Christine Rimmer - The Tycoon's Instant Daughter

Just then the phone on his desk rang—his private outside line. The caller ID window showed him a number he recognized. He hesitated before answering, thinking that he wanted to get back to his rooms, to check on his daughter—and on Ms. Miller, who by then should have been all settled in the nanny’s room off the nursery.

The line buzzed again. He went ahead and picked up.

“This is Cord.”

“As if I didn’t know.” The voice was soft. Extremely feminine. And thick with innuendo.

“Hello, Jerralyn.” Cord leaned back in his chair.

Jerralyn Coulter was a Texas aristocrat—if there actually was such a thing. One of her great-great-great-great-grandfathers had perished at the Alamo. And her great-great-great-grandfather had been a true cattle baron. Cord and Jerralyn had been an item in the gossip columns for several weeks now. They’d hooked up at a political fund-raiser, a thousand-dollar-a-plate dinner where they’d been seated across from each other. It had started with smoldering looks and teasing banter. He’d driven her home. And spent the night in her bed.

Jerralyn was twenty-six, an extremely beautiful and sophisticated woman. Not to mention energetic. With a very naughty mind.

“Are you working late again?” she asked.

“Guilty.”

“You work too hard.”

“I like to work.”

“You need to play—and I could be there in twenty minutes—with a bottle of Dom Pérignon in my hand and nothing on under my sables.”

He laughed at that. “How can you wear sable? I thought you told me you were an animal rights activist.”

“I was speaking figuratively.”

“About the rights of animals?”

“No, about the sables.”

“You are tempting,” he said, still thinking of Becky, of the irritating Ms. Miller, of the way she hadn’t seemed irritating at all, sitting in the white wicker rocker, her brown hair falling soft and thick along her cheek.

“And you are preoccupied.” Jerralyn pretended to pout. “I could be hurt.”

Cord blinked, rubbed his eyes. “Don’t be. Later in the week?”

“Oh, all right. But at least turn the light off now and get out of that office. Workaholics are not sexy.”

He promised her again that he was through for the night, and then said goodbye.

Emma Hightower, who had been the head housekeeper at Stockwell Mansion for well over a decade now, appeared in the doorway as Cord was turning off the lights. As always, she looked serious and sincere in her concern for his comfort. “Just making my last rounds. Is there anything else I can get for you tonight, Mr. Stockwell?”

“No, thank you, Emma. I’m fine. Did Ms. Miller get moved in all right?”

“Yes. She’s all settled.”

“You saw that she was fed?”

“I had dinner sent up to her room at seven-thirty, which seemed a good time for her, tonight anyway. By then, I assumed, she would have had sufficient opportunity to unpack her belongings. Consuela picked up the tray an hour later.”

“And did Ms. Miller eat her vegetables?” he teased, hoping, as he’d hoped for years and years, to catch a hint of a grin on Emma’s long, serious face.

“Yes,” Emma said, serious as ever. “She seems to have a fine appetite.”

“Good. It wouldn’t do to have a picky eater for a nanny.”

A slight crease appeared between Emma’s thin brows, but she apparently decided that Cord’s remark required no comment from her. She asked, “Would you like me to send a snack up for you tonight, Mr. Stockwell?”

“No, Emma. Thanks.”

She went out and he followed, pausing to lock up the offices behind him. When he turned back to the wide hallway, Emma Hightower had disappeared.

Cord took the West stairway to the second floor, and his rooms, which were also in the West Wing, above the suite of offices. He passed up the door to his own bedroom, at the end of the wing, and proceeded straight to the room with the robin’s-egg-blue walls, where his daughter should, by all rights, be asleep in her crib.

He paused before the closed door, listening—for a baby’s cry, or possibly a woman’s soft lullaby. But all he heard was silence.

Carefully, hardly realizing he was holding his breath, Cord turned the brass knob and slowly pushed open the door. The room was dark, the shades drawn against the moon outside. He tiptoed in, across the soft blue rug that in the daylight showed a pattern of swirling stars.

Yes. She was there. Sound asleep. He stood very still. After a minute, as the silence stretched out, he realized he could hear her breathing in tiny, even sighs.

As his eyes adjusted, he saw her more clearly, her round baby cheeks, her fat little mouth, that soft dark hair and the stubborn little chin.

All Stockwell. Yes.

He felt something tighten inside his chest.

All Stockwell.

Mine.

So strange. He’d never seen himself as a father. In all likelihood, he wasn’t going to be a very good one. He worked hard and he played harder, and he left the joys of family for other men. He was too much like the old man who lay dying at the other end of the house, and he knew it, to be any good as a husband. Pity the poor woman who might have married him. He would have made her life a misery, because he’d betray a wife eventually. Monogamy just plain wasn’t in him.

However, he’d always tried to be responsible, in his own way. He liked women. Plural. Well, not several at once. But a lot of them, one at a time. And while he was liking them, he’d always been damn careful not to get one of them pregnant. But apparently, with Marnie Lott—whose face, he felt a little ashamed to admit, he could hardly remember—he hadn’t been quite careful enough.

And now there was Becky.

The more he got used to her, the more he looked at her and burped her and held her in his arms, the more he thought that having her was just fine.

Perfect, really.

He’d done his bit toward perpetuating the family line. And he hadn’t had to get married and ruin some poor woman’s life to do it.

Becky made a small, cooing sound. But she didn’t wake. She cooed again, and rubbed her tiny lips together, then turned her head with a sigh toward the wall.

Cord stayed very still. He didn’t want to wake her, really. She might start crying and then Ms. Miller would come flying in here, shooting him narrow-eyed looks—and then probably deciding it was time he learned to do more than burping. He’d end up changing a diaper or something equally unsettling. He knew that woman. And he understood the kinds of things she was going to start expecting him to do.

But Becky’s eyes stayed shut. He watched the gentle rising and falling of her tiny chest and realized she wasn’t going to wake up, after all.

He was just about to tiptoe out when he heard a faint sound—the creaking of a chair, perhaps, or the squeak of a floorboard. He looked up, through the open door to the playroom and beyond.

A sliver of golden light shown beneath the closed door to the nanny’s room.

Ms. Miller was still awake.

Should that surprise him? It was only ten-thirty. No real reason she should necessarily have been sleeping.

Except, maybe, that he pictured her as someone who went to bed at twilight and rose before dawn.

He pictured her in a white cotton nightgown, with little bits of lace in small ruffled rows, at the cuffs and around the neck. The kind of nightgown a young girl would wear, so modest, covering everything—unless she just happened to stand in front of a lamp.

And then a man would be able to see it all: soft, secret curves sweetly outlined, and a tempting dark shadow in the V where her thighs joined…

Cord shook his head—hard.

What the hell? Was it possible he’d just had a sexual fantasy concerning Ms. Miller?