Mystery Heiress. Suzanne Carey

tion>

      

      Kate Fortune’s Journal Entry

      My whole world is falling apart! Just when I thought things were going to settle down, the unraveling scandal has never been more destructive. Our whole life is an open book for the public to scrutinize. All our deep, dark secrets we thought long buried are coming out one by one.

      I’ve just found out the most shocking news about my dearly departed husband, Ben. Apparently, he had an affair that produced an illegitimate heir! I have to believe he had a good reason for what he did. After all, I’ve done a few dishonest things out of desperation myself….

      A LETTER FROM THE AUTHOR

      Dear Reader,

      Writing about an extended family like the Fortunes makes me think of my own family, which is scattered from Illinois and Northern Kentucky to Florida, where I, my spouse and stepmother live.

      Needless to say, we keep the phone company and the airlines busy, visiting back and forth and exchanging information across the miles as we continue to weave new strands in the rich web of our connectedness. Often our talk (both earthshaking and otherwise) is phrased in a kind of shorthand because we share the same history, the same context. In my opinion, it’s one of the ways families most help us find our place in the world.

      In the story you’re about to read, the heroine, Jessica Holmes, arrives from England in the hope her long-lost relatives, the Fortunes, will be able to provide a bone-marrow transplant for her ailing daughter. Though the Fortunes are quite wealthy, she claims that’s all she wants from them.

      Yet she clearly wants more—not money, as she insists, but rather her share of the common history and web of connectedness I’ve been talking about. To me, the way she goes about getting it, and fitting in, is as interesting as her struggle to save her daughter’s life and her romance with the handsome but troubled physician she learns to love.

      Mystery Heiress

      Suzanne Carey

       www.millsandboon.co.uk

      MILLS & BOON

       Before you start reading, why not sign up?

      Thank you for downloading this Mills & Boon book. If you want to hear about exclusive discounts, special offers and competitions, sign up to our email newsletter today!

       SIGN ME UP!

      Or simply visit

      signup.millsandboon.co.uk

      Mills & Boon emails are completely free to receive and you can unsubscribe at any time via the link in any email we send you.

      I’d like to dedicate this book to my former editor at Silhouette Books, Lucia Macro, who has unfailingly offered warmth, creative latitude and good judgment for the many years we’ve worked together.

      SUZANNE CAREY

      A Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Lake Forest College, Lake Forest, Illinois, and a former reporter who covered politics and criminal courts as well as undertaking investigative assignments for several newspapers, Suzanne Carey has been writing novels for Silhouette Books since the early 1980s. Though she was born in Illinois, she has been a resident of Florida for many years. She and the man in her life, a clinical psychologist who is now a university professor, currently reside in Sarasota, on Florida’s Gulf Coast.

      Meet the Fortunes—three generations of a family with a legacy of wealth, influence and power. As they unite to face an unknown enemy, shocking family secrets are revealed…and passionate new romances are ignited.

      JESSICA HOLMES: The search for a donor to save her daughter’s life and the discovery of her true heritage led Jessica to the Fortune family…and into the comforting arms of a man who can help her child.

      STEPHEN HUNTER: Compassionate doctor. His strong shoulders are perfect for Jessica to lean on. But can he put aside the pain of his past to begin a new life with Jessica and her daughter, Annie?

      MONICA MALONE: She was on the verge of achieving her lifelong dream of destroying the Fortune family…until she was mysteriously murdered. Is it too late for the Fortunes to stop the wheels of revenge Monica already put in motion?

      GRANT MCCLURE: Love doesn’t come easy to a lonely cowboy who prefers his Wyoming ranch to the big city. Will he ever find a woman cut out for country living—and his special brand of loving?

      LIZ JONES—CELEBRITY GOSSIP

      Illegitimate! Well, well, well. What do we have here? It seems that Jake is not the legitimate son of Ben Fortune after all! Apparently, the prim-and-proper matriarch of the family, Kate, wasn’t a virgin bride! She was sleeping with another man and then tried to pass off to the world her unborn child as Ben’s.

      And one of the few people who knew the truth was Monica Malone. My sources tell me that Monica had been blackmailing Jake for quite some time, threatening to reveal the scandalous secret if he didn’t sell her large shares of Fortune stock. If that isn’t a motive for murder, I don’t know what is! And if Jake isn’t guilty, then why did he skip bail?

      The Fortunes are on a sinking ship. And I for one don’t see any chance of them staying afloat!

      Contents

      Chapter One

      Chapter Two

      Chapter Three

      Chapter Four

      Chapter Five

      Chapter Six

      Chapter Seven

      Chapter Eight

      Chapter Nine

      Chapter Ten

      Chapter Eleven

      Chapter Twelve

      Epilogue

      One

      To some, he supposed, it must be an ideal summer day, bright and breezy if decidedly cool for the twenty-fifth of July—perfect for kicking over the traces and taking your kid to visit the lions, chimpanzees and zebras. But that wasn’t how it felt to him. A pensive, solitary figure as he strolled the curving blacktopped paths of Como Park Zoo in St. Paul, Minnesota, thirty-six-year-old Stephen Hunter had no kid to delight with his undivided attention, no inquisitive, heartbreakingly courageous scrapegrace eight-year-old boy to whom he could explain that giraffes ate treetops for lunch and were strictly vegetarian.

      To be gut-wrenchingly precise, he had no David. Instead of his cherished towheaded son, who’d succumbed to a rare form of bone cancer three years earlier, he had what felt like a gaping hole in his heart. To date, no one and nothing had begun to fill it. Or even come close.

      Today was the anniversary of David’s death. Having purposely kept his schedule light, in view of the depressed and angry feelings that were bound to surface, he’d been drawn to the zoo by loneliness, memories of better days, and the ache of a loss he believed would never fully leave him.

      A dedicated physician who specialized in treating leukemia