Page 7 of A Baby to Make Her His Bride

“I’ll take you. It’s overgrown. You might get lost.”

Terrific.

It was August, so the ground was dry and the air warm, but there was coolness in the shadows beneath the boughs of the trees that spoke of old growth and time measured in centuries.

Jasper walked this path every day. It was easy enough to follow, but it would be just like a city girl to wander into the ferns and get disoriented. The last thing he needed right now was to have hissister-in-lawlost in the woods.

Why did that word bother him so much? They were related by marriage. That was a true fact and, someday soon, he would regain his old life. He would visit his sister and her baby and would cross paths with Vienna and her husband—

No. She was divorcing. That was why she was here. She was taking cover while it was announced. The gossip sites did love a celebrity breakup, but she wasn’t a celebrity in the league of an American pop star. How bad could it be? From what he’d read...

Huh. She’d put him in his place on that one, hadn’t she? He’d been subjected to false reports himself, so he had some sympathy on that front.

“What did she say?” he asked over his shoulder.

“Who?” Her voice was farther behind him than he’d realized.

He had spent half his life off-grid, so ducking branches or stepping over roots was as easy as a flat sidewalk for him. He stopped and watched her pick her way carefully down a short drop, clinging to a sapling. She paused to drink in the moss-laden branches around them, expression serene and all the more appealing for that softness.

“My sister,” he clarified, yanking his thoughts from where they shouldn’t go. “You said you would disregard what she had said about me and believe what you’d read online.”

“Oh. Um. I don’t know. That everything online was wrong,” she said wryly. “That you looked after her when your mom passed and taught her to drive. Things like that. She said you probably would have killed Hunter with your bare hands if you’d been around when she turned up pregnant.” She chuckled dryly, but he thought he caught a glimpse of agony in her expression before she blinked and looked curiously to where a crow was cawing in the trees.

“It sounds as though our father was prepared to do that when he showed up at Hunter’s wedding.” The fact Jasper hadn’t been there for Amelia, and had instead caused her and their father untold distress, was a continuous knife of guilt in his belly.

“Tobias was pretty livid,” she agreed, smile oddly wistful. “I think it’s nice that you’re so close, though. It makes me envious.”

“You and Hunter aren’t close?”

“Not in the same way. Our upbringing was very different from yours.”

“Wow.” He would go ahead and believe his first impression of her, if that was how she talked. If the opinion of people like her mattered to him, he would point out that his net worth was in the same neighborhood as hers.

“Not because of means,” she said, cross and defensive. “Our father remarried. Hunter was tapped to take over the family business and it’s not exactly a dry cleaning outlet. He was busy with that so we had a very different upbringing fromeach other.”

“You don’t work for Wave-Com?” It was a national communications conglomerate. There had to be room for her.

“No. My—Neal does. He’s the VP of Sales and Marketing.”

Her ex, he presumed.

“I couldn’t believe who Amelia married,” he admitted and started walking again, still astonished his sister was married at all.

He’d been in a remote village on a tributary of the Bío-Bío River, tanned deeply enough to pass for a local when a stranger had come looking for the Canadian who was reputed to be staying in the area.

I’m working for your sister’s husband. You can trust me, he had said to Jasper in Spanish.

Like hell. Jasper had impatiently waved him away, sending him downstream.

The next day, the man had come back with a story from Amelia’s childhood that Jasper genuinely believed she wouldn’t share with anyone except someone she trusted. By then, he’d been gone more than a year. A year in which he’d made very little headway, despite constant efforts to raise investigations in Chile. Along with causing a painful loss, REM-Ex had cut him off from more than his family and his resources. He had lost his reputation and very identity.

It had been a gamble to trust that stranger, but he had reasoned that his dad and sister already believed he was dead. He had climbed aboard the private jet and read up on his sister’s husband while flying back to Toronto.

“Hunter was about to marry someone else,” he recalled. “That doesn’t exactly sound like a love match for Amelia.” That was eating at him, even though Amelia had seemed happy when he’d seen her.

“Hunter wouldn’t have let it get that far if he’d known about Peyton,” Vienna insisted behind him. “Eden has since married someone else, too. It all worked out for the best.”

“It certainly worked out for me,” he said ironically. “I got a free flight back to Canada, but I can’t help worrying she married him for my sake.”

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