Kane (BBW Billionaire Romance) (2 page)

A
hot August sun
beat down on Daniella Marquardt as she slowly climbed the thirty-five steps from the sidewalk to the front doors of Stark International’s new world headquarters in Raleigh, North Carolina. Sweat gathered between her breasts and thighs. One hand clutched occasionally at the handrail that ran up the center of the granite steps as small, recurring waves of dizziness threatened to send her toppling all the way down to the circular drive.

It wasn’t the heat or the voluptuous size of her sweaty breasts and thighs that made her wobbly. She hadn’t been looking after herself the last few days, not since she had arrived home to find a very unpleasant letter from an even more unpleasant man taped to her front door. Since yesterday, she couldn’t even go home and had plan to leave the state.

Even if leaving meant she was breaking the law.

Before she fled North Carolina, she was making a last ditch attempt at observing social graces—tracking down the man who had saved her niece’s life. She was pretty sure he worked in the massive granite building that looked like a cross between a courthouse and a prison with its fancy stone blocks and too few windows and doors.

The company was the only address or witness contact information listed on the police report for her sister’s death. Calling the company didn’t get Daniella any response. If Trent Kane was an employee, the front desk apparently didn’t care whether he received his messages. She had checked LinkedIn and any number of sites, but she couldn’t find anything out about Stark International or Kane. She could have dug deeper, but she was only trying to thank the man.

This sweltering Friday afternoon would be her last attempt. She had more important things to focus her dwindling energy on.

Her purse snagging on something at the end of the handrail, Daniella jerked to a halt. She pulled a legal-size manila envelope out of the bag and gave an ineffectual tug, angling her head to see where the strap had caught. As she stared at the puzzle, twisting the purse, something soft and warm slid along the edge of her wrist, the brief contact short circuiting her brain for a second. Her brain switched back on when a strong, masculine hand entered her field of vision to unhook the strap from where a bolt protruded at the end pole.

“Thank you.”

Smiling, she lifted her gaze but the man didn’t stop, didn’t so much as look back as she voiced her appreciation.

He just kept walking.

The smile evaporated into a scowl as Daniella stared at his back. Looking at the expensive, tailored suit that draped his body, she figured she should probably consider herself lucky that the man had helped at all.

It wasn’t just the way the cut and fabric screamed “money.” The body it housed was tall, athletic, with broad shoulders and a powerful upper torso that tucked in as it reached the waist. His walk oozed an irritating confidence that reminded her of the most egotistical of the star athletes from her high school days a decade ago.

With a sharp snort, she continued toward the black glass doors the man had disappeared through, her steps restricted by the knee-length pencil skirt she wore. The day had started with her wearing sensible dress slacks, the material and a coordinating blouse much lighter in weight than what she perspired in as she pushed the door inward.

The earlier outfit had died a sudden death when she pulled Christine out of the car seat at the sitter’s and was rewarded with fifteen pounds of vomit from a twelve-pound baby. Daniella made a quick change into the only other businesslike outfit she had with her—a heavy dress jacket with a too tight skirt hugging curves that had gotten curvier since she had purchased the ensemble.

Scowl deepening, she stepped into the air conditioned interior and almost turned around and walked straight out.

What kind of business had an x-ray machine and metal detector in its lobby?

No wonder her web searches had come up empty!

She looked around for some kind of reception desk, but a velvet rope on each side of the glass doors herded her toward a female guard in charge of the machines. Beyond the ropes, there were only two other people in the lobby, the male who had unhooked her purse and an older man with whom he was engaged in earnest, whispered conversation.

At the exact moment her attention landed on the men, her rude rescuer looked over. His gaze locked on hers for an uncomfortable moment before turning away in complete disinterest.

Forget about men, she admonished with a sigh as she approached the woman at the metal detector. For the next eighteen years, her life was devoted to Christine, her two-month old niece.

Placing her purse on the conveyor belt, she waited for the machine to start. When it didn’t, she looked at the woman.

“What is your business at Stark International?” the guard asked with a tone that bordered on the kind actors used in movies when they were a cop with a suspect in the interrogation room.

“I…” her hands smoothed nervously at her skirt. Telling the woman she was here to talk to Colonel Mustard about a lead pipe he’d left in her conservatory was probably a terrible idea.

Leaving her car and taking the first step up the stairs was probably a terrible idea. It was an imposing building, with an imposing lobby and imposing staff. She didn’t have an appointment and didn’t know if the man she was searching for even existed. The police officer’s handwriting in the report hadn’t been the cleanest.

