skip the advice and tell me what information you turned up.”
Mick frowned at him and Simon thought that this was the downside of having your best friend work for you. He was less likely to take orders well and more likely to deliver his opinion whether Simon wanted it or not. “What did you find out? I know she’s related to Jacob Hawthorne, but how? Niece?”
“A lot closer than that, as it turns out. She’s his daughter.”
“His what?” Simon went on alert. “His daughter?”
His mind raced as he listened to Mick give him more details.
“Hawthorne and his ex split when Tula was a kid. Mom moved with her to Crystal Bay. Tula visited her father often, but several years ago, she appears to have cut all ties with people here completely—including her father. My source didn’t know much about it, just that Tula’s a sore spot with the old man.”
He had already known about her moving to that little town with her mother, Simon thought. But why would she cut all ties with everyone here, including her father? And why had he never heard about a daughter before? Was the old bastard protecting his child? Simon wouldn’t have thought Jacob Hawthorne capable of familial loyalty.
“And,” Mick added, “seems that when she started publishing children’s books, she began using her middle name, Barrons. It’s a family name, after her maternal grandmother. That grandmother left a will that provided a trust for Tula so that she—”
He straightened up in his desk chair and leaned both forearms on the neatly stacked files on his desk. “How big a trust?”
Mick thumbed through the papers he held. “To you, fairly small. To most of the world, very nice. It at least allowed her to buy her house and support herself while writing.”
“Her books don’t earn much?”
Mick shook his head. “She has a small, but growing readership for her Lonely Bunny series. The money will probably improve, but between her writing and the trust, she gets along and lives well within her limited means.”
“Interesting.” Her father was rich and she lived in a tiny house nearly an hour away from the city. What was the story behind that? he wondered.
“She hasn’t seen her father in a few years that I can find,” Mick continued. “But then, the old man almost never leaves the city, either.”
Hell, Simon thought, Jacob hardly left the Hawthorne building. He had a penthouse suite at the top of the structure that was his company’s headquarters. He ruled his world from the top of his tower and rarely interacted with the “little people.”
But as he thought that, Simon had to wince. Until the other day when he had deliberately gone through the store chatting with his employees, people could have said the same thing about him. There were some very uncomfortable similarities between Simon and his enemy.
“Is there anything else?” he asked, mainly to get his mind off that realization.
“No,” Mick said, laying the sheaf of papers on his lap. “I can probably get more if you want me to dig deeper.”
He thought about that for a moment. If he turned Mick loose and told him to dig, he’d have every piece of information available on Tula Barrons within a couple of days. But did he need more? He now knew who she was. He knew that she was the daughter of his enemy.
That was plenty.
While Mick talked, offering advice that he wasn’t listening to, Simon tried to consider the situation objectively. He was attracted to Tula, obviously. The passions she stirred in him were like nothing he’d ever known. But now he knew who she was and damned if he could bring himself to trust a Hawthorne. So where did that leave him?
“What’re you planning?”
He glanced at Mick. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Right. I’ve seen that look before,” his friend said, settling into the chair in front of Simon’s desk. “Usually just before you’re plotting some major takeover of an unsuspecting CEO.”
Simon laughed and missed his point deliberately. “No CEO is ever unsuspecting.”
“Damn it, Simon, what’re you up to?”
“The less you know, the better off you are,” he said, knowing that his friend would try to argue him out of the plan quickly forming in his mind.
“You mean the less you have to listen to my objections.”
“That, too.”
Mick slapped one hand down hard on the arm of his chair. “You’re crazy, you know that? So what if she’s a Hawthorne? Her father’s a miserable old goat. She’s got nothing to do with him.”
“Doesn’t matter.”
“Damn it, Simon,” Mick continued. “She split with him years ago. Doesn’t even use her real name for God’s sake.”
“She’s still his daughter,” Simon insisted. “Don’t you get it? The daughter of the man who tried to destroy my family is now in charge of when I get custody of my own son. How the hell am I supposed to take that, Mick? What if she just decides to never approve my custody of Nathan?”
“You really think she’d do that?”
“She’s a Hawthorne.” As far as he was concerned, that explained everything. God, he was an idiot. He had actually begun to trust Tula. He’d felt for her. More than he had anyone else in his life. Now he finds out this? For all he knew, Jacob had manufactured Nathan’s mother’s will. Maybe he and his daughter were in this together. Conspiring to dangle his son in front of him only to snatch him back.
He sprang to his feet as if the thought of sitting still another moment was going to kill him. Turning his back on his friend, he stared out the wide window at the view of San Francisco that Tula had admired so the first day he met her.
But instead of the high-rises and the glittering bay beyond the city, he saw her.
Her eyes. Her smile. That damn dimple in her cheek. He heard her sigh, felt the ripples of satisfaction rolling through her body as they took each other.
It had been one night since he had been with her and he wanted her again so badly, it was gnawing at him. Had she planned that, too? Had she deliberately set out to seduce him just so she could crush him later and sit with her father to enjoy the show?
His guts tightened and a cold, hard edge wrapped itself around his heart. The nebulous plan still forming in his mind was looking better and better by the moment.
“If you screw this up, you could be risking your son,” Mick reminded him unnecessarily.
“No,” Simon said, glancing back over his shoulder at his friend. “Don’t you get it? A Hawthorne is in charge of whether or not I’m fit to care for my son. How could I possibly make that any worse?”
“Let me count the ways,” Mick muttered darkly.
“You’ll see,” Simon told him,
