Cinderella's Secret Baby
Author
Dani Collins
Reads
18.5K
Chapters
14
The confession that stopped his billion-dollar wedding! The scandal of the century: she's had the billionaire's love child! Innocent waitress Amelia Lindor's encounter with tycoon Hunter Waverly was unforgettable. Their chemistry? Off the charts! Their connection? Soul-shattering! And, for Amelia, the consequences were life-changing… Amelia had braced herself to tell Hunter she was pregnant, only to learn he's already engaged. Unwilling to endure more heartache, she vows to raise their daughter alone. Then the news gets out! And Hunter's wholly convenient marriage is halted at the altar as all the groom's attention turns to Amelia… and her secret! Previously published.
CHAPTER ONE
AMELIA LINDOR COULDN’T fathom what had gotten into her father, Tobias. He had come straight back after leaving on his morning constitutional with a fire in his belly, insisting Amelia drive him from Goderich to Niagara-on-the-Lake. Right now.
It was a three-hour trip that her daughter, Peyton, had not enjoyed. The two-month-old believed any car ride longer than twenty minutes was intolerable torture and made sure everyone knew it. After fussing on and off for two hours, she had finally settled into a hard nap.
The silence was a blessed relief, but it threw off the schedule Amelia had finally started to establish with her. Peyton was meant to be nursing by now. As Amelia parked and bent into the back seat of her dusty but trusty sedan, her breasts were already heavy and tight. Should she wake the baby and coax her to feed? Or risk a public letdown?
“How long will we be here?” Amelia asked her father, but only got a slammed door in response. She stood and called, “Dad?”
“I told you, I have to meet someone,” he grumbled over his shoulder as he hurried through the full parking lot toward the door of the winery’s tasting house.
“Who?” she said with exasperation.
He didn’t answer. Or wait. Tobias had arthritis and a heart weakened by grief, but seconds later he had heaved open the wide door and disappeared inside.
This didn’t make sense. When her father met someone, it was usually his fellow retirees from the salt mine. Six mornings a week, he rose to take his medication, record the temperature in his weather journal and listen to the early news. He left as soon as it was light, joining his buddies at the café two streets over where they nursed coffee and grudges against politicians and potholes.
This morning, one of his cronies had said something that sent him home to snap orders like the maintenance supervisor Tobias had once been. Let’s go. This can’t wait.
Since Amelia’s only plan for the day had been drop-in infant yoga, she had hurriedly dressed, and here they were.
Tobias had refused to talk in the car, so she had bounced through the music stations, trying to calm Peyton, remaining ignorant as to what this was all about.
Releasing an irked sigh, she carefully skimmed the limp Peyton into her arms. Since the seat weighed more than her baby did, she only threw a receiving blanket over her shoulder and cradled Peyton there, not even bothering with the diaper bag so she could hurry after her father.
A couple came out the door as Amelia approached, both dressed to the nines. The man wore a dapper suit; the woman was in a strapless amethyst gown. Bridesmaid. Who else dressed like that at eleven twenty in the morning? Was that why there had been purple and pearl balloons on the welcome sign?
The woman abruptly halted before crashing into Amelia. She offered a strained smile that suggested a supreme effort at politeness when she was barely holding on to her temper.
“Hello. Vienna. Sister of the groom.” She touched her bare upper chest, then gestured into the tasting room. “Go all the way through and out the back. You’ll see the pergola by the shore. Everyone is sitting down. We’re about to start.”
“I’m not here for a wedding.” Amelia grimaced an apology as she realized they were intruding on a ceremony. “My father is—” On a rampage of some sort. “Inside. Looking for someone.”
“Oh?” Vienna cocked her head. “Who? We’ve reserved the entire place for the wedding. I might know them.”
“I’m not sure, but we’ll get out of your hair right away. I promise.” Amelia turned her friendly smile up to the man still holding the door. Cool, conditioned air beckoned from inside. “Thank you.”
