Damon terminated his latest attempt to call Zara when he arrived at the airport terminal. Like every other call had, it would go straight to voice mail. He had already left a message and Zara hadn’t replied, so there was no sense leaving another.
He parked and headed for departures. The flight to London was already on the tarmac waiting to depart, but the Dubai flight had yet to board. He skimmed the passengers massed in the lounge. Zara wasn’t there, so she must have boarded the first flight out, which was London bound.
He called Walter. He needed confirmation of which flight Zara had taken. Walter had connections in the aviation world. If anyone could get the information, quickly, he could.
Walter called him back a few minutes later and confirmed that Zara and Rosie were on the London flight.
Jaw tight, Damon watched as the jet began moving down the runway, picking up speed. A few seconds later it was in the air. Taking out his phone again, he called Mac. He had already asked her to fuel the jet and get ready to fly, but he was aware that they would have to queue.
It took an hour to file the flight plan, another hour to get a takeoff slot. When they were finally in the air, Damon opened up the file on his laptop and read through Walter’s report in detail.
Zara was Petra’s daughter and, yes, there were a few wild media stories about her, but on close inspection, there wasn’t a lot of substance to any of them. He studied the few photos that were included and shook his head. There was a photo of a child who was recognizably Zara, cute in plaits, and a blurred snapshot of a teenager with dark hair who could be anyone. Finally, he stared incredulously at an article entitled Angel Parties Hard. It was an article supposedly about Angel Atrides, but the photograph depicted a long-haired bottle blonde who was a complete stranger.
Grimly, Damon read on. The claims that she slept around were outright lies. He knew that for a fact because Zara had only ever slept with him. Claims that she was a fortune hunter looking for a rich husband were similarly flawed, because she had clearly never been a party girl, or dated anyone who actually had a fortune, except himself, and she’d had no compunction about ditching him.
Walter hadn’t just dug for information, he had mined.
After Petra’s death, Zara had been saddled with Petra’s funeral expenses. Damon knew she could have taken the easy way out and accepted his money, but instead, as a student, she had paid off her mother’s funeral expenses in tiny increments until the debt was cleared.
Those were not the actions of a woman who was looking for some man to bankroll her lifestyle. She hadn’t had a lifestyle. What she’d had were debts and worry, then a child to care for—his child—and a determination to make her own way. Without him.
Zara had no credit cards and almost no debt, just the mortgage on her business. Somehow, in this modern day and age, she managed to make all of her purchases with cash. From what Damon could glean, despite the Swiss finishing school and the jet-setting mother, Zara only bought what she could afford, and that was mostly necessities. No designer clothing or shoes, and definitely no jewelry. That meant the diamonds were exactly what she had claimed.
Security and stability.
The final nail in the coffin was the information he already knew, but which he had stubbornly ignored. When Zara had become pregnant and could have demanded money from him, she had determinedly made her own way.
Her business was a case in point. Zara had gotten her business degree, worked and saved, gotten a loan, then opened her own business. She had accepted him as a client only because she had needed the cash flow. Then she had insisted on dealing only with Howard, making it clear that she didn’t want Damon to step any further into her life.
Closing the file, Damon checked the time. They wouldn’t land for several hours. He needed to sleep, but first he needed to figure out how he was going to win back Zara when he had done his level best to drive her away.
When they landed at Heathrow, it was only to find that Zara and Rosie had caught a last-minute connection to Los Angeles.
Mac yawned. “What do we do now?”
Damon noted Zara’s arrival time in LA. He didn’t know if she would take a connecting flight from there, or choose to stop over. What mattered was that she appeared to be heading home.
“We get some dinner, get some sleep and then go home.”
* * *
Zara paid the taxi driver, who obligingly wheeled her luggage through her front gate while Zara carried Rosie.
Rosie was not happy. She had been fractious on the red-eye flight from LA to Auckland, which had taken thirteen long, horrible hours. Her lashes were spiky from crying and her cheeks were red. Zara suspected that she was cutting another tooth, which was, literally, the last straw.
Blinking against the brilliance of the morning sun, when her body clock wanted it to be night, she unlocked the front door and carried Rosie through to her room and settled her in her crib.
Feeling dizzy with exhaustion, she trudged back out to the porch to claim her luggage, only to be buttonholed by Edna Cross, who was waiting on the step with a woman’s magazine. “It says in here that you’re the daughter of that famous supermodel—”
“Petra Hunt. She was my mother.”
Edna blinked. “That explains why that blonde reporter was hanging around. I called the police on her.”
The sun seemed to shine a little brighter. “Vanessa Gardiner. Way to go, Mrs. Cross.”
“If she comes back, I can slap a harassment charge on her if you like.”
“Will that work?”
“Probably not, but it’ll make her life difficult.”
