Claiming His Secret Heir
“You said you searched everywhere for me.” Her voice was quiet. Serious. “Why didn’t you report me missing?”
The wind whistled through the tree branches overhead, a lonely sound that echoed through him.
Yesterday, when they’d touched on this subject, he’d been too stunned by the realization that she didn’t remember him to focus on the question. Now, he heard the hurt in her voice. The doubts underlying the question. She had hesitated to come back to him, thinking he might have “moved on.”
Which gave him no choice but to bring up her father.
He ground his teeth at the very thought of the man.
“Your father showed the police proof you’d been in touch with him. He said you’d left the marriage of your own volition and said I should respect your privacy.” He studied her expression, trying to interpret what she might be feeling at that news. “Do you remember much about him?”
“No. I’ve made progress since those first days where I didn’t recognize my own name. I can visualize my family, as well as college and the jobs I had after I graduated. But I don’t really remember anything about why I came out to Los Altos Hills. The last apartment I can recall clearly was in New York City.” She drew her knees up to her chest and wrapped her arms around them. “I can remember that I worked for my father, and I have a few memories of my childhood, but not much about him personally.”
Just his luck, she hadn’t wiped out all memory of Stephan Degraff. Just of Damon.
“Then you might recall your close relationship with your father,” he ventured carefully. “How often the two of you spoke.” Stephan Degraff counted on Caroline’s business advice for his investments, calling on her anytime day or night if he had a question. The guy was relentless. Manipulative. And then, a disturbing thought occurred to Damon. “I’m surprised you didn’t go to him first if you didn’t recollect anything about me.”
“I—” She hesitated, a mixture of emotions evident in her eyes. Guilt. Worry.
“It doesn’t matter.” He covered her knee with one hand, not wishing to upset her. “I’m glad you came here.”
“But my father told the police that I left you? Was it you who called the police?”
“You texted me when your plane landed after you returned here from London.” He wasn’t going to mention the argument they’d had about the UK trip. “It didn’t make sense to me that you would contact me then, only to pack up and leave me.”
“Of course not.” She shook her head, ponytail swinging. “Unless we’d been unhappy?”
“Right after the honeymoon?” He removed his hand from her knee to withdraw his phone and tapped open the gallery of images he’d saved. “Scroll through a few of those and see if they look like pictures of unhappy people.”
She shifted positions, lowering her knees to glance over the photos of them on the Ponte Vecchio, seated at their favorite café for morning espressos, in front of the Uffizi Gallery, at the top of that bell tower they’d climbed. Most of the images were of her smiling and him kissing her cheek, but in a few of them, you could see them both grinning. Wildly in love.
Or so he thought.
“My God.” Her finger swiped faster, sending pictures spinning off the screen, one after another. “Did you show these to the police? To my father? What did they say?”
Her voice quavered. Her whole body seemed to tremble. Damn it.
“I’m sorry.” He wrapped an arm around her shoulders and gently slid the phone from her hands. “I didn’t mean to upset you. We’ll figure it all out, okay? Just relax.”
She shook like a leaf. He couldn’t understand what, precisely, had her so troubled. But he didn’t want to rile her more.
“This is too important for me to relax.” Edging away from his touch, she shot to her feet and paced around the small lookout spot. “Would you be able to put me in touch with the officers you spoke to? The police who supposedly talked to my dad?”
“Supposedly?” Getting to his feet, he frowned. Defensive. “You don’t believe me?”
She tipped her head to one side. Thinking. “I’ve invested a lot of time struggling to piece together the past. I don’t want to worry that the perspectives I’m hearing are biased. I’d like to know what a neutral party has to say.”
“Of course.” He reached for her again, needing to offer some kind of comfort when she was clearly rattled. “Caroline, it’s not good for you to be so agitated. Let’s think about something else. Something happier.”
“Why would you believe I left of my own free will if we were so happy?” With her lips pursed and her eyebrows scrunched in confusion, she stared up at him waiting for answers he didn’t have.
Okay. Answers he didn’t want to share.
