The Billionaire's Heart: The Complete Series (Romance, Contemporary Romance, Billionaire Romance, The Billionaire's Heart Book 7)

by Nancy Adams

  The doctor checked me over, listened to my heart and the babies' hearts, and pronounced us all fit as fiddles, at least until my next appointment, which would be in two weeks. I grumbled something about moving right on into the office, and she laughed at me.

  “Don't worry, dear,” she said, “you'll be done with me inside of a month, now. Then you'll be trying to move in with your pediatrician! By the way, have you chosen one yet?”

  I nodded. “There's one who's leased an office at the new clinic out at Grizzly, a Doctor Stevens. She says she knows you?”

  “Winnie Stevens? Oh, goodness, yes, she's an excellent choice! I hadn't known she was moving, though. Did your husband bribe her into it?”

  I shrugged. Knowing Nate, it was possible, but I doubted it. She seemed genuinely pleased with the way the new clinic was set up, and loved the Doctors' Building, with its own lab and X-ray and everything. “I think she just saw it as an opportunity,” I said, “but after seeing her credentials and all the great reviews she's gotten, I'm delighted to have her for our babies' doctor.”

  Doctor Rodgers nodded. “You should be, she's about the best around, in my humble opinion. Not that I'm all that humble, of course, but then, what doctor ever is? See you in two more weeks, Kiddo!”

  Mom and I left there and went to have lunch at a little bistro she'd found, and I commented that she was getting really settled in to California life.

  “Oh, I don't know. I mean, it's okay, but sometimes I miss the old place. On the other hand, when we first moved here a few months back, I didn't think I'd ever be able to drive in the city, but look at me now. I scat around San Francisco and San Jose like they're no bigger than North Platte, and in the biggest car I've ever driven!”

  “I know,” I said. “I didn't think I'd ever get used to it, either, but I could manage. Now, I love it, but I love the fact that Grizzly is our home town, rather than San Francisco. Did you hear that UCSF has asked about putting a satellite campus out there?”

  “Your father told me this morning. Do you think Nate will go for it?”

  “He's talking to them today. They'd want about a hundred acres, and we've certainly got them to spare, so it all depends on what they bring to the table. If it's going to be something good for Grizzly, then he'll probably let it happen. It might not be good for us, though, since it would mean a few thousand college students and building even more apartments. He'll weight it all carefully before he agrees to anything.”

  We finished our lunch and headed toward home. I was a little anxious about meeting new possible nannies, but I had told Melinda to bring them on over. Might as well get it over with. I asked Mom if she wanted to stay and meet them with me, but she said this was one chore I needed to take care of on my own. I guess I can understand that, so I gave her a kiss and a hug and sent her on her way.

  I went inside, and Charles met me at the door. Since it was May, already, I hadn't worn a jacket, but I'd carried a light sweater with me just in case it got chilly while we were out. He took it and hung it up for me, and I thanked him.

  “Charles,” I said, and he turned to me with an expectant smile.

  “Yes, Madam?”

  “I'm just curious, but what's your last name? I've been here six months, and still don't know.”

  He blinked, and for a second I thought I'd made him mad, but then he began chuckling. “Madam, 'Charles' is my last name; I am a professional butler, and we are always addressed by our surnames. My given name, for the sake of your curiosity, is Winston, after Winston Churchill.”

  I was blushing. “Oh—I'm sorry, I didn't know...”

  “And there was no reason why you would know, Madam, since you are new to this lifestyle. It should have occurred to me to offer that tidbit of information, but I failed to do so, and for that I do apologize.”

  I waved him off. “No apologies necessary, Charles. I'm sure I'll be learning a lot about all of this over the next few years, and I'm not going to let a little embarrassment bother me too much. Thank you, though, for straightening me out about that!”

  He smiled and bowed to me, then went on about his butling duties.

  I settled myself into the living room to wait for Melinda, but it wasn't a long wait. She called my cell about ten minutes later to make sure we were still on, and I assured her we were. “Great,” she said, “we'll be there in a few minutes!”

  Her few minutes turned out to be about three minutes, and when the doorbell rang, Charles was there to answer it. He escorted Melinda and four other ladies in to see me, and the song and dance began. We seated the women there, and Melinda and I went into the parlor, where we could speak with each of them privately.

  I got to go over the resumes of each of the women, one at a time, and spoke with them each at length, but to be honest, I had spotted the right one as soon as they walked into the room. One of the girls was quiet and reserved, but not in the way people are when they're lacking confidence; more the opposite, the kind of person who simply doesn't need to toot her own horn. When it came time to talk with her, I was sure I'd found the girl who would be best for us.

  “Okay,” I said, reading from her resume. “You're Maria, right? Tell me about yourself, please.”

  Maria was about thirty, and had an energetic attractiveness to her. She looked confident and capable, and gave off an air of professionalism.

