Revealing Her Best Kept Secret, page 1
Brandon had known somehow the little girl was his as soon as he’d looked into her eyes and seen the same dark green as his own.
Lacey had lied to him—for five years. And made him a man worse than his father.
He had never planned to have children. Never even contemplated it. For the simple reason he was fairly sure he did not have the sensibilities to nurture or protect a child. But it was way too late to worry about that now.
He had to deal with what was, not what should have been.
Ruby Devlin Carstairs was a part of him. And however angry he was with her mother for keeping her existence from him, however angry he was with himself for not checking on Lacey after that long-ago encounter, he could not abandon the child... The way his own mother had abandoned him.
How the hell he was going to form a relationship with this child, he had no idea. He knew absolutely nothing about children. But one thing was certain—her mother would no longer be calling the shots.
USA TODAY bestselling author Heidi Rice lives in London, England. She is married with two teenage sons—which gives her rather too much of an insight into the male psyche—and also works as a film journalist. She adores her job, which involves getting swept up in a world of high emotions; sensual excitement; funny, feisty women; sexy, tortured men; and glamorous locations where laundry doesn’t exist. Once she turns off her computer, she often does chores—usually involving laundry!
Books by Heidi Rice
Harlequin Presents
Banished Prince to Desert Boss
Billion-Dollar Christmas Confessions
Unwrapping His New York Innocent
Hot Summer Nights with a Billionaire
One Wild Night with Her Enemy
Passionately Ever After...
A Baby to Tame the Wolfe
Secrets of Billionaire Siblings
The Billionaire’s Proposition in Paris
The CEO’s Impossible Heir
Visit the Author Profile page at Harlequin.com for more titles.
Heidi Rice
Revealing Her Best Kept Secret
To Rob, my hero.
Contents
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
EPILOGUE
EXCERPT FROM MARRIAGE BARGAIN WITH HER BRAZILIAN BOSS BY TARA PAMMI
CHAPTER ONE
DO NOT PANIC. There’s no way on earth Brandon Cade will remember you.
Lacey Carstairs recited the mantra for the fiftieth time. Unfortunately, it was doing nothing to steady her galloping heartbeat or reduce the boiling pain in her temples at the thought of the interview which loomed large in her future with the man who had ground her heart—and her career prospects—to dust beneath the heel of his hand-made Italian leather loafers.
‘Do you know how much longer Mr Cade is likely to be?’ Lacey asked the receptionist in the stark and stylish penthouse offices of Cade Tower on London’s South Bank.
‘This interview is not his top priority today,’ the woman replied, with enough haughty superiority to put Lacey firmly in her place. ‘But he should be with you soon. He has a meeting scheduled in Paris in...’ she clicked on her tablet ‘...two hours.’
‘Two hours, but surely...?’ Lacey trailed off, her anxiety catching up with her reporter’s instincts. Cade’s tight schedule could be a bonus. Surely he would have to reschedule? It took longer than two hours to get to Paris from here.
‘We have a heliport on the roof,’ the receptionist replied, crushing that hope like a bug. ‘He won’t have to leave till two.’
Fabulous. ‘Right.’
So, no reprieve. But the good news was he had less than an hour now before he had to leave, so the interview would have to be brief—a reprieve of sorts.
Her gaze strayed to the glass wall behind the receptionist’s desk, and the sky-high view of the Thames snaking lazily past the steel-and-glass blocks of London’s Square Mile, the City’s financial hotspot.
How fitting that the most powerful media mogul in Europe should conduct his empire from the top of the continent’s tallest building. Unfortunately, the bubble of vertigo wasn’t doing much for the nausea lying low in Lacey’s stomach.
The thought of having to see Brandon Cade again had kept her up all night. So she now had the foggy feeling of exhaustion to add to the double whammy of terror and stress which had slammed into her yesterday evening, when her editor, Melody, had phoned with the ‘stupendous news’—Lacey would be handling the Cade profile because Tiffany Bradford, the magazine’s star feature writer, had flu.
Unless Lacey wanted to kill her career a second time—and/or come up with a viable explanation as to why she was the only female magazine journalist in the known universe who would rather shoot herself in the head than spend sixty minutes with the world’s handsomest and most dynamic billionaire bachelor. Refusing simply hadn’t been an option.
Not that Melody had given her an option.
This interview was a seriously big deal for Splendour magazine. It had been three months in the offing, the result of intense negotiations between the magazine’s executive editor and the might of Cade Inc’s PR department. Even so, Lacey had no doubt at all Brandon Cade would have refused, but for the media furore surrounding his ex-mistress’s kiss-and-tell book, which was currently threatening to derail the company’s acquisition plans in the US.
Misty Goodnight had painted an evocative portrait of an impossibly handsome, powerful, sexually dominant and yet wholly unknowable autocrat of thirty-one, who treated his women with the same cool, calm, ruthless detachment with which he ran the empire he had inherited from his father at seventeen.
