Mystery Heiress

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

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 and other blood-related disorders at Minneapolis General Hospital, and knew a good deal about tumors, as well, he hadn’t been able to stem the tide of David’s downward progression or, in the end, keep the breath of life from deserting his child’s wasted body.

Ultimately, the torrent of rage and helplessness that had followed in the wake of their son’s death had driven Stephen and his ex-wife, the former Brenda Torgilson, apart. Immersed in those bleak, desperate days as deeply as he, Brenda had accused him of failing to be there for her. He realized in retrospect that her criticism was probably just. In his view, the emotional desertion had cut both ways. After David’s loss, he’d snapped shut like a clamshell, living solely for his work and battling his grief in the keep of his own private fortress, while she’d gone to the opposite extreme, venting her tears and outrage on him.

Divorced now for the better part of a year, they rarely saw each other. Though Stephen regretted the breakup, viewing it as a personal black mark that could never be erased, he’d long since decided that in the final analysis, parting company was for the best. If they lived to be a hundred, he suspected, he and Brenda wouldn’t be able to look into each other’s eyes without seeing the pain of David’s loss staring back at them.

Somehow, he needed to start fresh. Get a grip on himself. Live for real again, instead of simply going through the motions. He just wasn’t sure how to start. Never the kind of guy to get involved in casual affairs, he didn’t plan to take that path now. His son’s memory deserved better of him. Yet he was paralyzed by the prospect of committing to anyone. Most single women his age who weren’t already mothers deeply wanted a baby, while the thought of giving another hostage to fortune caused panic to grip him by the throat.

He, Brenda and David had come to the zoo as a family during David’s final, painfully brief remission. Though they were living on borrowed time, the occasion had been marked by a kind of frantic, ephemeral happiness. The remembrance of that afternoon had been his reason for coming today. In a way that was irrational and would have been difficult to explain, he’d hoped to catch a sidelong glimpse of his beloved child, if only in memory and imagination.

Pausing to gaze at the gorillas and orangutans, which David had always loved, Stephen noticed a slim, attractive dark-haired woman and a rather frail-looking blond female child of approximately kindergarten age who were touring the zoo together. The woman’s roses-and-cream complexion glowed as if it had been nourished by a cool but temperate climate.

Her naturally curly hair, worn short, framed her face in ringlets. Her clothes spoke of classic good taste and sufficient income to indulge it. She was wearing well-polished flat leather shoes, a hand-tailored beige wool skirt and a long-sleeved cashmere pullover in a flattering blue-violet shade. From what he could tell at that distance, the third finger of her left hand was innocent of a wedding ring.

The child was dressed a bit more warmly than her contemporaries at the zoo, in a plaid wool skirt, a cotton turtleneck and a red hand-knit cardigan with matching kneesocks and black patent Mary Janes. It was clear from the woman’s demeanor, in particular her nurturing but vaguely worried air, like that of a fretful guardian angel, that she was the girl’s mother and loved her very much.

Unfortunately, to Stephen’s practiced eyes her little girl didn’t look at all well. To begin with, she was too thin for her height. Her large, solemn eyes—he couldn’t see their color, thanks to the distance that separated them—appeared too big for her face.

For some reason, when mother and child moved on toward the seal island and the aquatic animals, Stephen followed at a slight distance, keeping them in view. Ironic, isn’t it? he thought, giving his head a wry mental shake. That today, of all days, you’d set eyes on a woman who could interest you. Really imagine, for the first time since David’s funeral, how nice it would be to have a family again.

His emotional state being what it was, he supposed it was just as well that he and the woman were strangers and he didn’t have an excuse to speak to her. The last thing she needed, if his assumption about her child was correct, was an emotionally crippled workaholic doctor cluttering up her life. She was probably married, anyway—a settled, if young and lovely, Minneapolis housewife with a doting, successful husband.

As it happened, the woman he was speculating about, twenty-five-year-old Jessica Holmes, a British investment analyst, had been widowed six months earlier, while she was in the process of obtaining a divorce from her philandering, well-to-do husband. She and her five-year-old daughter, Annabel, had arrived in the Minneapolis area just two days earlier, and were suffering from jet lag. Their tour of the zoo wasn’t as brisk or cheerful as it might have been, in part because Annie, recently diagnosed with leukemia, was somewhat low on energy, and Jess was terribly worried about her.

Maybe the zoo hadn’t been such a good idea, after all. Following their exhausting transatlantic flight, and a frantic day spent dragging her daughter to and fro as she tried to contact at least one member of the Twin Cities’ wealthy Fortune clan—as yet to no avail—she’d decided Annie needed a little fun for a change.

The expedition had proved to be only a modified success. Though she tried to tell herself she was just imagining things, Jess kept thinking she detected the harbingers of some ailment, a cold or the flu, that Annie’s compromised immune system would fight inadequately at best. Even on “good” days, when Annie had a modicum of stamina, Jess couldn’t seem to stop herself from hovering over the girl like a mother hen guarding a beloved and fragile chick. To her shame, Annie had picked up on her fears and, in her innocent, childish way, begun reassuring her.

