The Beaumont Heirs
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Panic kicked in. He was coming toward her, his lean legs closing the distance rapidly. If he got too close, he’d see the baby seat in the back of her car.
Her head began to swim. She wasn’t ready for this. He’d walked out on her. He’d believed her father over her and simply disappeared—just like her father had said all Beaumont men did. Beaumonts took whatever woman they wanted and when they were done, they simply abandoned them—and kept the children.
She’d known she’d have to confront him eventually. But now? Right freaking now?
She wasn’t ready. She hadn’t lost all the baby weight and, as a result, she was wearing the only kind of business-casual attire she could afford—the kind from discount stores. She couldn’t even be sure that Percy hadn’t spit up on her blouse this morning.
When she’d imagined facing the man who’d broken her heart and abandoned her, she’d wanted to look her very best to make him physically hurt. She hadn’t wanted to look like a rumpled single mother struggling to get by.
Even if he was the reason she was exactly that.
But she couldn’t let him see into the back of the car. If he didn’t know about Percy, she wasn’t going to tell him until she’d had time to come up with a plan. Because what if he did the Beaumont thing and demanded her child? She could not lose her son. She couldn’t let Byron raise the boy to be yet another Beaumont in the line of Beaumont men. She had to protect her baby.
So, against her better judgment, she walked toward him.
Oh, this wasn’t fair. It just wasn’t. Byron’s hair had gotten a little longer and he wore it pulled back into a low ponytail, which took all of the natural curl out of it—except for one piece that had come free. His lanky frame had filled out a little, giving him a more muscular look that was positively sinful in the white button-up shirt he wore cuffed at the sleeves.
He looked good. Heck, he looked better than good. And she looked...dumpy. Damn it all.
They met in the middle of the parking lot, stopping less than two feet from each other. “Leona,” he said in his deep baritone voice as he looked at her. His eyes were a deeper blue now—or maybe that was just the bright sun. God, he was so handsome.
She would not be swayed by his good looks. Those looks lied, just like he did.
“Byron,” she replied. Because what else could she say here? Where have you been? I had your son after you left me? I don’t know if I want to kiss you or strangle you?
This was no big deal, she tried to tell herself. It was just the former love of her life, the father of her son—suddenly back after a year’s absence. And apparently hiring her for a job. A flash of anger gave her strength. If he was back, why hadn’t he just called her? Why did he have to hire her?
Unless...he hadn’t come back for her.
He’d left without her, after all, jetting off to Europe. That’d been as much information as Leona had been able to get out of Byron’s twin sister, Frances. Europe—as far away from Leona as he could get without leaving the planet. Or so it had felt.
And now he was back and hiring her. For a job she desperately needed. This was not him sweeping back into her life and making everything right. This was not him needing her.
So she did not flinch as he looked her up and down as if he expected her to fall into his arms and tell him how damned much she’d missed him. She would not give him the satisfaction. Yes, the past year had been the hardest year of her life. But she wasn’t the same silly little girl who believed love would somehow conquer all. The past year had shown her how tough she could be. It was time for Byron to realize the same thing.
But it was difficult to keep her head up as his gaze traveled over her. He’d always done that—looked at her as though she was the most beautiful woman on the planet. Even when they’d worked together at that restaurant and the cream of the high-society crop had come into the restaurant every single night—even when other women had thrown themselves at his Beaumont name—Byron had always had eyes only for her.
She shivered at the memory of the way he used to look at her—at the way he was looking at her right now.
“You cut your hair,” he noted.
Her mouth opened, the truth on the tip of her tongue—she’d cut it because Percy liked to yank it while he was nursing. She clamped down on that impulse. The words sat in the back of her throat, a lead weight that held her tongue still. She would give him absolutely nothing to use against her. She would not let him hurt her again.
“I like it,” he hurried to add when she couldn’t think of a single reasonable thing to say in response.
