Secret Heiress, Secret Baby

Two (#ulink_f32edb39-45f6-5b30-94f6-940fd8bfcbbf)

Thirty minutes later—after Meg had nearly fainted, herself—the Cains finally lured her from the foyer into an elegant office in one of the front rooms. Dalton had poured drinks all around. Everyone else he knew well enough that he hadn’t needed to ask what they wanted, but when he got to her, he shot her a look, his eyebrows raised in silent question.

“Just water, please.” She needed to keep her wits about her. If there was one thing her mother had taught her, it was that rich people were all venomous snakes and the Cains were the worst. Like coral snakes. More deadly than rattlesnakes and twice as aggressive.

Once Dalton handed her the glass of water, he gestured toward a wingback chair, but she didn’t sit down. Portia and Sydney were seated on the sofa opposite the chair. Laney was in another wingback chair beside it with Dalton standing behind her. The other two men were scattered around the room. The last thing she wanted was to be sitting in the hot spot.

“Okay, tell me again why you think I’m your sister.”

Again it was Portia who answered. “Your eyes, obviously.”

“My eyes?”

“You have the Cain blue eyes.” Griffin pointed to one of his own eyes. Then he winked at her. “Very unique. All the Cains have them.”

“You assume I’m your sister just because my eyes are blue? That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard! There have to be millions of people with blue eyes.”

“Something like five million people have blue eyes, actually.” Everyone turned to look at Portia. She shrugged. “I looked it up. The point is, eyes your exact color are unique.”

“But not a reason to assume I’m a Cain.”

Dalton leaned over to brace his elbows on the back of his wife’s chair. “But you are, in fact, a Cain. Aren’t you?”

She looked down at her glass of water and gave it a jiggle to move the ice around. “What if I am?”

“Then we’ve been looking for you.”

“And,” Portia added, “I think you’ve been poking around getting information about us, too.”

For a second, Portia held Meg’s gaze, before Meg looked back down at her water. Portia was right, of course. When she’d been in Houston a year ago, Meg had just wanted to get a feel for the Cains. She’d needed to gauge just how desperate she’d need to be before she went to them for money. She had even met Portia—introduced herself using a fake name, of course—and had a conversation with her. She’d been so sure that Portia hadn’t suspected anything!

She forced her gaze back up to Portia’s. She didn’t say anything—didn’t reveal that they’d met before—but there was a light of triumph in the other woman’s gaze.

After several moments of silence, Laney and Sydney exchanged a worried look. Then Sydney spoke up. “Do you know why we’ve been looking for you?”

“No.” All her life, she’d been told that her father had abandoned her and her mother and that no one in the Cain family wanted them. She couldn’t imagine how they could have been looking for her when she lived in the same town where she’d been born, less than five miles from the courthouse where Hollister had married her mother. “There’s no reason for anyone to be looking for me. I haven’t exactly been hiding.”

There was another tense moment as the Cains all looked at one another as if they were trying to decide who would be the best one to break the bad news to her.

Laney leaned forward. Okay, Snow White it was.

“I don’t know if you know this, but Hollister’s health has been declining for the past several years.”

“If he recently died, don’t feel like you have to break it to me gently.” The father she’d never even met dying mere days before she finally decided to contact him? Yeah. That sounded about right. Not that she minded not meeting him, but it seemed unlikely that anyone else would care about her blackmail demands.

“Oh, no, Hollister is still alive,” Laney reassured her. “But a few years ago, when he was at his worst and we were all sure he was going to pass, he received a letter.” Laney paused and the Cains exchanged more awkward glances before Dalton gave her shoulder a little squeeze. “The letter was sent anonymously from a woman claiming to be your mother. She explained that she had born him a daughter many years ago and that she had purposely kept it from him to protect the girl. To protect you. But that she wanted him to go to his grave knowing that he could never get his hands on you. She was taunting him.”

Meg frowned. “My mother couldn’t have sent that letter. She died when I was a child.” Plenty of people in her life hated Hollister, but none hated him enough to track his health obsessively just to drop that bombshell when he was on his deathbed. “I don’t know anyone who would have done that. You don’t think I did it, do you? Because—”

“No,” Dalton said quickly. “We’re not worried about that. The woman who wrote the letter knew Hollister well enough to know it would drive him crazy—the fact that he had a daughter who was forever beyond his reach. So he set a challenge for the three of us.” Dalton gestured to indicate his brothers. “Whichever one of us found you and brought you back into the fold would get his entire estate. If no one found you before he died, everything would go to the state.”

“Excuse me?” For a long moment, that was all she could say. She couldn’t even think clearly enough to process what he’d said, let alone to comment. Hollister was worth...well, she didn’t know the precise numbers, but it was a buttload of money. Hundreds of millions at least. Finally she said, “What kind of—” she barely restrained herself from using the word asshole “—man sets up a crazy landgrab like that among his sons?”

Dalton just nodded. Griffin smiled grimly.

Cooper actually chuckled. “Yeah, exactly. Way to encourage sibling bonding, right?”

Except when she looked around the room, they did seem to be close. There wasn’t even a glimmer of animosity among them.

“You seem to be getting along awfully well when there’s so much money at stake.”

Griffin shrugged. “We decided early on it was better to share information and split the money. Four ways, obviously. Besides, you’ve been pretty hard to find, given that we had zero information to go on.”

“Except now that you’ve come to us—” Griffin looked around the room “—I guess we need to come up with a new plan. Should we give her the bigger share?”

“Wait, what? Her who? Her me?”

Laney smiled. “Obviously they were always planning on giving a quarter of the estate to you.”

Panic shot through her and Meg lurched to her feet. Even though she didn’t know exactly how many hundreds of millions Hollister was worth, it was a lot. Any way she looked at it, a quarter of a lot of millions was a lot of millions.

She held up her hands, palms out, and started backing toward the door. “I don’t want any of Hollister’s money.” Okay. That wasn’t true. “I only want a tiny bit of money.”

Laney stood up too and pulled out the Snow-White-coaxing-the-forest-creatures voice. “You seem upset by this news. Maybe you should sit down.”

Sit down? Sitting down, with all the Cains staring at her, was the last thing she wanted to do. What she wanted to do was bolt from the room, hop back into her sensible Chevy and get the hell out of Dodge.

But with panic racing through her veins, she suddenly felt as light-headed as Portia had looked right before she’d fainted. That thought alone was enough to get Meg back in her chair. She wasn’t a fainter. She never had been. Not even when she’d been pregnant. Not even when she’d been pregnant and working twelve-hour days at the bakery.

Nope. Not her.

She was tough. She wasn’t a skittish purebred like Portia. She was strictly blue-collar, working stock.

She was not meant to be rich.

Rich people were assholes. Everything in her upbringing and her life had taught her that.

As her thoughts raced, she drew breath after breath into her lungs, desperate to find a way out of this. She had come here expecting to do a little light blackmailing and that...well, that was disconcerting enough. She hadn’t expected things to get so out of control so quickly.

And then she slowly became aware that at some point she’d sat down and was cradling her head in her hands. When she looked up, it was to see all six of the Cains staring at her in total surprise.

Yeah. Clearly, they weren’t used to people who were afraid of money.

It was Sydney who spoke first. “You know that Hollister is your father. But you seem surprised that anyone else knows or believes that you’re Hollister’s. And you don’t seem to want the inheritance that is rightfully yours.”

“I don’t!” she said quickly. Thanks to the helpful pages of the Houston Chronicle, she’d seen what their lives were like. She was smart enough to know that kind of money came with strings a mile long and as strong as Teflon-coated titanium. She didn’t want any part of that.

“Then why did you come?”