All Chapters of THE BILLIONAIRE'S LOST FAMILY: Chapter 71 - Chapter 80

Catherine’s POV*02 days before*I kept my promise.I had said. You'll have your money. And here I was, in the back of my own car at one in the morning, with an envelope of cash in my handbag and my driver dismissed two blocks away. I had never kept an appointment so punctually in my life.The envelope was real. Twelve thousand dollars, banded, exactly as he had asked. I had counted it myself in my father's study that afternoon with the door locked, and then I had stood very still for a long time in front of the second thing in my bag, the thing I had taken from the locked cabinet behind my father's desk, the cabinet whose key I had been quietly copying since I was seventeen.I didn’t have to do it myself. I knew I could have ordered someone to do my dirty work for me. But the first person I hard ordered to do nothing but be a thief has ruined the job and killed someone. If you wanted something done properly, you had to do it yourself.Besides that, I felt a growing curiosity inside m

Colton’s POVI have been in a lot of rooms with a lot of lawyers. I've sat across from men who wanted to buy my company and men who wanted to take it. I've been in boardrooms in Manchester and tea rooms in Kensington.I had never been in a room where I was so frightened of the answer to a simple question.But that was after breakfast. Let me start with breakfast.Hannah came down the stairs at seven in the morning, one hand dragging along the banister, the other gripping the strap of a small purple backpack with a horse on it. She'd slept in it. I know because Nancy's mother had gone in at dawn to check on her, and had come out of the room with her eyebrows halfway up her forehead and whispered, "She's got her backpack on in bed. It’s all dirty. We have to wash the thing.""Just leave it, mom. She’s probably attached to it." Nancy had said with a sigh.So, we left it. Hannah sat at the kitchen table with the backpack on her lap while Nancy’s mom served her scrambled eggs and a glass o

Andrew’s POV"Uncle Colton makes the best cake in the whole world. I miss him."Liam said it with his mouth full of pancake, with maple syrup on his chin and his legs swinging under the breakfast table like a happy little metronome. He said it the way a child says something that's simply a fact, the way he might say the sky is blue or dogs bark.I kept smiling. I smiled and nodded and reached across with a napkin and wiped his chin."Is that right?" I said."Mm-hm. He made a velvet one. It was red. And he let me lick the spoon." Liam considered. "Mommy likes him. She laughed when he did the voice.""What voice?"Liam dropped his chin and did a deep, mock-posh baritone. "Good evening, good sir, I am the Earl of Cake."He collapsed in giggles. Rose, standing by the sideboard with the coffee pot, turned her face away. I saw her shoulders shake.I laughed too. Oh, I laughed beautifully. If anyone had been watching me, they would have seen a doting father at a perfect morning table, and no

Andrew’s POVCatherine was waiting in the living room when I got back.I'd given the guards instructions to let her in when she called. I'm not certain why. Perhaps because I'd been spending evenings across a table from her for weeks, reviewing contracts, and she'd gradually moved from enemy to something more like a very polite scorpion in my pocket. Perhaps because it was easier to leave the door open than to be bothered by the effort of closing it.She was sitting on the edge of my sofa with her coat still on. She looked up at me, and I stopped in the doorway.She was pale. She had no lipstick on, for once, and without that red slash across her face she looked oddly younger and smaller. Her hair was pulled back in a plain knot, as if she'd done it without a mirror. There were faint shadows beneath her eyes. When she reached for the glass of water on the coffee table, I saw her hand shake, a fine, rapid tremor, and she saw me see it and set the glass down at once.“What the hell happ

Ashanti stood behind a rack of discounted children's hats, with her phone held up as if she were checking a message, and watched Colton Earnshaw kneel on a shoe-store floor and tie a stranger's child's laces.She had been stalking him for days. She was honest enough with herself to call it stalking. She told herself it was due diligence. A strategist always knew her competition. But the truth was simpler and uglier.She had never taken his name off her phone. After the breakup, after the screaming, after he'd changed the locks and sent his security man to collect her key, there was a tiny blue dot on her map, always. While they were still dating, she had privately gone through his phone and shared his location with herself without his knowledge.And she was lucky that he hadn’t caught up on it yet. It gave her an advantage. It showed her where he slept. Where he ate. Where he went when he thought no one was watching.Two days ago, it had shown her something strange.A grimy industrial