Billionaire’s Missing Baby Read online

  “You did, didn’t you?” James laughed heartily. “She made you pick your middle name?”

  “Baby Michael, meet your Uncle James,” Adam grumbled. “John is his middle name, by the way.”

  His brother laughed. “I wouldn’t have it any other way.”

  THE END

  Thank you for reading!

  AND IF YOU HAVE TIME FOR ONE MORE...

  Turn the page to read: “14 Day Fiancee

  ” by Kayla Watkins

  14 Day Fiancee

  Chapter 1

  A cool New York breeze ruffled Dana’s head scarf, swooping between the rows of condo high-rises as she stood on the train platform. She put a gloved hand to it absently.

  It promised to be a sunny, brisk autumn day, with perfect clear skies and low temperatures. In other words, a great day to be working inside at her desk, admiring the sunlight from her heated office.

  Dana Deshaun stood out like a pineapple in a zucchini patch as she stood among her fellow commuters. Although thoroughly bundled against the cold, pops of yellow and orange peeked out from the neckline of her bright red coat, and her wild black locks waved in their natural frizzy glory, tied up presently in a fringed lemon-yellow scarf. But really, it might have been her smile that set her apart, grinning absently, sometimes offering a slice of perfectly white teeth against dark skin when something particularly pleasant caught her eye. To Dana, many things were pleasant, and she loved to smile.

  The 8am train pulled up and its old doors whooshed open. Passengers pushed out onto the platform, but there were many more crowding on to reach downtown—and work—at this time of the morning. Dana moved with the flow and found a space clinging to a rail in the cramped train car.

  A happy flutter started up in her belly as the train took off. There were seven stops between her neighborhood and her work at the Seven Diamonds Tower. But it wasn’t the seventh stop that interested her most. It was the third, which was coming up in just two—now, one platform.

  When her train stopped for the third time, Dana peered out the fogged glass and tried to see the faces waiting to board. This was the car they usually rode in…

  Her heart bumped a bit and she smiled again. “Andrew! Over here!”

  Another dozen passengers squeezed onto the already-packed train, including Andrew Poole, with whom Dana had been riding to work every day for over a year. Unlike Dana, he blended right in with the other New Yorkers, sullen of face, with a dark coat and hat. But when he saw Dana, he smiled back and shimmied in her direction through the packed car.

  Her pulse skipped a little as he approached. He was very tall—Dana was on the upper side of average height, and Andrew stood half a head above her, even in her heels. She’d never seen him do anything with his dark hair except comb it neatly, as if perhaps he didn’t know there were other styles available to him. Fitting through the subway crowd was fairly simple for him, since he was quite lean, almost thin. He claimed to go to the gym every day after work. Dana always laughed and told him that if he didn’t stop working out, he might wither into nothing and vanish.

  “Morning!” he greeted. He grabbed the rail next to her just as the train took off, and almost fell thanks to the inopportune placement of a little old lady’s walking cane against the bench beside them. The woman (who looked about 105 and draped in at least five coats) glared up at him and readjusted her cane. Dana waved an apology and chuckled.

  “It’s crowded today.”

  “Bleh, that’s Monday for you,” Andrew grumbled, reaching into his bag. He produced two little paper bags from the deli near his building with an exaggerated grin.

  “Oh! Yay!” Dana clapped excitedly. “Oh, you shouldn’t have!”

  “I know,” Andrew agreed. “I’m going to be three hundred pounds by the time I turn thirty.”

  Dana looked in the bag he handed to her: turkey and avocado, with Swiss cheese and vinaigrette. “This was actually perfect. I didn’t end up having time to make my lunch last night—I was just going to buy something from the Wendy’s.”

  “I’m glad I spared you, then,” Andrew chuckled.

  They passed the next three stops in pleasant conversation until the 8 o’clock train shuddered to a halt at the platform three blocks from the Seven Diamonds tower, where they both worked. Dana and Andrew stepped off the train together and walked toward their building, talking all the while.

