Page 10 of Overnight Inheritance

Now that he’d agreed, she hesitated. There was something she really wanted to ask, but didn’t know if it was too personal. Heath always said she pushed too far, but... What the heck. He could always tell her to mind her own business.

“Tell me the story about your wife and Alfie.”

He threw her a sharp glance. “I meant ask me anything about the company.”

She knew that’s what he’d meant, but she was determined to understand what made him tick, and to do that, she needed to see him from all sides. “This is relevant to the company. I’m interested in how a single father to a baby is able to run a company of this size. This question is for context.”

He shrugged one shoulder. “Okay, I’ll allow it, but only in the spirit of complete transparency.”

“Your commitment to the cause is noted,” she said with mock seriousness.

As he smiled, his eyes crinkled at the corners, and then his expression changed, becoming nostalgic. “Ashley and I met when we were kids. Her parents knew mine, which meant we crossed paths occasionally, but they lived in Upstate New York, so not enough that we grew up together. By the time we were in our late teens, everyone around us had decided that we should be together. We liked each other and had a lot in common.” He shrugged. “It seemed like a good idea at the time, so we started dating, and then I proposed.”

“That doesn’t sound like a love story for the ages,” she said, then bit down on her lip. Insulting the man’s marriage probably wasn’t the best start to working together for a week.

“It might not have been a great, passionate affair to start with, but we grew to love each other. Ash was a great partner to have by my side, and she was an excellent mother.” He glanced at the back seat in his rearview mirror. “For the time they had together.”

“How long did they have?” Watching his profile, she saw his jaw tense.

“Almost five months.”

“What happened?” she asked, her voice just above a whisper.

“Cancer.” He swallowed hard, his Adam’s apple moving down in the strong column of his throat. “She had treatment, but it was aggressive and took her fairly quickly.”

The tragedy of Alfie losing his mother that young, too young to even form proper memories, made her chest ache. “You’ve been raising Alfie on your own since then?”

“Pretty much. My mother isn’t on the scene, and I wouldn’t let my father near Alfie even if he was interested. Ashley’s parents are great, but they’re upstate. They try to see him regularly, and we visit them as much as I can manage.”

For a couple of minutes, she just watched the road, absorbing it all. Though she was watching him out of the corner of her eye too. She suspected he wouldn’t appreciate it if she stared at him, but she’d been raised by a single parent who’d had no support. She knew how big a job it was, and he was running a huge, complex company as well.

“Howdoyou manage?” she finally asked.

“I’m lucky,” he said with a rueful smile. “I have a live-in nanny who does a lot of the day-to-day care while I’m at work.”

Thatwaslucky—most single parents couldn’t afford a full-time nanny. Though he’d just parented solo all weekend.

“You didn’t bring the nanny to the Hamptons?”

He rolled his shoulders back, stretching, then relaxed his grip on the wheel again. “When Ashley,” he began, but his voice rasped, so he cleared his throat. “When Ashley knew she wasn’t getting better, she made me promise a bunch of things. One of them was that I’d find some sort of balance between work and parenthood, for Alfie’s sake. I have the nanny for the weekdays and I try to get up to the Hamptons on the weekends where it’s just the two of us. I don’t always manage it, but I’m doing my best.”

Mae sat back in her seat. That had been a whole lot more honesty than she’d expected. “You weren’t joking that you’d answer anything.”

“I’m an open book.” He rubbed a hand around the back of his neck before putting it back on the steering wheel. “Actually, that’s not true. Normally, I hate sharing private information.”

“So this is all in aid of being able to buy the company off me?”

“Yes,” he said. “No, not only that. There’s something weirdly honest between us. I think it’s from the way we met. It was like we were in a little bubble, apart from the world that night.”

“You knew who I was, though,” she pointed out, still not quite ready to let that go.

“I did, but it still felt...different. You don’t believe me, which is fine, but I was being honest with my advice in that conversation.”

She thought about what he’d said back then, his voice surrounding her in the inky-black night, and had to admit that he was right. It had felt different to any other conversation she’d had in her life. Chances were that he was conning her to get complete control of the company, but she had to admit one other thing too...

Listening to his deep, smooth voice through the hedge on a moonless night was the real moment she’d started developing a crush on Sebastian Newport.

Four

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