The CEO's Runaway Mom

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I wanted a baby. So I went shopping for a father.

I picked him the way I pick anything expensive. Good face, good brain, good genes. Seven days in Hawaii to close the deal.

Then I set a bank card on the nightstand and flew home before he woke up.

Three years later I had a daughter with his face and ten million people watching me raise her.

The morning after I hit ten million, a line of black SUVs sealed off my street.

The richest man in New York kicked my door off its hinges. The one nobody's ever managed to photograph. The one I'd forgotten on purpose.

He looked like he'd been awake for a year, and every hour of it had been about me.

"Nice move," he said. "Ditch the father. Keep the kid."

Chapter 1

I wanted a baby. I did not want a husband, a boyfriend, or a single complication that arrived attached to either.

So I did what I do with any big purchase. I made a list.

He had the face. Top of the gene pool, the kind of symmetry that had no business being real. He had the money, a five-star suite, and in the restaurant I'd overheard him on a work call, clipped and in command. Whatever else he was, he was smart.

Good face. Good brain. Good money. He'd make a beautiful kid.

I gave myself two weeks. I engineered the run-ins, the accidents, the almosts. Two weeks later I walked into his room.

Lucian Sinclair lived up to the face.

The wine hit me the way it always does, which is to say badly, and I looked up at the man standing over me and grinned until my eyes went to slivers. I opened my arms.

He reached for the nightstand.

I caught his wrist.

"Don't bother," I said. "I'm covered."

Something flickered across his face. Then his hand closed hard around my waist.

"You," he said, "are trouble."

We spent seven days on that island. Most of them we never left the room.

I'd wake in the crook of his arm, and there it was, first thing, that face. The kind a sculptor would obsess over for a year and still get wrong.

I'd trace it with one finger. The straight line of his nose. The stupid, pretty eyes. The jaw you could cut yourself on.

I wasn't swooning. I was doing math. Boy or girl, this kid was going to be criminally good-looking.

Something in my face must have given me away, because his mouth curved.

"What are you thinking about?"

I smiled and let my finger keep going, down.

"I'm thinking that watching a face like this come undone for me is a genuinely premium experience."

He had me flipped under him before I finished the sentence. Caught my wrist. Slid his hand into my hair and fisted it slow at the back of my skull, until I lost the rest of the joke.

When we got bored of the room, we went out for the view.

On the beach the wind took my skirt, and he came up behind me, bare to the waist, all that heat and hard muscle against my back.

The man's body was, frankly, a public hazard.

I wasn't the only one who noticed. The second he stepped off to take a call, a blonde in a very small bikini drifted over to introduce herself.

He said something short and came back to me.

"You," I said, "are a walking honey trap."

"If I weren't," he said, "would you have come sniffing around?"

Over his shoulder, the blonde was still looking. Something in me bared its teeth.

So I leaned in and pressed a kiss to the center of his chest and left it printed there in red. Then I looked up at him through my lashes.

"You're mine," I said. "Just mine."

His eyes went dark. His breathing dropped a register.

We didn't make it back to the good hotel. We found the nearest motel instead.

The walls were thin. I bit down on my own lip to stay quiet.

His voice came rough against my ear, lazy and low.

"Sabrina." A beat. "Don't hold back."

Chapter 2

Seven days of tangled sheets and slow mornings.

On the last one my assistant booked my flight home. I'd barely confirmed the itinerary when Lucian came in with a bottle of red and two glasses. I was wearing his shirt and not much else, sunk into the couch with half the buttons undone.

I dropped my phone face-down and stretched.

He poured. I reached for my glass.

He got there first. One hand closed light around my throat. The other lifted the glass to his own mouth, and then his mouth came down on mine and the wine came with it, cool and sweet, straight down. My face went hot.

When he finally let me breathe, he tipped the rest of the glass over me. Red bloomed across the white shirt, obscene and expensive.

Last night anyway, I told myself. Might as well ruin it properly.

So I kissed him first.

Later, while he slept, I set a bank card on the nightstand and let myself out.

My assistant had the car idling downstairs. Two hours later I was on a plane, waving goodbye to the whole thing.

It went clean. My period didn't show that month. I took a test. Two lines.

I packed practically singing and flew to Paris to have the baby somewhere quiet. Ten months later I had a daughter, and she was gorgeous.