“My pleasure,” he said in the very creepy tone some men used when they thought they were being charming by sexually harassing a woman. His gaze slid down to ogle the stretched neckline of her T-shirt. The pink cotton was straining across her nursing bra, but one breast was squashed by her newborn baby so, Don’t be gross, man, Amelia thought crossly.
Behind her, Vienna was saying an impatient, “Okay, Neal. What’s so important you had to drag me out here when it’s about to start?”
The door closed behind her, and Amelia blinked in the shadowed interior, turning over the name Vienna in her mind. It was unusual, but she had heard it somewhere, which caused a prickle of premonition.
At the same time, the sounds and smells of the tasting room were provoking a flashback. Last summer, Amelia had taken a job at a microbrewery not far from here. On her off days, she and her workmates had toured the local wineries on their bicycles, getting tipsy inside tasting rooms like this one with its brick floor and post-and-beam ceiling. This was a bigger vineyard, so the tasting room had two bars, one on either side. Behind each were rows and rows of bottles, while the space between was full of shelves displaying knickknacks and branded tea towels and specialty wineglasses.
Amelia automatically blocked the other memories that tried to invade from last July. The ones containing a brooding man who had kissed her in the moonlight and warned her against coming to his room.
My life is a mess right now. It won’t be more than tonight.
She shifted the weight of that encounter to her other shoulder as she searched for Tobias. He wasn’t among the guests scrambling for a glass of wine before they headed out the doors to the ceremony. Had he gone to the lawn? Was he meeting one of the wedding guests?
“Grandma. There’s one more. Would you like to sign the guest book?” An adorable girl of eight or nine reopened the book she had closed. She stood behind an upended barrel near the door and wore a demure version of the bridesmaid’s dress. Her hair was gathered up in a bundle of tight black curls on her crown, and she wore a hint of soft pink makeup on her lips and cheeks. She had clearly been given this Very Special Job and was taking it very seriously.
An older woman wearing a stylish royal blue dress gave the girl an indulgent look before saying to Amelia, “Welcome. Friend of the bride or groom?”
“I’m not here for the wedding.” That ought to be obvious from her very casual clothes. Her stomach was starting to sour at how ill-timed her father’s mission was. “Did you see an older man come through? He’s wearing a yellow shirt and brown pants. He has a bushy gray beard?”
“I think so.” The little girl’s face screwed up quizzically and she looked to her grandmother. “He didn’t sign, either.”
“He said he had an important message for the groom. I sent him to the guesthouse.” The older woman pointed down a hall where a glass door led to a covered walkway. “The groomsmen were gathering for a sip of courage in the breakfast room.” She winked. “Would you excuse us? Hannah and I need to take our seats.”
“Of course. Thank you.” Amelia turned to start down the hall, but her gaze was snagged by the chalkboard behind the bar.
The stark black slate was adorned with a border of silk orchids in purple and white. Calligraphed letters read Congratulations Hunter and Eden.
Amelia’s heart jolted to a stop, then slammed into a panicked gallop.
No. No, Dad. No.
Nooooo.
“I’ve always presumed I would get married at my aunt’s vineyard,” Hunter Waverly’s fiancée had said when their engagement became official. “Weddings are their specialty. She’ll pull out all the stops for me.”
Hunter had gone along because a groom didn’t override his bride when she set her heart on an outdoor wedding at a vineyard on a lake. Holding the ceremony here had been one less decision. Simple, if not ideal.
By anyone’s standards, everything about this wedding was perfect. Bright June sunshine beamed from a cloudless sky. There was a soft breeze coming off the water, just enough to keep Hunter from overheating in his suit as he walked out to the pergola. If any of the typical day of disasters had occurred behind the scenes, solutions had been found before Hunter heard a whisper of it.
The guests were taking their seats, the bride was said to be ready, and the officiant was motioning to the string trio to wrap up their current piece.
It was unfolding flawlessly, but Hunter was tense enough to snap in half.
PTSD, he thought dourly. For most of his life, every special occasion had turned into an embarrassing disaster. He had been tempted to insist on a small ceremony with Eden, but that would have been cowardly.