  “Thank you, Ma'am,” she said. “Well, I have a Bachelor's in Child Development, but that wasn't my original major; it just happened when I found myself working part time at a day care center, and realized that I liked working with kids. When I got out of college, though, I couldn't find a job that paid enough to cover all my bills, so I ended up going to work for the police department, instead. I started out as a uniform officer, then was transferred to the juvenile section, and from there I made detective four years ago. I've been decorated by the city of San Francisco twice for heroism, but I've been looking for a way to get out of police work, and ran across an article a few weeks ago about a combination Nanny and Bodyguard. With my experience and training, I thought that might be the line for me, so I put out a resume, and Mrs. Perkins called me last week to suggest I apply for this position.”

  “Wow,” I said, “that's pretty intense. You made detective?”

  “Yes, Ma'am, in juvenile vice. That's the section that deals with drug dealers and predators who go after children, and I made several very good arrests.”

  I looked her in the eye. “Maria, that sounds like very rewarding work, so I'm curious why you'd want to leave it to simply take care of my twins? Can you explain that to me, please?”

  She met me eye to eye, and didn't blink, but she hesitated a moment before she answered. “Mrs. Simmons, when you’re a cop, you're told that your job is to protect and serve the people. That's what I did, and I was good at it and proud of it, but sometimes—sometimes you can't be everywhere. Sometimes you can't even be in the one place you need to be in order to protect that one person who needs your protection the most.” She reached up and wiped a tear from her cheek. “That happened to me. I was trying to save one little girl, about ten years old, whose father was a drug dealer. He was using her to move drugs around, and I knew it, but I couldn't quite prove it, so I was working the case as carefully as I possibly could, building my evidence, making my case. I was just about ready to bring them in, when the whole family was killed because he owed his supplier a hundred and fifty dollars. He, his wife and that sweet little girl who only wanted to go to school and be a dancer someday, were all gunned down over a lousy hundred and fifty dollars.” She sobbed once, and then pushed her hair back behind her ear before going on. “I got the guy who killed them. I made that arrest myself, and the hardest thing I ever had to do was not shoot the bastard when I had the chance, but I didn't. He was sentenced two months ago to three hundred years without parole, and I decided I wanted out for sure, and the thought of taking care of two little babies and making sure they stay safe—well, that really appeals to me.”
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br />   I told Nate about her that night, and he had Mike Davenport, the company's security chief, check her out thoroughly, and she was telling the truth.

  We hired her the next day, and she moved in so that we could all get accustomed to one another.

  Nathanael

  Chapter Thirteen

  Racing The Wind

  * * * * *

  Sometimes, I start to think that I'm just the luckiest man alive. I mean, I've got one of the most fantastic jobs in the world, I have more money than almost anyone else in the country, I have the most beautiful wife any man could hope for, and now I'm having twins. A boy and a girl. Who could ask for anything more?

  I wish I could think back and find a certain point in time that made me so lucky. To just have it happen spontaneously, without a reason, doesn't seem to make a lot of sense to me. I'd really like to believe there's some justification behind it. I mean, there are so many people out there that need a break. Why do I get so many of them?

  That's not necessarily a bad thing, I guess, to be lucky, I mean. The alternative would probably be less than pleasant, and I'm sure I'd always be wondering why I had no luck, if that were the case. Then, I'm sure I'd be beating myself up, trying to remember what gypsy I had offended some time in the past. If you have nothing but bad luck, then you must have done something to cause it somewhere in the past, right? At least, that's how it would seem to me.

  In my case, though, everything was going fantastically well. Not only did I have all of the blessings listed above, but I was also involved in building the newest little city in California, the town we named Grizzly. What had begun as simply a way to share the beautiful estate we live on with others, so that there would be other children for our kids to play with, had grown into a project that was making headlines around the world. We had colleges, major corporations, even governments who wanted to have some sort of presence there. Some of it made no sense to me at all, but I was the guy that had to deal with it.

  My wife, Katelynn, refers to Grizzly as my “other child.” She says it's really ironic that the town came into existence in the same amount of time it took for our twins to develop and get ready to be born. That is quite a surprise, since there were hundreds of houses and buildings to be constructed, as well as doing all of the landscaping and other works necessary. We had to run sewer lines, power lines, phone lines, install the special recycling system that was designed specifically for our town, and a thousand other things that should have taken months to complete just on their own.

  A lot of the success of Grizzly I actually attribute to Kendall Williams, the architect who designed it all. His incredible innovations in waste management and recycling made it possible for the town to be greener than almost anywhere else in the country, and incredibly self sustaining. The waste processing plant that he designed was capable of turning almost all of the town's organic waste into a pair of fantastic by-products.

  First, there was methane gas, which could be burned as a fuel in the backup generator system that we installed, to be certain that our hospital and other important buildings would never run out of power. It was also useful to heat some of the buildings in the cooler months, and provide hot water for a number of them The quantities of gas that could be produced were absolutely amazing, until you considered the amount of waste that was likely to be generated. With nearly six thousand people already living there, we were already generating sufficient gas that we could sell some of it off to San Francisco's Natural Gas Utility.

  The second byproduct of our waste reclamation system was a liquid fertilizer that could be used throughout the entire town, to provide nourishment for lawns, trees, and other plants that the town would be responsible for. This was quite a blessing, since one of the greatest costs involved in maintaining a small community involves grounds care. By turning our community's own waste products into the fertilizer that our lawns and trees and such would need, we were probably going to save many hundreds of thousands of dollars per year.

