Fortune's Secret Heir Read online

  Her mom wouldn’t get off shift for another few hours, and Ella saw Rory off to school as usual, then pulled on her bicycle helmet, crossed the strap of her messenger bag across her chest and set off on her bike. She was determined to enjoy the fresh, crisp air and the ride, and to focus on the exorbitantly generous financial incentive waiting for her at the end of this job she’d been hired to do.

  When she was finished working for Ben, for the first time she’d be able to be a full-time student, to take a full load of classes instead of one or two at a time, and that would put her on track to graduate in only three semesters. Compared to the three or four years she’d been looking at otherwise, it was a definite motivator.

  And she needed to stop thinking of her boss as Ben. He was Ben Robinson. Maybe if she used his whole name every time she thought of him, she wouldn’t be so inclined to dream about him.

  She didn’t work for Ben. She worked for Ben Robinson.

  “Ben Robinson,” she said out loud as she stopped in front of a busy coffee shop near his house. Then she laughed at herself because she was sounding decidedly lunatic.

  “Excuse me?”

  She smiled at the waitress who was cleaning off a metal table set on the sidewalk. “Just talking to myself,” she said and locked up her bike before going quickly inside.

  She’d planned her schedule to arrive in plenty of time to avoid being “late” in Mrs. Stone’s calculations, but only if she didn’t waste too much of it standing in line. Ten minutes later, she set off again, covered coffee cup in hand. After that, it took no time at all to reach Ben’s—Ben Robinson’s!—house, where she locked up her bicycle again outside the front door, latching the chain around a narrow tree planted next to the street. She rang the bell and pulled off her helmet, and when Mrs. Stone hadn’t answered after a second ring, she used the key and let herself in.

  She was just heading up the first flight of stairs when Mrs. Stone appeared above her, carrying a feather duster. Of course the housekeeper immediately zeroed in on the coffee cup Ella was carrying. “If you wanted coffee, you should have said.” Then she passed Ella on the steps, going down without another word.

  Just another day in paradise, Ella thought, and continued up to Ben’s—darn it, Ben Robinson’s—office. He’d obviously looked over the notes she’d left for him, adding a few handwritten comments in the margin. He’d also left the names of three more women with whom his father had likely had affairs.

  Three. It boggled the mind how one man—a married man, at that—could have had so many dalliances. And that his son knew about them.

  She couldn’t imagine what sort of marriage Gerald must have.

  But then, she wasn’t being paid by Ben Robinson—yes, that was better; it would just take practice—to conjecture about the legitimate Robinson family. Her task was merely to find the illegitimate.

  Literally.

  She left her messenger bag and helmet on the table next to the windows, then settled down at the computer, picking up where she’d left off the evening before. The task felt less like looking for a needle in the haystack than it had the previous day, and with each click of the mouse, she felt a growing excitement. When she opened a conference program saved on the website of a Boston-based software firm and saw the list of employees involved, the hairs on the back of her neck even prickled. Because there was Randy Phillips, complete with a small photograph and an accompanying bio extolling his Cornell University education and his early childhood growing up in Denver, Colorado.

  If he wasn’t Antonia Bell’s son, she’d eat her hat.

  The black-and-white photograph showed he possessed hair just as dark as her boss’s and light-colored eyes that might very well be just as blue.

  She’d been instructed to call Ben immediately when she had news, but there was no phone on the desk and she didn’t possess a cell phone. She left the office, looking around the living area, and didn’t see one there, either.

  The man ran one of the largest computer firms in the world, but he didn’t have a darned phone?

  She stood in the middle of the spacious room, eyeing the two closed doors on the wall opposite the windows overlooking the river. “Mrs. Stone,” she called out, but naturally, the woman couldn’t choose that time to appear.

  She went to the closest door and knocked before gingerly opening it. She expected a closet. Or maybe the kitchen. But she was instead greeted by a stunning bedroom that had an unused air about it.

  She tried the second door and found a child’s room, charmingly decorated in red and yellow trains. There were dozens of toys clearly meant for a young child on the bright blue shelves. A gloriously beautiful crib that looked straight out of a magazine was positioned in the center of the room beneath a mobile that seemed to hang magically out of clear space. There was not a speck of dust or a single item out of place.

  Nevertheless, this room, too, felt unused. She remembered the photograph she’d found in Ben’s desk the first day she’d started and felt inexplicably sad as she pulled the door closed again.

  When she turned, Mrs. Stone was standing behind her, and Ella jumped.

  “That room is off-limits.”

  “Then maybe it should be locked,” Ella pointed out breathlessly, pressing her hand to her thumping chest. “I was looking for a phone!”

  Mrs. Stone’s lips pressed together. “The telephone is built into the Mister’s computer,” she said as if everyone should know that.

  Ella felt herself flush. “Obviously, I didn’t know that.” She returned to the office and sat back at the desk. A few mouse clicks later, and she discovered the telephone app and dialed the number that Ben had left for her. It was answered immediately by a woman who told her that Ben was unavailable. Disappointed, Ella left her name and hung up.

