Chapter 17

Back in the estate office, Piper carried on as if nothing had happened outside. Occasionally, she’d see Chase watching her from the corner of his eyes, but she didn’t call him on it.

Her previous boss’s cologne had knocked her back. Never in her life had she responded so suddenly to a smell. She needed to make a call to her doctor, the nausea thing, the smell thing, and the dizzy thing were off the charts.

Now it seemed Chase was watching her more than ever. Was that because she damn near begged him to kiss her outside or because she’d been displaying damsel-in-distress behavior with the constant desire to puke or pass out?

Luckily, Chase found a bundle of keys in the second belongings bag, along with a wallet and cell phone.

They both sat around the locked box, hoping one of the keys worked. “Here goes nothing,” he said with a wink.

He slid the key in . . . It turned. No hesitation.

“Yes!”

Piper didn’t know who was more excited, him or her.

The first thing she saw was cash. American dollars, British pounds, and euros.

By now, she shouldn’t be surprised by what the rich had just sitting around, but she was.

Chase waved a passport in her direction. “What did I tell you?”

“You thought that was going to be in a more secure place.”

“True.” He went back for more.

A small cloth bag held more keys, these ones smaller than the average house key.

“What do those go to?”

“Safety deposit boxes, maybe.”

“People still use those?” she asked.

“I don’t. But I also don’t have thousands of dollars in different currencies in a locked file cabinet in my office.”

“Do you have a home office?” she asked.

“No. I have a kitchen table and a laptop, like most people.”

Piper found some of the humor that had vanished the moment they nearly kissed. “That sounds entirely too normal.”

He reached in and pulled out several papers. “You’re the one who has to remind me how rich I am, I haven’t quite caught on yet.”

“Do you have a safe?”

He poked through the papers. “I do.” Chase lifted a single piece of torn paper with a triple set of two-digit numbers and waved it in the air for her to see. “And mine has a combination lock.”

Piper lifted both hands in the air. “There has to be a safe.”

Chase set the stack of papers to the side and stood. “I say we divide and conquer. Look behind books and paintings.”

“Furniture?”

“My dad wasn’t a big man, it won’t be behind the heavy stuff.”

Piper clapped her hands together. “Let’s do this. You take that side of the room, I’ll take this.”

A rolling ladder gave access to the books on the top shelves of the office. When she’d poked around the room before, she hadn’t done more than open the drawers and cabinets. Now she went at the search with a new sense of purpose.

A safe filled with a rich man’s cash and a secret affair paled in comparison to a lost son who’d just inherited a multibillion-dollar portfolio.

She started up the ladder when Chase stopped her. “Hold up.”

“What?”

“In the last two days, I’ve seen you white as a ghost and nearly passing out twice.” He pointed toward the top shelf. “I’ll take the upper half of the room; you take the lower.”

“I’m not going to—”

“You’re right. You’re not going to. Get off the ladder.”

“Chase!”

He stared at her.

“Fine.” Back on two feet, she gave the rolling ladder a little shove in his direction.

“Thank you.”

She attacked the reachable shelves, pulling large sections of books out, looking behind them and knocking on walls. Sliding books from left to right all down the line. Piper would finish one row, return the books, and move on to the next.

An hour later, they left the office, nearly everything out of place.

The common rooms went quicker. Nothing behind the paintings, which sounded a little too Hollywood for Piper to swallow, but it didn’t stop them from looking.

Chase shoved furniture aside, and if it was too heavy, he didn’t bother.

Upstairs, they started in Aaron’s bedroom. The next most logical place for a safe.

She attacked the closet while Chase did the dance with the pictures and furniture in the bedroom. Like the books, she removed large sections of hanging clothes to knock on the walls behind. There were plenty of glass doors, closing in shelves of pricey-looking things. Cuff links and tie clips aside, the man had a ton of stuff. Even his belts were rolled up and displayed in a way you’d expect in a department store.

“I overheard your conversation with Alex about finding a home for these clothes,” Piper called out to Chase, who was still in the other room.

“Can you do that?”

She picked up a jacket to put back on the rod, and something heavy from the pocket caught her attention. “What’s it worth to ya?” Inside, she found a money clip with several bills folded together.

“I won’t fire you for eavesdropping.”

“That’s fair.”

Chase walked into the closet as she was tossing the money clip on the island. “Do we need to pinky promise again?”

“It’s a corporate promise. Hey . . .” She pointed at the money. “You need to comb through each suit, or someone is going to get very lucky when they buy the discounted Armani. That was in the inside pocket of this one.”

Chase winced. “I have zero desire to pick my father’s pockets.”

“I’ll do it,” she volunteered.

“Deal.”

“For half of whatever I find,” she teased.

“Okay.”

He was serious.

“I’m joking.”

“I’m not.”

It was tempting. “No. That would be taking advantage.”