Lacey happened to know Misty hadn’t lied—or rather, her army of ghost writers hadn’t lied. The tabloid press had taken the story and run with it, dubbing Cade ‘the Great Gasp-by’, thanks to Misty’s lurid depictions of his sexual prowess.
Lacey’s nipples drew into hard peaks at the visceral memory of her one time with Cade. She swallowed down the aching pain in her throat and crossed her arms over her swollen breasts.
Don’t go there. Do not go there. Ever.
The evidence Cade still had a sexual hold on her body after one thirty-minute encounter five years ago was as mortifying as it was disturbing.
He will not remember you.
She repeated the mantra to quell the rising tide of hysteria.
He would never put the smart, sophisticated, perfectly styled magazine journalist together with the eager-to-please intern he had once seduced. She’d changed her name, cut her hair down from long chestnut waves to a curly bob, lost nearly ten pounds—thanks so much, Ruby and her terrible twos—and changed her wardrobe from the second-hand clothes she’d once kidded herself were vintage to the chic lines of the designer labels that were just within her reach now, if she budgeted accordingly.
But, most of all, she’d got a lot less stupid in the intervening years. He’d destroyed her, simply because he could. He’d seduced her at the Carrell launch party and had then napalmed her career. She still hadn’t quite figured out why he’d had her sacked. It wasn’t as if she’d made any demands of him, or expected anything after that mind-blowing encounter. Perhaps she should add paranoid and vindictive to his list of character flaws.
He doesn’t need to know about Ruby.
The familiar guilt pricked her conscience.
Maybe one day, if her daughter wanted to know who her biological father was, she could tell her. But, until that day came, Lacey refused to throw herself or her daughter on Brandon Cade’s mercy. Given the ruthless way he’d treated her once, she didn’t hold out much hope of his reaction to an illegitimate child being good, or even rational.
And she would never subject a child to a father like her own.
She bit into her lip. Tasted the tiny hint of metal to remind herself not to get carried away.
You’re not scared or heartbroken any more, like that starry-eyed nineteen-year-old. You’re cool, aloof and indifferent now. Just like him.
Brandon Cade was even on record as saying he didn’t want children. So why would she tell him about Ruby?
Thank goodness Cade’s PR team had insisted any discussion of his private life was out of bounds. Of course, Melody had implied a good feature writer ignored those kinds of rules. Well, not Lacey. Not this time.
The musical chime of the receptionist’s smartphone startled her.
‘Yes, I’ll send her up, then.’ The receptionist clicked off her phone. ‘If you’d like to take the lift to the top floor, Mr Cade’s EA will be waiting for you.’
Lacey crossed the lobby with as much purpose in her stride as she could muster to step into the scenic lift. The panoramic view of metal and glass across the water glittered like jewels in the noon sunshine. She pressed the top floor button. The buildings dropped away while the writhing snakes in the pit of her stomach plummeted to her toes.
&
CHAPTER TWO
BRANDON CADE STARED at the muddy brown line of the River Thames eighty-five floors below him. He drew in a tight breath, his nostrils flaring as he counted out on the exhale. He’d taught himself the breathing technique in childhood to stop himself from crying—and eventually from showing any emotion at all—at his first boarding school, age five. The technique had also come in useful to help him control his anxiety on the rare occasions when he’d come face to face with his father. But as he waited for his assistant to usher in the feature writer from Splendour magazine it was the first time he’d had to use it in years, to maintain the icy demeanour he was famous for.
He never talked to the damn press—ironic, when one considered Cade Inc owned ten global newspaper titles, a raft of cable and digital broadcasters in the UK and Europe and was currently in negotiations to acquire a media conglomerate in North America. But Cade Inc’s brand was all about hard news. He didn’t own any lifestyle magazines and had no social media interests for the simple reason he despised the kind of powder-puff journalism glossy magazines such as Splendour peddled to the masses.
And now, thanks to his affair with a woman who had bored him in bed after approximately ten minutes, he found himself in a straitjacket of his own making. The intrusion infuriated him.
He was suing Misty, of course, and given the expertise of his legal team, and the might of the media empire he controlled, he knew her memoir of their not-at-all memorable sexual exploits would never reach the shelves. But enough of it had been leaked online to make his negotiating team concerned about finalising the deal to acquire the very conservative Dixon Media Group in Atlanta. Hence the need for this damage limitation exercise.
Next time, maybe don’t date social media influencers who are as shrewd and ruthless as you are.
‘Mr Cade, Ms Carstairs from Splendour magazine is here, shall I show her in?’ Daryl, his executive assistant, announced.
Brandon unclenched his jaw and took another careful breath. ‘Sure.’
He turned from the window, thrusting clenched fists into the pockets of his suit trousers. But as the woman stepped into the office behind his EA, her slim figure accentuated by a demure power suit and her head bent, a bizarre thing happened. A ripple of reaction streaked down his spine, and his senses, which had been jaded ever since a torrid encounter with a very different woman during a company event five years ago roared back to life.
