His Surprise Daughter : A BWWM Billionaire Romance

by Tiana Cole

  Tim’s eyes met mine; he was chewing and swallowed before saying, “What?”

  “The new corporate partner. Who is it?”

  “Rashid Pharmaceutical,” he grinned proudly. “They made us an amazing offer. I don’t know how I can refuse it.”

  Chapter 18

  Denise

  Well, Rashid was just one of those companies that made you want to take a shower.

  I spent the entire morning in the media room reading literally everything we had on them, which was no small task. They were all over the news, mostly for good reasons, but running beneath all of the do-gooding was a thread of corporate manipulation. The CEO—Chuck Mansfield—was open about his desire to conquer cancer. In the past five years’ worth of interviews there was a smattering of words about Leukemia-A, but nothing specific enough to set off any alarms in my head. Mostly I felt a kind of big-brother vibe from them since they seemed to have their fingers in everything, especially in Chicago.

  Lunchtime came and went, but I didn't really notice because the less I ate, the better off my stomach felt. A banana and seltzer water kept my stomach satisfied—neither too empty nor too full—and sometime in the early afternoon my phone rang. A warm feeling spread through my chest as I saw that it was Derek.

  “Hey, you’re calling me. I love it,” I answered in way of hello.

  “Hey, Denise.” His voice sounded tight, distracted. In light of our recent airing of secrets, it made me wary. I’d thought, based on the previous night, that we’d made it through the part where we were suspicious and didn't trust each other. Truly, I felt like we’d turned a corner and were ready to actually have a real relationship. I hadn't had the time to really ponder it since I’d left Skip’s office, but handing off Derek’s story to Skip really was the first step towards being with him in a real, tangible way.

  “You sound a bit off, Derek. Are you okay?”

  “Yes and no. Listen, I don’t have much time. Let me bring up the good thing first. Are you free this weekend to go away with me? I rented a cabin on the other side of the lake. No phones or computers or work. Just us.”

  The warmth in my chest spread downwards. A small sigh escaped my lips. “Yes, yes of course. I’d love to do that.”

  I could hear the smile in his voice. “Good. I'll solidify that with you later. But here’s the other thing, Denise. I just had lunch with my boss, the Chief of Medicine at the hospital. Guess who offered a huge donation to the hospital in exchange for a research partnership?”

  The small bloom of nausea that had become my constant companion blossomed. “No.”

  “Yes,” Derek sighed.

  “Son of a bitch.”

  “Yes.”

  “Does your boss know about you and your lab and your research?”

  “Thankfully, no. That lab is private property. Technically, I lease it from the hospital so they have no legal claim to what’s in there. Still… I can’t help but think I should find a new place to set up shop.”

  “Can you do that without drawing suspicion?”

  And then Derek, who had for the entire time I've known him seemed a mild-mannered, kind-hearted type of guy, spoke with a fire and heat I’d not yet heard. Truth be told, it was damn sexy.

  “I don’t care. I'll do what I want,” he said, and I believed him.

  We talked for a few more minutes about the lab and about our weekend before he suddenly he asked, “Hey, how did your meeting with your editor go this morning?”

  “Oh,” I began, recalling the time with Skip mostly with satisfaction and relief, and only a slight underlying level of an indefinable worry. “It was peachy. He gave me a new story to work on.”

  Derek paused. “And you've spent your morning on that?”

  “No. I've spent the morning researching Rashid.”

  Derek

  The best part about all of it was having someone on my side. In Denise, despite our auspicious beginning, I felt like I had an ally.

  With an hour or so to burn before my clinic shift began, I walked upstairs to the lab. Logan was in class so I had the entire space to myself. Although a spare twenty-four hours had passed since I’d been there, I honestly felt the pull of the lab; it was almost exciting to look at it as if with new eyes.

  And then I scoffed at myself, knowing that was a little bit silly.

