Claiming His Secret Heir

by Joanne Rock

  Damon had gladly paid, transferring money to an offshore account on the appointed day. He’d never heard from the so-called kidnappers again.

  Pounding his way up the stairs to the main floor, he couldn’t wait to see who would have the nerve to pull a prank like this. He barreled through the handcrafted double doors that had delayed their move-in date by two weeks and stalked down the stone walkway covered in dried leaves that led to a fountain imported from India.

  He hated all of it. And he rarely had an outlet for any of the fury that had seethed in him for weeks—fury that was a welcome change from the old fears for Caroline, the guilt that he hadn’t done more to find her and the stark sense of loss...

  Holy. Hell.

  He stopped on the stone driveway leading down to the wrought iron gate.

  A woman stood outside the heavy bars, her fingers clutching the filigree that surrounded the house number in the center of the entrance. She was the right height. Even from this distance, he could recognize those dark brown eyes. The delectably full lips. The hair that had once been sun-streaked blond was now a shade of honey gold and pinned back in a way that showed hollows under cheeks formerly rounded with good health. Her frame was thinner. Her skin paler. And her expression was wary, lacking the vibrant self-confidence of the capable businesswoman he remembered.

  Yet there wasn’t a single doubt in his mind.

  Caroline Degraff had blindsided him the first time they met, igniting an incendiary passion that made him overlook every need for caution. Her father coveted Damon’s company, but it didn’t matter. Stephan Degraff had sent his smart, exquisite daughter to spy on Damon’s operation, possibly to undermine him and oust him from his own company. But who cared? Damon would have given up everything—everything—to have Caroline.

  Just when he’d thought he’d won her forever, after a honeymoon so beautiful that it hurt to recall, Caroline had vanished. She took her wallet and her car, a bag of clothes and a few prescription pills, all signs that, according to the cops, meant she left of her own volition. Her powerful father had convinced the police his daughter was entitled to her privacy and that she would file for divorce in her own time. The fact that Caroline left behind her wedding ring seemed to support the theory. Local law enforcement refused to file a missing person report, leaving Damon on his own to locate her. He’d been advised by multiple private investigators and the police not to talk to the media, so he hadn’t. A story had been leaked to the press at one point, but her father had forced the news outlet to print a retraction. His lone effort to reach out to the public—discreetly asking for any information about her from the employees who had worked with them both at Transparent—had resulted in that ransom note.

  Yet he never saw Caroline again.

  Until now.

  It occurred to him he’d stopped moving toward her. That he’d been staring at her like he’d seen a ghost for long, drawn-out moments, his head flooding with memories while his fingers ached with the need to touch her and see if she was real.

  “Caroline.” He forced himself into motion again, even though he had no idea what to say. Had she left him? Was she here for that divorce her father promised she would one day demand?

  She backed up a step from the gate as he neared. She wore jeans with threadbare knees and faded thighs that hugged her subtle curves. A gray wool sweater with fat toggle buttons kept the chill out; the temperature was in the midfifties, with a cold breeze blowing off the bay. She wore no makeup, her face looking younger even as the expression in her eyes seemed far older than he remembered. She looked wary. Cautious.

  And, if he read her expression correctly...confused. She appeared bewildered by his appearance even though she was the one who had shown up on his doorstep.

  “Damon McNeill?” she asked, her arched eyebrows knitting together as she pursed her lips.

  Just what the hell was she asking him? He noticed that one of the guys on the landscaping crew was hovering nearby, a crinkled piece of paper in his hand.

  Damon pressed a button on his phone to open the electric gate and stared down the gardener while the bars slid silently to one side. “You can leave now. Water the roses or whatever.”

  “Sure thing.” The guy nodded fast and seemed grateful for an excuse to leave, but first he ambled closer and handed Damon the faded, worn paper. “She said she found this.”

  Damon would have stuffed it in a back pocket to focus on Caroline, but the gold seal in one corner caught his eye.

  Their marriage certificate.

  “I don’t understand.” He moved closer to the wife who had once held his heart. The woman who now stared at him like a stranger. “Why did you bring this?”

  His pulse pounded hard. He braced himself to hear the words he dreaded. The news that she wanted to end their marriage legally. Forever.

  Alone on the private road that led to the mansion, she stuffed her hands in the pockets of the oversized sweater she wore, the fabric hugging her body tighter at the movement.

  There’d been a time when he would have picked her up off her feet and wrapped her in both arms. Even not knowing where she’d been, what had happened or why she’d come back now, Damon still wanted to kiss her more than he wanted explanations. Something about her body language, so hesitant, restrained him.

  “You’re Damon.” She seemed to seek confirmation, her brown eyes flecked with gold scanning his face, as if calculating the sum of his features. “I saw your photo online, but you look so much like your brother. Cameron.”

  Half brother, he silently corrected her while his brain tried to make meaning out of the nonsensical words.

  “It’s been less than a year since you saw me last. Do I look so different now?” He’d kissed her for long minutes in the airport in Florence, hating to part from her after the honeymoon. Their home in Los Altos Hills—this house—hadn’t been completed yet. So she’d gone to see a friend in London while he flew back to the States for business that couldn’t wait. Business he’d come to regret sorely in the last ten months, especially since they’d argued during the time they’d been apart and he’d always wondered if that had been the reason she left.

