The Bellamy was a brand-new five-star resort opening right outside Royal. Owner Shane Delgado had contacted Cecelia about decorating and furnishing the hotel about a month ago, after a previous designer had been fired well into the process. This would be a big step for Cecelia. If she could secure the contract with The Bellamy, it would give her the footing she needed to branch out into the luxury adult furniture market.
As her daddy always said, if you’re not moving forward, you might as well be moving backward. She was successful, but that wasn’t enough for the Morgans. Her subsidiary of To the Moon—Luna Fine Furnishings—could change everything for her.
She was shocked that Shane had reached out to her, given he was pretty clear he’d dismissed her as part of the mean girls clique, along with her best friends Simone and Naomi. Admittedly, she wasn’t very nice to his girlfriend Brandee and recent gossip had been less than flattering about Cecelia and her friends. Some even suspected them of being behind the recent blackmailings. Shane was taking a huge leap of faith inviting her to submit her ideas for this incredible opportunity; she wasn’t about to screw this up.
Cecelia gathered up everything into her portfolio binder and slipped it into her leather briefcase. She’d probably gone over it a hundred times already. She needed to stop fiddling with it and just let it lie. It was perfect. Some of her best work yet. As usual, she was putting too much pressure on herself. Her parents certainly didn’t help matters. They always held Cecelia, their only child, to very high standards and never accepted anything less than perfection.
She supposed that was why she was so successful. Brent and Tilly Morgan were practically Texas royalty and had raised their daughter to follow in their footsteps. She went to the best private schools, rode horses and competed in dressage in high school, and went on to graduate summa cum laude with a business degree from a prestigious Ivy League university. Anything less for the younger Morgan would’ve been unacceptable.
While her parents had been supportive both emotionally and financially when it came to her company, Cecelia always worried that their support came at a price. If Luna Fine Furnishings wasn’t the success that she hoped for, she might never hear the end of it. The last thing she needed was for her father to pat her on the back and tell her that maybe she needed to just stick with the baby things. You know...woman stuff. Or worse yet, to hand the business over to someone else and focus on settling down with Chip Ashford to make actual babies instead of baby furniture.
She wasn’t opposed to settling down with Chip—he was her fiancé after all—but she certainly didn’t want to throw away everything that she’d worked for in the process. Chip was a Texas senator, and he had been very supportive of her business so far. But Cecelia got the feeling that once they got married, Chip might feel the same way as her parents did.
It wasn’t that she didn’t want kids. Cecelia wanted her own children more than anything. But she was confident that she could be both a mother and the CEO of her own company. She didn’t intend to set one ambition aside for the other.
A chime sounded on Cecelia’s phone. She reached for it and tapped the screen to open up the Snapchat notification she’d just received for a private message. It took her a moment to realize what she was actually looking at. The picture was of a document with small text, but the header at the top brought a sinking feeling to her stomach. It read “Certificate of Birth” with the seal of the state of Texas on the bottom corner. The message across the screen was far more worrisome.
Somebody has got a secret.
Cecelia looked once more at the photo before it disappeared. It was then that she realized that this wasn’t just any birth certificate, it was her original birth certificate. The one issued before she was adopted by the Morgans.
For a moment, Cecelia almost couldn’t breathe. Her adoption had always been kept a secret. Everyone, including members of her extended family, believed that Cecelia was Brent and Tilly’s biological daughter. Even Cecelia had believed it until her thirteenth birthday. That night, they’d told her that she was adopted but that they had kept it a secret for her own protection. The unfortunate truth was that her birth mother had been a junkie, and child services had taken Cecelia away from her when she was only a few weeks old. Her mother had overdosed not long after that, and she was put up for adoption. The Morgans thought that it was best if Cecelia’s birth mother and that dark past were kept secret.
But someone had found out.
Cecelia didn’t know how—she hadn’t even seen her original birth certificate before. A new one had been issued when her adoption was finalized, so someone had done some serious sleuthing to find it.