Mystery Heiress

Mystery Heiress
Suzanne Carey

Jessica Holmes had come to Minneapolis looking for a miracle. Her sweet little girl's life was in jeopardy, and only a blood relative could help–only a Fortune.Amid all the skeptics who said she was after the Fortunes' money, just one man believed Jessica's story. Dr. Stephen Hunter vowed he would fight to save her precious daughter. But he hadn't counted on fighting his own feelings for this remarkable woman, whose beauty and spirit tempted his hardened heart….

Kate Fortune’s Journal Entry

My whole world is falling apart! Just when I thought things were going to settle down, the unraveling scandal has never been more destructive. Our whole life is an open book for the public to scrutinize. All our deep, dark secrets we thought long buried are coming out one by one.

I’ve just found out the most shocking news about my dearly departed husband, Ben. Apparently, he had an affair that produced an illegitimate heir! I have to believe he had a good reason for what he did. After all, I’ve done a few dishonest things out of desperation myself….

A LETTER FROM THE AUTHOR

Dear Reader,

Writing about an extended family like the Fortunes makes me think of my own family, which is scattered from Illinois and Northern Kentucky to Florida, where I, my spouse and stepmother live.

Needless to say, we keep the phone company and the airlines busy, visiting back and forth and exchanging information across the miles as we continue to weave new strands in the rich web of our connectedness. Often our talk (both earthshaking and otherwise) is phrased in a kind of shorthand because we share the same history, the same context. In my opinion, it’s one of the ways families most help us find our place in the world.

In the story you’re about to read, the heroine, Jessica Holmes, arrives from England in the hope her long-lost relatives, the Fortunes, will be able to provide a bone-marrow transplant for her ailing daughter. Though the Fortunes are quite wealthy, she claims that’s all she wants from them.

Yet she clearly wants more—not money, as she insists, but rather her share of the common history and web of connectedness I’ve been talking about. To me, the way she goes about getting it, and fitting in, is as interesting as her struggle to save her daughter’s life and her romance with the handsome but troubled physician she learns to love.

Mystery Heiress

Suzanne Carey

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

I’d like to dedicate this book to my former editor at Silhouette Books, Lucia Macro, who has unfailingly offered warmth, creative latitude and good judgment for the many years we’ve worked together.

SUZANNE CAREY

A Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Lake Forest College, Lake Forest, Illinois, and a former reporter who covered politics and criminal courts as well as undertaking investigative assignments for several newspapers, Suzanne Carey has been writing novels for Silhouette Books since the early 1980s. Though she was born in Illinois, she has been a resident of Florida for many years. She and the man in her life, a clinical psychologist who is now a university professor, currently reside in Sarasota, on Florida’s Gulf Coast.

Meet the Fortunes—three generations of a family with a legacy of wealth, influence and power. As they unite to face an unknown enemy, shocking family secrets are revealed…and passionate new romances are ignited.

JESSICA HOLMES: The search for a donor to save her daughter’s life and the discovery of her true heritage led Jessica to the Fortune family…and into the comforting arms of a man who can help her child.

STEPHEN HUNTER: Compassionate doctor. His strong shoulders are perfect for Jessica to lean on. But can he put aside the pain of his past to begin a new life with Jessica and her daughter, Annie?

MONICA MALONE: She was on the verge of achieving her lifelong dream of destroying the Fortune family…until she was mysteriously murdered. Is it too late for the Fortunes to stop the wheels of revenge Monica already put in motion?

GRANT MCCLURE: Love doesn’t come easy to a lonely cowboy who prefers his Wyoming ranch to the big city. Will he ever find a woman cut out for country living—and his special brand of loving?

LIZ JONES—CELEBRITY GOSSIP

Illegitimate! Well, well, well. What do we have here? It seems that Jake is not the legitimate son of Ben Fortune after all! Apparently, the prim-and-proper matriarch of the family, Kate, wasn’t a virgin bride! She was sleeping with another man and then tried to pass off to the world her unborn child as Ben’s.

And one of the few people who knew the truth was Monica Malone. My sources tell me that Monica had been blackmailing Jake for quite some time, threatening to reveal the scandalous secret if he didn’t sell her large shares of Fortune stock. If that isn’t a motive for murder, I don’t know what is! And if Jake isn’t guilty, then why did he skip bail?

The Fortunes are on a sinking ship. And I for one don’t see any chance of them staying afloat!

Contents

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Epilogue

One

To some, he supposed, it must be an ideal summer day, bright and breezy if decidedly cool for the twenty-fifth of July—perfect for kicking over the traces and taking your kid to visit the lions, chimpanzees and zebras. But that wasn’t how it felt to him. A pensive, solitary figure as he strolled the curving blacktopped paths of Como Park Zoo in St. Paul, Minnesota, thirty-six-year-old Stephen Hunter had no kid to delight with his undivided attention, no inquisitive, heartbreakingly courageous scrapegrace eight-year-old boy to whom he could explain that giraffes ate treetops for lunch and were strictly vegetarian.

To be gut-wrenchingly precise, he had no David. Instead of his cherished towheaded son, who’d succumbed to a rare form of bone cancer three years earlier, he had what felt like a gaping hole in his heart. To date, no one and nothing had begun to fill it. Or even come close.

Today was the anniversary of David’s death. Having purposely kept his schedule light, in view of the depressed and angry feelings that were bound to surface, he’d been drawn to the zoo by loneliness, memories of better days, and the ache of a loss he believed would never fully leave him.

A dedicated physician who specialized in treating leukemia and other blood-related disorders at Minneapolis General Hospital, and knew a good deal about tumors, as well, he hadn’t been able to stem the tide of David’s downward progression or, in the end, keep the breath of life from deserting his child’s wasted body.

Ultimately, the torrent of rage and helplessness that had followed in the wake of their son’s death had driven Stephen and his ex-wife, the former Brenda Torgilson, apart. Immersed in those bleak, desperate days as deeply as he, Brenda had accused him of failing to be there for her. He realized in retrospect that her criticism was probably just. In his view, the emotional desertion had cut both ways. After David’s loss, he’d snapped shut like a clamshell, living solely for his work and battling his grief in the keep of his own private fortress, while she’d gone to the opposite extreme, venting her tears and outrage on him.

Divorced now for the better part of a year, they rarely saw each other. Though Stephen regretted the breakup, viewing it as a personal black mark that could never be erased, he’d long since decided that in the final analysis, parting company was for the best. If they lived to be a hundred, he suspected, he and Brenda wouldn’t be able to look into each other’s eyes without seeing the pain of David’s loss staring back at them.

Somehow, he needed to start fresh. Get a grip on himself. Live for real again, instead of simply going through the motions. He just wasn’t sure how to start. Never the kind of guy to get involved in casual affairs, he didn’t plan to take that path now. His son’s memory deserved better of him. Yet he was paralyzed by the prospect of committing to anyone. Most single women his age who weren’t already mothers deeply wanted a baby, while the thought of giving another hostage to fortune caused panic to grip him by the throat.

He, Brenda and David had come to the zoo as a family during David’s final, painfully brief remission. Though they were living on borrowed time, the occasion had been marked by a kind of frantic, ephemeral happiness. The remembrance of that afternoon had been his reason for coming today. In a way that was irrational and would have been difficult to explain, he’d hoped to catch a sidelong glimpse of his beloved child, if only in memory and imagination.

Pausing to gaze at the gorillas and orangutans, which David had always loved, Stephen noticed a slim, attractive dark-haired woman and a rather frail-looking blond female child of approximately kindergarten age who were touring the zoo together. The woman’s roses-and-cream complexion glowed as if it had been nourished by a cool but temperate climate.