The Owner's Secret Client Read online

  The Owner’s Secret Client

  Forbidden Lake Romance, Book 3

  Elana Johnson

  Contents

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  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Sneak Peek! The Billionaire’s Secret Flame Chapter One

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  Chapter One

  Liam Addler sat beside his daughter, his nerves firing on all cylinders the way his luxury car did. Fine, the vehicle was an SUV, and it had been a luxury one a few years ago. He’d drive it until it died, because while his parents owned one of the largest cherry orchards in the state of Michigan, they’d taught him to live frugally.

  Or maybe he just didn’t want to drive a real luxury car through the muddy orchards in the spring. Thankfully, the ground had all dried up now that June was almost here. It felt like everyone in town was holding their breath for school to get out, and his seven-year-old was no exception. She was so done with second grade, she’d readily agreed to her yearly test at the oncologist.

  “Kimmie,” a woman called, and Liam tapped his daughter’s leg. She had headphones in her ears and was watching a video on his phone. She looked up at him, his late wife’s eyes staring right back into his.

  “It’s our turn,” he said, expecting the pinch in his heart. It came slowly these days, where it used to steal his breath and make him immobile for a moment. Liam wasn’t sure how he felt about not missing his wife as much as he used to, but he wondered if he could go out with someone and not be crippled with guilt. For the first time since Heather’s death, he actually wanted to try going out with another woman.

  Kimmie swooped the earbuds out and stood up. Liam made eye contact with the nurse, who smiled at him like he and Kimmie were just so cute.

  He’d seen it all before. He’d grown up in Forbidden Lake, and so had his wife, Heather. Breast cancer had taken her from him and Kimmie three years ago, and it was only in the last twelve months or so that anyone looked at him normally again.

  And the women…well, he could sense a woman’s interest in him from a mile away, and this nurse—definitely interested.

  Liam was not interested in her, though he probably should be. After all, dating a nurse at a doctor’s office would be acceptable. Totally okay. Normal.

  “How are you today, Kimmie?” the nurse asked, and Liam had forgotten her name again.

  “Fine,” his daughter said.

  Yes, Heather’s cancer had been extremely rare. Most women didn’t develop breast cancer in their early thirties. But she had. And it had already spread to her lymph nodes and lungs and liver. The doctor estimated she’d lived with the cancer for a decade, and he was “shocked” she’d been able to carry Kimmie to full term.

  Liam had been advised to have his daughter screened each year, though she had no breast tissue. The doctors couldn’t tell which area of Heather’s body had developed the cancer first, and Liam didn’t want to have to bury his daughter too.

  And so she got a CT scan once a year, got to get out of school for a while, and he could rest easier for the next three hundred and sixty-four days. Not that Liam rested all that easy anyway, especially as his nanny had just given notice that she was quitting—one week before school got out. Right at the crucial moment when he’d actually need her full-time.

  Kimmie could help him in the orchards a little bit, but his father had started giving Liam almost all of the meetings now, and a seven-year-old shouldn’t have to suffer through those. He barely wanted to go.

  “All right, go on in,” the nurse said, and Kimmie skipped through the door to the technician inside. Liam hadn’t even realized she’d left to change, and he wandered over to the row of chairs against the wall where he normally waited.

  The nurse-whose-name-he-couldn’t-remember turned toward him. “Has she had any symptoms?”

  “No,” he said. “We’re just here for preventative stuff.”

  She smiled and tossed her dark hair over her shoulder as she turned to press a button. “Are you guys doing free-pick yet out at the orchard?”

  He almost scoffed. It wasn’t even June yet, and everyone knew the week-long Cherry Festival happened at the end of July. Didn’t they? He was pretty sure this woman had been at the hospital last year when he’d brought in Kimmie.

  She turned toward him, and Liam realized he hadn’t answered. “No,” he said. “You can rent the cabins at the lake, but you can’t pick cherries until they’re ripe. That doesn’t happen until July.”

  “Oh.” She smiled her cherry-red lips at him, but Liam was so not interested. He wondered if he’d even know if he was, but he folded his arms, glad when the nurse didn’t ask him any more questions.

  The minutes passed, and Liam got drawn into a texting conversation with his foreman, McKenna Rodgers. She oversaw all the work with the trees, and it was a huge job. He had someone over the cabin rentals too, and someone over the fence line repair. Someone to clean the cabins. Someone to maintain their private beach. But out of them all, McKenna’s job was by far the biggest and hardest.

  And she wasn’t getting along with Charles, who ran their beach rentals. He keeps telling people they can go through the orchards, she’d texted. And they can’t. They hit the trees with their beach chairs and they don’t watch their kids. We’re losing money over this, Liam.

  I’ll talk to Charles, he promised her, glancing up to see if Kimmie had finished changing yet.

  She came out a few minutes later, and she said, “Do I have to go to school?”

