Wife Wanted by Christine Rimmer

Author:Christine Rimmer
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Romance: Modern, Contemporary, Fiction, Romance, Romance - General, Romance - Contemporary, General, Non-Classifiable, Fiction - Romance
Publisher: Harlequin Sales Corp (Mm)
Published: 1997-02-15T20:09:22.406000+00:00

Once they’d left, Jake waited, standing absolutely still, until he was sure they wouldn’t return. Then he strode to the double doors and pulled them shut.

After that, assured of privacy, he headed straight for the liquor cabinet—and the crystal decanter he sought. He poured himself a generous three fingers of Scotch and knocked it back in two throat-burning swallows.

His second drink he took more slowly. By the time he had it down, the knot in his gut had eased a little.

There was nothing to worry about. He had handled himself well enough. Erica and Natalie had left thinking he was okay. Nate might have sent them here hoping to put more pressure on him, but he’d fooled brother Nate.

Jake caught a glimpse of himself in one of the beveled glass panes of the liquor cabinet doors, and quickly turned away. He didn’t like what he saw when he looked into his own eyes lately. He didn’t like it one damn bit. Sometimes he wondered who the hell he was, anyway. Because, as that blackmailing bitch Monica Malone had so gleefully pointed out to him, he was not who everyone thought he was.

With a low growl that sounded like a noise a trapped animal might make, Jake returned to the desk, where he dropped into the big chair and stared broodingly at the carved double doors that led out onto the empty hall.

Monica.

He couldn’t get her off his mind.

Sometimes he wondered whether everything—everything that was pulling his family and his world apart—began and ended with her. The fires at the labs. Kate’s death. Allie’s stalker. All of it. Every damn insurmountable difficulty, caused by Monica Malone.

Lately, the scandal sheets had been full of stories of how she had loved Ben Fortune. Was that it? Thwarted love, turned bitter and murderous over the years?

If she had loved Ben, that would explain a lot. Lovers whispered things to each other, after all. They revealed secrets they’d be wiser to keep to themselves.

And Monica Malone knew plenty of secrets. The bitch had an inside track on too much. She knew things she had no damn right to know. Like the fact that Jake was not really Ben Fortune’s son…

Damn. What sick pleasure she’d taken in telling him all about it. In pointing out that he’d been born just six months after Ben and Kate’s wedding—and such a big baby, too. She’d described how his real father, some nobody G.I. named Joe Stover, had died on a battlefield in France before Jake was even born. How Ben had been so in love with Kate that he promised to raise her bastard as his own.

Oh, and Ben had kept his promise. Jake had never been told about the man who’d really fathered him. He’d been treated as Ben’s oldest son in all the ways that mattered—even if deep in his heart he’d sometimes felt that he didn’t really completely belong. Still, the lie had been passed on to the next generation. Jake’s children had grown up adoring their wonderful grandpa Ben.

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