“That was a deal. A quick negotiation, but a deal.”

She hung another suit, patted down the pockets. “No pinkies were involved, so you need to call the lawyer.”

Chase opened the glass doors that housed the belts, a grin on his face.

“I already looked in there,” she told him.

He kept looking anyway and pulled out a couple of the belts.

Piper continued to pat pockets and hang clothing.

“Did you look hard?”

She jolted. “Did you find it?”

Chase was holding a belt as if it were something she needed to see. “Know what this is?”

“If you’re asking what type of leather or brand, no.”

He laid it on the counter, underside up, and peeled back a small section that housed a zipper.

Piper stopped what she was doing to watch as Chase pulled the hidden zipper open to reveal more money.

“A money belt? I didn’t think they still made those.”

“They’re a pain in the ass to get into, but great when traveling. Pickpocket grabs your wallet, you still have cash.”

Each bill had the face of Benjamin Franklin, and there were forty of them tucked in that tiny space. “That’s crazy.”

Chase waved one in the air. “Fifty percent.”

She rolled her eyes. “You found that one.”

“There are more in there.”

“You’re impossible.”

The last jacket was back where she found it, and she turned to another section. This time patting down the pockets as she went.

Two more money clips . . . no safe.

She opened a drawer, immediately closed it. “I draw the line at your dad’s underwear.”

“I’ll have Karina toss them in the trash.”

“I’ll go find a bag.”

“You don’t have to.”

She walked away. “I need some water anyway. Want anything?”

“Water would be great.”

Piper walked by the open door of Melissa’s bedroom and paused. Something drew her into the room and had her looking around. An architectural inconsistency nagged at her sixth sense.

She walked into the closet. This one was larger, completely white, and stripped nearly bare. It sat on the same wall as Aaron’s and should take up the same amount of space based on the bedroom design . . . only it didn’t. The depth of the room was off by a good four feet.

Piper abandoned the trash bag and waters and walked back into Aaron’s closet.

“That was fast,” Chase said.

She walked to the wall in question and started taking the shoes off the shelves.

“What are you doing?”

“There’s something behind this wall,” she told him, tossing shoes to the floor.

“It’s the patio.”

“How much you wanna bet?” she asked, completely confident that there was a room behind the shoes.

She ran her fingers along the edges of the shoe shelves until she found what she was looking for. Every nerve in her body sparked to life when she pressed a hidden button and turned to watch Chase’s expression.

His wide-open eyes were filled with excitement.

“Do I get fifty percent of whatever is behind here?” She batted her eyelashes, teasing him.

“Holy shit balls, Piper. You’re kidding me.”

She pushed open a small hidden door that swung into an even more hidden room.

Piper couldn’t stop smiling.

Chase brushed past her to go inside. An automatic light clicked on with the motion.

She poked her head through the doorway. The room wasn’t big enough for two people comfortably, so she stayed outside.

Chase stood in front of a five-by-four-foot safe.

“Damn, I’m good,” she said.

“You got that right.” Chase removed the paper with the numbers on it from his pocket and placed his hand on the dial. “Wish me luck.”

He slowly moved the dial right, doubled back left and stopped, then right again. He placed his hand on the lever . . . and turned it.

The satisfying sound of solid locks clicking back made Piper squeal.

Chase looked at her . . . beaming.

He pulled the heavy door open.

Piper forgot to breathe. “I’ll take you up on that fifty percent.”

There were stacks and stacks of cash. Enough to make what they found in the office look like pocket change.

“Damn, Dad . . . what were you afraid of? The Great Depression?”

In addition to the cash, there was a shotgun leaning to one side of the safe and two handguns in the door.

“The only time I use cash anymore is at a drive-through burger joint,” she told him. “How do you even spend that?”

“I don’t think he did.”

Chase ignored the money and went straight for the stacks of papers. He handed some to her and grabbed another handful for him.

Stepping over the mess of shoes, they took the bundles of papers out of the room and down into the living room.

Piper cleared books off the coffee table, and Chase pulled a chair closer.

“I’ll get that water.”

A half-eaten pepperoni pizza sat on one end of the coffee table. Piper was on the floor, her back against the couch, knees pulled up, with an open folder resting on them. In one hand she had the crust of the pizza she was nibbling on and in the other, a soda. Which wasn’t on the pregnancy diet, but what the hell, she hadn’t been sleeping, and the midday crash needed to be avoided. Thankfully, the pizza was hitting the spot, and the wooziness of earlier was gone.

So far, they’d uncovered many hard copies of deeds and mortgage statements for properties all over the world.

“This stuff can all be scanned into a document, uploaded to a server, and easily accessed from any computer. Why did he save this in a safe?” Piper questioned.

“Same reason he saved the cash, I think.”

She stopped nibbling and looked up. “Why is that?”