The guard’s hand moved toward her utility belt. With a glance, Daniella saw the woman’s fingers curl around a canister that she guessed was mace or pepper spray.

“I need to speak with Mr. Trent Kane,” Daniella blurted, her cheeks immediately warming from her panicked outburst.

“You’re not on the list,” the guard stated.

Daniella quirked an eyebrow. What list? There was no clipboard nearby, no computer or anything else that might display a visitor’s list. Did the woman memorize it before each shift?

“If you’re not—”

Whatever the guard was going to add was cut off by a buzzing elsewhere along her utility belt. Her hand shifted from the canister to what looked like a beeper to the right of her buckle. She angled the device, staring impassively at its display for a few seconds before her mouth flattened into a stern line.

She slapped at a button on the X-ray machine and the belt began to carry Daniella’s purse past the rubbery curtain. Daniella moved toward the metal detector.

“Envelope,” the woman grunted.

“Oh…it’s only…” she trailed off, reading the guard’s expression.

The woman really wanted to use that pepper spray!

Letting the guard take the envelope, Daniella passed through the metal detector and waited patiently at the other end of the X-ray machine for her purse and envelope to emerge. Seeing the guard approach with a wand that looked identical to what was used at airports, Daniella allowed a faint gasp to escape over how much security was in place at Stark International.

With a brisk, detached professionalism, the guard moved the wand near the perimeter of Daniella’s body—above her shoulders, along her arms, over the curves and dips of her torso then all the way down to her knees where the skirt ended.

Putting away the wand, she extended her hand.

“You’ll need to leave your cell phone with me.”

Daniella offered the woman a blank stare for a few seconds before asking, “I can’t go up if I don’t?”

The guard’s brows knitted into one uncompromising line that could have used a pair of tweezers and a little plucking.

“Exactly.”

Shoulders sagging, Daniella reached into the purse, but hesitated.

“What if I have an emergency call?” Despite all the precautions she had taken yesterday, such a call wasn’t out of the question.

Cold silence stared her in the face.

The company was daunting. If she had showed up at a pickle factory and received this treatment, she would have deemed keeping her phone more important than her unannounced business with Mr. Kane. But maybe all this cloak and dagger behavior meant that Kane was the kind of man who could help her—again.

Still wishing on shooting stars, Daniella.

Right, she thought, dejectedly removing the phone and handing it over. She wouldn’t get her hopes up. The man probably worked in accounting.

The guard put the cell in a drawer then pulled out a visitor’s card with a clip attached, swiped the card’s stripe through a device at the end of the X-ray machine then swiveled the device in Daniella’s direction.

“Press your right thumb against the screen and hold until the green light appears.”

Turning to comply, Daniella heard the elevator doors open. Holding her thumb to the scanner, she glanced over her shoulder, expecting that the doors were opening for one or both of the men. The two males had already slipped away. Instead, a fifty-something female emerged from the elevator with a polite smile on her face and a digital tablet in her hand.

“Miss Marquardt, if you’ll come with me.”

Daniella took one step forward then froze.

She hadn’t said her name, had she?

Certain she hadn’t, Daniella looked at the scanner.

“Oh, no,” the older woman laughed pleasantly, taking the visitor’s card and clipping it to Daniella’s lapel. “Thumb prints take at least several minutes to process with all the permission protocols we have to navigate. Facial recognition is so much faster.”

“I’m Lindsey,” the woman said, stepping back and sweeping her hand toward the elevator doors. “Mr. Kane’s secretary. I do expect a wait before he’ll be able to see you.”

“A wait?” Daniella frowned, her displeasure directed inward. Not getting to see the man should have occurred to her, but the last two months had her running on empty.

Especially the last two days.

“Will it be long?” she asked clutching the manila envelope to her chest. “I’m on my way to the county jail.”

S
tanding in the operations room
, Trent Kane studied the camera feed for his office six doors down. His attention focused on the woman sitting in one of his visitor chairs, her hands nervously twisting around a legal-sized manila envelope.

“The papers don’t have to be handed to you in order for you to be served,” Teddy Gallant, chief legal counsel for the company, advised. “You already admitted you’re here by letting her past the lobby.”

“She said she was going to jail,” Kane mused, stroking lightly at the precisely trimmed beard bordering his strong jaw line.

“Actually, she said ‘to the county jail,’” Teddy corrected. “Semantically, that is quite different and something you would usually catch. Are you sure you don’t know her?”