She blushed at the compliment. Her fingers itched to tuck the short bob behind her ears, but she held fast to the straps of her bag. She was not here for Byron, just like he hadn’t been there for her. She was here to do a job and that was final. “Do you really need an interior designer or did you call me away from my job just to note I’ve changed my style?” Since you left.
She didn’t say those last words out loud, but they seemed to hang in between them anyway.
Byron took another step toward her. He reached up. Leona held her breath as he trailed the very tips of his fingers over her cheek. It was almost as if he couldn’t believe she was really here, either.
Then he reached down and picked up her left hand. His thumb rubbed over her ring finger—her bare ring finger. “Leona...” he murmured, his voice husky with what she recognized as need. He lifted her hand to his lips and kissed it.
Everything about her body tightened at the sound of her name from his mouth, his lips on her hand—tightened so much that she had to close her eyes because if she looked into the depths of Byron’s beautiful blue eyes for one second longer, she’d be lost all over again.
It’d always been this way. There’d been something about Byron Beaumont that had pulled her in from the very beginning—something that should have sent her running the other way.
After all, her father had been drumming his hatred of all things Beaumont into her head for as long as she could remember. She knew all about Hardwick Beaumont, her father’s nemesis, and his heirs. How the Beaumonts were dangerous, how they seduced young and innocent women and then cast them aside as if they were nothing.
Just as Leona had been seduced and cast aside.
So she did not give. She ignored her body’s reaction to Byron, ignored the old memories that the mere touch of his lips brought rushing back to her. She kept her eyes closed and her focus on the job.
The job she needed because she was raising Byron’s son on her own. A son he did not know about.
She needed to tell him.
But she couldn’t. Not yet. Not until she figured out what he was doing here. Not until she knew where she stood with him. She was no longer young and innocent and she was not someone who would forget a year’s worth of heartache and loneliness with the whisper of her name, thank you very much.
God, what a mess.
A tense second passed between them and then Byron dropped her hand. She felt him step away from her and only then did she open her eyes.
He now stood several feet away, looking at her differently—harder, meaner almost.
Another flash of panic hit her—did he already know about Percy? Or was he just mad that she wasn’t falling at her feet in gratitude for being acknowledged?
“I need a designer,” he said quietly. He didn’t sound angry, which was at direct odds with the way he was looking at her. “I’m going to be opening up my own restaurant.”
“Here?”
“Here,” he agreed, sounding resigned to it. “It’s a massive job and I—” she saw him swallow “—I wanted to see if it was the kind of thing you were still interested it.”
“You’re going to stay in Denver?” The question came out with more of an edge than she meant it to, but that was the thing she needed to know. If he were going to stay in Denver, then...
Then he’d have to know about Percy. They’d have to figure something out, something involving child support and visitation and...
Well, not their relationship. There was no relationship. That part of her life was over now.
And if he were opening up his own restaurant—her mind spun around the facts. Her father, Leon Harper, would find out that Byron had come home.
Oh, God. Her father would get out his old axes and grind them all over again. Her father would shove his way back into her life, ignoring all the ways she had tried to extricate herself from her parents. Her father would do everything he could to destroy Byron—again.
Her father would do everything to punish her again.
“Yes,” Byron said, turning away from her and looking up at the old buildings. “I’ve come home.”
Two
Byron walked into the darkened room that, somehow, would become a restaurant. Somehow. “Here we are. The dungeon.”
Behind him, he heard Leona cough lightly. “Is that the theme you’re working with?”
“No.”
What the hell was he doing? Touching her face? Kissing her hand? That was not part of his plan. His plan was to hire her, get his restaurant going and kick her right back out of his life—this time, on his terms. She hadn’t needed him. He didn’t need her. Except for design purposes.
But that’s not what had happened because something as simple as seeing Leona Harper again—and seeing that she wasn’t wearing a wedding ring—had blown all to hell his simple plan to get simple answers.
There was nothing simple about Leona. A fact she’d made abundantly clear when she’d closed her eyes—when she’d refused to even look at him.
“Pity,” she sniffed. “You wouldn’t have to change a thing.”
