Fourteen
“Rose, this might come as a shock, but we’re not divorced.”
Lincoln Hart looked around the room to make sure there was nothing pointed, heavy, or sharp enough to take out an eye, bash in his skull or maim a fairly important body part. Satisfied, he studied the woman he hadn’t seen in ten years and realized Rose Tucker was even more beautiful than she’d been then, when she took his breath away every time he saw her. When he was so in love that being apart from her was almost a physical ache.
Rose. Even her name was lovely. She was more polished than the young woman he’d walked away from. And more hostile, but he couldn’t blame her.
After what he’d just said she was going to hate him even more than she had a decade ago, and she’d hated him quite a lot then.
“What? Not even a hello?” The hostility in her dark blue eyes wavered to make way for surprise, then suspicion.
“I thought it best to lead with the headline, make sure you got the information before slamming the door in my face.”
“You’re telling me we’re still married? I don’t believe you. What kind of game are you playing now? What in the world would you have to gain by pretending we’re still married?”
“I’m not pretending. And I’m as thrown by this as you are.”
“I doubt that.” She put a hand to her forehead as if feeling dizzy.
Linc reached out and curved his fingers around her upper arm to steady her. “Let’s sit down.”
Apparently his touch snapped her out of it because she yanked her arm away. He half expected her to take a swing at him and wouldn’t blame her if she did. This whole mess was his fault from start to finish. If there was anything at all positive about his screwup, it was that his family knew nothing about his brief, whirlwind marriage.
His brothers, Sam and Cal, would rag on him relentlessly, which was bad enough. Katherine and Hastings Hart, his mother and her husband, and his younger sister, Ellie, would be disappointed in him for the way he’d handled the situation. But none of that mattered now. He and Rose had a problem and it was all on him.
“We should probably sit—”
“Don’t be nice to me, Linc. We both know that’s not who you are.”
“What I did to you was lousy, Rose, but that’s not who I am.” He wasn’t the man she thought she’d married, but he wasn’t a complete jerk, either.
They stood in the postage-stamp-sized living area of her apartment, which was upstairs from her small interior design studio in an old, redbrick building on one of Prosper, Texas’s, side streets. The fact that this one-room place had charm was a reflection of her skill as an interior designer. The paint was pale gold except for one olive-green accent wall in the living room. The kitchen and living areas were set apart by the clever placement of the love-seat-sized sofa. Wall hangings, knickknacks, lamps and throw pillows added color without being stuffy and formal. It was homey and warm. He liked her taste very much.
“You must have questions,” he said.
“How do you know we’re not divorced?” She tucked a strand of long black hair behind her ear.
“My lawyer passed away after a short illness and I had to hire a new one to handle my personal affairs. He insisted on looking over all of my official documents. There was a marriage license but no divorce decree. After researching the situation, he discovered that the papers were never filed with the court.”
“How could that happen?”
It was hard not to cringe at her bewildered tone, especially since he’d assured her he would handle everything. “I hired a half-price lawyer and got what I paid for—half a divorce.”
“Why would you do that, Linc? Your family is worth millions and Hart Industries must have a platoon of the best and brightest legal minds around. It doesn’t make sense that you would get an attorney from outside the company, especially someone incompetent. The Harts don’t do things like that.”
Leave it to Rose to zero in on the core of the problem. It wasn’t something he wanted to talk about, but she had a right to know. “I’m not a Hart.”
“Excuse me? You’re what now?”
“Hastings Hart isn’t my father.”
“No way.” She shook her head.
“It’s true. Hastings and Katherine confirmed it. I found out right after we got married.”
“How?”
“My biological father came to see me. He confessed he had a...thing with my mother.”
“You told me your parents were deliriously happy,” Rose said with equal amounts of accusation and defensiveness in her voice.
“That was their story. Turns out there was a rough patch. My older brothers were born nine months apart—twins the hard way, she always said. The fact is she had her hands full raising them and Hastings wasn’t around much. He was traveling, working long hours to build Hart Industries into something he could leave to his sons.”
“So she turned to another man and had an affair?”
“He and my mother were legally separated and headed for a divorce, so technically it wasn’t an extramarital affair.”
“And you never knew? Never suspected?” There was skepticism in the questions.
“No. They worked through their problems and he promised to give me his name. Both of them agreed there was no reason for me to know.”
“And your biological father was all right with the arrangement?”
“He was a lawyer on the partner track at an ultraconservative law firm that specialized in divorce. Sleeping with a client and getting her pregnant would have caused a scandal that might have cost him his career, so keeping it secret was fine with him.”
“Yet he told you all those years later. Why?”
“Midlife crisis, I guess. He never had children.” He stopped, waiting for the anger to roll through him so he could continue the act and pretend he was reconciled to the ugly secret. “No one to carry on the family name got to him, probably.”
“You don’t know?”
“It was a short conversation. At that moment I didn’t know whether or not he was lying.”