  “I wish I could install solar panels in my condo,” Dana groaned. “I’ve asked the super about it, but the answer was a resounding ‘no’. My sister spent a couple weeks watching about a million YouTube videos about how to make your own at home. She loves those DIY machine tutorials. I told you about the time she made an air conditioner out of a Styrofoam icebox and PVC pipe, right?”

  “How could I forget?”

  As they walked, the two of them passed the occasional homeless man or woman, in alleys, in doorways, walking the street. This was a common occurrence in New York, but it was one of Dana’s least favorite parts of life in the city.

  She stopped when she saw a mother with a terribly thin four-year-old bundled up on her lap, sitting with a duffel bag of belongings.

  “Here, ma’am.” Dana dug through her purse for her wallet. She sighed when she found it. Payday was four days away, and money was slim. She pulled out a ten, the largest bill left in Dana’s possession, and handed it to the woman.

  She did so at the same time that Andrew handed over a twenty.

  “I don’t carry anything bigger than that,” he explained briefly as they walked away.

  It was one more block before they reached the Diamonds. Dana walked it cheerfully, a little warmer than before. It was hard giving up money she might well need this week, but the homeless mother had been so thankful… Andrew, also, seemed to walk a little lighter.

  At the entrance, Andrew held the door for her. Still they walked together, through the expansive, glassy lobby, into the wood-paneled elevators.

  “The funding for a community center is astronomical,” Andrew continued as they climbed into the elevator. “But honestly, we make enough profits to sustain our business and put a monthly stipend towards keeping up a place, like a YMCA-type organization, where kids in the community can come and play and learn and find support. I mean, New York isn’t the easiest place to live if you aren’t making a six-figure salary, and it’s shocking the proportion of people living in poverty. And it’s a cycle, you know? I we can break the cycle and give kids a chance to aspire…”

  Dana listened happily. Hearing about Andrew’s plans for the neighborhood and the city and the world was one of the best parts of her morning, and he seemed more excited about it than usual today. Last weekend when they’d caught the train together, he had been telling her about a business deal he was hoping to make that would provide the funding for this community center—in her heart, Dana hoped he got it.

  On the twentieth floor, Dana stepped out and waved goodbye.

  “Good luck saving the children, today, Andrew,” she said, fully sincere. “Your work is so important. I wish I could make a difference like you do.”

  The elevator door closed between them before he could do much more than smile and wave.

  Dana smiled for a minute at the closed elevator door. Andrew was such a great guy. True, his company (Bellwethers) was a finance company, not a charity, but she’d heard so much about the community outreaches, fundraisers, and public service campaigns that Andrew managed, it was easy to see which part of his work was the most important to him. If only her job made such a difference!

  Not that she had reason to complain, Dana reasoned. She worked as an illustrator for The Current, a socio-political magazine that focused on the impact of the economy on their city and state legislature. She couldn’t count the number of political caricatures she’d done, which was fortunate, since those were some of her favorite. Today, she was working on a caricature of one of their Senate representatives in an unusually flattering light. The figure was almost done.
Dana had worked herself half-blind the night before, and had decided to leave the finishing touches until she was fresh and rested.

  Truthfully, Dana had been lucky to get this job. She’d first moved to New York five years ago, when she was nineteen. Hers was a familiar story, a desire to get out and see the world, live where exciting things happened, meet extraordinary people. She’d done all that, of course, but living in the city had been much harder than she imagined, and her first three years had been dogged by misfortune and the eternal hunt for rent money. Her old job waitressing had been misery, so much so that Dana had seriously considered packing up and moving home.

  Her parents, immigrants from Ghana, had moved here after their marriage and settled further inland, in a quaint little town where people were friendlier and housing was less expensive. Like all parents, they’d sighed and shook their heads when Dana announced her plans to make a move to the big city—but, also in common with parents the world over, they let her do what she had to.

