Reunited
A Billionaire Secret Baby Romance
Marcella Swann
© Copyright 2018 by Orléans Publishing. All rights reserved.
It is not legal to reproduce, duplicate, or transmit any part of this document in either electronic means or in printed format. Recording of this publication is strictly prohibited and any storage of this document is not allowed unless with written permission from the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review. This book is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, or places, events or locations is purely coincidental.
Table of Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Epilogue
About the Author
Read an excerpt of Rekindled, the next book in the Lost Love series.
Chapter 1
At first, I thought the pounding was entirely in my head: nothing more than the end result of a hard night of partying. But as I woke up a little bit, I realized that it wasn’t just my pulse pounding through my skull: it was actual pounding, going on somewhere nearby. My skull was just providing an excellent echo-chamber for the noise coming from the front of the house. “Son of a bitch,” I muttered to myself when it didn’t stop after a few moments.
I clawed my way out of the bed I’d ended up crashing on as slowly as possible, making sure not to move my head too much. My stomach lurched and rolled inside of me, and my mouth tasted like I had actually used it for an ashtray. As I managed to get through the guest room door, I saw the time: seven in the morning. “Good god, who’s even up this early?” I had one sock, a pair of board shorts, and an open bathrobe on, so I had to be grateful that at least I’d managed to fall asleep in a bed, instead of my pool.
The pounding kept going and I heard groans from the living room as I walked past it, trying to go slowly enough that I wouldn’t end up making my stomach decide to evict whatever was still in there, but fast enough to make the pounding stop sooner rather than later. I looked over at the living room and saw five or maybe six people sprawled out: three guys, two girls, and someone whose gender I couldn’t be sure of, since they were face-down and seemed to only be wearing jean shorts, and their hair was short but not so short I could make a guess. The girls were in bikinis, the guys were in boxers and swim trunks. So last night included a pool party. Good to know. I kept walking, scrubbing at my face and trying to get my brain to start working. Every step felt like someone planting a hatchet into my brain pan.
I finally got to the door and opened it to reveal a guy dressed in business-casual: clean-cut brown hair, starched oxford shirt, boring silk tie, dress pants and shined-up shoes. He looked the way my Dad used to look back when I had been a kid: professional, but not E-level. “Who the hell are you?”
“Where’s Jessica?” I blinked a few times. Was seven in the morning always that bright? I couldn’t remember.
“Jessica?”
“My girlfriend, asshole,” the man said, glaring at me. “Her friend Steph texted me that she came here last night, and she hasn’t replied to any of my texts since midnight.” I snorted.
“Dude: I can tell you that if she didn’t reply to your texts then, it was because she didn’t want to talk to you,” I said.
“Where is she?” I shrugged. I couldn’t remember anyone named Jessica, but then I was pretty sure I hadn’t even met half the people who came to the party the night before. Most of them had caught an Uber or a Lyft, but I thought there were probably seven or eight people crashed out in the house, and I had no idea if the guy’s girlfriend was one of them.
“What does she look like? I’ll ask around, see if anyone’s seen her,” I suggested. Really I just wanted the guy to leave, right away if possible.
“No, I’m going to find her and take her stupid ass home,” the man told me angrily and I laughed in his face, only to instantly regret it when it brought the headache pounding back worse than before, on top of bringing me right up to the edge of throwing up.
“Nah, man,” I said, shaking my head carefully. “This here is private property. And if your girlfriend came to the party last night, she came of her own free will; she’s going to leave when she’s ready to go home.” I didn’t want to make things worse, but the guy was on my property, being an asshole to me.
“Yo, Bobby! Everything okay?” Jessica’s boyfriend and I had apparently been loud enough to wake up at least one of the guys who’d crashed out in the living room, and within a minute or two, the guy--I remembered his name was Jackson--appeared in the hallway, coming towards the door.
“Yeah, everything’s all good,” I said. “Isn’t it, Jessica’s Boyfriend?”
“Fuck you,” the guy said, shoving me to try and get me out of the way. “Jessica! Jessica!” He tried to get past me but he couldn’t; I might have been hungover, but I was not entirely a stranger to brawling.
“Look, asshole,” I said, grabbing his hand and bending back his middle finger until he yelped. “Like I said: this is private property. It’s my private property. I don’t know if your girlfriend is still here, and I don’t give a rat’s ass if she is. You’re going to leave now or I’m going to break your finger and get someone to hold you down while I call the cops.”
The noise woke up the other two guys sleeping in my bedroom, and before I knew it, they were there, too, backing me up, jostling the guy to get him to the other side of the door.
“Man, you picked the wrong place,” Clancy told him.
“Yeah dude, you should probably just head out,” Jackson advised. I grinned and even though Jessica’s Boyfriend was shouting like he wanted to try and split my skull open with just his voice, I couldn’t be that upset about it. Jessica’s Boyfriend decided that he was outnumbered and shouted something about how he was going to talk to her later; I guessed that he was hoping she would hear, wherever she was in the house. Good luck with that, buddy, I thought, glancing around the foyer. The place I’d had built up from almost scratch was big enough that I could probably have someone living in it for a month without knowing them, if they were smart enough to avoid being out and about when I was home.
