by Addison Fox
Add on that thick head of dark curls and long-lashed eyes that would make a supermodel envious and she figured she’d better keep her head about her and her hormones off Nikolas Slater.
And hormones or not, there was something about him she trusted. Which was the last thing she needed to be doing after the whole Ferdy mess, but still...there was something there.
The kind way he’d taken on her case and then bought her lunch. Sure, he might be looking to get as much intel as he could for the other case he had on Ace Colton, but he was still helping her.
He’d even acknowledged that she had no reason to trust him.
It was a risk but she needed the help, too.
“Before,” she pressed on. “When I asked you why you were paying for lunch, you told me it was an investment and that you’d come up with a way to explain it later.”
“So I did.”
“Then that’s my answer.”
“About Ace and his family?”
“Yep. I want your opinion. Sooner or later I’ll figure out why.”
* * *
Nikolas had to give her credit, the woman paid attention. She was sharp and smart and she continued to amaze him at every turn.
Even if she was too stubborn for her own good.
And too focused on maintaining her independence to consider the realities of her safety.
No matter how capable she might be, she was seriously pregnant. A reality she seemed to keep ignoring. “When is the baby due?”
“A few more months.”
“Wow. That’s close.”
She rubbed a hand over the large mound that was impossible to ignore. “Not as close as you might think. Especially if you were the one staring down at many more weeks of an alien invasion.”
“An alien what?”
She smiled in a way that lit up her whole face, and again, he caught the teasing underneath her words. “There are moments when it feels like I’ve got an alien growing inside instead of a baby. The way he or she moves or a random foot that suddenly sticks out the side of my belly. A few weeks ago I swear he was doing jumping jacks.”
Nikolas smiled back, the idea of a baby inside of her taking on new shape in his mind’s eye. Of course he understood the mechanics of pregnancy—both how it happened and what followed on after that exciting first act—but he’d never really considered the experience itself.
Never considered it as a practical reality for himself. His parents’ marriage had set a course he had no desire to pursue. And yet...because of his determination not to follow in their footsteps, he’d dismissed the idea of having his own children, too.
Ignoring the sudden shot of remorse that thought ignited, he focused back on Nova. “And your little alien is practicing for entry to earth?”
“When she takes over as alien overlord of the western United States.”
“I guess it’s as good an explanation as any other.” He shrugged. “You’ve already called the baby a he and a she.”
“I don’t know what I’m having, so I switch off.”
Absurdly pleased by the idea of a small baby, Nikolas smiled to himself. And pulled up short.
Was he actually smiling about babies? And despite his lifetime refusal to enter into commitment, each time he looked at this woman he was oddly smitten.
Nova Ellis had commitment written all over her, from her green eyes to her pregnancy and impending motherhood to the messy braid that fell over her shoulder.
He found her deeply attractive and altogether sexy and...
Whoa.
Where had that come from?
He needed to protect her, not have the hots for her. Even if she was wildly attractive in a fresh, enticing way. Despite the seriousness of her situation, there was a lightness about her. She was still able to laugh and find humor in the world around her.
That was a gift. One he saw less often than he’d have liked.
In fact, when was the last time he’d been out with a woman and she’d poked fun at him or at herself? He mentally rolled through the last few years of his dating history and realized the number wasn’t just shockingly small, it was zero.
Was that possible?
Even as he thought it, he had to admit that it was. He’d chosen the bright and the shiny over substance. Most of his dates were incredibly attractive arm candy who accepted his company for a fancy evening out on the town. In exchange, he had a glamorous dinner companion to take to a business event.
Why hadn’t he ever noticed it before?
Women only want you for your money, Nikky, my boy. That’s all they want and it gets more and more true with each year that passes. So treat ’em kind and take good care of them but don’t get attached and don’t expect too much.
What had passed for his father’s words of wisdom echoed in his mind, rattling around with all the finesse of a pinball striking bonus lights, and Nikolas fought to shake off the voice. He’d come to an understanding a long time ago. He might not have liked his father’s behavior but his father had genuinely grieved his mother when she’d passed. It had been that moment when he’d finally come to grips with the relationship.
And all his father would never be.
Pushing it all back down in that small space he kept feelings for his father, he gestured Nova forward. “Come on. Let’s go back to my office, and we can make a plan to reach out to Ace’s family.”
“Doesn’t he actually have quite a few of them?”
“He does. His family is pretty big. But I’m suggesting a few of his female siblings. His sister, Ainsley, and his half-sister, Marlowe, are who I have in mind.”
“Okay.” Nova stopped and turned, her opportunity to slow their forward progression. “Even if you still haven’t answered my question.”
“The one about if I agree or not.”
“That’s the one.”
“You don’t miss much, do you?”
