The Reluctant Heiress. Christine Flynn

that to protect her family’s relationships and reputation, his daughter Tess had allowed the world to believe what Ashworth had claimed; that she had left him because she’d become bored with marriage and wanted other men.

      Jillian remembered the scandal that had erupted when the beautiful Tess Kendrick had taken her young son and left the country last year. At the time, Jillian had thought the woman the epitome of spoiled self-indulgence. Because of the relentless media coverage, so had everyone else. Beyond that recollection, though, little else about the woman and what was being said to clear her name computed just then.

      The entire nation knew the man on the screen. The powerful former senator was one of the richest men in the country. As a young man, he had charmed a princess into giving up a kingdom to marry him and he, his glamorous wife and their four pampered and privileged offspring had been treated by the press as America’s royalty ever since.

      Jillian had grown up with the media stories about their fairy-tale lives right along with everyone else. In high school, she and her girlfriends had devoured everything printed about the family, especially the girls. Ashley had been younger than Jillian by only a couple of years. Tess, by maybe two more. They had worn designer clothes and ball gowns. They’d attended the best private schools, had bodyguards, servants, staff. They’d spent summers in their royal grandmother’s tiny European kingdom of Luzandria. Their older brothers were gorgeous. The girls themselves had grown up to be as stunning as their mother, the elegant ash blonde the cameras now revealed to be sitting supportively at William Kendrick’s side.

      Jillian’s heartbeats turned to sickening thuds. Her mom had been the only person she knew who seemed to ignore everything about the Kendricks and their celebrity. She’d never heard her comment on any of the magazine or news articles about any member of their family. If Jillian brought them to her attention with some publication’s picture of the girls all decked out for a charity ball or riding horses on their fabulous estate in Camelot, Virginia, her only remark would be a seemingly preoccupied “how nice,” or something equally innocuous before changing the subject entirely.

      Jillian had simply thought that the lives of the rich and famous held no interest at all for her very practical, hardworking mom. At least, she had until two days before her mom had died.

      That was when she’d finally told Jillian who her father was.

      She was the illegitimate daughter the man on the screen was talking about. And he had promised he would tell no one she existed.

      His somber image gave way to a reporter who looked properly grave himself as he proceeded to recap what William had just said about Tess Kendrick having been abused by her ex-husband, then blackmailed into silence with supposedly incriminating pictures of William and an unidentified woman.

      It barely registered to Jillian that she had been mistaken for William’s lover. She barely even noticed that her name hadn’t been mentioned. All that mattered was that William Kendrick had just broken his word to her.

      The basket of laundry had slid from her arms, bits of pale neutrals and pastels now scattered over beige carpet. She had met him only once. Grief, resentment and a whole host of bitter and unidentified emotions had driven her to seek him out a few weeks after her mom’s death. As ambivalent as she had felt about him, and because she’d had no desire to become tabloid fodder herself, she’d made it unquestionably clear that she didn’t want their relationship made public. As quickly as he had agreed, she’d felt certain he hadn’t wanted that, either, if for no other reason than to avoid the scandal such news would create. He had promised her—promised—that he would tell no one other than his wife that she existed.

      She pressed her fingers to her mouth, realized she was shaking. She wasn’t sure if she felt sick, furious or numb as the newscaster began to speculate about who—and where—the daughter from his affair might be. All she knew for certain was that her mother had never stopped loving William Kendrick. The admission had come with nearly her dying breath. Yet, as much as Jillian loved and respected the woman who had held her head high and raised her illegitimate daughter alone, Jillian couldn’t imagine ever feeling anything remotely resembling affection for the man who had fathered her. Because her mother had shied from involvement with any other man, she suspected that he had hurt her badly. And now he had betrayed Jillian herself.

      The change she’d felt coming on minutes ago no longer seemed welcome at all. As she watched the image on the screen cut to archive footage of Tess and Bradley, then to William as a young senator to capitalize on the dual scandals coming to light, what she’d felt now was more like the beginning of a nightmare.

      Chapter One

      Ben Garrett did his best work under pressure. He thrived on challenges, deadlines and delivering the impossible. Obstacles were nothing more than hurdles to be jumped, shifted or removed as he saw fit. But the part of the game he loved best was developing strategies to alter or influence the public’s perception, and he always played the game to win.

      His clients paid him handsomely to see that he did.

      The hard muscles of his athletic frame shifted beneath his tailored three-piece suit as he moved from the unanswered front door to the side gate of the modest beige duplex in the working-class suburb Hayden, Pennsylvania. The toylike, earth-green Volkswagen he recognized as Jillian Hadley’s sat parked under the carport that belonged to her unit. It was a good bet that she was around there somewhere.

      Ben’s specialty was media relations for The Garrett Group’s high-profile clients; Washington, D.C.’ s movers and shakers, and the rich and famous—or infamous—who wanted their images enhanced, subdued or altered completely. In the fifteen years since he’d earned his MBA from Yale, he’d also earned a reputation in those rarefied circles as the expert at damage control. That ability was why his father, the senior partner in their prestigious public relations firm, and William Kendrick, his father’s close friend and a longtime client, had both insisted that he handle Miss Hadley himself.

      The good news was that he would get to her before the press descended on her like vultures on carrion. The bad news was that the information he’d been given about William’s newly disclosed daughter left him little to work with. All he knew about Jillian Hadley was that she taught grade school, that her sole meeting with William had not gone well and that no one had been able to reach her to warn her about yesterday’s press conference. What concerned him most, though, what concerned them all for that matter, was that she was a potential powder keg in the scandal that had broken twenty-four hours ago.

      There hadn’t been a newspaper, television station or radio talk show in the country that hadn’t jumped on the stories about William’s youngest daughter, Tess, being blackmailed by her ex-husband, and about William’s newly revealed affair and offspring. The gossip had gone international at the speed of light. The London Daily Star had announced the Crisis in Camelot in bold type on its front page. Headlines in Paris, Rome and on the Internet had leaned toward the theme of Tess paying for the sins of her father and speculation about whether his unnamed daughter had been paid for her silence.

      Since no one had any idea what Jillian might say, it was Ben’s job to keep the powder keg she represented from blowing. Part of his job, anyway. William had also been adamant that she be protected from the media for her own sake as much as to protect him and his family from any potentially damaging comments she might make.

      He reached a small side gate in the white picket fence surrounding the backyard. Letting himself through, he strode past the neat, profusely blooming flowerbed at the side of the house. He had allotted himself twenty-four hours to accomplish his goal with Miss Hadley. As he absently checked the date and time on his Rolex, he hoped fervently that this aspect of the “affair situation,” as it was being referred to in the office, would go as smoothly as the press conference he’d arranged and scripted yesterday. He was in the middle of a little family crisis of his own.

      He rounded the corner of the tidy little yard that looked much like the small yards on either side of it. Fruit trees and flower beds took up most of the space both sides of the duplex apparently shared. The bulk of his attention, though, settled on the slender brunette standing barefoot in the grass