“Every couple argues. When your father said you’d been contacting him regularly, I assumed I must have missed something, but you’d be home soon.” He didn’t want to delve into this now. Not when his whole purpose today had been to relive good times.
“And when months went by?” She peered up at him, frustration simmering in her clear brown eyes.
“I took solace from the knowledge that you loved me once and you’d love me again.” He dropped his palms on her shoulders, drawing her closer. Wanting her to feel the connection that still stirred inside him every time she was near. “I knew what we shared wouldn’t just disappear. I hired private investigators to find you myself.”
He could feel her swift intake of breath. A mixture of wariness and some warmer, answering emotion flared in her eyes, but she didn’t move away.
The wind stirred the leaves at their feet and whirled around them. To Damon, it felt like it was drawing them closer.
“I’d like to show you what I mean.” He teased a touch along her jaw, testing the softness of her creamy skin, breathing in the faint scent of roses.
He wanted to take his time, to soak in the feel of her, the warmth.
If she remembered nothing else, she had to remember this.
Slowly, he grazed his lips along hers, the barest brush of mouths. Of breath. He tipped his forehead to hers, standing still, waiting.
When her fingers curled into his shoulders, her nails softly pressing through his sweater and tee, Damon’s blood surged in a heated rush. He ground his teeth against the bolt of hunger and forced himself to step back. He simply took her hands in his and caressed and kissed them.
“That proves passion is still there,” she said finally, her voice expressing the same hunger he felt. Yet she backed up another step and slid her hands away from his, tucking them into her pockets. “But what about love?”
Three
Late that night, safe in the master suite that Damon had wanted her to use during her stay, Caroline called her sister on a burner phone to check on Lucas.
Her Mexican captivity had been frightening and lonely, but the experience had taught her about making herself difficult to find. The men who’d held her went through cheap, pay-by-the-minute phones like candy, opening new packages of them every week. They were perfect for contacting their colleagues and not leaving a trace. When Caroline left Vancouver with her son and her sister three days ago, she’d purchased similar devices at a few different places along the way, driving almost to Montana to cross the border discreetly.
Illegally.
But since they were US citizens anyhow, she didn’t feel as guilty about that as she did about deceiving Damon. Assuming, of course, that he really did love her. Even before the toe-curling kiss he’d given her on the hiking trail, those honeymoon photos he’d shown her had gotten to her. Could that kind of happiness be faked? She knew she’d been in love with him. But the pictures had her almost believing he sincerely felt the same way for her.
Almost. And she needed to be absolutely certain.
Because if Damon was being forthright about what they’d shared and about her father’s role in not reporting her missing—that meant her dad was guilty of... She didn’t even want to think about it. If that was the case, her father had far more to answer for than simply withholding the truth about her husband.
Earlier in the evening, she’d attempted to phone the two police officers Damon had spoken to, but neither was on duty. Surely Damon had to feel confident they would back up his story if he provided their names so readily?
Her sister answered the phone on the third ring, sounding flustered or maybe scared. “Caroline? Are you okay?”
Victoria’s worry fueled her own. Caroline sat up straighter.
“I’m fine. Are you safe? Is Lucas okay?”
She could hear Victoria huff out a breath on the other end, relaxing. In the background, the laugh track from an old sitcom added an odd note to their tense greeting.
“We’re good. He’s fast asleep in the other room and I have the baby monitor right next to me so I can hear if he so much as sighs.”
A pang of longing stabbed Caroline in the chest. She wished she were holding her infant son right now, the warmth of his small body comforting her and giving her strength after this stress-filled day.
“I miss him so much. Thank you for taking care of him.” She drew a steadying breath herself, padding over to the California king–size bed to slip between the luxurious sheets. She propped herself on down pillows stacked against the leather bolster. The room’s color scheme of tans and creams was so neutral it felt like an old sepia-toned photograph. “Have you seen anyone? Heard anything?”
