Baby In The Making
Baby In The Making
Elizabeth Bevarly
A long-lost billionaire’s will leads to a baby pact.The grandfather Hannah Robinson never knew has left her billions! If she becomes pregnant within six months. Hannah yearns for safety and stability. So it’s ironic that danger-loving adrenaline junkie Yeager Novak is the perfect candidate to father her baby. Yeager’s certainly up for the task – but only if they conceive the old-fashioned way while on an epic adventure.It’s the perfect arrangement. Until Hannah realises she wants more than a family. And until Yeager realizes the dangers of risking his heart…
A long-lost billionaire’s will leads to a baby pact. Only from New York Times bestselling author Elizabeth Bevarly!
The grandfather Hannah Robinson never knew has left her billions! If she becomes pregnant within six months. Hannah yearns for safety and stability. So it’s ironic that danger-loving adrenaline junkie Yeager Novak is the perfect candidate to father her baby. Yeager’s certainly up for the task—but only if they conceive the old-fashioned way while on an epic adventure.
It’s the perfect arrangement. Until Hannah realizes she wants more than a family. And until Yeager realizes the dangers of risking his heart...
“So, Mr. Novak. Have you ever thought about donating your sperm to a good cause?”
“Excuse me?” Yaeger asked.
“Your sperm,” Hannah said, enunciating the word more clearly this time. “Have you ever thought about donating it?”
“Uh…no.”
“I mean, if you would consider it—donating it to me, I mean—I’d sign any kind of legal documents you want to relieve you of all obligations for any offspring that might, um, you know, spring off me. I’d really appreciate it.”
“Hannah, I…I’m flattered, but it’s not a good idea for me to do something like that.”
She looked crestfallen. “Why not?”
“Because I’m not good father material.”
At this, she looked aghast. Almost comically so. “Are you kidding me? You’re incredible father material. You’re smart and interesting and brave and funny and well traveled and smart and, holy cow, you’re gorgeous.”
He bit back a smile at that. “Thanks. But those aren’t things that necessarily make a good father.”
“Maybe not, but they make an excellent breeder.”
* * *
Baby in the Making
is part of the Accidental Heirs series:
First they find their fortunes, then they find love
Baby in the Making
Elizabeth Bevarly
www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
ELIZABETH BEVARLY is the award-winning, New York Times bestselling author of more than seventy books, novellas and screenplays. Although she has called home exotic places like San Juan, Puerto Rico and Haddonfield, New Jersey, she’s now happily settled back in her native Kentucky with her husband and son. When she’s not writing, she’s binge-watching documentaries on Netflix, spending too much time on Reddit or making soup out of whatever she finds in the freezer. Visit her at www.elizabethbevarly.com (http://www.elizabethbevarly.com) for news about current and upcoming projects, for book, music and film recommendations, for recipes, and for lots of other fun stuff.
For Eli,
My greatest creation ever.
Love you, Peanut.
Contents
Cover (#u0af7e21c-df8e-5898-ab18-4ed3e5612641)
Back Cover Text (#u318927b3-1091-58d9-8f75-484ecce288d2)
Introduction (#ue2280a23-fba7-58d7-89df-83453cdd26cf)
Title Page (#u72f98987-ac89-5d50-b633-d357a5f6860c)
About the Author (#ue3a5191c-c627-5efa-8dbc-b5c00ebb1de6)
Dedication (#ufb05ed6e-bc91-5858-95ae-f59fff4f93fa)
One (#u31543b48-51c7-5003-837a-d022b16b0b5e)
Two (#uebf7f0f6-7c01-5c91-bcfc-4ed4aedead12)
Three (#u73df78d7-9dae-5ea2-9d69-ad3391270f48)
Four (#litres_trial_promo)
Five (#litres_trial_promo)
Six (#litres_trial_promo)
Seven (#litres_trial_promo)
Eight (#litres_trial_promo)
Nine (#litres_trial_promo)
Ten (#litres_trial_promo)
Extract (#litres_trial_promo)
Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)
One (#ufd32c605-406a-5634-b386-3da22488176a)
Really, it wasn’t the gaping hole in the shirt and pants that troubled Hannah Robinson most. It wasn’t the bloodstain, either. She’d seen worse. No, what troubled her most was how little Yeager Novak seemed to be bothered by the six tidy stitches binding his flesh just north of the waistband of his silk boxers. Then again, as far as Yeager’s garments were concerned, this was par for the course. Such was life sewing for a tailor whose most profitable client made his living at cheating death—and planning similar travel adventures for others—then brought in what was left of his clothing after the most recent near miss to have them mended. Or, in the case of the shirt, completely recreated from scratch.
Yeager towered over her from her current position kneeling before him, tape measure in hand. But then, he towered over her when she was standing, too. Shoving a handful of coal-black hair off his forehead, he gazed down at her with eyes the color of sapphires and said, “I’ll never let a bull get that close to me again.” He darted his gaze from the stitches on his torso to the ruined clothing on the floor. “That was just a little too close for comfort.”
Hannah blew a dark blond curl out of her eyes and pushed her reading glasses higher on her nose. “That’s what you said last year when you ran with the bulls.”
He looked puzzled. “I did?”
“Yes. It was the first time you came to see us here at Cathcart and Quinn, because your previous tailor told you to take a hike when you brought in one too many of his masterpieces to be mended.” She arched a brow in meaningful reminder. “Except when you were in Pamplona last July, you escaped into a cantina before the bull was able to do more than tear the leg of your trousers.”
“Right,” he said, remembering. “That was where I met Jimena. Who came back to my hotel with me while I changed my clothes. And didn’t get back into them for hours.” His expression turned sublime. “I probably should have sent that bull a thank-you note.”
Even after knowing him for a year, Hannah was still sometimes surprised by the frankness with which Yeager talked about his sex life. Then again, his personal life sounded like it was almost as adventurous as his professional life, so maybe he had trouble distinguishing between the two on occasion.
“Or at least sent Jimena a text that said adios,” Hannah said, striving for the same matter-of-factness and not sure if she quite managed it.
He grinned. “Hey, don’t worry about Jimena. She got what she wanted, too.”
I’ll bet, Hannah thought, her gaze traveling to the elegant bumps of muscle and sinew on his torso. Yeager Novak might well have been sculpted by the hands of the gods. But the scar left behind by his latest stitches would be in good company, what with the jagged pink line marring the flesh above his navel and the puckered arc to their left. He had scars all over his body, thanks to his extreme adventurer ways. And thanks to his total lack of inhibition when it came to being fitted for clothes, Hannah had seen all of them.
“So you think you can fix the shirt and pants?” he asked.
“The pants will be fine,” she told him. “They just need a good washing. But the shirt is a goner.” Before he could open his mouth to protest, she added, “Don’t worry, Mr. Novak. I can make a new one that will look just like it.”
He threw her an exasperated look. “How many times have I told you to call me Yeager?”
“Lots,” she replied. “And, just like I told you all those other times, it’s Mr. Cathcart’s and Mr. Quinn’s policy to use ‘Mr.’ or ‘Ms.’ with all of our clients.”
Just like it was Cathcart and Quinn policy that Hannah wear the ugly little smock she had to wear while working and always keep her hair confined, as if the shop’s sole female employee was a throwback to the Industrial Revolution.
“Anyway,” she continued, “I learned pretty quickly to keep all of your patterns and cut enough fabric for two garments whenever I make one.”
He smiled in a way that was nothing short of devastating. “And I love you for it,” he told her.
She smiled back. “I know.”
Yeager told Hannah he loved her all the time. He loved her for making him clothes that fit like a glove. He loved her for mending them when he thought he’d ruined them. He loved her for being able to remove bloodstains, oil stains, pampas stains, baba ghanoush stains, walrus stains...stains from more sources than any normal human being saw in a lifetime. And, hey, she loved Yeager, too. The same way she loved cannoli and luna moths and sunsets—with a certain sense of awe that such things even existed in the world.
She went back to measuring his inseam, pretending the action commanded every scrap of her attention when, by now, she had Yeager’s measurements memorized. There was no reason he had to know that, was there? Sometimes a girl had to do what a girl had to do. Especially when said girl was between boyfriends. Like eight months between boyfriends. None of whom had torsos roped with muscle or smelled like a rugged, windswept canyon.
“Have you ever been to Spain, Hannah?” Yeager asked.
“I lived for a while in what used to be Spanish Harlem,” she told him as she penned his inseam measurement onto the back of her hand. She lifted the tape measure to his waist. “Does that count?”
He chuckled. “No. You should go to Spain. It’s an incredible country. Definitely in my top five favorite places to visit.”
Hannah would have told him her top five were Queens, Manhattan, Brooklyn, the Bronx and Staten Island, since she’d never ventured outside the five boroughs of New York. For fifteen of her first eighteen years, it was because she’d been a ward of the state, and even though she’d been shuffled around a lot during that time, she’d never landed outside the city’s jurisdiction. For the last nine years, she hadn’t had the funds to pay for something as frivolous as travel. What didn’t go to keeping herself housed and fed went toward funding the business she’d started out of her Sunnyside apartment. Things like travel could wait until after she was the toast of the New York fashion industry.
“What are your other top four favorite places?” she asked.
She was going to go out on a limb and say that, to a man who’d built a billion-dollar company out of creating extreme adventure vacations for other alpha types, Sunnyside and what used to be Spanish Harlem probably weren’t going to make the cut.
He didn’t even have to think about his response. “New Zealand, Slovenia, Chile and Iceland. But ask me tomorrow and it could be a whole different list.”
Hannah jotted the last of his measurements onto the back of her hand with the others, returned the pen to its perennial place in the bun she always wore for work and stood. Yep, Yeager still towered over her. Then again, since she stood five-two, most people did.
“All done,” she told him. Reluctantly she added, “You can get dressed now.”
He nodded toward the clothes on the floor. “Thanks for taking care of this.”
“No problem. But you know, you could save a lot of money on tailoring if you stayed in New York for more than a few weeks at a time.”
“There’s no way I can stay anywhere for more than a few weeks at a time,” he said. “And I won’t apologize for being an adventurer.”
Hannah would never ask him to. She couldn’t imagine Yeager sitting behind a desk punching a keyboard or standing on an assembly line screwing in machine parts. It would be like asking Superman to work as a parking attendant.
“All I’m saying is be careful.”
He flinched. “Those are the last two words somebody like me wants to hear.”
And they were the two words Hannah lived by. Not that she was a fearful person by any stretch of the imagination. You didn’t survive a childhood and adolescence as a ward of the state by being timid. But after nearly a decade on her own, she’d carved out a life for herself that was quiet, steady and secure, and she was careful not to jeopardize that. Oh, blissful predictability. Oh, exalted stability. Oh, revered security. She’d never had any of those things growing up. No way would she risk losing them now.
“Your pants and new shirt will be ready a week from today,” she told Yeager.
He thrust his arms through the sleeves of a gray linen shirt Hannah had made for him and began to button it. “Great. That’ll be just in time for my trip to Gansbaai. South Africa,” he clarified before she could ask. “I’m taking a group to go cage diving with great white sharks.”
“Of course you are. Because after nearly being gored to death by a gigantic bull, why wouldn’t you risk being bitten in two by a gigantic shark? It makes perfect sense.”
He grinned again. “After that, it’s off to Nunavut with a couple of buddies to climb Mount Thor.”
“I would love to see your passport, Mr. Novak. It must be as thick as a novel.”
“Yeah, it is. Like Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix size.”
And the stories it could tell were probably every bit as fantastic.
“Well, have a good time,” she told him. “I’ll be at home, inventorying my swatches and organizing my bobbins.”
He threw her one last smile as he reached for his charcoal trousers—also fashioned by Hannah. “And you say I live dangerously.”
The bell above the shop entrance jingled, making her turn in that direction. “Excuse me,” she said as she backed toward the fitting room entrance. “Your claim check will be at the register when you’re ready.”
* * *
The minute Hannah disappeared through the fitting room door, Yeager Novak’s mind turned to other, more pressing, topics. When your life’s work was creating extreme adventures for wealthy clients, you had to make plans, sometimes years in advance. In putting together vacation packages, he had a million things to consider—a country’s culture and politics, its potential safety, its seasonal climate, how many people needed to be bribed for all the requisite permissions... The list was endless. And he always tried out the travel packages he designed for his clients first, to be sure they were doable without risk to life or limb.
Well, without too much risk to life or limb. No risk kind of defeated the purpose.
He knotted his tie, grabbed his suit jacket and headed for the register. Hannah’s blond head was bent over her receipt pad as she wrote in her slow, precise hand, a few errant curls springing free of the prim little bun she always wore. Nice to know there was at least some part of her that wanted to break free of her buttoned-up, battened-down self. He’d never met anyone more straitlaced than Hannah...whatever her last name was.
As if she’d heard him say that out loud, she suddenly glanced up, her silver-gray eyes peering over the tops of her black half-glasses. She did have some beautiful eyes, though, he’d give her that. He’d never seen the color on another human being. But the rest of her... The shapeless jacket-thing she wore completely hid her gender, and if she was wearing any makeup, he sure couldn’t see it. He guessed she was kind of cute in a wholesome, girl-next-door type of way, if you went for the wholesome, girl-next-door type—which he didn’t. He liked talking to her, though. She was smart and funny. And, man, did her clothes make him look good. He knew nothing about sewing or fashion, but he knew excellent work when he saw it. And Hannah Whatshername definitely did excellent work.
“A week from today,” she reiterated as she tore the receipt from the pad and extended it toward him.
“Thanks,” he replied as he took it from her. “Any chance you could make a second shirt like it by then? Just in case?” Before she could object—because he could tell she was going to—he added, “There could be an extra hundred bucks in it for you.”
She bit her lip thoughtfully, a gesture that was slightly—surprisingly—erotic. “I’m not allowed to take tips.”
“Oh, c’mon. I don’t see Leo or Monty around.”
