Secret Heiress, Secret Baby

For a moment, Meg considered bolting, trying to contact her father another day. Trying to get the money some other way. But she was out of time and she had no other way to get the money. And already footsteps were pounding across the tile floor toward them.

She looked up to see five more people crossing the foyer: two women and three men.

The men she all recognized. Her brothers. Dalton and Griffin Cain and Cooper Larson. If she had to guess, she’d say the two women were Laney and Sydney, her sisters-in-law.

To Meg’s surprise, it was Cooper who quickened his pace and crouched down beside Portia. He gently cradled her head and shoulders, and Meg wiggled out from underneath her.

“She fainted,” she said quickly. “I tried to catch her.”

“Thanks,” Cooper said, before muttering a curse under his breath. “She’s going to be pissed.”

“I tried to catch her!” Meg insisted again, scrambling back.

“Not at you,” he said gently. “About fainting. It’s the second time this week. She hates when it happens.”

The red-haired woman—Sydney, if Meg remembered correctly from the pictures she’d seen in the society column of the Houston Chronicle—knelt beside Cooper and rested her hand on his arm. “Is she going to be okay?”

He nodded, but his smile didn’t hide his concern. “The doctor says it happens to a lot of women in the first trimester.”

Sydney looked up at Meg. “Thanks for catching— oh my gosh.”

“Wait. What?” Meg asked, scooting farther away. Her gaze darted from Sydney to Cooper and then to the three people still standing. “I didn’t—”

But when her gaze met Dalton’s, he muttered a low “damn.”

Now they were all staring at her. As in, she’d-grown-an-extra-head-or-two staring at her. Or, they-somehow-knew-she-was-here-to-blackmail-their-father staring at her.

Meg automatically got to her feet and held out her hands, palms out. “I haven’t done anything wrong.” Yet.

The other woman, Laney—who had long dark hair and resembled a modern-day Snow White—sent a chiding look at the others. “For goodness’ sake, you’re scaring her.” Then she stepped forward, smiling. “No one thinks you did anything to hurt Portia. We’re glad you were here to catch her. Aren’t we?” She gave Dalton’s elbow a little nudge.

He stepped forward too. “Yes, absolutely.”

Meg looked warily from one sibling to the next. Gratitude for stopping Portia’s fall did not explain their behavior. Panic edged in under her confusion. She took a step back toward the door. “You know, I think I’m going to go.”

As one, Dalton, Laney, Griffin and Sydney took steps toward her as a chorus of protests echoed through the room.

Okay. This was getting weird.

She took a few more steps back toward the door. “I...um...”

“You can’t leave,” pleaded Laney. The rest of them stopped still in their tracks, as if Meg was some sort of spooked deer.

Great. She couldn’t leave. She had unwittingly made some rich pregnant woman faint and now they were trying to keep her contained so they could call the police or something. Okay, that was probably a bit paranoid.

Portia must have been slowly coming to, because she made a groaning noise and pushed herself up onto her elbows.

“Why can’t I leave?” Meg asked hesitantly.

“Not again.” Portia looked around the room, blinking. “Did I miss anything?”

Cooper cradled her shoulders, gently brushing her hair out of her eyes. “You weren’t out that long.”

Laney took advantage of the distraction by stepping forward to clutch Meg’s hand. “You can’t leave because you’re Hollister’s missing daughter. You’re their sister!”

“I know I’m their sister. How do they know it?”

Again, everyone turned to look at her and said, “You know?”

Two

Thirty minutes later—after Meg had nearly fainted, herself—the Cains finally lured her from the foyer into an elegant office in one of the front rooms. Dalton had poured drinks all around. Everyone else he knew well enough that he hadn’t needed to ask what they wanted, but when he got to her, he shot her a look, his eyebrows raised in silent question.

“Just water, please.” She needed to keep her wits about her. If there was one thing her mother had taught her, it was that rich people were all venomous snakes and the Cains were the worst. Like coral snakes. More deadly than rattlesnakes and twice as aggressive.