They’d both been worried their father would have them followed. Or he’d cut short the Singapore trip to come after them himself. It didn’t matter that they’d crossed the border in secret; Stephan Degraff would probably guess Caroline’s ultimate destination. Her father knew she was upset that he’d withheld Damon’s name from her when she’d been confused and suffering from amnesia.
At the time, her sister had been doing a semester abroad program for her degree and hadn’t been aware of what was happening. Victoria had some flexibility in her schedule this semester to work on her master’s thesis, but she was due back at Stanford by the end of the month.
“It’s been quiet. I haven’t left the carriage house and I’ve kept the blinds drawn, like we talked about. I’ve got enough diapers and formula for a whole week, I think.”
“I’ll be back long before then.” She briefly relayed to Victoria what she’d learned from Damon, ending with the news that an officer from the Santa Clara County Sheriff’s Department was supposed to return her call in the morning.
After a long silence, Victoria let out a low whistle. “My God, Caro, I don’t even know what to say.” She swore softly. “Because if your husband is telling the truth, that means Dad is—”
“Dangerous?” She barely breathed the word, not wanting to believe it herself.
When her sister scoffed, Caroline shifted against the pillows, flipping the cream-colored sheet up higher against her red floral nightshirt.
“Dad might be controlling,” Victoria mused aloud, the laugh track still rolling from the television in the background. “Hell-bent on winning, even, but that doesn’t make him dangerous.”
Right. This was the father who’d pushed them on the swing when they were girls and used it as a fun physics lesson. The same dad who took them camping and taught them how to tell which plants were poisonous. He might have had high expectations for his daughters, but Caroline had never had reason to doubt his love.
“How could he not have been worried if Damon told him he thought I was kidnapped?” She felt like she was missing pieces of a bigger puzzle. “Why wouldn’t he have at least looked into the possibility? Was he that angry with me that I married someone he didn’t approve of?” She thought back on the last few months in her father’s house. At first, she’d been ill. But as she gained strength and her memories began returning, she’d told him she’d been abducted. “Furthermore, why didn’t he call the police when I told him what I remembered about the men who held me against my will?”
“But Damon said Dad told the cops you’d been in contact with him shortly after you were taken,” Victoria said carefully. “Maybe that’s true and you still have gaps in your memory from the drugs?”
“I do have gaps in my memory. I know that.” Frustration simmered, but how could she expect other people to believe her version of past events when she had so many doubts of her own? “But I didn’t imagine that house in Mexico or the rotating staff of guards who stood watch every day for months.”
A shiver chilled her skin and she burrowed deeper in the covers, tugging the khaki-colored duvet up over the sheet. She reached a hand out of the blankets long enough to tap the remote for the gas fireplace. The flames leaped higher inside the pale-river-stone hearth. The house was quiet and she wondered if Damon was still awake. He’d kept things light between them after their kiss, his behavior toward her solicitous, polite...caring, even. But he’d seemed determined not to revisit conversation topics that could “agitate” her and he’d reminded her over dinner that she’d promised to see a doctor tomorrow.
For the amnesia she didn’t really have. The last holes in her memory now were drug-induced and, her doctor said, might never return.
“Okay.” Victoria turned down the television on her end of the call. “But what if the gaps in your memory are bigger than you realize? What if you were a captive for weeks and not months? Isn’t there a chance Dad could be telling the truth about having contact with you at first? Maybe you just don’t remember that you left Damon—like Dad said—because it was too upsetting.”
Her chest constricted. She wasn’t sure if she resisted the idea because she still cared about her husband, or because she wanted her son to have a relationship with his father. Or both.
“Why wouldn’t I have told you if I left my husband?” Caroline asked, tracing the buttons on the fireplace remote with her thumbnail.
Victoria was her closest confidante and had been since they lost their mother to an overdose of prescription opioids five years ago. Actually, she’d been closer to Victoria since well before that, as their mother had struggled with depression for years before her death. Caroline and Damon had that loss in common; his had died when he was young. At least she’d been close with her father. Damon’s dad had stopped visiting his illegitimate sons before Damon was a teen, choosing to be a father to his offspring by his legal wife rather than Damon and his brothers.
