by Fiona Brand
She took a deep breath and decided on the truth. After all, what did it matter now? “Yes.”
A curious satisfaction registered in Damon’s gaze. “So that’s why you didn’t want a relationship. You thought I would think you were after my money.”
It was only part of the truth.
The whole of it was that if Damon ever found out her real identity, he wouldn’t just think she was after his money, he would be certain of it. Although, the irony was that, from the first moment she had met him, she couldn’t have cared less about his wealth.
When she had walked into the interview with Damon, his remote gaze had connected with hers and for a split second she’d had a weird premonition that everything was about to change. She could not explain exactly what the phenomenon was, just that for her, at least, it had been instant, visceral and electric. Like a piece of flotsam caught in a powerful current, she had allowed herself to be swept along and had accepted the job. Two weeks later, she had ended up in Damon’s bed.
Determined to redirect the conversation back to the situation with Emily and Ben, and hustle Damon out of the door before Rosie woke up, Zara briskly stepped around her desk and busied herself tidying piles of pamphlets that did not need tidying. “I’m sorry for the inconvenience of Emily taking an unplanned leave of absence—”
“Along with my little brother,” Damon said drily.
With effort, Zara controlled her temper. She tended to see things from another angle entirely. It was a matter of record that the men in Damon’s family were extremely good at seduction. Damon’s uncle Tyler had swept Zara’s mother off her feet; Damon had gotten Zara into bed in a matter of days. And now it seemed clear that Ben—who had routinely shambled into work around ten o’clock, taken long lunches and drifted away by four—had seduced poor Emily!
Zara moved on to another shelf of pamphlets, which was much nearer the front door, hoping Damon would take the hint. “As far as I’m concerned, Emily is outstandingly qualified and my best temp, and Ben has enticed her away. If anyone needs protection, it’s Emily.”
Damon gave Zara an incredulous look.
She checked her watch as if she was in a hurry to be somewhere. She had gotten seriously distracted by the Emily/Ben situation, but now she needed to wrap up the issue and get Damon out of her office before Rosie woke up. “I investigated Emily thoroughly before placing her on the books—she’s perfectly trustworthy.”
“Emily Harris is, but Emily Woodhouse-Harris isn’t.”
Zara froze as Damon slipped a folded sheet of paper out of his coat pocket and handed it to her. She stared at what was obviously a photocopy of a newspaper cutting depicting a more youthful Emily, the daughter of a disgraced financier who had lost all of his money, and that of the pension fund he had founded, in a financial crash. In the shot, Emily was dressed for the beach in a bikini and filmy sarong, and she was clinging to the arm of a prominent playboy businessman. One who, from the caption, had apparently dumped her in favor of marrying a socialite with her fortune intact.
Zara’s jaw tightened. Her motto for Westlake Employment Agency was Reliable, High Quality, Vetted Office Staff, Privacy and Discretion Guaranteed. In this case, the reliability part of the motto hadn’t held. Neither had the privacy or the discretion.
However, the tacky little article, far from making Zara feel disappointed in Emily, only made her feel even more fiercely protective of an employee who reminded her an awful lot of herself. Even down to the way Emily had lost everything and had been forced to invent a new life. She knew exactly how Emily was going to feel when she saw the piece.
She set the incriminating article down on her desk. “You had Emily investigated.”
Damon’s expression grew impatient. “I waited for you to call back. When you didn’t, I made some calls of my own. As it turns out, I should have done it a whole lot earlier.”
“Choosing to use one half of a double-barreled surname, and a previous relationship do not make Emily a bad risk!”
“Maybe not, but before Vitalis, Emily was involved with another wealthy businessman.”
Now that she knew Emily’s full name, the whole embarrassing scandal was coming back to her, which made her feel even sorrier for Emily. “From memory, the Woodhouse-Harrises moved in wealthy circles, so, of course, Emily would meet wealthy men.”
“The relationships wouldn’t be such a problem if Emily hadn’t tried to conceal her past.”
“Maybe she had good reasons for doing so.”
Damon crossed his arms over his chest. “Such as?”
Zara’s chin came up. She felt she was fighting on two fronts, for Emily and for herself. “For a start, it can’t have been much fun having the media hounding her.”
“Granted.”
The curtness of his reply seemed to emphasize that the bottom line for Damon was Emily’s so-called deception. “Emily happens to be very good at her job.”
“I’m not disputing that, just her motives in seeking employment with wealthy men.”
That touched a nerve, guiltily reminding Zara that if Damon found out her true identity, he would ascribe the same kind of gold-digging motivation to her. She doubted he would believe that it had been Zara’s well-connected aunt who had set up the job interview and set her up by placing her back in Damon’s orbit in the hope that she might score another cash offer. Or that Zara had zero interest in that money! “So you still think all Emily wanted was a wealthy husband?”
His expression cooled. “Or a lover. It’s not exactly an uncommon motive.”
His flat statement once again dredged up the stark memory of the legal letter she had received from Damon’s lawyers. They’d offered to pay her off so she would not go to the press, attempt to contact his family or get her sticky fingers on the family inheritance.
As if.
