Keeping Secrets

by Fiona Brand

  The flush on her cheeks seemed to grow more heated as she jerkily closed the drawer on her stack of perfectly aligned, perfectly correct business cards. “I’m sorry you somehow ended up with the wrong address.”

  Grim amusement flickered at the corners of Damon’s mouth. “The number was reversed. But something tells me you already knew that.”

  Her chin jerked up. “What are you insinuating?”

  Damon shrugged. “Thirteen months ago, you quit your job and disappeared. For the past couple of months, ever since I discovered you had opened up your own employment agency, apart from picking up my first call, you’ve consistently failed to return my calls—”

  “You know I prefer to work via email. Besides, all the correspondence and contracts go through Howard.”

  He glanced around her office again, his gaze briefly settling on the door of the interview room where Rosie was sleeping. “Maybe the address you gave me was a genuine mistake.”

  But his tone told her he didn’t believe that.

  His gaze shifted thoughtfully back to the door of the interview room and a sharp jolt of adrenaline made her heart pound.

  She was suddenly certain that he knew.

  A little feverishly, she straightened piles of paper that did not need straightening. The only way Damon could have found out about Rosie was through Emily, although her contact with Emily had been minimal, two interviews and a couple of phone updates. She was not even sure Emily was aware that Zara had a baby. Of course, there were other ways he could have pried into her life. Given that he was in the security and surveillance business and had once been some kind of Special Forces agent in the military, she was certain he could find out whatever he wanted.

  Damon’s gaze skimmed her neatly arranged office and Zara did her best to conceal her relief that he was no longer concentrated on the door to the interview room in which Rosie was sleeping. When it came to Damon, usually, she erred on the side of fighting, but today running was at the top of the list—with Rosie tucked invisibly under one arm so he would not uncover that particular guilty secret.

  Shockingly, his gaze touched on hers before shifting and she realized he had noticed her hair. She took a calming breath and willed her heart rate to slow. There was nothing wrong with messy hair. It was a windy day. Her hair could have gotten disheveled when she’d gone out for coffee.

  A weird part of her acknowledged that she had always known this could happen, that one day her most lucrative client, who also happened to be the father of her child, would walk into her office and she would have to deal with him face-to-face. But, not now, not today, when she was struggling from lack of sleep and with Rosie just feet away in the next room.

  The last thing either of them needed was to be inescapably linked by Rosie. A small shudder went through Zara at the thought of the media attention that would erupt once it was found out that Petra Hunt’s daughter, using a new identity, had had a child with Tyler McCall’s nephew. They would come after her; they would come after Rosie. And Damon, apart from making it crystal clear that Zara was not welcome in his life, would hate that she had fooled him.

  On cue, a small, snuffling sound came from the interview room. Zara’s heart sped up. Lately, Rosie, who was usually a very good sleeper, was waking up after just a few minutes of restless slumber. A little desperately, she reached for a random file and slapped it down on the desk, trying to make enough noise that Damon would not hear Rosie. “So, now that you’ve found me, what can I do for you? Is there a problem with one of the employees I sent to you? Troy? Or Harold?”

  Troy was young, just eighteen, with tattoos and a brow piercing, but he was bright and earnest. Zara had thought he would be perfect for Damon’s IT team. Harold had been an older public servant who had failed to find a job through other employment agencies, owing to a rather unfortunate skin condition, and in desperation had come to Zara. She had found a place for him in Damon’s accounts department.

  Damon frowned slightly, as if he didn’t know who either Troy or Harold were, then his face cleared. “They’re fine, as far as I know. This is the problem.”

  He dropped the tabloid newspaper, which he had been carrying under one arm, on her desk. It was folded open at a tacky gossip columnist’s page.

  She drew a calming breath and forced herself to study a grainy black-and-white photo of Damon’s younger brother, Ben, who had his arm flung around Emily’s slim waist. The blaring caption, Magnum Security Heir’s Hot Affair with Blonde Temp, practically leaped off the page.

