

  “It could have ended better,” he agreed. It could have ended with her in his bed. It should have ended that way.

  He pulled back and glanced down at her beautiful face. Why hadn’t it ended that way?

  “Ginny said she was your grandmother’s best friend when they were girls.”

  Zach nodded his concurrence. “Back then, my grandmother Sadie was the caretaker’s daughter.”

  Kaitlin relaxed a little more. “Ginny said Sadie grew up here, married here and died here. All on this island.”

  Zach chuckled at the misleading description of Sadie’s life. “They did let her off once in a while.”

  “Those are some really deep roots.”

  “I guess they are.”

  “Yours are even deeper.”

  “I suppose,” he told her absently, more interested in paying attention to the way she molded against him than in talking about his family history.

  She’d relaxed completely now. Her head was tucked against his shoulder, one arm around his back, their hands clasped and drawn inward, while her legs brushed his with every step.

  As the song moved on, she eased closer. Their thighs met snugly together, her smooth belly and soft breasts plastered against him. Her heat seeped into his body, and he could smell the subtle scent of her perfume. It had to be her regular brand, because he remembered it from Vegas, from the yacht, from his office.

  The song ended, but the sound of Count Basie immediately came up. “It Could Happen to You.” Ginny obviously wasn’t giving Dylan any opportunity to escape her planned romantic web with Lindsay.

  Fine with Zach. Wild horses couldn’t pull him away from Kaitlin.

  “I was thinking—” he began.

  “Shh,” she interrupted. “What?”

  “Can you please not talk for a minute?”

  “Sure?” But curiosity quickly got the better of him. “Why not?”

  Her voice was low and sweet. “I’m pretending you’re someone else.”

  “Ouch,” he said gently, ignoring the sting of her words. Because she had pressed even closer, closing her eyes and giving herself up to his motion.

  “I’m pretending I’m someone else, too.” She sighed. “Just for a minute, Zach. Just for this song? I want to shut out the world and make believe I belong here.”

  His chest tightened.

  He gathered her closer still and brushed a gentle kiss on the top of her head.

  You do belong here, he silently thought.

  Seven

  Kaitlin had never in her life seen anything quite so magnificent as the Harper castle. And it truly was a castle. Made of weathered limestone, it had had both chimneys and turrets. It was three full stories. And there looked to be what she could only imagine was an extensive attic network beneath the steep-pitched roofs.

  Inside, wood panels gleamed, while ornate, suspended chandeliers bounced light into every nook and cranny. It was furnished throughout with antiques. Rich draperies hung from high valences and thick carpets muted footfalls and gave a welcoming warmth to the cavernous rooms.

  Each of three wings had a showpiece staircase that wound up through the three stories and beyond. The biggest staircase began on the main floor in the entry rotunda. From the rotunda, Zach had shown them through the great hall, a beautiful library, plus drawing and dining rooms. The kitchen was fitted with modern appliances, but stayed true to its roots through wood and stonework and the gleaming array of antique copper pots and implements hanging from ceiling racks.

  Last night, Kaitlin and Lindsay had each been appointed a guest suite on the second floor. Zach’s suite was on the third, while Sadie had converted the old servants’ quarters to a private bedroom, bath and sitting room on the main floor. Zach told them that the bathrooms had been added in the early 1900s and updated every few decades since.

  Five staff members lived in the castle year-round: a groundskeeper, maintenance man, a cook and two personal maids to Sadie. Although the workload had obviously eased since Sadie’s death, Kaitlin learned Zach kept them all on. They seemed very welcoming of company.

  “Did you ever get lost in here?” Kaitlin asked Zach in the morning, as he showed her through a passageway that led to the north wing. Lindsay had left right after breakfast to swim in the pool at the Gilby house and, Kaitlin suspected, to flirt with Dylan.

  “I must have as a little kid,” he told her, pushing open the door that led to the pale blue sitting room that had belonged to Sadie. “But I don’t ever remember being lost.”

  Kaitlin stepped inside the pretty room and gazed around with interest. “Can I get your cell phone number in case I have to call for help?”

  “Sure,” he answered easily from the doorway. “But you can orient yourself by the staircases. The carpets are blue in the main wing, burgundy in the north and gold in the east.”

  Sadie’s sitting room housed a pale purple settee, several ornately carved tables and armchairs and a china cabinet with an amazing array of figurines, while a grand piano stood on a raised dais in the corner.

  The morning sunshine streamed in through many narrow windows. Some were made of stained glass, and Kaitlin felt as if she should tiptoe through the hush.

  She ran her fingers across the rich fabric coverings and the smooth wood surfaces, wandering toward the piano. “How old are these things?”

  “I haven’t a clue,” said Zach.

  She touched middle C, and the tone reverberated through the room.

  “Sadie used to play,” he told her. “Ginny still does sometimes.”