Zara could feel her blood pressure shooting through the roof. Before that moment, she had been able to separate Damon from the contents of that insulting letter, even though she knew he was the one who had authorized it. But now she realized how naive she had been. Damon’s contempt for her and Petra was not so different from his ruthless assessment of Emily.
“There are women who don’t give a hoot about your family’s money, and Emily is one of them. She is not predatory.”
A faint rustling sound from the interview room, as if Rosie was struggling out of her cozy blanket, sent a fresh surge of adrenaline shooting through Zara’s veins. Damon’s cool gaze fixed on the door, reminding her that not only did he possess exceptional eyesight, but that his hearing was no doubt excellent, as well. Attributes that, along with an uncanny sixth sense had, apparently, made him some kind of superspy during his time in the Special Forces. She needed to get Damon out of her office, now.
She forced a professional smile and apologized, which was more difficult than she expected. Bleakly, she realized she was still surprisingly angry with Damon. Although, she didn’t know quite why that should be, since she was the one who had left Damon and not the other way around. Plus, she was over him, and had been for months.
She directed another breezy smile in Damon’s general direction. As much as she thought Ben was at fault, it was clear the responsibility for the employment part of this disaster belonged with her. Damon’s firm paid her to supply Magnum with the temping services they required, so it was up to her to fulfill the contract. She needed to find someone else to fill Emily’s position, and fast, before Magnum took their business elsewhere.
“As luck would have it, I’ve got a temp on the books who might do to replace Emily. She’s a little older, but extremely efficient—”
“No.”
Zara blinked and plowed on. “Harriet has a long work record and an extremely good skill set—”
“I don’t want Harriet,” he said in a flat, cool voice. “I want you.”
A pang of heat shot cle
ar to Zara’s toes, despite the fact that she knew Damon could only be referring to his need for an assistant. Even so, memories flickered, vivid and earthy, drawing every muscle of her body tight. She swallowed against a coiling tension that should not exist and desperately willed her body to return to normal. “Why?”
Damon’s darkened gaze locked with hers for a piercing moment, and the reason she’d succumbed to a wild, irresponsible fling with him when she had known it was a huge mistake to sleep with the boss was suddenly crystal clear: chemistry. It shimmered in the air and ran through her veins like liquid fire, the pressure of it banding her chest, making it hard to breathe. For some unknown reason Damon had wanted her and, against all common sense, she had wanted him too.
Damon frowned and dragged lean fingers through his hair and she received the indelible impression that for a long, stretched-out moment he had actually forgotten what he was going to say. “Uh, the McCall takeover. Before you disappeared, you did a lot of the groundwork—”
She stiffened at the mention of the McCall takeover. McCall Electrical being the company that had belonged to Tyler McCall. If there was ever a project she did not want to work on, it would be that one!
“I didn’t disappear—I resigned without notice.” Then she had disappeared. She’d had to get out of town quickly, because she had known that if she had tried to have a normal, aboveboard relationship with Damon, the press would have become interested in her. Even though they had no clue what Angel Atrides looked like, it would only have been a matter of time before her true identity was uncovered, then all the careful work she had done to invent a normal life and career would have been for nothing.
“Resignation?” he muttered in a low growl. “You sent a text.”
Warmth rose in her cheeks. “But I did resign.”
She knew she shouldn’t belabor the point, but a combination of her anxiety over Damon walking into her office and her extreme physical response to him were having a bad effect on her. She couldn’t seem to stop arguing with him, which was counterproductive. She needed to concentrate on getting rid of him before Rosie woke up.
Swallowing the exhilarating desire to argue some more, she reached for calm. “I agree that texting was not the ideal way to finish.” It had just been necessary at the time, because she had not wanted Damon to have her private email address. Email addresses opened too many online doors, some of which led back to her old life, and she knew how adept Damon was at utilizing those sorts of opportunities.
Damon’s thoughtful gaze seemed to burn right through her. “Whatever. Before you left without any notice or forwarding address, you did the groundwork for the McCall takeover. Despite a hitch in the proceedings, I’m now on the point of closing the deal, so I would prefer to have someone who knows their way around the issues.”
Zara had the sudden, suffocating sense of being entangled in a sticky web from which she could not escape. “I had thought you would have completed that months ago.”
“There’s been an unexpected complication, a missing block of voters’ shares that could jeopardize the takeover. And I’ve had...other things that have needed attention.”
A picture of the gorgeous blonde he’d been dating lately, heiress to a media empire, Caroline Grant, flashed into Zara’s mind. That image was instantly followed by a snapshot of the reed-slim redhead he had started seeing on a regular basis not long after Zara had left. Another hot dart of anger unsettled her further.
She did not want to admit that the anger could be linked with the fact that Damon had started dating less than a month after she left his bed. Wining and dining beautiful women while she had been hiding out in her aunt’s country cottage, feeling exhausted and nauseous in the first trimester of her pregnancy. Because, if she was angry, that meant Damon was still important to her, or worse, that she was jealous.
Another small sound drew Damon’s attention back to the door of the interview room. Zara’s heart rate increased another notch. Rosie was definitely awake.
