Secrets of the Tycoon's Bride Read Free

club—a job she’d specifically targeted when her research revealed he was the new deed-holder to her family’s estate.
    But marriage? No way. She’d had one disastrous marriage that began for all the wrong reasons. It wasn’t an experience she ever intended repeating.
    Not even as a business deal.
    A very lucrative business deal.
    Forget it.
    She padded barefoot to the kitchen, withdrew last night’s Chinese takeout leftovers and popped them in the microwave. The scent of Hunan shrimp mingled with citrus in the air as she peeled an orange to go with her dinner.
    If you lived with him you’d get to know him well.
    Well enough to convince him let her pry up a few closet floorboards in the fifteen-million-dollar estate he’d bought eighteen months ago?
    Why had he spent a fortune on a house if he wasn’t going to live there? She’d thought maybe he intended to remodel first, but a check at the courthouse revealed no building permits had been issued prior to her arrival, and as far as she could tell with her frequent drive-bys nothing beyond routine maintenance had been done to the house since her move to Florida.
    A lawn-care company groomed the lush yard, and she’d seen a pool-service company’s van in the circular driveway. She thought she’d spotted tennis courts on the other side of the stone and wrought iron fence but the bougainvillea hedge was too thick to be certain, and the exclusive Sunset Island wasn’t exactly the kind of neighborhood where you could climb fences to peer over the top without getting arrested.
    The estate wasn’t within walking distance of the club like Adam’s condo, but even in heavy traffic and with all the South Beach road construction the commute would take less than twenty minutes.
    While the food heated she set the table. Her mother—her heart hitched—her adoptive mother, she corrected, had always made a big production of setting the table. It was one of the many things she and Lauryn had done together. All that had changed eleven months ago when Lauryn’s father died and her “mother” had shared the letters.
    Letters that had been locked in a safety-deposit box for decades.
    Letters from her father’s former lover.
    Letters that had upended Lauryn’s life and sent her on a three-thousand-mile quest to find the woman who’d loved her enough to have her but not enough to keep her.
    Adrianna Laurence.
    Her birthmother.
    How could her father have lied? Lauryn asked herself for the billionth time. And how could her mother have let him?
    The timer beeped. On autopilot Lauryn retrieved the carton, scraped the contents onto a plate and pulled a Diet Coke with lime from the fridge.
    Hadn’t her father realized what a shock it would be for Lauryn to suddenly discover she wasn’t who she’d thought she was for the past twenty-six years?
    Hadn’t he known finding out she was the by-product of her father’s affair with a Miami Beach socialite would make Lauryn doubt everything she’d once held as truth?
    Why hadn’t he guessed that finding out he’d married his deceased buddy’s pregnant wife only to provide a mother for his infant daughter would make Lauryn question the very fabric of her parents’ marriage? Or that discovering the child growing in her “mother’s” rounded tummy in all those pictures wasn’t Lauryn at all, but a baby boy who had died before taking his first breath?
    Why couldn’t her father have told her about her birthmother earlier? Before Adrianna had died. If he’d done so Lauryn would have had a chance to meet the woman who’d given her life and ask questions. She could have heard her mother’s voice, seen her face and learned about her parents’ relationship. What attracted them? What separated them? What had driven Adrianna to give her baby away and why had she died so young?
    Even Lauryn’s name was part