HER SECRET HEIRS: TEN BROTHERS STAND GUARD

Chapter 6: The Valentines

(Richard's POV)

I called back three times. Nobody answered.

I pulled up my contacts and called Victor, my head of security. "I need you to trace a car. Black sedan left my property twenty minutes ago, heading south. And I need a full background check on a man named Benjamin Valentine."

"Yes, sir. How soon do you need it?"

"Now."

I hung up and stood by the window, looking out at the empty street. The only thing left of Evelyn's presence was a faint set of tire marks on the pavement where the black car had been parked.

Who were these people? Evelyn had never once mentioned having brothers, and in three years, the only family she ever spoke about was her aunt, Mirabel. She had no parents who came to visit, no siblings who called on holidays, no cousins who sent birthday cards. She was completely alone, and I had always assumed that was just the way things were.

But someone had answered her phone and called himself her brother. And he had said there were six of them.

Tonia walked into the study without knocking. "Richard, your mother just called me. She wants to come over tomorrow to discuss the wedding plans."

"What wedding plans?"

"Ours, of course." She smiled and sat on the edge of my desk. "Sylvia has already started looking at venues. She is thinking of the Grand Ballroom at the Crescent Hotel, or maybe..."

"Tonia, I need you to tell me the truth about what happened with Evelyn this morning."

Her smile faltered. "I already told you."

"I checked the hallway cameras."

The color drained from her face, just for a second, before she recovered. "Cameras? You have cameras in the hallway?"

"I saw you take something from the bedroom drawer, Tonia. You went in, took the pregnancy test, looked at it, and then put it on the bed where Evelyn would find it. You wanted her to panic."

Tonia stood up from the desk. "I was protecting you, Richard. If she is pregnant, you have the right to know."

"And the scene in the bedroom? You told me she attacked you. Did you grab her first?"

"She is lying."

"Then why did you move to take something out of her pocket?"

Tonia's lips pressed together. Her eyes were hard and flat, and for the first time, the mask slipped just enough for me to see what was underneath. It was not love. It was not even affection. It was calculation, cold and steady, like a person running numbers in their head.

"I think you should go back to your family's house for a few days," I said.

"Excuse me?"

"I need to sort some things out, and I cannot do that with you here."

"Richard, I gave up everything to come back to you. My career, my concerts, my life overseas. And now you want to send me away because of her? She is a nobody, Richard. A caretaker who got lucky."

"Tonia, I am asking you to leave. I am not going to ask again."

She stared at me for a long time, and something ugly flashed across her face before she smoothed it out. "Fine. But remember, Richard, I am not the kind of woman who waits forever."

She walked out and slammed the door behind her.

I sat down and rubbed my temples. My phone buzzed with a message from Victor.

"Sir, I have preliminary results on Benjamin Valentine. He is the CEO of Goldmark Technologies, one of the largest tech firms in the country. Net worth estimated at three billion dollars. He has two younger brothers, Franklin Valentine, a world-renowned architect, and Moses Valentine, a celebrity chef. He also has three cousins on his mother's side: Emmanuel Valentine, a senior prosecutor in the capital, Matthew Valentine, a national swimming champion, and Samuel Valentine, a Grammy-winning musician."

I read the message twice.

Three billion dollars. That was more than the entire Williams Group was worth. And that was just one brother.

Victor sent another message. "Also, sir, the Valentine family has been searching for a lost daughter for over two decades. The search was initiated by their late mother, Sarah Valentine, who died eight years ago. The family has a standing reward of fifty million dollars for any information leading to the daughter's recovery."

A lost daughter. Evelyn was a lost daughter.

My chair creaked as I leaned back. The world I had carefully built, the world where I was in control, where Evelyn was just a quiet, unimportant girl who cooked my meals and waited up for me, that world was cracking open right down the middle.

If Evelyn was a Valentine, then she was not the powerless nobody everyone had treated her as. She was the missing heiress of a family worth more than mine, and I had just handed her annulment papers and let another woman sleep in her bed.

I stood up and grabbed my car keys.

"Sir, where are you going?" Justina asked as I walked through the hallway.

I did not answer her. I could not even look at her. She had lied to me that morning about what happened in the bedroom, and she had told my mother about the pregnancy test. I made a mental note to deal with that later.

I drove east, toward Aunt Mirabel's neighborhood. It was a part of the city I had never visited before, a quiet street with small houses and overgrown gardens and laundry hanging on lines between balconies. It was the kind of place that people like me drove through without seeing.

I parked outside a small yellow house with a red mailbox. Through the front window, I could see a warm light and the shadows of people moving inside.

I walked to the door and knocked.

The door opened, and a woman in her fifties looked at me with sharp brown eyes. She was short and sturdy, with flour on her hands and a wooden spoon tucked into her apron pocket.

"You must be Richard," she said, and her voice held the kind of quiet anger that burned hotter than shouting. "I am Mirabel."

"Is Evelyn here?"

"She is resting. She has had a long day, thanks to you."

"I need to speak with her."

Aunt Mirabel did not move from the doorway. "You had three years to speak with her, and you spent every one of those years treating her like a piece of furniture. Now you show up at my door? What changed, Richard? The fact that she might be pregnant, or the fact that you just found out she is worth more than you?"

The words landed like a punch to the gut, because both of those things were true, and she knew it.

"I just want to see her," I said.

"And she does not want to see you." Aunt Mirabel began to close the door, but before it shut completely, she paused and looked at me one more time. "Six men came to my house today, Richard. Six men who have been searching for that girl for two decades. They built companies, won championships, and argued cases in the highest courts in this country, and the one thing that drove every single one of them was the hope of finding their baby sister."

She leaned closer, and her voice dropped to a whisper.

"They know what you did. They know about the annulment, the other woman, and the things your housekeeper said. And right now, they are sitting in my living room, all six of them, deciding what to do about it."

She closed the door in my face.

I stood on the porch in the dark, staring at the peeling paint on the doorframe, listening to the muffled sound of voices inside, voices that belonged to men who were richer, more powerful, and more dangerous than anyone I had ever crossed.

And somewhere behind that door, in a room I could not reach, Evelyn was carrying my child, the child I had told her I did not want.

My phone buzzed. A message from an unknown number.

"Mr. Williams, this is Emmanuel Valentine. I am a prosecutor, and I am very good at what I do. If you attempt to contact my sister again without her permission, I will make sure every legal and financial mistake you have ever made becomes public record. This is not a threat. It is a professional courtesy."

I lowered my phone and looked up at the small yellow house with its warm light and its red mailbox and its front garden full of wildflowers that someone had planted with care.

For the first time in my life, I had no idea what to do next.

Inside the house, a door opened and closed. Through the window, I caught a glimpse of Evelyn sitting in a rocking chair, a blanket across her lap, surrounded by men I did not know, men who looked at her the way I should have been looking at her for the past three years.

And she was smiling. For the first time in all the years I had known her, she was really, truly smiling.