  “I learned ‘Ode to Joy’ on the clarinet in high school.” That about summed up Kaitlin’s musical experience.

  She made her way to a china cabinet, peering through the glass to see figurines of cats and horses and several dozen exquisitely painted teacups. “Do you think she’d mind me looking around like this?”

  “She’s the reason you’re here,” he replied.

  Kaitlin suddenly realized Zach was still standing in the doorway. She turned in time to catch a strange expression on his face.

  “Something wrong?” she asked, glancing behind her, suddenly self-conscious. Perhaps he didn’t want her snooping through this room after all.

  “Nothing.” His response was definitely short.

  “Zach?” She moved closer, confused.

  He blinked a couple of times, drew a deep breath. Then he braced his hand on the door frame.

  “What is it?” she asked.

  “I haven’t come in here.” He paused. “Not since…”

  Kaitlin’s chest squeezed around her heart. “Since your grandmother died?”

  He nodded in answer.

&nbs
p; “We can leave.” She moved briskly toward the door, feeling guilty for having done something that obviously upset him.

  He shaped his lips in a smile and stepped decisively into the room, stopping her forward progress. “No. Sadie put my wife in her will. It’s right that you should learn about her.”

  For the first time, it occurred to Kaitlin that in addition to being blindsided by the news of their Vegas marriage, Zach had likely been blindsided by the will itself.

  “You didn’t expect your wife to inherit, did you?” she asked, watching him closely.

  He paused, gazing frankly into Kaitlin’s eyes. “That would be an understatement.”

  “Was Sadie angry with you?”

  “No.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “I’m sure.”

  “Maybe you didn’t visit her enough.”

  He shook his head and moved farther into the room.

  Kaitlin pivoted to watch as he walked toward the windows. “Seriously. Would she have liked you to come home more often?”

  “I’m sure she would have.”

  “Well, maybe that’s—”

  “She left you a few hundred million because I didn’t show up here enough?” He turned back to face her, folding his arms over his chest.

  Kaitlin took a step back, blinking in shock. “Dollars?”

  “It wasn’t like I never came home,” Zach defended.

  “Okay, I’m going to forget you said that.” Kaitlin knew Harper International was a very big company, but hundreds of millions? All those zeros were going to make her hyperventilate.

  “She did want me to get married,” Zach admitted, half musing to himself.

  But Kaitlin’s mind was still on the hundreds of millions of dollars. It was a massive, overwhelming responsibility. How on earth did Zach handle it?

  He swept his arm, gesturing around the room. “As you can probably tell, the Harper family history was important to Sadie.”

  “The responsibility would freak me out,” Kaitlin confessed.

  “The family history?”

  “The millions, billions, whatever, corporation.”

  “I thought we were talking about my grandmother.”

  Right. Kaitlin pushed the company’s value to the back of her mind. It was a moot point anyway. Her involvement would be short-lived.

  “What did you do to make her mad?” she asked again, knowing there had to be more than he was letting on. Zach was right, Sadie wouldn’t have cut him out of her will because he didn’t visit often enough.

  His lips thinned as he drew an exasperated sigh. “She wasn’t mad.”

  Kaitlin crossed her arms over her own chest, cocking her head and peering dubiously up at him.

  “Fine,” he finally conceded. “She was impatient for me to have children. My best guess is that she was trying to speed things up by bribing potential wives.”

  “That would do it,” said Kaitlin with conviction, admiring Sadie’s moxie. She could only imagine the lineup that would have formed around the block if Zach had been single and word got out about the will.

  “I’m not sure I want the kind of woman who’s attracted by money,” he stated.

  “She was obviously trying,” Kaitlin said, defending Sadie’s actions. “It was you who wasn’t cooperating.”

  He rolled his eyes heavenward.

  “Seriously, Zach.” Kaitlin couldn’t help but tease him. “I think you should step up and give your grandmother her dying wish. Get married and have a new generation of little Harper pirates.”

  He didn’t miss a beat. “Are you volunteering for the job?”

  Nice try. But he wasn’t putting her on the defensive.

  She smoothly tucked her hair behind her ears and took a half step in his direction, bringing them less than a foot apart. “You want me to call your bluff?”

  “Go ahead.”

  “Sure, Zach. I’m your wife, so let’s have children.”

  He stepped in, bring them even closer. “And you claim you’re not flirting.”

  “I’m not flirting,” she denied.

  “We’re talking about sex.” His deep voice hummed along her nervous system, messing with her concentration.

  “We’re talking about babies,” she corrected.

  “My mistake. I thought you were making a pass at me.”

  She inched farther forward, stretching up to face him. “If I make a pass at you, Zachary, you’ll know it.”

  He leaned in. “This feels like a pass, Katie.”

  “You wish.”

  “I do.” He didn’t laugh. Didn’t back off. Didn’t even flinch.

