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He wanted more than just to hold her. Far more.
What he didn’t want was to move from her.
He eased his arms from her, anyway. Reaching between them, he circled her wrists with his forefingers and thumbs. He brushed his lips to her temple. “Do you have any coffee?”
Amy blinked. Confusion masked the banked yearning in her tone. “Sure.” Her brow furrowed as she looked up at him. “You want coffee?”
“No,” he admitted, his breath warm on her face as he brushed his lips over hers. “It’s just that we need to do something before I kiss you.”
Her heart jerked in her chest. “You just did.”
“That wasn’t a kiss.”
The longing she’d veiled threatened to surface as his smoky grey gaze moved over her face, lingered on her mouth.
“It wasn’t?”
“Not even close,” he murmured.
“Maybe you should show me how it’s done.”
CHRISTINE FLYNN
admits to being interested in just about everything, which is why she considers herself fortunate to have turned her interest in writing into a career. She feels that a writer gets to explore it all and, to her, exploring relationships – especially the intense, bittersweet or even light-hearted relationships between men and women – is fascinating.
Dear Reader,
I believe in the fairy tale.
Really.
That said, I’m not naive enough to believe every prince will be wealthy or ride in on a white horse. I’ve also never heard of a man who has remained consistently charming. I know too many Cinderellas who have to wipe runny noses, work weekends and do laundry. Happily-ever-after isn’t a guarantee. It takes work. I know all that. So why do I believe in something that started out as a myth and became a children’s story? It’s because of what, for me, is at the core of the modern Cinderella tale: that love is often found where a person least expects to find it, and that good things happen to good, ordinary people.
I hope you believe in the fairy tale, too.
Love,
Christine
CHRISTINE FLYNN
With thanks to Lois Faye Dyer for the premise
and the invitation, to Allison Leigh and Pat Kay
for being such inspirations and to all three of
you for making The Hunt for Cinderella
come to life.
Prologue
J.T. Hunt sat sprawled in a deep, wing-backed armchair in his father’s spacious library, his head resting against the smooth leather. With a highball glass of hundred-year-old bourbon balanced on one thigh, he was trying hard to stay awake.
Beneath the long Tiffany lamp hanging over the pool table, his half brothers Justin, four years younger than his own thirty-eight, and Gray, older by six, killed time playing a game of eight ball. It was obvious from the muttering that Gray hadn’t played in a while. Their other half brother, thirty-six-year-old Alex, watched from a matching armchair a few feet away.
The last time they’d all been together at the Shack, as they’d long ago christened the multimillion-dollar estate on the shores of Seattle’s Lake Washington, had been a month ago. That had been when their father, Harrison Hunt, the billionaire founder of HuntCom, had suffered a heart attack. J.T. couldn’t remember how long it had been for him personally before that. He tended to be the black sheep. The prodigal. Though he was more circumspect than he’d been in his youth, he felt an outsider nonetheless. He only came to the home he’d been raised in when he absolutely had to.
He supposed that was mostly because he felt he had little in common with his tech-genius father and his half brothers, other than his passion for his portion of the business. As director of real estate development and the company’s lead architect, he lived, ate and breathed his work designing the structures that held everything from HuntCom’s thousands of employees, to the products they manufactured and shipped worldwide. The only thing that mattered as much to him as his work was the isolated island in the San Juans his father had bought when J.T. was a teenager. Hurricane Island was the only place on the planet where he felt anything remotely resembling a sense of peace. It was too bad he couldn’t stay long enough to sail out to it for a while.
“Does anybody know why the Old Man called this meeting?” Justin asked as he tapped one of the balls with his cue stick.
At six foot three, as long and lanky as the rest of them, Gray gave a shrug. “My secretary said he wouldn’t tell her the reason.”
Alex sat forward at that. “Harry called you himself? Me, too.” He waved his bottle of Black Sheep Ale toward J.T. “What about you, J. T? Did you get the message from his secretary, or from Harry personally?”
