The CEO's stolen heir · Free previews
Chapter 3 of 58The CEO's stolen heir
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Sarah had opinions about most things, but she had feelings about Adrian Blackwood, and by the third glass of wine that evening, both had fully surfaced.
"You're joking," she said, for the second time, phone forgotten face-down on the kitchen table between them while Noah's cartoons murmured from the next room. "Your first day. Your first day, Elena, and you already have the man's full attention."
"It's not attention, it's suspicion. There's a difference."
"With Adrian Blackwood there really isn't." Sarah topped up both glasses without asking, the way she'd been doing since university, when Elena's problems and Sarah's wine had first learned to keep each other company. "I used to do PR consulting for a firm that pitched Blackwood Group twice. You know what everyone says about him?"
"That he's a nightmare?"
"That he doesn't forget things." Sarah said it flatly, without drama, which somehow made it worse than if she'd whispered it. "Not grudges, not slights, not apparently five-year-old employees who wander into his lobby looking like they walked out of his own bloodline. If Adrian Blackwood is asking about your son's father, El, he is not going to simply *stop* asking."
Elena's stomach did the same slow drop it had done that morning, standing in the marble lobby with her whole plan for a stable, quiet life crumbling in real time.
"He doesn't know anything," she said. Mostly to herself. "He can't know anything. There's nothing to know. It was one night, five years ago, with a man whose name I never"
She stopped.
Sarah, wine glass halfway to her mouth, went very still. "El."
"It's not him."
"You haven't even said who *him* is."
"Because there's nothing to say." Elena pressed the heels of her hands against her eyes, willing the day to have gone differently, willing her body to stop doing this specific, humiliating thing where her pulse picked up every time she pictured pale grey-green eyes narrowing on Noah's face. "It was one night. I never even saw him in daylight properly. He was gone before I woke up. I don't know his last name, I don't know where he lives, I don't"
"Adrian Blackwood is thirty," Sarah said slowly, doing the maths anyone would eventually do, the maths Elena had spent five years actively refusing to do herself. "Noah is five."
"Sarah."
"I'm just saying the numbers"
"*Sarah.*"
The kitchen went quiet except for the tinny cartoon laughter drifting from the next room. Elena's hands were shaking again, the way they had in the lobby, and she hated it, hated that a stranger's face could do this to five years of carefully constructed calm.
"It's not him," she said again, softer this time, like saying it gently might make it truer. "It can't be. There are a thousand men in London with dark hair and money. It doesn't mean anything."
Sarah didn't argue. She reached over instead and covered Elena's hand with hers, the old, familiar gesture from a hundred worse nights than this one.
"Okay," she said. "But El if there is even a chance. A man like that, with that kind of money, that kind of reach if he decides Noah is his, he is not going to ask nicely for visitation rights. He's going to take what he thinks belongs to him. That's what men like that do."
"I won't let him."
"I know you won't try." Sarah's voice gentled, but the warning in it didn't. "I just don't know if trying will be enough."
Elena looked toward the doorway where Noah's small shadow flickered against the wall, lit by the television's glow, utterly unaware that his existence had cracked something open in a glass tower that morning.
"He looked at Noah," she said quietly, "like he'd seen a ghost."
Sarah's grip on her hand tightened. "Then you'd better hope it stays a ghost he doesn't go looking for."
Forty floors above the city that same night, Adrian sat alone in his office long after everyone else had gone home, a single photograph pulled up on his monitor a stock image from the Blackwood Group's internal HR system, Elena Hart's staff ID photo, professional, unsmiling, giving nothing away.
He'd told himself, all afternoon, that it meant nothing. Coincidence. Dark hair was common. Five-year-olds looked like a hundred different men at that age; bone structure hadn't finished deciding what it wanted to be.
He told himself that, and did not believe a word of it, and picked up his phone anyway.
"Get me everything there is on Elena Hart," he said, when the call connected. "Birth records. Employment history. Anything on the boy school registration, medical records, all of it."
A pause on the other end. "That's a significant overreach for a new hire, Adrian."
"Just do it," Adrian said, and hung up before he had to explain, even to himself, why his hand wasn't quite steady on the phone.
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