  They breathed in unison for a long minute. His gaze dropped to her mouth, and the urge to surrender became more powerful with each passing second.

  He seemed to guess what she was thinking. “We won’t stop this time,” he warned.

  She knew that.

  If he kissed her, they’d tear off their clothes right here in Sadie’s sitting room.

  Sadie’s sitting room.

  Kaitlin cringed and drew away.

  Zach’s expression faltered, but she forced herself to ignore it, pretending to be absorbed in the furniture and the decorations, moving farther from him to peer through the door into Sadie’s bedroom.

  It took her a minute before she thought she could speak. “Sadie seems like she was an incredible person.”

  “She was,” said Zach, his tone giving away nothing.

  Maybe Kaitlin had imagined the power of the moment. “Do you miss her?”

  “Every day.” There was a vacant sound to his voice that made Kaitlin turn.

  She caught his unguarded expression, and a lump formed in her throat.

  For all his flaws, Zach had obviously loved his grandmother.

  “Back then,” Ginny informed Kaitlin and Lindsay from where she lay on a deck lounger, head propped up, beside the Gilbys’ pool, “Sadie was a pistol.”

  While Lindsay was chuckling at Ginny’s stories of growing up on Serenity Island, Kaitlin had been struggling to match the seemingly meticulous, traditional Sadie who’d been in charge of the Harper castle for so many years, with the lively young girl who’d apparently run wild with Ginny.

  Both Kaitlin and Lindsay were swimming in the pool. Right now, their arms were folded over the painted edge, kicking to keep their balance while Ginny shared entertaining stories. The water was refreshing in the late afternoon heat. A breeze had come up off the ocean, and dozens of birds flitted in the surrounding trees and flower gardens.

  Kaitlin was beginning to think Serenity Island was paradise.

  “It wasn’t like it is now,” Ginny continued, gesturing widely with her half-full glass of iced tea. “None of these helicopters and the like. When you were on the island, you were here until the next supply ship.”

  “Did you like living here?” asked Lindsay, stretching out and scissor-kicking through the water.

  “We constantly plotted ways to get off,” said Ginny, with a conspiratorial chuckle. “Probably ten kids in all back then, what with the families and the staff. We were seventeen. Sadie convinced my daddy that I needed to learn French. Mais oui. Then I convinced him I couldn’t possibly go to Paris without Sadie.”

  “You went to Paris?” Lindsay sighed, then pushed off the pool wall and floated backward in her magenta bikini. “I love Paris.”

  Kaitlin had never been to Paris. Truth was, she’d never left New York State. Shelter, food and education were the top of her priority list. Anything else would have to come after that. Though, someday, she’d like to see Europe, or maybe California, even Florida.

  “We took one year of our high school in France,” said Ginny, draining the glass of iced tea. “Came home very sophisticated, you know.”

  One of the staff members immediately arrived with another pitcher of iced tea, refilling Ginny’s glass. She offered some to Kaitlin and Lindsay, filling up a fresh glass for each of them. They thanked the woman and set their glasses on th
e pool deck in easy reach.

  Kaitlin had spent several hot hours today prowling through the castle. The dusty attic rooms were particularly hot and stuffy. Now she was grateful for the cool water of the pool and the refreshing glass of iced tea.

  Ginny waited until the young woman left the pool deck and exited back into the main house.

  Then she sat up straighter, leaning toward Kaitlin and Lindsay. “Zachary’s grandfather, Milton Harper, took one look at Sadie in those diaphanous Parisian dresses and, boom, she was pregnant.”

  Kaitlin tried to hide her surprise at learning such an intimate detail. Back in the 1950s, it must have caused quite a scandal.

  Lindsay quickly returned to the pool edge next to Kaitlin. “They had to get married?” she asked.

  Ginny pointed a finger at Lindsay. “I’m not recommending it to you,” she cautioned. “You girls want to know how to catch a man nowadays?”

  “Not necessar—”

  Lindsay elbowed Kaitlin in the ribs. “How?”

  “Withhold sex,” Ginny told them with a sage nod. “They can get it any old place they want out there—” she waved a hand toward the ocean, apparently including the world in general in her statement “—but you say no, and he’ll keep coming back, sniffing around.”

  “Auntie,” came Dylan’s warning voice. But it held more than a trace of humor as he strode across the deck in a pair of blue jeans and a plain T-shirt. “I don’t think that’s the advice I want you giving our lady guests.”

  Ginny harrumphed as he leaned down to give her a kiss on the cheek.

  “You’re cramping my style,” he admonished her with good humor.

  Ginny looked to Lindsay again, gesturing to her grandnephew. “This one’s a catch.”

  “I’ll try not to sleep with him,” Lindsay promised. Then she covered her chuckle with a sip from her glass.

  “You’ll do more than try, young lady.” Ginny, on the other hand, seemed completely serious. “I like you. Don’t mess this up.”