Once Dalton handed her the glass of water, he gestured toward a wingback chair, but she didn’t sit down. Portia and Sydney were seated on the sofa opposite the chair. Laney was in another wingback chair beside it with Dalton standing behind her. The other two men were scattered around the room. The last thing she wanted was to be sitting in the hot spot.

“Okay, tell me again why you think I’m your sister.”

Again it was Portia who answered. “Your eyes, obviously.”

“My eyes?”

“You have the Cain blue eyes.” Griffin pointed to one of his own eyes. Then he winked at her. “Very unique. All the Cains have them.”

“You assume I’m your sister just because my eyes are blue? That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard! There have to be millions of people with blue eyes.”

“Something like five million people have blue eyes, actually.” Everyone turned to look at Portia. She shrugged. “I looked it up. The point is, eyes your exact color are unique.”

“But not a reason to assume I’m a Cain.”

Dalton leaned over to brace his elbows on the back of his wife’s chair. “But you are, in fact, a Cain. Aren’t you?”

She looked down at her glass of water and gave it a jiggle to move the ice around. “What if I am?”

“Then we’ve been looking for you.”

“And,” Portia added, “I think you’ve been poking around getting information about us, too.”

For a second, Portia held Meg’s gaze, before Meg looked back down at her water. Portia was right, of course. When she’d been in Houston a year ago, Meg had just wanted to get a feel for the Cains. She’d needed to gauge just how desperate she’d need to be before she went to them for money. She had even met Portia—introduced herself using a fake name, of course—and had a conversation with her. She’d been so sure that Portia hadn’t suspected anything!

She forced her gaze back up to Portia’s. She didn’t say anything—didn’t reveal that they’d met before—but there was a light of triumph in the other woman’s gaze.

After several moments of silence, Laney and Sydney exchanged a worried look. Then Sydney spoke up. “Do you know why we’ve been looking for you?”

“No.” All her life, she’d been told that her father had abandoned her and her mother and that no one in the Cain family wanted them. She couldn’t imagine how they could have been looking for her when she lived in the same town where she’d been born, less than five miles from the courthouse where Hollister had married her mother. “There’s no reason for anyone to be looking for me. I haven’t exactly been hiding.”

There was another tense moment as the Cains all looked at one another as if they were trying to decide who would be the best one to break the bad news to her.

Laney leaned forward. Okay, Snow White it was.

“I don’t know if you know this, but Hollister’s health has been declining for the past several years.”

“If he recently died, don’t feel like you have to break it to me gently.” The father she’d never even met dying mere days before she finally decided to contact him? Yeah. That sounded about right. Not that she minded not meeting him, but it seemed unlikely that anyone else would care about her blackmail demands.

“Oh, no, Hollister is still alive,” Laney reassured her. “But a few years ago, when he was at his worst and we were all sure he was going to pass, he received a letter.” Laney paused and the Cains exchanged more awkward glances before Dalton gave her shoulder a little squeeze. “The letter was sent anonymously from a woman claiming to be your mother. She explained that she had born him a daughter many years ago and that she had purposely kept it from him to protect the girl. To protect you. But that she wanted him to go to his grave knowing that he could never get his hands on you. She was taunting him.”

Meg frowned. “My mother couldn’t have sent that letter. She died when I was a child.” Plenty of people in her life hated Hollister, but none hated him enough to track his health obsessively just to drop that bombshell when he was on his deathbed. “I don’t know anyone who would have done that. You don’t think I did it, do you? Because—”

“No,” Dalton said quickly. “We’re not worried about that. The woman who wrote the letter knew Hollister well enough to know it would drive him crazy—the fact that he had a daughter who was forever beyond his reach. So he set a challenge for the three of us.” Dalton gestured to indicate his brothers. “Whichever one of us found you and brought you back into the fold would get his entire estate. If no one found you before he died, everything would go to the state.”

“Excuse me?” For a long moment, that was all she could say. She couldn’t even think clearly enough to process what he’d said, let alone to comment. Hollister was worth...well, she didn’t know the precise numbers, but it was a buttload of money. Hundreds of millions at least. Finally she said, “What kind of—” she barely restrained herself from using the word asshole “—man sets up a crazy landgrab like that among his sons?”

