Claiming His Secret Heir

Seeing that necklace—a piece she hadn’t seen in months—brought back a flood of new memories. The streak of thoughts through her head came so fast it almost hurt. She reeled back a little from the photo, the day of her kidnapping returning to her mind.

“Caroline?” Damon was beside her, his hand on her waist. Then, he shifted it to her shoulder when she still wobbled. “Are you all right?”

“My father was there.” She blurted the worst of it, needing to share the burden of those painful moments. “My God. He was in our house that day they took me.”

“Sit down.” He guided her into a spot on the love seat near the windows, the stiff white denim fabric yielding under their weight as they sat down together. “You remembered something?”

Just two days ago she’d sat across the room from a therapist in New York who’d told her she might never recover her memories. But now, new information flooded her neuropathways, making connections throughout her brain in a way that felt like her whole head was lighting up.

“The necklace I’m wearing in that photo.” She pointed to the picture of them on the park bench. “I was wearing it on the flight back from London.”

Damon left her side for a moment to retrieve the image for a closer look. Lowering himself back to the loveseat, he set the silver picture frame on the low table near a stack of books on gardening.

“I bought you the replica of one of the daisy windows you liked.” His full attention returned to her, his hand smoothing light, comforting circles between her shoulder blades. “It was just a fun, lunchtime trip to get out of the office. I put daisies in your hair that day, too.”

Her heart hugged the memory close. How could she lose this man now when she was only fully appreciating how much he’d meant to her?

“Right. It was a happy time and I liked wearing that daisy.” She closed her eyes, remembering. “I heard someone in the house a couple of hours after I got back to the Los Altos Hills place. I hoped maybe it was you, coming home early to surprise me, because who else enters a house without knocking?” She shook her head, her chest tight. “I guess I’d left the door unlocked though, and the security system hadn’t been hooked up yet.”

“I was furious with the security company when I realized there were no cameras going the day you disappeared.” Damon nodded, his expression grave. He looked impossibly handsome in his navy suit and custom tailored shirt. “I fired them for not having everything up and running when you returned. Then I hired a whole new company to redo every bit of the job.”

She thought back to Maresa’s insistence that Damon had been a wreck without her. How could it be too late to recover their love if it had run so deep? She dragged in another steadying breath.

“When I went downstairs, my father was in our house. He’d flown here the day before me, hoping to convince me to leave you since he hadn’t managed to do that when I saw him in London.” Her fingers clenched into fists as the time washed over her, blooming in bright red bursts of pain. His cruelty had been shocking. Painful. “I was angry to see him, but I attempted to be civil even though he’d brought two goons with him I didn’t know. I thought they were his private security. I didn’t realize until later they were there for me.”

She no longer needed the police to tell her the role her father had played in her disappearance. She remembered.

A gust of air from the ventilation system sent a chill through her and she shivered.

“I’m so sorry I wasn’t there to protect you.” Damon brushed his hand over her hair where it trailed down her back. “So damned sorry.”

“I would have never guessed he would try something so…” She shook her head, then steadied herself by looking into Damon’s eyes as he patiently let her find her way through wave after wave of emotions. “He went ballistic about the necklace.” That had tipped her off to the heartbreaking—terrifying—realization that Stephan Degraff had moved from eccentric and controlling to full-on obsessive. “He said cheap trinkets were beneath me. He ripped it off my throat.” Her hand went to her neck, remembering the scrape of his nails on her skin as he took it. “He wrestled off my wedding rings, too. I was screaming so much, one of his guards had to restrain me.”

Damon hugged her closer, his lips brushing her temple. “The police have him. You’ll never have to deal with him again, I promise you, on my life, I promise.”

“I know.” She breathed deep, trying to regain that sense of strength she’d felt after she tricked her father into signing away his share of Transparent, but she found herself needing Damon’s support to sustain her through the past steamrolling over her. “I told him to leave, but he refused. He said he would have me committed for unstable behavior. Then those goons grabbed me and—” Things got a little hazier after that.