Midnight Legacy by Dee Tenorio
Tara Sellers has an identity problem. Having grown up in countless foster homes, she scratches out a living as a paparazzi photographer. Until she discovers she’s the illegitimate daughter of one of the richest men in the world. Suddenly, everything she thought she knew about herself is a lie.
Dr. Perry Chase has a proximity problem. His friendship with the Remingtons has long defined him, but when they ask him to help steer their newfound sister to seeing things their way, he can’t let himself get too close to his very attractive prey. But he can’t seem to make himself get far enough away, either…
By day, they bicker, but by night their private lessons turn to passion.
Unclear who she is and who she wants to be, Tara must decide how much she’s willing to give up for the chance to have a real family of her own.
This is the final book in The Midnight Trilogy (pssttt hon, update your website). So far I have loved the series. Very harlequinish, a touch soapy and entertaining… think Dynasty when it was good.
I haven’t read this one yet, but have a review up for Midnight Temptation. And there looks like we have another excerpt for this up… who knew?
And after you finish the excerpt, before or after you buy the book, you can go read Dee’s guest post that amuses me muchly:
Dee Tenorio, Is She An Author Behaving Badly?
Unedited Excerpt:
“I’ve found her.”
“Legacy.” Chase didn’t need confirmation again, but he said the name anyway.
Jordan nodded. “You won’t believe how. Or where.”
He actually didn’t care, but he made sure not to let his face reflect that.
“She’s a photographer in Dallas, right back where she started and she probably doesn’t even know it. Paparazzi! The boys are going to love that.”
“Jordan.” He tried to soften his impatience.
Her eyes narrowed on him, a flash of her temper quelling him. “I’m not a fool, Chase. I know good and well what this woman is capable of doing to us. You’re the one who doesn’t understand.”
“Why are you doing this to yourself? The girl you’ve found probably doesn’t know who she is. Better yet, she doesn’t have to know.” He’d come to that conclusion about ten seconds after Jordan confided her strange quest to him more than five years ago.
“Yes, she does. I have to meet her, Chase. I need to see her and speak to her.”
“It won’t bring him back.” How many times had he said this to her? He could never give her back the belief that her husband was faithful. He couldn’t take back the birth certificate she’d discovered in Harper Remington’s desk after his untimely death of a massive coronary at the relatively young age of forty. All he could do was try to dissuade her from finding her husband’s love child.
Well, he’d tried, anyway.
“I don’t have any interest in bringing Harper back,” Jordan murmured, looking away from him to the tall bay windows lining the south side of the room. “I needed to find his daughter. And I have.” She turned back to him, her expression brittle. “If I had a choice, I’d probably have left the girl to her life, but I don’t have that kind of luxury. I certainly don’t have the option of time. Her thirtieth birthday is December twenty-eighth.”
Chase’s conscience twitched. In his mind, Legacy was still something of a baby. It was safer that way. Easier. Whenever he thought about her, she had a whole life of possibility ahead of her. The reminder that she was only four years younger than him not only brought to crystal clarity that she was a real woman somewhere…it reminded him that the man he’d once idolized had never been capable of fidelity. His anger at that knowledge never ceased to surprise him.
“The secret won’t be safe after she turns thirty.”
Jordan had been speaking, but he hadn’t been listening. “What secret?”
“Her. Legacy.” Her fingers twisted against each other. “The day after she turns thirty, Harper’s will becomes public. She won’t be safe, Chase, and neither will we.”
“Safe from what? You’re not making any sense.”
“I know, but you have to trust me.”
“Of course I trust you.” What did trust and this nonsense have to do with one another?
She took a deep breath. “I need you to take care of her for me.”
Chase stared at her, hoping to understand her request, but his synapses didn’t seem to be firing. “You want me to take care of her?” At her unhelpful nod, he had the coldest sense of surprise wash over him. “You mean…take care of her?”
“What?” Her head tilted to the side before understanding dawned bright and incredulously on her face. “No! I need you to arrange for her to come to California. For heaven’s sake, Chase, I need you to get to know her, not murder her.”
Now his blood was definitely cold. “You’re bringing her here?” Why didn’t she just set the woman on fire, it would be faster and possibly less painful. “No, Jordan. No.” He stood up, ready to walk out of the room. He’d even made it all the way to the double doors when she finally called his name.
“If you don’t help me control this, everything we’ve built is going to disappear. This family, this house, our entire future. It’ll be gone.”
Chase kept his hand on the knob. He wasn’t an idiot. He knew he was being cornered into something—a terrible something—but he couldn’t leave knowing Jordan needed him. “This isn’t just about meeting Harper’s illegitimate daughter, is it?”
It took her some time before she whispered, “No.”
Chase turned his head, finding her standing only a few feet away. “You need to tell me. I can’t help you if you don’t tell me what’s going on.”
He gave her the time she needed to decide. Watched her worry her lip and finally drop her gaze. She turned from him, heading back to the desk, reaching into a file drawer at the bottom. He stepped back from the door and followed when she pulled out a thick manila folder. She held it out to him.
Reluctantly, Chase took hold of the heavy file. It felt like a mistake from the moment he touched it. This was someone’s life. An invasion of privacy.