  Snatching up the paper, she skimmed the story—which was the stuff of her nightmares—with growing horror. Thankfully, the detail was minimal. To her relief, the name of her employment agency had not been mentioned...yet.

  She took a closer look at the photograph. Details she had not noticed first off finally registered. Emily’s hair seemed longer and curlier. Gone were the subtle makeup and low-key suits, the crisp blouses that had seemed to summarize Zara’s star temp as sensible, trustworthy and professional. Emily looked younger and a touch bohemian. She certainly no longer looked like the poster girl for Westlake Employment Agency.

  Zara quickly read the sketchy article. Of course, the journalist had painted Emily as a fortune-hunting employee and Ben as the kind of high-powered playboy businessman who was only interested in a quick fling and who would not be easily caught by a mere office girl.

  Compassion for Emily mixed with a surge of outrage and a fierce desire to protect her protégé. Just because Emily had fallen for Ben and decided to make the best of herself did not make her a cheap, trashy opportunist. Zara had lost count of the times the papers had portrayed her mother as cheap and on the make, when the truth was that her mother had been so gorgeous she had literally had to fend off men. And yes, some of those men had been breathtakingly rich.

  When Petra died, the behavior of the tabloids and women’s magazines had worsened. They had smeared her reputation even more before turning their malicious spotlight on Zara. Although, luckily, Petra had always made sure Zara was hidden from the media, so their store of background information had been meager. Most of the photos they’d had were blurred shots of Zara as a child or as a plump teenager taken through telephoto lenses.

  Horrified and frightened by the relentless pursuit of the media, Zara had ditched her degree and disappeared. Angel Atrides, the fictional spoiled party girl the media seemed intent on creating, had become the ordinary, invisible person she longed to be—Zara Westlake. Zara had been her paternal grandmother’s name, Westlake her maternal grandmother’s maiden name.

  Her mother’s cousin Phoebe Westlake, a sharp-edged accountant who was ill with leukemia, had provided the hideout Zara needed in the South Island city of Dunedin while she had painstakingly reinvented her life. Which had made it all the more frustrating when, almost three years later, with a new name and a degree in business management—in effect a new life—Phoebe’s last act before she had died had been to secure Zara a job interview with the nephew of Tyler McCall.

  Not that Zara had made that connection until after she had taken the job, because Damon’s surname, Smith, was so neutral and ordinary that she hadn’t suspected the link. To further muddy the waters, Damon was reclusive by nature, avoiding the media. It hadn’t been until two weeks into her job and after she had made the mistake of sleeping with Damon, that he had handed her a takeover bid for Tyler McCall’s electric company.

  She had finally understood exactly who Damon was.

  As much as she needed to sit down now, Zara remained standing. Once again, the desire to run was uppermost, but she instantly dismissed that option. In setting up her business after Rosie was born she had made a stand. She was over running.

  She was tired of giving up things that were important, like home and friendships and career choices, and having to start fresh somewhere else. Having to be someone else. If she ran now, she would have to give up her
cozy rented cottage, which was just a twenty-minute commute from her office. She would have to abandon her business, which she loved with passion, because, finally, all of her study and hard work had paid off and she had something of substance that was hers. Plus, if she walked away now she would be deeply in debt, with no way to repay it.

  The thought of defaulting on her business loan made her stomach tighten. It was a sharp reminder of exactly why she had buckled and taken on Damon as a client in the first place. It had been a huge risk, but if she hadn’t, she would have gone under. Damon, against all odds, was her most lucrative client and had taken on a staggering number of personnel, most of them temps, which meant she continued to accrue fees.

  Her jaw firmed. Right now, she could not cope with another debt. It had taken her years to pay off her mother’s funeral expenses. However, not running meant she might have to face the press, and probably sooner rather than later.

