The Forgotten One (The Heirs #2)

Chapter Four

Max didn’t know what he expected, but it wasn’t what he found.

The brief conversation he’d had with Chase on the phone the night before consisted of a total of five exchanges.

“Okay, I’ll hear you out.”

“I hope you didn’t bash in the truck before you read my letter.”

“It’s in one piece.”

“Good. Can we meet tomorrow?”

“Yes. I’ll come to you.”

“I’ll text you my address.”

“Okay.”

“And, Max?”

“Yeah?”

“Leave the baseball bat at home. You won’t need it.”

Max pulled down a driveway to a normal-looking house in a normal neighborhood with neighbors that could hear you arguing if they were outside.

The trees were fuller, the yards better maintained, and certainly the cost of Chase Stone’s home was likely double if not triple what it would be in the Antelope Valley, but it wasn’t Brentwood or Malibu. Not a billionaire’s address that Max had ever heard of.

Not that he knew a lot of billionaires.

Instead of going to the bar the night before, Max had showered and then sat in the cab of the truck for a half an hour before taking it out for a test-drive. He’d gone out past the city light pollution and into the desert, where the stars came out by the tens of thousands ... and then he’d called Chase.

Who in their right mind handed over a hundred-thousand-dollar truck to a complete stranger?

Someone who didn’t think twice about that kind of money. That’s who.

Their conversation had been brief.

Chase had given Max his address, and they arranged a time to meet the next day.

Now Max turned down Chase’s driveway and parked beside the truck he’d seen the Stones file out of less than a week before.

He pushed out of the cab and stood looking at Chase’s yard for a couple of breaths before he approached the front door and knocked.

Chase answered with a reserved smile. “You made it.”

Max looked back over his shoulder at the driveway. “Your invitation was a little hard to ignore.”

Chase stood back and indicated for Max to come in. “How does it drive?”

“Like a wet dream.”

Chase huffed out a laugh, closed the door behind him. “I’m glad. Can I get you something to drink? Beer?”

No. Max did not want to have this conversation intoxicated. “Is that coffee I smell?”

“Yeah. How do you take it?”

“Black.”

Chase moved farther into the house and over to an open kitchen. The décor was sleek, not entirely modern, but not traditional either. Dark, bachelor colors broken up by a huge bouquet of flowers sitting on the kitchen island.

A beefy rottweiler walked from a back hall and straight toward Max.

“Who is this?” Max asked.

“Kit.”

Max lowered his hand for the dog to sniff. His stubby tail wasn’t wagging, but the dog wasn’t growling either. “Friendly?”

“He won’t bite you. Unless you threaten Piper, then there’s no telling what will happen.”

Kit accepted a scratch behind the ear before moving closer to Chase.

“Where is your sister and fiancée?” Max asked.

“They’re out looking at wedding venues.” Chase handed a treat to the dog, who accepted the snack and walked out of the kitchen.

“When is the big day?”

“I have no idea. We’ve been engaged just over a week. Piper wants to wait until after the baby comes.”

“And you?” Max asked.

“I’m trying to convince her to see a judge and have the party after. We’ll see how that works out.”

Max pulled a barstool out from under the kitchen island and took a seat. Beside him was a laptop and a pile of mail. “Your home office looks like mine,” he said.

“I was about to turn the extra room into an office, then Piper entered my life, and now we’re converting it into a nursery.” Chase handed Max the coffee, pushed aside the computer, and took a seat.

“That’s appropriate.” It all felt slightly off, mainly because it seemed so normal.

“Yeah, I don’t know.” Chase lifted his gaze to the ceiling as if taking in the room. “Truth is ... I don’t think we’re going to stay here long. Seems a waste to paint walls and change the flooring.”

“Why is that?”

Chase leveled his gaze to Max’s. “Ever since our father died, the media has made a habit of showing up. They’re relentless and have no regard for personal space. Much as I’m not a huge fan of manor homes and gates, it’s starting to make sense to go that route.”

“Why don’t you have that now?” Manor homes and gates were exactly what Max had expected driving up.

“Up until the reading of the will, this is what I could afford with what my company brought in.”

“Shipping, right?”

Chase grinned. “You looked me up?”

Max sipped the coffee, put it down. “I did. And I didn’t see anything about a long-lost brother.”

“No ... no, you didn’t. And won’t. Not until we go public. Which we need to do strategically.”

Max lifted a hand in the air. “You really think I’m this ... brother?”

“Yeah, I do.” Chase stood, walked around to the pile of papers under the opened mail, and removed a folder. He tossed it in front of Max before taking his seat again.

“What’s this?”

“The PI report.”

“Private investigator?”

