Her Millionaire, His Miracle

by Myrna Mackenzie

  She looked up to meet Jeremy’s grin. Lula had not been informed of any guests for lunch, she knew.

  “That’s wonderful, Eden,” Jeremy said. “Lula’s cooking is the stuff a man would kill for, DeFray. It’s not to be missed. Eden, maybe you should go see Lula and check on when we might expect to eat. Let her know that we’re done here. She’ll be thrilled at the chance to show off her skills to Jonathan, especially if she’s been slaving away all morning in order to make him something impressive.”

  Eden wanted to scowl at Jeremy for teasing her, but she gave him a sweet smile and made a humming sound that would let him know she was on to him even if he didn’t catch her mocking expression. The darn man knew that as soon as she cleared the door, she would have to sprint to the kitchen and pray that Lula could come through for her. She hoped that she hadn’t messed up too badly this time.

  The meal had been a good idea, Jeremy had to concede two hours later when DeFray finally left, although he was afraid it had put too much of a strain on Eden. Not knowing her, DeFray wouldn’t have noticed her stress, but Jeremy had been aware of it the entire morning.

  He came up behind her after DeFray had rolled off in his Jaguar. “You were pretty magnificent today. Thank you for your help.”

  “I didn’t do all that much.”

  “You made sure I didn’t fall over anything, and you made sure I didn’t look weak. DeFray is a decent guy in his way, but he’s also the sort who senses cracks in a person’s veneer and considers them a weakness. Although he must have some disabled people among his rank and file employees, he doesn’t have to interact with them one-on-one, so he doesn’t have to reveal his discomfort. With this new relationship, he and I will have several prominent meetings. He’ll want to appear confident and proud of our new relationship in front of his partners and business associates, not awkward. We wouldn’t have landed this account if the truth had been known.”

  “That’s offensive.”

  “In his case, I don’t think it’s an intentional or even a conscious thing. He’d probably be surprised and offended himself if it was brought to his attention, but he still would feel awkward in my presence if he knew the truth.”

  She frowned. “Then you shouldn’t let him have your business.”

  Jeremy laughed. “If I did a scan of every client and eliminated those who have opinions I don’t agree with, I wouldn’t have any business. You probably wouldn’t have any students or at least you wouldn’t if you decided their parents had to conform to a standard of behavior. People sometimes have biases, Eden.”

  “I know that. I don’t have to like it.”

  He smiled. “And I’m sure you try to change their opinions.”

  “Yes,” she said primly.

  “Then you’re the secret to the world improving. People like you, and teachers like you, make the world turn and change. And you did help me today. A great deal of my business is handled by my employees and salespeople. I don’t get involved unless, in prominent cases such as this one, the client insists on dealing with me personally. I’ve been able to avoid these kinds of situations for the most part, but today I couldn’t. That might have been problematic, and you know I’m not—I can’t go public with my situation. When it happens, I want to choose the time and do it my way, not have it happen accidentally. So, I needed you today. I didn’t worry with you there. I could concentrate on the things I know best and ignore my concerns that I would slip up. Thank you.”

  She sighed. “You’re welcome.”

  “Although moving our guest’s glass away from the edge of the table did go above and beyond the call of duty, I think.” Jeremy smiled. He saw Eden jerk slightly.

  A frustrated sigh slid from that pretty mouth. “Don’t remind me. I can’t believe I actually did that. It’s a teacher thing and maybe a mom thing from all the years of raising my siblings. I wasn’t even aware…I just did it. Do you think he was offended?”

  “I think he was enchanted that you cared. You do have a lot of parenting experience, don’t you? All those siblings?”

  She shrugged. “My mother wasn’t really available to do the job.” She took a deep breath. “She was an alcoholic. I don’t think I’ve ever mentioned that. To anyone, not even to Ashley, although, she knew, of course.”

