The Boss's Baby Affair(57)
Any hope that he might discover secrets that had not died with Jilly was fading rapidly. The bathroom cupboards held only unopened toiletries, clean towels and a hairdryer. Impersonal items waiting for the next occupant. The personal items Jilly had used were long gone.
Back in her bedroom he checked the dresser drawers, her bedside table…all empty…as he’d expected. He’d gone through them himself. Nick moved on to her writing desk, already knowing what he’d find.
The first drawer revealed her wallet, a checkbook, an expired passport and a folder of canceled credit cards. The next drawer down contained Jilly’s lime-green laptop and an iPhone. The final drawer held a box of Jilly’s gold embossed stationery, envelopes, her address book…exactly as she’d left them. He lifted the stationery box out and opened it. Letterheads with Jilly Valentine surrounded by tiny pink hearts. He smiled. How Jilly. There were thank-you notes, too. He put the box back and started to close the drawer, then paused.
Taking out the stationery box again, he lifted the large black address book, and pulled out a second black volume. Jilly’s appointment book. Next he opened the drawer above and extracted her laptop with its power cable.
Seating himself on the padded desk chair, Nick flipped open the cover of the five-year appointment book. Finally he booted the laptop up. In less time than expected he’d found a file labeled Journal. Opening it, Nick started to read.
The following morning, Nick strode past an unsuspecting receptionist and, at the end of the corridor, entered the corner office unannounced.
Desmond Perry sat behind his desk, puffed up as an angry toad. Red-faced, he demanded, “What’s the meaning of bursting into my office like this?”
Nick took a seat in one of the two chairs in front of the desk, and leaned back. “If you prefer, I can arrange to see you another time with my lawyer in attendance. Or you can listen to what I have to say now.”
Desmond stopped blustering. “What do you want?”
“I want you to stop harassing my sister and brother-in-law and tell your crony at NorthPark to withdraw his eviction notice.” Nick paused, while Desmond stared at him. “I want you to forget about trying to acquire enough of a stake in Valentine’s to force a takeover—yes, I know about your plan to develop the land, not for high-density apartments, but for a shopping mall in partnership with NorthPark.”
“How did—”
Nick held up a hand. “And you’re going to halt all legal action to get custody of Jennie.”
“Why should I do anything you want?”
Nick started with what was most important to him first. Jennie. “Jennie isn’t Jilly’s daughter.”
“I know that.”
It appeared that Candace was right; Desmond was only trying to hurt him though his daughter, enough to make him pursue a frivolous legal suit purely to frustrate Nick. But did he know who her real mother was?
“Then you know you have no right to her.”
The older man picked up a pen and tapped it against the wooden edge of the desk. “My daughter adopted her—she’s my grandchild.”
Nick’s first reaction was to lean over the desk and punch Desmond, as he’d been dying to do for weeks. Instead, he said, “I intend to challenge that adoption. I don’t want my daughter growing up like Jilly did, with a guardian whose only way of showing his love is to buy her whatever she wants.”
Desmond blinked, and Nick regretted his hotheaded reply. The man had lost a daughter. Then he remembered the pain that had poured out in Jilly’s diary. It was no wonder that the only way she knew to respond to being in love was to try to buy the loved one.
It had been a disastrous course of action; but spoiled, emotionally starved Jilly had been too insecure to know any other way.
Nick held his father-in-law’s gaze, until Desmond looked away first.
“I found the journal Jilly kept. It made for very interesting reading.” That jerked Desmond’s attention back to him, Nick noticed with satisfaction. “She poured everything into it—even the reason why the IVF was done offshore—she knew she would never get her harebrained scheme past the ethics committee that approves surrogate arrangements in New Zealand. When I gave the necessary signature for my sperm to be transferred offshore, I had no knowledge that it wouldn’t be used to impregnate my wife, but rather the surrogate she had chosen.”
Jilly had written of her overriding need for a baby to fill the emptiness of her life. That had caused Nick a pang of guilt. He’d been so busy resenting Jilly for forcing him into an untenable situation that he’d never tried to figure out what had been behind her desire for a child. Jilly had also written about her craving to experience pregnancy firsthand. Nick could only assume that longing had triggered the fake pregnancy she’d enacted—together with the desperation for Jennie to be seen as her child.