“From Harry.” Rubbing his eyes with his thumb and forefinger, he yawned and leaned forward himself. With his elbows on his thighs, he dangled his glass of bourbon between them. “I told him I’d have to cancel meetings in New Delhi and spend half a day on the corporate jet to get home in time, but he insisted I be here.”
The trip made no sense to him, either. Since Harry’s health didn’t seem to be the issue, given the vigor in his father’s voice when he’d called, J.T. couldn’t imagine anything the man wanted that couldn’t have been handled by phone, fax or e-mail. Harry had practically perfected the technologies. The least he could have done was use one of them.
Running his hand through his dark hair, he looked at his Rolex. With the thirteen-hour time difference between Seattle and New Delhi, at the moment he had no idea what time his body clock was on.
He’d just decided it wasn’t worth figuring out when the hall door burst open. Six feet six inches tall, his black hair nearly devoid of gray, Harrison Hunt strode into the expansive room with its rich cherry wood paneling and handbound collections of books. Black, horn-rimmed bifocals framed blue eyes sharp with the intelligence that had invented the software and technology that had made HuntCom a household word.
“Ah, you’re all here. Excellent.” His energy totally belying the heart attack he’d suffered only a month ago, he headed for his massive mahogany desk. Four chairs faced it. “Join me, boys.”
As Harry settled himself into his executive chair, J.T. watched Justin lean against the wall. Gray moved behind one of the chairs, remaining there while Alex leaned against the wall not far from where Gray stood.
Rising, J.T. stayed the farthest back, separated from them all by a long credenza defining the seating areas.
Harry frowned first at Justin. “Why don’t you sit down?”
“Thanks, but I’ll stand.”
That frown swept them all.
With an impatient shrug, Harry muttered, “Very well. Stand or sit. It makes no difference to the outcome of this meeting.” He paused, clearing his throat. “Since my heart attack last month,” he began, “I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about this family. I’ve never thought a lot about my legacy, nor about having grandchildren to carry on the Hunt name. However, the heart attack made me face some hard truths I’d ignored. I could have died,” he said flatly. “I could die tomorrow.”
He rose from his chair, leaned forward with his knuckles resting on the desktop. “I finally realized that, left to your own devices, you four never will get married…which means I’ll never have grandchildren. I don’t intend to leave the future of this family to chance any longer. You have a year. By the end of that year, each of you will not only be married, you will either already have a child or your wife will be expecting one.”
Absolute silence met his emphatic proclamation.
That silence stretched, lengthened.
“Right,” J.T. finally muttered. Like that’s going to happen, he thought.
Still leaning against the wall, Justin stifled a grin and looked over at Gray. Gray looked amused. Alex lifted his bottle and tilted it to his mouth.
Harry didn’t seem at all dissuaded by their collective lack of interest.
“If any one of you refuses to do so,” he calmly insisted, “you’ll all lose your position in HuntCom and the perks you love so much.”
Justin stiffened.
Alex lowered his bottle.
Gray’s amusement died. “You can’t be serious.”
“I’m deadly serious.”
J.T. didn’t bother getting upset. He didn’t believe a word of the threat. “With all due respect, Harry,” he said, fairly leaking patience he didn’t feel. “How will you run the company if we refuse to do this?” Ice clinking, he lifted his glass toward his half brothers. “I don’t know what Gray, Alex or Justin have going on right now, but I’m in the middle of expansions here in Seattle, in Jansen and at our New Delhi facility. If another architect has to take over my position, it’ll be months before he’s up to speed. Construction delays alone would cost HuntCom a fortune.”
Harry appeared unfazed. “It wouldn’t matter, because if the four of you refuse to agree, I’ll sell off HuntCom in pieces. The New Delhi facility will be history and I’ll sell Hurricane Island.”
Having just made it clear he knew full well how important that island was to J.T., his unflinching gaze settled on Justin.
“I’ll sell HuntCom’s interest in the Idaho ranch.” His glance shifted to Alex. “I’ll shut down the Foundation if you refuse to cooperate.” His hard stare finally met Gray’s. “And HuntCom won’t need a president because there will no longer be a company for you to run.”