My parents finally got their grandchild and finally stopped auditing my life.

Two years after that, my mother posted a clip of the baby without thinking about it, and the internet lost its mind. A million likes before lunch.

I smelled money.

The clip going viral was never the plan. But business had been ugly all year, the whole market pouring into short-form, everyone with a phone suddenly a mogul. My assistant ran the numbers, the trend lines, the whole forecast, and they all said the same thing. This was the window.

My company sold jewelry and clothes, all of it to women. If I could plant a flag as America's favorite hot mom, sales would solve themselves.

So I went from jewelry-label CEO to full-time mom influencer overnight, and loud about it. Two months. Ten million followers.

And then it all went sideways.

Clementine was just past two now, all round cheeks and a tiny con-artist personality nobody could get enough of. Clemmie.

As for Clemmie's father, I never looked into him. On purpose. No sense building ties I'd only have to cut later.

It was a fling. He'd forget me by fall. And if he didn't, if he ever came knocking, I'd write him a check and we'd both move on. I wasn't asking him for a thing. I never had. I'd literally left him money.

I had money.

What I didn't count on was him having more.

He didn't want my check.

He wanted my head.

The night I hit ten million, I celebrated the way any responsible single mother does. Alone. Drunk. On my own living room floor.

Clemmie was at my mother's for once, so the historic occasion was all mine. Somewhere around the second bottle I face-planted on the couch and stayed there.

I woke to my phone screaming.

My skull was one solid fist of hangover. I patted around the floor, found the phone, squinted.

Fourteen missed calls. All from my assistant.

What could possibly be that urgent.

I dragged my thumb across the screen. The second it connected, her voice tore out of the speaker, raw and shaking.

"Boss. Run."

Chapter 3

My company didn't owe anyone money. That was my first, useless thought.

My assistant didn't get to say anything else, because that was the moment someone drove a bulldozer through my front gate.

The hangover evaporated. I ran out barefoot and stopped dead.

Dozens of them. Men in black suits, ringing my house like a noose. The bulldozer that had eaten my gate had also flattened the row of succulents I'd been babying all summer.

I didn't understand a second of it yet. But I'm Sabrina Quinn. I've walked into a hostile room before.

Barefoot, hair like a crime scene, I marched up and yelled.

"Who the hell are you? I'm calling the cops."

This was New York. You do not get to roll up on a woman's house with heavy machinery.

Then a man stepped out from behind the bulldozer.

Black suit, tall, cut like a blade. Cold. A muscle ticked in his jaw, like he was holding something down by force. His hair, which had no business being anything but perfect, was wrecked. The top button of his shirt was open.

He looked like he hadn't slept. Like he'd spent the whole night waiting for exactly this.

The second his eyes landed on mine, my legs went out from under me. I almost hit the ground.

And here's the thing my body understood before my brain caught up. I could not win this. Not head-on. Dozens of his men, one of me, barefoot and hungover and no idea yet where my daughter was. So the part of me that has closed a hundred deals started doing the only smart thing left on the table. It started folding. Buying time. Getting close.

He laughed, cold and quiet.

"Keep running, Sabrina."

I wanted to. My knees had other plans.

The call was still live. On the other end my assistant's phone rang, and then her voice came back, shredded.

"Boss, that man from Hawaii. The one you seduced. He runs the Sinclair family. He knows you had his kid and ran, he sat outside your parents' place at midnight, and this morning he took Clemmie. Boss, run, if he kills you who's going to sign my paychecks?"

The Sinclair family. Everyone knew the Sinclairs. And everyone knew the man who'd taken it over two years ago, the one who had never once shown his face online.

I looked at the man in front of me. Three years ago on that island he'd been all lazy heat and easy indulgence. This version looked like the fury had eaten him hollow, like he was one wrong word from taking me apart just to feel better.

"Mr. Sin Mr. Sinclair," I said. My voice had started to stutter.

He stepped forward, over my crushed succulents, and stopped standing over me.

"Nice move," he said. "Ditch the father. Keep the kid."

"I wouldn't dare"

"Is there anything you wouldn't dare?"

I looked at the men boxing in my house. I thought about Clemmie, already gone, already his.