Kane cut a sharp glance in the attorney’s direction. He was certain he had never seen the woman before encountering her outside the building. Beyond her being the only other person on the steps, he had noticed the nervous dance of her fingers along the handrail and the way she paused for a second every few steps, the vulnerable roll of her shoulders when she stopped stirring something protective inside him.

To his surprise and continued confusion, he had slowed down so as not to overtake her on the steps. Hanging back, he had watched the mesmerizing tick tock pendulum of her plump bottom, his cock slowly responding. That unexpected physical response was the source of his consternation. The woman sitting in his visitor chair was nothing like the paid submissives he used once then discarded. Those females were lean, some anemically so, others athletic. One had been an aspiring cage fighter, and he’d been tempted for a few minutes to bring her back a second time for the sake of novelty.

In contrast, Daniella Marquardt had an hourglass figure with a couple of hours added on. Yet the way her clothes hugged at her body filled him with a sudden curiosity as to what she looked like naked. That was before she had said his name in the lobby while he was talking to Gallant.

Hearing his identity burst past startled lips as plump as Daniella’s bottom, Kane’s ebbing erection had returned with an immediate vigor.

What the hell was that all about?

“I can speak with her instead,” Gallant offered. “If this is a legal matter—”

“No,” Kane decided, stepping away from the attorney. Turning to one of the operations team, he jerked his head at the bank of monitors. “Cut the feed from my office.”

Knowing better than to argue with the company’s Chief Operations Officer and de facto CEO, the man immediately complied, his face a blank mask as he executed the order.

“This is irregular,” Gallant objected, following Kane from the room.

Stopping in the hallway, Kane shrugged. “Yes, but it’s not boring. You know what’s boring, Teddy?”

The older man’s face soured at the question. He shook his head, his expression one of parental disappointment. Kane’s opinion of the legal department as delaying meddlers was well known and oft repeated in subtle ways.

“One of these days you’ll learn,” Gallant said, walking away. “You don’t have to walk the razor’s edge to feel alive. There are times when a cautious approach is best.”

Kane huffed but let the man get the last word in. For an attorney, that was like throwing the old timer a bone, keeping him content and, occasionally, making him happy.

Reaching his outer office, Kane nodded at Lindsey before slipping silently past the double doors with their well-oiled hinges.

Daniella didn’t act as if she had heard him, which was exactly what he wanted. Studying her on camera wasn’t good enough. A person’s energy didn’t translate through the screen, neither did scent. And, as high definition as the cameras were, they lost the delicate lines of her curves and the shine on her light, golden brown hair.

A dozen more stealthy steps and he was within arm’s reach of the woman. Inhaling softly, he detected no perfume. He had mentally noted its absence while passing her on the steps outside the building. He would have to get much closer to discover the buried scents, the ones that most delighted him.

With an intentionally brusque cough, he cleared his throat, watching with a smirk as her body lifted some three inches off the seat cushion while she released a startled sound.

With that soft, plump ass touching the cushion once more, Daniella slowly twisted her upper body and looked at him. Her face instantly crumbled from a polite mask to…

Scorn?

The smirking corner of his mouth lifted a little higher as he skirted the massive teak desk and settled in his chair. Keeping a relaxed demeanor, he leaned back and stared at the woman, a cozy satisfaction filling him as she tried to resume that neutral mask while micro expressions she couldn’t possibly control betrayed her inner turmoil.

Kane could read that Daniella wanted to leave but felt that she must stay. She didn’t like him, perhaps because of how he had accelerated away after unhooking her purse. There was also a heavy dose of anxiety, which was standard for anyone sitting on her side of the desk.

People came to Stark International because they had a problem to solve or a valuable asset to protect.

Reading the last feeling that skittered across Daniella’s face, his chest tightened.

Fear.

“Why are you hear?” Kane asked, his voice softening as he stared into the foggy gray eyes with their thin obsidian streaks that stretched from her pupils to the extreme edge of her irises.

Her lips moved, then she shut them to swallow roughly. He lifted an encouraging brow, relieved that her more subtle expressions had turned back toward anxious, the fear—and scorn—gone for the moment.

“You delivered a baby two months ago.”

Her hands twisted at the envelope and his gut twisted right along with them. Gallant was right. She was here to slap him with a lawsuit or try to convince him to give her money so she wouldn’t sue.

But her name was Marquardt. That name hadn’t come up in his brief search into the life and death of Lynn Hoover. The pregnant girl had been a prostitute. Judging by the track marks he’d seen on her inner thighs when he had pulled the kid out of her, she had been a junkie at some point in her life.