“Mr. Cathcart is on a buying trip to London,” she said. “And Mr. Quinn is at lunch.”
“Then they’ll never know.”
She expelled the kind of sigh someone makes when they know they’re breaking the rules but they badly need cash for something. Yeager was intrigued. What could Ms. Goody Two-shoes Hannah need money for that would make her break the rules?
With clear reluctance she said, “I can’t. I’m sorry. I just don’t have time to do it here—we’re so backlogged.” Before he could protest, she hurried on. “However, I happen to know a seamstress who does freelance work at home. She’s very good.”
Yeager shook his head. “No way. I don’t trust anyone with my clothes but you.”
“No, you don’t understand, Mr. Novak. I guarantee you’ll like this woman’s work. I know her intimately.”
“But—”
“You could even say that she and I are one of a kind. If you know what I mean.”
She eyed him pointedly. And after a moment, Yeager understood. Hannah was the one who did freelance work at home. “Gotcha.”
“If you happened to do a search on Craigslist for, say, ‘Sunnyside seamstress,’ she’d be the first listing that pops up. Ask if she can make you a shirt by next week for the same price you’d pay here, and I guarantee she’ll be able to do it.”
Yeager grabbed his phone from his pocket and pulled up Craigslist. He should have known Hannah would live in Sunnyside. It was the closest thing New York had to Small Town America.
“Found you,” he said.
She frowned at him.
“I mean...found her.”
“Send her an email from that listing. I’m sure she’ll reply when she gets home from work tonight.”
He was already typing when he said, “Great. Thanks.”
“But you’ll have to pick it up at my—I mean, her place,” she told him. “She can’t bring it here, and she doesn’t deliver.”
“No problem.”
He sent the email then returned his phone to one pocket as he tugged his wallet from another. He withdrew five twenties from the ten he always had on him and placed them on the counter. Hannah’s eyes widened at the gesture, but she discreetly palmed the bills and tucked them into her pocket.
Even so, she asked, “Don’t you want to wait until you have the extra shirt?”
He shook his head. “I trust you.”
“Thanks.”
“No, thank you. That was my favorite shirt. It will be nice to have a spare. Not that I’ll be letting any sharks near my clothes, but you never know when you’ll meet another Jimena.”
She nodded, but he was pretty sure it wasn’t in understanding. Someone like her probably wouldn’t let a lover that spontaneous and temporary get anywhere near her. She was way too buttoned-up, battened-down and straitlaced for idle encounters, regardless of how beautiful her eyes were or how erotically she bit her lip. Hannah, he was certain, only dated the same kind of upright, forthright, do-right person she was. To Yeager, that would be a fate worse than death.
“I’ll see you in a week,” he said, lifting a hand in farewell.
As he made his way to the door, he heard her call after him, “Have a great day, Mr. Novak! And remember to look both ways before you cross the street!”
* * *
A week later—the day Yeager was scheduled to pick up his new shirt at her apartment, in fact—Hannah was in the back room of Cathcart and Quinn, collecting fabric remnants to take home with her. Everyone else had gone for the day, and she was counting the minutes until she could begin closing up shop, when the store’s entrance bell rang to announce a customer. Hoping it would just be someone picking up an alteration, she headed out front.
She didn’t recognize the man at the register, but he had the potential to become a client, judging by his bespoke suit from... Aponte’s, she decided. It looked like Paolo’s work. The man’s blond hair was cut with razor-precision, his eyes were cool and keen, and his smile was this just side of dispassionate.
“Hello,” Hannah greeted him as she approached. “May I help you?”
“Hannah Robinson?” he asked. Her surprise that he knew her must have been obvious, because he quickly added, “My name is Gus Fiver. I’m an attorney with Tarrant, Fiver and Twigg. We’re a probate law firm here in Manhattan.”
His response only surprised her more. She didn’t have a will herself, and she knew no one who might have included her in one. Her lack of connections was what had landed her in the foster care system as a three-year-old, after her mother died with no surviving relatives or friends to care for her. And although Hannah hadn’t had any especially horrible experiences in the system, she could safely say she’d never met anyone there who would remember her in their last wishes. There was no reason a probate attorney should know her name or where she worked.
“Yes,” she said cautiously. “I’m Hannah Robinson.”
Gus Fiver’s smile grew more genuine at her response. In a matter of seconds he went from being a high-powered Manhattan attorney to an affable boy next door. The change made Hannah feel a little better.
“Excellent,” he said. Even his voice was warmer now.
“I’m sorry, but how do you know me?” she asked.
“My firm has been looking for you since the beginning of the year. And one of our clients was looking for you long before then.”
“I don’t understand. Why would anyone be looking for me? Especially when I’m not that hard to find?”
Instead of answering her directly he said, “You did most of your growing up in the foster care system, yes?”
Hannah was so stunned he would know that about her—few of her friends even knew—that she could only nod.
“You entered the program when you were three, I believe, after your mother, Mary Robinson, died.”
Her stomach knotted at the realization that he would know about her past so precisely. But she automatically replied, “Yes.”
“And do you remember what your life was like prior to that?”
“Mr. Fiver, what’s this about?”
Instead of explaining he said, “Please, just bear with me for a moment, Ms. Robinson.”
Hannah didn’t normally share herself with other people until she’d known them for some time, and even then, there were barriers it took a while for most people to breach. But there was something about Gus Fiver that told her it was okay to trust him. To a point.
So she told him, “I only have a few vague memories. I know my mother was a bookkeeper for a welding company on Staten Island and that that’s where she and I were living when she died. But I only know that because that’s what I’ve been told. I don’t have any mementos or anything. Everything she owned was sold after her death, and what was left in her estate after it was settled was put into trust for me until I turned eighteen and was booted out of the system.”
Not that there had been much, but it had allowed Hannah to start life on her own without a lot of the stress she would have had otherwise, and she’d been enormously grateful for it.
“Is your mother the one you inherited your eyes from?” Mr. Fiver asked. “I don’t mean to be forward, but they’re such an unusual color.”
Hannah had fielded enough remarks about her singularly colored eyes—even from total strangers—that she no longer considered them forward. “No,” she said. “My mother had blue eyes.”
“So you at least remember what she looked like?”
Hannah shook her head. “No. But I take back what I said about mementos. I do have one. A photograph of my mother that one of the social workers was kind enough to frame and give to me before I went into the system. Somehow, I always managed to keep it with me whenever they moved me to a new place.”
This interested Mr. Fiver a lot. “Is there any chance you have this photograph with you?”
“I do, actually.” Hannah had taken it out of the frame when she was old enough to have a wallet, because she’d always wanted to carry the photo with her. It was the only evidence of her mother she’d ever had.
“May I see it?” Mr. Fiver asked.
Hannah was about to tell him no, that this had gone on long enough. But her damnable curiosity now had the better of her, and she was kind of interested to see where this was going.
“It’s in my wallet,” she said.
He smiled again, notching another chink in her armor that weakened her mettle. “I don’t mind waiting.”
She retrieved her purse from beneath the counter and withdrew the photo, now creased and battered, from its plastic sheath to hand to Mr. Fiver. It had been cropped from what must have been a studio portrait, and showed her mother from the chest up, along with the shoulder of someone sitting next to her.
“And your father?” he asked as he studied the picture.
“I didn’t know him,” Hannah said. “He’s listed as a Robert Williams on my birth certificate, but do you know how many Robert Williamses there are in New York alone? No one ever found him. I never had any family but my mother.”
Mr. Fiver returned the photo to her. “The reason we’ve been looking for you, Ms. Robinson, is because we have a client whose estate we’ve been managing since his death while we search for his next of kin. That’s sort of our specialty at Tarrant, Fiver and Twigg. We locate heirs whose whereabouts or identities are unknown. We believe you may be this client’s sole heir.”
“I’m sorry to disappoint you, Mr. Fiver, but that’s impossible. If my mother had had any family, the state would have found them twenty-five years ago.”
He opened his portfolio and sifted through its contents, finally withdrawing an eight-by-ten photo he held up for Hannah to see. It was the same picture of her mother she had been carrying her entire life, but it included the person who’d been cropped from her copy—a man with blond hair and silver-gray eyes. Even more startling, a baby with the exact same coloring was sitting in her mother’s lap.
Her gaze flew to Mr. Fiver’s. But she had no idea what to say.
“This is a photograph of Stephen and Alicia Linden of Scarsdale, New York,” he said. “The baby is their daughter, Amanda. Mrs. Linden and Amanda disappeared not long after this picture was taken.”
A strange buzzing erupted in Hannah’s head. How could Gus Fiver have a photo of her mother identical to hers? Was the baby in her mother’s lap Hannah? Was the man her father? What the hell was going on?
All she could say, though, was, “I don’t understand.”
“One day, while Stephen Linden was at work in the city,” Mr. Fiver continued, “Alicia bundled up ten-month-old Amanda and, with nothing but the clothes on their backs, left him.” He paused for a moment, as if he were trying to choose his next words carefully. “Stephen Linden was, from all accounts, a...difficult man to live with. He...mistreated his wife. Badly. Alicia feared for her and her daughter’s safety, but her husband’s family was a very powerful one and she worried they would hinder her in her efforts to leave him. So she turned to an underground group active in aiding battered women, providing them with new identities and forged documents and small amounts of cash. With the assistance of this group, Alicia and Amanda Linden of Scarsdale were able to start a new life as Mary and Hannah Robinson of Staten Island.”
By now, Hannah was reeling. She heard what Mr. Fiver was saying, but none of it quite registered. “I... I’m sorry, Mr. Fiver, but this... You’re telling me I’m not the person I’ve always thought I was? That my whole life should have been different from the one I’ve lived? That’s just... It’s...”
Then another thought struck her and the air rushed from her lungs in a quick whoosh. Very softly, she asked, “Is my father still alive?”
At this, Mr. Fiver sobered. “No, I’m sorry. He died almost twenty years ago. Our client, who initially launched the search for you, was your paternal grandfather.” He paused a telling beat before concluding, “Chandler Linden.”
Had there been any breath left in Hannah, she would have gasped. Everyone in New York knew the name Chandler Linden. His ancestors had practically built this city, and, at the time of his death, he’d still owned a huge chunk of it.
Although she had no idea how she managed it, Hannah said, “Chandler Linden was a billionaire.”
Mr. Fiver nodded. “Yes, he was. Ms. Robinson, you might want to close up shop early today. You and I have a lot to talk about.”
Two (#ufd32c605-406a-5634-b386-3da22488176a)
Yeager Novak didn’t find himself in Queens very often. Or, for that matter, ever. And he wasn’t supposed to be here now. His assistant, Amira, was supposed to be picking up his shirt at Hannah’s. But she’d needed to take the afternoon off for a family emergency, so he’d told her he would deal with whatever was left on his agenda today himself—not realizing at the time that that would include going to Queens. By train. Which was another place he didn’t find himself very often. Or, for that matter, ever. This time of day, though, the train was fastest and easiest, and he needed to be back in Manhattan ASAP.
But as he walked down Greenpoint Avenue toward 44th Street, he couldn’t quite make himself hurry. Queens was different from Manhattan—less frantic, more relaxed. Especially now, at the end of the workday. The sun was hanging low in the sky, bathing the stunted brick buildings in gold and amber. Employees in storefronts were turning over Closed signs as waiters at cafés unfolded sandwich boards with nightly specials scrawled in bright-colored chalk. People on the street actually smiled and said hello to him as he passed. With every step he took, Yeager felt like he was moving backward in time, and somehow, that made him want to go slower. Hannah’s neighborhood was even more quaint than he’d imagined.
He hated quaint. At least, he usually did. Somehow the quaintness of Sunnyside was less off-putting than most.
Whatever. To each his own. Yeager would suffocate in a place like this. Quiet. Cozy. Family friendly. Why was a healthy, red-blooded young woman with beautiful silver-gray eyes and a surprisingly erotic lip nibble living somewhere like this? Not that anything Hannah did was Yeager’s business. But he did kind of wonder.
Her apartment was on the third and uppermost floor of one of those tawny brick buildings, above a Guatemalan mercado. He rang her bell and identified himself, and she buzzed him in. At the top of the stairs were three apartments. Hannah had said hers was B, but before he even knocked on the door, she opened it.
At least, he thought it was Hannah who opened it. She didn’t look much like the woman he knew from Cathcart and Quinn. The little black half-glasses were gone and the normally bunned-up hair danced around her shoulders in loose, dark gold curls. In place of her shapeless work jacket, she had on a pair of striped shorts and a sleeveless red shirt knotted at her waist. As small as she was, she had surprisingly long legs and they ended in feet whose toenails were an even brighter red than her shirt.
But what really made him think someone else had taken Hannah’s place was her expression. He’d never seen her be anything but cool and collected. This version looked agitated and anxious.
“Hannah?” he asked, just to be sure.
“Yeah, hi,” she said. She sounded even more on edge than she looked. “I’m sorry. I totally forgot about your pickup tonight.”
“Didn’t my assistant email you yesterday to confirm?”
“She did, actually. But today was...” She shook her head as if trying to physically clear it of something. But that didn’t seem to work, because she still looked distracted. “I got some, um, very weird news today. But it’s okay, your shirt is finished.” She hurried on. “I just...” She inhaled a deep breath, released it in a ragged sigh...and still looked as if she were a million miles away. “I forgot about the pickup,” she said again. Almost as an afterthought, she added, “Come on in.”
She opened the door wider and stepped back to get out of his way. Good thing, too, since the room he walked into was actually an alcove that was barely big enough to hold both of them. As he moved forward, Hannah wedged herself behind him to close the door, brushing against him—with all that naked skin—as she did. It was then he noticed something about her he’d never noticed before. She smelled like raspberries. Really ripe, really succulent, raspberries.