  With nothing else to do, she moved on to the next prospective baby mama, and spent the rest of the day—save the ten minutes she took to consume the wedge salad and club sandwich Mrs. Stone delivered—pouring through vital-statistic websites.

  She rode her bicycle back home again at the end of the day.

  Ben hadn’t called. Nor had he come home for lunch again.

  And even though the sky was still dry and still clear, the day felt gloomy as a result.

  * * *

  Ben looked from his pile of messages to Bonita. “Why didn’t you tell me about this?” He held up the one from Ella between two fingers.

  Bonita eyed him, obviously unperturbed by his perturbation. “One or another of your women calls and begs to speak to you on a daily basis. If you want me to bring your attention to them each and every time, you’ll never get out of this office.”

  “Ella’s not one of my women.”

  Bonita made a disbelieving face. “Then who is she?”

  She’d worked for him since before he’d become COO. There were no secrets he’d ever kept from her. Until now. But he was damned if he could come up with a lie. “She’s a friend. Just a friend,” he said with emphasis, trying to forestall her smirk.

  “Sure. Like you have female friends.” Bonita left a folder of correspondence on his desk. “Those need your signatures tonight. They need to go out tomorrow.”

  He hated signing letters. “You could have signed them for me. You sign my name better than I do.”

  “A good reason for me not to,” she pointed out wryly, and left his office. “Sign them. Then go out and play with Ella the friend,” she said loudly from her desk.

  Wes walked in a moment later and tossed a thick binder in front of him. “Who’s Ella?”

  Ben looked pointedly at the opened door behind his brother and Wes pushed it closed.

  “She’s the person I hired to find out if Dad has other children out there.”

  Wes’s lips thinned. Ben knew good and well that his twin didn’t share his feelings on
locating their father’s illegitimate offspring. If there were any. “Like there aren’t already enough Robinsons,” he muttered. “If it’s not that, it’s your damn ‘Fortune business.’” He air-quoted the term before gesturing at the binder. “Those are all the PRDS on the latest apps we’re developing.”

  “I was expecting a page of bullet points, not full-on product requirement docs.” Ben lifted the binder an inch and let it drop back on his desk with a thud. “Either give me a ten-second skinny that I can report back to Dad when I have dinner with him tonight, or come and do it yourself.”

  Wes’s lips twisted even more. He retrieved the binder and opened the door. “Fine. Give me ten minutes.”

  Ben exhaled, wishing he knew what to do to ease the tension between his brother and himself. But he couldn’t change being COO of Robinson Tech. Didn’t want to change it. Nor was he willing to call off his hunt for Gerald’s offspring or give up this “Fortune business.”

  “Bonita,” he barked. “Go home and cook dinner on time for your husband for once.”

  She appeared in his doorway, one hand on her generous hip. “Have you signed those letters?”

  He dutifully picked up his pen and flipped open the folder. “Satisfied?”

  “Mildly.”

  He scrawled his name at the bottom of the first page and flipped to the second. “Go home,” he repeated. “I’m not paying you overtime.”

  “How do you know? I do sign your name better than you do,” she reminded him with a sly smile. “And I’ll leave. With pleasure. But I won’t cook for Enrique. He always cooks for me.” Waggling her fingers in a wave, she disappeared from view again and a moment later, he heard her leave.

  He dropped his pen on the desk and dialed Ella’s number. This time, he didn’t assume she’d be the one to answer, but she was.

  “I didn’t know you’d called until a few minutes ago,” he said. “Did you find him? Our Randy Phillips?”

  “Yes. I don’t have his home address or anything, but he works for a small software firm in Boston named BRD Systems. Assuming their staff listing on their website is accurate, he’s the senior programmer there.”

  “Excellent.” His fingers tightened around the receiver.

  “Do you want me to try to contact him or anything?”

  “No. I’ll take care of that.”

  “I also have a possible line on a woman in Chicago,” she offered. “Do you want me to proceed with that, or...?”

  “Absolutely.” He wished to hell he hadn’t scheduled a dinner meeting with his father. But he’d done it earlier that week with the intention of presenting Kate Fortune to him. Her hospitalization had changed that plan, but not the fact that the old man expected to meet with Ben. “And next time you call my office, Bonita will put you through.”

  “Okay. Was there anything else, then?”

  He frowned, picking up something distant in her tone that he couldn’t explain. “No.”

  “Have a, uh, a nice evening, then.”

  “You, too.” He didn’t hang up until the line went dead. He finished signing his letters, then headed out, barely remembering to stop by Wes’s office for his bullet list because he was too preoccupied with Ella’s call.

  Even though the official dinner hour at the Robinson estate wasn’t for another few hours, he drove out there now, feeling the same itchy tension he’d been feeling ever since his sister Rachel had reconnected with them after being away for several years.

  He’d been glad she hadn’t written off the entire family—when she’d up and moved away with no rhyme or reason that he’d understood at the time, he’d wondered—but the information she’d returned with about Gerald’s true identity had sent him spinning. Even though their father denied it, that itch of Ben’s had told him otherwise. It was an itch that still nagged, driving him to find what other secrets their father was harboring.