Alex took a step forward. “But that’s insane. What do you hope to accomplish by doing this, Harry?”
“I mean to see you all settled with a family started before I die. With a decent woman who’ll make a good wife and mother,” he insisted. “The women you marry have to win Cornelia’s approval.”
“Does Aunt Cornelia know about this?”
Justin posed the question before J.T. could ask it himself. Personally, he hadn’t had much to do with the widow of Harry’s business partner. At least, not as an adult. As a kid and a teenager, the woman had seemed to be around only when he was in trouble. Where the others regarded her as something of a honorary aunt, he thought of her mostly as the woman who’d insisted to Harry that J.T. needed restrictions. She was good at calling a person on their behavior. From what he’d heard from Gray, since he was the brother he dealt with most, she was also the only person Harry ever really listened to.
“Not yet.”
“So,” Justin said, looking somewhat relieved by that. “Let me see if I’ve got this straight. Each of us has to agree to marry and produce a kid within a year—”
“All of you have to agree,” Harry cut in. “All four of you. If one refuses, everyone loses, and life as you’ve know it—your jobs, the HuntCom holdings you each love—will be gone.”
“—and the brides have to each be approved by Aunt Cornelia.”
“She’s a shrewd woman. She’ll know if any of the women aren’t good wife material. Which reminds me,” he added abruptly. “You can’t tell the women you’re rich. Or that you’re my sons. I don’t want any fortune-hunters in the family. God knows I married enough of those myself. I don’t want any of my sons making the mistakes I made.”
Considering the history the man had with each of their mothers, J.T. had the feeling he wasn’t the only one biting his tongue at that glaring understatement. He lifted his glass, waited to see who would be first to tell Harry to take a hike.
Harry drew a deep breath. “I’ll give you some time to think about this. You have until 8:00 p. m., Pacific Time, three days from now. If I don’t hear from you to the contrary before then, I’ll tell my lawyer to start looking for a buyer for HuntCom.”
With that, he moved from his desk and walked out the door.
The moment he closed it behind him, every one of them swore.
“It’s not going to happen,” J.T. insisted. “He’ll never sell HuntCom. As for the rest of it…”
“He can’t possibly be serious,” Justin concluded.
Alex’s scowl deepened. “Maybe he is serious.”
From where he remained back from the others, J.T. listened to his half brothers debate whether or not Harry meant what he said. The uneasy possibility existed that he did, and none of them wanted to lose what mattered to them. Yet not one of them said he was ready to cater to the man’s demands.
J.T. knew he was beyond tired when he didn’t bother to mention what an insult those demands were.
Sleep, he thought. He needed sleep. “So we’re all agreed?” he asked. “None of us are caving in to his crazy ultimatum?”
Justin nodded. “No question. Even if I wanted to get married, which I don’t, I wouldn’t do it because Harry decided it was time to settle down.”
“Settling down.” J.T. shook his head, shoved his fingers through his hair. “That’s not happening. I’m never home long enough to have a dog. What would I do with a wife?” He set his now-empty glass on the credenza with an audible thud. “No offense, but I haven’t slept since yesterday.” He hadn’t even caught a nap on the flight. He’d spent the entire trip trying to resolve the design problem he’d been working on when he’d been summoned. “I’m heading home to crash.”
“I’ll see you at the office tomorrow,” Gray told him as they all moved toward the door. “We need to go over the figures for that possible plant in Singapore.”
“Singapore,” he muttered. “My head’s still in India. Let’s do it when I get back next week.”
“Not a problem.”
“Give me a ride downtown, will you? I took a limo here from the airport.”
Gray told him he’d be glad to, then pulled his cell phone from his pocket when it rang yet again.
“It’s my secretary, Loretta,” Gray said. “She’s at the office working on the white paper for the buyout. If you don’t mind, I’ll talk to her on the way.”
Accustomed to being available at all hours himself, J.T. told him he didn’t mind at all and took advantage of the twenty-five-minute drive into the sprawling city to check his own messages, text back responses to most of them and decide what to do for a meal.
