The Reluctant Heiress

The Reluctant Heiress
Christine Flynn

Senator’s Secret Daughter! It was quite a shock when popular family man Senator Kendrick recently announced he had an illegitimate daughter. But teacher Jillian Hadley insisted she wanted nothing to do with the legendary Kendricks. Who could they send to change her mind? Sexy PR expert Ben Garrett has recently been seen whispering in Jillian’s ear. No one knows what sweet words he used, but suddenly Jillian was whisked away to Ben’s very own private getaway.If pictures of the two together are any indication, perhaps the sudden impulse to be with Ben has more to do with passion than power?

“Nothing in my life,nothing,”Jillian stressed,“is the sameany more.”

She’d thought Ben would understand. He’d seemed so understanding of everything else.

“I even look different. The Kendrick women are tall and blonde and poised and self-confident, but I’m short, brunette, and so… not.”

Reaching out, Ben grabbed her wrist. “Trust me,” he insisted, as his eyes shifted from her mouth to the skin exposed by the vee of her top. “The last thing you ever need to worry about is how you compare to your half-sisters.”

Beneath his fingers, Jillian felt her pulse give a betraying little leap. Too aware of his big body, she took a step back, turned away.

“You don’t need to humour me, Ben. That’s not what I want from you.”

When she met his glance, his smile was gone.

“I’m not humouring you, Jillian. I meant exactly what I said.” His blue eyes narrowed as he cautiously searched her face. “Now that you’ve mentioned it, what do you want from me?”

CHRISTINE FLYNN

admits to being interested in just about everything, which is why she considers herself fortunate to have turned her interest in writing into a career. She feels that a writer gets to explore it all and, to her, exploring relationships – especially the intense, bittersweet or even lighthearted relationships between men and women – is fascinating.

Dear Reader,

The bulletin board above my desk is a mess. The green bamboo backing that I thought looked better than plain cork is barely visible. It’s covered with reminders, schedules and little bits of inspiration. That inspiration includes an 8x10 of an incredibly hunky guy – the hero for my work in progress – and dozens of quotes. Some of those quotations make me smile. Most make me think. One inspired this story.

“Life is change. Growth is optional. Choose wisely.”— Attributed to Karen Kaiser Clark

We know we can’t always control what happens to us. And sometimes it takes us a while to realise that our response to a situation is as important as the change itself. Change can be difficult. Growth can be a struggle. That’s why my first response to a crisis is to head for anything chocolate…and take it from there.

Love,

Christine

The Reluctant Heiress

CHRISTINE FLYNN

www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)

Prologue

Jillian Hadley always waited until September to make her New Year’s resolutions. Where the rest of the world planned new beginnings on January first, she waited for the start of the new school year to compile her annual list of the faults she would fix, habits she would break and objectives she would pursue.

She wasn’t rebelling against convention, though she definitely marched to her own drummer. She wasn’t asserting herself, either. The little quirk affected no one but herself. The independent streak she’d been raised to protect simply found the timing more logical. A new school year was a fresh start in itself. January came in the middle of it.

As had become her habit, she’d turned on the television in the living room for company the minute she’d walked into the cozy little duplex she called home. Accompanied by a persuasive male voice promising her better gas mileage, she lugged the luggage she’d taken on her trip into her bedroom, flipped on the overhead light to illuminate the purely feminine space and tossed her suitcase and carry-on bag onto her white eyelet-covered bed.

Only once in her eight years of teaching had she returned to Thomas Jefferson Elementary without her usual, lengthy list of items geared toward self-improvement. That had been last year; her very own personal year from hell. It had actually been closer to eighteen months, but there were details she preferred to overlook about that time as she unzipped her suitcase and started to unpack.

Within three months, her mom had become seriously ill, her now ex-fiancé had informed her that he had no intention of marrying her and her mom had died. It seemed as if bad news had simply been heaped on worse to the point where numbness had become a constant state of being. She hadn’t even realized how much of a fog she’d drifted in until the pain and numbness had finally, mercifully begun to dull over the past summer.

She lifted a slightly squashed, pale-pink orchid lei from atop a stack of shorts and tank tops. As of now, as of that very moment, she was declaring that horrible time officially over. Done. Finished. The loss of her mom, she would feel forever. Beth Hadley had been her friend, her champion and the strongest woman she’d ever known. Eric Chandler, she had long since concluded, she could easily survive without.

It was her awareness of how completely she was over the man she’d once thought she would grow old with—and the realization that her biological clock hadn’t stopped running just because the rest of her life had gone on hold—that led straight to her first resolution.

This year, she decided, hanging the lei over a post of her four-poster bed, if Coach Gunderson asked her out again, she would go. He was a nice guy. A little bald, but nice. And heaven knew how hard it was to find a decent guy anymore. One that wasn’t married, involved or gay, anyway. She would also avoid the doughnuts in the teachers’ lounge, learn to play the guitar she’d bought four years ago, and seriously consider getting her long, impossibly curly hair straightened. If she was feeling particularly adventurous, she might also get the unmanageable mass cut and dyed some color other than the uninspiring shade of plain old dark brown that it was.

The reemerged optimist in her could practically feel all manner of change coming on. Her vacation—a major, much-needed splurge—was now officially over. Other than the lei and a bunch of little paper drink umbrellas, all she had left of those ten days on Maui was a hibiscus-print sarong she’d probably never wear, the postcards and photo books she’d brought back to share with her students and the great tan she’d acquired because she’d kept forgetting to reapply sunscreen.