Another step forward took him into her apartment proper, but it wasn’t much bigger than the alcove and seemed to consist of only one room. Yeager looked for doors that would lead to others, but saw only one, which had to be for the bathroom. The “kitchen” was a couple of appliances tucked into another alcove adjacent to the single window in the place, one that offered a view of a building on the next street. The apartment was furnished with the bare essentials for living and the tools of a seamstress’s trade—a sewing machine and ironing board, a trio of torso stands for works-in-progress, stacks of fabric and a rack of plastic-covered garments.
“I guess my place is a little smaller than yours, huh?” Hannah asked, obviously sensing his thoughts.
Smaller than his place? Her apartment was smaller than his bedroom. But all he said was, “A bit.”
She squeezed out of the alcove, past him—leaving that tantalizing scent of raspberries in her wake—and strode to the rolling rack, from which she withdrew one of the plastic-covered garments. As he followed, he noted a half-empty bottle of wine on one of the end tables by the love seat. He thought maybe he’d interrupted a romantic evening she was spending with someone else—the bathroom door was closed—then noted that the near-empty glass sitting behind the bottle was alone.
“Do you want to try it on before you take it?” she asked. “Just to be sure it fits?”
Yeager figured it probably wasn’t a bad idea, since he was leaving in two days for South Africa and there wouldn’t be time for Amira to come back for it if it needed alterations. Truth be told, he also wasn’t sure he should leave Hannah alone just yet, what with the wine, the distraction and the anxious look...and, okay, all that naked skin.
“Yeah, I guess I should, just in case,” he replied.
As she removed the plastic from the shirt, he tossed his suit jacket onto the love seat, tugged free his tie and unbuttoned the shirt he was wearing. By the time he shed it, she was holding up his new one for him to slip on. She looked a little steadier now and seemed more like herself. His concern began to ease a bit. Until he drew near and saw that her eyes housed a healthy bit of panic.
It was obvious there was something bothering her. A lot. Yeager told himself that whatever it was, it was none of his business. But that didn’t keep him from wondering. Boyfriend troubles? Family conflicts? Problems at work? He knew nothing about her outside her job. Because there was no reason for him to know anything about her outside her job. There was no reason for him to care, either. That wasn’t to be cold or unfeeling. That was just how he was. He didn’t care about much of anything outside his immediate sphere of existence. Somehow, though, he suddenly kind of cared about Hannah.
“I’m sorry,” she said as he thrust his arm through the shirt’s sleeve, “but the fabric isn’t exactly the same as the original. Since I was moonlighting, I couldn’t use what we have at work, and that came from Portugal. But I found a beautiful dobby in nearly the same color. I hope it’s okay. It brought the price down a bit.”
Yeager couldn’t have cared less about the price. He cared about quality and style. Maybe it was superficial, but a man who was the face of a Fortune 500 company had to look good. And, thanks to Hannah, he always did.
“No, this is good,” he said. “It’s got a great texture. I actually like this one better than the one you made for me at Cathcart and Quinn. Why aren’t you the one they’re sending on buying trips to London and Portugal?”
“You’ll have to ask Mr. Cathcart that question,” she said in a way that made him think she’d already broached the topic with her employer and been shot down. Probably more than once.
“Maybe I will,” he said, wondering about his sudden desire to act as her champion. “Or maybe you should just open your own business.”
As she studied the fit of his shirt, she gestured to the rack of clothes against the wall. “I’m trying.”
Out of curiosity, Yeager walked over to look at what she’d made for her other clients. He was surprised to see that the majority of items hanging there were children’s clothes.
“You mostly make stuff for kids?” he asked.
Instead of replying, Hannah moved to her sewing machine to withdraw a business card from a stack and handed it to Yeager. It was pale lavender, imprinted with the words, Joey & Kit, and decorated with a logo of a kangaroo and fox touching noses. Below them was the slogan, “Glad rags for happy kids.” At the bottom were addresses for a website, an email and a PO box.
“This is your business?” Yeager asked, holding up the card.
She nodded. “I’m an S-corporation. I trademarked the name and logo and everything.”
“Why kids’ clothes? Seems like other areas of fashion would be more profitable.”
“They would be,” she said. He waited for her to elaborate. She didn’t. He was about to ask her to when she told him, “Turn around, so I can make sure the back darts are aligned.”
He did as she instructed, something that left him looking out the apartment’s solitary window. He didn’t know why, but it really bothered him that Hannah only had one window from which to view the world. His West Chelsea penthouse had panoramic views of Manhattan and the Hudson from floor-to-ceiling windows in most rooms—including two of the three-and-a-half baths. Not that he spent much time at home, but his office in the Flatiron District had pretty breathtaking views of the city, too. No matter where Yeager went in the world, he always made sure he had a lot to look at. Mountain ranges that disappeared into clouds, savannas that dissolved into the horizon, oceans that met the stars in the distant night sky. Some of the best parts of adventure travel were just looking at things. But Hannah lived her life in a square little room with one window that opened onto a building across the way.
“You know, I don’t usually have to put darts in a man’s shirt,” she said. “But the way you’re built...broad shoulders, tapered waist...”
Yeager told himself he only imagined the sigh of approval he heard.
“Anyway,” she went on, “I think this looks good.”
She ran her hand down the length of his back on one side, then up again on the other, smoothing out the seams in question. The gesture was in no way protracted or flirtatious. Her touch was deft and professional. Yet, somehow, it made his pulse twitch.
She stepped in front of him, gave him a final once-over with eyes that still looked a little haunted, and told him, “You’re good to go.”
It was one of his favorite statements to hear. Yeager loved going. Anywhere. Everywhere. Whenever he could. Strangely, though, in that moment, he didn’t want to go. He told himself it was because, in spite of the relative ease of the last few minutes, there was still something about Hannah that was...off. He’d never seen her be anything but upbeat. This evening, she was subdued. And that just didn’t sit well with him.
Before he realized what he was doing, he asked, “Hannah, is everything okay?”
Her eyes widened in now unmistakable panic. She opened her mouth to reply but no words emerged. Which may have been his biggest tip-off yet that there was something seriously wrong. Hannah was never at a loss for words. On the contrary, she was generally one of those people who had a snappy reply for everything.
He tried again. “You just don’t seem like yourself tonight.”
For a moment she looked as if she was going to deny anything was wrong. Then she made a defeated sound and her whole body seemed to slump forward.
“Is this about the weird news you got today?” he asked.
She nodded, but instead of looking at him, she lowered her gaze to the floor. Hannah never did that. She was one of the most direct people he knew, always making eye contact. It was one of the things he loved about her. So few people did that.
“What kind of news was it?”
She hesitated again, still not looking at him. Finally she said, “The kind that could not only completely change my future, but also confirmed that my past could have—should have—been a lot better than it was.”
“I’m not sure I understand.”
At this, she emitted a strangled chuckle completely devoid of humor. “Yeah, I know the feeling.”
Maybe the wine had affected her more than he thought. Probably, he ought to just drop it and pay her for his shirt. Definitely, he should be getting the hell out of there.
Instead he heard himself ask, “Do you want to talk about it?”
At that, she finally pulled her gaze from the floor and met his squarely...for all of a nanosecond. Then she lifted both hands to cover her beautiful silver-gray eyes. Then her lips began to tremble. Then she sniffled. Twice. And that was when Yeager knew he was in trouble. Because Hannah crying was way worse than Hannah panicking. Panic eventually subsided. But sadness... Sadness could go on forever. No one knew that better than he did.
She didn’t start crying, though. Not really. After a moment she wiped both eyes with the backs of her hands and dropped them to hug herself tight. But that gesture just made her look even more lost. Especially since her eyes were still damp. Something in Yeager’s chest twisted tight at seeing her this way. He had no idea why. He barely knew her. He just hated seeing anyone this distraught.
“Holy crap, do I want to talk about it,” she said softly. “I just don’t have anyone to talk about it with.”
That should have been his cue to get out while he still had the chance. The last thing he had time for—hell, the last thing he wanted—was to listen to someone whose last name he didn’t even know talk about her life-altering problems. He should be heading for the front door stat. And he would. Any minute now. Any second now. In five, four, three, two...
“Give me one minute to change my shirt,” he told her, wondering what the hell had possessed him. “Then you can tell me about it.”
* * *
While Yeager changed his shirt, Hannah moved to the love seat, perching herself on the very edge of the cushion and wondering what just happened. One minute, she’d been double-checking the fit of his shirt and had been almost—almost—able to forget, if only for a moment, everything she’d learned today from Gus Fiver. The next minute, Yeager had been offering a sympathetic shoulder to cry on.
Not that she would cry on him. Well, probably not. She didn’t want to ruin his shirt. But she appreciated his offer to hang around for a little while. She hadn’t felt more alone in her life than she had over the last few hours.
She’d taken Gus Fiver’s advice to close Cathcart and Quinn early, then had sat with him in the empty shop for nearly an hour as he’d given her all the specifics about her situation. A situation that included the most stunning good news/bad news scenario she’d ever heard. Since then she’d been here in her apartment, combing the internet for information about her newly discovered family and mulling everything she’d learned, in the hope that it would help her make sense of the choice she had to make. Maybe someone like Yeager, who didn’t have any personal involvement, would have a clearer perspective and some decent advice.
She watched as he changed his shirt, doing her best not to stare at the cords of muscle and sinew roping his arms, shoulders and torso. But in an apartment the size of hers, there wasn’t much else to stare at. Then again, even if she’d had the frescoes of the Sistine Chapel surrounding her, it would still be Yeager that drew her eye. So she busied herself with filling her wineglass a third time, since the two glasses she’d already consumed had done nothing to take the edge off.
“You want a glass of wine?” she asked Yeager, belatedly realizing how negligent a hostess she’d been.
Also belatedly, she remembered she’d picked up the wine at Duane Reade on her way home from work. She reread the label as she placed it back on the table. Chateau Yvette claimed to be a “wine product” that paired well with pizza and beef stew. It probably wasn’t a brand Yeager normally bought for himself. But it was too late to retract the offer now.
“Yeah, that’d be great,” he said as he finished buttoning his shirt.
She retrieved another glass from the kitchen and poured the wine. By then, Yeager had draped the plastic back over his new shirt and was sitting on the love seat—taking up most of it. So much so that his thigh aligned with hers when she sat and handed him his glass. She enjoyed another healthy swig from her own and grimaced. She honestly hadn’t realized until then how, uh, not-particularly-good it was. Probably because her head had been too full of Omigod, omigod, omigod, what am I going to do?
“So what’s up?” he asked.
She inhaled a deep breath and released it slowly. It still came out shaky and uneven. Not surprising, since shaky and uneven was how she’d been feeling since Gus Fiver had dropped his Chandler Linden bombshell. There was nothing like the prospect of inheriting billions of dollars to send a person’s pulse and brain synapses into overdrive.
If Hannah actually inherited it.
She took another breath and this time when she released it, it was a little less ragged. “Have you heard of a law firm called Tarrant, Fiver and Twigg?” she asked.
Yeager nodded. “Yeah. They’re pretty high-profile. A lot of old money—big money—clients.”
“Well, I had a meeting with one of their partners this afternoon.”
Yeager couldn’t quite hide his surprise that someone like her would be in touch with such a financial powerhouse, though he was obviously trying to. Hannah appreciated his attempt to be polite, but it was unnecessary. She wasn’t bothered by being working class, nor was she ashamed of her upbringing. Even if she didn’t talk freely about her past, she’d never tried to hide it, and she wasn’t apologetic about the way she lived now. She’d done pretty well for herself and lived the best life she could. She was proud of that.
Still, she replied, “I know. They’re not exactly my social stratum. But I didn’t contact them. They contacted me.”
“About?” he asked.
“About the fact that I’m apparently New York’s equivalent to the Grand Duchess Anastasia of Russia.”
Now Yeager looked puzzled. So she did her best to explain. Except she ended up not so much explaining as just pouring out her guts into his lap.
Without naming names, and glossing over many of the details, she told him about her discovery that she’d been born to a family she never knew she had in a town she would have sworn she’d never visited. She told him about her father’s addiction and abuse and about her mother’s custodial kidnapping of her. She told him about their false identities and their move from Scarsdale to Staten Island. She told him about her mother’s death when she was three and her entry into the foster care system, where she’d spent the next fifteen years. And she told him about how, in a matter of minutes today, she went from living the ordinary life of a seamstress to becoming one of those long-lost heirs to a fortune who seemed only to exist in over-the-top fiction.
Through it all, Yeager said not a word. When she finally paused—not that she was finished talking by a long shot, because there was still so much more to tell him—he only studied her in silence. Then he lifted the glass of wine he had been holding through her entire story and, in one long quaff, drained it.
And then he grimaced, too. Hard. “That,” he finally said, “was unbelievable.”
“I know,” Hannah told him. “But it’s all true.”
He shook his head. “No, I mean the wine. It was unbelievably bad.”
“Oh.”
“Your life is... Wow.”
For a moment he only looked out at her little apartment without speaking. Then he looked at Hannah again.
And he said, “This isn’t the kind of conversation to be having over unbelievably bad wine.”
“It isn’t?”
He shook his head. “No. This is the kind of conversation that needs to be had over extremely good Scotch.”
“I don’t have any Scotch.” And even if she did, it wouldn’t be extremely good.
He roused a smile. “Then we’ll just have to go find some, won’t we?”
Three (#ufd32c605-406a-5634-b386-3da22488176a)
Instead of extremely good Scotch, they found a sufficiently good Irish whiskey at a pub up the street from Hannah’s apartment. She’d ducked into the bathroom to change before they’d left, trading her shorts for a printed skirt that matched her shirt and dipping her feet into a pair of flat sandals. By the time the bartender brought their drinks to them at a two-seater cocktail table tucked into the corner of the dimly lit bar, she was beginning to feel a little more like herself.
Until she looked at Yeager and found him eyeing her with a scrutiny unlike any she’d ever had from him before. Normally he showed her no more interest than he would...well, a seamstress who was sewing some clothes for him. Sure, the two of them bantered back and forth whenever he was in the shop, but it was the kind of exchange everybody shared with people they saw in passing on any given day—baristas, cashiers, doormen, that kind of thing. In the shop, his attention passed with the moments. But now...
