Keeping Secrets. Fiona Brand

that a much-needed client had just opened the door of Zara’s fledgling employment agency, diverted her attention from her four-month-old baby, Rosie. Thankfully, after a marathon effort to get Rosie to nap, her tiny daughter had finally drifted into a restless slumber.

      Anxious to snag her client before he or she lost interest and decided to take their very valuable business elsewhere, Zara tiptoed out of the smallest interview room, which today doubled as Rosie’s makeshift nursery. Makeshift, because normally, when Zara was working, Rosie was in day care. But, because Rosie had been a little off-color, the center hadn’t wanted to take her, so Zara had planned to work from home while she kept an eye on her daughter. However, that arrangement had crashed and burned when her assistant, Molly, had called in sick at the last minute, meaning that Zara had been forced to bring Rosie to the office.

      It wasn’t until she had gently closed the door behind her that Zara realized she had left her high heels, which she had slipped out of while she had fed and changed Rosie, behind her desk. Added to that, her hair, once smoothed into an immaculate French pleat, was now disheveled from the playful grip of Rosie’s fingers.

      Pinning a smoothly professional smile on her face, she turned to her client. In that instant, the room seemed to whirl, reminding her of the last month of pregnancy when bouts of dizziness would hit out of the blue.

      Disbelief froze her in place as Zara’s gaze traveled from the rock-solid shape of a masculine jaw, with the hint of a five o’clock shadow, to the scar that sliced across one cheekbone, a fascinating counterpart to the damaged line of a once-aquiline nose. Her own jaw taut, she braced herself for the impact of the magnetic silvery gaze, which had always put her in mind of that of a very large, very focused wolf.

      Her heart slammed against the wall of her chest. A complicated mix of panic, edged with another purely feminine reaction she refused to acknowledge.

      He had found her.

      Damon Smith.

      Six foot two inches of scarred, muscular, reclusive billionaire standing in her tiny office, taking all the air, his sleek shoulders broad enough that they stretched the dark fabric of a very expensive black coat.

      A stomach-churning anxiety kicked in as she wondered why he was here. Damon Smith had the kind of wealth and power that meant he did not have to leave his private island or his penthouse office unless he chose to do so. There was a small army of devoted, ex-military employees who had been with him for years and who were ready and willing to do his slightest bidding.

      Damon turning up in her office was significant.

      * * *

      Cold air gusted, shaking the windows. Predictably, her door, which had a malfunctioning catch, flung open. Damon caught the door before it could bang against the wall, his dark coat swirling like a mantle as he did so, cloaking its owner in the shadows and secrets that permeated his life. Public secrets due to his work. Private secrets, which she was privy to and wished she wasn’t, because they also scored her life.

      He closed the door and tested it to make sure the catch had engaged. His gaze, now distinctly irritable, pinned her again. “You need to get that fixed.”

      “It’s on my list.”

      Along with fixing the leaky tap in the tiny bathroom and replacing some of the light fittings, which looked like they had been salvaged from a Second World War junk sale. Knowing her landlord, they probably had.

      Keeping a neutral smile fixed firmly in place, Zara girded herself to hold Damon’s gaze with the equanimity she had learned in an elite finishing school in Switzerland, all paid for by her gorgeous, restless, jet-setting supermodel mother, Petra Atrides, who had been known in the fashion and media worlds as Petra Hunt. A practiced composure, which had been put to the test by the paparazzi when Petra had plunged to her death along with her new fiancé—Damon’s uncle Tyler McCall.

      Not that Damon knew any of that, which was the way she wanted to keep it. There was no way Damon would believe she had not known who he was when she accepted the job as his personal assistant and then practically flung herself into his bed. Not when he discovered she was Petra Hunt’s daughter and had given birth to his child.

      The wind buffeted the front door again, the force of it actually making the lights flicker, but this time the door held.

      Damon took in her small office in one sweeping glance. “So this is where you’ve been hiding out.”

      “What do you mean, ‘hiding out’?”

      Although the fact that she had been in hiding for the past thirteen months, hiding a pregnancy and now a baby, put an annoying blush on her cheeks.

      Damon’s expression was deceptively mild. “You haven’t been answering your phone or returning calls, and the address you gave me over the phone a couple of months ago is incorrect. I’ve spent the past half hour walking the streets and questioning shop owners who had never heard of you. It wasn’t until I went online and checked your social media site that I managed to get your real address.”

      Zara struggled to control another surge of heat to her cheeks. Weeks ago, when Damon had contacted her out of the blue, she hadn’t meant to give him incorrect information. In a moment of panic, thinking that he had somehow found out about Rosie, the transposed figures had just tumbled out of her. But neither should he, a CEO, have been even remotely interested in the whereabouts of her office. When she had agreed to take on Magnum Security as a client, she had only done so because she had desperately needed the money and on the condition that all of her dealings were with Damon’s dry-as-dust business manager, Howard Prosser. In theory she should never have had to deal with Damon, period.

      She stiffened at the image of the extraordinarily wealthy and private Damon Smith walking the streets and questioning shop owners.

       Hunting her.

      A sharp little thrill shot down her spine. Instantly, her jaw firmed. That was the kind of feminine reaction toward Damon that she had never been able to afford, because he was, literally, the one man she should not want and could not have in her life.

      Aside from being a link to a past she was determined to leave behind, she had found out that Damon was also the trustee of his uncle’s estate. He had requested, through his lawyers, that she, as Angel Atrides—her name before she had legally changed it to Zara Westlake—sign a legal document relinquishing any claim on Tyler’s estate in exchange for a one-off, extremely offensive cash offer.

      Raw with grief, insulted and hurt, Zara had refused the offer and had refused to sign the horrible legal agreement. She had been sickened by the tactics of a family who had obviously bought into the media hype around her mother as a model who was past her prime and who had inveigled her way into Tyler’s über-rich, normally sensible life. No doubt Damon believed that Angel Atrides was just as trashy and opportunistic, and that a chunk of cash and a legal agreement was a necessary insurance against her ever darkening his doorstep or, horror of horrors, trying to make a claim on Tyler’s fortune.

      Once again, the calculated risk of accepting Magnum as a client made her heart pound. Her chest seized on a sudden thought. Could Damon know about Rosie?

      Last night he had left a message on her answering service, a terse command to call him back. It was something she had deliberately left for Molly to attend to.

      Summoning a smooth smile, and trying to control her racing pulse, Zara made it to the safe haven of her desk. “I’m sorry you had trouble finding me.”

      Feeling pinned by his gaze, she opened a drawer on the pretext that she wanted to check the address on her business cards. Although, she knew there was nothing wrong with her cards. Her mother might have been a creative, artistic personality who resisted being organized and hated dealing with numbers, but Zara was her polar opposite. A perfectionist and a details person, she preferred to lead, not follow, and she liked to get things right.

      The flush on her cheeks seemed to grow more heated as she jerkily closed the drawer on her stack of perfectly aligned, perfectly correct business cards.