She shrugged, those delicate shoulders nearly hitting her earlobes before dropping back down. “I guess not. The hazard of growing up an only child, spoiled by my mother. I didn’t have to share much, and if I wanted to know something, I asked. And, my mother being who she was, pretty much always gave me an answer. Besides, since it was just me, there wasn’t a whole lot to distract me when I really got going.”
Nikolas considered that and compared it to his own upbringing. He, too, was an only child, and even with his father’s intermittent distractions had been fairly doted upon his entire life. Although he doubted that was the sole reason why his mother’s passing had affected him so hard, he also knew that was a big piece of it. He hadn’t had any siblings to share the grief.
Or to reminisce about all the good times they’d had together.
All those memories lived in his head and that was all he had left. All he’d ever have. That and his father’s pithy words of wisdom about what women wanted, of course.
Suddenly sick of his thoughts, he decided to answer Nova. Whether to humor her or because it was important to her, he wasn’t sure yet, but he broke his personal rule of investigating and decided to stick his nose into it.
All the way in.
“You want my opinion? Okay. Here goes. Yeah, I think you should reach out to Ace’s family. If he was here, I’d suggest you go to him first. But like I said at the restaurant, he’s not, and you deserve some closure.”
“Thank you. I was hoping you’d say that.”
And just like that, she upended him once more. From happy and funny to questioning and serious, to poking at him with a big side of sassy, he’d seen so many facets of Nova Ellis in a few short hours. Yet, here was another one.
Vulnerability.
“I’ve actually met Ace’s siblings. Why don’t we go back to my office, and you can give them a call.”
* * *
Ferdinand Adler didn’t lik
e to be kept waiting.
He didn’t like waiting for a meal. He didn’t like waiting for a car. And he sure as hell didn’t like waiting for news of his traitorous ex-girlfriend.
Standing up from his desk and stalking over to the credenza where he kept several bottles of liquor, he poured himself a generous helping of some of Kentucky’s finest bourbon. Tossing back half of it, he slammed the tumbler back onto the countertop, the hit of crystal against thick glass causing a satisfying crack.
Where the hell had she gone?
He’d asked himself that same question for the past few months. The same day the shipment went to hell. He wanted to chalk it up to a coincidence, but something about the timing bothered him.
Had she been a plant all along?
An undercover cop?
Or just another young, naive blonde, which were in abundant supply in New York?
He was depending on that shipment to make his mark and move up into the inner circle of trust with his business associates.
Associates who had not been pleased by the challenges at the port and the delays in getting the prime, grade A heroin they’d been depending on into circulation.
It had come in eventually, and they had grudgingly accepted his apologies when their stock was delivered in full, but it hadn’t gotten him that seat in the inner circle he so coveted.
It had also put him several more “tests” behind as a way to prove his loyalty.
He’d done them all, of course. He’d had no choice. The three private flights with cocaine stuffed into false chambers in his carry-on suitcase. The additional money laundering he’d had to add to one of his personal operations down in the East Village. And the hit he’d executed by himself in a dimly lit area of Central Park one night.
Oh yes, he’d done them all and done them flawlessly.
None of it explained why Nova had gone missing the very day the shipment had been held up. A seemingly minor detail that had nagged at him for five freaking months.
He had put his best tech guy on the problem about three days in when it became evident he couldn’t find the stupid bitch, his texts going unanswered. Wally had put trackers on all of her accounts, her cell phone, and even attempted to put one on her email.
Yet nothing had hit.
Which had left him in an uneasy conundrum. Had she simply run away? Or had his wannabe boss done something to her? Or worse yet, was she working with the cops, biding her time in some witness protection program?
Regardless of the answer, she had to be punished. And for several months he figured the tracking on her bank account would ultimately give him what he needed to hunt her down and deliver the punishment himself. Only it hadn’t, because other than the regular, automatic payments she had scheduled to come out each month from her checking account for her rent and utilities, nothing else showed up.
Her body hadn’t shown up, either, killed as an example to him of his mistakes. No one had told him she was dead, or showed him pictures, or produced a body.
So he was now back to door number one, with his questions. He hated loose ends and Nova Ellis was a big, honking loose end.
Why had she run?
What did she know?
And how in the ever-loving hell was he going to find her?
* * *
Nova tried to still her tapping fingers, but no matter where she put them, she couldn’t get them to hold still. On her lap, on the arms of Nikolas’s really uncomfortable office chair or even on her hips, when she’d stood to pace after getting sick of said uncomfortable office chair.
Was this really happening?
From the time her mother had told her about her father, Nova had imagined what it would be like. She’d spent her entire life up to that conversation believing she was the daughter of Paul Ellis. And it was only after that she was forced to reevaluate everything.
Like did Paul know she wasn’t biologically his?
Would he have cared if he did?
Unfortunately, her mother had been in the last stages of her life and getting straight answers out of her had been a challenge. But best as she could tell, Paul had died believing she was biologically his.