Now, Yeager Novak’s undivided attention was an awesome thing. His sapphire eyes glinted like the gems they resembled, and if she’d fancied he could see straight into her soul before, now she was certain of it. Her heart began to hammer hard in her chest, her blood began to zip through her veins and her breathing became more shallow than it had been all day. This time, though, the reactions had little to do with the news of her massive potential inheritance and a lot to do with Yeager.
He must have sensed her reaction—hyperventilation was generally a dead giveaway—because he nudged her glass closer to her hand and said, “Take a couple sips of your drink. Then tell me again about how you ended up in Staten Island.”
She wanted to start talking now, but she did as he instructed and enjoyed a few slow sips of her whiskey. She wasn’t much of a drinker, usually sticking to wine or some sissy, fruit-sprouting drink. The liquor was smooth going down, warming her mouth and throat and chest. She closed her eyes to let it do its thing, then opened them again to find Yeager still studying her. She was grateful for the dim lighting of the bar. Not just because it helped soothe her rattled nerves but because it might mask the effect he was having on her.
“According to Mr. Fiver,” she said, “my mother got help from a group of women who aided other women in escaping their abusers. They paid counterfeiters to forge new identities for both of us—fake social security numbers, fake birth certificates, the works. I don’t know how my mother found them, but she needed them because my father’s family was super powerful and probably could have kept her from leaving him or, at least, made sure she couldn’t take me with her.”
“And just who was your father’s family?”
Hannah hesitated. During her internet search of her birth name, she had come across a number of items about her and her mother’s disappearance from Scarsdale a quarter century ago. Some of them had been articles that appeared in newspapers and magazines shortly after the fact, but many of them were fairly current on “unsolved mystery” type blogs and websites. It had been singularly creepy to read posts about herself from strangers speculating on her fate. Some people were convinced Stephen Linden had beaten his wife and daughter to death and disposed of their bodies, getting away with murder, thanks to his social standing. Some thought baby Amanda had been kidnapped by strangers for ransom and that her mother had interrupted the crime and been killed by the perpetrators, her body dumped in Long Island Sound. Other guesses were closer to the truth: that Alicia escaped her abusive marriage with Amanda in tow and both were living now in the safety of a foreign country.
What would Yeager make of all this?
Since Hannah had already told him so much—and still had a lot more to reveal—she said, “My father’s name was Stephen Linden. He died about twenty years ago. It was my recently deceased grandfather, Chandler Linden, who was looking for me and wanted to leave me the family fortune.”
Yeager studied her in silence for a moment. Then he said, “You’re Amanda Linden.”
She had thought he would remark on her grandfather’s identity, not hers. But she guessed she shouldn’t be surprised by his knowing about Amanda’s disappearance, too, since so many others did.
“You know about that,” she said.
He chuckled. “Hannah, everyone knows about that. Any kid who was ever curious about unsolved crimes has read about the disappearance of Amanda Linden and her mother.” He lifted a shoulder and let it drop. “When I was in middle school, I wanted to be a private investigator. I was totally into that stuff.”
“Yeah, well, I wasn’t,” she said. “I had no idea any of this happened. Let alone that it happened to me.”
She took another sip of her drink and was surprised by how much she liked the taste. Since Yeager had ordered it, it was doubtless the best this place had. Maybe her Linden genes just had a natural affinity for the finer things in life. She sipped her drink again.
“So you were destined for a life of wealth and privilege,” Yeager said, “and instead, you grew up in the New York foster care system.”
“Yep.”
“And how was that experience?”
Hannah dropped her gaze to her drink, dragging her finger up and down the side of the glass. “It wasn’t as terrible as what some kids go through,” she said. “But it wasn’t terrific, either. I mean a couple of times I landed in a really good place, with really good people. But just when I started to think maybe I’d found a spot where I fit in and could be reasonably happy for a while, I always got yanked out and put somewhere else where I didn’t fit in and wasn’t particularly happy.”
She glanced up to find that he was looking at her as if she were some interesting specimen under a microscope. A specimen he couldn’t quite figure out. So she returned her attention to her glass.
“That was the worst part, you know?” she continued. “Never feeling like I belonged anywhere. Never feeling like I had a real home or a real family. Now I know that I could have and should have—that I actually did have—both. The irony is that if I’d grown up as Amanda Linden, with all her wealth and privilege, I would have had a terrifying father who beat up my mother and very well could have come after me. Foster care was no picnic, but I was never physically abused. Dismissed and belittled, yeah. Neglected, sure. But never harmed. As Amanda, though...”
She didn’t finish the statement. She didn’t dare. She didn’t even want to think about what kind of life she might have lived if her mother hadn’t rescued her from it. What kind of life her mother had endured for years before her daughter’s safety had compelled her to run.
“Some people would argue that neglect and belittlement are harm,” Yeager said softly.
“Maybe,” she conceded. “But I’d rather be neglected and belittled and shuffled around and have nothing to my name than live in the lap of luxury and go through what my mother must have gone through to make her escape the way she did. I just wish she’d had more time to enjoy her life once she got it back.”
And Hannah wished she’d had more time herself to get to know her mother. Mary Robinson, formerly Alicia Linden, might very well have saved her daughter’s life—both figuratively and literally. Yet Hannah had no way to thank her.
“Your grandfather, Chandler Linden, was a billionaire,” Yeager said in the same matter-of-fact tone he’d been using all night.
Hannah’s stomach pitched to have the knowledge she’d been carrying around in her head all evening spoken aloud. Somehow, having it out in the open like that made it so much more real. Her heart began to thunder again and her vision began to swim. Hyperventilation would come next, so she enjoyed another, larger, taste of her drink in an effort to stave it off.
“Yeah,” she said quietly when she set her glass on the table. “He was.”
“Which means that now you’re a billionaire,” Yeager said in the same casual tone.
Oh, boy. There went her stomach again. “Well, I could be a billionaire,” she told him.
“Could be?” he echoed. “You said your grandfather bequeathed his entire estate to you. What are they waiting on? A DNA test?”
“Mr. Fiver took a sample of my saliva while we were talking,” she said. “But that’s just a formality for the courts. There’s no question I’m Amanda. I didn’t just inherit my father’s unique eye color. I also have a crescent-shaped birthmark on my right shoulder blade that shows up with some regularity in the Linden line. And, yes, my grandfather wants his entire estate to go to me. But there are certain...terms...of his will that need to be met before I can inherit.”
“What kind of terms?”
Hannah threw back the rest of her drink in one long gulp. Before her glass even hit the table, Yeager was lifting a hand to alert the bartender that they wanted another round. He even pointed at Hannah and added, “Make hers a double.”
Hannah started to tell him that wouldn’t be necessary. Then she remembered her grandfather’s demands again and grabbed Yeager’s drink, downing what was left of it, too. She would need all the false courage she could get if she was going to actually talk about this. Especially with someone like Yeager.
Once the whiskey settled in her stomach—woo, that warmth was starting to feel really good—she did her best to gather her thoughts, even though they all suddenly wanted to go wandering off in different directions. And she did her best to explain.
“Okay, so, as rich as the Lindens have always been,” she said, “they weren’t particularly, um, fruitful. I’m the last of the line. My father was an only child, and he didn’t remarry before his death. My grandfather’s sister never married or had children. Their father had twin brothers, but they both died from influenza before they were even teenagers. The Linden family tree prior to that had been growing sparser and sparser with each ensuing generation, so I’m all that’s left of them.”
Her thoughts were starting to get a little fuzzy, so Hannah drew in another long breath and let it go. There. That was better. Kind of. Where was she? Besides about to have a panic attack? Oh, right. The dried-up Linden family tree.
“Anyway...” She started again. “I guess my grandfather was sort of horrified by the idea that the world would no longer be graced with the Linden family presence—we were, I have learned, some of the best fat cats and exploiters of the proletariat out there—so he tied some strings to my inheritance.”
“What kind of strings?” Yeager asked.
“Well, actually it’s only one string,” she told him. “A string that’s more like a rope. A rope that’s tied into a noose.”
He was starting to look confused. She felt his pain.
“Hannah, I think I can safely say that I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
She tried again. “My grandfather included a condition I’ll have to meet before I can inherit the family fortune. He wanted to make sure that I, um, further the Linden line.”
“Further the line?”
She nodded. Then nodded some more. And then some more. Why couldn’t she stop nodding? And why did her head feel like it was beginning to disconnect from her body? With great effort, she stilled and tried to think of the most tactful way to tell Yeager how her grandfather had stipulated that, before she could inherit the piles and piles and piles of Linden moolah, she’d have to become a Linden baby factory.
Finally she decided on, “My grandfather has stipulated that, before I can inherit the piles and piles and piles of Linden moolah, I have to become a Linden baby factory.”
Yeager’s eyebrows shot up to nearly his hairline. “He wants you to procreate in order to inherit?”
Yeah, that would have been a much more tactful way to say it. Oh, well. “That’s exactly what he wants,” she said. “It’s what he demands. In order to inherit the family fortune, I have to either already be a mother or on my way to becoming one.”
“Can he do that?”
“Apparently so. The wording of his will was something along the lines of, if, when I was located after his death, I had a child or children, then no problem, here’s more money than you could have ever imagined having, don’t spend it all in one place.”
“But you don’t have a child or children,” Yeager pointed out.
“Nope.”
“So what happens in that case?”
“In that case, I have six months to get pregnant.”
Yeager’s eyebrows shot back up. “And what happens if you don’t get pregnant in six months?”
“Then aaaallllll the Linden money will go to charity and I’ll get a small severance package of fifty grand for my troubles, thanks so much for playing. Which, don’t get me wrong, would be great, and I’d be most appreciative, but...”
“It’s not billions.”
“Right.”
He opened his mouth to say something then closed it again. For another moment he studied her in silence. Then he said, “Well, that sucks.”
“Yeah.”
The bartender arrived with their drinks and Hannah immediately enjoyed a healthy swallow of hers.
“See, though,” she said afterward, “the problem isn’t with me having children. I’ve always planned on having kids someday. I want to have kids. I love kids. I wouldn’t even mind being a single mother, as long as I had the time and money to make sure I could do it right. Which, of course, I would, with billions of dollars. But to only have six months to make the decision and put it into action?”
“Actually, you don’t even have six months, if that’s the deadline,” Yeager said oh, so helpfully. “I mean, I’m no expert in baby-making—and thank God for that—but even I know it doesn’t always happen the first time. Or the second. Or the third. You’re going to need all the time you can get.”
Hannah closed her eyes at the reminder of what she already knew. “Thanks a lot, Grandpa. There’s nothing like the pressure of a ticking clock to bring a girl’s egg delivery to a crawl.”
She snapped her eyes open again. Oh, God, did she actually just say that out loud? When she heard Yeager chuckle, she realized she had. Then again, this whole situation was kind of comical. In an over-the-top, stranger-than-fiction, absolutely surreal kind of way.
She leaned forward and banged her head lightly against the table. In some part of her brain, she’d already realized that, if she wanted to inherit this money—and she very much wanted to inherit this money, since it would enable her to realize every dream she’d ever dreamed—she was going to have to make a decision fast and get herself in the family way as soon as possible.
But now that the rest of her brain was getting in on the action, she knew the prospects weren’t looking great. She had nothing remotely resembling a boyfriend. She didn’t even have a boy who was her friend. And only one attempt at in vitro was way beyond her financial means. She’d already checked that out, too.
Which left visits to a sperm bank, something she’d also been researching online tonight. If necessary, she could afford a few of those—barely—but if none of the efforts took, and she didn’t conceive by the six-month deadline, she would have drained what little savings she had. And fifty grand, although an impressive sum, wasn’t going to go far in New York City. These things came with no guarantees, especially if her anxiety about everything really did turn her eggs into the same kind of shrinking violets she was.
What Hannah needed was something that could counter her potentially diminished fertility. A super-tricked-out, ultra-souped-up, hypermasculine testosterone machine that could fairly guarantee to knock her up. And where the hell was she supposed to find a guy like—
She sat back up and looked at Yeager—and the super-tricked-out, ultra-souped-up, hypermasculine body that housed him. Talk about testosterone overload. The guy flew MiG 29s over the Russian tundra for kicks. He’d climbed Mt. Everest. Twice. He served himself up as shark bait on purpose, for God’s sake. The man probably produced enough testosterone for ten men. If he couldn’t put a woman in the family way, nobody could.
Maybe it was the wine. Maybe it was the whiskey. Maybe it was the wine followed by the whiskey. Or maybe it was just the unmitigated terror of having finally discovered who she was and where she belonged and everything she could attain. It wasn’t just the reclaiming of a life that had been denied her, but the promise of a happiness she never thought she would have—and realizing she could lose it all in the blink of an eye or the shrink of an egg.
And she heard herself saying, “So, Mr. Novak. Have you ever thought about donating your sperm to a good cause?”
* * *
Before he could stop himself, Yeager spat back into his glass a mouthful of whiskey, something that had never happened to him before. Then again, no one had ever asked him about his intentions for his sperm before, either, so he guessed he was entitled to this one social lapse.
As he wiped his chin with his napkin, he tried to tell himself he’d misheard Hannah’s question. “Excuse me?” he asked.
“Your sperm,” she said, enunciating the word more clearly this time. “Have you ever thought about donating it?”
So much for having misheard her. “Uh...no,” he said decisively.
She eyed him intently, her gaze never wavering from his. For a minute he thought she was going to drop it. Then she asked, “Well, would you think about it now?”
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Elizabeth Bevarly
A long-lost billionaire’s will leads to a baby pact.The grandfather Hannah Robinson never knew has left her billions! If she becomes pregnant within six months. Hannah yearns for safety and stability. So it’s ironic that danger-loving adrenaline junkie Yeager Novak is the perfect candidate to father her baby. Yeager’s certainly up for the task – but only if they conceive the old-fashioned way while on an epic adventure.It’s the perfect arrangement. Until Hannah realises she wants more than a family. And until Yeager realizes the dangers of risking his heart…
A long-lost billionaire’s will leads to a baby pact. Only from New York Times bestselling author Elizabeth Bevarly!