Max opened the folder and stared at a picture of himself outside in his front yard taken with a long lens. He saw his name, address, and Social Security number.

“I have to tell you,” Chase started, “I don’t like the fact that I know more about you than you know about me. The first time I laid eyes on that, I felt like I violated your privacy.”

Max turned the page and saw the multitude of homes he’d been in growing up; many of the guardian names he remembered, some he didn’t.

His eyes landed on his juvenile record and notes from the detention center he spent way too much time in. “This record was supposed to be sealed.”

“And once we get this resolved, we’ll make sure it is.”

Not liking what he saw, he kept turning the pages. It wasn’t until the final pages that he came across the information about his mother. “I was told my parents were dead.”

“Telling a child they were abandoned doesn’t feel like the right thing to do.”

He lifted the page that offered the most information on his mother. “Where is she?”

“Your mother?” Chase asked.

“Yeah.”

“We don’t know. We do know that our father sent her money. And with more digging, we might be able to find her. But she wasn’t our priority—you were.”

Max felt his brain hitch on that piece of information. “Your father sent child support?”

Chase nodded. “That’s what it looks like.”

“As in money?”

“Yeah.”

“She took it and left?” After all these years, to learn the kids in the group homes were right was a little hard to swallow.

“That’s how it appears.”

Max ran a hand over his beard and closed the file. “Damn.”

“For what it’s worth, I am sorry.”

“None of this is on you.”

“True, but—”

“I don’t do sympathy.” Max’s voice took on an edge.

Chase took the hint and changed the subject. “Alex and I have already completed the DNA testing. All we need from you is a cheek swab. There’s a lab on standby and a trusted friend that will deliver the sample today. We can have the results in a couple of hours.”

“How does anyone have a lab on standby?”

Chase offered a half smile. “With enough money, you can have just about anything on standby.”

Max couldn’t sit still. He stood, ran a hand through his hair. “This is unreal.”

“I can’t pretend to understand what’s going through your head right now.”

A father that was dead, a mother that could still be alive, and two siblings.

And money.

Max didn’t let his head go there.

Not yet.

“Where’s the swab?”

Sarah stood by the bank of elevators, tugging down the edges of her skirt. A glance at her watch said she was on time—as long as the elevator didn’t stop on every floor, which wasn’t likely since it was a Saturday and most of the building was filled with eight-to-five offices.

But the magazine almost never slept. Major holidays were about the only time the offices of RMI Magazine were closed.

Patrick had asked, or more like demanded, that she come into the office. He said something about needing to see her in person, which truly made her nervous. The weekend request shot off plenty of alarm bells. Team meetings and the occasional phone call or sweep by her desk when she was in the office were about as much attention as she received from her boss.

A one-on-one meeting was out of character.

Elevator luck had her scrambling past her coworkers without a glance and pushing into Patrick’s office five minutes ahead of schedule. “Am I here too early?” Sarah asked for the sole purpose of making sure he knew she wasn’t late.

He glanced at the clock and back to her.

“No, come in and close the door.”

Her palms felt moist with sweat. Do palms actually sweat, or is that just something people say? Sarah stepped into the office, closed the door, and made a mental note to look up the facts about sweaty palms when the meeting was over. That is, unless she was looking for a new job.

All her internal thoughts spun as she painted on a smile and sat in the chair opposite her boss. Patrick was a man in his fifties who hadn’t worked out in a gym since it was mandated in high school. Too many fast-food lunches and a pack a day habit was likely topped off with a home-from-work cocktail, a dinner wine ... and a nightcap. To Sarah, Patrick always appeared to be one bad phone call away from a heart attack. And in their line of work, bad phone calls happened on the daily.

“What’s up?” Sarah asked straightaway with a lift in her voice she faked to the best of her ability.

“We need to talk about a couple of things.”

She smiled, blinked, and kept her hands at her sides to avoid pulling on her clothing or any other nervous gestures. “Okay.”

“You’ve been working here for four years now.”

“Four years, two months.”

“Right.” The chair Patrick sat on groaned as he leaned back. “Do you like it here?”

“Of course,” she answered quickly, hoping her expression didn’t reveal the complete truth of the matter. Writing for a tabloid had not been her life’s goal, but it paid the bills.

“Do you think you pull your weight?”

This is not good. Sarah shifted in her chair. “I do everything I’m asked to do.”

Patrick tilted his head. Unconvinced. “That’s not completely true.”

Oh, God, oh, God. She could not lose her job. She’d just paid off her parents for the last of her student loans and couldn’t face asking them for money again. “What do you mean?” Sarah shifted again, her nerves started to unhinge.

“You’re always late.”