  “Yep,” he said. “I have a problem at work, and we don’t get our new nanny until tonight.”

  He’d only texted with his new nanny—oops, au pair—Serenity over the past few days. “It’s a new agency, remember?”

  “I hope she’s nice.”

  “Of course she’s nice,” he said, though he really had no way of knowing that for sure. “I contacted her family in France, and they loved her. They had three kids—they all loved her.” He put his arm around his daughter. “Think of that. She has to be totally nice, and fun, and just awesome to get three kids to love her.” He grinned down at her, and Kimmie smiled back.

  “All right. Is she living with us like Ella did?”

  “This agency does things differently,” he said, a bit anxious about the all the changes with it being so close to summer. He didn’t know this new woman, and she didn’t know him, and sometimes he had to run out early in the morning. It had been really great to have Ella in the basement, where she had a fully furnished apartment of her own. Locking door on the steps. Everything.

  “So Serenity has a housing allowance, and I’m told she has an apartment right across from that park you love.” Liam waved to the woman who scheduled the tests for them, and he and Kimmie left the imaging wing of the hospital.

  Kimmie didn’t say anything, and Liam’s thoughts rotated about this new agency he�
�d found. Heartland Au Pair had actually been recommended to him by another single father at a group Liam attended from time to time. When he’d discovered he’d need someone quickly, he’d texted Jason to find out who he used.

  Heartland had said it would be a challenge to find someone, and then the next day, they’d called to say one of their au pairs was returning to Forbidden Lake from France quiet unexpectedly and needed a new job.

  Liam hadn’t asked a whole lot of questions. He’d gotten Serenity Silvers’ name and phone number, filled out all the paperwork, and she would be there that evening.

  “Do you have your backpack?” he asked.

  “No.” Kimmie hopped over the cracks in the sidewalk as they walked to the SUV.

  Liam sighed. “Why didn’t you bring it?” He knew why. She didn’t want to go to school, where they were probably washing desks and then watching a movie. With only five days left, if he was a teacher, that was what he’d be doing.

  Kimmie didn’t answer, and it wouldn’t do any good to lecture her. He waited for her to buckle her seatbelt, and then he put the vehicle in drive.

  “Do we need the backpack?” he asked. “It’s the last week of school.”

  “Yeah,” she said. “Miss Butler said to bring stuff to take papers home in. She’s passing out all of our art today.”

  Annoyance bolted through Liam, but he didn’t let it show. He supposed he should’ve reminded her to bring her backpack if he’d wanted her to have it. Truth be told, he wasn’t going to go into work today at all. He’d been planning to go to their appointment and then take Kimmie to lunch.

  Why couldn’t Charlie just send the tourists to their cabins along the clearly marked roads?

  They lived out on the Addler family land, adjacent to the orchards, so it wasn’t just a quick trip to grab what she needed. Liam drove in silence, the lake on his left glinting in the almost-summer sunshine.

  With Kimmie absorbed into her video again, Liam was left to his own thoughts. Both of his brothers had found someone to spend their lives with recently, and he’d been out of the dating pond for so long. Maybe Jon or Phoenix could give him the names of some eligible women.

  He almost laughed at the thought of asking Phoenix. While he’d left his cabin in the woods a few times recently, the man literally hadn’t been into town in years before that. His suggestions for who Liam could ask out would probably include a co-worker or two and that was it.

  Jon would definitely have a wider net, and Liam resolved to text his brother before the day ended. Just thinking about what that text would say sent his stomach into a frenzy.

  He tapped her arm and waited for her to take out her headphones. “Will you miss lunch?” he asked.

  “What time is it?”

  “Well, it’s eleven-fifteen now. Don’t you go to lunch at eleven thirty-five?”

  “Yeah.”

  “So we should get something at the house,” he said, glancing at her. “We won’t be back until half your lunch is over.”

  “Maybe we could get something,” she said, her whole face lighting up.

  “No.” He shook his head. “We have food at the house. I have to get you back to school and take care of something at the office.” He glanced at her and watched her face fall. He hated it. Hated not being able to do everything she wanted.

  “Fine,” she said.

  The orchards came into view, and they were bright and green and glorious. Liam had worked his whole life in the family orchards, and he was set to take them over one day. One day soon, with the amount of work his father had turned over to him this year.

  He stopped at the intersection, the road to his left winding up to the cabin rentals and parking for the free-picking that nurse had mentioned. Straight ahead led to the private Addler property, and right would take him south, toward Chicago if he stayed in the car long enough.

  He peered up through the windshield, noticing a line of white smoke lifting from his family’s private property. All of the Addler’s lived on this lane, including Phoenix. He just lived farther down it than most.

  “What in the world?” He crossed the road and went down the road. Jon’s. Karly’s. Mia’s. Past his parent’s house. His grandparent’s.