  “Eden…” he said, and without thought he drew her into his arms. “I didn’t know. Of course I didn’t. Ashley wouldn’t have shared that. Your childhood must have been difficult.”

  She rested there against his heart, feeling as if she had been made to be there. “I did love her. It was a sickness she couldn’t seem to help made worse when my father left us, and I had the girls to raise. I love them to death, so it wasn’t totally awful. Some of it was pretty wonderful in ways.” She was talking fast. Too fast. He was sure that everything she said was true, but he knew her life could not have been easy.

  “Today must have been a bit of a flashback. Having someone lean and rely on you to cover for any mistakes made.”

  Immediately she pulled back. “No! Don’t think that. It wasn’t at all like that. I—you’re so obviously a master at what you do. I’ve heard all the stories about how your employees love you and your clients revere what you do. I was just there today as a helper for the show. I didn’t feel as if the weight of the whole show was on my shoulders.”

  He cupped his hands around her face. “I would never ask that of you. I don’t want to ask more of you than you feel comfortable giving, so…tell me if I ever cross the line.”

  His lips were a mere breath from hers, and he knew he was very much in danger of crossing the line right now. Her mouth was pure temptation, the scent of her drew him, enticed him. Her body felt so right this close. He wanted her closer.

  “Tell me,” he said again.

  “I will,” she said, the words coming out on a soft breath. “I promise I will.”

  The phone rang, and the sound seemed to break the spell. Jeremy nearly groaned, but immediately he released Eden and tried to forget that he had been on the verge of pulling her closer, tasting her, taking it further and touching her in ways that would have been difficult to explain or call back. Several seconds later, the intercom buzzed.

  “Mr. Fulton, that’s Mr. Leedman on the line. He wants to come over right now. He says he has something important to report to you.”

  In that instant the world turned dark. The truth marched into Jeremy’s life with a horrible, dissonant clatter. There must be a child, someone he had potentially harmed, someone whose life might be changed forever because of him, and not in a good way.

  “Tell him to come,” he told Mrs. Ruskin as he looked at Eden.

  “Do you want me to stay or go so that you can talk to Barry in private?” Eden asked.

  Jeremy’s reaction was immediate and powerful. Stay, he thought. He wanted her with him…too much and for more reasons than he cared to examine. That fact sent up red flags and told him to back off. Being the support system for others might have been the pattern of her life, but he didn’t want to blithely join the herd of people taking what she offered, then turning away. Most of all he didn’t want to start missing her when she wasn’t around.

  But this meeting was at the heart of why he’d hired her. This was just a service he was paying her for.

  “Stay.” He finally said the word. Now that he had acknowledged the danger, he could control the outcome.

  CHAPTER NINE

  “THERE’S definitely a child,” Barry had said. Eden remembered the moment so clearly. “One child.”

  The words had fallen into the room like a bomb exploding, tearing things apart and then leaving a terrible silence in its wake.

  Her glance had immediately gone to Jeremy, who was white-lipped, the muscles in his jaw taut. “You’re sure? How do you know?”

  Barry shook his head. “The first employee I talked to disappeared, but he had spoken to some of his former colleagues and there was one woman who remembered you quite well. She felt that you should know t
he truth.”

  “It was so long ago,” Eden had said. “How could she be sure?”

  Barry looked uncomfortable. “Each donor at the registry was given a code to identify him. Jeremy was…let’s just say you impressed the staff,” Barry told Jeremy.

  In other instances, this would have been a light moment, Eden thought. There was no question what Barry was referring to. Jeremy had been an impressive specimen of a man even in his younger years. Not as much as he was now, she admitted, staring at the man who crept into her most innocent dreams and turned the heat factor up many degrees. But he had always been memorable. She understood exactly what the woman had meant.

