Her Little Secret, His Hidden Heir Read online

  No doubt she was right. Eleanor Keller was rather stuck in her ways. Raised in the lap of luxury and used to servants bustling around her, ready to do her bidding, she wouldn’t have looked kindly upon her own daughter-in-law doing something as lowly or mundane as preparing a meal or baking desserts, regardless of how talented she might be in that respect.

  “You should have done it, anyway,” Marc told her.

  For a minute, Vanessa didn’t reply, though her mouth tightened into a flat line. Then she murmured, “Maybe I should have,” before spinning on her heel and leading him away from the counter and display cases.

  She pushed through a set of swinging doors painted yellow with The Sugar Shack emblazoned on them in a playful white font and led him into the kitchen. Along with a wave of heat wafting from the industrial ovens lining one wall, the smell of baking was even stronger here, making him hope Vanessa might offer to let him sample a few more items as part of his tour.

  While explaining the setup of the kitchen and how she and her aunt shared both baking and front counter duties, she moved around checking timers. Slipping a thick oven mitt on one hand, she began removing cookie sheets and pie pans, setting them on a wide metal island at the center of the room.

  “A lot of the recipes are from Aunt Helen’s personal collection,” she confided, using a nearby spatula to transfer cookies from sheet to cooling rack. “She’s always loved to bake, but had never considered opening her own shop. I couldn’t believe she wasn’t earning a living with her talents, since everything she makes tastes like heaven. I’m pretty good in the kitchen myself—I must get it from her—” she added with a lopsided grin “—and I guess after a bit, the two of us decided to make a go of it together.”

  Marc rested his hands on the edge of the island, watching her work. Her movements were smooth and graceful, but also quick and efficient, as though she’d done this a million times before and could do it with her eyes closed, if necessary.

  He definitely didn’t want to close his eyes, though. He was enjoying the view, struck once again by how much he’d missed being near Vanessa.

  The divorce had been so cut and dry, finished almost before he knew what was happening. One minute he’d been married to a beautiful woman he’d adored, thinking everything was fine. The next, she’d announced that she couldn’t “live this way anymore” and wanted a divorce. Within a few short months, the papers had been signed and she’d been gone.

  Looking back, he admitted that he probably should have fought harder to make their marriage work. At the very least, he should have asked why she was leaving him, what it was she needed that he wasn’t giving her.

  At the time, however, he’d been busy with the company and the demands of his family and let his pride take the position that he didn’t want to be married to any woman who didn’t want to be married to him. A part of him, he understood now, had also thought Vanessa was just being dramatic. That she was threatening him with divorce because he hadn’t been as attentive to her as she might have wanted, or that once she saw that he wasn’t going to put up a fight, she would change her mind and recognize how good she had it.

  But that hadn’t happened. She hadn’t changed her mind and by the time he’d realized she wasn’t going to, it had been too late.

  “Blake showed me some of your financials,” he said, wondering if she’d rap his knuckles with her spatula if he tried to snitch one of the mouthwatering, fresh-from-the-oven cookies. “It looks as though you’re doing fairly well.”

  Without bothering to glance in his direction, she nodded. “We’re doing okay. Could be better. We’ve got a lot of overhead, and the rent for this building wipes us out most months, but we’re holding our own.”

  “Then why are you looking for an investor?”

  Finishing up what she was doing, she set aside her spatula and oven mitt, and turned to face him more directly. He noticed, too, that she straightened slightly, shoulders pulling back as though she expected a confrontation.

  “I have an idea for expansion,” she said slowly, obviously weighing her words carefully. “It’s a good idea. I think it will go over well. But it’s going to require a bit of construction and more start-up cash than we’ve got at our disposal.”

  “So what’s the idea?” he wanted to know.

  She licked her lips and Marc watched the delicate tendons of her throat convulse as she swallowed before answering. “Mail order. I want to start with a Cookie-of-the-Month Club subscription service that could one day be turned into a catalog business for all of our products.”

