Fortune's Secret Heir Page 5

  Like the day before, the house was quiet as a tomb inside, and she followed Mrs. Stone up to the third-floor study.

  “Mister has already left for the office,” the housekeeper finally said when she gestured at Ben’s empty desk. “I suppose you know what you’re supposed to do.”

  Ella wondered if Mrs. Stone knew what Ella’s purpose there was. Not that it mattered. Mrs. Stone had a job to do, the same as Ella did.

  She set her messenger bag on the floor behind the desk and tried to act as if she wasn’t totally intimidated simply pulling out the leather chair that Ben had occupied the afternoon before.

  “Lunch will be at noon,” Mrs. Stone intoned. “I’ll bring you a tray.”

  “Oh.” Surprised, she gestured toward the admittedly worn bag. “I didn’t know. I brought a sandwich.”

  Mrs. Stone stared. “The Mister said to prepare lunch.”

  “Which probably beats my PB and J all to pieces.”

  “PB and J?”

  “Never mind. Thank you. Lunch at noon will be great. But I can come down—” she realized she didn’t know where the kitchen was located because she’d never seen it “—or up,” she added ruefully, “to the kitchen. I don’t need waiting on.” The woman was still staring. Not quite a glare but definitely no humor there, either. Maybe she didn’t want interlopers in her kitchen. “But, whatever you’re used to,” she said weakly.

  “Mister never has people working in his office,” Mrs. Stone said and turned to leave.

  Presumably that meant she was delivering a lunch to Ella at noon just as she intended.

  Nervously twisting her watch, Ella sat down in the leather chair. It was on casters. Surprisingly old-fashioned for a man who was firmly entrenched in a modern tech world. In fact, the entire study seemed steeped in old-fashioned touches. The clock on the wall behind her looked as if it had come out of an old railway station. The desk itself was gigantic, with warm inlaid wood on the top and worn metal corner braces that reminded her of a steamer trunk.

  There was a manila folder sitting on the center of the desktop with her name scrawled on the front. When she hadn’t been stalking her new boss online the night before, she’d been reading whatever she could find on how to locate missing people. Not that his siblings—if there were any to begin with—were missing.

  She’d decided the hunt wasn’t any different than doing a person’s genealogy. And these days, genealogy websites abounded.

  She flipped open the folder. The notes inside were typed. Neat. Chronological. She had a hard time envisioning Ben preparing them himself. Probably had had a secretary do it.

  There were also a couple of sticky notes stuck to the inside of the folder; handwritten in the same slashing style as her name on the front. That she had no trouble imagining as Ben’s. He’d written the password for his computer network on one. And on the other, a directive to make herself at home and help herself to drinks in the fridge.

  She leaned back in the chair and looked around the study. If there was a refrigerator here, it was cleverly hidden. Besides, she had a bottle of water in her messenger bag.

  She gingerly opened the center drawer of the desk and was glad to see it contained the computer keyboard and a few pens and pencils. The moment she tapped the keyboard, the sleek monitor on top of the desk leaped to life and she keyed in the password he’d left, opened an internet browser and turned back to read through all of Ben’s notes.

  That task took longer than she’d expected, because there weren’t only notes about Gerald Robinson’s history. There were copious notes about the extensive Fortune family and the mysterious, supposedly deceased Jerome Fortune.

  By the time she did finish, she decided she needed to make some of her own notes. Reading about Gerald Robinson’s life had been fascinating enough that she didn’t feel so odd when she began pulling open the drawers of Ben’s desk in search of a notepad. When she reached the last of the four drawers, she’d found everything from a bottle of Scotch and two crystal glasses to a single snapshot of a cute blond-haired toddler boy. But no blank paper. Rather than hunt through anything else of his, she retrieved the spiral notebook from her messenger bag that she used for school notes and flipped to a fresh page.

  Ben’s material chronicled Gerald’s life from his founding of Robinson Tech, known until recently as Robinson Computers, his marriage to Charlotte Prendergast and the subsequent births of their children. It covered a lot of years. From the dates Ben had provided, Ella knew that Gerald and Charlotte had been married nearly three and a half decades. She drew out a visual time line of these known dates. On another sheet, she drew, contrastingly, the brief time line of Jerome Fortune’s life span. If Gerald was not Jerome, that young man had had a regrettably short life.

  She idly traced her pen over Jerome’s time line, while studying Gerald’s. She hadn’t been hired to determine that the two men were one and the same. Ben already believed that they were. There wasn’t anything interesting of note on Gerald’s time line until he’d founded his computer company. Before that were just the basics. Birth date. The names of his supposed parents—both deceased.

  “Lunch.”

  She nearly jumped out of her skin when Mrs. Stone spoke.

  Without asking, the housekeeper carried the tray she held over to the table near the windows. She set out the place setting, a plate with a silver dome covering it and a crystal glass filled with what look like iced tea. When she was done, she tucked the tray under her arm and headed back out the doorway. “I’ll collect everything in an hour,” she said as she left.

  “Yes, ma’am,” Ella murmured under her breath. But curiosity as well as hunger pangs propelled her across the room to see what was under the dome. She was relieved to see a flaky croissant brimming with—she filched a tiny bit on her fingertip to taste—chicken salad, a steaming cup of some sort of soup and a glistening fruit tart.

