Claiming His Secret Heir. Joanne Rock
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that one of the guys on the landscaping crew was hovering nearby, a crinkled piece of paper in his hand.
Damon pressed a button on his phone to open the electric gate and stared down the gardener while the bars slid silently to one side. “You can leave now. Water the roses or whatever.”
“Sure thing.” The guy nodded fast and seemed grateful for an excuse to leave, but first he ambled closer and handed Damon the faded, worn paper. “She said she found this.”
Damon would have stuffed it in a back pocket to focus on Caroline, but the gold seal in one corner caught his eye.
Their marriage certificate.
“I don’t understand.” He moved closer to the wife who had once held his heart. The woman who now stared at him like a stranger. “Why did you bring this?”
His pulse pounded hard. He braced himself to hear the words he dreaded. The news that she wanted to end their marriage legally. Forever.
Alone on the private road that led to the mansion, she stuffed her hands in the pockets of the oversized sweater she wore, the fabric hugging her body tighter at the movement.
There’d been a time when he would have picked her up off her feet and wrapped her in both arms. Even not knowing where she’d been, what had happened or why she’d come back now, Damon still wanted to kiss her more than he wanted explanations. Something about her body language, so hesitant, restrained him.
“You’re Damon.” She seemed to seek confirmation, her brown eyes flecked with gold scanning his face, as if calculating the sum of his features. “I saw your photo online, but you look so much like your brother. Cameron.”
Half brother, he silently corrected her while his brain tried to make meaning out of the nonsensical words.
“It’s been less than a year since you saw me last. Do I look so different now?” He’d kissed her for long minutes in the airport in Florence, hating to part from her after the honeymoon. Their home in Los Altos Hills—this house—hadn’t been completed yet. So she’d gone to see a friend in London while he flew back to the States for business that couldn’t wait. Business he’d come to regret sorely in the last ten months, especially since they’d argued during the time they’d been apart and he’d always wondered if that had been the reason she left.
As it turned out, she hadn’t just been seeing her friend, after all. She’d gone to the UK to make amends with her father, who would give anything to take control of Transparent. Stephan Degraff’s plans to oust Damon were about to come to a head one week from now at the final board meeting before the product launched.
Had Caroline been helping her father take over Damon’s company from the start?
“I don’t remember.” Her eyes were haunted. Scared. Unsure. “I’ve been in Mexico. With amnesia. I remembered my name two months ago, but it’s taken time to recall more than that.” She glanced up and away from him. Shut her eyes for a long moment before she began again. “I’ve had this paper ever since I woke up in a fishing village on the Baja Peninsula. But at the time, I didn’t even know that name was mine.”
Damon could not have been more stunned if she’d been the ghost he’d first imagined. Amnesia? A bracing gust of wind sucked the breath right out of him.
“You don’t remember me? Us?” He tried to envision what this meant for them. Behind him, he heard the sprinkler system switch on.
“Nothing.” She shook her head slowly, a wave of her honey-gold hair bumping her cheek. “I looked you up online weeks ago, but I’ve been scared to come because there was...no mention of me being missing. No photos of us together.” She lifted her shoulders in an awkward shrug. “I thought maybe the marriage certificate was fake. Or that we divorced and you’d moved on—”
“No.” He’d been living in a state of suspended animation without her. Hell, he couldn’t call it “living” at all. He’d spent his time chasing leads about her all over the globe, incapable of “respecting her privacy” the way her father had demanded. “I’ve searched everywhere for you.”
He wanted answers about where she’d been. If she’d been kidnapped or if she’d left him of her own free will. His private investigators had spent endless hours chasing down fake leads for her whereabouts—it was as if she’d wanted to purposely disappear, or someone had spent significant time making it look that way.
He still had her wedding rings that she’d left behind.
But he remembered reading somewhere that chasing memories wasn’t good for an amnesia victim. And didn’t the fact that she was suffering from amnesia suggest she’d been through a trauma already? The need to protect her—to make sure nothing else hurt her—overrode everything else. He needed to keep her safe and get her healthy.
And, selfishly, he couldn’t help but see her return as a second chance.
If she’d left him, she didn’t remember.
Once she was well and whole again, Damon had a chance to rewrite history. To show her they could be good together again.
To win her back.
“I don’t know where I’ve been. My memories should come back in time.” She pulled a hand from her sweater pocket and smoothed aside the wave of hair that brushed her cheek. For a moment, he could see the old Caroline in the gesture. The vibrant, flirtatious woman who had captivated him the moment she strode into his office, demanding a position on his team. “But until they do, I’m not sure where to go. I’ve been at a shelter the last two nights.”
The idea appalled him. How long had they been in the same state while he’d been lost in alternating bouts of grief and bitterness, not knowing what had happened to her?
“You were right to come home.” He stepped closer, careful to give her space but needing to touch her.
She flinched and backed up a step, reminding him that they might be married but they were still essentially strangers in her mind.
She just needed time. Something he was more than happy to give her since he was determined to help her remember how happy they’d been together before that one stupid argument. And, hell, if she hadn’t been happy, he’d make her remember something better than that.
“You belong here, Caroline,” he assured her. “Always.”
To keep her guilty conscience at bay, Caroline sank deeper into the thick cushions of the hanging daybed on the second-floor patio and thought about her son—her whole reason for lying her way into Damon’s home.
Lucas was safe with her sister, Victoria, in a carriage house Caroline had rented for them nearby. She’d paid in cash and used a fake name to ensure their father wouldn’t find them. She’d timed their trip to coincide with his business visit to Singapore, but she doubted their absence had remained a secret past the first forty-eight hours, which meant he could be learning about their defection anytime now. Would he guess that Caroline had run straight to Damon in Los Altos Hills? Would he be worried about their safety and send the police?
She had no idea, but she knew Lucas and Victoria would be safer in the carriage house than with her. Victoria swore that their father had purposely tried to keep her from seeing Caroline while she was recovering from her ordeal. Her version of events since Caroline’s return—so different from her father’s—had been the impetus to see Damon for herself. To find out if he loved her or if he’d only married her for expediency’s sake.
Still, she found it difficult to accept that her father coveted Transparent so badly that he would use her as a pawn. She’d been kidnapped, after all. How could Damon have kept that a secret from her family? Her father would have reported her missing if he’d known, but he said that her bills—cell phone, car payments, the mortgage on a small apartment she maintained