Page 27 of Hired For the Billionaire's Secret Son

She’d given Bo some space to talk to his mum about Mat, to explain how he’d come to have a son. She’d taken Mat out into the garden but their raised voices had drifted out through the open windows, and Ollie could tell that Bo had been doing his best to keep his temper. Bridget had demanded to know how he could be sure Mat was his kid—even though he was his spitting image!—whether he’d done a DNA test and whether there was anyone else who could take Mat.

He was a little boy, Ollie wanted to howl, not an unwanted box of family keepsakes! How would having a child affect his business? What would Bo be sacrificing by taking on the challenge of raising him? It had taken all of Ollie’s willpower not to storm into the house and strip sixteen layers of skin off her boss’s—and lover’s—mother.

When Bridget had deigned to be introduced to Mat, she hadn’t taken him in her arms, neither had she touched his cheek or his hand. She’d admitted that, as far she could remember, he looked a little like Bo when he’d been a baby—but Bo’s nanny would know better—and she supposed she would have to add him to her birthday calendar. But Bo shouldn’t expect her to babysit, or for her to have much to do with him. As she’d told him on more than one occasion, children only became interesting when they became adults and were no longer a drain on her finances.

She’d heard of tall, cool blondes but Bridget was a solid block of ice.

‘You’re still frowning,’ Bo said, stepping into the nursery.

Ollie looked past his broad shoulder to the open door. ‘Is she gone?’ she whispered.

‘Yep. Her driver collected her,’ he replied in a normal tone of voice. ‘Fun, isn’t she?’

Ollie grimaced. She knew he was trying to make light of his mother’s rudeness, and her lack of interest in Mat, but she’d picked up the hurt in his eyes, on his face. ‘How did she manage to raise you?’ Ollie demanded as Bo took the sleeping Mat from her to cuddle him.

‘I mean, you aren’t extroverted—you’re much too implacable to be that—but you do have a sense of humour and know how to laugh.’

Bo kissed Mat’s forehead. ‘She didn’t raise me. A series of nannies did. And I spent a lot of time with my grandfather, my father’s father, the man who started our boat-building business. He was awesome.’

Bo sat down in the rocking chair next to the cot and Ollie perched on an ottoman in front of him. She watched as he leaned his head back and closed his eyes. Ollie thought that the mental snapshot she took of Mat and him could be a perfect advert for something baby-related. A hot guy and his gorgeous son: they’d move a ton of product.

‘I guess she’s the reason I decided not to have kids,’ Bo said, his voice softer than before. ‘She and my father are the reason I decided to live my life solo.’

Ollie leaned forward and clasped her hands together. ‘They weren’t good together?’ she asked.

Bo shrugged. ‘I don’t know if my father made her cold, or her coldness made him stay away, but they were horrible together. They were one of those couples who brought out the worst in each other.’

Ollie wrinkled her nose. ‘How?’

‘My mum was demanding and ambitious and she thought, probably correctly, that my father should work harder, do more, make more of a splash and be more ambitious. But he liked to work a little and party more. He thought she should relax a little, take some time off and be a wife and mother, and not a robot. He had a point. But neither would compromise, so Bridget worked even longer hours so that she didn’t have to come home to an empty house.’

‘A house you were in,’ Ollie pointed out.

‘But I wasn’tinteresting, Ollie, I didn’t get to be interesting until I hit my late teens and twenties and became—in her words—less needy. And my father didn’t come home because there was fun to be had, and warm and willing women who were prepared to share that fun with him.’

‘And you were caught in the middle,’ Ollie observed.

Desolation hit his eyes. ‘I was never in the middle. I was relegated to the outskirts of their lives. Neither of them could be bothered with me, and each thought I was the other’s responsibility. I never wanted to be in the position of wanting love, looking for love and not getting it again. So I made up my mind to devote my attention to my business and my work, and to live my life by myself.’

Sure, Ollie had had her disagreements with her parents about her career, but she’d always felt part of a family, and she felt loved. A few couples she’d worked for had had marital issues but nothing so bad that the kids had been affected. Or at least, she didn’t think so.

But she knew that children picked up on emotion, and they could read a room better than any adult. Having met Bridget, she now understood on a fundamental level why Bo had so many reservations about falling in love, marriage and commitment. He’d only ever seen the very worst of what people who said they loved each other could do. Love, to him, meant pulling people down, not building them up.

How horrible.

‘I don’t want to mess Mat up the same way I was messed up, Ol. I want him to grow up feeling secure in my love—I want him to know that heisloved.’

Ollie heard the break in his voice and could see the emotion bubbling through the cracks in his facade. If he lowered some of his shields and broke a hole in his castle-thick wall, people would see the sensitive, loving and thoughtful side behind the alpha man he presented to the world. The man worried about how good a father he’d be, who worried whether he’d do right by his son.

She leaned forward and placed a hand on his knees, her thumb digging into the hollows of his knees. ‘There are no perfect parents, Bo, of this I am sure. But the smart parents, well, they take the lessons they’ve learned from their parents—or identify the way they were messed up—and try not to inflict the same pain on their kids. That’s not to say they won’t make mistakes, but hopefully they won’t make thesamemistakes.’

She, for instance, wouldn’t put provisos on her kids’ education. Her job would be to have her kids educated—their job would be to use or not use what she’d give them.

‘I just figure that, whatever my parents did, I’ll just do the opposite. I figure I can’t go far wrong,’ Bo stated, sounding infinitely weary.

That was a good place to start and Ollie told him so. She stood up and bent down to place a kiss on his cheek. ‘Just love your son, Bo. Honestly, that’s all he needs. I’ll see you in bed.’

She walked out of the room to give him some time alone with the bundle of wonderfulness that had dropped into his life.

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