  Judging by the quality of the items he’d tasted so far, he thought it sounded like a damn good prospect. He would certainly consider buying a year’s worth of baked goods as quick and easy holiday gifts for numerous family members and business associates. And maybe even one for himself, because he would certainly enjoy a box of The Sugar Shack’s cookies showing up on his doorstep once a month.

  Not that he told Vanessa as much. Until he decided for sure whether or not he was going to invest in her and her aunt’s little bakery, it was better to keep his thoughts to himself.

  “Show me where the construction would take place,” he said instead. “I take it you have some back storage area that you could convert, or are maybe thinking of renting the empty building next door?”

  She nodded. “The space next door.”

  Double-checking the rest of the timers and contents of the ovens, she made her way out of the kitchen, trusting Marc to follow. They passed a narrow stairwell outside of the kitchen but tucked away from the front of the shop so that it was nearly invisible to anyone who didn’t know it was there.

  “Where does that lead?” he asked, inclining his head.

  If he wasn’t mistaken, he thought Vanessa’s eyes went wide and some of the color drained from her face.

  “Nowhere,” she said quickly. Then, apparently realizing that he would know something was at the top of those stairs, she added, “It’s just a small apartment. We use it for storage, and as a place for Aunt Helen to nap throughout the day. She wears out easily.”

  Marc raised a brow. Unless she’d aged exponentially in the year or two since he’d last seen Vanessa’s aunt, he found that hard to believe. The woman might be pushing eighty, but there wasn’t a bone in her body that could be labeled old, and for as long as he’d known her, she’d had the disposition of a hummingbird. But he let it go, deciding that if the building’s second story didn’t have anything to do with the bakery or his possible investment, then there was nothing up there he needed to know about.

  Instead, he allowed her to lead him back through the front of the bakery and outside to the space for rent next door. Though it was locked and they were unable to enter, he could see clearly through the plate glass windows that it was half the size of The Sugar Shack, but completely empty, which meant that there would be very little remodeling necessary to turn it into anything Vanessa wanted. And if his vision of the mail order aspect of the business matched hers, he imagined it wouldn’t take much more than a few computers, several packing stations, and a direct and open path connecting it to The Sugar Shack for easy access.

  While he continued to peer inside, studying the structure of the connected, unrented area, Vanessa stepped back, standing in the middle of the sidewalk.

  “What do you think?” she asked.

  He turned to find the afternoon sun glinting off her hair, making it shine like a new penny. A flash of desire hit him square in the chest, nearly knocking him back a pace. His throat clogged and he felt himself growing hard despite the knowledge that he had no right to be attracted to her any longer.

  But then, who was he kidding? They might not be married anymore, but he had a feeling it would take a lot more than a signed divorce decree to keep his body from responding to his ex-wife’s presence. Something along the lines of slipping into a coma or having a full frontal lobotomy.

  Tamping down on the urge to step forward and run his fingers through her ma
ss of copper curls—or do something equally stupid, like kiss her until her knees went weak—he said, “I think you’ve done very well for yourself.” Without him, he was sorry to acknowledge.

  She looked only moderately surprised by the compliment. “Thank you.”

  “I’m going to need some time to look at the books and discuss things with Brian, but if you’re not still completely set against working with me, there’s a good chance I’d be interested in investing.”

  If he’d expected squeals of joy or for her to throw herself into his arms in a display of unabashed appreciation, he was doomed to disappointment. She nodded sagely, but otherwise didn’t respond.

  And he didn’t have a reason to stick around any longer.

  “Well,” he murmured, stabbing his hands into his pockets and rocking back slightly on his heels, “I guess that about does it. Thank you for the tour—and the samples.”

  Damn, he felt like a teenager out on his first date, and the polite smile she offered only made matters worse.

  “I’ll be in touch,” he told her after a moment of awkward silence.

