The Billionaire's Baby 3: A Single Dad Romance

by Lila Bella

  I knew it wasn’t going to grant me any answers, but I hoped it would relieve some of the tension I felt that kept me from being able to think clearly about the situation.

  I knew there had to be a way to get Kaylee back without involving the law or paying out any money, but it wasn’t coming to me as easily as I had hoped.

  I poured another glass and went up to the bedroom, where Hollie waited for me. She needed to know how the conversation with Marie had gone.

  It was the least I could do for someone who had put so much time into taking care of my daughter, and who had been so worried about her since her mother had come back into the picture.

  I shook my head and chuckled on the way upstairs as I considered again that she was using Kaylee trying to extort money from me.

  Part of me couldn’t believe she’d stoop that low, though this was the woman that had abandoned her child.

  What did I expect?

  4 - Hollie

  “So, how’d it go?”

  Jude walked into the room with a glass of Scotch in his hand, looking like he wanted to forget about the conversation he’d just had on the phone, but I wasn’t going to let him off the hook that easily.

  I started on him the minute he walked into the room, before he even sat down on the bed.

  "We talked,” he said, as if trying to avoid telling me what the conversation had really been about.

  “First of all, who exactly is we?”

  “Marie and me,” he answered begrudgingly. He took a sip of his liquor as if being honest about it was taking something out of him and he needed the drink to restore his nerves.

  “Okay, that’s a good start. What did you talk about? How did it go?”

  I sat up in the middle of the bed to let him know I wasn’t going to let him gloss this over. I wanted every detail, and I was determined to get real answers from him.

  Kaylee had become my baby, too, over the last couple of weeks, whether anyone wanted to admit it or not.

  “What else would we have talked about? Getting Kaylee back, of course.”

  He sat with his back to me, slumped over, staring at the glass he held in his lap. It didn’t look like it had gone all that well.

  “You know, it’s like pulling teeth with you. What’s going on, Jude? What did she say? What is she trying to pull by coming back into the picture all of a sudden to take Kaylee away?”

  I tried not to sound too pushy, but I couldn’t help how it all came out. Dammit, I wanted to know what was going on! I wanted to be kept in the loop.

  I put my hand on his shoulder, and he almost jumped out of his skin, shrinking away from my touch at first. That didn’t deter me, though.

  I gripped him and held him where he was, scooting over on the bed to sit behind him. He was a strong, powerful man. He ran a corporation and was in charge of countless employees.

  To see him slumped over, weighed down by what was happening to us, elicited an immediate reaction within me.

  My heart went out to him in that moment, wishing there was a way I could wrap my arms around him and insulate him against everything she was trying to do to him.

  Until I could do that, however, I needed him to be open and honest with me about what was going on.

  “She’s not going to give her up without a fight,” he said.

  “A fight? She doesn’t even have a leg to stand on, right?”

  “Not at all, but I don’t think she wants to make it a legal battle,” he said.

  “Okay, now I’m confused, Jude. What’s going on? How is she trying to make this a fight?”

  His shoulders heaved as he sighed. “She asked me to deliver ten million dollars to her so we can get Kaylee back.”

  My jaw hit the mattress. “You’re kidding. She wants you to buy the baby from her? Isn’t that illegal?” I didn’t know what else to say.

  “Yep, and right now it’s that or take it to court and turn it into a legal battle that could take months to resolve at the very least.” His voice trailed off and he sipped his drink.

  I felt like he wanted to add more to what he was saying about how long the court case could take, something along the lines of not needing a nanny for that time because he didn’t have a daughter to require a nanny.

  I didn’t know why, but I was convinced our relationship was at stake as well as the rest of it.

  “What are you going to do? Surely, you’re not going to pay her ten million.”

  “No way. She’s not getting a dime. Then, again, I don’t want to take it to court. I don’t want to spend months fighting her, months that could be detrimental to Kaylee.”

  “Is there anyone you can call to get advice on other ways to handle it?”

  “Are you thinking I should handle it outside the law?” He looked at me with a smile on his face, like he was about to start laughing at any moment.

  “Yeah, pretty much. Maybe you know someone who can handle her, which would solve the problem entirely, without losing any money or going to court.”

  It made perfect sense to me that someone with as much money as he had would know who to hire in the event something like this went down.

  “I mean, I’m sure I could figure something out, but I don’t think I actually know anyone, you know?” He seemed like he was starting to consider it, though, and I felt like that was a good sign.

  “Well, look, how did all of this happen anyway?” I finally asked.

  He looked at me and cocked an eyebrow. “Do you really need me to tell you that?”

  “No, I mean from the beginning. What happened between you two to lead to this?”

  I sat back. I felt like knowing their story would help me understand what was going on between them now and possibly give me some insight into helping him solve the situation.

  “We met a couple of years ago, right after I graduated with my business degree. I was struggling to find work.” He shook his head and chuckled to himself. “I never did well working for other people. I have a hard time with authority, and Marie convinced me it’s because I need to be my own boss.”

