His Instant Heir

Allan had a point. But Dec didn’t really care about all that. He could only think of Cari. He had thought he would be able to appease her after the meeting, but he’d heard the heartache in her voice and he knew that there was no way he was going to be able to win her back easily.

Allan stepped out of the conference room to go find Kell and try to calm him down, but all Dec could do was sink into a chair and think about how much he loved Cari. Business, money and the Montrose name meant nothing to him if he didn’t have her by his side.

He picked up his cell phone and saw on the screen the picture Cari had taken of him and DJ. She’d given him so much more than he could ever thank her for, and she deserved more from him. Something that would show her that he really had changed.

But grand gestures weren’t his thing. He might be the man to force a change, but to woo someone he had no idea how to begin. He hoped that confessing his love for her would be a start, but he had a few other ideas, as well.

It would take some time to put his plan in motion, but that was okay; he wanted to leave nothing to chance. Last night when he’d held her and come up with his plan to save her job, he realized he’d been too narrow in his thinking. He and Cari were part of something bigger, and he knew that he was going to have to get her sisters on board before he went after her and won her back.

Fifteen

“Sorry about breaking down,” Cari said later that night when she was ensconced on Emma’s living room sofa. DJ and Sam were playing quietly on the floor and she felt a little more normal now that she’d had a pint of Ben & Jerry’s One Sweet Whirled.

“You were entitled to,” Jessi said. “I would have socked Dec if he’d done that to me.”

Cari half smiled, but she didn’t think that was amusing. “I don’t want to talk about Dec. We should be thinking of a plan to ensure they have to keep the three of us on staff. I’m sure that if I have the finance department rework our new figures—”

“We don’t want to talk business now,” Jessi said, interrupting her. “We all heard you say that you loved Dec. What are you going to do about that now?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “I really thought he’d handle everything differently. I thought… Well, I guess that doesn’t matter. I can’t make him into any man other than the one he is. And I get why the takeover and being a Montrose is so important to him.”

“Yeah,” Jessi said. “He’s adopted.”

“How do you know?”

“I had him investigated. I sort of guessed that he was DJ’s father, too.”

“How?” Cari asked.

“The investigator talked to the staff at the Atlanta hotel where you stayed and found out that Dec had been there, too. The timeline worked out to make him the dad.”

Cari nodded. She should have known Jessi would figure it out. She was like a dog with a bone when she got on something.

“I suspected that Dec might be DJ’s father when you started dating him,” Emma added. “You’d been so careful to keep every man away.” She put her empty ice-cream pint on the coffee table next to Cari’s and Jessi’s.

“I wasn’t planning to say anything about DJ to him,” Cari said. From the moment she’d decided to have the baby, she’d realized she had only herself to depend on. And then Dec reappeared.

“What happened? You never really said too much about it,” Jessi asked.

“It was just a crazy attraction and we ended up in bed. The next morning he was gone, and I felt stupid so I didn’t try to get in touch with him. I mean, at first I didn’t realize he was a Montrose,” Cari said.

“So when you realized you were pregnant?” Emma asked. Her sisters were both watching her intently.

“He had been out of the picture for so long and I didn’t really want him back in it. It was so overwhelming, you know?”

“If I had found out I was pregnant I’d be freaking out,” Jessi said.

“So would I,” Emma said with a wink.

“You should have told us, Cari. I would have been the one to liaise with Dec if I’d known.”

“You couldn’t have protected me from this, Em. No matter what we did in the office, once I heard his name I knew I had to tell him about DJ.”

“Why?” Jessi asked. “He forfeited his rights when he walked away.”

“Because he’s DJ’s father,” Cari said. “And you know we love our parents no matter what. Remember how Dad was always trying to please Grandfather and Grandfather never had anything nice to say?”