The officiant checked in with his best man. Remy nodded, patting his lapel, smile tight. Something had been eating at him for months. Hunter noticed it at the engagement party, but Remy didn’t want to talk about it and Hunter had lived with so little privacy in his own life, he didn’t invade others’.
Through the amplifier that would allow the guests to hear their vows, he heard Eden’s voice ask, “Is it working?” Her tone was a fraction higher than normal.
Wedding jitters. A bride was entitled, and Hunter refused to catch a case of it. This marriage was advantageous for both of them.
Eden had inherited controlling interest in Bellamy Home & Garden last year. Its stock value had languished in recent years, but it was a trusted Canadian icon, especially in rural communities. Eden would right the ship once she had Waverly cash at her disposal. The fact that their marriage merger included a plan to use Bellamy as a road map to bring Wave-Com’s next generation of wireless technology into all those remote locations wouldn’t hurt, either.
For his part, Hunter was repairing the Waverly reputation by attaching himself to the Bellamy name. Wave-Com had suffered in the years after his father died, plagued by ugly legal fights and a takeover attempt as his stepmother had sought to steal the corporation from her husband’s children, throwing mud every chance she got.
Today would turn the page on those perpetual scandals. With this sophisticated wedding, brimming with homegrown celebrities and dynasties from abroad, Hunter was setting a tone of respectability, family values and stability. Dare he add, class? Because Eden was intelligent, cultured and accomplished. She was well known for her philanthropy and admired for her Canadian-made fashion choices. Her grandfather had been a beloved voice on the national radio waves, and her mother still contributed weekly gardening tips to one of their programs.
Eden was suitable in other ways, too. Vienna had introduced them, implicitly promising that family gatherings would always be pleasant and civilized. Eden wanted babies right away, and Vienna was ready to start her family, too. Their children would grow up together.
Best of all, Hunter found Eden attractive, but not too attractive. They would have a foundation of friendship and respect, not fickle love or treacherous lust. Hunter wouldn’t be tugged around by his fly the way his father had been, subjected to spectacles every other week while making excuses for the source of his humiliation.
This marriage was exactly the right thing for all concerned.
Yet his gut was full of gravel, and he couldn’t shake this sense of impending doom.
It was the location. As Hunter breathed the scent of newly mown grass and heard the ducks on the lake and the buzz of bees, more prurient memories were accosting him. A musical laugh and a soft shoulder under his lips. Fine hair that carried a fragrance of sunshine.
That one night had been an escape, he often reminded himself. In some ways, it had been a narrow escape, because the heat in his blood had nearly made him say rash, embarrassing things. Don’t go in to work. I’ll stay another night. For sex.
Stop it. What kind of groom awaited his bride with a one-night stand clouding his thoughts?
Maybe it was the natural reckoning of a wedding day. He was saying goodbye to freedom and flings as he committed the rest of his life—his sex life—to one person. That heaviness in his gut wasn’t misgiving. Or regret. It wasn’t.
The music faded to expectant silence. The murmuring crowd quieted.
The officiant covered her lapel microphone with her hand and asked, “Ready?”
Hunter drew the device from the pocket of his coat and turned it on, noting the green light. He nodded and brushed his jacket straight again. He looked over the guests. There were roughly two hundred arranged on either side of the carpeted aisle, all smiling with anticipation.
The first notes of their wedding playlist were plucked from the harp. He looked to the top of the stairs from the terrace where his cousin’s tot of three years appeared in a flouncy dress. A bridesmaid of fourteen, one of Eden’s cousins, kept a firm hold of the little one’s hand and used the other to hold the rail as they began to descend.
“You!”
The gravelly bellow cut through the sublime moment, creating a stillness that silenced the angelic notes and the rustling leaves on the nearby rows of vines. Even the lap of water on the shore seemed to hold its breath.
Then a higher, feminine, anguished voice broke in.
“Daddy, no. Please.”
