by Fiona Brand
He took another deep breath but, even so, when he spoke his voice was raspy. “The baby’s...all right?”
Ben said something short and flat. “You really didn’t know. Well, that takes the cake. You’re a security guru. You wrote the book on surveillance techniques and you produce software for half a dozen governments, and you don’t know when your ex-girlfriend has your child? I thought you didn’t want to know, because you don’t want kids. Lily said enough about the sub—”
“Don’t bring Lily into this.” The response was automatic, because every thought was blasted away by the fact that Zara had given birth to his child.
The one outcome he had taken care to avoid, except on one notable occasion, had happened.
He was a father.
A final boarding call echoed down the phone.
“I’ve gotta go,” Ben muttered. “Look, I’m sorry about breaking the news about Zara and the baby like this. The fact was, I thought you did know but were...you know, avoiding the whole issue.” There was a rustling sound as if Ben was holding the phone awkwardly jammed to his ear as he surrendered his boarding pass. “Emily was fairly sure you didn’t know. She seemed to think it was more that you lack emotional intelligence...whatever that means.”
There was a feminine yelp in the background along with a further rustling noise as if Ben had jammed the phone against his chest to muffle the sound for a few seconds.
Ben’s voice came back, loud and clear. “Anyway, I think we both know that trying to turn me into an executive wasn’t working. I told you right from the start that the kind of locked-down life you lead isn’t for me. I want to travel and do something with my fine arts degree. Anything but add up soulless numbers all day and stare at computer code, which, by the way, I will never understand. Don’t try to find us. I’ll send a postcard...eventually.”
A click signaled the call had been terminated.
Damon slipped the phone back into the pocket of his sweatpants. There was no point in running after Ben now. The boarding calls meant that whatever flight Ben and Emily had booked, they would be airborne before he could pull the strings needed to either detain them or delay the flight. That was no doubt the reason Ben had rung just before the flight left. Damon guessed he was lucky that Ben, who had been kicking against Damon’s authority for the past year, had called at all.
Feeling like an automaton, Damon went back over the conversation. Ben’s crack about his lack of emotional intelligence grated. Apparently, he had missed two major cues in his life, Ben’s utter lack of interest in Magnum Security and the fact that Damon had fathered a child, despite Zara assuring him there was no chance of a pregnancy.
He tried to remember the exact words Zara had used immediately after they’d had crazy, passionate, unprotected sex. She had dragged on a robe and escaped to the bathroom, pausing to send him an irritatingly neutral smile, before assuring him that he had no need to worry.
He had taken that to mean Zara had taken care of contraception. But now he knew it could also have meant that his assistant, in her usual brisk, efficient way, had been stating her intention to take full responsibility if there was a pregnancy.
Cold water splashed his ankles and Damon became aware that the tide had advanced and water was now surging around his shoes. Still absorbed with his thoughts, he strolled up the beach and headed for his house. Perched on a headland, the large multilevel house seemed to grow from the dark cliffs, stark and spare and a little forbidding. Built of stone, it reminded him of the medieval fortress Tyler had owned on the Mediterranean island of Medinos and which Damon had spent his adolescence exploring.
Fatherhood. The realization sank in a little deeper.
Damon turned to stare across the water in the direction of Auckland’s cityscape, the first glimmer of evening lights visible in the distance. Somewhere across the water existed a child who, in a profound, unassailable way, belonged to him.
Just beyond the breaking waves a sleek gannet arrowed into the water, then surfaced with a silvery fish in its beak. Damon drew in a lungful of cold air as he struggled with imperatives that were as opposite as black and white. He had long ago decided that fatherhood was not for him, but fate had intervened and he was caught and held as fast as the small, flapping fish. He could not turn his back on his child.
The sun was sinking fast, the last burnished glow infusing the clear winter air with rose and gold. The sea breeze had dropped, leaving the water glassily smooth.
He did not understand why Zara had chosen to cut him out of his child’s life, but that would soon change. In the methodical way of his mind, Damon began to formulate a plan to meet with Zara and discover what he could about the child. Although the practical to-do list seemed cold and antiseptic when he considered exactly what it meant—confronting his ex-lover about the child they had made together. And he knew exactly when that had happened—the first time they had made love.
As Damon climbed the steep cliff path to his house, memories flickered, vivid and irresistible.
Torrential rain pounding down as he held his jacket over Zara’s head to shelter her as he dropped her home after a late business dinner. He shook out the wet jacket in the dimness of her porch. She laughed as she swept soaked hair back from her forehead. With her dark hair gleaming with moisture, her cheeks flushed, suddenly she was quite startlingly beautiful.
There was a moment when he bent his head, a split second before their mouths touched, when she could have stepped away and didn’t. Instead, her breath hitched, her fingers closed on the lapels of his jacket and she lifted up on her toes for his kiss.
He caught the scent of her skin and desire closed around him like heated manacles. Sensation shuddered through him in waves as they kissed for long, spellbinding minutes. They made it to her bedroom, just.
He used a condom the first and even the second time, but in the hour before dawn, waking to Zara making slow, exquisite love to him, and caught in that strange halfway state between dream and reality, he did not.
