The Billionaire's Baby Chase

A faint sense of disappointment rippled through her. So he wasn’t to be involved in the purchase beyond today’s inspection. She dismissed the thought with surprising difficulty. “In that case, it’s been a pleasure doing business with you, James.” She slid into the driver’s seat and he got in beside her. “I’ll have you back at your car in fifteen minutes.”

“There’s no hurry,” he said, catching her unawares. “I still have some matters to discuss with you.”

Unaccountably her spirits lifted. He probably wanted to question her about the local zoning laws and heritage listing requirements, but it didn’t seem to matter. She only knew she was happy to continue the conversation.

They had reached her house before she realized he hadn’t asked any of his questions, talking instead about inconsequential matters. “Would you like to come in for coffee?” she offered and found herself holding her breath as she waited for his answer.

He nodded, his face impassive. She couldn’t tell whether he was as drawn to her as she was to him, but at least he hadn’t refused. Her step was light as she led the way inside.

Her home was modest but well-cared-for. Not what he would be accustomed to, she thought as they stepped over toys in the hallway to reach the living room. She’d decorated it herself with cream wallpaper, a handwoven Mexican rug and a few inventive touches such as a pottery jar holding giant paper sunflowers.

James settled himself on the sofa while she fetched coffee and homemade walnut cake. But he refused the cake and his coffee sat untouched at his elbow as he leaned toward her. “I have something to tell you, Zoe.”

He looked so serious that alarm shrilled through her. “If you’re worried about the heritage listing—”

“This isn’t about the property.” He forestalled her. “It’s about Genevieve.”

For a moment the name confused her, then the truth dawned. “You mean Genie. What about her?”

James reached into his jacket pocket and withdrew a sheaf of documents. “There’s no easy way to tell you this, but there’s absolutely no doubt. The child you know as Genie is my daughter, Genevieve. All the proof you need is in these reports.”

Chapter Two

Zoe felt as if she had stepped off a sandbank into deep water, which was rapidly closing over her head. Her skin turned icy and every breath became a huge effort. This was how it felt to drown, she thought, as if seeing her own reaction from a distance.

“She’s what?”

“She’s the daughter who was taken from me eighteen months ago. Her real name is Genevieve Matilda Langford.”

The drowning sensation went on and on, but there was also the sense of seeing herself from above as Zoe dispassionately noted every detail of her pose which miraculously hadn’t altered.

She sat frozen with one slim leg crossed over the other in a calm precision which now seemed to mock her other self, watching from above. She had actually thought that James wanted to prolong their meeting for other than business reasons. The truth chilled her beyond belief. All his interest in her marriage and her child had been designed to draw her out, to confirm what he must already have known. Like a panther toying with its prey, he had been waiting for the right moment to deliver his devastating news.

With an agonizing rush she inhabited her body again, feeling every nuance of the pain squeezing her heart relentlessly. Her bones felt liquid and she knew she couldn’t have stood up to save her life.

She was aware of James’s tension as if they were connected by invisible wires. The denials she held back in her throat vibrated along the connection like the ghostly echo of a million callers down a telephone line. He watched her silently, apparently waiting for her to say something. But her mind was gripped by so much pain and confusion that speech seemed beyond her.

He had come to claim Genie. The realization burned through her tortured mind, erasing all other coherent thoughts. Her beautiful, beloved daughter belonged to him.

It couldn’t be true. It was all some terrible nightmare from which she would awaken at any moment. She would feel Genie’s insistent tug on her hair and she would pry her eyes open to protest that it was too early to get up. “But the sun’s awake, Mummy,” Genie would insist. Laughing, Zoe would swing her legs over the edge of the bed and catch the child’s squirming body to her for a good-morning hug.

“Zoe? Are you all right?”

It wasn’t Genie’s voice but James’s vibrant baritone, which banished the vision and replaced it with a harsh reality that refused to be denied. Without knowing it, Zoe had squeezed her eyes shut. She opened them now, knowing that the full extent of her pain would be visible to James who was reaching out to her.

She shrugged away his offered hand. “I’m all right. I just…this is…I don’t know what to say.”

He looked down at his long-fingered hands then back to her again, his cerulean gaze mirroring her torment. “There’s nothing to say. You’ve done a wonderful job of taking care of her.”

She recoiled from the decisive edge in his voice. Done, past tense. She found her voice with an effort. “You make it sound as if it’s over.”

His head jerked up. “You know it is, Zoe. You were only able to foster her while her family couldn’t be traced. Now she has family. I’m her father and she belongs with me.”

“But Ruth told me…” Zoe clamped her jaw shut on the accusations welling up inside her. Ruth had managed to convince her that Genie’s father was an unfeeling brute who didn’t care about his wife and daughter.

James gave a resigned sigh. “Whatever she told you about me is probably as much a fabrication as the identity she used.”

