amusement flickered at the corners of Damon’s mouth. “The number was reversed. But something tells me you already knew that.”
Her chin jerked up. “What are you insinuating?”
Damon shrugged. “Thirteen months ago, you quit your job and disappeared. For the past couple of months, ever since I discovered you had opened up your own employment agency, apart from picking up my first call, you’ve consistently failed to return my calls—”
“You know I prefer to work via email. Besides, all the correspondence and contracts go through Howard.”
He glanced around her office again, his gaze briefly settling on the door of the interview room where Rosie was sleeping. “Maybe the address you gave me was a genuine mistake.”
But his tone told her he didn’t believe that.
His gaze shifted thoughtfully back to the door of the interview room and a sharp jolt of adrenaline made her heart pound.
She was suddenly certain that he knew.
A little feverishly, she straightened piles of paper that did not need straightening. The only way Damon could have found out about Rosie was through Emily, although her contact with Emily had been minimal, two interviews and a couple of phone updates. She was not even sure Emily was aware that Zara had a baby. Of course, there were other ways he could have pried into her life. Given that he was in the security and surveillance business and had once been some kind of Special Forces agent in the military, she was certain he could find out whatever he wanted.
Damon’s gaze skimmed her neatly arranged office and Zara did her best to conceal her relief that he was no longer concentrated on the door to the interview room in which Rosie was sleeping. When it came to Damon, usually, she erred on the side of fighting, but today running was at the top of the list—with Rosie tucked invisibly under one arm so he would not uncover that particular guilty secret.
Shockingly, his gaze touched on hers before shifting and she realized he had noticed her hair. She took a calming breath and willed her heart rate to slow. There was nothing wrong with messy hair. It was a windy day. Her hair could have gotten disheveled when she’d gone out for coffee.
A weird part of her acknowledged that she had always known this could happen, that one day her most lucrative client, who also happened to be the father of her child, would walk into her office and she would have to deal with him face-to-face. But, not now, not today, when she was struggling from lack of sleep and with Rosie just feet away in the next room.
The last thing either of them needed was to be inescapably linked by Rosie. A small shudder went through Zara at the thought of the media attention that would erupt once it was found out that Petra Hunt’s daughter, using a new identity, had had a child with Tyler McCall’s nephew. They would come after her; they would come after Rosie. And Damon, apart from making it crystal clear that Zara was not welcome in his life, would hate that she had fooled him.
On cue, a small, snuffling sound came from the interview room. Zara’s heart sped up. Lately, Rosie, who was usually a very good sleeper, was waking up after just a few minutes of restless slumber. A little desperately, she reached for a random file and slapped it down on the desk, trying to make enough noise that Damon would not hear Rosie. “So, now that you’ve found me, what can I do for you? Is there a problem with one of the employees I sent to you? Troy? Or Harold?”
Troy was young, just eighteen, with tattoos and a brow piercing, but he was bright and earnest. Zara had thought he would be perfect for Damon’s IT team. Harold had been an older public servant who had failed to find a job through other employment agencies, owing to a rather unfortunate skin condition, and in desperation had come to Zara. She had found a place for him in Damon’s accounts department.
Damon frowned slightly, as if he didn’t know who either Troy or Harold were, then his face cleared. “They’re fine, as far as I know. This is the problem.”
He dropped the tabloid newspaper, which he had been carrying under one arm, on her desk. It was folded open at a tacky gossip columnist’s page.
She drew a calming breath and forced herself to study a grainy black-and-white photo of Damon’s younger brother, Ben, who had his arm flung around Emily’s slim waist. The blaring caption, Magnum Security Heir’s Hot Affair with Blonde Temp, practically leaped off the page.
Snatching up the paper, she skimmed the story—which was the stuff of her nightmares—with growing horror. Thankfully, the detail was minimal. To her relief, the name of her employment agency had not been mentioned...yet.
She took a closer look at the photograph. Details she had not noticed first off finally registered. Emily’s hair seemed longer and curlier. Gone were the subtle makeup and low-key suits, the crisp blouses that had seemed to summarize Zara’s star temp as sensible, trustworthy and professional. Emily looked younger and a touch bohemian. She certainly no longer looked like the poster girl for Westlake Employment Agency.
Zara quickly read the sketchy article. Of course, the journalist had painted Emily as a fortune-hunting employee and Ben as the kind of high-powered playboy businessman who was only interested in a quick fling and who would not be easily caught by a mere office girl.
Compassion for Emily mixed with a surge of outrage and a fierce desire to protect her protégé. Just because Emily had fallen for Ben and decided to make the best of herself did not make her a cheap, trashy opportunist. Zara had lost count of the times the papers had portrayed her mother as cheap and on the make, when the truth was that her mother had been so gorgeous she had literally had to fend off men. And yes, some of those men had been breathtakingly rich.
When Petra died, the behavior of the tabloids and women’s magazines had worsened. They had smeared her reputation even more before turning their malicious spotlight on Zara. Although, luckily, Petra had always made sure Zara was hidden from the media, so their store of background information had been meager. Most of the photos they’d had were blurred shots of Zara as a child or as a plump teenager taken through telephoto lenses.
Horrified and frightened by the relentless pursuit of the media, Zara had ditched her degree and disappeared. Angel Atrides, the fictional spoiled party girl the media seemed intent on creating, had become the ordinary, invisible person she longed to be—Zara Westlake. Zara had been her paternal grandmother’s name, Westlake her maternal grandmother’s maiden name.
Her mother’s cousin Phoebe Westlake, a sharp-edged accountant who was ill with leukemia, had provided the hideout Zara needed in the South Island city of Dunedin while she had painstakingly reinvented her life. Which had made it all the more frustrating when, almost three years later, with a new name and a degree in business management—in effect a new life—Phoebe’s last act before she had died had been to secure Zara a job interview with the nephew of Tyler McCall.
Not that Zara had made that connection until after she had taken the job, because Damon’s surname, Smith, was so neutral and ordinary that she hadn’t suspected the link. To further muddy the waters, Damon was reclusive by nature, avoiding the media. It hadn’t been until two weeks into her job and after she had made the mistake of sleeping with Damon, that he had handed her a takeover bid for Tyler McCall’s electric company.
She had finally understood exactly who Damon was.
As much as she needed to sit down now, Zara remained standing. Once again, the desire to run was uppermost, but she instantly dismissed that option. In setting up her business after Rosie was born she had made a stand. She was over running.
She was tired of giving up things that were important, like home and friendships and career choices, and having to start fresh somewhere else. Having to be someone else. If she ran now, she would have to give up her cozy rented cottage, which was just a twenty-minute commute from her office. She would have to abandon her business, which she loved with passion, because, finally, all of her study and hard work had paid off and she had something of substance that was hers. Plus, if she walked away now she would be deeply in debt, with no way to repay it.
The thought of