  We could generate so much of this fertilizer, in fact, that we were offering to allow homeowners to connect to the lines and pipe it to their own lawn sprinkler systems. This meant a small additional fee on their water bills, of course, but it was a fantastic way to make these innovative systems pay for themselves.

  Kendall brought other innovations to town, as well. His design for an underground conduit tunnel meant that all of our water lines, sewer lines, power lines, phone lines, even our recycling and fertilizer lines, would always be easily accessible for repairs and maintenance. The tunnel ran underneath the entire town, and there was absolutely no place where a line might be buried and unreachable in order to make a fast repair of a break.

  The town had already been written up in dozens of magazines, everything from magazines on self sufficiency, to magazines on politics and world events. Some of them actually surprised me, but if they wanted to give us publicity, that was fine with me. We'd already sold more than half the houses and at least half the condos. We could have sold more, I'm certain, if I'd agreed to let the colleges in, but I looked at other college towns and saw the problems they had, and chose not to bring those to Grizzly. This town was conceived as a place for people to raise families, and I wanted it to remain true to that ideal.

  Do you see what I'm doing? I'm so nervous about the babies coming soon that I'm just running off at the mouth about anything else. I know I'm doing it, but I don’t know how to stop, and that’s another whole frustration to me.

  Okay, so let me talk about it. We're at thirty nine weeks, and Doc Rodgers says it could happen at any time, now. We've got the bags all packed, one for Katelynn and one for the twins, and they're already in the back seat of my Mercedes, ready to go as soon as Katelynn says it's time. We've got all the pre-registration done at the hospital, so all we have to do is show up and they'll get her admitted and ready the birthing room. Katelynn says she wants to go natural childbirth, so we got all the forms done for that, as well.

  I've got a phone group set up so when the time comes, all I have to do is punch one button, and the message that the twins are on the way will be sent to everyone who needs to know: Our parents, Corie, Melinda and Maria, the nanny. Katelynn wants her there, so she can be among the first few people to see the babies.

  The hospital is one of the newest in the whole state, of course, and has birthing and after birthing rooms where I can stay right there with Katelynn the entire time. That's good, because I don't think they've got anyone big enough to tell me I can't be with her, and we don't need those kinds of problems, anyway.

  I got so nervous that I finally called Kendall and asked him to come over and sit with me for a bit. Like me, he'd been in the Corps in Afghanistan, and there were times when we just seemed to be the buddy we each needed. He said he'd be right over, and I heard his little electric car buzzing into my driveway a few minutes later.

  Katelynn, Corie, Jolene and Maria were playing Phase Ten in the dining room, so I went outside to meet him. We sat on the benches in the flower garden that was the center of my circular drive, and where we could see all around but not be overheard.

  “My wife in there?” he asked with a grin.

  “Yep,” I said. “She's playing card games with mine and their friends.”

  “Good, she needs that. She's been too shy to get to know people for a while, so I'm glad she's opening up to your Mrs.”

  “Katelynn's easy to like, and she really likes Jolene. We're all tense right now with the babies almost due, but I imagine we'll all be getting together to do some stuff after they're born. You guys ever been out on a yacht?”

  Kendall laughed. “Nate,” he said, “six months ago I couldn't afford to buy a magazine about yachts, let alone ever get onto one. If it hadn't been for this job, I'd be slinging burgers by now, just to keep food on the table. Danged hard to get started in business nowadays; I thank god for your Daddy-in-law every single day!”

  “Yeah, well, we'll take you out for a cruise in a few we
eks, okay? I think you'll like it, and the way your recycling system is selling, you can probably afford to buy a yacht of your own, soon.”

  He whistled. “Man, that'd be nice. When I got back, you know, I didn't know what to do with myself, so going to school seemed like the best answer. I'd always liked building things, so architecture seemed natural to me, and I got good grades, and all. Just didn't think I was ever gonna get a paying job, after school. I spent every dime of our savings trying to get work, but no one would hire me til Jim came along.”

  “Jim's the best, I'll give you that, but it was partly you that sold him on it. When you included a home for yourself as part of the fee you wanted for designing the whole town, he knew you'd be serious about making it the best it could be. Believe me, I've heard that story about a hundred times!”

  We laughed at that; we both knew how Jim loves to tell good stories over and over, and we were always willing to listen when he needed us to.

  “You're a wreck, Nate,” he said, and I just nodded. “You remember being over in 'Stan, and how we'd always get nervous wrecked out before a mission? I know you were in Recon, and I wasn't, but even you guys with balls of iron must have gotten the pre-mission jitters, right?”

  I chuckled. “Oh, yeah, we got 'em. And I get where you're goin', too; this is just my next mission, right? Just like orphan escort, bring 'em in safe, bring 'em in alive, right?”

  Kendall nodded. “That's it, man. This is your mission; get them babies home safe. Everything else you got goin' on can wait, but the mission—that's your priority.”

  I nodded, and then the front door of our house flew open and Corie was screaming, “NATE!” at the top of her lungs.