But the baby had been healthy, surviving when the mother had not. The last he’d seen of either, they were being loaded into an ambulance.

“What does that have to do with you?” he asked, his voice turning rough as he recalled the details of that night.

The girl shouldn’t have been at the hotel, a place many of its regular visitors had nicknamed “Gray’s” in recent years. She wasn’t upscale enough for the wealthy men who took rooms for the night but only used them for a few hours.

She certainly shouldn’t have been with man who had bought her time.

Kane’s eyes drifted shut. He snapped them open before he could remember the mess he’d made of the girl’s client. From his room down the hall, he had known the screams leaking into the corridor weren’t right. She was in terror and in extreme pain. Pain was a common experience in the hotel—but not terror. Anyone with that kink took it someplace far more private, and soundproof.

“What does that have to do with you?” Kane repeated, clipping each word at its end.

Daniella blinked, the reflex slow enough he had time to see how long and thick her lashes were despite the lack of mascara. She wasn’t, he noted, wearing any makeup at all. The flawless skin and pink glow to her cheeks were natural.

“Christine is my niece.”

Kane’s brain uncharacteristically blurred. He shook his head, forcing himself away from the contemplation of the woman’s soft, full lips. “I thought her name was Lynn.”

“The baby is Christine,” Daniella answered. “Lynn is…was my half sister.”

His gaze narrowed. He had briefly investigated the dead woman, the act nothing more than professional curiosity he had never learned to turn aside, even when there was no point to it. And if ever there was something pointless to him, it was the life and death of Lynn Hoover.

“Same father?” he asked, knowing that no father had been listed on Lynn’s birth certificate. A certain amount of digging showed that Lynn’s dead mother, Ronelle, had no other children, at least not any born in North Carolina. She also had no out-of-state address history.

Daniella shook her head, her back straightening and her chin lifting a notch. “Roni, our mother, had me when she was sixteen. I was adopted by the Marquardts, but I’m not here to discuss that.”

Kane filed away the fact that soft, sweet Daniella carried a relatively large chip on her shoulder concerning the circumstances of her birth.

Realizing that he was cataloging information thoroughly irrelevant to his interests, he laughed inwardly. The job never left him, and he never left the job. Work was the only relationship that had ever left him satisfied.

With a glance at the envelope she continued to mangle, Kane extended his hand. “So you’ve got custody and you’re here to threaten me with a lawsuit. For what, a wrongful death or a wrongful life?”

Her face paled at the question, or at least at one part of it.

“Wrongful life?”

He threw up his hands. “If there’s something profoundly wrong with the kid, you might want to consider it’s because your sister was a junkie who shot up heroin rather than anything I might have done, or failed to do, in pulling the baby out.”

Tears glazed the woman’s eyes but she held them in check.

“Christine is in perfect health,” she said, her voice a hot, warbling whisper.

“Great.” He forced a smile. He was genuinely glad the baby was okay, but he wanted this woman out of his office with a sudden desperation he couldn’t identify. The flood of emotions waiting to break free from her made him uncomfortable.

All that touchy-feely crap was for the masses.

For the weak.

And there was nothing as infectious with its weakness as a woman.

“I came here to thank you,” she clarified. “For saving Christine.”

His hands swept outward from one another along the surface of the desk, his forced smile widening in equal measure. “You’re welcome. I’ll have Lindsey—”

Seeing Daniella rise on shaking legs and start to walk away, Kane slid his finger off the intercom button. He had enough experience with people fainting to recognize that, the way Daniella was moving, she wasn’t going to stay upright more than a few seconds.

Jumping to his feet, he slid across the corner of his desk, his long frame landing just behind Daniella as she began to fold toward the floor. He scooped her up before she hit the ground, her fluffy frame light compared to the weights he lifted to remain ready for the company’s tactical operations.

Cradling Daniella in his arms, Kane walked to the sofa in his office and sat her down. He took a seat next to her, his knee and elbow in casual contact with the voluptuous curves of her body. Without a word between them, he took the envelope and pulled out the papers.

Typed with an attempt at legalese, it appeared to be a surrender of parental rights, one Merl Wagner named as the father of baby Christine. Said surrender would be made in exchange for the sum of twenty-five thousand dollars.

Regaining at least some of her wits, Daniella tried to snatch the papers out of Kane’s hands. Playing keep away, his muscular shoulder bossing the woman around, he continued reading. When he finished, he lifted his gaze from the waiver to gray eyes that sparkled with the threat of tears.

“You want to tell me what this is about?”