Cinderella and the Billionaire by Marion Lennox

Author:Marion Lennox
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Harlequin
Published: 2019-04-05T12:09:55+00:00

* * *

Back in the land of telecommunications, his phone was crammed with messages. Of course. He’d abandoned complex negotiations to bring Henry to Australia, and his world hadn’t stopped because of it.

When he finally had time to check, it was four in the afternoon, which was midnight New York time. It was hardly the time to return business calls.

There was, though, one caller whose need for a response seemed more urgent than the rest. Helen, his personal secretary for years, was intelligent, competent and unflappable. But now she sounded...flapped.

She’d left ten different voicemail messages at various times over the last few days, each increasingly pressing.

‘Matt, you need to ring me. Please, Matt, this can’t wait. I need to speak to you, now.’

If it was anyone but Helen, he wouldn’t ring at this hour but he could hear the increasing worry. For him to be out of range for this long was unthinkable. It was a wonder she hadn’t organised a search party herself.

She answered on the second ring. He imagined her in her neat New York apartment, cool, collected, part of his ordered business world, but there was nothing ordered about the way she answered. ‘Where the hell have you been?’

He explained but she hardly listened.

‘Well, thank heaven you’re okay,’ she said, interjecting over his last words. ‘But, Matt...something’s happened. We’ve located Henry’s father. Steven Walker. You know you asked me to keep looking? After you left I thought of searching through Amanda’s client files from eight years ago, just on a hunch. And there he was. Of course, I wasn’t sure—how many Steven Walkers do you think there are in the States? But on the off chance I took the liberty of ringing, ostensibly to let him know his lawyer had died and to check there was nothing outstanding we needed to cover. And at the end... I ventured. I sort of casually dropped that Amanda had a seven-year-old son. Matt, there was a silence on the end of the phone, almost like he expected what was coming. So I went for it. I said the father’s name on the birth certificate was Steven Walker and we hadn’t been able to find him. Could that possibly be him?’

And then Helen hesitated, seeming to gather herself for what needed to be said next.

‘And then he said yes, it could. He was almost cool about it, maybe as if he’d suspected. He asked what was happening with Henry. I told him and he thanked me and disconnected. He went away and obviously did some investigation. A few hours later he phoned back. He has a family of his own—actually children from three marriages. He says he’ll want a DNA test but as long as that proves positive he’ll accept responsibility.’

‘That’s...good,’ Matt said cautiously.

‘Maybe,’ Helen told him. ‘But there’s more. He says it depends on the DNA result, but if it’s positive...he says he’s damned if he’s letting a son of his live on some forsaken island in the middle of nowhere.

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