His Billionaire Heir

CHAPTER 4 PART 1

Ethan Blackwood did not like to wait.

Waiting was something men with the leisure of patience indulged in, and he had never been among them.

He had built his life on action—on quick decisions, on consequences measured and stepped on, on control taken and mastered. In his private office with the lights of the city seeping into the glass like thick gold,

he felt no satisfaction that came with victory.

In her place was a knot of void, a different kind of pain with no connection to business and all about a small boy whose storm-grey eyes haunted him.

He replayed the scene in the bakery with the analytical mind that had constructed empires.

Noah's piping voice—"Daddy"—echoed in his head.

Isabella's silence was an image he could not shake.

She had chosen, he thought, not to tell him. She had only kept him away from his son. And the decision had the temerity of an insult. But beneath the insult was a colder consciousness: he had been denied the thing he had not known he would desire—family.

He moved over to the window and watched the city that had made him. Glass towers glowed in the crescent moon and spread light into the river; below, a thousand smaller lives flowed on in their own silent rotation.

He'd always been fascinated by the mechanics of those rotations.

Tonight, one small rotation had entered his.

He called in his executive counselor, Patrick Rivers, and did so with the economy of a man ordering an overture.

"I want you to combine all this on custody law and immediate legal action," Ethan told him. "Off the record. No press. No leaks. I need options.

Temporary custody, visitation under supervision, emergency motions.....what would bind me to my child's life while we sort the rest out."

Patrick's tone was quick and even, the type of composed Ethan fostered in his inner circle. "We can file on paternity and move for temporary custody pending the result.

We can move for supervised visitation immediately if she won't comply voluntarily. But we'll need proof of parentage and evidence of neglect may be difficult to come by.

Where is the child enrolled? Hospital records? Birth certificate?"

Find them. And quietly—check for any attachments to her name. Apartments, social services, orders. I don't want a spectacle. I want the facts. Call no press."

He let the silence carry the burden.

"And Patrick—that bakery. I want the unit to hold back. No SWAT pageantry. I don't want to purchase a trophy. I want him."

He set the receiver back down and leaned back, fingers crossed, the weight of decisions pressing on him like pieces of iron. The man he was had never been tested by so intimate a thing.

Business was numbers and pressure; human beings were variables that had to be managed.

This was different. Noah's small faith in the world—Noah's faith in the idea of a father—locked up like a fragile thing beyond his ability to act in restraint.

He replayed the evening: crayon drawing, the way Noah had looked at him as if recognition was something to be earned rather than something that would follow. He wished he could hold him, experiment with how much the resemblance went past eyes. He wished he could teach him how to tie a tie and how to stand firm before a world that would attempt to appropriate what was his. He yearned, in his silly way of one who had never listened to a bedtime story, to read one to a little child who might address him as Daddy.

There was work, however. Feelings, he knew, were a luxury in courtrooms.

In the morning his schedule was full of appointments he had not made. He summoned in his lawyers, the crème de la crème of family law for hire without inspiring unnecessary publicity.

Coffee and power hung in the air like a perfume. Women and men sat with muted efficiency like connoisseurs who had seen all forms of human desperation and could still reduce it to strategy.

"You can't just charge into a courtroom and demand a child," Patrick replied when Ethan brought them up to date. "You file, you introduce evidence, and you persuade the court that your involvement is in the best interest of the child. You might also establish the mother is unfit or that there is justifiable reason to move custody. But this is complicated. We are not going to succeed on anger."