Page 2 of I'll Carry You
Wiping his mouth with the back of his hand, TJ said, “The ‘inconvenience.’”
Right now, it was TJ who was being inconvenient with his cryptic vagueness. Jason scowled and opened a desk drawer. “I pay you to make my life easy. Not for rounds of twenty questions.”
“You don’t pay me nearly enough.” TJ looked bored. “Considering what I found out, my price just increased.”
His head snapped up. He leveled his gaze with TJ’s grin, which vanished as he saw Jason’s murderous expression. “You have about ten seconds before you lose my attention entirely. I didn’t come into the office today to waste time.”
His lips twitched. Jason should feel bad. It wasn’t TJ’s fault his proposal to Bill Powell had gone south. But he didn’t feel bad. TJ wasn’t his colleague. Or friend, even if they got along well. TJ was hired to do a job and paid handsomely for his discretion. End of story.
TJ waited for a beat, as though expecting him to return to a more normal rapport. He bit into the apple again. “I found your brother’s ex-girlfriend. And his little bastard kid. Took some digging. Apparently, your brother was using the last name Connor at the time he was with her.”
Jason shifted his gaze back to the desk, not wanting to show a reaction to his words. The worst likely scenario.Goddammit, Kevin.
He slid his laptop into its case, even though he wasn’t planning on leaving. He zipped up the case forcefully and set it on his desk. When he returned a cool gaze to TJ, he hoped it looked as emotionally unattached as he could. “Then there is a kid.”
“She gave the baby her last name . . . Klein. There’s always a chance it’s not his. But look at the photos.” TJ slid the file over the surface of the desk.
Jason caught the file before it fell off the desk. This time, he didn’t hide his annoyance with TJ. He glared. Thumbing the file open, a few photographs came into view. A little boy, no older than three or four, holding the hand of a woman who faced the other way. Same light blond hair, same piercing blue eyes.
He looked just like Kevin.
Jason’s chest squeezed, then he killed the emotion before it could develop further.
The blue eyes were the only thing the Cavanaugh brothers had in common. With dark hair, Jason was the black sheep of the Cavanaugh gene pool. In more ways than one. But not this kid. This kid looked like he had come straight from Thomas Cavanaugh’s loins himself.
He could almost hear his grandfather’s cackle on his deathbed.
“You won’t get a cent from me if there’s another Cavanaugh heir. Not one cent.”
And he’d made good on his promise. The will stipulated that if any other direct descendants came forward, they’d get it all. Everything. Worst of all, if the heir was Kevin’s child and a minor, his grandfather had named the CEO of Cavanaugh Metals as the manager of the inheritance trust until the kid came of age—a safeguard to ensure the kid would get the money and Jason wouldn’t take it. Another slap in the face.
Jason’s eyes narrowed at the picture. This kid wasn’t his nephew. Wasn’t Kevin’s son. He was nothing more than a broken condom. And a giant obstacle in the way of hundreds of millions of dollars and any say Jason had in what happened to Cavanaugh Metals.
His fist tightened on the edge of the desk, the rage he’d been holding back since his grandfather’s lawyer had read the will uncurling into his chest and throat. He didn’t look at TJ. Instead, he focused on the smile on that little child’s face. The back of the woman who could take it all away. She was slender with long blond hair. In the next photo, she’d turned her face.
Pretty, even.
Not that pretty fooled him these days.
As though some random bitch had ever dealt with the shit Jason had. Kevin had walked away and left him to handle the fallout. When Kevin had turned up homeless and dead from an overdose on the streets of Chicago, their grandfather had somehow blamed Jason for that, too.
And even though Jason had carried the weight and been by his grandfather’s side until his death, the old man had still effectively disinherited him.
Jason straightened. “This woman doesn’t know about my grandfather, though, does she?” He flipped the portfolio closed, too sick to look at the pictures any further. If she did, she probably would have found them. Few people would pass up an opportunity at millions.
“I don’t know what she knows. But I’m not the only one who’s looking. Thanks to Amanda, the Powells are on the hunt to see where Kevin was all those years, too. And they assigned Ned Vickers to investigate.”
“Should I be worried?” Jason had to trust TJ would shoot him straight. “How did you find him?”
“Kevin did a decent job covering his tracks. The chances of Ned finding him are slim. I found an old, almost unreadable receipt in Kevin’s wallet that you turned over to me, and that helped me get in the general vicinity. Ned won’t have that advantage. But you never know—he’s smart and been doing this longer than I have.”
“If another eligible heir hasn’t come forward after ninety days, it’s all yours,”his lawyer had said. Just thirty days left. It had taken TJ two months to find this kid. How long would it take Ned Vickers?
Jason checked his watch. It was barely noon, but this type of news required a drink. He crossed the large office toward the small table beside the windows. They gave him a panoramic view of Chicago. Jason barely stopped to look. Pouring himself a glass of whiskey, he swallowed it, feeling the burn down his throat. “Where did you find this woman? Somewhere they’ll look?”
TJ leaned back on the edge of Jason’s desk. “Brandywood. Some sort of hole-in-the-wall town in the mountains of Western Maryland near Deep Creek Lake. I’d never heard of it.”
Jason froze. His fingers curled over the smooth surface of the glass. Kevin had been hiding in plain sight. For how long?