Chase flipped the page of the pile he was working on and met her eyes. “I see him walking into that room, opening that safe, and visualizing his worth.”

“This house . . . those cars, and the huge building with Stone Enterprises wasn’t enough?”

“Maybe he was afraid someone was going to take it all away.”

“That’s not possible,” she said.

“My father wasn’t an open man. We may never know why he has Fort Knox behind his shoes. There are only two motivations I know that plagued him.”

“Which are?”

“Money and women. And when you have enough money, you can get the arm candy that ignores the extras in your life.”

“Your mom wasn’t one of them.”

Chase glanced up and then back to the papers. “No.”

When he didn’t elaborate, Piper went back to her pizza and the papers on her lap.

Deciding there wasn’t any secret-son-worthy material in what she was looking at, she set it aside and grabbed a large legal envelope and opened it.

Pictures.

She pulled them out and shuffled through them. Some were old photographs, like the kind that were developed at a corner photo lab, a few Polaroid shots that couldn’t be from the era when the camera came out, because of the cars in the background. “Do you know who these people are?”

Chase stopped studying his pile and took the pictures she handed him.

The first one he smiled at. “This is my grandfather.” He twisted the image around for her to see. “That was his first hotel.”

“That’s cool.”

Chase looked at it again before moving on to the next. “No idea, no idea . . .”

While he looked over the pictures, Piper removed a smaller, letter-size envelope from the larger one and opened it.

“None of these pictures are me or Alex.”

“That has to suck,” she told him. “You could hold the walls of my parents’ house up with pictures of us kids.”

“You have siblings?”

“I do, a sister and a brother, both never left the county.”

She unfolded the paper in her hand and looked at it.

A chill went down her spine.

“Chase.”

“Yeah?” He flipped another photograph over.

“I found it.”

His eyes snapped to hers.

In her hand was a DNA paternity testing document.

She gave it to Chase, stood, and moved to his side.

Sitting on the armrest of the chair, they looked at it together.

There was a mother’s name, a child’s name . . . and AS in the section for the father.

Proof of parentage was stamped in red ink. Ninety-nine point nine percent was the final number on the paper.

Piper heard Chase take in a shaky breath.

He grew quiet.

She placed a hand on his shoulder. “You okay?”

He shook the paper. “She named him Maximillian Smith.”

“Stone would have been too obvious.”

Chase pointed to her name. “Lisa Davis. She could have used Davis. She chose Smith with an agenda. A million-dollar baby.”

Piper slowly began to remove her hand from Chase’s shoulder.

He reached up quickly and placed his fingers over hers, holding it in place.

For a moment, they both sat staring at the paper. Piper wanted to lean into him, comfort him.

They had a name.

“I need to call Alex,” he said on a sigh.

“I’ll clean this up.”

Chase unfolded from the chair and walked out of the room.

An hour later, they were both in the driveway, the house put back in order, the hidden room once again hidden.

“I couldn’t have found this without you,” he told her as he stood in front of her car.

“All we have is a name. I don’t think it will be as easy as googling him.”

“We have two names we didn’t have this morning.”

True. “Don’t forget all that money,” she teased.

He laughed, looked up at the house. “I think we’re done here for now.”

“Back in the office tomorrow?”

“Yeah.”

“I’m going to miss going to work in my jeans.”

Chase looked up and down her frame with a grin. Then he squeezed his eyes shut. “Thank you, again,” he said as he started to turn away.

“Anytime.”

She opened her car door.

“Wait!” Chase pivoted, one hand raised in the air.

“Yes?”

He hesitated as if not knowing what words to use. “Earlier. Out here . . . with the cars.”

Oh no. She was not ready for him to catch on to her condition.

“That wasn’t just me, right? We had a . . . a moment.”

Oh God, this is worse.

He tilted his head.

Did she lie, tell him she didn’t know what he was talking about? Did she say it was only him?

Then the voice in her head, the one that told her to own her shit . . . the one that had stopped her from going to a clinic and getting on with her life, came out of nowhere and made her shake her head.

“It wasn’t just you.” Her heart was beating so fast she felt it against her rib cage.

Chase let a slow smile wash over his face.

“But we can’t,” she quickly added. “I need this job.”

“Right.” He was still smiling, as if her words didn’t register.

“And people will talk.”

“True.”

“Good, we’re on the same page.”

He nodded several times and let his smile fall. “We are. I don’t want to resemble my father.”

“Ehh, no. Your dad was gross. You are—” She cleared her throat. “Far from that. But we can’t.”

“Of course not.”

“Okay!” She was rambling. She hated it when she rambled. “I’m glad we got this out in the open. No elephant in the room.”

“Right.”

“We can get past it,” she told him. And herself.

“Like adults.”

“Yeah . . . okay. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

“Drive careful.”

Piper cleared her throat and escaped into the interior of her car.