  “That makes sense,” I agreed. “I feel like I’ve read that somewhere. People who have trouble as subordinates are the types who do well as the boss.”

  “Right. So, there I was—a kid who knew everything better than everyone else, with a successful businesswoman at my side. She helped me develop the plan for my own firm, and she even went as far as to put up most of the startup money. Now she’s saying that’s why she needs the ten mil, so she can recover from the money she put into starting my business.”

  “Was it supposed to be a loan?” I was completely caught up in his story, focusing on what happened between them more than what was going on between us at the moment.

  “Not that I knew of. No, she went into business with me. She was one of the senior partners when we opened the doors.”

  “Sounds like everything went well, then,” I remarked. I wasn’t seeing how things had turned to terribly wrong in the present yet.

  “Everything was great. She’s got an amazing mind when it comes to business. She helped me open up, helped me build it up, helped me hire the first handful of members I had. But something wasn’t right. The guys saw it and tried to warn me that she was going to be trouble. They never liked her much from the start.”

  I felt like I was in the same boat. His friends seemed not to like me much either. I didn’t say anything, though. I didn’t want to draw attention to any similarities between us, but he must have seen it in my eyes.

  “Look, because of her, they’re going to be skeptical of anyone else I bring around, so they look at you as ‘the help’ in order to establish a kind of distance between you and them. See, I had forced them to hang around Marie, and things really hadn’t gone well.” I held up a hand to stop him right there.

  “Okay, we can address that later. Let’s get back to what happened between the two of you? Everything you’ve told me so far has made it sound like you two were made for each other.
Where’s the drama? Where’s the falling apart?”

  I wasn’t enjoying the story at all. The Marie I had seen at the park, practically foaming at the mouth like a rabid dog, was nothing like the person he was describing to me.

  She’d been mad, absolutely bat shit crazy, not the reasonable, successful businessperson he was telling me about.

  “Well, after the initial success of my firm, with both of us at the head of it, I decided to ask her to marry me, and we got engaged. Then, she got pregnant with Kaylee, and that was when everything changed. She stayed home for a good chunk of her pregnancy.”

  I furrowed my brow. “Why did she do that?”

  “She didn’t want everyone to see the changes her body was going through. Basically, she didn’t want everyone to see her swell up and get fat, like pregnant women do.”

  He chuckled, like he was remembering something humorous about that time.

  “So, what you’re telling me is she went from working all the time to staying at home all the time, starting before Kaylee was even born?”

  It didn’t take a genius to see how that would have been a problem, but he had apparently missed it.

  “Yeah. I tried to convince her it wasn’t a good idea, but she was pretty adamant at the time. She stayed home and took care of the house, making sure things got done that needed done, so I didn’t see the problems right away,” he said, almost defending himself and their decision that she stay home.

  “When did it become apparent that there was a problem, Jude?”

  I tried to watch my tone. The last thing I wanted to do was make him feel like it had been his fault in any way; at the end of the day the only person responsible for Marie’s decisions was, of course Marie herself.

  Still, I couldn’t help thinking there must have been something he could have done to change the outcome of the situation and to prevent not only what happened between them, but everything that happened down the road.

  “After Kaylee was born.”

  He set his glass on the bedside table and ran a hand down his face.

  “It became apparent pretty quickly that Marie was not pleased with being a mother. She was a strong, independent woman when I met her, but when the baby came along, she didn’t have any motivation to do anything. She did what she could manage to care for Kaylee, but even that seemed minimal.”

  I didn’t want to feel any sympathy for Marie, but from what I’d heard, postpartum depression was a big deal. At the same time, though, there were supposed to be a lot of ways to treat it so the worst wouldn’t happen.

  While nothing he told me justified what she had done, I was starting to see why she might have felt the need to run off and give up everything she had. Of course, doing that would inevitably lead to needing money to bail her out of her financial woes.

  “Did you realize how bad it was before she ran off with Kaylee?” Please say you didn’t, I added in my head.

  “I had no idea. I didn’t realize most of what had been going on until I had time to look back. You know what they say—hindsight is twenty-twenty. If I had realized it sooner, I might have been able to help.”

  Of course, I realized that if he’d been able to help her before things got to the point where she was running off with their daughter, I wouldn’t have been in the picture, but at the same time, it seemed like they’d been happy until the pregnancy and the baby.

  The way I saw it, every relationship deserved the chance to work, even if that meant other opportunities wouldn’t have occurred.

  Whatever was going on between us was only relevant because of what had happened between them. I wouldn’t have even known what I would have been missing.

  “And after all of that, she ran off, leaving you with the baby,” I added.

  He nodded. “Yeah, that’s what she did. She waited until I got home one day, told me she was heading to the store, and she just never came back. I was frantic, until I finally figured out she must have done it on purpose. Now she wants all this money from me. She doesn’t even want Kaylee; she just believes holding her is an easy way to get me to pay up.”