I have a perfect right to be afraid, Jess thought, outwardly stiffening her spine and putting on her bravest face. Annie’s form of leukemia is deadly. She needs a bone-marrow transplant, and soon. If she doesn’t get it, I’m going to lose her. And that would be the end of both our worlds.

It was the need for matching bone marrow, a rare and precious commodity, that had brought them to Minneapolis. As Jess had quickly learned once Annie’s condition was diagnosed, her child’s best hope of finding a donor was among blood relatives. Unhappily, they’d already exhausted every possibility among Jess’s scattered family members and the somewhat more prolific clan of her late husband, a prosperous but cavalier bank executive who’d been killed in an automobile crash, along with his most recent mistress, shortly after Jess initiated divorce proceedings.

Refusing to be immobilized by fear, she’d signed Annie up with a British bone-marrow registry and settled back to bite her nails when she ran across a letter, addressed to her grandmother, that had been among her recently deceased mother’s possessions.

Specifically, the letter had been tucked in a volume of children’s verses from which her mother had read to her every evening when she was Annie’s age. Scrawled in a strong, masculine hand on yellowing, unlined paper, the letter had suggested that Benjamin Fortune, a legendary American entrepreneur who’d fought with the Allies in France during World War II, was her true maternal grandfather, not George Simpson, her grandmother’s husband of many years.

In doing so, it had explained why some of the blood tests among her relatives had been so far off the mark, while opening up a whole new world of possibilities for Annie’s salvation. There had been no reason to doubt that the letter was genuine. Making up her mind in an instant, she’d arranged for a leave of absence from her London investment-banking firm and carted Annie off to America in the hope that one of Benjamin Fortune’s descendants could provide the help she so desperately sought.

So far, every door she’d tried to open remained closed in her face. True, after several minutes of impassioned pleading on her part, the formidable secretary who guarded the entrance to the executive offices of Fortune Industries in downtown Minneapolis like some kind of exquisitely coifed and made-up dragon at the gate had agreed to give Jacob Fortune, Benjamin’s oldest son and the company’s chief executive officer, her handwritten note when he returned to the office three days hence. But Jess doubted he’d bother to get in touch with her. From what she’d been able to glean from her hurried research into the family history, the Fortunes had been the target of numerous false claims on the family wealth over the years. Jacob Fortune could hardly be blamed if he regarded her plea as another swindle in the making.

Somehow, she’d have to convince him otherwise. None of the other Fortunes had turned out to be accessible. As she’d feared, most had unpublished phone numbers. International directory assistance had been able to give her just three subscribers with the Fortune surname in the Minneapolis–St. Paul metropolitan area when she phoned before leaving England.

The two she’d reached had turned out to be unrelated. She wasn’t sure, yet, about the third. Phoning from her country cottage in Sussex several days before their departure, she’d twice managed to contact a certain Natalie Fortune’s answering machine, which had played back a friendly greeting in a young woman’s sweet, energetic voice. To her disappointment, though she’d left a message urging the unknown Natalie to phone her collect as soon as possible, no return call had been forthcoming.

A second call, made after they reached Minneapolis, had proved even less promising. This time, the answering machine had been switched off. Or unplugged. Maybe Natalie Fortune had moved, or something.

Whatever the case, Jess knew one thing for certain. She hadn’t come to Minneapolis to fail. Unless a miracle occurred and Jacob Fortune returned her call without further prompting, she’d camp on his doorstep. I’ll renew my quest tomorrow, she vowed, even if I have to leave Annie with a hotel-provided baby-sitter. It was a desperate attempt at pluck, coming from a devoted mother who hated to let her beloved, seriously ill child out of her sight for a single second.

Having looked their fill at the seals, polar bears and penguins, Jess and Annie headed for the giraffes and the other hooved African animals, pausing at a vendor’s cart on the way, so that Jess could buy her daughter a paper cone of raspberry-colored cotton candy. Her cheeks flushed from what Jess prayed was just excitement and not another bout of chills and fever to come, Annie took a bite of the spun-sugar confection, which colored her mouth a streaky hot pink, and ran ahead.

“Zebras, Mummy! Zebras!” she exclaimed.

Calling himself an idiot for maintaining his tenuous low-key pursuit of them, but intrigued by Jess’s delicate good looks and what appeared to be the strong bond between her and her daughter, Stephen Hunter kept pace. As he watched, unable to intervene, Annie stumbled and fell to the pavement, skinning her left knee slightly.

Jess was beside her in a flash, inspecting the damage. “Are you all right, darling?” she demanded worriedly, sinking to her haunches so that she and Annie were at the same level as she attempted to brush every trace of dirt from the abrasion with a clean handkerchief.

Annie seemed willing to take the mishap in her stride. However, she complained, “My head feels hot, Mummy.”

From what Jess could tell on closer inspection, her child’s large green eyes were exceptionally bright, as if from a fever. When she tested Annie’s forehead with the back of her wrist, she learned, to her dismay, that it was burning up. Her beloved child’s deteriorating immune system had failed to protect her from yet another virus or bacterial infection.