  The samples had continued on basically the same trajectory—the healthy cells were both completely healthy, and in addition had formed a sort of protective coating. Of course, my next step would need to be isolating the protective coating on the cell to see what it was made of and where it came from, but that was an entirely different experiment and even in my excitement I knew that I may be unable to precisely replicate what I’d accomplished in this test. The actual cancer cells, which I’d culled from Maria’s tissue, were growing smaller and smaller every day. They weren't fully eradicated yet, but according to Logan’s meticulous notes, they were shrinking at a steady rate.

  That in itself was exciting. With pain I recalled how quickly Maria’s cancer grew. How, week by week, I watched her grow frail. With dismay I’d checked her monthly scans and watched the opaque white spots grow. Leukemia-A had taken her so quickly, and none of the traditional methods had worked. Chemo and radiation only made her feel worse, and at best had stalled the tumors’ growth rates only marginally. For a moment I closed my eyes, reliving her brave fight, her loss to the new disease, and was shaken anew with grief. I wondered if losing my wife in such a way made her passing worse for me. If she had suddenly died in a car accident or suffered an early-onset stroke or heart attack, would I have suffered this continued grief? Perhaps it only because I was a doctor, because I had watched as she rapidly withered from a disease that nobody seemed able to fix.

  I’d never be able to know the answer to that. Although on the far side of five years, and after finding recent… whatever I had… with Denise, I could say that the sting I felt that morning was less longing for Maria and more regret that I hadn't been able to help. As I watched the Leukemia-A cells shrink in my Petri dishes, I regretted that we… I… weren't able to do more for Maria as she wasted away. She was a good woman, though. She would be proud of me now, and happy for me and Denise. I knew that for sure.

  With a sigh I brushed away the maudlin feeling and noted the changes in the hourly-updated log that Logan had created on a small tablet, to which only he and I knew the passcode. When I was finished with that, I spent some time cleaning up and noted that the lab was bigger than I actually needed. I mentally calculated how much space I’d require to actually house my experiments somewhere off-site. The idea of moving the lab was daunting, but was only necessary if the hospital actually partnered with Rashid. That wasn't a sure thing yet, but seemed likely.

  As much as I told myself that the partnership was only theoretical, I knew the business and knew it was only a matter of time. The medical business—particularly the research end—thrived on corporate donations since experiments were expensive. For a huge partner like Rashid to offer to come alongside the hospital and walk through drug trials together was a dream for any research facility. There was very little chance that Tim would turn it down. Was it too narcissistic to suspect that Rashid’s sole interest in the hospital was my Leukemia-A research?

  Totally. I gave my head a firm shake and locked the lab door behind me. Rashid was a huge outfit and probably had interests all over the country.

  But then I remembered the phone calls.

  Chapter 19

  Denise

  Derek had really outdone himself this time.

  Three days after leaving my story in Skip’s hands and effectively walking away from the responsibility to report on Derek, I climbed into his sedan and looked forward to forty-eight hours away with the man I was quickly falling for. It had been a relatively uneventful few days. Like a dutiful employee, I’d spent a good amount of time on the lawyer Skip had sent me to look after. She really was a piece of work, that one. There was a list of unp
roven accusations against her a mile long that nobody seemed to be able to flesh out, and now that she was running for office it was all going to come out.

  But that’s politics.

  My research on Rashid Pharmaceutical was probably just beginning. I was slowly assembling information, but because I was looking at them under the radar I had to keep my information contained. No need to raise questions as to why I was digging into a multi-billion dollar, Chicago-based company.

  As Derek’s car hugged the lakeshore and we made our way north out of the city, we promised to not discuss work the entire weekend.

  “I’m serious,” Derek cautioned half-jokingly. “If you bring up Leukemia-A or Rashid Pharmaceutical, I will pack you in this car and drop you at the nearest bus station.”

  “Come on. That’s mean.”

  He laced his fingers through mine. “But seriously, this research story is one huge thing we have in common; it’s the reason we met and what drove the early weeks of our acquaintance. I want us to push past it and bond over other things.”