His gaze narrowed on the short cap of wavy curls, the lightning strike of awareness firing through his system as irritating as it was unexpected.
‘Ms Carstairs, Mr Cade,’ Daryl announced, showing Brandon’s unwanted guest into the large airy office. ‘You have exactly twenty minutes before Mr Cade has to depart for Paris, Ms Carstairs,’ he added. ‘Would you like anything to drink?’
‘No, thank you,’ the woman replied, her voice a smoky purr, which tugged at Brandon’s memory and did not help one bit with the inexplicable reaction. The slight tremble in her tone and the way her fingers clutched her bag in a death grip suggested she was nervous.
Good—she ought to be. He didn’t want her here. But then she crossed the room and he caught a lungful of her scent—citrus and spice, and as annoyingly intoxicating as the rest of her.
His jaw tensed as visceral heat pounded into his groin.
Great. Was he actually getting turned on?
As if it wasn’t bad enough he was having to speak to this journalist, he noticed the tempting glimpse of cleavage peeking from the vee of her blue silk blouse, and the toned legs accentuated by her pencil skirt. He shook his head to dispel the vivid image of his tanned hand cupping the pale swell of her breast, the mouth-watering thought of her nipple elongating against his tongue...
‘Take a seat, Ms Carstairs,’ he said sharply as Daryl left the room. ‘What is your first name?’ he asked, surprised to realise he was curious. He wanted to see her face, to gauge her reaction to him—because he felt at a disadvantage, and he didn’t like it.
The brusque enquiry did the trick. At last, her head rose and she looked directly at him. But only for a second. That single glimpse was enough for him to make several important observations, though.
Her eyes were a fathomless chocolate-brown with hints of amber, and had a similarly slanted cat-like shape as those of the girl he remembered. And had tried very hard to forget. He’d never seen the colour of that girl’s eyes. It had been too dark in the club and the empty manager’s office where they’d ended up making love—or rather having raw, frantic, sweaty sex over a desk. But he still remembered the shape of her cheek in the moonlight, the tilt of her eyelashes, and could still hear the sound of her broken sobs as she’d climaxed.
Stop thinking about her, dammit.
He forced his mind away from the unsettling memory. And concentrated on the other thing he’d seen in this woman’s eyes.
Awareness. Wary and guarded, but there none the less. Apparently, she was attracted to him too...but was equally as unhappy about it.
Unusual. When was the last time a woman had desired him and not been eager to follow through on it? Her novel reaction made the need surge.
‘Lacey,’ she said, and he heard the tremble of nerves again. ‘Lacey Carstairs.’
She took the seat he’d indicated, brushing her skirt over her lush backside to sit.
Is she doing that deliberately?
But then her knuckles whitened on her smartphone as she retrieved it from her purse. She wasn’t just nervous, she looked scared, as if she would rather be anywhere else but in his office—with him—despite the mutual flare of attraction.
Interesting.
She had to know he was giving this interview under duress, and if she had done her research she would also know he wasn’t a good man to cross. If someone displeased or threatened him, he acted swiftly and without mercy. Just ask that artless girl who had lured him in and sacrificed her virginity, believing their rare sexual chemistry could be bartered for something more.
He frowned, aware he was thinking of that girl again whom he’d exorcised from his consciousness five years ago.
‘Do you mind if I record this, Mr Cade?’ the journalist asked, engaging the voice app on her phone with shaking fingers.
‘Go ahead, Lacey,’ he said, pleased when the use of her given name made her stiffen.
Of course, he had no intention of allowing anything to go into print he hadn’t agreed to. One of the stipulations his PR team had insisted on was that he would have final approval on the article before it went to press. And he would also demand any notes or tapes be destroyed as a matter of course. But, even so, he didn’t usually allow his words to be recorded.
‘And please call me Brandon,’ he added.
As expected, the offer had her head jerking up. This time, their gazes locked and held. The surge of heat crackled in the air between them. But he was prepared for it now. Enough to find himself enjoying the flare of reaction lighting the gold shards in the rich brown of her irises and flushing her pale skin a vivid pink.
Yes, she could feel it too, this rare electric chemistry. But what had unnerved him five years ago with that girl excited him now. His sex life had been non-existent since the Misty debacle, and had lacked the visceral spark of attraction for years, which this woman had ignited without even trying.
Why not play with it, and her—see how far she wished to take it? It wasn’t as if he would be risking anything. At thirty-one, he was even more cynical and ruthless than he had been five years ago. No way would she be able to get under his skin and fray the tight leash he kept around his emotions, the way that virginal girl had once done.
And who said she even wanted to? She was a journalist. She had to know how to use an attraction like this to her advantage—despite the pretence of nerves. The tremor in her voice, the wary tension in her gaze and the white knuckles were probably a carefully rehearsed act. But, even so, it was a good act. And an original approach, which he found surprisingly beguiling. After all, when was the last time he’d been treated to the thrill of the chase?