  There were three other cars parked in the wide drive when he arrived; two belonged to his parents, and he didn’t recognize the third. So that meant that Zoe, Olivia or Sophie were probably around, too. Ordinarily, he didn’t mind running in to one of his little sisters, but Ben wanted to get in and out as quickly as possible so he could get on with the task of meeting Randy Phillips.

  Because he would need to meet the guy.

  He’d decided that the moment that Ella said she’d located him.

  He went in the house through one of the rear doors, stopping to give his mother the obligatory kiss on her cheek when he spotted her sitting at the end of the table in the formal dining room. She had papers spread around her—probably some event or another from one of her charities—and she gave Ben as much attention as he gave her. Had she ever shown more warmth to the children she’d borne Gerald Robinson, it might have been different.

  But Ben had gotten more affection from the cook than he ever had his own mother.

  “Dad?”

  “His office, of course,” Charlotte said, barely lifting her platinum-blond head.

  He left her to her paperwork and strode through the house. When he found his father in his office, Gerald was pacing in front of the windows, his cell phone at his ear. Ben was waved in and he took one of the leather chairs in front of the desk, drumming his thumb silently on the arm until his father completed his call and eyed him, arching one of his dark, prominent brows.

  “Thought you were coming later for dinner.”

  “I thought I was, too, but something’s come up that I need to take care of.”

  Gerald gave him an inquiring look, but Ben wasn’t biting. Instead, he gave his father the thumbnail sketch of everything he’d been overseeing for the past two weeks, beginning with the Japan acquisition and ending with Wes’s information on the latest products under development and the status of the dating app they were gearing up to launch soon. He kept the conversation strictly on company business. The last time he’d veered off that, they’d gotten into a shouting match about Gerald’s past that Ben had no interest in repeating. As a result, he got out of the meeting with his dad in just under thirty minutes.

  He was back in his own home office less than half an hour after that, where he pored over the information that Ella had left him. Armed with the name of Randy’s employer, Ben did some of his own research and discovered that the vice president of BRD System was a fellow Wharton alum.

  He smiled.

  * * *

  The phone rang, jerking Ella awake.

  She’d dozed off over her Intro to Taxation textbook.

  She swiped her hand over her bleary face and got up from the table, where she’d been reading-slash-dozing, and grabbed the phone before it could ring again. “’Lo?”

  “Ella?”

  She went wide-awake as a shiver danced down her spine from the sound of Ben’s deep voice. That’s supposed to be Ben Robinson, remember?

  She ignored the acerbic voice of her conscience. “Hi, Ben.” Just saying his name made something inside her chest feel soft. A glance at her watch told her it was nearly ten and she sank down on the arm of the couch. “What’s up?”

  “We’re going to Boston in the morning.”

  She blinked. His voice had been distinctly edgy. “I’m sorry?”

  “Pack for overnight.”

  “You...ah...you want me to go with you to Boston?”

  “I just said that. Weather is a lot colder, too. They just got dumped with about a foot of snow, so bring a winter coat if you’ve got one.”

  Her common sense tried to pour water over the excitement sparking inside her belly. “I can’t just go off to Boston.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because I—” She looked down the hall, and could hear her brother’s video game through the closed door. “Can I call you back in a few minutes?”

  “We’ll have separate
hotel rooms, Ella, if that’s what’s worrying you.”

  Her stomach hollowed out at the mere thought of not having separate rooms. “It wasn’t. I’ll call you right back.” Before he could say whether he liked it or not, she pressed a shaking finger against the Disconnect button. Then she got to her feet and paced in front of the couch while she dialed her mother’s number at work.

  “What’s wrong?” Elaine immediately asked. “Is Rory—”

  “He’s fine,” she assured her quickly. “I’m sorry to bother you at work, but, um, but my boss wants me to go with him to Boston tomorrow, and—”

  “Boston!” Elaine sounded as surprised as Ella still felt.

  “—and I couldn’t agree without talking to you first. You’re still on nights, and Rory would be alone.”

  “Is this business or pleasure?”

  “Mom!” Ella felt her face flush and was glad her mother couldn’t see it. “Business, of course. But we’d be staying overnight. Rory would be alone.”

  “Honey...” Elaine’s voice softened. “Worrying about your brother is my job, not yours. Of course you’ll go to Boston. When else would you ever have an opportunity like this?”

  “Are you sure?”

  “You are more of a worrywart than I am,” her mother chided gently. “I’m sure. And if I weren’t sure, I’d tell you to go, anyway. I can take a day of vacation if I need to. But I’ll work that out with Rory. He’s almost seventeen. He’s naturally going to think he’s old enough to stay by himself for a night.”

  “He says I’ll need a winter coat.”

  Fortunately, her mother interpreted the “he” to mean her boss, rather than her brother. “I have a wool peacoat,” she said. “It’s old, but they never go out of style. You can use that. You’ll be fine, Ella. Now, before you argue with me for another ten minutes, I’m going to hang up. I love you.”

  Ella’s “Love you, too,” was said to a dial tone.

  She pressed her palm to her jumpy stomach and redialed Ben’s number. “I can go.”

  “What were you doing? Checking with your boyfriend?”