  As it turned out, she hadn’t just been seeing her friend, after all. She’d gone to the UK to make amends with her father, who would give anything to take control of Transparent. Stephan Degraff’s plans to oust Damon were about to come to a head one week from now at the final board meeting before the product launched.

  Had Caroline been helping her father take over Damon’s company from the start?

  “I don’t remember.” Her eyes were haunted. Scared. Unsure. “I’ve been in Mexico. With amnesia. I remembered my name two months ago, but it’s taken time to recall more than that.” She glanced up and away from him. Shut her eyes for a long moment before she began again. “I’ve had this paper ever since I woke up in a fishing village on the Baja Peninsula. But at the time, I didn’t even know that name was mine.”

  Damon could not have been more stunned if she’d been the ghost he’d first imagined. Amnesia? A bracing gust of wind sucked the breath right out of him.

  “You don’t remember me? Us?” He tried to envision what this meant for them. Behind him, he heard the sprinkler system switch on.

  “Nothing.” She shook her head slowly, a wave of her honey-gold hair bumping her cheek. “I looked you up online weeks ago, but I’ve been scared to come because there was...no mention of me being missing. No photos of us together.” She lifted her shoulders in an awkward shrug. “I thought maybe the marriage certificate was fake. Or that we divorced and you’d moved on—”

  “No.” He’d been living in a state of suspended animation without her. Hell, he couldn’t call it “living” at all. He’d spent his time chasing leads about her all over the globe, incapable of “respecting her privacy” the way her father had demanded. “I’ve searched everywhere for you.”
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  He wanted answers about where she’d been. If she’d been kidnapped or if she’d left him of her own free will. His private investigators had spent endless hours chasing down fake leads for her whereabouts—it was as if she’d wanted to purposely disappear, or someone had spent significant time making it look that way.

  He still had her wedding rings that she’d left behind.

  But he remembered reading somewhere that chasing memories wasn’t good for an amnesia victim. And didn’t the fact that she was suffering from amnesia suggest she’d been through a trauma already? The need to protect her—to make sure nothing else hurt her—overrode everything else. He needed to keep her safe and get her healthy.

  And, selfishly, he couldn’t help but see her return as a second chance.

  If she’d left him, she didn’t remember.

  Once she was well and whole again, Damon had a chance to rewrite history. To show her they could be good together again.

  To win her back.

  “I don’t know where I’ve been. My memories should come back in time.” She pulled a hand from her sweater pocket and smoothed aside the wave of hair that brushed her cheek. For a moment, he could see the old Caroline in the gesture. The vibrant, flirtatious woman who had captivated him the moment she strode into his office, demanding a position on his team. “But until they do, I’m not sure where to go. I’ve been at a shelter the last two nights.”

  The idea appalled him. How long had they been in the same state while he’d been lost in alternating bouts of grief and bitterness, not knowing what had happened to her?

  “You were right to come home.” He stepped closer, careful to give her space but needing to touch her.

  She flinched and backed up a step, reminding him that they might be married but they were still essentially strangers in her mind.

  She just needed time. Something he was more than happy to give her since he was determined to help her remember how happy they’d been together before that one stupid argument. And, hell, if she hadn’t been happy, he’d make her remember something better than that.

  “You belong here, Caroline,” he assured her. “Always.”

  Two

  To keep her guilty conscience at bay, Caroline sank deeper into the thick cushions of the hanging daybed on the second-floor patio and thought about her son—her whole reason for lying her way into Damon’s home.

  Lucas was safe with her sister, Victoria, in a carriage house Caroline had rented for them nearby. She’d paid in cash and used a fake name to ensure their father wouldn’t find them. She’d timed their trip to coincide with his business visit to Singapore, but she doubted their absence had remained a secret past the first forty-eight hours, which meant he could be learning about their defection anytime now. Would he guess that Caroline had run straight to Damon in Los Altos Hills? Would he be worried about their safety and send the police?

  She had no idea, but she knew Lucas and Victoria would be safer in the carriage house than with her. Victoria swore that their father had purposely tried to keep her from seeing Caroline while she was recovering from her ordeal. Her version of events since Caroline’s return—so different from her father’s—had been the impetus to see Damon for herself. To find out if he loved her or if he’d only married her for expediency’s sake.

  Still, she found it difficult to accept that her father coveted Transparent so badly that he would use her as a pawn. She’d been kidnapped, after all. How could Damon have kept that a secret from her family? Her father would have reported her missing if he’d known, but he said that her bills—cell phone, car payments, the mortgage on a small apartment she maintained in Manhattan—were being paid consistently, even during the times when she’d been a captive.

  How was that possible? Someone was lying to her, or else she really was going crazy.

  Caroline stared into the leaping flames in the stone fireplace and tried to relax before Damon returned. He’d started the blaze to ward off the late afternoon chill as the sun set over San Francisco Bay in the distance. The view was beautiful and the patio heater nearby sent bonus warmth her way. As if the blankets she burrowed under weren’t enough. Damon had dragged half the linen closet outdoors when she professed a desire to sit on the patio, extending her the courtesy he might give an invalid.