Dalton just nodded. Griffin smiled grimly.

Cooper actually chuckled. “Yeah, exactly. Way to encourage sibling bonding, right?”

Except when she looked around the room, they did seem to be close. There wasn’t even a glimmer of animosity among them.

“You seem to be getting along awfully well when there’s so much money at stake.”

Griffin shrugged. “We decided early on it was better to share information and split the money. Four ways, obviously. Besides, you’ve been pretty hard to find, given that we had zero information to go on.”

“Except now that you’ve come to us—” Griffin looked around the room “—I guess we need to come up with a new plan. Should we give her the bigger share?”

“Wait, what? Her who? Her me?”

Laney smiled. “Obviously they were always planning on giving a quarter of the estate to you.”

Panic shot through her and Meg lurched to her feet. Even though she didn’t know exactly how many hundreds of millions Hollister was worth, it was a lot. Any way she looked at it, a quarter of a lot of millions was a lot of millions.

She held up her hands, palms out, and started backing toward the door. “I don’t want any of Hollister’s money.” Okay. That wasn’t true. “I only want a tiny bit of money.”

Laney stood up too and pulled out the Snow-White-coaxing-the-forest-creatures voice. “You seem upset by this news. Maybe you should sit down.”

Sit down? Sitting down, with all the Cains staring at her, was the last thing she wanted to do. What she wanted to do was bolt from the room, hop back into her sensible Chevy and get the hell out of Dodge.

But with panic racing through her veins, she suddenly felt as light-headed as Portia had looked right before she’d fainted. That thought alone was enough to get Meg back in her chair. She wasn’t a fainter. She never had been. Not even when she’d been pregnant. Not even when she’d been pregnant and working twelve-hour days at the bakery.

Nope. Not her.

She was tough. She wasn’t a skittish purebred like Portia. She was strictly blue-collar, working stock.

She was not meant to be rich.

Rich people were assholes. Everything in her upbringing and her life had taught her that.

As her thoughts raced, she drew breath after breath into her lungs, desperate to find a way out of this. She had come here expecting to do a little light blackmailing and that...well, that was disconcerting enough. She hadn’t expected things to get so out of control so quickly.

And then she slowly became aware that at some point she’d sat down and was cradling her head in her hands. When she looked up, it was to see all six of the Cains staring at her in total surprise.

Yeah. Clearly, they weren’t used to people who were afraid of money.

It was Sydney who spoke first. “You know that Hollister is your father. But you seem surprised that anyone else knows or believes that you’re Hollister’s. And you don’t seem to want the inheritance that is rightfully yours.”

“I don’t!” she said quickly. Thanks to the helpful pages of the Houston Chronicle, she’d seen what their lives were like. She was smart enough to know that kind of money came with strings a mile long and as strong as Teflon-coated titanium. She didn’t want any part of that.

“Then why did you come?”

“I came because I need money.”

Dalton gave her an impatient look. “You do realize that the inheritance from Hollister is worth a lot of money, right?”

“I’m poor, I’m not an idiot.” She stood and marched over to the windows, staring unseeingly at the pristinely manicured lawns. From the corner of her eye, she might have seen Griffin punch Dalton in the arm. “I don’t want an inheritance from Hollister. And I don’t need money in two years or five years or wherever Hollister dies and the estate goes through probate. I need money now.”

“How much?” asked one of the guys—she didn’t know their voices well enough to know which one.

She glanced over her shoulder to see who had asked, and was surprised to see all three of the men reaching for their wallets. As if they’d just whip out two hundred thousand dollars in small bills.

“About two hundred thousand.” She automatically rattled off the number she’d settled on to cover all of Pearl’s expenses.

“For what?” asked Dalton after only a brief moment of silence.

“That’s something I’ll discuss with Hollister. When the time comes.” This was getting her nowhere. “Now, if you could just tell me where I can find him...”

Griffin stepped forward. “He’s not here now. He just left for Vail. But when you meet him for the first time, one of us should be with you.”

“So you can claim you found me and secure your inheritance?” she asked archly. Why the hell couldn’t she have come to Houston on a day when Hollister was at home? It would have been so much easier dealing with one greedy bastard instead of six.

