The Billionaire's Baby 4: A Single Dad Romance Page 2

  “Is Hollie Reed still working for you as a nanny?”

  She looked at me with accusation in her eyes, as if to say she knew there was more to my relationship with Hollie than her position as my nanny.

  “Of course. It would be shortsighted on my part to let her go now, would it not? If there’s a delay, she would have to seek another job, and could rightly be no longer available when I called her to come back, which would be especially unfortunate since Kaylee has already bonded with her and will need stability after this nightmare with Marie. So, Hollie is still working as a member of my staff, and handling other duties around the house.”

  She cocked an eyebrow. She obviously had her own opinion of what those duties must have been, though she wouldn’t tell me. I wasn’t going to say anything if she didn’t; I felt like any admission on my part would have incriminated me in her eyes.

  “I’ve looked over the files on her disappearance. When your daughter is recovered, that incident will undoubtedly be used against Marie. It is clear that she has kidnapped your daughter and we need to do what we can to get her back.”

  She took a bite out of her sandwich.

  “Music to my ears,” I chuckled, relieved that she sounded like she was going to help me, after all.

  “I will use the screenshot you sent me to elevate things and help you get your daughter back faster. It is clear what’s going on now, and I’m sorry. We acted hastily the other day, and we need to correct that mistake.”

  “Thank you, I appreciate that.”

  I realized I could have been a complete jerk to her, threatening her and making demands, but there was no point. She’d agreed to help me out, and that was all I needed from her.

  “No problem. And thank you. This place is great.” She took another bite of her sandwich.

  “It is, isn’t it? It’s one of my favorite places for lunch.”

  We sat and ate like normal people for a few minutes, as if we were on a typical business lunch. She inhaled her sandwich and drank her coffee, dabbing the corners of her mouth with her napkin, all while I ate maybe the first half of mine.

  I could tell she appreciated my peace offering, and I didn’t know which had helped me more in the end—the damning texts or the delicious food.

  My phone went off while we were eating, and I glanced down. It was another text from Marie. I couldn’t believe it. I glanced around before I checked it, wondering if she was sitting somewhere watching us.

  “What is it?” Charlotte noticed my intensity.

  “It’s a text from Marie.”

  “Read it.”

  Her tone was hard and commanding again. For her, lunch was over and it was time to go back to work.

  I picked up the phone and looked down at the screen, reading her text myself before sharing it with Charlotte. I wasn’t sure how involved I wanted her to be, and while I was looking at the words printed on my screen, I realized I shouldn’t have said anything to her.

  I should have given myself the opportunity to read it first, and sharing it only if it was something I needed to share with her.

  “Out loud, please,” she ordered. She acted like a member of law enforcement, not at all the way I expected someone with Child Protective Services to act.

  I read to her from my phone.

  That was intended to be a limited offer, Jude. Please let me know how you’d like to proceed. I’d like for you to have the opportunity to see your daughter again.

  “What? You haven’t replied yet? Are you trying to make her do something stupid?” The words came out of Charlotte’s mouth like a knee-jerk reaction.

  “No, I haven’t. I was shocked that she would throw herself under the bus like that by admitting what she was really up to.”

  “Look, if you want my help, you’ve got to be open with me, okay? I can’t help you if you keep trying to keep stuff like this from me, and from law enforcement. Got it?”

  “Got it.”

  My phone rang. Marie was calling me. I held it up so Charlotte could see the incoming call. She shook her head.

  “Don’t answer it. Force her to talk to you through texting or voicemail. That way anything she says will be documented. Let her dig herself even deeper. That last text was beautiful, making a veiled threat against you and your daughter. That’s not going to look so great in court. I hope she understands that.”

  Answer your phone.

  I showed Charlotte the new text as it came in. It seemed as if Marie knew I was available and was merely ignoring her.

  “Tell her you’re at lunch with a client and can’t talk right now,” Charlotte said.

  I texted back and waited for a response. Nothing came back immediately. While we waited, my new partner from Child Protective Services coached me on what to say to her when I did talk to her again.

  “Whatever you do, make sure you only text her. Tell her you’re working late or whatever and can’t talk. You know how to play head games with people, I’m sure; so, do that with her to an extent. Try to buy some time without making her suspicious. She needs the money, so she’s going to try to get you to rush meeting with her. She may even ask for less and less until she gets down to the exact amount she needs, and she may even give you the real reason she needs it.”

  I sat back in my chair. I had been willing to give Marie the benefit of the doubt and accept that she needed it to cover legitimate debts, like she’d said, but Charlotte didn’t seem so forgiving.

  She talked like it wouldn’t have surprised her to find out Marie had gotten into something darker, something illegal, and needed my money to bail her out of her troubles.

  “We don’t have a lot of time to work with here, so I’m going to start as soon as I get back to the office. I hope I’m wrong, but I’m going to treat this as if your daughter were in imminent danger.”

  She slid her phone back into her jacket and stood up, tossing a couple of dollars on the table.

  I reached for them. “It’s my treat,” I reminded her.