  Desire flared in my abdomen, not a small feat with my current state of exhaustion and nausea. “I know a few things we can bond over.”

  Derek chuckled. “And we will,” he promised. “But I also want to talk. Get to know each other outside of our occupations, and our occupation with one another.” He glanced at me with a sexy wink. I sighed happily.

  There were plenty of things that I’d yet to share with Derek, among them the fact that I was pregnant with his child. I hadn’t been irresponsible, though. I’d spent an entire hour on the internet and learned that it was basically too early for me to even see a doctor. That, and the fact that up to 30% of pregnancies end in early miscarriage, kept me quiet for the time being. If things progressed, both with him and with the pregnancy, I would tell him. Hell, he was a doctor. He would probably figure it out on his own, eventually.

  Deep down, I knew that keeping it quiet was odd. Too much self-protection, maybe? Perhaps a latent inability to trust that our relationship would go anywhere? I’d lived on my own too long and wasn't accustomed to trusting another human. It was hard to force myself to do so at this stage in the game. In the meantime, I’d worked hard to be as healthy as possible to hold off the nausea. I ate little, but often, and made sure to stay hydrated. My daily coffee consumption had to either be skipped completely or cut with decaf—I was still working on that. I’d also tried to get regular sleep. I was proud of those small steps.

  Then again, it had only been about a week since I found out. I had a long way to go.

  As we pulled further out of the city I tried to bite back my worries and just enjoy Derek, the feel of his fingers wrapped about mine, and the weekend ahead. For forty-eight hours I was certain I could leave behind thoughts of the pregnancy, of Skip, and all things worrisome.

  ***

  The good thing about such a weekend is that you don’t have to feel rushed. We arrived at the most beautiful of lakeside cabins, and after getting settled, strolled into the small village to find something to eat. Derek had a ravenous appetite and enjoyed a bounty of local seafood; of course, I nibbled on French bread and a weak chicken soup, but it stayed down. We rustled through old bookshops and climbed the steps of a local lighthouse. When we returned to our retreat we fell dead asleep in a huge feather bed and didn't wake up until well past dawn.

  With the warm morning sun streaming through the white curtains, Derek laid a hand on my back and murmured, “Did we just start our romantic weekend by falling asleep at nine o’clock?”

  I giggled. “I think we did.”

  He groaned, but I was thrilled. That we were comfortable enough to forego the sex and just exist together like humans demonstrated, to me at least, that we were able to have a real relationship. In any case, he did not forego the sex for much longer. He completely ravaged me, and I happily allowed it.

  Saturday was handled in a similar fashion. We ate heartily—well, Derek did as I pretended to—while taking in the quiet lakeside village and the surrounding nature. The weather was gorgeous, so we did a fair bit of walking and hiking. After lunch Derek suggested a small boat ride around the lake. Having experienced some success in controlling my nausea, I reluctantly agreed.

  The boat wasn’t large, but was able to handle the swells of Lake Michigan with confidence. It was only a forty-five minute boat tour, and we were halfway through it when I was certain my stomach was going to revolt. With tense fingers I clutched the sides of the boat and closed my eyes, trying to appear as if I was having a good time. I let the sun bathe my face and took deep breaths, glad at least that if I had to throw up, I had an entire lake at my disposal.

  “Denise?” Derek’s fingers grazed my shoulder from his seat on the next bench. “Are you feeling all right?”

  “A little seasick, I think,” I muttered, taking in great gulps of air and concentrating on keeping my lunch securely tucked away in my stomach. The boat captain told me to hold tight, that we would be back ashore before too long.

  Derek’s hand closed around my neck and squeezed supportively. “I’m so sorry,” he said. “I had no idea you’d get seasick.”

  “Me neither,” I said weakly, but really, I should have known better.

  Incidentally, I didn't make it back to the dock.

