Claiming His Secret Heir

“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 (#u46b1e0a7-ce94-5be4-980c-9a765e873b49)

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.