The grandfather Hannah Robinson never knew has left her billions! If she becomes pregnant within six months. Hannah yearns for safety and stability. So it’s ironic that danger-loving adrenaline junkie Yeager Novak is the perfect candidate to father her baby. Yeager’s certainly up for the task—but only if they conceive the old-fashioned way while on an epic adventure.
It’s the perfect arrangement. Until Hannah realizes she wants more than a family. And until Yeager realizes the dangers of risking his heart...
“So, Mr. Novak. Have you ever thought about donating your sperm to a good cause?”
“Excuse me?” Yaeger asked.
“Your sperm,” Hannah said, enunciating the word more clearly this time. “Have you ever thought about donating it?”
“Uh…no.”
“I mean, if you would consider it—donating it to me, I mean—I’d sign any kind of legal documents you want to relieve you of all obligations for any offspring that might, um, you know, spring off me. I’d really appreciate it.”
“Hannah, I…I’m flattered, but it’s not a good idea for me to do something like that.”
She looked crestfallen. “Why not?”
“Because I’m not good father material.”
At this, she looked aghast. Almost comically so. “Are you kidding me? You’re incredible father material. You’re smart and interesting and brave and funny and well traveled and smart and, holy cow, you’re gorgeous.”
He bit back a smile at that. “Thanks. But those aren’t things that necessarily make a good father.”
“Maybe not, but they make an excellent breeder.”
* * *
Baby in the Making
is part of the Accidental Heirs series:
First they find their fortunes, then they find love
Baby in the Making
Elizabeth Bevarly
www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
ELIZABETH BEVARLY is the award-winning, New York Times bestselling author of more than seventy books, novellas and screenplays. Although she has called home exotic places like San Juan, Puerto Rico and Haddonfield, New Jersey, she’s now happily settled back in her native Kentucky with her husband and son. When she’s not writing, she’s binge-watching documentaries on Netflix, spending too much time on Reddit or making soup out of whatever she finds in the freezer. Visit her at www.elizabethbevarly.com (http://www.elizabethbevarly.com) for news about current and upcoming projects, for book, music and film recommendations, for recipes, and for lots of other fun stuff.
For Eli,
My greatest creation ever.
Love you, Peanut.
Contents
Cover (#u0af7e21c-df8e-5898-ab18-4ed3e5612641)
Back Cover Text (#u318927b3-1091-58d9-8f75-484ecce288d2)
Introduction (#ue2280a23-fba7-58d7-89df-83453cdd26cf)
Title Page (#u72f98987-ac89-5d50-b633-d357a5f6860c)
About the Author (#ue3a5191c-c627-5efa-8dbc-b5c00ebb1de6)
Dedication (#ufb05ed6e-bc91-5858-95ae-f59fff4f93fa)
One (#u31543b48-51c7-5003-837a-d022b16b0b5e)
Two (#uebf7f0f6-7c01-5c91-bcfc-4ed4aedead12)
Three (#u73df78d7-9dae-5ea2-9d69-ad3391270f48)
Four (#litres_trial_promo)
Five (#litres_trial_promo)
Six (#litres_trial_promo)
Seven (#litres_trial_promo)
Eight (#litres_trial_promo)
Nine (#litres_trial_promo)
Ten (#litres_trial_promo)
Extract (#litres_trial_promo)
Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)
One (#ufd32c605-406a-5634-b386-3da22488176a)
Really, it wasn’t the gaping hole in the shirt and pants that troubled Hannah Robinson most. It wasn’t the bloodstain, either. She’d seen worse. No, what troubled her most was how little Yeager Novak seemed to be bothered by the six tidy stitches binding his flesh just north of the waistband of his silk boxers. Then again, as far as Yeager’s garments were concerned, this was par for the course. Such was life sewing for a tailor whose most profitable client made his living at cheating death—and planning similar travel adventures for others—then brought in what was left of his clothing after the most recent near miss to have them mended. Or, in the case of the shirt, completely recreated from scratch.
Yeager towered over her from her current position kneeling before him, tape measure in hand. But then, he towered over her when she was standing, too. Shoving a handful of coal-black hair off his forehead, he gazed down at her with eyes the color of sapphires and said, “I’ll never let a bull get that close to me again.” He darted his gaze from the stitches on his torso to the ruined clothing on the floor. “That was just a little too close for comfort.”
Hannah blew a dark blond curl out of her eyes and pushed her reading glasses higher on her nose. “That’s what you said last year when you ran with the bulls.”
He looked puzzled. “I did?”
“Yes. It was the first time you came to see us here at Cathcart and Quinn, because your previous tailor told you to take a hike when you brought in one too many of his masterpieces to be mended.” She arched a brow in meaningful reminder. “Except when you were in Pamplona last July, you escaped into a cantina before the bull was able to do more than tear the leg of your trousers.”
“Right,” he said, remembering. “That was where I met Jimena. Who came back to my hotel with me while I changed my clothes. And didn’t get back into them for hours.” His expression turned sublime. “I probably should have sent that bull a thank-you note.”
Even after knowing him for a year, Hannah was still sometimes surprised by the frankness with which Yeager talked about his sex life. Then again, his personal life sounded like it was almost as adventurous as his professional life, so maybe he had trouble distinguishing between the two on occasion.
“Or at least sent Jimena a text that said adios,” Hannah said, striving for the same matter-of-factness and not sure if she quite managed it.
He grinned. “Hey, don’t worry about Jimena. She got what she wanted, too.”
I’ll bet, Hannah thought, her gaze traveling to the elegant bumps of muscle and sinew on his torso. Yeager Novak might well have been sculpted by the hands of the gods. But the scar left behind by his latest stitches would be in good company, what with the jagged pink line marring the flesh above his navel and the puckered arc to their left. He had scars all over his body, thanks to his extreme adventurer ways. And thanks to his total lack of inhibition when it came to being fitted for clothes, Hannah had seen all of them.
“So you think you can fix the shirt and pants?” he asked.
“The pants will be fine,” she told him. “They just need a good washing. But the shirt is a goner.” Before he could open his mouth to protest, she added, “Don’t worry, Mr. Novak. I can make a new one that will look just like it.”
He threw her an exasperated look. “How many times have I told you to call me Yeager?”
“Lots,” she replied. “And, just like I told you all those other times, it’s Mr. Cathcart’s and Mr. Quinn’s policy to use ‘Mr.’ or ‘Ms.’ with all of our clients.”
Just like it was Cathcart and Quinn policy that Hannah wear the ugly little smock she had to wear while working and always keep her hair confined, as if the shop’s sole female employee was a throwback to the Industrial Revolution.
“Anyway,” she continued, “I learned pretty quickly to keep all of your patterns and cut enough fabric for two garments whenever I make one.”
He smiled in a way that was nothing short of devastating. “And I love you for it,” he told her.
She smiled back. “I know.”
Yeager told Hannah he loved her all the time. He loved her for making him clothes that fit like a glove. He loved her for mending them when he thought he’d ruined them. He loved her for being able to remove bloodstains, oil stains, pampas stains, baba ghanoush stains, walrus stains...stains from more sources than any normal human being saw in a lifetime. And, hey, she loved Yeager, too. The same way she loved cannoli and luna moths and sunsets—with a certain sense of awe that such things even existed in the world.
She went back to measuring his inseam, pretending the action commanded every scrap of her attention when, by now, she had Yeager’s measurements memorized. There was no reason he had to know that, was there? Sometimes a girl had to do what a girl had to do. Especially when said girl was between boyfriends. Like eight months between boyfriends. None of whom had torsos roped with muscle or smelled like a rugged, windswept canyon.
“Have you ever been to Spain, Hannah?” Yeager asked.
“I lived for a while in what used to be Spanish Harlem,” she told him as she penned his inseam measurement onto the back of her hand. She lifted the tape measure to his waist. “Does that count?”
He chuckled. “No. You should go to Spain. It’s an incredible country. Definitely in my top five favorite places to visit.”
Hannah would have told him her top five were Queens, Manhattan, Brooklyn, the Bronx and Staten Island, since she’d never ventured outside the five boroughs of New York. For fifteen of her first eighteen years, it was because she’d been a ward of the state, and even though she’d been shuffled around a lot during that time, she’d never landed outside the city’s jurisdiction. For the last nine years, she hadn’t had the funds to pay for something as frivolous as travel. What didn’t go to keeping herself housed and fed went toward funding the business she’d started out of her Sunnyside apartment. Things like travel could wait until after she was the toast of the New York fashion industry.
“What are your other top four favorite places?” she asked.
She was going to go out on a limb and say that, to a man who’d built a billion-dollar company out of creating extreme adventure vacations for other alpha types, Sunnyside and what used to be Spanish Harlem probably weren’t going to make the cut.
He didn’t even have to think about his response. “New Zealand, Slovenia, Chile and Iceland. But ask me tomorrow and it could be a whole different list.”
Hannah jotted the last of his measurements onto the back of her hand with the others, returned the pen to its perennial place in the bun she always wore for work and stood. Yep, Yeager still towered over her. Then again, since she stood five-two, most people did.
“All done,” she told him. Reluctantly she added, “You can get dressed now.”
He nodded toward the clothes on the floor. “Thanks for taking care of this.”
“No problem. But you know, you could save a lot of money on tailoring if you stayed in New York for more than a few weeks at a time.”
“There’s no way I can stay anywhere for more than a few weeks at a time,” he said. “And I won’t apologize for being an adventurer.”
Hannah would never ask him to. She couldn’t imagine Yeager sitting behind a desk punching a keyboard or standing on an assembly line screwing in machine parts. It would be like asking Superman to work as a parking attendant.
“All I’m saying is be careful.”
He flinched. “Those are the last two words somebody like me wants to hear.”
And they were the two words Hannah lived by. Not that she was a fearful person by any stretch of the imagination. You didn’t survive a childhood and adolescence as a ward of the state by being timid. But after nearly a decade on her own, she’d carved out a life for herself that was quiet, steady and secure, and she was careful not to jeopardize that. Oh, blissful predictability. Oh, exalted stability. Oh, revered security. She’d never had any of those things growing up. No way would she risk losing them now.
“Your pants and new shirt will be ready a week from today,” she told Yeager.
He thrust his arms through the sleeves of a gray linen shirt Hannah had made for him and began to button it. “Great. That’ll be just in time for my trip to Gansbaai. South Africa,” he clarified before she could ask. “I’m taking a group to go cage diving with great white sharks.”
“Of course you are. Because after nearly being gored to death by a gigantic bull, why wouldn’t you risk being bitten in two by a gigantic shark? It makes perfect sense.”
He grinned again. “After that, it’s off to Nunavut with a couple of buddies to climb Mount Thor.”
“I would love to see your passport, Mr. Novak. It must be as thick as a novel.”
“Yeah, it is. Like Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix size.”
And the stories it could tell were probably every bit as fantastic.
“Well, have a good time,” she told him. “I’ll be at home, inventorying my swatches and organizing my bobbins.”
He threw her one last smile as he reached for his charcoal trousers—also fashioned by Hannah. “And you say I live dangerously.”
The bell above the shop entrance jingled, making her turn in that direction. “Excuse me,” she said as she backed toward the fitting room entrance. “Your claim check will be at the register when you’re ready.”
* * *
The minute Hannah disappeared through the fitting room door, Yeager Novak’s mind turned to other, more pressing, topics. When your life’s work was creating extreme adventures for wealthy clients, you had to make plans, sometimes years in advance. In putting together vacation packages, he had a million things to consider—a country’s culture and politics, its potential safety, its seasonal climate, how many people needed to be bribed for all the requisite permissions... The list was endless. And he always tried out the travel packages he designed for his clients first, to be sure they were doable without risk to life or limb.
Well, without too much risk to life or limb. No risk kind of defeated the purpose.
He knotted his tie, grabbed his suit jacket and headed for the register. Hannah’s blond head was bent over her receipt pad as she wrote in her slow, precise hand, a few errant curls springing free of the prim little bun she always wore. Nice to know there was at least some part of her that wanted to break free of her buttoned-up, battened-down self. He’d never met anyone more straitlaced than Hannah...whatever her last name was.
As if she’d heard him say that out loud, she suddenly glanced up, her silver-gray eyes peering over the tops of her black half-glasses. She did have some beautiful eyes, though, he’d give her that. He’d never seen the color on another human being. But the rest of her... The shapeless jacket-thing she wore completely hid her gender, and if she was wearing any makeup, he sure couldn’t see it. He guessed she was kind of cute in a wholesome, girl-next-door type of way, if you went for the wholesome, girl-next-door type—which he didn’t. He liked talking to her, though. She was smart and funny. And, man, did her clothes make him look good. He knew nothing about sewing or fashion, but he knew excellent work when he saw it. And Hannah Whatshername definitely did excellent work.
“A week from today,” she reiterated as she tore the receipt from the pad and extended it toward him.
“Thanks,” he replied as he took it from her. “Any chance you could make a second shirt like it by then? Just in case?” Before she could object—because he could tell she was going to—he added, “There could be an extra hundred bucks in it for you.”
She bit her lip thoughtfully, a gesture that was slightly—surprisingly—erotic. “I’m not allowed to take tips.”
“Oh, c’mon. I don’t see Leo or Monty around.”
“Mr. Cathcart is on a buying trip to London,” she said. “And Mr. Quinn is at lunch.”
“Then they’ll never know.”
She expelled the kind of sigh someone makes when they know they’re breaking the rules but they badly need cash for something. Yeager was intrigued. What could Ms. Goody Two-shoes Hannah need money for that would make her break the rules?