  The way she saw it, her only viable option was damage control. Luckily, due to her current line of work, she had become quite skilled at it. Refolding the paper so she no longer had to look at the damaging article or the gleeful smile of the gossip columnist, and utterly relieved that the situation with Ben and Emily was Damon’s reason for seeking her out, she directed a brisk glance at him. “When did they leave?”

  “Last night, on a scheduled flight. Which is why the tabloids got hold of the story.”

  If it had been the firm’s private jet, the press wouldn’t have gotten a look in, but Damon would have been notified. Damon had been caught by surprise, which meant Ben had kept his plans secret. That being the case, it was entirely possible, given that Zara hadn’t known about the relationship, that Damon had not, either.

  Light glimmered at the end of a very long, very dark tunnel. Damon had clearly bought into the tabloid story, but there were other constructions that could apply to Ben and Emily leaving the country together—constructions that did not place the blame on either Emily or Westlake Employment.

  Mind working quickly, Zara examined and discarded a number of options, finally settling on attack as the best form of defense. “It’s highly irregular that Ben has taken Emily out of the country.” She lifted her chin, but even so, in her bare feet, her gaze was only just level with Damon’s throat. She tried not to be fascinated by a very interesting pulse along the side of his jaw. “When might I expect my temp to be returned?”

  Damon’s brows jerked together. “Emily was not kidnapped.”

  Surreptitiously, Zara felt around with her toes for her shoes. “I didn’t say kidnapped, exactly.”

  Damon crossed his arms over his chest, which only served to make him seem even larger and more ticked off. “You’re implying that she has been coerced in some way. Since Emily, at twenty-six, is older than Ben by a good six years, I doubt any coercion was involved.”

  The age twenty-six hit an unexpected nerve. It was the same age she had been when she’d had the wild, silly affair with Damon. Heat surged into her cheeks. It was hard to believe it had been little more than a year ago. So much had happened it felt like centuries had passed. “You’re right, at twenty-six, she should have known better.”

  Zara only wished she had.

  Damon’s gaze clashed with hers. Zara dragged her gaze free, but not before her fiery irritation was replaced by other, more disturbing sensations coiling low in the pit of her stomach.

  Upset and annoyed at the intense, too-familiar awareness that had hit her out of left field, as if they were still connected—still lovers—in desperation, Zara recommenced the search for her shoes. She finally located them in the shadowed recesses beneath her desk. Relieved to have a distraction, she bent down and snatched them up. Unlike her suit, which was black and neatly tailored, the shoes were a tad subversive, a gorgeous sea blue that unashamedly matched her eyes.

  On the subject of eyes, she thought grimly, note to self, never look into Damon’s eyes for too long. Apparently, despite dismissing him from her life and putting a great deal of effort into forgetting about him completely, even one second was too long.

  With an effort of will, Zara smoothed out her expression, but there was another tiny issue that was bugging her. “And Emily being older than Ben by several years would, of course, make her the predatory one.” She could not forget that the paparazzi had nicknamed Petra, who had been several years older than Tyler, “the Huntress.” As if Petra had been cold and calculating, and had deliberately set out to ensnare a rich lover, when Zara knew that it had been Tyler who had pursued Petra.

  Damon frowned. “I wasn’t trying to imply that Emily was predatory because she’s older—”

  “Good, because we both know Ben is something of a party animal.”

  Damon seemed briefly riveted by the shoes, and she realized she was brandishing them in front of her like a weapon. Taking a deep breath, she placed the shoes on the floor and methodically slipped them on. The heels gave her an extra inch and half, which wasn’t nearly enough.

  Damon’s gaze clashed with hers again, the hard edge tempered by something she had never seen before, something new, an intent curiosity, as if he was logging the changes in her and taking stock in a completely masculine way.

  She suppressed her automatic panic that Damon would somehow equate her extra curves with motherhood. She had to keep reminding herself that Damon’s focus was on rescuing Ben from Emily; he didn’t know Zara had had his child. In any case, the obvious explanation for her more rounded shape was a whole lot simpler, that she had just put on a little weight.

