He’s Your Son (Billionaire Heirs #3)

Prologue

Eight years earlier.

He never told her his last name. For one whole summer it had not mattered at all.

His name was Ronan. That was the whole of it — the only thing he ever offered about himself — and Solange Bishop had decided early on that she did not need the rest. She had a name for him already. She called him hers.

She was twenty-two that summer, home from her last year of college and working the counter at her grandmother's little shop on the Gull Harbor waterfront, a sun-faded place that sold sticky buns, salt taffy and bad coffee to people who did not come for the coffee.

In the slow gray hour before the town woke up, she would prop the door open to the smell of the harbor, set her sketchbook on the counter, and draw the boats coming in.

The lobster boats. The little sloops with their single masts.

The fishing trawlers that wallowed home heavy and proud.

She had wanted to be an artist once. She still half wanted it; in the private way a person keeps a wish they are too sensible to say out loud.

He came in on the third morning of June with grease on his hands and sawdust in his black hair, asked for the worst coffee she had, and grinned at her like the whole gray morning had been built just so he could stand in her doorway.

Solange would remember that grin for eight years. She would remember it longer than she meant to.

He was tall, lean and white, with black hair he kept tied back off his face in a careless knot at the nape of his neck, his forearms scarred from a thousand small accidents with chisels and lines.

He was restoring hulls down at the marina, sanding, caulking and bringing dead boats back to life for the summer people who paid him in cash and did not ask questions.

He was good with his hands and better with his mouth, funny in a quick crooked way that snuck up on her.

There was something underneath all of it, a hunger.

A man with his back against a door, holding it shut, pretending the door was not there.

He told her almost nothing true about himself.

He told her his family was complicated and that he had walked away from them and did not intend to walk back.

When she pushed, even gently, his whole face would change, the warmth shuttering closed like a window before a storm.

So she stopped pushing. She told herself a man was allowed his secrets, the version of him she got, the one who laughed, argued about music and learned the names of every boat in the harbor, was the real one. The rest was just weather.

She was not entirely wrong. She was only missing the size of it.

They fell into each other completely, without the safety of an exit.

He learned that she collected her grandmother's blood pressure pills from the pharmacy on Thursdays and pretended she did it for the walk.

She learned that he could not sleep through a storm, that he knew the constellations by their old sailors' names, that he had a temper he kept on a short leash and a tenderness he kept on no leash at all.

They spent the long gold evenings out at the end of the Breakwater, on the flat granite point where the town ran out into the open water and the lighthouse blinked its patient warning across the dark.

That Point became theirs. He kissed her there the first time with the whole Atlantic going pink behind him, and she had thought, with a terrifying certainty, that she would love this man until she died.

"You don't even know my last name," he said once, lazy and warm against her hair, the two of them lying on the warm rock watching the lighthouse.

"I know everything that counts," she told him.

He went quiet for a long time. When he spoke again his voice had gone rough. "You might be the only person alive who does."

She had not understood it then. She understood it later, when understanding could no longer save either of them.

Then the summer turned in a single morning.

She was four days late and then she was eight.

She stood in the cramped bathroom over the shop with a drugstore test balanced on the edge of the sink and watched two pink lines surface like something rising from deep water.

Her heart slammed against her ribs. She sat down hard on the cold tile floor, pressed her hand flat to her stomach and did not move for a long time, the fear climbing up her throat with a taste like copper.

She was pregnant. She was twenty-two and pregnant by a man whose last name she did not know.

She told him at The Point, because where else would she tell him. She made him walk all the way out to the end of the Breakwater first, the granite warm through her sandals, the evening coming on soft and apricot-colored over the water, and she got the words out before her courage could fail.

"Ronan. I'm pregnant."

He went absolutely still.

For one long, falling second she was certain that she had just lost everything.

His face had gone blank. The harbor breathed behind them.

She braced for the shutter to come down, the window to close against the storm, and she had already begun, somewhere deep and cold, to plan the life she would build alone.

Then he laughed.

It came up out of him helpless, astonished and enormous, and he grabbed her by the waist, lifted her clean off the granite and spun her around with the lighthouse wheeling behind his head.

He was saying her name, and "a baby, a baby," and "God, Solange, a baby," and when he set her down his eyes were wet, his hands were shaking, and he was grinning that grin, the one built for gray mornings, the one she'd spent all summer collecting like a child gathering shells.

"This is it," he said. "Do you understand me? This is the thing I have wanted my whole life and didn't think I was allowed to have."

"You're not scared?" she said. It came out half a question.

"I'm terrified." He took her face in his hands. "And I have never been this happy in my life. Both at once. I didn't know you could feel both at once."

And then he made her the vow.

He held her face and told her he was done hiding.

He told her there was money, his money, more of it than she could imagine, locked up behind a name and a family he had run from because the price of touching it had always felt too high.

But it was his by right, by blood, by birth, and he was going to go claim it, all of it, so that he could put the whole world at the feet of this woman and the child she was carrying.

He was going to drive out to her first thing the next morning, stand in front of his mother and tell her exactly what he intended to do.

"I'll be back by nightfall," he said. "I'll go, I'll say what needs saying, then I'll be back here and I'll tell you the rest of my name. Then you can decide if you still want it." He pressed his forehead to hers. "Say you'll wait for me."

"I'll wait," she said. "Of course I'll wait."

He held her face a moment longer and gave her the thing he always gave her when they parted, the small foolish sailor's charm of it worn smooth by a whole summer of saying. "However far you go," he murmured against her mouth, "you find your way home to me."

She did not know it yet, but she would wait a very long time.

They spent the last night of the summer together.

*****

He had a loft above the old boat shed at the marina, a single warm room that smelled of cedar shavings, varnish and the sea, with a brass lamp he had salvaged off a wreck and a bed under a window that framed the whole dark harbor.

He lit the lamp low. The light fell over them like something poured, amber and slow, gilding the warm brown of her skin and catching in the loosened crown of her dark curls where his fingers had freed them from their knot.

"Come here," he said, and there was nothing left guarded in his face at all.

She came. He drew her down onto the bed and undressed her without hurry, his hands gentle at the buttons of her dress, his mouth following the line of each new bared inch of her. She felt the whole summer gathering in her body, every gold evening, every withheld thing finally given.

She reached for the hem of his shirt and pulled it over his head, and he let her, feeling her hands while she ran her palms over the warm muscle of his chest, over the place his heart was hammering.

She had touched him a hundred times that summer.

Tonight her fingers shook anyway. He caught her wrist and pressed her open palm flat against his sternum so she could feel exactly what she did to him.

"Feel that" he said roughly. "That's all you. That's been all you since June."

"I love you," he said against her throat a moment later, when she had drawn him down to her.

"I should have told you weeks ago. I was a coward about the wrong things.

" His lips moved down to the curve of her breast, and he covered one dark nipple with his mouth, his tongue circling slow until she arched up off the bed with a soft cry, her fingers buried in the black silk of his loosened hair.

"I'm done being a coward about anything. "

He took his time with her. He kissed his way down the soft swell of her belly, over the place where their child was already growing, and lingered there with a tenderness that undid her completely, his stubble grazing her skin, his big hands spread possessive across her hips.

When his mouth moved lower still, she gasped his name and gripped the sheets, and he worked her slow and patiently until she was trembling, slick and pleading, until the first climax broke over her soft and golden, left her boneless and gasping in the lamplight.

"Ronan. Please. I need you."

"I've got you," he murmured, dragging himself back up the length of her body, his own control fraying now, his hardness pressing hot against her thigh. "I've got you."

"Then show me," she whispered.