Chapter 4

Daddy!

Richard's POV

I could not stop seeing her in that red suit.

Karen. My Karen. Except she was not mine anymore and maybe she never had been. The woman on that stage had been someone else entirely. Confident, articulate, commanding. She had owned that room in a way I never imagined her capable of.

I sat at my desk staring at my laptop screen without seeing it. The sun was rising over Seattle and I had not slept. Every time I closed my eyes, I saw her walking away from me in that hotel corridor. Go to hell, Richard. Her voice had been cold with a fury that made my chest tight.

I deserved it. I knew I deserved it. But that did not make it easier to accept.

"Mr. Palmer?" My assistant's voice crackled through the intercom. "Your nine o'clock is here."

"Cancel it. Cancel everything today."

"Sir?"

"Everything, Jennifer. Clear my schedule."

A pause. "Yes, sir."

I stood and walked to the windows overlooking the city. Somewhere out there, Karen was probably in her own office celebrating her win. The contract I had wanted, the recognition I had assumed would be mine. She had taken it all and made it look easy.

Karen Andrews. She had gone back to her maiden name and built an empire worth hundreds of millions. In two years. While I had been coasting on the legacy my father built.

The thought made me sick.

I pulled out my phone and called down to my personal assistant on the executive floor. "Michael, I need a complete background check. Everything you can find on Karen Andrews, CEO of A.A. Biotech Group."

"How detailed do you want this, sir?"

"Everything. Education, business holdings, financial records, personal life. I want to know what she has been doing for the past three years."

"I will have it to you by noon."

The file arrived at eleven-thirty. I tore through it like a man possessed.

MBA from Harvard, completed in eighteen months with honors. How had she even gotten into Harvard? The Karen I knew had barely finished her bachelor's degree before we married.

A.A. Biotech Group founded twenty-six months ago with initial capital of two hundred thousand dollars. My mind tried to work out where she had gotten that kind of money. The divorce settlement had been generous but not that generous. Had she saved during our marriage? Had someone invested in her?

Current valuation: two hundred and thirty million dollars.

I read the number three times. She had built a company worth more than some corporations that had been operating for decades. In two years.

Patents pending in antimicrobial research. Partnerships with major hospital networks. Board of directors that included Nobel Prize winners and former government officials.

Then I saw it on page six, buried in the personal information section.

Dependents: One minor child, female, eighteen months old.

My hand froze on the mouse. The coffee I had been drinking turned to acid in my stomach.

She kept it. She kept our baby.

The room tilted slightly and I gripped the edge of my desk. That thing, I had called it. Abort it, I do not care. The words came back to me with brutal clarity and shame washed over me so intense I could barely breathe.

I had a daughter. Somewhere in Boston, there was a little girl with my DNA and I had told Karen to get rid of her.

What kind of man did that?

I stood abruptly and grabbed my keys from the desk drawer. My rational mind told me this was insane but I was not listening to rational thought anymore. I needed to see her. Needed to see my daughter. Needed to understand what I had thrown away.

"Jennifer, get the helicopter ready. I am going to Boston."

"Sir, you have meetings this afternoon and the board presentation tomorrow morning."

"Cancel them. All of them."

I did not wait for her response. I took the elevator down to the parking garage and drove to the helipad on the roof of Palmer Tower. The flight crew looked surprised to see me but they were professionals. Within twenty minutes, we were airborne.

The flight from Seattle to Boston took four hours and twenty minutes. I spent every second of it thinking about Karen's face when she told me she was pregnant. The hope in her eyes that I would react like a human being. The way that hope had died when I dismissed her and our child like an inconvenience.

I had been cruel. Not just cold but deliberately, calculatingly cruel. Because Lena had come back and I had wanted to erase Karen from my life as quickly as possible.

Lena. I had not thought about her once since Karen walked off that stage. The woman I had left my wife for now seemed like a stranger I barely knew.

The helicopter landed at a private airfield outside Boston and I rented a car. Karen's address was in the file Michael had compiled. A residential neighborhood, upscale but not ostentatious. The kind of place where professionals raised families.

I parked down the street and walked to her house. It was elegant with a well-maintained garden and large windows that let in natural light. Nothing like the mansion we had shared in Seattle but it looked like a home in a way that place never had.

I heard laughter before I saw them.

I walked around to the side of the house where a gate led to the backyard. Through the wooden slats, I could see Karen sitting on a blanket in the grass. She wore jeans and a simple sweater with her hair loose around her shoulders. She looked younger than she had on that stage, more like the woman I remembered.

Beside her was a little girl.

My breath caught. Dark curls, exactly like mine. She was chasing a butterfly with unsteady toddler steps and laughing with pure joy. Karen watched her with an expression of such open love that something cracked in my chest.

That was my daughter. My child. The one I had told Karen to abort.

Then the back door opened and a man stepped out carrying two glasses of lemonade. He was tall with an easy smile and casual clothes. The little girl shrieked with delight.

"Daddy! Daddy, come play with me and Mummy!"

The words hit me like a physical blow. I watched as the man set down the glasses and scooped up my daughter, spinning her around while she squealed. Karen was laughing and the three of them looked like a perfect family.

Daddy.

My daughter called another man Daddy.

Karen had moved on. She had built a new life with someone who was there for her in ways I never had been. Someone who played with their daughter in the garden on Sunday afternoons. Someone who made Karen laugh like that.

I stood frozen at the gate and my hand gripping the wood until splinters bit into my palm. This was what I had thrown away. Not just Karen but this. A family. A child who would have called me Daddy if I had not been too selfish and blind to see what I had.

Karen glanced toward the house and for one terrible second I thought she would see me standing there like some pathetic stalker. But her attention returned to the man and my daughter and she said something that made them both laugh.

I turned and walked back to my car with my vision blurring. I sat behind the wheel and pressed my palms against my eyes.

I had lost everything that mattered and I had not even known it until now.