  Definitely beat out her poor little peanut butter and jelly sandwich.

  Knowing she’d spent more time that morning thinking about the Gerald/Jerome connection than hunting down any of his possible offspring, she carried the food back to the desk and ate while she began methodically searching the whereabouts of the women listed in Ben’s notes.

  She was able to cross off the first two almost immediately. One had died childless in an automobile accident only a few months after the conference where she and Gerald had met. The other was now a United States senator with an eye toward the presidency, and Ella figured if there were any other children besides the high school–age twins she shared with her husband, the media would have ferreted them out long before now.

  She made her notes next to their names and moved on to the third prospect. “You do get around, don’t you,” she commented and looked up to focus again on the computer monitor.

  Ben was standing in the doorway, wearing an immaculate pinstriped suit and gray tie, and for the second time, she nearly jumped out of her skin.

  “Who gets around?”

  Over the course of the morning, she’d gotten comfortable sitting in his chair, but now she felt nothing but awkwardness and she hopped to her feet. “Sorry about the mess,” she muttered, quickly gathering the empty dishes that Mrs. Stone had yet to retrieve, and swiping croissant crumbs off the glorious desk onto the plate.

  “What mess?” He rounded the desk from the other side and angled his dark head, studying her handwritten notes. Aside from Gerald’s time lines, which had numerous additions and comments jotted here and there, her notes were fairly neat. But nothing like his typed stack.

  Rather than standing there, inhaling the intoxicating scent of him, she carried the dishes over to the table. She wondered if his thick, dark hair ever got mussed out of the severe way he combed it back from his face.

  “Looks like you’ve been busy,” he said. “Mrs. Stone taking care of you?�
�

  She hovered near the table. “Yes. Lunch was unnecessary, but delicious. Thank you.”

  “Thank her. She fixed it.” He glanced at the computer monitor, then back at her again. “You’ve found everything you needed?”

  She nodded quickly. “I’ve already eliminated two women from your list. If it continues this quickly, you’re definitely overpaying me for the job.”

  He picked up her spiral notebook and read what she’d written. “It won’t always go that quickly. Nothing involving my father ever does. Where’d the notebook come from?”

  “What?”

  He lifted the notebook slightly before tossing it on the desk.

  “Oh.” She gestured at her messenger bag sitting on the floor against the wall behind his desk. “I had it with me.”

  “Reminds me of my school days,” he murmured. He walked over to her and reached out his arm, but only to open one of the built-in cabinets near where she stood. “Plenty of supplies for you to use,” he said, and moved away again. “No need to use up your own stuff for school.”

  “It was just a few pages,” she pointed out. But she pulled out a legal pad from the well-stocked shelf behind the cabinet door and closed it again.

  “School’s not in session for you right now.”

  “Classes start up again in about a week and a half.” She set the legal pad on the desk, but then didn’t really know what to do. It was his office. Taking the seat behind his desk while he was there seemed too strange. Instead, she ended up just hovering there beside the desk, folding and unfolding her arms. “I, um, I only have one class right now that’ll be on campus. Intro to Taxation. The last class I took was online only.”

  “Handy.”

  “Depends. Sometimes things are easier in a classroom. But—” she shrugged and unfolded her arms yet again “—it’s what’s been working.” It was also hard knowing where to focus her attention. If she looked at him, she was very much afraid she might stare. Or drool. The man was that handsome. But it was also awkward not looking at him.

  God help her. You’d think she’d never been around a guy before. She wasn’t a virgin, for heaven’s sake. She’d had a few boyfriends. Nobody serious enough to stick around through her busy schedule and the demands of her family. But still...

  “Well, looks like you’re doing fine. I’ll leave you to it.”

  “Mister!” Mrs. Stone appeared, unable to hide her surprise. “I didn’t know you were here. I’ll prepare you lunch immediately.”

  “No. I had a few spare minutes but I’m heading back to the office. Make sure Ella leaves in a few hours.” His eyes slid over Ella’s face, a sudden glint of amusement in them. “I’m not paying her overtime.”

  With that, he departed as unexpectedly as he’d appeared.

  “He never comes home during the workday.” Mrs. Stone glared at Ella as if she was to blame. “I would have had a proper lunch for him prepared.”

  “I don’t think he expected lunch,” Ella offered. “It was all delicious, though. Thank you.”

  Mrs. Stone didn’t look soothed. As rocky faced as always, she loaded up her tray with Ella’s lunch dishes and strode out of the room. Ella was fairly certain she’d have slammed the door if the doorway had possessed one.

  Fortunately, it wasn’t Mrs. Stone’s opinion about Ella that mattered.

  And Ben had said she was doing fine.

  Chapter Four

  He showed up shortly after lunch the next day, too.

  This time, though, Mrs. Stone was prepared.

  As if she’d been hovering somewhere, waiting and watching for Ben to “sneak” into his own home, two minutes after he walked into the study, the gray-haired housekeeper appeared with a second lunch tray, which she set next to Ella’s on the round table near the windows. “You don’t eat enough,” she said before striding out of the office once more.