“Actually,” Sydney said, “I think Griffin was offering more to protect you.”

“I don’t need protection from a dying seventy-year-old man.” At least, she assumed she didn’t. She was picturing Hollister as fairly weak, since they’d just described him as being on his deathbed. On the other hand, she was planning on blackmailing him. Which would probably piss him off.

“My father—” Griffin paused to gesture to her. “Our father isn’t a very nice man.”

“Yeah. I know that. I think I can handle anything he can dish out.”

But again, before she could make it to the door, Dalton stopped her. “If you think Hollister is just going to hand over two hundred thousand dollars, you’re wrong. He’s going to make it as hard on you as possible. Because that’s his MO.”

Meg hesitated. Dalton could well be right. And she was prepared for that. She had never expected this to be easy.

She must not have had a very good poker face, because apparently her nerves showed in her expression.

“Why do you need the money?” Dalton asked.

She stiffened. “That’s none of your business.”

“Are you in trouble? Is it for something illegal?”

“No!” Indignant, she leapt to her feet.

“Look, I didn’t mean to offend you,” Dalton said. “I want to help.”

Her gut reaction was eye-rolling suspicion and she didn’t bother to hide it. “Right. Because the Cains are known for their altruism.”

“Okay,” he admitted with a wry smile. “I think we can work something out that will help both of us. If you can stick around for a few days, do things our way, get Hollister to acknowledge you and change his will, then I can get you the two hundred thousand dollars. Free and clear, on top of whatever you inherit from Hollister when the time comes.”

Two hundred grand? The Cains must really be worried about losing control of that stock.

“And you can just come up with two hundred thousand dollars?” she asked, mostly to buy herself time to think.

Dalton shrugged. “Give me seventy-two hours and I can give you a hundred thousand in cash.”

“Same here,” Griffin said.

“Yeah, sure,” Cooper added.

“So there you have it. You agree to stay long enough to prove to Hollister that you are, in fact, the daughter he’s been looking for and you can have the money in three days. But you stick around after you get the money. You stay until we have a new will that no one can contest. Deal?” Dalton held out his hand.

She just stood there, staring at it. A handshake was still legally binding in Texas, after all. She had to be sure.

“If Hollister has been looking for me, why are you so worried about him believing I’m his daughter?”

They all looked at Dalton again, as if they were trying to decide how much to say.

Finally Dalton sighed, ducking his head slightly as he spoke. “Hollister’s behavior has been erratic the last few years. The fact that he set up this challenge proves that. We’ll all feel a lot better when his will is nailed down.”

Okay, so they were worried about their own skins. At least that was a motive she could believe and understand.

A guaranteed two hundred thousand dollars sounded a lot better than facing Hollister with blackmail demands and hoping she didn’t blink first.

On the flip side, it meant staying in Houston. At least three days. Maybe longer.

Janine, she knew, would be happy taking care of Pearl. But God...several days away from Pearl? On the other hand, it was a few days and it was only a two-hour drive. So she could make it back to Victoria if something serious came up.

She just needed to avoid Grant while she was in Houston. But how hard could that be? Houston was a city of more than two million people. All she had to do was lay low and stay out of his way while this was going on. Easy as pie, right? And she made pies for a living.

She held out her hand to Dalton. She’d come here expecting to make a deal with the devil and instead she was making one with the devil’s son.

“Deal,” she agreed.

* * *

This was so not her idea of laying low.

Meg stood in the doorway of the Kimball Hotel’s grand ballroom, staring out at the two hundred or so people who made up the glitterati of Houston society. The Children’s Hope Foundation’s annual fund-raiser was one of the premier social events in the city. The average net worth in this room probably exceeded the GDP of most developing nations. Of course, she was there to bring down the average. Or at least, she would be if she could bring herself to step into the room.

At her side, Sydney gave her elbow a squeeze. “You got this. Come on, into the lion’s den.”

“Aren’t they going to announce me or something?”

“I think they only do that in England.”

