The Alpha's Accidental Heir

Chapter 4

The ten days moved like ten years.

I filled the time the only way I knew how: job hunting, because rent doesn't care about heartbreak. I sent out applications to every nannying agency in the city, every daycare, every family with a listing that even hinted at needing help. Most didn't respond. The ones that did all asked for a reference from my most recent employer, and I had nothing to give them but silence, because Mrs. Whitfield wasn't returning my calls.

On the sixth day, desperate and running low on both money and pride, I walked to the Whitfield house one more time, hoping to catch her in person, hoping I could get even a shred of explanation.

I didn't get Mrs. Whitfield. I got her neighbor's tall iron gate instead, and behind it, a man who made the whole street feel smaller just by standing in it.

He was easily six and a half feet, dressed simply in dark clothes that somehow still looked expensive, with sharp features and dark eyes that fixed on me the second I came into view. I froze on the sidewalk like a rabbit that had just noticed the hawk overhead, some old, wordless instinct telling me to be very, very still.

"You're lost," he said. Not a question.

"I... no. Sorry. I used to work next door." I gestured weakly toward the Whitfield house. "I was just trying to catch my old employer."

His eyes narrowed slightly, taking in what I was sure was a mess: wrinkled clothes, tired eyes, the general look of someone whose whole life had come apart at the seams in under two weeks. "The nanny," he said, like he was placing a puzzle piece. "I've seen you with the children before."

"Clara," I offered, because it felt strange not to. "Clara Bennett."

Something flickered across his face, surprise, maybe, though it was gone before I could be sure. "Logan Vance," he said.

The name landed somewhere in the back of my mind, a half-remembered echo of Nora's voice in the clinic ten days earlier. Terrifying, gorgeous, and apparently has fertility concerns of his own. I felt heat climb up my neck, ridiculous and unwelcome.

"I should let you go," I said quickly. "Sorry to bother you."

"You're not bothering me." He said it plainly, without warmth, but he didn't look away either, and something about the way his gaze tracked me, steady, assessing, almost like he was cataloguing something, made my skin prickle in a way I couldn't explain. "Whitfield's not going to answer that door. She's traveling. Left three days ago."

"Oh." That explained the silence, at least, even if it didn't explain the locked door and the note. "Thank you for telling me."

He nodded once, that same unreadable focus still on me, and I made myself walk away before I could embarrass myself further by staring back. I felt his eyes on me the whole length of the block, and it wasn't until I turned the corner that I let out the breath I'd been holding.

I didn't understand it. I'd just had my heart shredded by a man I loved, I was carrying, hopefully, a stranger's child in a clinic-issued attempt at building a family alone, and here I was, rattled by ten seconds of eye contact with a billionaire I'd never see again.

Never see again, I told myself firmly, and went home to keep filling out job applications, certain I was right.

I wasn't.

Four days later, on the morning I was due back at Sunvale Clinic, my phone rang before I'd even gotten out of bed. Nora's name lit up the screen, and something about the hour, barely past six, sent a cold feeling straight through my chest before I even answered.

"Nora?"

"Clara." Her voice came out thin, stretched tight over something close to panic. "Can you come to my apartment? Right now? I need to talk to you before your appointment, and I can't... I can't say this over the phone."

"You're scaring me."

"I know. I'm sorry. Just, please. Come now."

I was dressed and out the door in four minutes, my heart hammering the whole cab ride across town, running through every possible explanation and discarding each one as not bad enough to match the fear in her voice. Nora didn't panic. Not like this. Not since we were kids and panic had meant something could actually hurt us.

She opened her apartment door before I even knocked, her face pale, her eyes red-rimmed like she hadn't slept.

"What happened?" I asked, stepping inside. "Nora, you're scaring me half to death."

She sat me down at her kitchen table, took both my hands the way she had the day I found out about Jason, and I understood, with a sinking certainty, that whatever she was about to tell me was going to break something else in my life wide open.

"There was a mix-up," she said. "At the clinic. Ten days ago."

"What kind of mix-up?"

Nora's grip tightened on my hands, and when she finally spoke again, her voice was barely above a whisper.

"Clara, the sample you were inseminated with wasn't the donor you chose."