Project: Runaway Heiress Read Free Page A

the same time. It felt as though an angry gorilla was trapped inside her chest, rattling her rib cage to get out.
    And her stomach...her stomach was pitching and rolling so badly, she thought she must surely know how it felt to be on a ship that was going down in a storm-tossed sea. If she didn’t lose her quickly scarfed-down breakfast in the next ten seconds, it would be a miracle.
    To keep that from happening, she leaned forward, tucking her head over her knees. Over them, because it was nearly impossible to get between them in the slim, tailored skirt she’d chosen for her first day of working undercover and with a false identity.
    Lillian. Blech. It was the best name she’d been able to come up with that she thought she would answer to naturally, the blending of her first and middle names—Lily and Ann.
    And as a last name, she’d gone with something simple and also easily identifiable, at least to her. George—what she and her sisters had called their first pet. A lazy, good-natured basset hound their father had found wandering around the parking lot where he worked.
    Her mother had been furious right up until the moment she’d realized George woofed at the top of his lungs the minute anyone stepped foot on their property. From that point on, he’d been her “very best guard dog” and had gotten his own place setting of people food on the floor beside the dining-room table whenever they sat down to eat.
    So Lillian George it was. Even though being referred to as Lillian made her feel like a matronly, middle-aged librarian.
    Then again, she sort of looked like a librarian.
    Her usual style, and definitely her own designs, leaned very strongly toward the bright, bold and carefree. She loved color and prints, anything vibrant and flirty and fun.
    But for her position at Ashdown Abbey, she’d needed to be much more prim and proper. Not to mention doing as much as she could to disguise her identity and avoid being recognized or linked in any way to Zaccaro Fashions.
    She could only hope that the change of name and switch to a wardrobe drawn entirely from Ashdown Abbey’s own line of business attire, coupled with the glasses and darkening of her normally light blond hair would be enough to keep anyone at the company from figuring out who she really was.
    It helped, too, that Zaccaro Fashions was only moderately successful. She and her sisters weren’t exactly media darlings. They’d been photographed here or there, appeared in magazines or society pages upon occasion, but mostly in relation to their father and their family’s monetary worth. But she would be surprised if most people—even those familiar with the industry—would recognize any one of them if they passed on the street. Although Zoe was doing her level best to change that by going out on the town and getting caught behaving badly on a more and more regular basis.
    After a couple of minutes, Lily’s pulse, the spinning of her head and the lurching in her stomach all began to slow. She’d made it this far. She’d made it past human resources with her creatively worded but fairly accurate résumé and her apparently not-so-rusty-after-all interview skills. Then she’d stood in front of corporate CEO Nigel Statham himself without being found out or dragged away in handcuffs.
    He also hadn’t followed her out of his office, shaking a finger at her deceit, or instructed security to meet her at her desk. Everything was quiet, calm, completely normal, as far as she could tell.
    Ashdown Abbey certainly didn’t have the hum of voices and sewing machines in the background the way the Zaccaro Fashions offices did. But, then, Zaccaro Fashions wasn’t a major, multimillion-dollar operation the way Ashdown Abbey was, either. They hadn’t yet reached the point where their corporate offices and manufacturing area were two separate entities.
    Frankly, Lily thought she could use the mechanical buzz of a sewing machine or her sisters’ laughter as she worked