  Derek

  My instincts were good. Taking Denise out of Chicago for the weekend was a fantastic idea. The weather was perfect, the setting was gorgeous, and our time together was rich. After Denise threw up in the lake Saturday afternoon, we hobbled back to the cabin and I set her up with some ginger tea from the local coffee shop. We sat on the porch of the cabin and she told me all about her childhood and her family. The more I learned about her, the more amazing she proved to be. She’d started from very humble beginnings and worked her way up with her quickness and style. She told me she got her start at her school paper in Illinois where she received a full scholarship, and by chance landed a job as a page at the Tribune—one of the biggest papers in the Midwest.

  “How did you get started at the Tribune?” I asked as I watched her slowly chew on a few crackers. Her nausea had improved but wasn't gone, and I felt bad about putting her on that boat without asking whether she got seasick. As bonding experiences go, however, it helped us function like an actual couple.

  “I was in the right place at the right time,” she told me. “I was rushing around delivering copy to various writers—I had a very, very small column at the time so I doubled up as a page. My editor happened to be shouting about an arrest that was going down at City Hall. Like, standing in the office and literally yelling that he had no people to head down there and cover the drama. I basically volunteered to run down there and do it. He didn't really trust me, but he didn't have anyone else so he let me go.” The corner of her mouth lifted in a smirk.

  “Let me guess,” I said. “You bullied your way in and took care of business?”

  A laugh escaped her mouth and it brought a flush to her previously pale cheeks. She was better from her seasickness, but hadn't yet bounced back completely. “I did indeed take care of business,” she smiled. “I got the interview he wanted and more. He was very impressed and started feeding me smallish jobs here and there until I built up a reputation. I guess now I’m kind of his go-to girl.” As she said this her face turned ashen once more and her top teeth pressed into her bottom lip. She looked a little anxious.

  “Hey,” I reached across the table and took her hand in mine. “You look sad all the sudden. What’s going on?”

  She met my eyes and gave me a faint smile. “I’m fine. Just still feeling sick, I guess. Been a stressful few weeks.”

  “Can I help? I am a doctor, you know.”

  “No,” she said quickly with a shake of her head. “I’m fine. Maybe I could lie down for a bit before dinner?”

  I rose to my feet and lifted her by the elbow. “Of course,” I replied, leading her to the bedroom. After pulling the covers back I laid her gently in the bed
and planted a kiss on her forehead. “Feel better,” I said. “I hate to see you feeling badly.”

  After closing the door behind me I resisted the urge to check my phone. We’d promised one another no phones and no computers, and had left them both locked in the trunk of my sedan in our respective laptop bags. I stood uncertain in the foyer of the cabin for a few minutes, but managed to resist. Instead I grabbed a paperback book from the shelf that the rental company kept stocked; some medical thriller which would either intrigue me or make me angry. In any case, I stretched out on a sofa of the screened-in porch and was promptly asleep myself.

  ***

  I woke up at dusk. From the cabin I could hear the sound of Denise throwing up and promptly pulled myself to a standing position. “Denise?”

  The toilet flushed. “I’m fine, Derek. I think my stomach is too empty.”

  My feet dragged as I shuffled into the cabin. “Should we go get something to eat?” I asked. “Or do you need me to bring something in?”

  She appeared in the hallway looking a little pale but well overall. “No, I think a walk would do me good. Let’s go into town.”

  And so we walked, hand in hand, into the small village. We found a little soup and sandwich shop because the air had taken on a little fall chill. There was a deck overlooking the lake and we ate comfortably.

  “Do you want a glass of wine?” I asked her as I tipped a chilled white wine into my glass.

  She smiled and ate small pieces of her sandwich crust. “Maybe I'll just have a bit of yours.”

  The sun set while we ate, then we walked back to the cabin with me a little tipsy and Denise, by her own admission, feeling better. When we shut the door behind us, we faced each other with matching awkward grins.

  “So this is a normal Saturday night for a normal couple?” Denise asked. “We’ve never had one of those.”

  I crossed the room towards her and laid my hands lightly on her hips. “No, we haven’t,” I said. “But I’m happy to show you what Saturday nights look like for normal couples.”