“Her name is Tara Sellers, for the time being. She was adopted to a family from Dallas. Harper was very selective about who he allowed to take her. They were screened and monitored for the entire first year.”
“And then?”
She shrugged. “I suppose he lost interest. I don’t know. Maybe he thought it best to step back. Or he was sure they were all he expected. Either way, he didn’t check on her again until she was twelve, after Marissa died. By then she was gone.”
“What do you mean…gone?”
“Taken. Her adoptive parents died in a house fire when she was four. She was kidnapped. She was presumed dead years ago. The paper trail ends there.”
Dead? Jordan had been tracking a ghost? Chase glanced down to the thick file.
“There’s plenty of paper here.”
Jordan nodded, curling her fingers and bringing them to her lips before turning to walk to the windows she’d been staring out of earlier. “Do you remember that incident Raven got himself into at the Texas Governor’s mansion last year?”
Chase didn’t see how Raven getting a woman angry enough to push him into a fountain tied into their discussion. It wasn’t as if pissing people off was new for him. “Vaguely.”
Jordan half turned, her lips curved into an impish grin much closer to the woman he knew so well. She knew without being told that he was most likely dragging the incident out as often as he could, just for kicks. “I wanted to know who the woman was. It takes a special kind of person to get the better of him. Especially given his unusually lasting animosity toward her. I was…curious.”
Translated, she was inspecting the woman feisty enough to belt her son for possible marriageable qualities. After successfully steering Sky into marriage, Jordan’s maternal instincts had gone into overdrive.
“And you found this Tara woman?”
Jordan’s smile faltered. “It wasn’t as easy as it sounds. She’s a freelancer and virtually no one had an actual picture of her, but I was tenacious. One of my contacts recognized her name and set my investigator up with the editor of a paper where she consistently gets work.” Her sigh did nothing to detract from her pride over her victory.
“This all sounds like a fluke.”
“A big one, considering how much money I’ve put into searching for her all these years. Harper used to say that things happen when they’re meant to happen, not before, not after. I don’t think I believed him until I saw this woman’s picture myself. I had her investigated. When I read the file…I knew.”
Chase allowed himself the smallest increment of relief. “That’s it? That’s how you know?”
“It’s how I know. Her past is a perfect fit for Legacy’s. There was no Tara Sellers before she was six, two years older than she was supposed to be at the date of her adoptive parents’ death, but as you can see, she’s a very tall woman. If she’s anything like my children, she could easily have passed for two years older if that was the cover story given by her kidnapper. I need more evidence, so I’ve arranged an interview with her. A work interview. This is where you come in. I need a blood sample. I want you to tell her it’s for drug testing.”
“Which you’ll use to illegally test her DNA?”
Jordan looked affronted. “There’s nothing illegal about it. If she reads the fine print on the contract, she’ll see that she’ll be signing over rights to the sample for whatever the company sees fit to do with it. I’ll choose to compare her DNA to the sample from the trust. There’ll be no mistaking the results.”
“You have Legacy’s DNA?” Thirty years ago, no one would have imagined keeping cord blood. Why would they have kept it?
Jordan nodded. “Harper was fastidious to a fault. He might have been a cheating bastard, but he was also a careful one. He wasn’t likely to get anyone pregnant and when he found out about Legacy, he insisted on a paternity test. He had his lawyer maintain a sample in the trust, just like the other children.”
Chase shook his head. “Jordan, that was simple blood type testing back in the seventies. Maybe some HLA typing, but those were notoriously inconclusive. I could probably have passed for his child.”
“Which is why it’s imperative I get this sample and compare it not only with the sample of Legacy, but with that of my sons.”
He knew he wasn’t going to win this point. But should he? The odds of her having found Harper’s daughter thanks to a photograph were millions to one. He let it go. “You haven’t said why you’re bringing her here, Jordan.”
She nodded. “Harper searched for her after Marissa died. Until the day he died. I remember he seemed almost manic about something there at the end. After he died, I’d put it down to his health. Then I found out about Legacy. About his codicil.”
Chase swallowed, waiting. Harper’s lost legacy was taking on a whole new meaning, but if the knotting in his stomach was anything to go by, it was probably going to be far worse than he worried over.
“The day after her thirtieth birthday, his will becomes unsealed and the codicil goes into effect. Legacy has until her thirtieth birthday to lay claim to her inheritance or it goes to a list of charities Harper devised.”
Since the Remingtons had more money than they could spend in the next ten generations, Chase wondered what could scare Jordan for fifteen years. Unless…
“All the monies, Remington Medical Industries, everything financial is built into the trust. Harper couldn’t take from the boys what was theirs by birthright. All that was left is what passes to the oldest son of every generation, separately.”
Chase finally realized why Jordan was so enamored of the view.
“This house, this land, and everything on it, belongs to her.”
Somehow, swearing didn’t feel quite up to covering it. Harper had leveraged away Sky’s inheritance. Given away the land that was so intrinsic to all of them. Hell, he’d just ripped the home right out from under his wife without so much as a warning. Anger at a dead man never seemed so damned pointless. Or necessary.
He looked down at the file in his hands. Were they about to take their anger out on the wrong person? Did they have a choice? “What’s your plan?”
“Isn’t it obvious, dear?” She said, not even batting her lashes. “You are my plan.”