With clear reluctance she said, “I can’t. I’m sorry. I just don’t have time to do it here—we’re so backlogged.” Before he could protest, she hurried on. “However, I happen to know a seamstress who does freelance work at home. She’s very good.”
Yeager shook his head. “No way. I don’t trust anyone with my clothes but you.”
“No, you don’t understand, Mr. Novak. I guarantee you’ll like this woman’s work. I know her intimately.”
“But—”
“You could even say that she and I are one of a kind. If you know what I mean.”
She eyed him pointedly. And after a moment, Yeager understood. Hannah was the one who did freelance work at home. “Gotcha.”
“If you happened to do a search on Craigslist for, say, ‘Sunnyside seamstress,’ she’d be the first listing that pops up. Ask if she can make you a shirt by next week for the same price you’d pay here, and I guarantee she’ll be able to do it.”
Yeager grabbed his phone from his pocket and pulled up Craigslist. He should have known Hannah would live in Sunnyside. It was the closest thing New York had to Small Town America.
“Found you,” he said.
She frowned at him.
“I mean...found her.”
“Send her an email from that listing. I’m sure she’ll reply when she gets home from work tonight.”
He was already typing when he said, “Great. Thanks.”
“But you’ll have to pick it up at my—I mean, her place,” she told him. “She can’t bring it here, and she doesn’t deliver.”
“No problem.”
He sent the email then returned his phone to one pocket as he tugged his wallet from another. He withdrew five twenties from the ten he always had on him and placed them on the counter. Hannah’s eyes widened at the gesture, but she discreetly palmed the bills and tucked them into her pocket.
Even so, she asked, “Don’t you want to wait until you have the extra shirt?”
He shook his head. “I trust you.”
“Thanks.”
“No, thank you. That was my favorite shirt. It will be nice to have a spare. Not that I’ll be letting any sharks near my clothes, but you never know when you’ll meet another Jimena.”
She nodded, but he was pretty sure it wasn’t in understanding. Someone like her probably wouldn’t let a lover that spontaneous and temporary get anywhere near her. She was way too buttoned-up, battened-down and straitlaced for idle encounters, regardless of how beautiful her eyes were or how erotically she bit her lip. Hannah, he was certain, only dated the same kind of upright, forthright, do-right person she was. To Yeager, that would be a fate worse than death.
“I’ll see you in a week,” he said, lifting a hand in farewell.
As he made his way to the door, he heard her call after him, “Have a great day, Mr. Novak! And remember to look both ways before you cross the street!”
* * *
A week later—the day Yeager was scheduled to pick up his new shirt at her apartment, in fact—Hannah was in the back room of Cathcart and Quinn, collecting fabric remnants to take home with her. Everyone else had gone for the day, and she was counting the minutes until she could begin closing up shop, when the store’s entrance bell rang to announce a customer. Hoping it would just be someone picking up an alteration, she headed out front.
She didn’t recognize the man at the register, but he had the potential to become a client, judging by his bespoke suit from... Aponte’s, she decided. It looked like Paolo’s work. The man’s blond hair was cut with razor-precision, his eyes were cool and keen, and his smile was this just side of dispassionate.
“Hello,” Hannah greeted him as she approached. “May I help you?”
“Hannah Robinson?” he asked. Her surprise that he knew her must have been obvious, because he quickly added, “My name is Gus Fiver. I’m an attorney with Tarrant, Fiver and Twigg. We’re a probate law firm here in Manhattan.”
His response only surprised her more. She didn’t have a will herself, and she knew no one who might have included her in one. Her lack of connections was what had landed her in the foster care system as a three-year-old, after her mother died with no surviving relatives or friends to care for her. And although Hannah hadn’t had any especially horrible experiences in the system, she could safely say she’d never met anyone there who would remember her in their last wishes. There was no reason a probate attorney should know her name or where she worked.
“Yes,” she said cautiously. “I’m Hannah Robinson.”
Gus Fiver’s smile grew more genuine at her response. In a matter of seconds he went from being a high-powered Manhattan attorney to an affable boy next door. The change made Hannah feel a little better.
“Excellent,” he said. Even his voice was warmer now.
“I’m sorry, but how do you know me?” she asked.
“My firm has been looking for you since the beginning of the year. And one of our clients was looking for you long before then.”
“I don’t understand. Why would anyone be looking for me? Especially when I’m not that hard to find?”
Instead of answering her directly he said, “You did most of your growing up in the foster care system, yes?”
Hannah was so stunned he would know that about her—few of her friends even knew—that she could only nod.
“You entered the program when you were three, I believe, after your mother, Mary Robinson, died.”
Her stomach knotted at the realization that he would know about her past so precisely. But she automatically replied, “Yes.”
“And do you remember what your life was like prior to that?”
“Mr. Fiver, what’s this about?”
Instead of explaining he said, “Please, just bear with me for a moment, Ms. Robinson.”
Hannah didn’t normally share herself with other people until she’d known them for some time, and even then, there were barriers it took a while for most people to breach. But there was something about Gus Fiver that told her it was okay to trust him. To a point.
So she told him, “I only have a few vague memories. I know my mother was a bookkeeper for a welding company on Staten Island and that that’s where she and I were living when she died. But I only know that because that’s what I’ve been told. I don’t have any mementos or anything. Everything she owned was sold after her death, and what was left in her estate after it was settled was put into trust for me until I turned eighteen and was booted out of the system.”
Not that there had been much, but it had allowed Hannah to start life on her own without a lot of the stress she would have had otherwise, and she’d been enormously grateful for it.
“Is your mother the one you inherited your eyes from?” Mr. Fiver asked. “I don’t mean to be forward, but they’re such an unusual color.”
Hannah had fielded enough remarks about her singularly colored eyes—even from total strangers—that she no longer considered them forward. “No,” she said. “My mother had blue eyes.”
“So you at least remember what she looked like?”
Hannah shook her head. “No. But I take back what I said about mementos. I do have one. A photograph of my mother that one of the social workers was kind enough to frame and give to me before I went into the system. Somehow, I always managed to keep it with me whenever they moved me to a new place.”
This interested Mr. Fiver a lot. “Is there any chance you have this photograph with you?”
“I do, actually.” Hannah had taken it out of the frame when she was old enough to have a wallet, because she’d always wanted to carry the photo with her. It was the only evidence of her mother she’d ever had.
“May I see it?” Mr. Fiver asked.
Hannah was about to tell him no, that this had gone on long enough. But her damnable curiosity now had the better of her, and she was kind of interested to see where this was going.
“It’s in my wallet,” she said.
He smiled again, notching another chink in her armor that weakened her mettle. “I don’t mind waiting.”
She retrieved her purse from beneath the counter and withdrew the photo, now creased and battered, from its plastic sheath to hand to Mr. Fiver. It had been cropped from what must have been a studio portrait, and showed her mother from the chest up, along with the shoulder of someone sitting next to her.
“And your father?” he asked as he studied the picture.
“I didn’t know him,” Hannah said. “He’s listed as a Robert Williams on my birth certificate, but do you know how many Robert Williamses there are in New York alone? No one ever found him. I never had any family but my mother.”
Mr. Fiver returned the photo to her. “The reason we’ve been looking for you, Ms. Robinson, is because we have a client whose estate we’ve been managing since his death while we search for his next of kin. That’s sort of our specialty at Tarrant, Fiver and Twigg. We locate heirs whose whereabouts or identities are unknown. We believe you may be this client’s sole heir.”
“I’m sorry to disappoint you, Mr. Fiver, but that’s impossible. If my mother had had any family, the state would have found them twenty-five years ago.”
He opened his portfolio and sifted through its contents, finally withdrawing an eight-by-ten photo he held up for Hannah to see. It was the same picture of her mother she had been carrying her entire life, but it included the person who’d been cropped from her copy—a man with blond hair and silver-gray eyes. Even more startling, a baby with the exact same coloring was sitting in her mother’s lap.
Her gaze flew to Mr. Fiver’s. But she had no idea what to say.
“This is a photograph of Stephen and Alicia Linden of Scarsdale, New York,” he said. “The baby is their daughter, Amanda. Mrs. Linden and Amanda disappeared not long after this picture was taken.”
A strange buzzing erupted in Hannah’s head. How could Gus Fiver have a photo of her mother identical to hers? Was the baby in her mother’s lap Hannah? Was the man her father? What the hell was going on?
All she could say, though, was, “I don’t understand.”
“One day, while Stephen Linden was at work in the city,” Mr. Fiver continued, “Alicia bundled up ten-month-old Amanda and, with nothing but the clothes on their backs, left him.” He paused for a moment, as if he were trying to choose his next words carefully. “Stephen Linden was, from all accounts, a...difficult man to live with. He...mistreated his wife. Badly. Alicia feared for her and her daughter’s safety, but her husband’s family was a very powerful one and she worried they would hinder her in her efforts to leave him. So she turned to an underground group active in aiding battered women, providing them with new identities and forged documents and small amounts of cash. With the assistance of this group, Alicia and Amanda Linden of Scarsdale were able to start a new life as Mary and Hannah Robinson of Staten Island.”
By now, Hannah was reeling. She heard what Mr. Fiver was saying, but none of it quite registered. “I... I’m sorry, Mr. Fiver, but this... You’re telling me I’m not the person I’ve always thought I was? That my whole life should have been different from the one I’ve lived? That’s just... It’s...”
Then another thought struck her and the air rushed from her lungs in a quick whoosh. Very softly, she asked, “Is my father still alive?”
At this, Mr. Fiver sobered. “No, I’m sorry. He died almost twenty years ago. Our client, who initially launched the search for you, was your paternal grandfather.” He paused a telling beat before concluding, “Chandler Linden.”
Had there been any breath left in Hannah, she would have gasped. Everyone in New York knew the name Chandler Linden. His ancestors had practically built this city, and, at the time of his death, he’d still owned a huge chunk of it.
Although she had no idea how she managed it, Hannah said, “Chandler Linden was a billionaire.”
Mr. Fiver nodded. “Yes, he was. Ms. Robinson, you might want to close up shop early today. You and I have a lot to talk about.”
Two (#ufd32c605-406a-5634-b386-3da22488176a)
Yeager Novak didn’t find himself in Queens very often. Or, for that matter, ever. And he wasn’t supposed to be here now. His assistant, Amira, was supposed to be picking up his shirt at Hannah’s. But she’d needed to take the afternoon off for a family emergency, so he’d told her he would deal with whatever was left on his agenda today himself—not realizing at the time that that would include going to Queens. By train. Which was another place he didn’t find himself very often. Or, for that matter, ever. This time of day, though, the train was fastest and easiest, and he needed to be back in Manhattan ASAP.
But as he walked down Greenpoint Avenue toward 44th Street, he couldn’t quite make himself hurry. Queens was different from Manhattan—less frantic, more relaxed. Especially now, at the end of the workday. The sun was hanging low in the sky, bathing the stunted brick buildings in gold and amber. Employees in storefronts were turning over Closed signs as waiters at cafés unfolded sandwich boards with nightly specials scrawled in bright-colored chalk. People on the street actually smiled and said hello to him as he passed. With every step he took, Yeager felt like he was moving backward in time, and somehow, that made him want to go slower. Hannah’s neighborhood was even more quaint than he’d imagined.
He hated quaint. At least, he usually did. Somehow the quaintness of Sunnyside was less off-putting than most.
Whatever. To each his own. Yeager would suffocate in a place like this. Quiet. Cozy. Family friendly. Why was a healthy, red-blooded young woman with beautiful silver-gray eyes and a surprisingly erotic lip nibble living somewhere like this? Not that anything Hannah did was Yeager’s business. But he did kind of wonder.
Her apartment was on the third and uppermost floor of one of those tawny brick buildings, above a Guatemalan mercado. He rang her bell and identified himself, and she buzzed him in. At the top of the stairs were three apartments. Hannah had said hers was B, but before he even knocked on the door, she opened it.
At least, he thought it was Hannah who opened it. She didn’t look much like the woman he knew from Cathcart and Quinn. The little black half-glasses were gone and the normally bunned-up hair danced around her shoulders in loose, dark gold curls. In place of her shapeless work jacket, she had on a pair of striped shorts and a sleeveless red shirt knotted at her waist. As small as she was, she had surprisingly long legs and they ended in feet whose toenails were an even brighter red than her shirt.
But what really made him think someone else had taken Hannah’s place was her expression. He’d never seen her be anything but cool and collected. This version looked agitated and anxious.
“Hannah?” he asked, just to be sure.
“Yeah, hi,” she said. She sounded even more on edge than she looked. “I’m sorry. I totally forgot about your pickup tonight.”
“Didn’t my assistant email you yesterday to confirm?”
“She did, actually. But today was...” She shook her head as if trying to physically clear it of something. But that didn’t seem to work, because she still looked distracted. “I got some, um, very weird news today. But it’s okay, your shirt is finished.” She hurried on. “I just...” She inhaled a deep breath, released it in a ragged sigh...and still looked as if she were a million miles away. “I forgot about the pickup,” she said again. Almost as an afterthought, she added, “Come on in.”
She opened the door wider and stepped back to get out of his way. Good thing, too, since the room he walked into was actually an alcove that was barely big enough to hold both of them. As he moved forward, Hannah wedged herself behind him to close the door, brushing against him—with all that naked skin—as she did. It was then he noticed something about her he’d never noticed before. She smelled like raspberries. Really ripe, really succulent, raspberries.
Another step forward took him into her apartment proper, but it wasn’t much bigger than the alcove and seemed to consist of only one room. Yeager looked for doors that would lead to others, but saw only one, which had to be for the bathroom. The “kitchen” was a couple of appliances tucked into another alcove adjacent to the single window in the place, one that offered a view of a building on the next street. The apartment was furnished with the bare essentials for living and the tools of a seamstress’s trade—a sewing machine and ironing board, a trio of torso stands for works-in-progress, stacks of fabric and a rack of plastic-covered garments.