  His was next, and the smoke was definitely coming from the back of his house. Panic hit him hard. Had he left something burning? A candle? A heater? The stove?

  He couldn’t think. He said, “Stay here,” to Kimmie, and bolted from the SUV. After taking the front steps two at a time, he burst through the front door to the loudest rock music on the planet.

  “Hey,” he yelled into it, thinking a vagrant had gotten into his house. Maybe they’d been watching him and noticed he and Kimmie left every morning at the same time and rarely came home during the day.

  He marched through the foyer, scanning the living room for any intruders. He didn’t see anyone, but a woman started singing along with the music. It was more like screeching, and he came to a complete halt when he rounded the corner and saw the blonde dancing in his kitchen.

  His heart thrashed then, and pure attraction poured through him. So he would know when he was attracted to another woman, because wow, every cell in his body was firing.

  “Hey,” he said again, and she spun toward him. Where the nurse had been made up and fake, this woman was raw and beautiful. Her hair sat halfway between brown and blonde and fell over her shoulders in long curls he wanted to fist his fingers in. She wore simple jeans and a tank top that could’ve been labeled pumpkin by a crayon company.

  “Who are you?” he asked, managing to hide the way his hormones seemed to have forgotten he was a thirty-five-year-old man. And this woman was clearly much younger than him, and so very obviously not for him. Off-limits.

  She scrambled to turn down the music, her eyes wide and afraid. “I’m so sorry,” she said. “I didn’t think you’d be home until tonight.”

  “Clearly,” he bit out, folding his arms. He did it because he knew it made him look large and imposing, and this woman seemed afraid…but she wasn’t at the same time.

  “I’m Serenity,” she said, darting forward to shake his hand. “Serenity Silvers. Your new au pair.”

  Sparks shot up Liam’s arm when her hand touched his, and he knew he’d just fallen into a deep vat of very, very hot water.

  Chapter Two

  Serenity Silvers kept her smile in place as she pulled her hand back. She tucked both of them in her back pockets for good measure. Then she wouldn’t grab onto this guy again, though she really wanted to.

  She’d worked for three families over the years, and none of the fathers had even come close to stirring her blood the way Liam Addler did. Wow. His profile said he sometimes left the house early to run, but…wow.

  Her heart pounded in her chest in time with the now-silent music as embarrassment hit her full-force. “Heartland said I was cleared,” she said. “I talked to my program director, and she thought it would be fine if I came over.” Why didn’t he blink? Those dark teal eyes seemed to devour her, and yet she couldn’t look away from them.

  “It looked like my house was on fire,” he said.

  She waved her hand in front of her, though most of the smoke was gone. “Yeah, I had a little mishap with the oven.”

  Liam glanced toward it, and then turned abruptly with the word, “Kimmie.” He glared at Serenity one more time before striding back the way he’d come. Serenity couldn’t help herself. She moved so she could watch him walk away, and yeah, the view from the back was just as good as she’d hoped it would be.

  “Stop it,” she hissed to herself. He was thirty-five-years-old, and she might not have been the brightest in calculus, but she knew that was seven years older than her. Too old. Not to mention Heartland had a very strict no-dating rule while working for them—and not just the fathers. Anyone.

  She’d only be able to work for the family for a year anyway, and then she’d age out of the au pair program. Then she’d have to figure out what to do with h
er life. She thought of the French pastries and the walks with the kids she used to watch along the river and to the Eiffel Tower.

  Forbidden Lake was nothing like France, and a sigh escaped Serenity’s mouth. “You need to be here,” she said, moving over to the French doors—about all the French experience she was going to get here in Michigan—and closed them. The house seemed decently aired out now.

  “Ew,” a little girl said. “What’s that smell?”

  Okay, maybe not. Serenity hurried back to the spot in the house where she could see all the way to the front door. “Hey, there,” she said, crouching down so she could meet her new charge. “You must be Kimmie.”

  She looked up at her father, who nodded for her to go on ahead. “Yes,” she said.

  “So proper.” Serenity grinned at her, already liking the dark-haired girl who’d clearly gotten her mother’s eyes. She’d studied the file on Kimmie and Liam Addler as she’d crossed the Atlantic Ocean, so she knew quite a bit about them already. She knew the girl’s mother had died of cancer a few years ago, and she knew Liam ran the cherry orchards bordering the house where she now stood.

  She wished she’d known he’d come home in the middle of the day. Then she wouldn’t have made a fool of herself with the punk rock music and the bad singing.

  “Do you want lunch?” she asked, straightening. She’d need to sit down with Mr. Addler and work out her schedule later, but right now, she could barely look at him without her lungs squeezing a bit too tight.

  “Yes,” Kimmie said at the same time Liam said, “We don’t have time.” He looked down at Kimmie, who wore the brightest look of hope. “She needs to get back to school.”