  Dana would have hated to admit defeat, but months of hounding the art circuit finally gave her a window to the world of professional illustration. A little over a year ago, Dana had first walked in to The Current offices, and had never looked back.

  And soon after that, her sister Maya asked to move to the city with her. Nothing could have made Dana’s life brighter than sharing a house with her little sister again—even though their ‘house’ was a very old condo on the fifth floor of a very old brick tenement building.

  Maya came for a different dream than Dana. The younger of the Deshaun sisters wanted to study medicine here in New York, where Dana had chased after her art.

  A little frown tilted Dana’s contentment. Maya wanted to go to medical school, but it was so expensive… much more expensive than the brief schooling Dana had undergone for her arts degree. There were always grants and loans, but for over a decade of med school, the number would be in the six digits before Maya was halfway done. Her sister was practical. There was some understandable hesitation to taking on such a financial commitment, and Maya was still searching for other options to avoid so much debt. She took courses at the community college, for now, and paid tuition as she went.

  Dana reached her work space and shook off that train of thought. Something would come along to solve the tuition problem, she was sure. In the meantime, she had to be in the right frame of mind to get her work done.

  Her desk was in a bright corner, a space of cubicles that were surrounded by windows, where the cool autumn sunshine poured in. Dana adored her office. She and her co-workers had ornamented the space with plants and mirrors, artwork in and out of frames plastered across the cubicle dividers, and odd rugs across the floor. The floor manager had been tough to win over, but in the end, he’d allowed the alterations when he saw the jump in productivity.

  Dana hadn’t been surprised. She smiled as she remembered, taking her seat at her easel and settling in. You could pay a person less or more, yell at them or coddle them, but what really made a difference was the atmosphere. What really put a person at their best was when they felt at home.

  Chapter 2

  Andrew stepped off the elevator into chaos.

  Even for Bellwethers, the madness was worse than usual, complete with the odd explosion of flying papers as someone tripped over a stray cord or turned a corner too quickly. The elevator shut behind him. He wasn’t so sure that it had been safe to disembark, after all.

  Before Andrew could convince himself to flee, he pressed into the fray, dodging interns and assistants all the way. It wasn’t as if this place was normally serene, but something big had happened. His guts twisted in a combination of anxiety and thrill as he found his office, threw down his briefcase, and dove into the papers waiting on the desk.

  Before he could read the top page (it looked like an office memorandum, anyway), his door blew open again and his personal assistant rushed in. Nick McNulty had been Andrew’s assistant for almost three years, a slim and prim young man with black-rimmed glasses and a mop of dark reddish hair. Sharply-dressed as only a gay man could be. Half Israeli and half Irish was an odd mix to look on, with his very-blue eyes and olive skin, but he was a brilliant organizer. That skill alone had earned him several raises over the years. Truthfully, he was almost of an age with Andrew, but his face belonged to someone several years younger. He’d been mistaken for an intern more than once by new employees.

  “Oh, thank God, you’re here!” Nick had a box and a handful of papers that he was juggling. He set down the box and pushed the papers into Andrew’s hands. “No, really, stop everything. Just an hour ago, we got feedback from Westcorp.”

  His senses seemed to laser-focus. Westcorp was a notoriously tough partner to hook. Bellwethers had been trying to scoot into an agreement with them for years. Most recently, Andrew himself had been burning the midnight oil, working weeks of overtime drafting a proposal to entice this coveted prize into their conference room.

  He was almost afraid to ask. “And?”

  Nick held up a hand for Andrew to high-five. “We got them biting.”

  With a hushed exclamation of victory, Andrew slapped Nick’s hand exultantly. “Yes! When do we meet with them?”

  Nick hissed through his teeth and clasped his hands awkwardly. “Well, the thing is, we haven’t set a date just yet.”

  “What?! What are we waiting for? Did Brown send me something?” Andrew rifled through the papers on his desk, then the ones in his hand. Nick had handed him a run-down of numbers and dates and figures and dreams, and Andrew was already halfway through the next ten years of this agreement. His mind had taken off, and he was hardly paying attention to Nick, who folded his arms.