This was Lucian Sinclair. Where exactly did I think I was going to run.

Hungover, terrified, my whole steel spine went to water. I slid down the doorframe and did the smart thing. I folded all the way.

"I'm sorry, Mr. Sinclair. I know I was wrong."

He huffed out a laugh. He tugged the crease of his slacks and crouched down to my level, and his hand came up and caught my face, tipping it until I had to look at him.

"An apology," he said, "isn't going to cut it."

Chapter 4

By now the joggers had found us.

Rich neighborhood. A wall of men in black suits didn't scare these people off. It just made them slow down and rise up on their toes to see better.

A young, unmarried woman with a baby and a house this size. The nannies on this block had already decided I was some rich man's mistress. After this little show, they'd file it under confirmed.

I did not need to become the headline of this zip code. So I grabbed a fistful of Lucian Sinclair's slacks and looked up at him with everything I had.

"Mr. Sinclair. Sir. Please. This is my fault, do whatever you want with me, carve me up, I don't care. But can we please, please take this inside."

He'd have his moment and sweep off in his motorcade. I'd be the one left here for the neighbors to gnaw on for a month.

He didn't mind looking ridiculous. I did.

He'd clocked the crowd too. He looked down at how small I'd folded myself, and he smiled.

"What," he said. "Afraid of a little humiliation?"

I didn't answer. I just counted the eyes on us and shifted, careful, until I was tucked in close and his body put itself between me and their view.

His brow lifted. His voice dropped to something only I would catch, and it came out through his teeth.

"So you do know what humiliation feels like. When you used me and walked, when you left a bank card on the nightstand and disappeared, I felt a great deal more of it than you're feeling right now."

He straightened.

"This is what you get, Sabrina."

Right. Sure.

He could have left me there for the block to feast on. He didn't. He turned toward the cars, and the message didn't need words. Clemmie was wherever he decided she was. If I wanted within a mile of my daughter, I went where he went.

So I went.

Not to my place. To his.

What Lucian Sinclair lived in did not qualify as a place. It was the top two floors of a tower in the middle of Manhattan, punched into one, a wall of glass swallowing the whole city, and out past it, thirty-some floors up, an infinity pool. The kind of obscene money most people can't picture even while they're standing in it.

His men didn't follow us in. He sat down on a black leather couch and looked at me like something the shoe had tracked in.

Here is where most people fall apart. I didn't.

I knew the move. No man takes being used and left, and this one was a god who had never once been told no. So I gave him what the scene wanted. Head down, shoulders in, my whole face one clean apology. The exact act I used to run on clients back when I was clawing the company off the ground, when kissing up was the entire job.

Underneath it, I was doing arithmetic. Where was Clemmie, in this building or out of it. What did he actually want. How long could I keep him talking.

"Mr. Sinclair, I didn't realize who I was dealing with. If I'd known it was you, I wouldn't have had the nerve to come near you if you'd handed me a hundred lives."

Head down, I watched his face at the edge of my vision. Still black as a storm.

Not contrite enough. I dug for the angle.

A family that old cares about one thing. The line. I had a little money. Next to the Sinclairs it was a rounding error. So the way I read it, he was this far gone because I'd taken a Sinclair heir and vanished. That, plus the card. A man like him only ever did the discarding. I had flipped it. I'd left him the money and walked, and it had gone straight through his pride.

Found it. I'd hit the thing that mattered.

He watched me work myself toward the wrong answer. Then he cut me off. Two fingers under my chin, tipping my face up, his voice very soft.

"You think this is about the card." A pause that ran too long. "You don't have the first idea why I'm here."

Chapter 5

He wasn't talking, and the silence was doing terrible things to my imagination. What was he going to do about Clemmie.

So I dropped to my knees at his feet, pressed my palms together, and put on the full performance.

Here's the math I was running. To the Sinclairs, Clemmie was a scandal with a face. A secret love child. Ten million people already followed her online, which to a family like this made me look like a woman who'd planned it all, breeding an heir to hold over them and climb. If they wanted that buried, the cleanest place to start digging was me.

That thought got me talking fast.

"Mr. Sinclair, listen to me. I would never use her against you. I swear I didn't know who you were. I never planned to bring her back to you, I never once imagined she'd have anything to do with the Sinclairs. I'll keep the secret. I'll take her and disappear, so far you will never hear either of our names again."