He was hungry for pancakes, which meant it must be morning, body time. Since it was night in Seattle, he phoned for takeout from Rico’s. The Italian restaurant was on the ground floor of the building where he owned a penthouse with black granite and cherry wood in the kitchen and a million-dollar view of Puget Sound from nearly every room. Rather than go through his matronly, enormously efficient assistant, Kate Cavanaugh, who was probably feeding her husband at this hour, he then called HuntCom’s chief pilot himself to let him know he’d need the plane ready for a trip back to New Delhi in the morning.
For now, he wasn’t wasting another second’s thought on Harry’s insane ultimatum.
A day later—the middle of the night where he was, midday where his half brothers were—a conference call from his brothers demanded that he rethink his position. They all agreed that had their father’s threat involved only money, they’d have collectively ignored the man’s demand. It wasn’t just money, though. It was about the things and places Harry knew mattered most to them.
Because of that, and because J.T. didn’t want to give up the island or be responsible for his brothers losing what was important to them, he agreed with what Justin proposed. Even though there were serious doubts about finding marriageable women who didn’t know who they were, and about how each man could get that woman to stay married after the deception was revealed, they would meet Harry’s terms. But only if he signed an agreement preventing him from ever blackmailing them again.
Gray wanted the agreement to be ironclad, signed, witnessed and notarized so Harry couldn’t throw out any new conditions.
What J.T. wanted as he hung up the phone and headed into his bathroom in search of an antacid tablet was to know how Harry thought something that had never worked for him should work any better for any of his sons. As far as he was concerned, no matter what happened, he’d just kissed his life as he knew it goodbye.
Chapter One
J.T. rubbed the back of his neck as he watched the numbers of the downtown office building’s elevator ascend. A run was definitely in order. Or a workout in the hotel’s gym. There was nothing like working up a sweat to lessen tension—with the possible exception of sex. Since he didn’t know any women in Portland, Oregon, and since he wasn’t into one-night stands, a workout seemed his best option for loosening the knots and easing the restiveness he could never quite shake.
His broad shoulders lowered with a long expulsion of breath.
He didn’t want to think about women just then. Aside from making him aware of a different sort of frustration, since it had been a while since he’d had the pleasure of intimate female company, thinking about women reminded him that he was supposed to be looking for one.
He still couldn’t believe the ultimatum his father had delivered two months ago. Two and a half, he mentally grumbled, reminding himself that the clock continued to tick.
His jaw worked in a slow grind as the numbers continued to climb. Justin had discovered he was a father not long after that meeting, but no one knew if he was making any progress with his little girl’s mom. As far as J.T. knew, the guy still didn’t want a wife. He knew for a fact he didn’t want one himself.
He wanted nothing to do with the whole home-and-family thing. He knew firsthand that commitment on that level simply didn’t work. He couldn’t even remember his own mother, his father’s second wife. She had bailed when J.T. was two, leaving him to a series of nannies, au pairs and the two succeeding stepmothers who’d pretty much ignored him before they’d abandoned him and their sons, too. They’d literally taken the money and run, which had pretty much proved to him long before he graduated from high school that women could be bought.
He’d learned a couple more valuable lessons back then, too. He’d learned that women pretended to care only when they wanted something in return. And that the best way to get any attention from anyone was to get into trouble. A visit from a truant officer was usually good for at least a ten-minute audience with his father. That was often the most time the man spent with him all week.
The elevator slowed. Over the quiet drone of the Muzak, a refined ding announced his floor.
He didn’t cause problems now. At least, not the kind that involved threats of expulsion or fines for speeding tickets. He’d refined his talent for trouble into a tendency to merely break or bend any rule that didn’t suit his purpose. His opinion of women, however, hadn’t changed much. His father’s rules for the Bride Hunt were that the women not know who they were or anything about the family wealth. When he got around to looking for a woman, which he was still in no rush to do, his personal requirements would be more specific.