The vibration of a cell, thankfully, distracted Damon. Despite her clear need to get rid of Damon fast, a sudden intense curiosity manifested itself as he extracted the phone from his coat pocket and checked the screen.
Jaw taut, she watched as he slipped the phone back into his pocket. She wondered if the call had been from Caroline Grant, and suddenly her mind was made up.
“No. Working for you is out of the question, I have—”
“I realize you have a business to run,” Damon cut in smoothly. “But I only need you for three weeks, four at most, until the negotiations are completed. And you do have a part-time assistant who could fill in for you.”
Damon offered a fee that was so generous it would cover her agency costs for the next year. More, she would finally be able to afford to fly to Medinos to check out a mysterious safe-deposit box she had recently discovered her mother had obtained not long before she died.
But, as tempting as the money was, as much as she needed it, she could not risk being that close to Damon. As it was, she was kicking herself that she had allowed financial desperation to hold sway when she had accepted him as a client.
“I’m sorry. I can’t work for you.”
Walking briskly to her front door, she yanked it open. She had to get Damon out of her office before he discovered Rosie. He would take one look at her coal-black hair and eyes that were changing by the day to look eerily like his and would instantly know she was his daughter.
Cold, damp air flowed in, making Zara shiver, but instead of taking the hint and walking through the door, Damon paused and she made the fatal mistake of looking into his eyes.
Long, tense seconds later, Damon’s gaze dropped to her mouth and the heady tension she had so far failed to control tightened another notch.
“Damn,” he muttered, “I promised myself I wasn’t going to do this.”
Zara froze as he cupped her jaw, unwillingly riveted by the tingling heat that radiated out from that one point of contact, the unbearably familiar masculine scents of soap and skin. Despite the cold air, she could feel herself growing warmer by the second. Damon’s touch was featherlight; all she needed to do was step away, so why couldn’t she do that one simple thing?
It was a bad time to discover that, despite everything that had happened, the heady excitement that had been her downfall a year ago was still just as potent, just as seductive.
It shouldn’t be, she thought a little desperately. She had changed; she had moved on. When she did decide to allow a man back into her life it would not be because of an off-the-register sexual attraction. This time she would choose carefully. She needed steady and reliable, not—
Damon’s mouth slanted across hers and any idea that the day was cold was blasted away by a torrent of heat. Her heart pounded so hard she found it difficult to breathe and her legs suddenly felt as limp as noodles.
This was why she had made “the mistake,” she thought dimly. Her palms slid up over Damon’s chest; her fingers convulsively gripped the lapels of his coat, as a familiar, guilty pleasure flooded her. Damon’s hands settled at her waist, molding her more firmly against him and she found herself responding with an automatic, mindless pleasure, lifting up on her toes as she pressed into the kiss, clutching at his shoulders as if she couldn’t get enough of him.
It was moth-to-the-flame stuff, irresistible and utterly dangerous, because it was abruptly clear to her that Damon was nothing short of an intoxicating addiction. When he was in the room she couldn’t think; worse, she didn’t want to think. As emancipated and independent as she was, as determined as she was to run her life in a practical, logical way, she had never been able to resist him.
Long, drugging seconds later Damon lifted his head. “Before I go, I have one more question.”
A thin, high cry pierced the air. Zara’s stomach sank. With a convulsive movement, she released her grip on Damon’s coat.
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Damon’s gaze turned wintry. “Question answered.”
With a sense of fatalism, undergirded by the sudden wrenching suspicion that Damon had known all along that there was a baby, Zara watched as he reached the door to the interview room in two gliding strides and pushed the door open wide.
Four
Damon stared at the baby in the bassinet.
He thought he had been prepared for this moment, but the reality of the tiny baby literally flipped his world upside down in the space of a moment.
The first thing he noticed about the child, his child, was the color of her sleep suit. Pink.
The tension banding his chest increased exponentially. Not only did he have a baby, he had a daughter.
“What’s her name?” His voice came out more roughly than he cared for, but then it wasn’t every day he discovered he was a father.
Emotion, painful and inchoate, seemed to burst through some interior barrier. With it came a torrent of memories. Memories that should have faded, but hadn’t: his father’s voice late at night, the muffled sounds that meant his mother was being hit and was trying to stay quiet so he wouldn’t know. Later, when he was older, the breathless pain of broken ribs, the harsh chemical scents of the hospital emergency room.
Once, a memory of reckless fury bursting through him when his father had attacked Damon’s mother, who had been pregnant with Ben at the time. Ten years old, but big for his age, Damon had hit out and caught Guy Smith by surprise. He could still remember the rage behind that punch, the hot rush of satisfaction that had poured through him when his father had gone down.
Fatherhood, he thought bleakly. It was something he had consciously avoided, just as he avoided emotional relationships in general. As a child he had learned that the kind of intense out-of-control love most people seemed to wish for was neither a practical nor a safe basis for any relationship. Although, looking at the tiny baby whose gaze had latched onto his with singleminded intensity as she sucked on one small fist, he registered that you could not prove that by him. The first night he had spent with Zara had been characterized by a distinct lack of control.