I made my voice small and watery. I even squeezed out a couple of tears. Honestly, I could have booked a soap on the spot.

And the more I said, the worse his face got.

Gray. Shuttered. If you looked closely you could catch him grinding his back teeth.

Which made no sense to me. Why was he angrier.

So I recalculated. Read the room. Read the king. Maybe what still stung was the bank card, the way I'd humiliated him. Maybe he needed to hand that back to me, get his face back, before any of this would settle.

I dialed the smile back up.

"I shouldn't have left a bank card and walked out. I see now how wrong that was."

His expression cracked, just slightly. There. I'd found the thread.

Thrilled, I shuffled closer on my knees, made a little fist, and started patting his leg, the very picture of a woman with no dignity left to lose.

"It should have been you throwing a card at me and telling me to get lost. I swear, you fling one at me and I'll be so good, I'll disappear so far and so fast"

I didn't finish. He knocked my hand off him before I could, like he couldn't stand the contact.

His face went dark. He didn't blow up. That was worse. That was the flat quiet right before something breaks.

"Sabrina," he said. "You're even more shameless than you were three years ago."

"...What?"

Where exactly was I shameless. Fine. Yes. The whole ditch-the-father thing had a little shameless in it.

But not capital-crime shameless.

I was gearing up to apologize like some doomed queen in a period drama when his phone rang.

I opened my mouth. He gave me one look and I folded it right back up, sat there like a good girl, and waited him out.

Whatever came through that phone made his face worse. When he hung up, he stood.

He spared me one glance, voice gone to ice.

"Stay put. Don't get clever." He let the rest of it hang there and didn't bother finishing.

Then he turned and left, and slammed that ridiculous steel door behind him.

I sat there a second. Then I tipped over sideways onto his obscenely expensive wool rug, and rolled onto my back, and howled at the ceiling.

Because here was the part I couldn't crack. I'd offered to take her and vanish, to hand him the one clean ending he should have wanted, and it only made him worse.

"What is even happening."

Chapter 6

They'd taken my phone before they brought me here.

I could move around the apartment freely enough. I just couldn't reach a single person. No way to know how Clemmie was, or my parents.

The smart play was obvious. Sit tight, make no trouble, let him put out whatever else was on fire and come back to me when he was ready. And technically I could walk out any time I wanted. The door wasn't even locked.

But walking out meant walking out without my daughter, and that was the one move I would never make.

So no. I wasn't a prisoner in here. I was a woman who'd planted herself in the enemy's house until she found a way to take her kid back.

Which meant sitting tight was off the table.

I was worried sick. Money like this comes with feuds you could drown in, and my baby was two. Two. If they pulled her into their poison, how was she supposed to grow into anything but a sad little heiress with a standing therapy appointment?

Not my kid. Not happening.

So I went up to the second floor and found his study.

The computer wanted a password.

His birthday, maybe. I sat there and dug through what I had. I'd seen his ID once, back in Hawaii. Scorpio. I built a birthday out of a blurry memory and typed it in.

Wrong.

Some other date that mattered to him, then. What else could possibly matter to a man like that.

When thinking got me nowhere, I started opening things. I went down his shelves, a whole wall of them, every spine worth more than my first car. I muttered something like a prayer the whole time, as if that made the snooping less of a crime.

And after a while, tucked between the expensive books, I found a box.

It had been opened recently. It wasn't locked.

Something told me it mattered.

I hesitated. You do not go pawing through a man like this one's private things. But this was for Clemmie, so I placed my bet and opened it.

Nothing valuable inside. Just a plain notebook. And beside it, a sunflower hairclip and a folded handkerchief in pale lavender.

I opened the notebook to the first page.

March 12, 2011.

This is the first time I ever saw her.

Oh. Oh, this was good.

The untouchable Lucian Sinclair, the man who ran an empire and had never once shown his face, was sitting on a soft, secret, hopeless little crush he'd been carrying since 2011.

I couldn't help myself. I thumbed a few pages deeper, and it came in fragments, out of order. The girl who wasn't scared of anyone. The girl who'd pulled him out of something bad and never once made it into a thing. And near the back, where the ink pressed harder, like it had cost him something to write: the day she just wasn't there anymore.