“Just guessing, but I was buried in coursework that semester, so maybe you held off because of that.” She seemed to hesitate and for a moment Caroline heard nothing but the soft hiss of the flames in the fireplace before Victoria continued. “Or maybe you were keeping me out of it since Dad asked you to keep your distance from me when you chose to marry his business enemy.”
It was all speculation of course, since Victoria couldn’t know Caroline’s reasons any better than Caroline did. A wave of fatigue hit her.
“But I remember someone entering the house. And it wasn’t Damon.” She had to have been kidnapped. She remembered being frightened that day.
“You were drugged,” Victoria said softly. “There’s a reason they give benzodiazepines to patients to forget about surgery. It makes things fuzzy and confusing. Time bends. That’s not your fault, Caroline.”
Right. Her physician had said the same thing. But that didn’t make it any less scary or infuriating.
Before she could say as much, however, she heard a baby’s cry on the other end of the call. She sat up straight in bed, poised to help before reminding herself that she wasn’t in the same house as Lucas.
“Guess it’s time for the midnight bottle.” The crying quieted for a moment; Victoria must have turned down the volume on the baby monitor. “I’d better go.”
“Okay. Wish I was there.” Caroline wanted her baby with her. Always.
She hated that she had to deceive people—her father and her husband, too—just to find out who was telling her the truth.
“Soon. Be safe, Caro. And good luck.” Victoria disconnected, leaving Caroline feeling more alone than ever.
Tomorrow, she’d have to find a way to divert Damon from her doctor’s appointment. She would go in person to the police station if she didn’t hear from the officers first thing in the morning. Her future was riding on what they had to say. Because once she found out if Damon had been telling her truth, she would confront him with her own: that although she couldn’t remember if she’d left him or not, she knew without a doubt she’d been held against her will for some of the time.
Damon had been the man she’d missed then, the one person she’d yearned to see. No drugs could make her forget how much she’d loved him once. Too bad she was no closer to knowing if he’d felt the same about her. Worse, she feared that even if he had returned those feelings at one time, she might have destroyed that love forever by keeping their child a secret.
* * *
“I’ve got a simple solution for all your problems, brother,” Damon’s younger brother told him in their Skype call at dawn.
Well, dawn West Coast time. Where Gabe sat, on the back patio of the Birdsong Hotel near the McNeill family compound in Martinique, it was already late morning. Exotic birds chirped in the palms swaying behind him, the whole image like an eighties pop-art painting full of pinks and turquoise.
“My missing bride finally returns home and doesn’t remember me. Her investor father wants to kick me out of my own company. I found a glitch in the new software we’re about to launch. And our older brother is happy just to sell off everything and get out of Dodge so he can spend time with his new wife.” Damon sat in the breakfast nook off the kitchen, one of the few rooms in the gargantuan house that didn’t echo when he had a phone conversation. Also, he’d chosen this spot since it was close to the stairs from the master suite, and he needed to stick near Caroline. “Now, explain to me how you could possibly have a solution to all those problems.”
Gabe had surprised him with the call this morning after Damon texted him the night before, asking for his opinion on the potential sale of Transparent. Their older brother, Jager, wanted the sale to happen so they could start over and get out from under the pressure of investors who wanted to control the direction of the company.
Namely, Stephan Degraff.
Damon couldn’t let go yet. He was grateful to Jager for leading the company while Damon had searched for Caroline. But now he was ready to return his focus to the technology he’d developed. Technology he believed in. He wasn’t selling. And he wasn’t allowing Stephan Degraff to unseat him from the board, either.
“Go to New York,” Gabe informed him simply, spreading his arms wide as he rocked back in a purple-painted lounge chair, as if the answer was obvious. “Call on the new family relations and see if the McNeills will put their legendary money where the old man’s mouth is. Granddad says he wants us to be part of the family. Let him dust off the wallet and buy out Degraff to prove it.”
“Spoken like the baby of the family.” Damon leaned back against the leather banquette cushion and toasted Gabe with a mug of black coffee. “It doesn’t gall you even a little to go begging for a handout?”