The unprotected lovemaking had happened with blinding speed, over almost before he realized it, but that did not negate his responsibility. Zara’s pregnancy had been his fault.
Damon climbed the steps to his house and paused in the shelter of the heavy stone portico, which protected the entryway from the wind. Peeling out of his wet shoes, he pushed open the heavy, ancient door made of thick oak and bands of iron that he had imported from Medinos and headed for his shower. After drying off, he pulled on soft, faded jeans with the fluid economy of movement he had learned during his years with the military in Afghanistan and the Middle East.
Not bothering with a shirt, Damon padded into his cavernous bedroom, found his laptop and keyed in the GPS program his firm used as a security measure for the company’s top executives. He typed in his brother’s phone number. Instantly a map materialized along with a tracking icon, which indicated that Ben was over the Pacific Ocean, just northeast of Auckland. It was somehow typical that Ben, with his utter disinterest in all things to do with Magnum Security, had been careless enough to forget that his phone could be tracked.
Damon checked the time then rang Walter, his head of security and one of his most trusted employees. Minutes later, Ben’s flight details were confirmed. He was headed for the island of Medinos, and would, no doubt, be staying in the clifftop fortress Tyler had left to him and Ben jointly.
Retrieving his cell, he found the only number for Zara that he had, her employment agency. After a moment of hesitation, he dialed. In the past two months, ever since he had discovered that Zara had opened her own agency, apart from picking up his initial call, he had invariably found himself shunted through to her answering service. His jaw compressed when, as usual, the call went straight through to voice mail. He left a terse message and set the phone down on his bedside table.
Stepping out onto his balcony, he studied the gray clouds building overhead, blotting out
the first scattering of stars. Ben had been right in pointing out the irony that Damon specialized in designing hardware and software to collect, unlock and decode information, and yet he could not unlock the mystery of the woman who had shared his bed and then attempted to disappear with all the skill of a master spy.
Cold droplets spattered Damon’s broad shoulders as he turned from the darkening view, strolled through to the kitchen and lifted the lid on the casserole Walter’s wife, Margot, had left for him. Not for the first time, he was keenly aware of the utter emptiness of his house.
For years he had been living in a kind of deep freeze. Just over a year ago, when Zara had strolled into his office in a beige jacket and skirt that on most women would have looked shapeless and boring, but on her had somehow looked sexy, the thaw had been instant and profound.
He had wanted her. If he was ruthlessly honest, that was also the reason he had reconnected with Zara again when he found out she had opened her own employment agency. To date, he had resisted what he’d come to view as a fatal attraction, but that was about to change. The knowledge that Zara had had his child had kicked away some invisible barrier. They were linked in the most primal, intimate way a man and woman could be linked and he was no longer prepared to tolerate the distance she seemed to prefer.
From now on, they were playing by his rules.
He had not forgotten Ben. As Ben’s only close relative and the trustee of Ben’s inheritance, Damon’s course of action was clear. He needed to retrieve his brother before Ben did something completely irresponsible, like get married to a woman he had only known for a few weeks.
The retrieval of Ben, as luck would have it, dovetailed with Damon’s need to gain access to his child. Zara Westlake stood at the center of both issues, which meant that, whether she liked it or not, she would have to meet with him face-to-face.
Out of the murk of the first two objectives, a third emerged. Despite Zara’s betrayal, despite the grip the past still had on his life, he needed one more thing.
Zara Westlake back in his bed.
Two
A soft chime, indicating that a much-needed client had just opened the door of Zara’s fledgling employment agency, diverted her attention from her four-month-old baby, Rosie. Thankfully, after a marathon effort to get Rosie to nap, her tiny daughter had finally drifted into a restless slumber.
Anxious to snag her client before he or she lost interest and decided to take their very valuable business elsewhere, Zara tiptoed out of the smallest interview room, which today doubled as Rosie’s makeshift nursery. Makeshift, because normally, when Zara was working, Rosie was in day care. But, because Rosie had been a little off-color, the center hadn’t wanted to take her, so Zara had planned to work from home while she kept an eye on her daughter. However, that arrangement had crashed and burned when her assistant, Molly, had called in sick at the last minute, meaning that Zara had been forced to bring Rosie to the office.
It wasn’t until she had gently closed the door behind her that Zara realized she had left her high heels, which she had slipped out of while she had fed and changed Rosie, behind her desk. Added to that, her hair, once smoothed into an immaculate French pleat, was now disheveled from the playful grip of Rosie’s fingers.
Pinning a smoothly professional smile on her face, she turned to her client. In that instant, the room seemed to whirl, reminding her of the last month of pregnancy when bouts of dizziness would hit out of the blue.
Disbelief froze her in place as Zara’s gaze traveled from the rock-solid shape of a masculine jaw, with the hint of a five o’clock shadow, to the scar that sliced across one cheekbone, a fascinating counterpart to the damaged line of a once-aquiline nose. Her own jaw taut, she braced herself for the impact of the magnetic silvery gaze, which had always put her in mind of that of a very large, very focused wolf.