Whoever she was, she'd gotten under this man's skin young and never left.

I didn't dare read the rest. If he ever learned I'd been in here, I felt fairly certain I'd be a missing person by morning.

But I kept the date.

I sat down and typed it in. 110312.

The screen opened.

I pressed my palms together and quietly thanked whatever girl he'd spent all those years pining over, some total stranger who'd just handed me his password thirteen years too late.

I put everything back exactly where I'd found it, logged in, and pulled up the account. My assistant runs it out of the office, and it was right about posting time. She'd cleared out the backlog. The comments were already rolling in, thousands of them, all that love pouring in for their favorite baby and their favorite mom.

Not one of them had the faintest idea their favorite mom was currently camped in the enemy's tower, going through his things, hunting for a way home.

Chapter 7

I dug up what I could find on him online, which wasn't much.

As the Sinclair heir he'd apparently skipped the whole trust-fund-disaster phase the rest of that world specialized in. Before he took the company over, he'd barely existed in public. No photos. No noise.

He'd taken it from his father a little over two years ago and stayed just as invisible after. And since my industry and his empire never touched at a single point, I'd spent two full years not noticing that the man running the Sinclairs was the same man I'd picked up in Hawaii.

Unreal. The random gorgeous guy I grabbed off a beach, and he turns out to be that.

You had to laugh. Some girls really are born under a lucky star.

I still couldn't reach my parents. But going by the internet, the Clemmie situation hadn't leaked. I watched our follower count tick up and felt something in my chest loosen. With a fanbase this size, the Sinclairs wouldn't dare move on us. Not yet.

Between last night's hangover and the morning's demolition derby, I was running on empty. Evening came and Lucian still wasn't back. I found a bottle of water in his fridge, drank it, and dozed off against the couch.

I don't know how long I was under. At some point I felt someone near me, but my eyelids each weighed a thousand pounds and would not lift. I let myself be picked up.

Carried into a bedroom. I was so far gone I couldn't tell dream from awake. The second I felt a mattress under me I laughed, low and dopey, grabbed a fistful of collar, and hauled the body down onto mine.

"Mm. Hey," I mumbled, full creep. "C'mere. Let me touch."

The body over me went rigid.

He didn't pull away, though, and dream-logic said that meant he was mine to enjoy, so I got greedy. I dragged his shirt loose at the waist and slid my hand up under it. When my fingers found the ridges of a genuinely excellent set of abs, I sighed like I'd struck gold.

I was winding up for another appreciative grope when a voice cut through, familiar and freezing.

"Sabrina."

It went through me like a hook through a fish. Every scrap of sleep evaporated.

I opened my eyes onto Lucian Sinclair's, and his were about two seconds from setting the room on fire. I lunged to sit up. He flattened a hand on my shoulder and pressed me right back down.

He looked down at me from a great height. I squirmed. He caught both my wrists in one hand and pinned them, easy, and I understood with total clarity that I was not getting up until he decided I could.

"Exactly the same as before," he said, cold. "Insatiable."

I tested the grip. One of his hands held both of mine and didn't even have to work at it. He had me on size, on strength, and it wasn't close. So I did the only thing left. I went soft.

I melted under him and gave him the eyes. "Only for you."

He didn't answer. Just watched me.

His face stayed hard. "Sabrina. Behave."

The expression didn't move. But I could hear his breathing change, and the muscle in his jaw had gone tight.

And every instinct I had said the same thing.

Right now, taking this man would be the easiest thing I've done all week.

Chapter 8

The silk of my nightgown was slippery as water. One roll of my shoulder and it slid down, baring a pale line of skin. I drew my knee up, and the hem rode high on my thigh.

"Lucian."

I said his name in the softest voice I own, barely more than breath.

Right on cue, his whole body locked, every line of him gone taut and still.

"Trying to seduce me again?" A low laugh.

I laughed too. "This isn't seduction. This is deep, genuine feeling."

We were both adults. He was Clemmie's father. And the plain truth was that I'd wanted this man since a beach three years ago. If wanting him also happened to soften him toward me and my daughter, I could live with the bonus. That was mine to decide, and I'd decided.

His hand closed around my waist.

"Then show me," he said, "exactly how deep this feeling goes