It didn’t matter that her vacation was now nothing but a memory. She felt none of the letdown she would have experienced even a few weeks ago at returning to her ordinary, rather predictable life. Even tired from eleven hours in the air, three plane changes and interminable waits in airports, she found herself looking forward to the new school year, to meeting her new students, to putting her resolutions to work. She didn’t even mind that before she could go to bed, she needed to do laundry so she could wash the top she wanted to wear to school tomorrow.

In the interests of time, she dumped the remaining contents of the suitcase into her laundry basket and headed for the washer and dryer behind the louvered doors in her kitchen. Thinking she should check the messages on her blinking answering machine, she’d just passed the assortment of herbs and a fern she’d left in water in her sink when the disembodied male voice on the evening news brought her to a halt.

With her heart beating a little too rapidly, she turned to the television opposite the sofa dividing the area in half.

“…affair early in my marriage. That affair took place more than thirty years ago and resulted in a daughter I didn’t know I had until she approached me after her mother’s death last year. The photographs taken by Bradley Ashworth were of that meeting. As you know, Bradley was married to my youngest daughter, Tess. When Tess told him she wanted a divorce to escape his mental and physical abuse, he told her I was having an affair and used those photographs to blackmail her into silence.”

On the screen, a distinguished-looking, silver-haired gentleman spoke in solemn tones from behind a bank of microphones. His sharp gray eyes peered intently toward his audience of millions.

With her pulse beating in her ears, Jillian tried to concentrate on the man’s words. He was saying that to protect her family’s relationships and reputation, his daughter Tess had allowed the world to believe what Ashworth had claimed; that she had left him because she’d become bored with marriage and wanted other men.

Jillian remembered the scandal that had erupted when the beautiful Tess Kendrick had taken her young son and left the country last year. At the time, Jillian had thought the woman the epitome of spoiled self-indulgence. Because of the relentless media coverage, so had everyone else. Beyond that recollection, though, little else about the woman and what was being said to clear her name computed just then.

The entire nation knew the man on the screen. The powerful former senator was one of the richest men in the country. As a young man, he had charmed a princess into giving up a kingdom to marry him and he, his glamorous wife and their four pampered and privileged offspring had been treated by the press as America’s royalty ever since.

Jillian had grown up with the media stories about their fairy-tale lives right along with everyone else. In high school, she and her girlfriends had devoured everything printed about the family, especially the girls. Ashley had been younger than Jillian by only a couple of years. Tess, by maybe two more. They had worn designer clothes and ball gowns. They’d attended the best private schools, had bodyguards, servants, staff. They’d spent summers in their royal grandmother’s tiny European kingdom of Luzandria. Their older brothers were gorgeous. The girls themselves had grown up to be as stunning as their mother, the elegant ash blonde the cameras now revealed to be sitting supportively at William Kendrick’s side.

Jillian’s heartbeats turned to sickening thuds. Her mom had been the only person she knew who seemed to ignore everything about the Kendricks and their celebrity. She’d never heard her comment on any of the magazine or news articles about any member of their family. If Jillian brought them to her attention with some publication’s picture of the girls all decked out for a charity ball or riding horses on their fabulous estate in Camelot, Virginia, her only remark would be a seemingly preoccupied “how nice,” or something equally innocuous before changing the subject entirely.

Jillian had simply thought that the lives of the rich and famous held no interest at all for her very practical, hardworking mom. At least, she had until two days before her mom had died.

That was when she’d finally told Jillian who her father was.

She was the illegitimate daughter the man on the screen was talking about. And he had promised he would tell no one she existed.

His somber image gave way to a reporter who looked properly grave himself as he proceeded to recap what William had just said about Tess Kendrick having been abused by her ex-husband, then blackmailed into silence with supposedly incriminating pictures of William and an unidentified woman.

It barely registered to Jillian that she had been mistaken for William’s lover. She barely even noticed that her name hadn’t been mentioned. All that mattered was that William Kendrick had just broken his word to her.

The basket of laundry had slid from her arms, bits of pale neutrals and pastels now scattered over beige carpet. She had met him only once. Grief, resentment and a whole host of bitter and unidentified emotions had driven her to seek him out a few weeks after her mom’s death. As ambivalent as she had felt about him, and because she’d had no desire to become tabloid fodder herself, she’d made it unquestionably clear that she didn’t want their relationship made public. As quickly as he had agreed, she’d felt certain he hadn’t wanted that, either, if for no other reason than to avoid the scandal such news would create. He had promised her—promised—that he would tell no one other than his wife that she existed.

She pressed her fingers to her mouth, realized she was shaking. She wasn’t sure if she felt sick, furious or numb as the newscaster began to speculate about who—and where—the daughter from his affair might be. All she knew for certain was that her mother had never stopped loving William Kendrick. The admission had come with nearly her dying breath. Yet, as much as Jillian loved and respected the woman who had held her head high and raised her illegitimate daughter alone, Jillian couldn’t imagine ever feeling anything remotely resembling affection for the man who had fathered her. Because her mother had shied from involvement with any other man, she suspected that he had hurt her badly. And now he had betrayed Jillian herself.

The change she’d felt coming on minutes ago no longer seemed welcome at all. As she watched the image on the screen cut to archive footage of Tess and Bradley, then to William as a young senator to capitalize on the dual scandals coming to light, what she’d felt now was more like the beginning of a nightmare.

Chapter One