Confusion coiled through Zoe. Throughout the house inspection she’d begun to feel compassion toward him. Yet Ruth had described him as hard and uncaring, too preoccupied with business affairs to have much time for his family. Which was the real James Langford? she wondered.

His public image was of a stop-at-nothing entrepreneur who had built a global communications business from nothing. The Aussie Bulldozer, Time magazine had called him. Now Zoe was standing in the bulldozer’s path, and he would go over her if she forced him to. But he would not be stopped, that much she knew with a numbing certainty.

She clutched at another straw. “You said your wife took your daughter to another country.” Perhaps this was some ghastly case of mistaken identity.

He nodded. “She did—Australia. My company was setting up a satellite communications network in the Middle East when we met. Ruth was handling security for the project. Neither of us planned on what happened, but it was a forbidding, lonely place for a foreigner. The political situation was delicate, and we couldn’t move outside our headquarters without an armed escort.” He gave a wry grimace. “In a situation like that, people turn to each other and form bonds more quickly than they might under normal conditions.”

Her throat felt gravelly. “You were married in the Middle East?”

“We hadn’t planned to until Ruth became pregnant.” He frowned at Zoe’s sharply indrawn breath. “Don’t look so scandalized. We took precautions, but Ruth suffered a bout of food poisoning and her contraception failed. Ruth wasn’t really the marrying kind, and I doubt if she would have said yes if not for her pregnancy.”

From her short acquaintance with his wife, Zoe suspected he was right. Ruth had given the impression that she enjoyed flaunting her power over men, but hated being pinned down for long. As a mother, she took little interest in the childish milestones Zoe had dutifully reported to her each day.

In many ways Ruth had reminded Zoe of a butterfly, moving restlessly from flower to flower, hating to be impeded in her travels. She hadn’t struck Zoe as a woman for whom marriage and motherhood were natural choices.

James watched the expressions moving over her face. “I see you know what she was like.”

“I only knew her for a short time when she moved into an apartment across the road,” Zoe explained, her voice deepened by the ache in her throat. “She called herself Ruth Sullivan and said she was working as a courier in the city. Sometimes she left Genie with me overnight, so I was accustomed to having her sleep here. But when Ruth didn’t return to collect her for two days, I went to her address to see if she was ill. There was no answer and her neighbors hadn’t seen her in days, so I contacted the police.”

“Who traced her movements and discovered she’d been killed in that sailing accident,” James supplied. His tone said he was still adjusting to the discovery. In the midst of her own desolation, Zoe felt an unexpected wave of compassion for him.

“According to the police, she was involved with a pretty reckless crowd who encouraged her to try all sorts of dangerous sports,” Zoe added.

His sigh of resignation hissed between them. “Knowing Ruth, she wouldn’t have needed much encouragement. She enjoyed living on the edge. It made her feel alive. Working in the Middle East suited her need for adventure. I should have known better than to expect her to settle into domesticity with me.”

“What happened between you?” Through her hurt, Zoe felt compelled to ask the question, to know everything about Genie’s brief life before she came to Zoe. Until now she’d only had Ruth’s account to go by.

A shadow crossed his chiseled features. “When we found out she was pregnant, I suggested returning to Australia so the baby could be born here.” He lapsed into a long, nerve-stretching silence before continuing. “For a while, things seemed to work out, but Ruth became restless. I had to return to the Middle East to complete our contract. Ruth wanted to come with me, but Genevieve was not yet two. I tried to cut my trip as short as I could. I was only supposed to be gone for a month.”

His deep voice cracked. The pain caused by his memories enfolded Zoe as if it was her own—which in a way, it was. But for these events triggered half a world away, she would not now be facing the worst moment of her life.

“She couldn’t wait a month?” she managed to ask, saying the unsayable for him. How could any woman, the mother of his child, not wait a lifetime for the man she loved, if that was what was required?

“In the end…circumstances…intervened. It was much longer than a month before I was able to return,” he rasped. “By the time I got back she was gone, taking my daughter with her.”

A distant part of her mind noticed that he made no attempt to explain what circumstances had kept him away. Was it the pressure of business? Or, heaven forbid, another woman? Neither were excusable when he had a wife and baby waiting for him at home.

Whatever had happened was none of her business except as it concerned Genie, she told herself. He was probably only telling her the story at all to help her understand how Genie came to be in Zoe’s care. The crazy part was she did understand. In his shoes she would have done everything in her power to find her child, just as James had. But the mother in her railed against it with every breath in her body. How in the name of all that was right and true could she face giving Genie up?

“I know this must be hard for you,” James conceded. Distantly she registered that he felt badly about what he was doing. Yet she also sensed that nothing she said or did, no amount of tears or pleading, would change his course any more than one rock can alter the eventual course of a mighty river.