Oh no.

“But I get the work done.”

“You ask for extensions.”

“Only when I need to.”

“You look half-asleep during team meetings.”

“It’s my home Wi-Fi. The building has terrible coverage.” Her hands ended up in her lap, fingers twisting together.

“To be honest, I’d always thought you’d be gone by now. You’re not exactly the model employee for what we do here.”

If she was getting fired, she’d make damn sure Patrick knew what he was throwing away.

“Everything I turn in is true and accurate and never causes Legal to get involved. How many others can say that?”

“And there is the crux of the problem. Sometimes rules need to be broken and boundaries pushed in this line of media. I can’t help but think that if you took risks, as many of our staff do, you wouldn’t need extensions, and you’d achieve a higher page count. More stories with more ...”

“Gossip?”

Patrick pointed a meaty finger in her direction. “Exactly.”

“Are you asking me to print lies?” she asked.

He didn’t agree or deny. “Being vaguely specific and offering the reader to come up with their own conclusions and using words and phrases that can be interpreted more than one way is what magazines like us do, Sarah. All our lawyers need is plausible deniability to keep us out of court. You knew that when you took the job.”

Yes, but printing lies was something that would bite her in the ass when she moved on to bigger, brighter, and more reputable media. She’d been told that five years of publishing experience would help open the doors to the big guys. The Times , the Journal , and every possible major paper throughout the country.

She was a year out from her five-year goal. Getting fired now would send the wrong message. Leaving on her own merit, however, and maybe even standing on some kind of moral hill might save her résumé.

Either way, she wasn’t in a position to lose her job for not doing her job.

She’d paid off her student loans in the summer and had yet to really bank any savings. Certainly not enough to cover her half of the bills in her apartment with Teri for any more than a month.

She needed the paycheck.

“I need this job,” she flat out told Patrick.

His silence was loud.

He sat with his fingers folded over his belly, his eyes on hers.

She matched his silence, desperately searching for the words that would save her job and not turn her into a trashy tabloid reporter who would never see the inside of a major paper or magazine.

Only those words didn’t come.

“And I need employees that aren’t afraid of getting a little wet in the storm.”

His metaphor missed the mark. He wanted employees that weren’t afraid of getting dirty in a desert or taking a personal hit instead of making the magazine pay the price.

He wanted what Sarah couldn’t bring herself to do.

Telling Patrick that would be job suicide.

Maybe starting to fill pages with the vaguely specific crap he was asking for was what she needed to do. At least until she could map out another way.

“I can do better,” Sarah told him.

“You could.”

Damn, damn, damn.

She started to shake.

Patrick unfolded his fingers and placed his palms on his desk. “Relax, Sarah. I’m not firing you.”

She held her breath, head spinning. “You’re not?”

“No. Although I have every reason to escort you to the unemployment line.”

Oh, how she wanted to argue that.

She didn’t.

“I’m putting you on a special assignment.”

“What?”

Patrick reached for a paper, looked at it. “We got a tip. Anonymous, and maybe even bogus. It’s incredibly high profile and needs to be handled with your special skill.”

“What skill is that?”

“The kind that keeps us out of court. Normally I’d pass this story to my best shark and have them sniff for blood, and if they didn’t find it, plant it. But these people are too big, with too many bigger friends.”

“That sounds like news from someplace other than a tabloid.”

“It is. But if there is something nefarious to be sniffed out, I want to know what that is. The truth, not the lies, and I want it to be an exclusive.” Patrick handed the paper in his hand to Sarah.

There were two names. One she recognized and one she didn’t.

“What do you want me to do?”

“I need to know how those people are connected. And to do that, you’re going to need to get close. This is not something you will uncover doing internet research.”

“Okay.”

“When you snuggle up to people like this, they can’t know you work here. Which means you’ll be working remotely.”

“I write under a pen name,” she reminded him.

“True, but people like this have bodyguards and staff that would keep you yards away if they followed you through this door.” Patrick’s eyes traveled down her frame but not in a sleazy way, more of a disapproving glance. “Even though to look at you, nobody would believe you worked here. We’re still not going to give them an excuse to close you out.”

Sarah looked down at herself. “What’s wrong with the way I look?”

“Nothing, if you’re going for the grad-student angle.”

She had no idea what he was getting at. Maybe it was the Converse shoes she wore with every outfit.

“Trust me on this, Sarah, you’re perfect for this assignment.”

“Because I’m . . . what exactly?”

“Because you’re the only one in this office that won’t force a story if there isn’t one. But if there is a story, and you want to keep your job, you’re going to get it for me. And if there is a story that you’re unwilling to write, I’ll fire you.”