“I guess my place is a little smaller than yours, huh?” Hannah asked, obviously sensing his thoughts.
Smaller than his place? Her apartment was smaller than his bedroom. But all he said was, “A bit.”
She squeezed out of the alcove, past him—leaving that tantalizing scent of raspberries in her wake—and strode to the rolling rack, from which she withdrew one of the plastic-covered garments. As he followed, he noted a half-empty bottle of wine on one of the end tables by the love seat. He thought maybe he’d interrupted a romantic evening she was spending with someone else—the bathroom door was closed—then noted that the near-empty glass sitting behind the bottle was alone.
“Do you want to try it on before you take it?” she asked. “Just to be sure it fits?”
Yeager figured it probably wasn’t a bad idea, since he was leaving in two days for South Africa and there wouldn’t be time for Amira to come back for it if it needed alterations. Truth be told, he also wasn’t sure he should leave Hannah alone just yet, what with the wine, the distraction and the anxious look...and, okay, all that naked skin.
“Yeah, I guess I should, just in case,” he replied.
As she removed the plastic from the shirt, he tossed his suit jacket onto the love seat, tugged free his tie and unbuttoned the shirt he was wearing. By the time he shed it, she was holding up his new one for him to slip on. She looked a little steadier now and seemed more like herself. His concern began to ease a bit. Until he drew near and saw that her eyes housed a healthy bit of panic.
It was obvious there was something bothering her. A lot. Yeager told himself that whatever it was, it was none of his business. But that didn’t keep him from wondering. Boyfriend troubles? Family conflicts? Problems at work? He knew nothing about her outside her job. Because there was no reason for him to know anything about her outside her job. There was no reason for him to care, either. That wasn’t to be cold or unfeeling. That was just how he was. He didn’t care about much of anything outside his immediate sphere of existence. Somehow, though, he suddenly kind of cared about Hannah.
“I’m sorry,” she said as he thrust his arm through the shirt’s sleeve, “but the fabric isn’t exactly the same as the original. Since I was moonlighting, I couldn’t use what we have at work, and that came from Portugal. But I found a beautiful dobby in nearly the same color. I hope it’s okay. It brought the price down a bit.”
Yeager couldn’t have cared less about the price. He cared about quality and style. Maybe it was superficial, but a man who was the face of a Fortune 500 company had to look good. And, thanks to Hannah, he always did.
“No, this is good,” he said. “It’s got a great texture. I actually like this one better than the one you made for me at Cathcart and Quinn. Why aren’t you the one they’re sending on buying trips to London and Portugal?”
“You’ll have to ask Mr. Cathcart that question,” she said in a way that made him think she’d already broached the topic with her employer and been shot down. Probably more than once.
“Maybe I will,” he said, wondering about his sudden desire to act as her champion. “Or maybe you should just open your own business.”
As she studied the fit of his shirt, she gestured to the rack of clothes against the wall. “I’m trying.”
Out of curiosity, Yeager walked over to look at what she’d made for her other clients. He was surprised to see that the majority of items hanging there were children’s clothes.
“You mostly make stuff for kids?” he asked.
Instead of replying, Hannah moved to her sewing machine to withdraw a business card from a stack and handed it to Yeager. It was pale lavender, imprinted with the words, Joey & Kit, and decorated with a logo of a kangaroo and fox touching noses. Below them was the slogan, “Glad rags for happy kids.” At the bottom were addresses for a website, an email and a PO box.
“This is your business?” Yeager asked, holding up the card.
She nodded. “I’m an S-corporation. I trademarked the name and logo and everything.”
“Why kids’ clothes? Seems like other areas of fashion would be more profitable.”
“They would be,” she said. He waited for her to elaborate. She didn’t. He was about to ask her to when she told him, “Turn around, so I can make sure the back darts are aligned.”
He did as she instructed, something that left him looking out the apartment’s solitary window. He didn’t know why, but it really bothered him that Hannah only had one window from which to view the world. His West Chelsea penthouse had panoramic views of Manhattan and the Hudson from floor-to-ceiling windows in most rooms—including two of the three-and-a-half baths. Not that he spent much time at home, but his office in the Flatiron District had pretty breathtaking views of the city, too. No matter where Yeager went in the world, he always made sure he had a lot to look at. Mountain ranges that disappeared into clouds, savannas that dissolved into the horizon, oceans that met the stars in the distant night sky. Some of the best parts of adventure travel were just looking at things. But Hannah lived her life in a square little room with one window that opened onto a building across the way.
“You know, I don’t usually have to put darts in a man’s shirt,” she said. “But the way you’re built...broad shoulders, tapered waist...”
Yeager told himself he only imagined the sigh of approval he heard.
“Anyway,” she went on, “I think this looks good.”
She ran her hand down the length of his back on one side, then up again on the other, smoothing out the seams in question. The gesture was in no way protracted or flirtatious. Her touch was deft and professional. Yet, somehow, it made his pulse twitch.
She stepped in front of him, gave him a final once-over with eyes that still looked a little haunted, and told him, “You’re good to go.”
It was one of his favorite statements to hear. Yeager loved going. Anywhere. Everywhere. Whenever he could. Strangely, though, in that moment, he didn’t want to go. He told himself it was because, in spite of the relative ease of the last few minutes, there was still something about Hannah that was...off. He’d never seen her be anything but upbeat. This evening, she was subdued. And that just didn’t sit well with him.
Before he realized what he was doing, he asked, “Hannah, is everything okay?”
Her eyes widened in now unmistakable panic. She opened her mouth to reply but no words emerged. Which may have been his biggest tip-off yet that there was something seriously wrong. Hannah was never at a loss for words. On the contrary, she was generally one of those people who had a snappy reply for everything.
He tried again. “You just don’t seem like yourself tonight.”
For a moment she looked as if she was going to deny anything was wrong. Then she made a defeated sound and her whole body seemed to slump forward.
“Is this about the weird news you got today?” he asked.
She nodded, but instead of looking at him, she lowered her gaze to the floor. Hannah never did that. She was one of the most direct people he knew, always making eye contact. It was one of the things he loved about her. So few people did that.
“What kind of news was it?”
She hesitated again, still not looking at him. Finally she said, “The kind that could not only completely change my future, but also confirmed that my past could have—should have—been a lot better than it was.”
“I’m not sure I understand.”
At this, she emitted a strangled chuckle completely devoid of humor. “Yeah, I know the feeling.”
Maybe the wine had affected her more than he thought. Probably, he ought to just drop it and pay her for his shirt. Definitely, he should be getting the hell out of there.
Instead he heard himself ask, “Do you want to talk about it?”
At that, she finally pulled her gaze from the floor and met his squarely...for all of a nanosecond. Then she lifted both hands to cover her beautiful silver-gray eyes. Then her lips began to tremble. Then she sniffled. Twice. And that was when Yeager knew he was in trouble. Because Hannah crying was way worse than Hannah panicking. Panic eventually subsided. But sadness... Sadness could go on forever. No one knew that better than he did.
She didn’t start crying, though. Not really. After a moment she wiped both eyes with the backs of her hands and dropped them to hug herself tight. But that gesture just made her look even more lost. Especially since her eyes were still damp. Something in Yeager’s chest twisted tight at seeing her this way. He had no idea why. He barely knew her. He just hated seeing anyone this distraught.
“Holy crap, do I want to talk about it,” she said softly. “I just don’t have anyone to talk about it with.”
That should have been his cue to get out while he still had the chance. The last thing he had time for—hell, the last thing he wanted—was to listen to someone whose last name he didn’t even know talk about her life-altering problems. He should be heading for the front door stat. And he would. Any minute now. Any second now. In five, four, three, two...
“Give me one minute to change my shirt,” he told her, wondering what the hell had possessed him. “Then you can tell me about it.”
* * *
While Yeager changed his shirt, Hannah moved to the love seat, perching herself on the very edge of the cushion and wondering what just happened. One minute, she’d been double-checking the fit of his shirt and had been almost—almost—able to forget, if only for a moment, everything she’d learned today from Gus Fiver. The next minute, Yeager had been offering a sympathetic shoulder to cry on.
Not that she would cry on him. Well, probably not. She didn’t want to ruin his shirt. But she appreciated his offer to hang around for a little while. She hadn’t felt more alone in her life than she had over the last few hours.
She’d taken Gus Fiver’s advice to close Cathcart and Quinn early, then had sat with him in the empty shop for nearly an hour as he’d given her all the specifics about her situation. A situation that included the most stunning good news/bad news scenario she’d ever heard. Since then she’d been here in her apartment, combing the internet for information about her newly discovered family and mulling everything she’d learned, in the hope that it would help her make sense of the choice she had to make. Maybe someone like Yeager, who didn’t have any personal involvement, would have a clearer perspective and some decent advice.
She watched as he changed his shirt, doing her best not to stare at the cords of muscle and sinew roping his arms, shoulders and torso. But in an apartment the size of hers, there wasn’t much else to stare at. Then again, even if she’d had the frescoes of the Sistine Chapel surrounding her, it would still be Yeager that drew her eye. So she busied herself with filling her wineglass a third time, since the two glasses she’d already consumed had done nothing to take the edge off.
“You want a glass of wine?” she asked Yeager, belatedly realizing how negligent a hostess she’d been.
Also belatedly, she remembered she’d picked up the wine at Duane Reade on her way home from work. She reread the label as she placed it back on the table. Chateau Yvette claimed to be a “wine product” that paired well with pizza and beef stew. It probably wasn’t a brand Yeager normally bought for himself. But it was too late to retract the offer now.
“Yeah, that’d be great,” he said as he finished buttoning his shirt.
She retrieved another glass from the kitchen and poured the wine. By then, Yeager had draped the plastic back over his new shirt and was sitting on the love seat—taking up most of it. So much so that his thigh aligned with hers when she sat and handed him his glass. She enjoyed another healthy swig from her own and grimaced. She honestly hadn’t realized until then how, uh, not-particularly-good it was. Probably because her head had been too full of Omigod, omigod, omigod, what am I going to do?
“So what’s up?” he asked.
She inhaled a deep breath and released it slowly. It still came out shaky and uneven. Not surprising, since shaky and uneven was how she’d been feeling since Gus Fiver had dropped his Chandler Linden bombshell. There was nothing like the prospect of inheriting billions of dollars to send a person’s pulse and brain synapses into overdrive.
If Hannah actually inherited it.
She took another breath and this time when she released it, it was a little less ragged. “Have you heard of a law firm called Tarrant, Fiver and Twigg?” she asked.
Yeager nodded. “Yeah. They’re pretty high-profile. A lot of old money—big money—clients.”
“Well, I had a meeting with one of their partners this afternoon.”
Yeager couldn’t quite hide his surprise that someone like her would be in touch with such a financial powerhouse, though he was obviously trying to. Hannah appreciated his attempt to be polite, but it was unnecessary. She wasn’t bothered by being working class, nor was she ashamed of her upbringing. Even if she didn’t talk freely about her past, she’d never tried to hide it, and she wasn’t apologetic about the way she lived now. She’d done pretty well for herself and lived the best life she could. She was proud of that.
Still, she replied, “I know. They’re not exactly my social stratum. But I didn’t contact them. They contacted me.”
“About?” he asked.
“About the fact that I’m apparently New York’s equivalent to the Grand Duchess Anastasia of Russia.”
Now Yeager looked puzzled. So she did her best to explain. Except she ended up not so much explaining as just pouring out her guts into his lap.
Without naming names, and glossing over many of the details, she told him about her discovery that she’d been born to a family she never knew she had in a town she would have sworn she’d never visited. She told him about her father’s addiction and abuse and about her mother’s custodial kidnapping of her. She told him about their false identities and their move from Scarsdale to Staten Island. She told him about her mother’s death when she was three and her entry into the foster care system, where she’d spent the next fifteen years. And she told him about how, in a matter of minutes today, she went from living the ordinary life of a seamstress to becoming one of those long-lost heirs to a fortune who seemed only to exist in over-the-top fiction.
Through it all, Yeager said not a word. When she finally paused—not that she was finished talking by a long shot, because there was still so much more to tell him—he only studied her in silence. Then he lifted the glass of wine he had been holding through her entire story and, in one long quaff, drained it.
And then he grimaced, too. Hard. “That,” he finally said, “was unbelievable.”
“I know,” Hannah told him. “But it’s all true.”
He shook his head. “No, I mean the wine. It was unbelievably bad.”
“Oh.”
“Your life is... Wow.”
For a moment he only looked out at her little apartment without speaking. Then he looked at Hannah again.
And he said, “This isn’t the kind of conversation to be having over unbelievably bad wine.”
“It isn’t?”
He shook his head. “No. This is the kind of conversation that needs to be had over extremely good Scotch.”
“I don’t have any Scotch.” And even if she did, it wouldn’t be extremely good.
He roused a smile. “Then we’ll just have to go find some, won’t we?”
Three (#ufd32c605-406a-5634-b386-3da22488176a)
Instead of extremely good Scotch, they found a sufficiently good Irish whiskey at a pub up the street from Hannah’s apartment. She’d ducked into the bathroom to change before they’d left, trading her shorts for a printed skirt that matched her shirt and dipping her feet into a pair of flat sandals. By the time the bartender brought their drinks to them at a two-seater cocktail table tucked into the corner of the dimly lit bar, she was beginning to feel a little more like herself.
Until she looked at Yeager and found him eyeing her with a scrutiny unlike any she’d ever had from him before. Normally he showed her no more interest than he would...well, a seamstress who was sewing some clothes for him. Sure, the two of them bantered back and forth whenever he was in the shop, but it was the kind of exchange everybody shared with people they saw in passing on any given day—baristas, cashiers, doormen, that kind of thing. In the shop, his attention passed with the moments. But now...
Now, Yeager Novak’s undivided attention was an awesome thing. His sapphire eyes glinted like the gems they resembled, and if she’d fancied he could see straight into her soul before, now she was certain of it. Her heart began to hammer hard in her chest, her blood began to zip through her veins and her breathing became more shallow than it had been all day. This time, though, the reactions had little to do with the news of her massive potential inheritance and a lot to do with Yeager.