  “The staff apparently spoke freely about Donor 465 and about the lucky woman whose children would receive his DNA. This particular employee admitted she had been smitten. Donor 465 had seemed more mysterious than most, more evasive, attractive and temporary. Because he quit the program earlier than usual, the odds of positive results weren’t that great. So, when it became known that there had, in fact, been a positive result, she had noted it. The staff had discussed it. There’s no question in her mind that there was a child and only one child. Unfortunately, that’s all she knows. However, the identification code is key.”

  “I hadn’t even paid any attention to it,” Jeremy admitted. “I didn’t take note of it. That was how careless my decision to donate had been.”

  His voice was grim, and Barry left soon afterward with Jeremy’s thanks and with Barry’s promise to keep pursuing a lead to the child in question.

  After he had gone, the room went silent.

  “A child, Eden. An innocent human being,” Jeremy said.

  Eden didn’t bother saying that at least there was only one. She knew better than anyone that every child counted. So, apparently, did Jeremy. But she couldn’t leave him with this gut-wrenching guilt.

  “You know the odds. There’s a definite chance that there won’t be a problem,” she said.

  Jeremy turned toward her. The smallest of smiles lifted his lips.

  “I’ll bet you brought happiness to your sisters’ lives, despite what they had to deal with every day. You must be a heck of a good teacher. Ashley was right about you, you know.”

  In a different situation that comment might have made her day, but not today. Jeremy was bearing a heavy weight, traveling a path where she couldn’t follow, Eden thought as she left him.

  “How can I help?” she asked her silent room.

  No answers came. She was, after all, just an employee hired to do a job, and her task today had been completed. Trying to do more wouldn’t be welcome or smart.

  “So when have you ever been smart where Jeremy is concerned?” she whispered as she began to make plans.

  Jeremy sat at his desk and tried to empty his mind, but it was impossible.

  The child was real. Somewhere his defective DNA lived in another human being and changed that person’s life.

  A definite chance there would be no problem, Eden had said. Jeremy’s throat hurt at the sweetness of that statement. She was trying so hard to help him. What had he ever done to deserve that kind of genuine goodness?

  “Not a damn thing.” And too many things all his life that proved he didn’t deserve to have Eden on his side. He’d dated girls and then left them once he realized that his aunt approved of them. He’d wrecked more cars than he could remember. He’d flaunted all the rules at home and at school. He’d helped conceive a child every bit as carelessly as his poor-excuse-for-a-human-being father. None of that could be relived. Now a child or that child’s children might suffer the results of his rash actions. And Eden was worried and hurting for him. He hated that he was doing that to her.

  If there was justice in the world, he supposed his aunt was somewhere whooping it up and regaling herself with the knowledge that he was finally paying for his sins. Blindness had stopped him in his tracks. It made it impossible for him to come to a woman whole. The future was unclear in more ways than one, and he had nothing to offer.

  Jeremy wanted to yell. Instead, with the last light of day, he forced himself to do what he hadn’t done since Eden’s arrival. He stared straight ahead and took stock. The dark areas of his visual field were larger than they had been. He knew there was a clock directly in front of him, but he couldn’t see enough of it to tell the time. Carefully, he mentally measured what he could see, the area of the periphery that was still distinct.

  Smaller. A touch smaller than before.

  His heart squeezed. He battled the loneliness of his condition and came up swinging.

  “Fight, Fulton,” he ordered himself. “Keep going.”

  All right. But what could he tell the child? And what would he do when it was time to let Eden go? That time was coming up fast. Summer was slipping away, and a darkness unrelated to his blindness gripped him. He was starting to have feelings for her that couldn’t be acted on.

  Which meant that he needed to take a step back from Eden.

  It was so easy to want to do something and so difficult to actually do anything that mattered, Eden realized a few days later. The pipeline of information had stopped. Barry had nothing more to give them. Eden had no solutions. And Jeremy had been distant, cool, formal and mostly absent.

  She knew why. Jeremy had spent his life as a rebel. Stung by his aunt’s hatred, he had hit back and had unintentionally harmed a child. In his eyes, he was now every bit as selfish as his father and as cruel as his aunt.