“Okay.” Meg blew out a breath, rubbed her palms down her borrowed dress, took one wobbly step forward in her borrowed heels and then abruptly stopped and turned around. Sydney and Griffin closed ranks on either side of her and turned her back around. “This is a horrible idea!” she protested.

“It’s a fantastic idea!” Sydney muttered as she and Griffin steered her into the room. “Portia and Caro have been cochairing this event for years. It’s their party. So when Portia introduces you as Hollister’s long-lost daughter, no one will argue with her. When Caro welcomes you with open arms, it will seal the deal.”

“Wait,” Meg said. “Am I supposed to know who Caro is?”

“She’s Hollister’s ex-wife,” Portia explained. “They divorced over a year ago. Things have been rocky for her, because Hollister tried to destroy her in the divorce, but she’s back on her feet again and holds a lot of sway in this town.”

Griffin added, “By the time Hollister gets back into town from his trip to Vail, the results of the genetic testing we did yesterday will be back from the lab. We’ll have proof that you are our sister. Hollister will have to accept the results. You’ll have the money from us by Monday.”

“Right. By Monday. What could go wrong?”

For starters, she could trip and fall or generally make an idiot of herself. But that, that would just be small potatoes. No, her deepest fear involved running into Grant Sheppard.

That would be a total disaster.

She had tried to get Portia to show her the guest list—back when Portia had first proposed this plan—but Portia had dismissed her concerns, declaring, “Don’t freak yourself out about the guest list. Yes, there are a few big names. Some politicians, a couple of sports stars. But it’s nothing to worry about. No one scary will be there. And we’ll be by your side the whole time.”

That had been Meg’s mantra ever since. No one scary. No one scary. No one scary.

Of course, their definition of scary might differ from hers. Mostly because she hadn’t yet worked up the courage to tell them she’d had an affair with their4 business rival.

But surely Grant wouldn’t come to this event. Yes, it was big, but why on earth would he come to a ball that was always chaired by a Cain?

As one, Meg, Sydney and Griffin moved through the room. With Griffin always introducing her as a valued member of the family, combined with Sydney’s easygoing manner, the evening began to take on a surreal quality. At some point someone handed her a glass of champagne. And then another.

A lot of strategy had gone into planning who would bring Meg to the party and when everyone would arrive. Portia, Cooper and Caro had arrived at the party hours before the event actually began. Dalton had argued that he should bring Meg because now that Hollister didn’t get out into society often, Dalton was ostensibly the head of the family. Griffin had countered that the consensus in Houston society was that Dalton was a brilliant businessman, but as Griffin had teased, “A cold and heartless robot.”

“Your point?” Dalton had asked with an icily arched brow.

“That I should bring her,” Griffin had answered easily. “That way, she’ll meet a lot of people before you and Laney even show up. That way, everyone will be watching. Everyone will be waiting to see what happens when you and Laney walk in. Since everyone knows you’re a heartless bastard, when you greet her, smiling warmly, the sight of you displaying actual human emotion will convince everyone she must be our long-lost sister.”

Meg had tried to protest that the plan was overelaborate. There were too many elements. Too many things that could go wrong. But no one seemed to listen to her. And what did she know, really? She knew cakes and pies. Sweets and coffees. She knew that if you had more than three flavor profiles, you overwhelmed the palate, but that didn’t mean she knew jack about...this. She didn’t even have a word in her vocabulary for these kinds of social machinations.

All she could do was smile politely, try to remember names and avoid talking about...well, everything. Chances were good everyone she met thought she was a little bit stupid. Which was fine. She could live with that. All she needed to do was get through the next few days without incident and without running into Grant.

Quite honestly, she never wanted to see him or his beautiful wife again. She was still too angry over how he’d treated her. Too indignant. Too hurt. And—admittedly—too vulnerable to him.

Around the time someone handed her a third glass of champagne, Dalton and Laney walked in. They navigated the crowded ballroom more easily than anyone else, almost as if the crowd was parting to let them through. Just as Portia had predicted, everyone was turning to watch. Right on cue, Portia and Caro also converged on Meg. A united front.

Even though she’d known these people only two days, even though she didn’t fully trust them and probably never would, she felt weirdly comforted by their presence.