He must have sensed her reaction—hyperventilation was generally a dead giveaway—because he nudged her glass closer to her hand and said, “Take a couple sips of your drink. Then tell me again about how you ended up in Staten Island.”
She wanted to start talking now, but she did as he instructed and enjoyed a few slow sips of her whiskey. She wasn’t much of a drinker, usually sticking to wine or some sissy, fruit-sprouting drink. The liquor was smooth going down, warming her mouth and throat and chest. She closed her eyes to let it do its thing, then opened them again to find Yeager still studying her. She was grateful for the dim lighting of the bar. Not just because it helped soothe her rattled nerves but because it might mask the effect he was having on her.
“According to Mr. Fiver,” she said, “my mother got help from a group of women who aided other women in escaping their abusers. They paid counterfeiters to forge new identities for both of us—fake social security numbers, fake birth certificates, the works. I don’t know how my mother found them, but she needed them because my father’s family was super powerful and probably could have kept her from leaving him or, at least, made sure she couldn’t take me with her.”
“And just who was your father’s family?”
Hannah hesitated. During her internet search of her birth name, she had come across a number of items about her and her mother’s disappearance from Scarsdale a quarter century ago. Some of them had been articles that appeared in newspapers and magazines shortly after the fact, but many of them were fairly current on “unsolved mystery” type blogs and websites. It had been singularly creepy to read posts about herself from strangers speculating on her fate. Some people were convinced Stephen Linden had beaten his wife and daughter to death and disposed of their bodies, getting away with murder, thanks to his social standing. Some thought baby Amanda had been kidnapped by strangers for ransom and that her mother had interrupted the crime and been killed by the perpetrators, her body dumped in Long Island Sound. Other guesses were closer to the truth: that Alicia escaped her abusive marriage with Amanda in tow and both were living now in the safety of a foreign country.
What would Yeager make of all this?
Since Hannah had already told him so much—and still had a lot more to reveal—she said, “My father’s name was Stephen Linden. He died about twenty years ago. It was my recently deceased grandfather, Chandler Linden, who was looking for me and wanted to leave me the family fortune.”
Yeager studied her in silence for a moment. Then he said, “You’re Amanda Linden.”
She had thought he would remark on her grandfather’s identity, not hers. But she guessed she shouldn’t be surprised by his knowing about Amanda’s disappearance, too, since so many others did.
“You know about that,” she said.
He chuckled. “Hannah, everyone knows about that. Any kid who was ever curious about unsolved crimes has read about the disappearance of Amanda Linden and her mother.” He lifted a shoulder and let it drop. “When I was in middle school, I wanted to be a private investigator. I was totally into that stuff.”
“Yeah, well, I wasn’t,” she said. “I had no idea any of this happened. Let alone that it happened to me.”
She took another sip of her drink and was surprised by how much she liked the taste. Since Yeager had ordered it, it was doubtless the best this place had. Maybe her Linden genes just had a natural affinity for the finer things in life. She sipped her drink again.
“So you were destined for a life of wealth and privilege,” Yeager said, “and instead, you grew up in the New York foster care system.”
“Yep.”
“And how was that experience?”
Hannah dropped her gaze to her drink, dragging her finger up and down the side of the glass. “It wasn’t as terrible as what some kids go through,” she said. “But it wasn’t terrific, either. I mean a couple of times I landed in a really good place, with really good people. But just when I started to think maybe I’d found a spot where I fit in and could be reasonably happy for a while, I always got yanked out and put somewhere else where I didn’t fit in and wasn’t particularly happy.”
She glanced up to find that he was looking at her as if she were some interesting specimen under a microscope. A specimen he couldn’t quite figure out. So she returned her attention to her glass.
“That was the worst part, you know?” she continued. “Never feeling like I belonged anywhere. Never feeling like I had a real home or a real family. Now I know that I could have and should have—that I actually did have—both. The irony is that if I’d grown up as Amanda Linden, with all her wealth and privilege, I would have had a terrifying father who beat up my mother and very well could have come after me. Foster care was no picnic, but I was never physically abused. Dismissed and belittled, yeah. Neglected, sure. But never harmed. As Amanda, though...”
She didn’t finish the statement. She didn’t dare. She didn’t even want to think about what kind of life she might have lived if her mother hadn’t rescued her from it. What kind of life her mother had endured for years before her daughter’s safety had compelled her to run.
“Some people would argue that neglect and belittlement are harm,” Yeager said softly.
“Maybe,” she conceded. “But I’d rather be neglected and belittled and shuffled around and have nothing to my name than live in the lap of luxury and go through what my mother must have gone through to make her escape the way she did. I just wish she’d had more time to enjoy her life once she got it back.”
And Hannah wished she’d had more time herself to get to know her mother. Mary Robinson, formerly Alicia Linden, might very well have saved her daughter’s life—both figuratively and literally. Yet Hannah had no way to thank her.
“Your grandfather, Chandler Linden, was a billionaire,” Yeager said in the same matter-of-fact tone he’d been using all night.
Hannah’s stomach pitched to have the knowledge she’d been carrying around in her head all evening spoken aloud. Somehow, having it out in the open like that made it so much more real. Her heart began to thunder again and her vision began to swim. Hyperventilation would come next, so she enjoyed another, larger, taste of her drink in an effort to stave it off.
“Yeah,” she said quietly when she set her glass on the table. “He was.”
“Which means that now you’re a billionaire,” Yeager said in the same casual tone.
Oh, boy. There went her stomach again. “Well, I could be a billionaire,” she told him.
“Could be?” he echoed. “You said your grandfather bequeathed his entire estate to you. What are they waiting on? A DNA test?”
“Mr. Fiver took a sample of my saliva while we were talking,” she said. “But that’s just a formality for the courts. There’s no question I’m Amanda. I didn’t just inherit my father’s unique eye color. I also have a crescent-shaped birthmark on my right shoulder blade that shows up with some regularity in the Linden line. And, yes, my grandfather wants his entire estate to go to me. But there are certain...terms...of his will that need to be met before I can inherit.”
“What kind of terms?”
Hannah threw back the rest of her drink in one long gulp. Before her glass even hit the table, Yeager was lifting a hand to alert the bartender that they wanted another round. He even pointed at Hannah and added, “Make hers a double.”
Hannah started to tell him that wouldn’t be necessary. Then she remembered her grandfather’s demands again and grabbed Yeager’s drink, downing what was left of it, too. She would need all the false courage she could get if she was going to actually talk about this. Especially with someone like Yeager.
Once the whiskey settled in her stomach—woo, that warmth was starting to feel really good—she did her best to gather her thoughts, even though they all suddenly wanted to go wandering off in different directions. And she did her best to explain.
“Okay, so, as rich as the Lindens have always been,” she said, “they weren’t particularly, um, fruitful. I’m the last of the line. My father was an only child, and he didn’t remarry before his death. My grandfather’s sister never married or had children. Their father had twin brothers, but they both died from influenza before they were even teenagers. The Linden family tree prior to that had been growing sparser and sparser with each ensuing generation, so I’m all that’s left of them.”
Her thoughts were starting to get a little fuzzy, so Hannah drew in another long breath and let it go. There. That was better. Kind of. Where was she? Besides about to have a panic attack? Oh, right. The dried-up Linden family tree.
“Anyway...” She started again. “I guess my grandfather was sort of horrified by the idea that the world would no longer be graced with the Linden family presence—we were, I have learned, some of the best fat cats and exploiters of the proletariat out there—so he tied some strings to my inheritance.”
“What kind of strings?” Yeager asked.
“Well, actually it’s only one string,” she told him. “A string that’s more like a rope. A rope that’s tied into a noose.”
He was starting to look confused. She felt his pain.
“Hannah, I think I can safely say that I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
She tried again. “My grandfather included a condition I’ll have to meet before I can inherit the family fortune. He wanted to make sure that I, um, further the Linden line.”
“Further the line?”
She nodded. Then nodded some more. And then some more. Why couldn’t she stop nodding? And why did her head feel like it was beginning to disconnect from her body? With great effort, she stilled and tried to think of the most tactful way to tell Yeager how her grandfather had stipulated that, before she could inherit the piles and piles and piles of Linden moolah, she’d have to become a Linden baby factory.
Finally she decided on, “My grandfather has stipulated that, before I can inherit the piles and piles and piles of Linden moolah, I have to become a Linden baby factory.”
Yeager’s eyebrows shot up to nearly his hairline. “He wants you to procreate in order to inherit?”
Yeah, that would have been a much more tactful way to say it. Oh, well. “That’s exactly what he wants,” she said. “It’s what he demands. In order to inherit the family fortune, I have to either already be a mother or on my way to becoming one.”
“Can he do that?”
“Apparently so. The wording of his will was something along the lines of, if, when I was located after his death, I had a child or children, then no problem, here’s more money than you could have ever imagined having, don’t spend it all in one place.”
“But you don’t have a child or children,” Yeager pointed out.
“Nope.”
“So what happens in that case?”
“In that case, I have six months to get pregnant.”
Yeager’s eyebrows shot back up. “And what happens if you don’t get pregnant in six months?”
“Then aaaallllll the Linden money will go to charity and I’ll get a small severance package of fifty grand for my troubles, thanks so much for playing. Which, don’t get me wrong, would be great, and I’d be most appreciative, but...”
“It’s not billions.”
“Right.”
He opened his mouth to say something then closed it again. For another moment he studied her in silence. Then he said, “Well, that sucks.”
“Yeah.”
The bartender arrived with their drinks and Hannah immediately enjoyed a healthy swallow of hers.
“See, though,” she said afterward, “the problem isn’t with me having children. I’ve always planned on having kids someday. I want to have kids. I love kids. I wouldn’t even mind being a single mother, as long as I had the time and money to make sure I could do it right. Which, of course, I would, with billions of dollars. But to only have six months to make the decision and put it into action?”
“Actually, you don’t even have six months, if that’s the deadline,” Yeager said oh, so helpfully. “I mean, I’m no expert in baby-making—and thank God for that—but even I know it doesn’t always happen the first time. Or the second. Or the third. You’re going to need all the time you can get.”
Hannah closed her eyes at the reminder of what she already knew. “Thanks a lot, Grandpa. There’s nothing like the pressure of a ticking clock to bring a girl’s egg delivery to a crawl.”
She snapped her eyes open again. Oh, God, did she actually just say that out loud? When she heard Yeager chuckle, she realized she had. Then again, this whole situation was kind of comical. In an over-the-top, stranger-than-fiction, absolutely surreal kind of way.
She leaned forward and banged her head lightly against the table. In some part of her brain, she’d already realized that, if she wanted to inherit this money—and she very much wanted to inherit this money, since it would enable her to realize every dream she’d ever dreamed—she was going to have to make a decision fast and get herself in the family way as soon as possible.
But now that the rest of her brain was getting in on the action, she knew the prospects weren’t looking great. She had nothing remotely resembling a boyfriend. She didn’t even have a boy who was her friend. And only one attempt at in vitro was way beyond her financial means. She’d already checked that out, too.
Which left visits to a sperm bank, something she’d also been researching online tonight. If necessary, she could afford a few of those—barely—but if none of the efforts took, and she didn’t conceive by the six-month deadline, she would have drained what little savings she had. And fifty grand, although an impressive sum, wasn’t going to go far in New York City. These things came with no guarantees, especially if her anxiety about everything really did turn her eggs into the same kind of shrinking violets she was.
What Hannah needed was something that could counter her potentially diminished fertility. A super-tricked-out, ultra-souped-up, hypermasculine testosterone machine that could fairly guarantee to knock her up. And where the hell was she supposed to find a guy like—
She sat back up and looked at Yeager—and the super-tricked-out, ultra-souped-up, hypermasculine body that housed him. Talk about testosterone overload. The guy flew MiG 29s over the Russian tundra for kicks. He’d climbed Mt. Everest. Twice. He served himself up as shark bait on purpose, for God’s sake. The man probably produced enough testosterone for ten men. If he couldn’t put a woman in the family way, nobody could.
Maybe it was the wine. Maybe it was the whiskey. Maybe it was the wine followed by the whiskey. Or maybe it was just the unmitigated terror of having finally discovered who she was and where she belonged and everything she could attain. It wasn’t just the reclaiming of a life that had been denied her, but the promise of a happiness she never thought she would have—and realizing she could lose it all in the blink of an eye or the shrink of an egg.
And she heard herself saying, “So, Mr. Novak. Have you ever thought about donating your sperm to a good cause?”
* * *
Before he could stop himself, Yeager spat back into his glass a mouthful of whiskey, something that had never happened to him before. Then again, no one had ever asked him about his intentions for his sperm before, either, so he guessed he was entitled to this one social lapse.
As he wiped his chin with his napkin, he tried to tell himself he’d misheard Hannah’s question. “Excuse me?” he asked.
“Your sperm,” she said, enunciating the word more clearly this time. “Have you ever thought about donating it?”
So much for having misheard her. “Uh...no,” he said decisively.
She eyed him intently, her gaze never wavering from his. For a minute he thought she was going to drop it. Then she asked, “Well, would you think about it now?”
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Elizabeth Bevarly
Тип: электронная книга
Жанр: Современные любовные романы
Язык: на английском языке
Издательство: HarperCollins
Дата публикации: 16.04.2024
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О книге: A long-lost billionaire’s will leads to a baby pact.The grandfather Hannah Robinson never knew has left her billions! If she becomes pregnant within six months. Hannah yearns for safety and stability. So it’s ironic that danger-loving adrenaline junkie Yeager Novak is the perfect candidate to father her baby. Yeager’s certainly up for the task – but only if they conceive the old-fashioned way while on an epic adventure.It’s the perfect arrangement. Until Hannah realises she wants more than a family. And until Yeager realizes the dangers of risking his heart…