  “Makes sense. What are you going to do?”

  “I don’t know.”

  I didn’t want to tell him, but it all seemed a lot less random all of a sudden, knowing what had been going on before.

  Ten million would have been less than a drop in the bucket for him, so I could see that being a very tempting option.

  At the same time, no matter what had happened before, it didn’t justify her going off the deep end, but what could we do?

  Hearing his story didn’t give me any insights into how to stop her, but it did make their relationship seem more tragic.

  Everything could have been prevented if she’d just received some help. I hated that for them, but I couldn’t deny that it was working out for us.

  5 - Jude

  “Meet me for lunch.”

  Marie was talking before I even got the phone to my ear. I had to listen closely to keep up with her since I was already starting off behind.

  I had no idea what she’d said before that, if anything. My first question, of course, was where we were meeting.

  “You’ll get there before I do,” she continued.

  “Where, Marie? You haven’t told me where we’re meeting.”

  “You know the place. That little café where we used to go all the time. You’ll get there before I do and sit outside. If I see anyone with you, I won’t show. I will leave, and all bets are off after that. If you come alone like you’re supposed to, we can sit down and discuss how this is going to go down.”

  “You do understand—” I started, but I stopped myself, realizing it would be to my benefit not to remind her that the police were looking for her, and that being out in the open would make it more likely for her to be recognized by the cops.

  “Understand what, Jude?”

  “You’re asking a lot, Marie. How do I know I can trust you?”

  “How do I know I can trust you? I don’t, and neither do you, so we don’t have a choice but to give each other the benefit of the doubt here, right?”

  Her stern tone reminded me of watching her cut deals when we first launched my firm.

  She’d been ruthless back in those days, and she’d apparently tapped into that part of herself again. That made her especially dangerous. I wished there was another way, but I couldn’t think of one.

  “Okay, let’s do it. I’ll see you at the café around lunchtime.”

  “Thank you.”

  She hung up again. I sighed and put the phone down. I sat behind the desk in my office, struggling in vain to get anything done that morning. Lunch was still a couple of hours away, and I knew exactly where she wanted me to meet her.

  There was a little curbside café we went to all the time when we were dating. It was a place where we’d actually gone less and less over the last couple of years, and we stopped completely while she was pregnant.

  I hadn’t gone there since the last time I’d gone with her. I’d moved on to other places for lunch, but when lunch rolled around a couple of hours later, I grabbed my suit jacket and left the office, telling my secretary I was heading out for lunch and that I would probably be late returning.

  I wasn’t supposed to tell anyone, but I texted Hollie to let her know I was meeting up with Marie. I felt like I should have texted the guys, too, but I hadn’t been able to tell them about what she’d done in the park, and I didn’t feel like texting them out of the blue like that would have been a good idea—mainly because I didn’t have time to explain it.

  The police had kept the case low profile as far as the media was concerned. More to downplay their own role, than catch Marie unawares, but I was thankful for it anyway. The last thing I needed was to have Marie take Kaylee and go underground

  I showed up and sat by myself at a table outside, ordering an iced coffee—it was a warm day and I wanted something cool to drink with my lunch—and one of their turkey sandwiches.
>
  It was a lite lunch, but something told me I wasn’t likely to be eating much of it anyway. I wondered how long it was going to be before she showed.

  I looked around, searching for her car along the street, but I didn’t see any sign of her. I didn’t see her standing anywhere watching either.

  “Here’s your sandwich, sir,” my waiter said, jolting me back to the café.

  “Hey, before you go, has anyone come in today looking for a Mr. Black, or someone named Jude?” I asked, before he could run off.

  “No, I can’t say they have, but I can check to see if anyone else has noticed.” Such a helpful kid.

  “No, never mind, it’s fine, man. It’s not that important. Thanks, anyway.”

  I dug into my sandwich, not because I was hungry, but because it was a good distraction from waiting for her to finally show up. Plus, it was a pretty good sandwich, as good I remembered.

  I sat there and ate the whole thing, looking up from time to time to see if she was around. I started to think she wasn’t going to show.

  I figured that she would send me to eat all alone at a place filled with nostalgia, a place to remember our relationship before things went bad.

  Of course, by not showing, she also reminded me of how bad things had gotten before she left, so she wasn’t reaping any benefit by making me eat one of the best turkey sandwiches in the city and drink some of the best coffee money could buy.

  If anything, the place had redeemed itself from being associated with her and might be back on my mealtime radar.

  I took the last bite and closed my eyes as I savored it. When I opened them, Marie stood in front of me, right across the table. She looked at me with a smug little grin on her face.

  But there was no baby. I furrowed my brow, wondering where she’d left Kaylee and worrying about who was watching her.

  “Where’s Kaylee?” I snapped.

  “Relax. You’re not the only one who can get a babysitter, Jude.” She sat down casually and signaled our waiter to come over.