He grinned in spite of himself. Leona had always been something of a contradiction. She was, in general, a quiet woman who avoided confrontation. But when she’d been alone with him, she’d let out the real her—snarky and sarcastic with a biting observation ready at all times. She’d made him laugh—him. He’d thought he was too jaded, too cynical to laugh anymore, to feel much of anything anymore. But he’d laughed with her. He’d had all these feelings with her. For her.
He’d loved her. Or thought he had. But maybe that’d all been part of the trick, a Harper trapping a Beaumont. She hadn’t told him who she was, after all, until it was too late.
“So if you’re not going with torture chamber,” she went on, “what do you want?”
“Whatever.”
“Be serious, Byron.” If he hadn’t been looking at her, he wouldn’t have seen the tiny stamp of her foot that set off eddies of dust.
He paused. “I am being serious. You can do whatever you want. I can cook what I want. The only caveat is that the beverage menu has to feature our beer. The restaurant can be whatever it wants.”
Clutching her tablet to her chest, she gave him a long look that he couldn’t quite make out in the dim light. “You have to have some idea of what you’re interested in,” she finally said in a soft voice.
“I do. I’ve always known what I wanted.” He turned away from her. This was a bad idea. But then again, it was Leona—she’d always been a bad idea. “But I’m used to not getting it.”
She gasped, but he kept walking back toward the soon-to-be-kitchen. He couldn’t let her get under his skin. He never should have asked her here. He was safer in Spain, where she was nothing but a memory—not a flesh and blood woman who would always push him past the point of reason.
The reasonable thing to do was to keep as much space between the Beaumonts and the Harpers as possible. That’s the way it’d always been, before he’d unwittingly crossed that line. That’s the way it should have stayed.
He dragged open the doors to the workroom and flipped on all the lights. “This needs to be upgraded considerably,” he said. He couldn’t fix the past, couldn’t undo his great mistake. But he could stop making it over again. He just had to focus on the job—it was the reason they were both here. He needed to find a way to be Byron Beaumont in a place where his last name permanently branded him, and he needed to make sure that Leona Harper knew she would never exert any power over him ever again.
She followed him into the cleaner space. “I see.” She took several pictures with her tablet. “Do you have a menu yet?”
“No. I only agreed to do this yesterday. I thought I’d be on my way back to Madrid by now.”
“Madrid? Is that where you went?”
Of course she wouldn’t know. She probably hadn’t bothered to look him up at all.
But there was something in the way she said it—as if she couldn’t believe that was the answer—that made him turn back to her. She stared at him with big eyes and this time, there was no hiding that look. She was stunned—confused? She was hurt.
Well, that made two of them “Yes. Well, I spent six months in France first. Then Spain.”
Her eyes cut down to his left hand—his ring finger. “Did you...”
He tensed. “No. I was working.”
She exhaled. “Ah.” But that was all she said. He was about to turn away when she added, “Where did you work?”
“George, you remember him?”
“Your father’s old chef?”
For some reason, the fact that she remembered who George was made Byron relax a little. It wasn’t like she’d forgotten him. Not entirely, anyway. “Yes. One of his old friends from Le Cordon Bleu gave me a job in Paris. Then I heard about an opening at El Gallio in Madrid and took the job.”
Her eyes widened again. “You were at El Gallio? That’s a three-star restaurant!”
He relaxed more. She remembered. Even though her reaction was probably all part of the same ruse to undermine the Beaumont family, he couldn’t help himself.
For months, he and Leona had talked about restaurants—how they’d love to travel and dine at the world’s best establishments and then open up their own. She’d design everything and Byron would handle the food, and it’d be so much better than working for Rory McMaken, the egotistical bastard.
Leona spoke, pulling him out of the past. “You’re leaving behind El Gallio to open your own restaurant here?”
“Crazy, right?” He looked around the workroom. “Don’t get me wrong. I loved Europe. No one there knew or cared that I was a Beaumont. I could just be Byron, a chef. That was...” Freeing.
He’d been free of the family drama, free of the long-standing feud between the Beaumonts and the Harpers.