  Ella was still sitting at his desk. And if she had perhaps done a little of her own preparing, too, by choosing to wear a green turtleneck and black slacks instead of the jeans and shirt she’d worn the day before, she was the only one who had to know.

  Now, Ben gave her a wry look. “If I don’t eat it, I’m afraid she might poison me in my sleep or something.”

  Ella couldn’t keep from smiling. “I think she’s just trying to be—” she hunted for a suitable word “—nurturing.”

  “I’m pretty sure she ate her young,” he returned, but pulled off his suit jacket—pale gray today—and hung it over the back of the table chair. “You haven’t had a chance to eat yours, yet.” He gestured at the second dome-covered plate. “Come and keep me company and fill me in on your progress.”

  Since he’d made a point of telling her he was never at his home office during the day, she figured he was more anxious to make progress on his search than he’d admitted. She’d been there two days so far, and so far, he’d appeared twice. She pushed out of his desk chair and joined him at the little conference table. But thinking of this as an impromptu business meeting was hard, considering the way he rose and pulled out her chair for her before she could do it herself.

  She couldn’t envision the man doing such a thing during one of his meetings at Robinson Tech. But then they were in his home. To her, his manners seemed flawless. He probably treated every female the same way.

  She stole a look at him, while he sat back in his own chair across from her, then pulled the cover off her plate. Today, it was seared scallops on a bed of pasta. She’d never had scallops, but she’d watched enough cooking shows to recognize them when she saw them. “Mrs. Stone is quite the cook.”

  “One of her redeeming qualities.” He shook the linen napkin over his lap and watched her over the bite he took. “Cooks like she was trained at le Cordon Bleu.”

  Ella cut one of the scallops in half and popped it in her mouth. Buttery. Faintly sweet. A bit like shrimp. And altogether pleasant, she was relieved to find, and swallowed. “I may have a line on someone actually,” she told him.

  The look he gave her was neither one of surprise nor particularly inquisitive, but when he said nothing in response, she quickly continued. “His name is Randy Phillips. His mother is Antonia Bell. She was an intern at Robinson Computers close to thirty years ago. From what I can tell, after she left the company, she moved to Colorado. Then Massachusetts, where she married Ronald Phillips. But that was only fifteen years ago, and Randy would be twenty-eight now. He has the surname, but maybe Ronald isn’t Randy’s natural father. Thirteen years just seems like a long time to wait to marry the father of one’s child.”

  “Is he in Massachusetts still?”

  “I know he graduated with a master’s from Cornell, but I haven’t been able to find where he’s at now.” She took a quick sip of her iced tea. “But I will.”

  His dark head dipped. “Good work. And when you do, you call me immediately.”

  She tried not to beam too brightly as she focused on her plate. She wound her fork through the creamy linguine. “Have you been to Paris?”

  “Of course. Why?”

  Of course, he’d been to France. He’d probably been all over the world. “Le Cordon Bleu. It’s in Paris, isn’t it?”

  “There are a lot of locations, I believe.” He gave her a vaguely amused look. “I didn’t study there with her. She didn’t study there, either.”

  She flushed. She’d only been trying to make conversation. “I know you didn’t. You went to Wharton.”

  His eyebrows rose a little, and she flushed even more. “I noticed the degrees.” She gestured at the collection of frames on one wall and was glad that they were there to explain away her knowledge, because she’d originally read about his education on the Robinson Tech website. She knew he’d been recently appointed chief operating officer of the company, that his identical twin brother, Wes, w
as vice president of R&D there. In fact, from what she could tell, only one of his siblings didn’t work at Robinson Tech. Graham. She’d learned that from searching Ben’s family online. Graham was a rancher or something. There wasn’t as much information readily available about him as the others.

  “What made you want to study accounting?”

  “Security,” she said immediately. “People will always need accountants.”

  “Death and taxes?”

  “Something like that.”

  “Security important to you?”

  “Yes.” She wasn’t going to apologize for it. “Isn’t it to everyone?”

  His lips twisted. “No.”

  “Have you ever had to worry about it?”

  “No.”

  “Then you don’t know, do you?” she pointed out reasonably.

  “Just because my family has money doesn’t mean we live in an ivory tower. But I know plenty of people without the Robinson resources who don’t give a second thought to security.”

  “Well, not me,” she said feelingly. “When my father died, he didn’t have life insurance or anything. My mother hadn’t worked since before they got married. I can still remember listening to her plead with the electric company to give her two more days to pay the bill before they shut off our power. It was better once she went back to work, but that took a while.”

  “How did he die?”

  “Aneurysm. It was nothing anybody could have predicted.” She lifted her hand, showing the old watch. “This was his.”

  “He wore a Mickey Mouse watch?”

  She smiled, the memory sad. “Yup. He was a musician. Played saxophone.”

  “He must have done it pretty well if your mother didn’t have to work.”

  That wasn’t the reason her mother hadn’t worked, but she didn’t feel like explaining the demands of her brother’s health. “He also was a substitute teacher,” she said. “Often at my elementary school. Everyone I went to school with loved him, but he definitely wasn’t a planner.”