Baby Trouble: The Spy's Secret Family

His survival instinct kicked in. Must keep busy. Give himself small jobs to do. Count the ribs in the walls of his box. Check his food and water supply. Exercise and stretch. Press his eyes close to the small hole in one wall of the box. Keep his retinas acclimated to light. Think about the business plan for the new company he was going to start when he got out of here. Just. Keep. Moving.

Mechanically, he mumbled, “I wonder if our dinner’s here yet.” Take care of basic body needs first. Food. Water.

“I’m taking a shower,” she announced, revulsion plain in her voice.

She wanted to scrub the feel of him off of her. The frost surrounding his heart hardened a little more, constricting painfully. He’d lost his son, and now her. The blow was almost more than he could bear. An urge to crumple to the floor, to curl up in a ball, to close his eyes and slip into the black abyss in his mind nearly overwhelmed him. He almost wished for his box. Things had been simple in there. Clear. Survive one day at a time. One sunrise to the next.

But this—this he wasn’t sure he could stand.

He stood in the middle of the bedroom and stared at nothing until he heard the shower water cut off. The sudden silence spurred him to motion and he stumbled out into the living room.

Laura emerged from the bedroom a while later. He had no idea how long it took her to dress. He pulled a chair out for her at the table their dinner had been laid upon. She sat down, silent, and he moved around to sit across from her. The rounded stainless dome over his plate had actually kept his fillet mignon lukewarm. The meat was tender and juicy. It probably tasted wonderful, but he couldn’t tell. It all tasted like sawdust.

Laura ate quickly and then moved over to her computer to start cruising through the AbaCo documents. The search for Adam was all they had left between them.

He had files of his own to search. The ones he’d lifted from William Ward’s desk after the attorney had been murdered. Maybe they’d have information in them that might lead to his son. Even the idea of such a project overwhelmed him right now. He needed to think more simply than that. Move to desk. Open laptop. Turn it on. Insert flash drive into USB port.

“What’s that?” Laura asked suspiciously.

“The thumb drive I found in my lawyer’s desk.”

Her brows shot up in surprise. “I assumed you’d already looked through that and hadn’t found anything worth mentioning.”

He sighed. “I was avoiding it, actually. I expect there’ll be information in here about my past, and I wasn’t ready to face it until now.”

The dishonesty of his words tore at his tongue as if it were being ripped off a frozen well handle. He still wasn’t ready to face his past. But it wasn’t like he had any choice. Adam’s life hung in the balance, and he’d walk through the fires of Hell for his son.

Laura’s gaze was dark and accusing.

The directory of files on William’s secret storage device scrolled down the screen in front of him. It looked like a list of client names. Most of this stuff was probably highly confidential. He glanced through the list. Smith. Spangler. Spiros.

There he was. He clicked on his name.

A sub folder opened up and a list of files unfolded before him. He browsed the titles curiously. They mostly looked like business contracts. But on the third page of file names, one in particular caught his eye. It was a report from the same private investigator who’d been looking into the Nick Cass identity and found nothing. It was dated the day William had called and insisted Nick come to the Cape—the same day William had died. Nick abruptly felt as if he’d just been kicked in the stomach. Hard. Taking a deep breath, he clicked on the report and started to read.

“What did you find?” Laura asked from across the desk. Sometimes the degree to which she was observant made living with her damned hard. Or more to the point, made living with secrets around her damned hard.

He answered heavily, “I think I just found my prenuptial agreement with Meredith.”

Chapter 11 (#ulink_9f8a9ad3-b026-52aa-a377-ec66b0ba2a0d)

What little breath Laura had left after the mood swings of the past two hours whooshed out of her. She felt like a washcloth that had been twisted and squeezed until every last drop of life had been wrung out of her. She was empty. Emotionally done in. Logic told her this was an extreme situation and not to make any major life decisions in the midst of the crisis. But the urge to sweep aside everything and everyone who stood between her and Adam was irresistible.

Nick began to read aloud. She exhaled carefully as he went through a ridiculously huge list of assets. Nikolas Spiros hadn’t been merely rich. He’d been wealthy beyond imagining. And she had a pretty big imagination.

“Listen to this,” he exclaimed. “If I die of unnatural causes, she gets nothing.”

“As in zero?”

“That’s correct. Not a dime. And in fact, she’s required to return any jewelry, clothing, cars, homes, or cash assets accrued during the marriage to my estate.”

“Wow. Trust her much, did you?”

“Apparently not.”

“Sounds like you thought she was a potential black widow even before you married her,” Laura responded.

Nick was frowning, too. “It does beg the question, why did I marry her in the first place if I thought it was a good possibility that she’d try to kill me for my money?”

“Were you always that mistrustful of the women you dated?”

“It was an issue wondering if women wanted me for myself or for my wealth. But at some point, you have to take a chance and go with your gut. I may have gotten it wrong with Meredith, but I got it right with you … twice.”

She brushed aside the overture. Adam was her entire focus at this juncture. But the mystery of Nick’s marriage to a woman he clearly thought dangerous tantalized her. Was Meredith behind either or both kidnappings after all?

The man she knew—both in Paris and now—simply wouldn’t have married a woman in whom he had so little faith. Surely Nick’s core personality hadn’t changed that much in the past six years. “Do you have any idea how you met Meredith?” she asked.

“No, I don’t.”

She asked cautiously, “Would you mind if I researched your wife a little?”

His gaze was open and honest, and he answered without hesitation. “Be my guest.”

Thank God. He was finally willing, not only to face his past, but to let her see it, too. She minimized the AbaCo files and pulled up her favorite search engine. She typed rapidly.

In seconds, pictures of Nick and Meredith from the front pages of the tabloids leaped onto her screen. “Attractive woman,” Laura commented.

Nick shrugged. “Beauty comes from inside a person. You’re attractive. From what I know of her, she has the heart of a snake. She may be well-groomed, but she is not attractive to me.”

Laura might have smiled under other circumstances. But as it was, she kept typing grimly. “She was living pretty high on the hog when you met—designer clothes, expensive hotels and spas, jewelry running into hundreds of thousands of dollars …” She typed some more. “Did you know she was collecting art? It looks like she’d bought a couple million dollars’ worth by the time you two hooked up.”

Nick looked about as interested as if she’d told him the price of tea in China had gone up by a penny a pound.

Laura poked around some more, but then leaned back, perplexed. “I can’t find the source of her money. She doesn’t come from a wealthy background, and I’m not finding any indication she had a high-paying job. She had a high school education from an average school. No college. She wasn’t a model. Several years prior to meeting you, she started tossing around the big bucks. She didn’t appear to be dating any men who could’ve financed that sort of lifestyle. According to her tabloid appearances, she seemed to be picking up mostly good-looking toy boys and footing the bill for them.”

Nick made a face. “Maybe she was a hooker.”

Laura snorted. “Even high-end working girls don’t pull down the kind of money she was spending. She was blowing through three to five million dollars a year.”

“Was she running up a massive debt? Maybe she married me to dig herself out?”

Laura gestured with her chin toward his laptop. “Is there any record of your attorney running a background check on her? My lawyer used to run one on all the guys I dated in college, and I didn’t inherit anywhere near the wealth you had.”

Nick scowled. “I seem to recall William checking out my girlfriends at university, and it drove me crazy.”

“Did you tell him to stop?”

He laughed. “I doubt William would have listened to me. He was the executor of my father’s estate and had the power to do pretty much whatever he pleased. As I recall, he didn’t think I was exactly the most responsible young man on the planet.”