Zara’s chest suddenly felt a little tight. “Thank you, Mrs. Cross.”
“You can call me Edna. Just being neighborly. If there’s anything else you need, let me know.”
Zara watched as Edna ambled back to her house. Across the road another neighbor—old Mr. Harris, who was out washing his car—paused and lifted a hand. It was a strange moment to feel that, finally, she belonged somewhere.
After depositing her bags in the sitting room and opening up a few windows to air out the house, she called Molly to see how she was coping. Apparently, owing to the media attention, they’d had an influx of new clients and there was a long list of new job applicants to screen. The magazine article, and a number of tabloid follow-ups, all of which Molly assured her she had hated, had done wonders for business. She’d had to take on one of their temps to cope with the increased workload and Harriet was proving to be a real gem.
Molly paused. “Are you really Angel Atrides and a contessa?”
Zara smothered a yawn. Now that she was home, tiredness was closing in. All she wanted to do was sleep. “Yes and yes. But the contessa thing is a bit like the sheikh taxi driver who just dropped me off. Without an estate and a huge bank account, it doesn’t actually mean anything.”
“Hmm. Harriet thinks it’s an asset. She’s had a lot of experience with public relations and thinks it could provide an important point of difference for the agency. Not to mention an opportunity to harness the media attention in a good way.”
After a brief discussion, Zara decided that with Harriet in the mix, she could take a few days off and disappear from sight until the media furor died down. Molly instantly offered Zara the use of a family beach house on Auckland’s west coast.
Even though she was exhausted, Zara decided to leave straightaway. They were already packed and even though Rosie was still out of sorts, at least if they went for a drive in the car, she might fall asleep.
Two hours later, with Rosie bathed, changed and fed, all of her luggage transferred to the car and enough groceries to last a few days, Zara drove until she found the small cottage, which was situated on a windswept cliff overlooking a wild stretch of coastline. She found the key, which was sitting beneath a flowerpot, unlocked the door and began ferrying bags inside.
Rosie, thankfully, had fallen into a deep slumber, so Zara gently transferred her from her car seat to a portable crib she had managed to borrow from a friend.
The sun was sliding into the sea by the time she made herself a sandwich and a cup of tea for dinner and collapsed into a faded armchair. She woke hours later to find that she had fallen dead asleep in the chair and was now freezing cold. She blinked at the noise that had woken her and realized it was her phone.
Retrieving the cell from the kitchen table, she checked the screen. Her heart slammed hard against her chest. Damon had tried to call her for about the twentieth time.
She stared at her voice mail, which also registered a message from Damon. What she really needed to do was throw the whole phone, which belonged to Magnum Security, away.
Switching on a light, she checked on Rosie who was warmly cuddled up beneath thick blankets and searched out a sweater and a warm pair of socks for herself. She checked her watch as she filled a kettle with water so she could make a hot drink and was shocked to see it was only ten o’clock. She was about to turn the kettle on when she thought she heard a noise. Frowning, she listened hard. There was a road not far from the cottage, which led to a popular beach suburb, so there was traffic, but this didn’t sound like a car.
Another sound, this one more distinct, made her stiffen. Suddenly wondering if a reporter had tracked her here and was even now sneaking up to the window to snap a photo of her, she grabbed the kettle, which was full of cold water. Instead of walking out the front door and being an instant target for anyone with a camera, she padded out the back door and walked quietly around the small cottage.
A low sound behind her spun her around. Damon’s gaze locked with hers, but it was too late to stop the flight of the kettle which, out of sheer fright, she’d flung in the direction of the sound.
He caught the kettle, but water sprayed, drenching his dark jersey and jeans. “Remind me to put you on one of my security teams.” He wiped water from his face. “No, cancel that. Walter said you should be running a war. I’m in complete agreement. You can run the teams.”
Zara rubbed her arms against the biting cold and tried to ignore the fact that even dripping wet and probably just as tired as she, Damon looked certifiably gorgeous. “What are you doing here?”
“Looking for you.”
“Why?”
“I found the note from Tyler. It was in the bank, like you said.”
Her heart pounded at that, but she refused to let herself hope. “So you believed Tyler.”
Turning on her heel, she walked back into the house, but despite every effort to be indifferent to Damon her pulse was hammering and she was hopelessly aware of him. A little desperately she wondered what it took to get rid of the zing of attraction, or the crazy, heady feeling of hope springing to life again.
If she let herself hope, she thought ruthlessly, she would only set herself up to be hurt again and she was over being hurt.
She flicked on lights, illuminating the tiny rooms with their jumble of mismatched furniture, the miniature kitchen that fitted two or three people at the most. When Damon stepped into the kitchen, the room seemed to shrink even more.