Was that why her mother had kept it a secret for so long? To spare his feelings?
Or to hide her deception?
Allegra had told Nova that she’d rushed into a relationship with Paul—an older, handsome family friend who lived in Europe and had been groomed as a suitable love interest from an early age—as soon as the pregnancy from her summer love affair had been discovered.
Even now, Nova wondered how it had all come about. How could she have simply leaped into a marriage with one man to hide from an affair with another? Yet her mother had done it, obviously burying her feelings. By all accounts she had been relatively happy with the decision. She’d grieved terribly five years earlier, when Paul had died in a car accident. And she’d always spoken of Paul Ellis as the love of her life. And Paul had always loved Nova as his own.
Had it all been an act?
Or a way to rewrite history and the pain of a failed teen romance?
As they often did when she thought of her mother’s doomed romance, thoughts of her time with Ferdy filled Nova’s mind. The past five months had given her a good amount of distance—both physically and emotionally—from the man, and she’d come to understand more about what had made him so appealing.
And why she’d leaped with little understanding of who he really was.
It wasn’t something she was proud of, but she wouldn’t lie about it to her child. Nor would she hide her baby’s paternity from the man she would eventually share her life with. She still had hope she’d find love in her life. Her child would be a part of that family they created, and Nova would tell him or her the truth of their paternity.
She’d accepted that she would never really know whether Paul Ellis was aware she was not his daughter. She wouldn’t go through life doing that to a man who came into her life. The situation with Ferdy might be scary and even embarrassing, thanks to her poor judgment, but if she was lucky enough to find love, she wouldn’t hide any of it.
She continued pacing, the movement needed after the heavy lunch and equally heavy thoughts, but her gaze surreptitiously shifted to Nikolas.
Goodness, he really was attractive. Her mother had always thought swarthy men were the most gorgeous of the movie stars, and while Nova hadn’t thought she was wrong, per se, she honestly hadn’t ever paid much attention. But oh, wow, did she ever now. The dark curls, the olive-colored skin and the five o’clock shadow all did things somewhere low in her belly that had nothing to do with a growing baby or a large lunch of fish and chips.
No, this was a different sort of heaviness. The sort that made her remember, despite all the changes currently happening inside of her, that she was a woman.
Which pulled her up short because—hello!—she’d just met Nikolas Slater that morning. And she was having another man’s baby. And she was on the run from that same man who was likely a gangster of the first order, even if Nikolas didn’t know that part of the story.
But still, she kept sneaking glances at him. And even if she shouldn’t feel attracted, she did feel attracted and there wasn’t much she could say to herself to feel differently. Because whatever appealing qualities Nikolas Slater carried in the looks department, he’d proven himself an even better man.
The kindness with which he’d listened to her story about Ace. The confidentiality he’d still maintained with his existing client. Even the sweet gesture of lunch when he figured out how hungry she really was. Even the maneuver he’d just pulled on the sidewalk, negotiating her into a safe place to stay for the night.
All of it had combined to demonstrate that he was a good man.
Nikolas’s voice broke into her thoughts. “You ready to make the call, Nova?”
She took
a deep breath and resumed a seat in the torture chair. “Can we walk through it once more?”
“Of course.”
He turned his computer monitor around so she could see it, then tapped a few notes into a search bar. In a matter of seconds, an image from a society event popped up and Nikolas clicked on it, expanding it so that it fit the screen. The man she recognized as her father smiled back from the middle of the photo, dapper in a tuxedo, with two women, one under each arm. The women’s resemblance to each other was easy to see, even without the caption below the picture.
Asa “Ace” Colton poses at the annual Mustang Valley General Hospital Pediatrics Gala with his sisters Ainsley Colton (left) and Marlowe Colton (right). The Colton family are patrons of the hospital and established the gala in memory of Tessa Ainsley Colton, late first wife of Colton Oil CEO, Payne Colton.
“Those are my aunts? Or sort-of aunts?” She swallowed around the lump in her throat, the image making things real in a way it hadn’t been up to now.
“I know them both. The blonde is Marlowe and the darker-haired one is Ainsley. They’re both good women and devoted to the family. They’ll want to meet you, Nova. I know they will.”
Nova drank in the image, struggling to believe it could be so easy after all this time. Even if the women in that photo weren’t related to her father by blood, they shared history and a lifetime together.
They were still her father’s family, which meant they were her family, too. They’d be her child’s family.
As the reality of that sank in, something she’d been holding onto very tightly crumbled.
The idea that she had to do this all alone.
“Let’s make the call.”
Chapter 4
Nikolas hunted through his files for the numbers he’d accumulated over the course of building his business. Some contacts he’d known even longer and some he’d acquired through hard work and the daily grind of owning his own firm.
When it came to Marlowe and Ainsley, one fitted the first category and the other into the second.