“Who’s begging? Degraff would sell out his own kid to take over Transparent and the dude is worth a fortune. Clearly there is capital to be gained from your software idea.” Gabe shrugged, his sunglasses glinting with the reflected noontime glare. “Although, to be honest, I only invested because we’re related.”
“Generous to a fault, you are.” Damon shook his head, content to let Gabe ramble on about his assessment of “Granddad” following a recent phone call. But Damon’s thoughts lingered on something else his brother had said.
How much would Stephan Degraff “sell out” Caroline to obtain control of Transparent? What lengths would he go to?
A year ago, Damon had told himself that it didn’t matter what Stephan did because Damon’s love for Caroline surpassed everything else. But what if Stephan hadn’t just sent Caroline to Transparent for business reasons—to be Damon’s entrepreneur in residence? What if Caroline had come to get close to Damon personally, as well?
The idea was ridiculous. She was a beautiful, brilliant woman. She would have never married him solely because her father wanted to spy on Damon’s company. But the fact that she’d disappeared right after the honeymoon, coupled with the fact that she’d returned now, claiming to have no memory of the marriage, right at a sensitive time of transition for the business...
Across the kitchen, he saw the door of the master bedroom open silently. He closed his laptop with no warning to Gabe, not wanting Caroline to overhear the discussion. Damon watched her as she stepped onto the bamboo floor, her shoes in her hand, as if she wanted to make as little sound as possible. She was fully dressed in fresh clothes she must have found in the closet. A cranberry-colored purse was slung over the shoulder of a shawl sweater that swung around her knees. Her gaze was on the door.
Leaving?
“Good morning.”
He startled her so badly she dropped the shoes she’d been carrying, brown leather boots that clunked heavily to the floor. Damn it. How had he let his brother’s comment twist him around to think the worst of their relationship? He knew Caroline better than that. Didn’t he?
Shoving to his feet, he was across the room and at her side. Picking up her shoes and setting them neatly by the kitchen island, he reached to steady her arm.
“I’m sorry, Caroline.” He smoothed a touch along her shoulder, remembering the feel of her lips against his the day before. “I should have given you a warning.”
“No need.” She waved off the apology, her high ponytail brushing her shoulder when she moved away. “You live here. I’m the newcomer.” She tipped the cell phone in her hand to show him. “I’m on hold with the local police department. I’m trying to speak to the officers you mentioned yesterday.”
“I thought they were going to call you when they went on duty?” He had been with her when they’d left a message at the station the day before.
“Shift change is at seven a.m. I thought I’d try to reach them before they head out for the day.” Her attention shifted to the call and she tucked the phone against her cheek. “Yes, I’m here. I’m holding for Officer Downey.”
Damon watched her pace the kitchen, her outfit a swirl of rich colors reflected in stainless steel appliances. She must have been transferred to the officer she wanted because she gave her name and the details of why she was calling, checking notes that she pulled from her purse to read him approximate dates Damon had given her yesterday.
Having his story checked was a strange sensation. Long before he’d dreamed up the idea for Transparent, he’d been a successful businessman. In Martinique, where he and his brothers owned a marina and a historic plantation home available for private parties and corporate retreats, he had a reputation for being a fair employer and a generous contributor to local causes. In Silicon Valley, he was a man people listened to. He filled lecture halls when he spoke at prestigious universities about digital progress.
But the woman he’d given his heart to had to verify his story with the police. Was that normal for amnesia sufferers? He added it to the list of things to ask the specialist, who’d made time to see her today when he called in a favor from a friend.
For now, he distracted himself by making a fresh pot of coffee for Caroline while she quizzed the cop on the other end of the phone.
“Thank you so much,” she finally said, her brown eyes darting Damon’s way. “I appreciate knowing more about what my father said.” She seemed to hesitate as she listened to the officer. She shook her head even though he couldn’t see her. “No,” she finally said. “Not yet. But I will contact you as soon as I’m ready to come in to give a statement.”
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