  “Well, Andrew, to answer that, I guess I could just go simple: you. We’ve hit a bit of a hold-up.”

  Andrew’s train of thought derailed and flipped off the tracks. “What?”

  Nick closed Andrew’s office door. “Look, we’ve had Neimens investigating this company, trying to figure out what they’re waiting on in a merger. Marcel propositioned us out of nowhere this morning, we didn’t expect a reply so fast—anyway, Niemens has been rooting around, and she’s discovered a trend with their partners. They have that whole song and dance about family values, remember?”

  Andrew remembered. He’d sat through a half-hour lecture on the importance of family in this day and age when he’d attended the most recent event for Westcorp, a grand opening of a new bank branch they were backing. He’d found the emphasis on the nuclear family a little bizarre (after all, his own parents had gotten divorced when he was young, and they lives hadn’t all fallen apart) but he’d nodded and agreed politely. That was simply what you did when you were trying to get a person’s signature on a deal.

  “What about it?”

  Nick twisted his hands and blurted out suddenly, “Neimens thinks they’ll refuse to partner with us because you aren’t married.”

  “What?!”

  “Don’t shoot the messenger,” Nick continued, “but she’s been looking through their previous partnerships, and they always deal with people who are married with kids—they’ve never agreed to a deal with a bachelor before. Or, heaven forbid, an unmarried woman,” Nick said the last with exaggerated horror and rolled his eyes. “They don’t come out and say this—”

  “—because they’d get hit with a discrimination lawsuit,” Andrew added grimly.

  Nick nodded fervently. “Exactly. But they don’t have to give a reason for refusing. They can just say they don’t feel like it. Brown doesn’t think it’ll be a problem, but then he doesn’t really care much for Niemens, anyway, so he probably just wants her to be wrong.”

  Andrew took a deep breath. Westcorp, practically on his doorstep! They were interested! They’d looked over his proposition and they wanted to buy into it! Everything was happened at once and they were so close. There was no room to trip over the finish line, now.

  He ran a hand through his hair, thinking fast. “They don’t hav
e to deal with me,” Andrew pointed out quickly. “Jason—he’s married, and he has two kids. He’ll look great.”

  “That’s true,” Nick agreed, folding his arms again, thinking. He pushed his glasses up on his nose. “But Jason has only been a lead on the team for two months. Not the best candidate to give this sort of pitch.”

  “I can run him through everything he needs—”

  “They want a presentation on Thursday,” Nick added.

  Andrew’s mouth dropped open. “That’s in three days! What do they think is going on here?” But he already knew. Westcorp was an elite company and very well-established. Businessmen all over New York—all over the world—dreamed of signing with them. If you had worked with Westcorp, that was it. You had it made: doors flapped open left and right, opportunities fell into your lap like apples from a tree. And Westcorp knew it. They knew how badly they were sought after, and they took advantage of it. Not the kindliest business practice, but effective.

  They wanted to see how well Bellwethers could step up to the task. Unfortunately, the only person who could possibly be ready by then was Andrew himself. He stood up straighter and tugged his suit, shirt, and tie back into place.

  “I’ll just have to give the presentation,” Andrew decided.

  Nick nodded. “There’s really no one else. Niemens could be wrong—or even if she’s right, you’re a charming guy, I bet you can win them over, married or not. So I’ll tell Brown you’ll want to meet and decide the particulars before The Westcorp meeting, correct?”

  Andrew nodded. Nick bobbed his curly head, picked up the box he’d dropped on Andrew’s desk, and let himself back out onto the floor.

  Left alone, Andrew shuffled through the heap of papers left on his desk over the weekend. Most were menial, a few were important, but all the while he kept turning this new development over in his mind. A deal with Westcorp. That would make his career, not that he needed any further success. He was already a millionaire, at twenty-eight. The only thing missing was a nice trophy wife to show off at company dinners.