  Eden’s heart hurt at the thought. She wanted Jeremy to revert to the laughing, carefree man who made women fall in love with him just by breathing. She missed him, but what could she do?

  Find the child. If his recipient child was found and turned out to be free from any genetic markers of the disease, that would help a lot.

  And if the opposite was true? If the child had inherited Jeremy’s condition?

  Eden closed her eyes and turned to her computer. There had to be other avenues to learn the truth, stones left unturned. She picked up her phone and called Barry.

  “There are avenues, but none of them are perfect or particularly reliable,” he told her, naming some of the steps he was taking. She wrote down Internet links and sites.

  “Barry?” she said.

  “Yes?”

  “I didn’t tell Jeremy I was calling. Just so you know.” She didn’t ask him not to tell, although she hoped he wouldn’t. It felt wrong to be following paths backward and delving into Jeremy’s past without his knowledge, but she couldn’t not try.

  “All right. I know now,” Barry said with a sigh.

  “Thank you.”

  “Just be careful, Eden. Jeremy’s not an easy man to get close to. He may seem dazzling but if you fall in love with him you might get hurt.”

  As if she hadn’t known that. “That won’t be a problem. I’m too smart to take risks,” she promised, hoping that it was true.

  The day dragged on. She went to lunch and ate alone. She went to dinner and ate alone. She stayed up all night at her computer screen. When the morning came she knew nothing more than she had known the day before.

  And still Jeremy didn’t put in an appearance. According to Mrs. Ruskin he was working in his offices. Most likely he was, given the fact that he had a new client who would be expecting results, and yet they had not discussed the child and…

  He’s cut himself off from the world, and there’s nothing to tempt him to come out, Eden thought, staring out the window to where the gardener was trimming the lawn around the yet-to-be-used climbing wall.

  A glimmer of an idea lit in her. Jeremy might beat up on himself twenty-four hours a day, but he had a protective streak for those in his care. Of course, doing what she was thinking of doing would be totally out of character. It would mean overcoming fears she didn’t want to think about. Nausea began to chase her down and attack.

  “Ignore it,” she told herself. “Don’t think. Just do.”

  Immediately, Eden stood up and rushed to her room.
The words Don’t think, don’t think, don’t think ran through her mind as she threw on jeans and a white T-shirt and hurried down the stairs.

  “Donald,” she called when she saw him. “Do you know how to use that contraption?” She pointed toward the wall that was visible from every window on the south side of the house.

  “I’ve done some climbing, and Mr. Fulton had some trainers teach me what I needed to know.”

  “Good, because I don’t have a clue. I just know I’m going up. Not too high, though.”

  “Are you sure about this?”

  She was sure she was crazy to be doing something that frightened her so much, especially when she wasn’t even remotely certain that her plan would work. Already dizziness was threatening. It was all she could do to keep herself from turning around and running back to her room. Somehow, she managed to stay put. “They even have climbing walls at schools now, Donald,” she said, trying to seem nonchalant. “Maybe I’ll be able to make use of this somewhere else someday.”

  “Okay, but you’re right that you’re not going up too high,” Donald warned her. “I like you, and Mr. Fulton has given you free rein, but I don’t like the fact that we’re doing this without his knowledge.”

  “He’s not available, Donald.”

  “I know that,” he grumbled, looking almost as unhappy as Eden felt as he showed her how to put on the harness and got her set up.

  Eden looked up the wall. It wasn’t terribly high, she supposed, but for a woman who experienced mind-numbing terror on a step ladder, the massive surface seemed threatening.

  Still, she put on her helmet, tested the feel of the harness and reached out for the first handhold. It felt very small, too inconsequential, but she placed her foot on the next foothold and drew herself up. She was officially off the ground. And feeling about as awkward and frightened as she could remember. Her stomach clenched, her head spun. Get down, go back, her brain ordered.