  Which made sense, considering he thought she was suffering from amnesia. And she still did suffer from it, of course. Just not to the degree she pretended.

  While she waited for him to return with their dinner, she closed her eyes and reminded herself this was absolutely necessary. She couldn’t think of any other way to find out if he had only wed her for material gain, or if he’d genuinely cared for her. And she refused to introduce him to Lucas until she knew for sure. For now, all she knew for certain was that her husband hadn’t come for her when she’d been kidnapped. Her captors said he didn’t pay the ransom and didn’t want her back. While she had no reason to trust them whatsoever, her father’s version of events supported this.

  He’d sworn he hadn’t known she was missing until that fisherman discovered her. But something didn’t add up, and she knew her father would lie to further his own ends—of course he would. He hadn’t even breathed Damon’s name in his house when she’d still been confused about her ordeal and couldn’t remember who the father of her child was. How could her dad do that? He’d always been manipulative, relentlessly steering Caroline in the direction he wanted. But she’d drawn the line at allowing him to tell her who she could—and could not—marry.

  She would learn all she could in the next two days, and then she would tell Damon the truth. Two days was her limit for being apart from Lucas. But if there was a chance she and Damon could have a future together, she would introduce him to Lucas personally and maybe they could be a family. If it turned out that Damon had never loved her and married her for self-serving purposes?

  She would hire a lawyer and sue for full custody through formal channels. She had her own money, accounts solely in her name. She’d changed all the passwords on them last week after discovering someone might have accessed them to pay her bills while she’d been held captive. If necessary, she would hire a financial investigator to help her track what happened there. But her balances were still healthy from her years of nonstop work before she’d met Damon. And right now, she cared far more about her personal affairs than her bottom line.

  “Caroline?” Damon asked quietly from the opposite end of the patio, a tray of food in his hands. He must have come up the outdoor stairs; she’d been so caught up in her thoughts, she hadn’t heard. She would need to be more careful, more on guard in the future.

  He waited there now, balancing the heavy, domed silver platter. With his dark brown hair and deep blue eyes, her husband shared the features of his equally handsome brothers she’d met at their wedding. Damon was slightly taller than Jager and Gabe, though, his six-foot-three frame well-proportioned. And whereas his younger brother, Gabe, possessed an easygoing nature that made him quick to smile, Damon was serious, often pensive and intense. More like his driven older brother, Jager, who managed the brothers’ businesses while Damon and Gabe both tended to follow their passions. Damon had always been deeply passionate about his work, he could lose track of the hours spent on business, and he told her once that she was the only woman who’d ever intrigued him enough to get him to spend time away from his company.

  He’d had the same effect on her, enticing her out of her office to savor a sunny day or breathe in a cool breeze off the Santa Cruz Mountains.

  “Yes?” She straightened from her slouch, propping herself higher on the back pillows so they could share the daybed like a sofa.

  A spark arced and popped from the stone fireplace.

  “Just checking to make sure you hadn’t fallen asleep.” He headed her way with the tray, settling it on the low tile table nearby. He’d changed from his earlier cargos and
tee to a lightweight black wool sweater and gray trousers. The winds off the bay were chilly now that the sun had gone down. “Are you sure you’ll be warm enough out here?” He checked the setting on the patio heater and held his broad palms out to test the temperature. “We can take dinner inside, if you prefer.”

  “This is perfect, actually.” She remembered those early days of recovering her memory when she had grounded herself in the everyday, simple things to anchor her. Enjoying the feel of a warm bath. Stroking the furry back of her sister’s cat, Socrates. “I saw a physician about the amnesia in Mexico and she said that surrounding myself with the familiar will help me to recover my memories.” Caroline smoothed a hand over the cashmere blanket that Damon had given her earlier, her heart picking up pace as she prepared to dig for information. “I’ll bet I spent a lot of time on this swing.”

  Damon settled on the edge of the cushion beside her, the warmth of his sudden nearness making her senses come alive. She’d forgotten the way he smelled—the musk and spice of his aftershave that sent a flood of pleasurable memories to her brain. Of shared kisses. Incredible sex. Orgasms. Curling into his side afterward and having him stroke her back until she fell asleep.

  Her body tingled at just the thoughts.

  “None.” His blunt response was so at odds with everything she was feeling—the word as stark as his expression. “This house was still being built while we were on our honeymoon in Florence and the Tuscan countryside. We never spent any time here.”

  She held her breath, waiting for him to say something about the day she’d been abducted. The only day she’d ever stepped inside the completed house. The events of that afternoon were still fuzzy in her mind. Her father had insisted she was planning to leave Damon that day, but she couldn’t remember why.

  When he continued, however, his attention had returned to the tray of food. “I’ve only been in town for a few days myself, so I’m afraid the meal offerings aren’t as extensive as I would have hoped for your return.” He tugged off the silver dome and set it on the stone patio, revealing two empty plates and a cold cut platter. “I called for a grocery delivery and a catered meal for later, but for now, this is the complete contents of the refrigerator.”