  Tucking a strand of hair behind one ear, Vanessa tipped her head, but said, “I’d prefer you have Brian call me, if you don’t mind.”

  He did mind and a muscle in his jaw ticked as he ground his teeth together to keep from saying so. As much as it annoyed him, though, he understood her reluctance to be in contact with him again. He suspected that even if he offered to sink a boatload of money into Vanessa’s enterprise, she might refuse just on principle. A ridiculous principle that would only cause her to end up shooting herself in the foot, but principle all the same.

  Vanessa remained on the sidewalk outside The Sugar Shack, watching as Marc walked away, back toward the offices of Blake and Fetzer. Not until he was well out of sight, and she felt sure he wasn’t going to turn around and come back, did she let herself release a pent-up breath.

  Then, as soon as the pressure in her chest eased and her heart was beating normally again, she spun around and returned to the bakery, heading straight for the stairs that led to the second floor apartment. Halfway up, she heard some of her aunt’s favorite 1940s big band music playing, and beneath that, the sound of Danny fussing.

  Taking the last several steps two at a time, she hurried in and found her aunt pacing back and forth across the floor, bouncing and hushing and doing everything she could think of to calm the red-faced child in her arms.

  “Poor baby,” Vanessa said, reaching for Danny.

  “Oh, thank goodness.” Helen sighed in relief, more than happy to hand over her squalling charge. “I was just about to give him a bottle, but I know how much you prefer to feed him yourself.”

  “That’s all right, I’ve got him now,” Vanessa told her, continuing to bounce Danny up and down as she moved to the ugly, beige second-hand sofa along the far wall, unbuttoning her blouse as she went. “Thank you so much.”

  “How did things go? Is Marcus gone now?” Her aunt wanted to know.

  “Yes, he’s gone.”

  When the words came out more mumbled than intended, she realized it was because she wasn’t entirely pleased with that fact. She might have thought Marc was out of her life for good, and may have been desperate to keep him away once he’d shown up in Summerville unexpectedly, but she realized now that seeing him again hadn’t been entirely unpleasant.

  One glance from those moss-green eyes and her body went soft and pliant. Her blood turned the consistency of warm honey, her brain functioning about as well as too-flat meringue.

  Spending a short amount of time with him while she’d shown him around the bakery had been…not horrible. If it hadn’t been for the secret she was hiding just one floor above, she may even have gotten him that cup of coffee and invited him to stay a while longer.

  Which was a really bad idea, so it was better that he’d taken off when he had.

  She had Danny pressed to her chest, content now that his belly was being filled, when she heard footsteps coming up the stairs. Considering that everyone who knew about the second floor apartment—namely she and Aunt Helen—was already up there, she suspected she was about to get a very rude surprise.

  There was no time to jump up and hide the baby, no time to yell for Aunt Helen to run interference. One minute she was glancing around for a blanket to cover her exposed chest, and the next she was frozen in place, staring with alarm at her stunned but furious ex-husband.

  Three

  Marc honestly didn’t know whether to be stunned or furious. Perhaps a mix of both. He wondered if the whooshing sound in his ears and the tiny pinpricks of white marring his vision would ever go away.

  It wasn’t hard to figure out what was going on.

  First, Vanessa had lied to him. The space above the bakery wasn’t used primarily for storage and as a place for her octogenarian aunt to nap when she started to feel run-down. It was actually a fully furnished and operable apartment, complete with a table and chairs, a sofa, a television…a crib in one corner and a yellow duckie blanket covered with baby toys in the middle of the floor.

  Second, Vanessa had a child. She wasn’t sitting for a friend; hadn’t adopted an infant after their separation just for the thrill of it or to exert her independence. Even if she hadn’t been breast-feeding the baby in her arms when he’d walked in the room, the protective flare in her eyes and the alarm written all over her face told him everything he needed to know about her connection to the child.

