Heart's Secret. Adrianne Byrd

released a long sigh. Her resistance was starting to wear down.

      “It can be at a party. You come separately and leave separately. We can make it as casual as you want.”

      Another sigh.

      “Trust me.” Melanie made one last desperate plea. “You’ll thank me for it at your wedding.”

      Zora laughed at the unlikely notion.

      “There’s just one thing.”

      “Aha! I knew there was a catch. What is it? He has a tribe of children by half a dozen women?”

      “It’s nothing like that.” Melanie frowned and then pulled herself up into a sitting position while clutching her towel.

      Zora picked up her friend’s hesitation and felt the hair on the back of her neck stand up. “All right. Then what?”

      Melanie shrugged as if to suggest that it really wasn’t such a big deal. “I just need for you not to tell him…you know.”

      Zora signaled for Alejandro to stop rubbing her shoulders. “No. I don’t know. Why don’t you just spit it out?”

      “Let’s just say that Jaxon doesn’t know that I’m setting this…meeting up.”

      Zora closed her eyes to prevent herself from rolling them out the back of her head. “A blind date? You’re trying to set up a blind date?”

      Melanie’s smile returned and grew even wider. “Remember. You’ll thank me on your wedding day.”

      Zora’s eyes rolled again. “Something tells me that I highly doubt that.”

      Chapter 3

      Jaxon was not looking forward to his grandparents’ sixtieth wedding anniversary.

      It didn’t help that he’d almost forgotten about it. It was his crack secretary, Janine, who had cleared his schedule, bought a gift and reminded him that he would probably need to rehire his fake fiancée for a repeat performance or come up with a plausible lie to why Kitty was a no-show.

      It was an irritating inconvenience, but one that he would grin and bear for at least a couple of hours.

      When he placed a call backstage to the Velvet Rope, Kitty reacted to his invitation like she had just won the lottery. In a way maybe she did. He’d promised her a cool $5K for the night. No, he didn’t need to pay for a date, but knowing Kitty’s financial situation with her grandma made him feel like he wasn’t such a hard-ass like many believed. Plus, he would get another kick out of seeing Carlton sputter and stew in his own indignation.

      It would probably be the highlight of his night.

      He left his Manhattan high-rise a little past six o’clock, already anxious for the night to speed by. In his apartment lobby, Alfred tipped his hat and wished him a good evening. Jaxon highly doubted that was even possible.

      Kwan, his new twenty-one-year-old driver, greeted him at the curb with his Maybach 62. He wore a penguin suit that looked as though it was three sizes too big and a hat that looked even bigger than that. Each time Jaxon saw the kid, he questioned his decision to hire him, but there was just something about the young man’s exuberance for the job that won him over.

      Of course, the brother also tried his patience with his incredible knack for getting lost in a city he claimed to have lived in his entire life. That took a certain talent. And Jaxon could just forget about Kwan reading or understanding the GPS system in the car. Words like south, east, west or north were all met with the same blank stare. And if Jaxon combined them, southeast, northwest, Kwan looked ready to cry. So it was just best to keep it simple with oldies but goodies like make a left or a right that garnered the best results.

      An hour later they made it to Brooklyn with only two wrong turns to which Jaxon had to listen to a ten-minute nonstop apology. Kitty must’ve been waiting by the door, because the bell hadn’t stopped jingling when she jerked it open and greeted him with a Texas-size smile.

      The only thing that Jaxon wished that Janine had reminded him to do was tell Kitty to dress conservatively. As it was, she wore a cream-colored sequined dress that fortunately or unfortunately turned transparent when the light hit it. Since he was sure that his grandparents still had the habit of paying their electric bill, there just might be a problem with Kitty’s attire.

      Then again…didn’t he hire the curvaceous stripper to be provocative?

      “You don’t like my dress?” Kitty guessed after a full minute of him dragging his roaming eyes over her body. She prepared for his usual sly criticism only to be blown away by his devastating smile.

      “On the contrary. I think you look ravishing.” He offered her his arm, and then seemingly produced a single red rose out of thin air. “Shall we go?”

      It was on the tip of Kitty’s mouth to say that she would follow Jaxon anywhere, but she reined in her childlike fantasy and just accepted his proffered arm with a practiced innocent smile. “After you.”

      In the car, Jaxon gave Kwan his grandparents’ address only to be met with a wide-eyed blank stare.

      Jaxon huffed out a weary breath. “Take a right at the corner.”

      “Right, boss.” Kwan started to pull away from the curb only to be blasted by the horn of a passing Bentley.

      “We would like to get there in one piece, if you don’t mind,” Jaxon added.

      “Right, boss. I’m on it, boss.”

      Kwan tried it again.

      Another horn blared, but Kwan forced his way into the lane and then flashed his thanks by giving them all a two-finger salute.

      Jaxon covered his brow with his hand and tried to massage away the tension headache before it started. During the hour-plus drive out to the Hamptons, Kitty and Jaxon shared stiff smiles over a few glasses of champagne. But for the most part Jaxon allowed his mind to wander back in time. Back to when he was nothing more than a skinny thirteen-year-old kid being forced to live with grandparents he hardly knew.

      Jaxon’s father, Carlton Jr., had himself rebelled against his father’s stern, iron hand to forge his own path in the world. His dropping out of Harvard caused a rift between father and son that lasted until the day Jaxon’s parents were killed in a tragic home invasion. It was just lucky that Jaxon had been spending the night at a friend’s house the evening of his parents’ murder. Otherwise, he would have been home in his own bed, just like his parents had been when two felons broke in the back door and took the most important people in Jaxon’s young life.

      They say that time heals all wounds—but that was a lie. He missed his parents more today than ever. And the eight years he spent living with his grandparents was like a slow death unto itself. Well, he would be stretching the truth if he included his grandmother. He loved his grandmother. And one of the things he loved most about her was that she knew how and when to stay out of his business.

      As far as he was concerned, his grandmother was a class act. He put her beauty and grace high on a pedestal. She was a great confidante, cheerleader and referee between him and Carlton. She never once pressured him into doing anything or becoming anything. Sure, she could get carried away from time to time, feeling faint, needing smelling salts and swearing that her heart could go at any minute. But it was all done with such theatrics that no one really took such declarations seriously.

      But Carlton had the ability to get under Jaxon’s skin and ride his last nerve effortlessly. Thinking back on it, they had been butting heads from the start, almost as if Jaxon was born to pick up just where his father had left off.

      Jaxon was convinced that when Carlton looked at him, he only saw his mother’s black skin. Carlton’s disapproval of Jaxon’s parents’ marriage was evident and documented when he didn’t bother to attend their wedding in Johannesburg. Carlton was also missing in pictures when Jaxon was born in Los Angeles—or any other