He put the kettle on the bench. “I’m sorry I frightened you. I thought I heard someone around the back.”
“That would be me!”
“As it turned out.”
Okay, so he had been protecting her. She tried not to feel happy about that as she filled the kettle with water again and put it on to boil. Feeling crazily nervous to have Damon so close, in her personal space when she never thought he would be again, she busied herself finding a towel.
In the meantime, Damon had peeled out of his jersey, which was soaked, and hung it over the back of a chair. Zara tried not to notice his bronzed biceps, or the way the T-shirt clung across his chest. She concentrated, instead, on making tea. After he had blotted the worst of the moisture from his T-shirt, Damon tossed the damp towel over the back of another chair.
She poured tea and handed him a mug. His gaze caught hers. “You were right. I didn’t believe you, and for the reason you said. I have difficulty with...trust.”
Leaning against the bench, he began to talk about his childhood, the words at first hard and slow, then flowing more smoothly. Ben had given Zara a brief outline of how Damon’s life had gone, but he had barely scratched the surface. By the time Damon had finished, the tea had gone cold.
Zara set her mug down. “But growing up, you must have realized your parents’ marriage was...dysfunctional.”
He set his mug down, the drink untasted. “Maybe, but I wasn’t exactly brought up under normal circumstances even after they died. Tyler was the closest thing Ben and I had to a real father—”
“And he was a confirmed bachelor until he met my mother.”
“Then there was my stint in the army. I’m not making excuses. I’m just trying to explain why I’ve been so resistant to a real relationship.”
Her head came up. For a long, vibrating moment she thought she’d heard wrong. “What do you mean by a real relationship?”
He caught the fingers of one hand and drew her close. “I mean you and me and a second chance.”
“Why? Because of Rosie?”
He pulled her closer still. “You know it’s not about Rosie. I love her, she’s my daughter and finding her jolted me. But it was falling for you and losing you that made me realize how empty my life was. I’ve been trying to control my relationships but that approach never worked. Lily hit it right on the button. If I refused to risk myself and go out on a limb for someone else, I couldn’t expect to be in a relationship.”
“Which explains why you walked away from me when you found me in Dunedin over a year ago!”
His gaze locked with hers. “I didn’t say I wasn’t stubborn. But, when you came back to town, it didn’t take me long to track you down. And once I did, I tried to stay close. Why do you think I kept employing your temps?”
She tried not to drown in the molten heat of his gaze. “I did wonder.” She suddenly remembered the question that had gnawed at her earlier. “By the way, how did you find me this time?”
“GPS. You’ve got a company phone.”
She tried to breathe, but it seemed to be getting awfully hot and close in the tiny kitchen. “I was thinking of throwing the SIM card away.”
He grinned. “Why do you think I got here so fast?”
He reached into his pocket and she caught the glint of something shiny. Her heart slammed hard in her chest. At first she thought he was returning the earrings to her, but she was wrong. It was an engagement ring.
Suddenly all the vulnerabilities that had gone with loving Damon surged back. If they were going to do this, she couldn’t bear it if it all fell apart again.
Damon went down on one knee, with difficulty, because the space between the kitchen counter and the small table was so cramped. One shoulder bumped against a shelf of pots, sending a lid spinning onto the tiled floor. When Zara stepped back to allow him more room, a chair crashed to the floor. The noise woke Rosie, who began to make cute sounds in her room. It was bedlam and it was the most romantic thing that had ever happened.
Damon gripped her hand. “I don’t want to lose you again. I’ve loved you from the first moment you stepped into that interview room. The problem was, you made me feel too much and I had gotten used to closing down and looking for reasons not to trust. I’m sorry, babe—I didn’t mean to hurt you. I just didn’t have the courage to admit that I needed you. When you walked out on me this time, I knew that I loved you. It was too late, but I finally understood exactly what I wanted. You, Rosie and the home we can make together, if only you’ll trust me.”
Damon grasped her left hand. “Will you marry me, for better or worse, for richer or poorer?”
The vows of the marriage service made Zara’s throat close up so that when she spoke her voice was husky. “That’s all I ever wanted. I just hadn’t thought it was possible.”
But as Damon slid the engagement ring onto the third finger of her left hand, and rose up to kiss her—knocking his mug of tea into the sink—she suddenly realized that it was more than possible.
Two people truly, honestly in love, and their baby.
It was real and just a little chaotic, and she knew it was going to be perfect.
* * * * *
If you liked this story of an alpha hero tamed by
love—and a baby!—don’t miss the next
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The Billionaire’s Legacy
by Reese Ryan
Available October 2018!
Or any of these other
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bestselling author Maureen Child
Taming the Texan by Jules Bennett
Keep reading for an excerpt from Runaway Temptation by Maureen Child.
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