Her heart slammed against the wall of her chest. A complicated mix of panic, edged with another purely feminine reaction she refused to acknowledge.
He had found her.
Damon Smith.
Six foot two inches of scarred, muscular, reclusive billionaire standing in her tiny office, taking all the air, his sleek shoulders broad enough that they stretched the dark fabric of a very expensive black coat.
A stomach-churning anxiety kicked in as she wondered why he was here. Damon Smith had the kind of wealth and power that meant he did not have to leave his private island or his penthouse office unless he chose to do so. There was a small army of devoted, ex-military employees who had been with him for years and who were ready and willing to do his slightest bidding.
Damon turning up in her office was significant.
* * *
Cold air gusted, shaking the windows. Predictably, her door, which had a malfunctioning catch, flung open. Damon caught the door before it could bang against the wall, his dark coat swirling like a mantle as he did so, cloaking its owner in the shadows and secrets that permeated his life. Public secrets due to his work. Private secrets, which she was privy to and wished she wasn’t, because they also scored her life.
He closed the door and tested it to make sure the catch had engaged. His gaze, now distinctly irritable, pinned her again. “You need to get that fixed.”
“It’s on my list.”
Along with fixing the leaky tap in the tiny bathroom and replacing some of the light fittings, which looked like they had been salvaged from a Second World War junk sale. Knowing her landlord, they probably had.
Keeping a neutral smile fixed firmly in place, Zara girded herself to hold Damon’s gaze with the equanimity she had learned in an elite finishing school in Switzerland, all paid for by her gorgeous, restless, jet-setting supermodel mother, Petra Atrides, who had been known in the fashion and media worlds as Petra Hunt. A practiced composure, which had been put to the test by the paparazzi when Petra had plunged to her death along with her new fiancé—Damon’s uncle Tyler McCall.
Not that Damon knew any of that, which was the way she wanted to keep it. There was no way Damon would believe she had not known who he was when she accepted the job as his personal assistant and then practically flung herself into his bed. Not when he discovered she was Petra Hunt’s daughter and had given birth to his child.
The wind buffeted the front door again, the force of it actually making the lights flicker, but this time the door held.
Damon took in her small office in one sweeping glance. “So this is where you’ve been hiding out.”
“What do you mean, ‘hiding out’?”
Although the fact that she had been in hiding for the past thirteen months, hiding a pregnancy and now a baby, put an annoying blush on her cheeks.
Damon’s expression was deceptively mild. “You haven’t been answering your phone or returning calls, and the address you gave me over the phone a couple of months ago is incorrect. I’ve spent the past half hour walking the streets and questioning shop owners who had never heard of you. It wasn’t until I went online and checked your social media site that I managed to get your real address.”
Zara struggled to control another surge of heat to her cheeks. Weeks ago, when Damon had contacted her out of the blue, she hadn’t meant to give him incorrect information. In a moment of panic, thinking that he had somehow found out about Rosie, the transposed figures had just tumbled out of her. But neither should he, a CEO, have been even remotely interested in the whereabouts of her office. When she had agreed to take on Magnum Security as a client, she had only done so because she had desperately needed the money and on the condition that all of her dealings were with Damon’s dry-as-dust business manager, Howard Prosser. In theory she should never have had to deal with Damon, period.
She stiffened at the image of the extraordinarily wealthy and private Damon Smith walking the streets and questioning shop owners.
Hunting her.
A sharp little thrill sh
ot down her spine. Instantly, her jaw firmed. That was the kind of feminine reaction toward Damon that she had never been able to afford, because he was, literally, the one man she should not want and could not have in her life.
Aside from being a link to a past she was determined to leave behind, she had found out that Damon was also the trustee of his uncle’s estate. He had requested, through his lawyers, that she, as Angel Atrides—her name before she had legally changed it to Zara Westlake—sign a legal document relinquishing any claim on Tyler’s estate in exchange for a one-off, extremely offensive cash offer.
Raw with grief, insulted and hurt, Zara had refused the offer and had refused to sign the horrible legal agreement. She had been sickened by the tactics of a family who had obviously bought into the media hype around her mother as a model who was past her prime and who had inveigled her way into Tyler’s über-rich, normally sensible life. No doubt Damon believed that Angel Atrides was just as trashy and opportunistic, and that a chunk of cash and a legal agreement was a necessary insurance against her ever darkening his doorstep or, horror of horrors, trying to make a claim on Tyler’s fortune.
Once again, the calculated risk of accepting Magnum as a client made her heart pound. Her chest seized on a sudden thought. Could Damon know about Rosie?
Last night he had left a message on her answering service, a terse command to call him back. It was something she had deliberately left for Molly to attend to.
Summoning a smooth smile, and trying to control her racing pulse, Zara made it to the safe haven of her desk. “I’m sorry you had trouble finding me.”
Feeling pinned by his gaze, she opened a drawer on the pretext that she wanted to check the address on her business cards. Although, she knew there was nothing wrong with her cards. Her mother might have been a creative, artistic personality who resisted being organized and hated dealing with numbers, but Zara was her polar opposite. A perfectionist and a details person, she preferred to lead, not follow, and she liked to get things right.