“Oh, baby,” Jess whispered, her heart sinking as she enveloped the girl in a guilty hug. “We’ve got to get you back to the hotel at once.”

She wasn’t aware of the tall blond man’s approach. As a result, she almost jumped to find him towering over them.

“Excuse me, my name is Stephen, and I’m a doctor. Is there anything I can do to help?” he asked in his decidedly American accent.

He was tall and lean, with boyishly tousled, sun-bleached hair and penetrating blue eyes that hinted at the possibility of Nordic ancestry. His hands were neat and long-fingered. They looked capable. Jess’s off-the-cuff impression was that he had a kind face. Despite everything she’d heard about crime in American cities, she was inclined to trust him. Instinct told her his claim to be a physician wasn’t an empty boast.

Still, she wasn’t accustomed to accepting medical advice from strangers on the sidewalk—especially not where Annie’s welfare was concerned.

With a fluid motion that wasn’t lost on him, she arose. “Thanks, but not really,” she said in her cultivated British voice. “The abrasion on my daughter’s knee isn’t serious. However, she seems to have caught cold. I’ve decided to give up on the zoo for today…and return to our hotel.”

Viewed at close range, she was stunning, in the fair-skinned, dark-haired way Stephen liked best. A young Elizabeth Taylor, as she’d looked when she starred in the classic version of Father of the Bride, he thought, ever the vintage-movie buff. Her accent betrayed that she was British—on holiday in the U.S., if her reference to a hotel was any indication. More than he could have said, he liked her natural air of refinement and her obvious devotion to her daughter.

After three wasted years spent imprisoned in the cocoon of his heartache and loneliness, he realized, the social man in him was on the verge of reaching out again. He had to admit, the idea was more than a little frightening. Meanwhile, in his practiced and usually infallible judgment, her daughter had contracted something more serious than a garden-variety upper respiratory infection.

With an unmistakable air of authority that swept past Jess’s weakened defenses, Stephen crouched to lay his wrist against the child’s forehead and feel her neck with strong but gently probing fingers. Brief though it was, the latter exam caused her to wince. And no wonder, Stephen thought with a slight shake of his head. She had swollen glands, and doubtless a sore throat. Though he couldn’t be sure without a thermometer, he estimated her temperature at one hundred and one degrees Fahrenheit or thereabouts.

He made a production of examining her knee, as well. Producing a brightly colored stick-on bandage from the pocket of his tweed sport jacket, where he always carried them for his younger patients, he applied it to the child’s injured knee as if it were a badge of honor before getting to his feet.

“Better?” he asked.

Distracted from her fever and the pain of her injury by the bandage’s novelty, Annie managed a shy “I guess so” as she stared up at the tall, blond stranger. She quickly added a polite “Thank you,” at Jess’s prompting.

“Your daughter has swollen glands and a temperature,” Stephen added, gazing directly into Jess’s dark-fringed brown eyes. “Hadn’t you better take her to a doctor?”

Tempted for a hot moment to abandon her us-against-the-world stance and let herself lean on this blond Viking of a physician who had invaded their privacy as if he owned it, Jess felt anger, tinged with panic, flow through her veins. What was he doing, exactly? Accusing her of negligence? Or attempting to secure a new patient?

“I would if we had one here in the U.S.,” she snapped, then crumbled as Annie shivered slightly. “We just got here from England day before yesterday, and the weather’s much chillier than I expected,” she added almost apologetically, drawing her daughter close. “I’m afraid Annie’s cardigan’s not warm enough….”

Stephen didn’t hesitate. “Here…take my coat,” he insisted, shrugging off his tweed sport jacket and wrapping it warmly about Annie’s shoulders. “Did you come by car?”

Jess nodded, overwhelmed by his take-charge manner and, now that she’d dropped her defenses, more than a little grateful for his intercession.

“Show me where it’s parked,” he offered. “I’ll carry her.”

With her mother at the tall stranger’s side, evincing approval, Annie didn’t protest when Stephen lifted her in his arms. Instead, she seemed to wrap her arms about the blond doctor’s neck and nestle against his tan oxford-cloth shirt as if she belonged there, as if she appreciated his fatherliness.

It was just an illusion, of course, fostered by Jess’s anxiety that she wouldn’t be equal to managing Annie’s medical crisis on her own, not to mention her residual pain over the fact that Annie’s father had so seldom evinced an interest in the girl. Instead of reading stories and taking their precious five-year-old on outings, Ronald Holmes had spent most of his free time chasing other women and driving fast cars while under the influence.

As she led the way to the Wolf parking lot, where she’d left their cherry-red rented sedan with its unnerving left-hand drive, Jess reflected that her husband’s untimely and undignified exit from their lives had become irrelevant. She and Annie were on their own, and in a sense they’d always been. Thanks to the fact that Ronald had died before the divorce was final, they had more than enough money at their disposal to pay for Annie’s treatment. If they could just find a marrow donor…