  Damon’s expression shuttered. “You know very well that I meant Ben couldn’t take a woman like Emily anywhere she didn’t want to go.”

  In the midst of what was for Zara a stressful encounter, Damon’s flat statement informed her that he knew exactly what she was trying to achieve with her line of reasoning. It was also a reminder of just why she had fallen for him in the first place. Most people, quite rightly, viewed him as cold and formidable, even dangerous. But that had not been Zara’s experience. As an employer she had found him to be demanding but utterly straightforward. Far from being intimidated, she had found that, on a purely feminine level, she had liked his air of command and the knowledge that, in a company full of alpha males, Damon was the scariest, most alpha of them all.

  Grudgingly, she conceded Damon’s point that Emily was not the type to be coerced. “Even so, this is out of character for her. If she had wanted to take time off, she would have emailed me or left a message.”

  Although the instant Zara said the words she remembered that she had seen an email from Emily but hadn’t opened it because she’d been so busy with Rosie and walk-in clients.

  Damon extracted his cell from his pocket, flicked the screen with his thumb, then placed the phone down on her desk so she could see Emily’s email. “Her resignation is there in black and white.”

  Shocked, Zara flipped her laptop open and scrolled down her inbox to confirm that she had received almost exactly the same message. Hers, however, was peppered with apologies and assurances that Emily would ring once they got to Medinos.

  Medinos. Zara tensed even further.

  The island was exotic and beautiful and was popularly styled as the Mediterranean isle of romance. It had also been Zara’s home as a child while her father, Angelo Atrides, the last conte of the once-aristocratic but now-impoverished Atrides line, had been alive. But in Zara’s experience, since Angelo’s death when she was barely seven years old, the only thing that had come out of Medinos was trouble. “I don’t know why Emily would run off with Ben. They’re total opposites.”

  Ben, though ridiculously handsome, was too young for Emily and a little spoiled. He hadn’t been born with a silver spoon in his mouth; it had been platinum.

  While Zara had been reading, Damon had been pacing around her office, examining her walls with their job-notice boards and career displays, reminding her
of nothing so much as a large wolf on the prowl. “It would seem Emily’s decided to take a break from work with Ben—”

  “You think this is just a holiday?” Damon’s tone was laced with disbelief.

  Still upset at the physicality of her reaction to Damon, a reaction that should have been as dead as a doornail by now, Zara snatched up the newspaper and stared at the grainy photo. “What else could you call it? I don’t see an engagement ring, so they’re not eloping—”

  Damon’s gaze pinned her. “Damn right. Ben will not be marrying Emily.”

  The flat denial, which somehow implied that Emily was not good enough to marry Ben, flicked Zara on the raw. “Ben should be so lucky. Emily is smart and mature. Apart from this...error of judgment, she’s an exemplary personal assistant.”

  “If there’s been an error of judgment, then that also applies to Ben.”

  Zara slapped the newspaper back down on the desk. “Why does it always come back to that? You know, people can simply fall in love. When my father died, it took my mother years to find—” She stopped, appalled by what she had almost given away.

  There was a moment of vibrating silence. “What do you mean by ‘Why does it always come back to that?’”

  Relieved that Damon had bypassed her comment about her mother, Zara blurted out her thoughts. “Isn’t that what rich men automatically think? That women are attracted by their wealth?”

  She cringed the moment the words were out, because she didn’t actually believe that about all wealthy men.

  Damon’s gaze pinned her. “Is that what you believed about me?”

  Three

  The soft, flat question made her chest go tight and her heart pound. Damon zeroing in on their short, secretive fling was disorienting when a moment ago they had been firmly focused on Ben and Emily.

  Zara found herself once more staring at the pulse throbbing along the side of Damon’s jaw as she desperately tried to find a neutral way out of a conversation that had careered out of control.