The Tycoon's Secret Child (Texas Cattleman's Club: Blackmail 1)

“So,” he said, with another sip of coffee he really didn’t want. “Tell me.”

“I’m not sure where to start.”

“How about the beginning?” Wes set the coffee down and folded his arms across his chest as he leaned back in his chair. “If you have family money, why the hell did you come to work for me?”

“Rich people can’t have jobs?” Offended, she narrowed her eyes on him. “You have money, but you go into the office four days a week. Even when you’re at home in Royal, you spend most of your free time on the phone with PR or marketing or whatever. That’s okay?”

He squirmed a little in his chair. Maybe she had a point, but he wouldn’t concede that easily. “It’s my company.”

She shook her head. “That’s not the only reason. You’re rich. You could hire someone to run the company and you know it. But you enjoy your job. Well, so did I.”

Hard to argue with the truth. “Okay, I give you that.”

“Thank you so much,” she muttered.

“But why did you lie to get the job? Why use a fake name?” He cupped his hands around the steaming mug of coffee and watched her.

“Because I wanted to make it on my own.” She sighed and sat back, idly spinning the cup in front of her in slow circles. “Being a Graystone always meant that I had roads paved for me. My parents liked to help my brothers and I along the way until finally, I wanted to get out from under my own name. Prove myself, I guess.”

“To who?”

She looked at him. “Me.”

He could understand and even admire that, Wes realized. Too many people in her position enjoyed using the power of their names to get what they wanted whenever they wanted it. Hell, he saw it all the time in business—even in Royal, where the town’s matriarchs ruled on the strength of tradition and their family’s legacies. The admiration he felt for her irritated hell out of him, because he didn’t want to like anything about her.

She’d lied to him for years. Hidden his child from him deliberately. So he preferred to hold onto the anger simmering quietly in the pit of his stomach. Though he was willing to cut her a break on how she’d gotten a job at his company, there was no excuse for not telling him she was pregnant.

Holding onto the outrage, he demanded, “When you quit your job and left Texas, you didn’t bother to tell me you were pregnant. Why?”

“You know why, Wes,” she said, shaking her head slowly. “We had that what if conversation a few weeks before I found out. Remember?”

“Vaguely.” He seemed to recall that one night she’d talked about the future—what they each wanted. She’d talked about kids. Family.

“You do remember,” she said softly, gaze on his face. “We were in bed, talking, and you told me that I shouldn’t start getting any idea about there being anything permanent between us.”

He scowled as that night and the conversation drifted back into his mind.

“You said you weren’t interested in getting married,” she said, “had no intention of ever being a father, and if that’s what I was looking for, I should just leave.”

It wasn’t easy hearing his own words thrown back at him, especially when they sounded so damn cold. Now that she’d brought it all up again, he remembered lying in the dark, Belle curled against his side, her breath brushing his skin as she wove fantasies he hadn’t wanted to hear about.

He scraped one hand across his face but couldn’t argue with the past. Couldn’t pretend now that he hadn’t meant every word of it. But still, she should have said something.

“So you’re saying it’s my fault you said nothing.”

“No, but you can see why I didn’t rush to confess my pregnancy to a man who’d already told me he had no interest in being a father.” She rubbed the spot between her eyes and sighed a little. “You didn’t want a child. I did.”

“I didn’t want a hypothetical child. You didn’t give me a choice about Caroline.”

“And here we go,” she murmured with a shake of her head, “back on the carousel of never-ending accusations. I say something, you say something and we never really talk, so nothing gets settled. Perfect.”

She had a point. Rehashing old hurts wasn’t going to get him the answers he was most interested in. He wanted to know all about his little girl. “Fine. You want settled? Start talking, I’ll listen. Tell me about Caroline. Was she born deaf?”

“No.” Taking a sip of coffee, she cradled the mug between her palms. “She had normal hearing until the summer she was two.”

Outside, the wind blew snow against the window and it hit the glass with a whispering tap. Wes watched her and saw the play of emotions on her face in the soft glow of the overhead lights. He felt a tightness in his own chest in response as he waited for her to speak.

“We spent a lot of time at the lake that summer, and she eventually got an ear infection.” Her fingers continued to turn the mug in front of her. “Apparently, it was a bad one, but she was so good, hardly cried ever, and I didn’t know anything was wrong with her until she started running a fever.