“That must have been amazing,” she said in a wistful tone. Which was so at odds with how he remembered the way things had gone down that he turned back to her in surprise.
“Yeah. I wasn’t sure I wanted to come back to all of this. But this is an opportunity I can’t pass up. It’s a chance to be a part of the family business on my terms.”
“I see. So you’ve decided to be a Beaumont, then.” Her voice was quiet, as if he’d somehow confirmed her worst fears.
He would not let her get away with using guilt on him. Guilt? For what? He was the injured party here. She’d lied about who she was—not once, but for almost a year. And then she’d cast him aside the moment her father asked her to. Hell, for all he knew, that had always been the plan. It’d only been after he’d left the country that Leon Harper had managed to sell the Beaumont Brewery out from under the Beaumonts. Maybe he’d told Leona to split one of them off—divide and then conquer.
Right. If anyone should be feeling guilty here, it was her. He’d never lied about his last name or his family. He’d never made promises and then broken them. Thank God he hadn’t actually asked her to marry him before she betrayed him.
“I’ve always been a Beaumont,” he answered decisively. “And we are not to be trifled with.”
He shouldn’t have said that last bit, but he couldn’t help it. He was the boss here. She worked for him. Emotionally, he didn’t need her. If she was getting any ideas about turning the tables on him, she’d best forget them now.
She looked away.
“Anyway,” he went on, focusing on the job. His restaurant. “I’m starting from scratch and I wanted...” Unexpectedly, his words dried up. He wanted so much, but like he’d said, he’d gotten used to disappointment. “I know there was a time in our past when we talked about a restaurant.”
Even though she was studying the tips of her shoes very closely, he still saw her eyes close.
He remembered that look of defeat—he’d only seen it one other time—when her father, Leon Harper himself, had shown up at Sauce and gotten Byron fired and demanded that Leona come home with her parents right now or else. Leona had looked at the ground and closed her eyes and Byron had said “babe” and...
Well. And here they were.
“If you don’t want the job, that’s fine. I know that Harpers and Beaumonts don’t work well together and I wouldn’t want to make your father mad.” He didn’t quite manage to say father without sneering.
He watched her chest rise and fall with a deep breath. “I want...”
Her words were so quiet that he couldn’t hear her. He stepped in closer and took a deep breath.
Which was a mistake. The scent of Leona—sweet and soft, roses and vanilla—was all it took to transport him to another time and place, before he’d realized that she wasn’t just someone with the last name of Harper, but one of those Harpers.
He leaned forward, unable to stop himself. He’d never been able to stay away from her, not from the first moment she’d been hired at Sauce as a hostess. “What do you want, Leona?”
“I need to tell you...” Her words were still little more than a whisper.
He touched her then, which was another mistake. But she took what control he had and blew it to bits. He cupped her face in his hand and lifted her chin until he could look into her hazel eyes. “What do you need?”
Her eyes widened again as his face moved within inches of hers, and she exhaled, something that sounded a hell of a lot like satisfaction. His gut clenched. Despite her lies and betrayal, the messy ending to their relationship and the long year on a different continent—despite it all—he wanted her.
“The job,” she said in a voice that didn’t even make it to a whisper. “I need the job, Byron.”
She didn’t kiss him, didn’t tell him she was so sorry she’d picked her family over him. At no point did she apologize for lying to him. She just stood there.
“Right, right.” She couldn’t be clearer. She was here for the job.
Not for him.
* * *
Her heart pounded and she wasn’t sure she was still breathing.
Byron had dropped his hand and turned back to the stove, leaving her in a state of paralysis.
If he was going to stay in Denver, he had to know and the longer she didn’t tell him—well, that would just make everything worse.
Somehow. She wasn’t sure how things could get much worse, frankly. Byron hiring her to design a restaurant—and then switching between unbridled lust and a cold shoulder?
That thought made her angry. Why did he have to hire her to see her? He could have called. Sent a text.