My friends escorted the guy to the gate where he’d parked his car and came back up to the front door, looking no worse for the night’s partying. I went back into the living room and threw myself down on the couch; apparently the person whose gender I hadn’t known about was a woman--topless. “Hey, is your name Jessica?”
“No, I’m Claire,” she said dazedly. I chuckled and rubbed at my temples.
“Damn, man, how late did things go last night?” Marie, someone I actually did know, joined me on the other end of the couch, combing her fingers through her messy hair.
“You went in around four, the rest of us kept going until almost dawn,” she said. “So like maybe an hour or two ago I guess.” I snorted.
A few more people came downstairs: Nolan, a friend of mine from college, Harvey, a guy he was working with, Ben--whose name was all I really knew about him--and two girls whose names I didn’t even know. “Anyone
here named Jessica?” Everyone shook their heads. “Well screw that guy, then. His girlfriend wasn’t even here.”
“I think Natalie caught an Uber with her around three,” Claire said.
“Maybe they went home together,” Jackson suggested, wiggling his eyebrows. I chuckled.
“Free country,” I observed. I tilted my head back against the couch cushion and tried to figure out what to do. I had eleven people waiting for a decision from me, and none of us was in any shape to cook or clean anything up, or really do anything that required much thought.
“Well, we’re all awake now, at least,” Marie pointed out. “Might as well get the day started, right Bobby?”
“Yeah, might as well,” I agreed. “Anyone else just, like, starving?” I opened my eyes and looked around the room.
“I could eat,” Nolan said.
“Screw it, let’s jump in a couple of Ubers and go to IHOP,” I suggested. An excited--if a little quiet--cheer went up around the room.
“Just the thing,” Claire said. I would have to get dressed, at least in something more than a bathrobe and board shorts.
“Let me throw on some clothes--and y’all find your own clothes--and we’ll head out,” I told them.
“IHOP is the best freaking thing for a hangover,” Jackson commented.
“Hell yeah, it is,” I agreed. “You know what--anyone know what it costs to buy an IHOP? Like that way I could just...go whenever I felt like it.” Everyone laughed at that.
“I think they’re corporate, not all franchises,” Harvey said.
“Whatever, I’m sure I could find a way,” I said. “I’ll ask whoever is in charge when we get there. Maybe I’ll buy that exact one!”
“Oh man, that would be badass,” Ben said, and I agreed with him. I started towards my room upstairs, but the doorbell rang, and I thought it might be Jessica’s Boyfriend, back after giving his courage a little boost, to try and find his girlfriend again. I’d just tell him his girl wasn’t even there, anyway.
I went to the door but instead of a guy in half a suit, it was my PA and “handler,” Kara. Her I opened the door for right away, without any kind of snark at all. She had worked with my uncle when he’d still been alive, and now she worked with me--in a way, I’d sort of inherited her, and even though she wasn’t that much older than I was, she had this way of looking at me sometimes that reminded me of the principal at school, about to lay into you for what you’d done wrong.
“What’s up, Kara?” she looked me up and down and I could see her mentally shaking her head, even though she didn’t even let me see any sign of surprise on her face. She was about half a foot shorter than me, with blonde hair that she kept in a tight, perfect bun and brown eyes, and I had yet to see her wearing the same thing twice--but every outfit she wore was absolutely the bleeding edge of style: usually a designer name. I couldn’t remember ever seeing her in jeans and a tee shirt; the most casual I’d ever seen her, she’d been in a “distressed” blazer. And she was always, completely, impeccable. I had never, in all the years I’d known her, going back to before I had even known I was going to inherit from my uncle, seen her with even a single hair out of place.
“I’m guessing by your current state that you completely forgot our meeting today.” Kara raised an eyebrow slowly, meeting my gaze.
“Forgot…” It wasn’t the best answer; it made it obvious that I had forgotten whatever it was Kara had come to my house for.
“You have that school tour this morning,” Kara said. “You’re giving a donation to J.D. MacCallister.” I cringed. I wasn’t at all against the donation--it had been my idea--but I had totally and completely forgotten about the tour and talking to the kids that was supposed to go along with it.
“Why can’t I just sign the check and mail it to them?” Kara stepped into my house and looked around, and I saw the disappointment on her face at the sight of my friends, waiting to see what I was going to do. She took her phone out of her purse and unlocked it, and I had to suspect she was taking notes to do a background check on every person she saw there with me.
“I mean, come on. Isn’t it a bit gaudy to do the stupid tour and expect them to like, thank me and all that?”