The woman would have to have good genes. Preferably, in a tall, leggy blonde sort of way. She couldn’t come with any emotional or familial baggage. And she needed to have a career she wanted to keep so she’d have interests of her own. His father had said that the woman had to fall in love with him—not that he had to fall in love with her. Not that he believed for an instant that his father’s demands could be met—which was why he was about to implement Plan B.
The elevator doors slid open. Stepping into a wide hall, vaguely aware of the sounds of construction coming from a floor below, he noted the plaque on the wall indicating the direction of the suite he was looking for.
Plan B was to have everything in place to open his own architectural firm so he’d have something to fall back on when his father sold out. He figured that would happen in nine and a half months, when the time for the hunt expired. The logistics of that new venture became the sole thoughts on his mind as he opened the door marked Kelton & Associates.
A spacious reception area of white walls, gray industrial carpet and a wide mobile of what looked like stainless steel boomerangs greeted him. Beneath the slowly moving mobile sat a large amoeba-shaped Lucite secretarial desk. A state-of-the-art computer monitor and telephone system, lines ringing, occupied the short side of the curved L.
He’d chosen to interview this particular marketing firm because of its reputation for being cutting edge, and its relatively small size. Small meant fewer people who might recognize him. It was also half an hour away by air and two and a half to three hours by car from Seattle, which meant that it operated outside the sphere of core support businesses HuntCom used in the Seattle area. To avoid the publicity that would come if news of his endeavor got out, he wanted to keep everything under wraps until implementing it became absolutely necessary.
His first impression of the ultramodern decor was that it echoed the firm’s cutting-edge hype. His second was that there was no one manning the reception desk. There wasn’t a soul in sight.
Or so he was thinking when a totally preoccupied young woman in a gray sweater and skirt barreled around the corner from a hallway. Her dark head was down, her arms loaded with files. Judging from her direction and her speed, her destination was the ringing telephone on the desk. Before he could do anything more than think about stepping from her path, she walked right into him.
Her startled gasp met the rustle of papers and the soft plop of files hitting the carpet. Of the dozen thick folders she carried, half of them hit the floor. The other half she clutched to her chest as she dropped to her knees.
“Ohmygosh. I’m so sorry.” Flushing to the roots of her barely chin-length, chopped brown hair, she grabbed a file. “Our receptionist isn’t in today, so I thought I’d work out here so I could get the phone…” She shook her head, flushed. “Never mind. Please,” she murmured, clearly embarrassed as he crouched beside her and picked up a file. “I’ll get these. You don’t have to help.”
Ignoring her insistence, he reached past her for another file. Closer to her now, her scent drifted toward him. Something fresh, faintly herbal and unexpectedly, inexplicably erotic. Caught off guard by the quick tightening low in his gut, he jerked his focus to the delicate lines of her profile. As he did, she looked up—and went still the instant her dark eyes met his. A quick, deep breath, a quicker blink, and her glance fell away.
Young, he thought. That was how she looked to him as he scanned the fine lines of her profile once more. Pretty. A little self-conscious. And impossibly…innocent. As edgy as he’d felt lately, he figured her to be about a lifetime shy of his own admittedly jaded thirty-eight years. The thought made him feel older, and edgier still.
Her focus remained on her task. “Please tell me you’re not Jared Taylor.”
The name caught him momentarily off guard. To protect his plans, he’d made the appointment using his full first name and his mother’s maiden name. He needed to remember that. “Sorry,” he replied, “but that’s me.” He handed her another file as his eyes narrowed. “You wouldn’t be Candace Chapman, would you?”
Still looking a little flustered, she took the file, reached for another. She had a beautiful mouth. Full. Unadorned. Kissable.
With a frown, he reminded himself that she also didn’t look a day over twenty-two. Not exactly jailbait, but not fair game for a man who preferred women who held as few illusions as he did when it came to the opposite sex.
“No. I’m…no,” she repeated. “I know you have a one-o’clock with her, though. I can get these. Really,” she insisted, her focus on the transparencies and computer disks she quickly pushed back into a folder. She reached past him for another disk. Bumping his knee with her forearm, she pulled back, apparently deciding that disk could wait. “If you’ll have a seat, I’ll let her know you’re here.”