  “Then leave that for the tip. Thank you for lunch, Mr. Black, and I’ll let you know when things are moving. Until then, hold her at bay, and be smart about it. Remember, your daughter really could be in danger here.”

  She looked me dead in the eye as she said it, and then she walked off, leaving me to handle the check.

  I wanted to think that her help was good news, but for some reason, as she left the café, I felt a sense of dread creeping in on me.

  Her dire view of the situation made me feel like it was only a matter of time before things really went south with Marie. I didn’t want to wait to solve this any longer than I needed to.

  3 - Hollie

  “Hey, get up.”

  It was Violet, walking up behind the couch in the living room where I lay staring at the wall beneath the blank TV screen.

  While Jude had made me feel better the night before, it hadn’t lasted. When I woke up that morning, the emptiness of the house had come crushing down on me, leaving me feeling incapable of doing anything.

  “Come on. We need to get you up off that couch and out of the house,” she demanded, as I slowly pushed myself up to a seated position on the couch.

  “I don’t really feel like going out.” I looked at her with a grimace on my face, shaking my head slightly.

  “I didn’t ask if you felt like it. Come on, I told you what we’re doing, get moving. Get up, get a shower, whatever you need to do. Complain all you want, but we’re getting out of here for a while.”

  I shook my head again, but then she took a page out of my mother’s book and pulled me off the couch, forcing me to stand up in front of her, something my parents did when I refused to bathe or eat as a child.

  I didn’t even have the energy to fight back. I simply looked her right in the eye, trying to muster up enough defiance to let her know I really didn’t want to participate in the plans she had for me.

  “Come on, Violet, Jude is out trying to fix this right now. I want to stay right here u
ntil then, okay?” I pleaded.

  “No, not okay. Upstairs, now.” She got behind me and guided me away from the couch, pushing me upstairs toward the bedroom. “You’re getting a shower, and we’re doing something. I don’t care if we just go to the mall and walk around, okay?”

  “Okay, okay.” I left her standing in the bedroom doorway as I made my way to the shower and started the water. I had to step past her to get to my clothes in the guestroom.

  “So, you have been staying in here with him,” she commented, as I walked back into the bedroom.

  “Yeah, of course, but what makes you so sure?” I didn’t remember ever denying it.

  “If you weren’t sleeping in his room, you wouldn’t be sharing his bathroom. You’d be using another bathroom in the house,” she winked.

  “Right.” I shook my head and closed the bathroom door.

  The shower felt good, and I realized I probably should have showered when I got up that morning, to wash off the sex if nothing else. I hadn’t wanted to miss anything, and wanted to be available in case Jude called with any news.

  It was alright now though, with Violet there. If I was missing a call she could have answered my cell phone for me, or picked up the house phone if she saw that Jude was calling.

  The hot water relaxed my body, but it couldn’t relax my mind. Even as I got out and toweled off, I still felt like the weight of the world was on my shoulders, and I could feel the tension I’d been feeling all day.

  The emptiness and silence of the house stole my breath away when I opened the bathroom door, but with my best friend there, I decided to fight it back as much as I could. She wasn’t going to let me lie on the couch all day.

  “So, did you think I wasn’t going to come over when you didn’t answer my calls or respond to my texts?”

  Violet was sitting on the couch when I came back downstairs. She had the TV on one of the daytime talk shows. I couldn’t tell if she’d actually been watching it or if she had it on only for background noise.

  I chose to ignore her question, but it didn’t seem to faze her a bit and she rattled on.

  “So, where are we going?” she asked, turning around on the couch to look at me, her face as bright and happy as a child promised a trip for ice cream.

  “You tell me. This was your idea, not mine,” I told her.

  “Yeah, but it’s for you. I want to make sure you enjoy yourself.”

  “Did Jude put you up to this?” I plopped down on the other couch, my hands in my lap, my face turned to the floor.

  “I already told you. You put me up to this when you didn’t answer your phone all day. Have you eaten?”

  I furrowed my brow and looked around the room for the clock. I didn’t know what time it was, and didn’t even realize it might be after lunch. Sure enough, I’d missed lunch completely. I hadn’t even thought about food.

  “That looks like a no. Does Jude have a cook?”

  “Yeah, but I don’t know if he’s here… he doesn’t stay at the house all day. But I’m not really hungry,” I protested.

  “You still have to eat, Hollie.”

  I couldn’t understand how everyone was able to continue going on about their days as if nothing had happened. For me, it felt like time was moving at a snail’s pace.

  It seemed like nothing was happening and no progress was being made. I had started to worry that nothing was going to happen and we couldn’t get Kaylee back.

  “Come on.” Violet had my hands and was pulling me up off of the couch toward the back door. “We’re at least going to go sit out by the pool, okay?” She pushed through the glass door and took me with her, heading out into the bright sunlight.

  “I don’t have a bathing suit.” I probably would have used any excuse at that point as a reason not to leave the comfort and security of the couch.

  “I didn’t say we were getting in the pool, but you’ve got to have a change of scenery, and I think the pool is the perfect place to start since you don’t want to go anywhere else.”