“Who was the guy who said ‘You know what would be perfect? I could donate to schools!’” Kara reminded me, mimicking my voice almost perfectly in her sarcasm. She wasn’t wrong. One of the stipulations on my inheritance was to get involved in the community in a lasting, meaningful way. When Kara had cornered me on making progress on my uncle’s checklist, I’d decided to do my required charity work with public schools; my mom had been a public school teacher until she’d passed away from cancer, and in spite of my family’s money, my parents had insisted on me attending public schools. It was something I believed in. I just didn’t much want to spend the next several hours of recovering from my hangover around a few dozen little kids.
“Right, yeah, I know,” I said. I looked at my friends and sighed. “I’ll call you guys an Uber, you can send me a pic of the bill and I’ll Venmo.”
“Really?” Claire looked positively eager, but most of my friends looked disappointed.
“Yeah, I gotta do this thing,” I told them.
“I hope you’re not planning on showing up at an elementary school looking like an extra from Portlandia,” Kara told me sharply.
“No, I promise I won’t,” I told her. “If you can get coffee for me, I’ll hop in the shower, take a couple of Aleve, and put some decent clothes on--I’ve got time for that, right?” Kara gave me one of her rare, approving smiles and nodded.
“I had pretty much counted on you forgetting you had to be somewhere early today, so there’s coffee waiting in the car,” she told me and I had to laugh. Kara knew me well.
“All right, team,” I said, gesturing all around. “We all have our stuff to do, so one-two-three, break!” my friends headed for the door and I found my phone in my bathrobe pocket. It still had about 15% battery; more than enough to make the arrangements, and I could charge it in the car on the way to the school. I started up the stairs to my room, careful not to trip over my clumsy feet while I got started on the plans. It was going to be a long day--but maybe, at least after the tour, I could get a good lunch.
Chapter 2
“Mommy, what was that noise?” I kept my smile on my face as I glanced at the rearview mirror to meet my daughter’s gaze.
“Just the gremlins in the engine, sweet-pea,” I told Tanya. “Nothing to worry about.” I counted myself lucky that my daughter couldn’t see--and wouldn’t be able to understand--the lights occasionally flicking on and off on my control panel in front of me. We were about five minutes from her school when the car started making the clicking, grinding noises.
“Do all cars have gremlins?” I had to work quickly to avoid stopping short as one of the drivers in front of me slammed on her brakes.
“Just older cars like Mommy’s,” I replied absently.
“Are they good to have?” I pressed my lips together and took a quick breath. I’d made a promise to myself, back when Tanya had been born, that I would do everything in my power to make sure my girl never understood how much we were struggling. Sometimes, though, it was hard.
“It’s just a thing that older cars come with,” I told my daughter. “Like the different kinds of seatbelts.”
Tanya chattered on about other things and I couldn’t help but feel relieved. I heard about her friend Stacy’s new cat, about the teacher’s discussion with the class about what kind of class pet they might get and how much of a responsibility it might be. “And Sarah said that rabbits were mean, but Luke wants us to get one so it can play with his rabbit.”
“Rabbits are a lot of work,” I told my daughter. “They need lots of care and gentleness. I’m not sure you guys would all be able to take good care of one--especially on the weekends.”
“Ms. Sellers said she thought we should get a hamster, that way there wouldn’t be too much holding,” Tanya
told me.
“I think Ms. Sellers has a good idea there,” I agreed. Not to mention that if it dies, it’ll be cheaper to replace. “Maybe a fish would be a good idea.”
“Oh! Yeah!” And that sent Tanya off talking about one of her favorite topics, which was good for me because I hadn’t quite had the chance to finish my coffee before we left the house to make sure I could get my little girl to school and myself to work on time. All I had to do was give an occasional “uh-huh,” and “you don’t say,” and make sure she saw me looking back at her now and again while I drove. My little girl was so smart, and so chatty, but there were times that I just needed to be able to support her while not having to pay full attention to what she was saying.
Finally I turned into the drop-off loop at the elementary school, and got out of the car, hoping against hope that it wouldn’t stall out or overheat on me while I was getting Tanya out of the back seat. I helped her hop down, gave her a kiss, and then she was off like a shot, skip-running towards the river of kids headed from the drop-off area to the entrance of the school. I watched her in amongst the kids and teachers, and saw her catch up with one of her friends from class, the two of them immediately moving to talk each other’s ears off.
The car was still running okay when I pulled out of the school’s drop-off loop, but it stalled on me at a light about three blocks from work. I shut off the engine and turned it on again, and had to do it a second time before it would get going properly, just in time for the light. “Come on, baby, just keep going a little bit longer,” I murmured to the car, petting the dashboard as if it would make a difference. If I could just clear some of the bills hanging over my head, I could maybe get the car looked at, but I had to have it keep going on me for at least another three weeks. The car barely got me to the parking structure, but it was making noises. Then I shut off the engine and grabbed my ID and my purse.
Reunited: A Billionaire Secret Baby Romance (Lost Love Book 2) Page 1