Have Baby, Need Billionaire & The Sarantos Secret Baby: Have Baby, Need Billionaire / The Sarantos Secret Baby

He was just aggravated enough by what Tula had had to say the night before that he told Mick everything. He finished by saying, “She ticked off my day hour by hour, on her fingers, damn it.”

Mick laughed as the elevator doors swept closed and Simon stabbed the button for the ground floor of the department store. “Wish I’d seen your face.”

“Thanks for the support.”

“Well come on, Simon,” Mick said, still chuckling. “You’ve got to admit you’ve dug yourself a pretty deep rut over the years.”

“There’s nothing wrong with a tight schedule.”

Mick leaned against the wall. “As long as you allow yourself some room to breathe.”

“You’re on her side?”

Grinning, Mick said, “Absolutely.”

Grumbling under his breath at the memory, Simon stalked up the stairs, haunted by the now unnatural silence. For years, he’d come home to the quiet and had relished it. Now after only a few days of having Tula and the baby in residence…the silence was claustrophobic. Made him feel as if the walls were closing in on him.

“Ridiculous. Just enjoy the quiet while you’ve got it,” he muttered. At the head of the stairs, he headed down the hall toward his room, but paused in front of the nursery. The baby wasn’t there, but the echo of him remained in the smell of powder and some indefinable scent that was pure baby.

He stepped inside and let his gaze slide across the stacked shelves filled with neatly arranged diapers, toys and stuffed animals. He smiled to himself and inspected the closet as well. Inside hung shirts and jackets, clustered by color. Tiny shoes were lined up like toy soldiers on the floor below.

In the dresser, he knew he would find pajamas, shorts, pants, socks and extra bedding. A colorful quilt lay across the end of the crib and a small set of bookshelves boasted alphabetically arranged children’s books.

Tula might thrive in chaos herself, he mused, but here in the baby’s room, peace reigned. Everything was tidy. Everything was calm and safe and…perfect. He’d had a crew in to paint the room a neutral beige with cream-colored trim, but Tula had pronounced it too boring to spark the baby’s inner creativity. It hadn’t taken her long to have pictures of unicorns and rainbows on the walls, or to hang a mobile of primary-colored stars and planets over the crib.

Shaking his head, Simon sat down in the cushioned rocker and idly reached to pull one of the books off the shelves. Lonely Bunny Finds a Garden.

“Lonely Bunny,” he read aloud with a sigh. Now that he’d heard her story, he could imagine Tula as a lonely little girl with wide blue eyes, trying to make friends with a solitary rabbit. He frowned, thinking about how her mother had so callously treated her daughter’s fears.

He was feeling for Tula. Too much.

Opening the book, Simon read the copyright page and stopped. Her name was listed as Tula Barrons Hawthorne.

He frowned as his memory clicked into high gear, shuffling back to when he was dating Nathan’s mother, Sherry. He remembered now. She had been living here in the city then and she’d told him that her uncle was in the same business as Simon.

“Jacob Hawthorne.” Simon inhaled slowly, deeply, and felt old anger churn in the pit of his stomach.

Jacob Hawthorne had been a thorn in his side for years. The man’s chain of discount department stores was forever vying for space that Simon wanted for his own company. Just three years ago, Jacob had cheated Simon out of a piece of prime property in the city that Simon had planned to use for expansion of his flagship store.

That maneuver had cost Simon months in terms of finding another suitable property for expansion.

Not to mention the fact that Jacob had bought up several of the Bradley department stores when Simon’s father was busily running the company into the ground. The old man had taken advantage of a bad situation and made it worse. Hell, he’d nearly succeeded in getting his hands on the Bradley home.

By the time Simon had taken over the family business, it was in such bad shape he’d spent years rebuilding.

Jacob Hawthorne was ruthless. The old pirate ran his company like a feudal lord and didn’t care who he had to steamroll to get his own way.

At the time Simon had briefly dated Sherry, he’d enjoyed the thought of romancing a member of Hawthorne’s family, knowing the old coot would have been furious if he’d known. But Sherry’s own clingy instability had ended the relationship quickly. Now, though, he had a son with the woman—which made his child a relative of Jacob Hawthorne.