  Jude’s pool sat in the middle of a large patio that took up most of his backyard. The patio was surrounded by a beautiful garden that acted as a buffer between the pool and the fence separating the backside of his place from the surrounding properties.

  Lounge chairs lined one side of the pool, and Violet immediately took a seat in one of them after opening the umbrella above it.

  “You’re kidding, right? What’s the difference between being out here and being inside on the couch?” I took the chair next to hers and lay back under the shade of the umbrella.

  “You tell me,” she said simply, leaving me to sit in silence and try to figure out what she was talking about.

  A few minutes later, I started to hear the sounds of the backyard. It had seemed so silent to me at first, because the traffic noise I was accustomed to that surrounded my apartment in town was absent from Jude’s home.

  He lived far enough out from downtown that his neighborhood sat in relative silence. I started to realize now that the silence created by the missing traffic had left room for other, more beautiful sounds.

  I could hear the birds chirping and singing, the fountain trickling in the garden, and the occasional car passing on the road. In the distance, I could hear someone’s children playing in their backyard.

  It was peaceful and calming, and in no time it didn’t seem silent at all. The world was full of the beautiful sounds of nature all around me.

  “It’s peaceful out here isn’t it?” she asked, after a few minutes of letting me listen to the backyard.

  “It is.”

  Only minutes earlier, I would have argued that the inside had been peaceful as well, but the utter silence, devoid of any human presence, was anything but peaceful.

  It had been stressful, leaving me to focus on everything that was going wrong instead of giving me hope that everything was going to be alright. I didn’t really need hope to tell me that. I knew everything was going to work out.

  “It’s better than sitting inside and dwelling on everything, huh?”

  I laughed, coming back reality from my thoughts, which had been trying to take me back inside. It was like Violet knew what was going on in my head and had decided to work against it to keep me from going back to the misery I’d put myself in.

  I didn’t understand why it worked, but the sunlight, the heat, and the singing birds all seemed to come together to give me a sense of hope.

  It was so beautiful outside that I didn’t want to go back to that drab, miserable existence inside. I was perfectly content where I was.

  “Okay, I’ll be honest with you. Jude called and told me to come by to check on you,” Vi finally admitted.

  “Well, thanks,” I chuckled. “I guess I needed it.”

  “You sure looked like it when I got here. He told me to tell you he talked to the lady from Child Protective Services, and she’s going to use those texts to get Kaylee back. He said you would know what he meant.”

  “That’s great news.”

  Of course, it was just what he said would happen. He’d known those texts would undermine Marie’s efforts to take baby from us. It was also good to see someone taking the threat she posed seriously.

  “So, there’s nothing to worry about. We can sit back here by the pool and relax all afternoon. If you get hungry, we can have the cook whip up something in the kitchen or order delivery.”

  “Why don’t we go out to eat?” I suggested.

  “Whatever you’d like.” I could hear the smile in her voice, pleased with herself for getting me out of the shell I’d tried to climb into.

  “So was that it? He sent you here to make sure I wasn’t lying on the couch or moping around the house all day?”

  I lay there with my eyes closed, smiling at the thought of how concerned he’d been for me throughout his mess.

  I knew that some would think it silly for me to be so worried about a little girl who wasn’t even mine, but I’d grown really close to her.


  “You got it. Apparently you didn’t answer the phone for him either, and he was concerned.”

  My eyes shot wide open and panic gripped my heart, bordering on terror. What if it had been an important call? How had I missed it?

  I’d kept my phone right next to me all day so I wouldn’t miss hearing from him in case there was news. I started to sit up, but Violet tried to ease my nerves.

  “Don’t worry about it. That’s why he called me. He figured maybe you are finally getting some good sleep or stepped away from your phone. I figure you probably fell asleep on the couch and didn’t hear the phone go off, that’s all. You didn’t miss much, so lie back down and relax. You’ll be alright.”

  I didn’t feel alright. My heart was jumping around in my chest, pounding against my ribs, trying to get out. I felt like my entire body was screaming.

  I tried not to listen to it… I tried to listen to my best friend instead. She’d actually spoken to Jude, so she knew what she was talking about, at least in theory. She knew what he’d told her.

  “Hey, Hollie, you’ll be fine,” she reiterated.

  “Thanks. So, what do we do now? Do we keep sitting out here, or what?” I tried to remain calm and get my mind off the pounding in my chest and the squeezing sensation in my lungs.

  “Well, are you getting hungry?”

  I laughed. The sound seemed distant, like someone else’s laughter and not my own. I closed my eyes and chuckled again, trying to force myself to recognize that it was, in fact, my own laughter that I heard.

  “Are you hungry, Vi? You’ve brought it up a few times already.”

  “I sort of am actually,” she said, wrinkling her nose in that familiar way she had.

  “Alright, that settles it then, I said as I pushed myself up from the chair. Let’s get the driver to come around and take us out to eat.”

  “Are you serious?”

  “Absolutely. I need to get out of here and get a change a scenery for a little while, and we both need to eat, so let’s do it.”