The anger felt good. It gave her back some power. She was not a helpless girl at the mercies of the men in her life, not anymore. She’d gotten away from her father and had a son and done just fine without Byron. So what if all he had to do was look at her and her knees turned to jelly? Didn’t matter. He’d left her behind. She was only here for the paycheck. Not for him.
She could not tell him about Percy, not when she couldn’t be sure what version of Byron she would get. She’d spent the past year carving out a life that made her as happy as possible—a job she liked and a family she loved, with May and Percy. She’d spent a whole year free to make her own choices and live her own life. She’d stopped being Leon Harper’s wayward oldest daughter, and she’d stopped dreaming of being Byron Beaumont’s wife. She was just Leona Harper and that was a good thing.
Now she had to remember that.
“Well,” she started, then cleared her throat to get her voice working properly. “I guess what I need is a menu. It doesn’t have to be specific, but are you going to serve burgers and fries or haute cuisine or what? That will guide the rest of the design choices.”
“Something in the middle,” he replied quickly. “Accessible food and beer, but better than burgers and fries. You can get that anywhere. I want this to be a different kind of restaurant—not about me, but about the meal. The experience.” He looked out at the depressing room that she was somehow going to transform into a dining hall. “A different experience than this,” he added with a shake of his head.
“Okay, that’s a good start. What else?”
“Fusion,” he added. “I was cooking things in Europe that I didn’t cook here. Locally sourced ingredients, advanced techniques—the whole nine yards.”
She took notes on her tablet. “Any ideas for the actual menu items?”
“A few.”
She waited for him to elaborate, but when he didn’t, she looked up again. “Such as?”
He didn’t look at her. “Why don’t you come by the house tomorrow and I’ll make you a tasting menu? You can tell me what might work and what doesn’t.”
She should say no. She should insist that their interactions be limited to this dank building. “The house?”
“The Beaumont Mansion. I’m staying there until I get my own place.” He pivoted and fixed her with a look that she’d always been powerless to resist. “If you can tolerate being in the lair of the Beaumonts, that is.”
“I tolerate you, don’t I?” she snapped back. She would not allow him to make her the bad guy, and she would not let him paint her as the coward. He was the one who’d run off. She was the one who’d stayed and dealt with the fallout.
She didn’t know how she’d expected him to respond, but that lazy smile? That wasn’t it. “Shall we say six, then?”
Leona mentally ran through her calendar. May had class tonight—but tomorrow night she should be able to stay with Percy.
“Who else will be home?” Because no matter what had happened between Leona and Byron, that didn’t change the larger fact that the Beaumonts and the Harpers got on much worse than oil and water ever had.
He shrugged. “Chadwick and his family live there full-time, but they eat on their own schedule. Frances just moved back in, but she’s rarely home. A couple of my younger half siblings are still there—but again, everyone’s on their own schedule. Should be just us.”
For a brief, insane second, she entertained the notion of bringing Percy with her. But the moment the thought occurred to her, she dismissed it. The Beaumonts were notorious for keeping the children from broken relationships. That’s what her father had always told her—Hardwick Beaumont always got rid of the women and kept the babies, never letting the children see their mothers again. That’s what Byron had said happened to him and his siblings. It wasn’t until later in his life that he’d gotten to know his mother.
At the time, that story had broken her heart for him. He’d been a lost little boy in a cold, unloving house. But now she knew better. He hadn’t been looking for sympathy.
He’d been warning her. And she was more the fool for not realizing it until it was too late.
She was done being the fool. No, she would not bring Percy. Not until she had a better grasp on Byron’s reaction to the idea of having a five-month-old son. Not until she knew if he would decree that the boy would be better off a Beaumont instead of a Harper.
Byron had to know about his child eventually, but she could not lose her son.
“All right,” she finally said. “Dinner tomorrow night at six. I’ll draft a few ideas and you can provide feedback.” Her phone chimed—it was a text from May, reminding Leona about her class tonight. “Anything else?”
The question hung in the air like the cobwebs hung from the ceiling. Byron looked at her with such longing that she almost weakened.