  Third and finally, that baby was his. He knew it as well as he knew his own name. Felt it, deep down in his bones. Vanessa would never have been so determined to keep him from discovering she was a mother if that weren’t the case—if she didn’t believe she had something momentous to hide.

  Not only that, but he hadn’t become the CEO of his family’s very successful textile company by being stupid. He could do the math. The only way Vanessa could have such a young infant was if she’d either been pregnant before their divorce had become final or if she’d been cheating on him with another man. And despite the differences that had pushed them apart, infidelity had never been one of them—not by him and not by her.

  “Want to tell me what’s going on here?” he asked, slipping his hands into the front pockets of his slacks.

  It was safer that way. Burying his hands—now curled into tight, angry fists—in his pockets kept him from reaching out to strangle someone. Namely her.

  And though his words might have been delivered in the form of a calm, unruffled question, the sharp chill of his tone let her know it was a demand. He wasn’t going anywhere until he had answers. All of them.

  Out of the corner of his eye, he saw a blur of blue-topped motion as Aunt Helen bustled forward and tossed a blanket over Vanessa’s half exposed chest and the baby’s head. Marc didn’t know which was more disappointing—losing sight of his ex-wife’s creamy flesh…or of the child he hadn’t known existed until thirty seconds ago.

  “I’ll be downstairs,” Helen murmured to her niece before turning a critical glare on him as she passed. “Yell if you need me.”

  What Aunt Helen had to be annoyed about, Marc couldn’t fathom. He was the victim here. The one who had never been told he was a father, who’d had his child kept from him for so long. He didn’t know how old the baby was, exactly, but given the amount of time they’d been divorced and the nine months of her pregnancy, his guess would be about four to six months.

  Vanessa and her wily Aunt Helen were the bad guys in this situation. Lying to him. Hiding pertinent facts from him for the past year.

  After glancing over his shoulder to be sure they were finally alone, he took another menacing step forward.

  “Well?” he prompted.

  At first she didn’t respond, buying some time by rearranging the lightweight afghan so that it covered her exposed flesh, but not the baby’s face. Then with a sigh, she raised her head and met his gaze.

  “What do you want me to say?” she asked softly.

&
nbsp; Her seeming indifference had his molars grinding together and his fingers curling even tighter, until he thought his knuckles would pop through the skin.

  “An explanation might be nice.” Followed by a few hours of abject groveling, he thought with no small amount of sarcasm, while outwardly he struggled not to let his true level of annoyance show.

  “I didn’t realize it at the time, but I was pregnant before the divorce became final. We weren’t exactly on speaking terms then, so I couldn’t find a way to tell you, and to be honest, I didn’t think you’d care.”

  Fury bubbled inside his chest. “Not care about my own child?” he growled. “Not care that I was going to be a father?”

  What kind of man did she think he was? And if she could believe he was the sort of man who wouldn’t care about his own flesh and blood, why had she bothered to marry him in the first place?

  “How do you know it’s your baby?” she asked in a low voice.

  Marc laughed. A sharp, humorless bark of sound at the sheer ridiculousness of that question.

  “Nice try, Vanessa, but I know you too well for that. You wouldn’t have broken your vows to have some sleazy, sordid affair. And if you’d met someone you were interested in while we were still married…”

  He trailed off, a sudden thought occurring to him that hadn’t before. “Is that why you asked for a divorce? Because you met someone else?”

  It would be just like her. She would never have cheated on him, never been physically unfaithful. But emotional infidelity was another matter, and toward the end, he had to admit that they hadn’t been as close or connected as at the beginning of their relationship.

  With his brother as second-in-command, he’d taken over the Keller Corporation and started spending longer and longer hours in the office or traveling for business. Vanessa had complained about feeling lonely and being treated like an outsider in her own home—which was something he could understand, given his mother’s less-than-warm nature and the fact that she’d never really cared for the woman he’d married. Hadn’t she made that clear from the moment he’d first brought Vanessa home for a visit and announced their engagement?