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Prologue
This couldn’t be right.
Jade Nolan studied the genetic test report she’d just received in the mail. The DNA kit had been a Christmas gift from her younger brother, Dean. He’d gotten it for everyone in the family this year. He thought it would be fun to see what parts of the world they’d come from. They were fairly certain of the family’s Irish and German heritage, so there weren’t going to be many surprises.
But the words Jade was looking at were a surprise and then some. They were actually a shock.
“Jade? Are you okay?”
She looked up from the paper in her hand and stared blankly at her best friend, Sophie Kane. They were hanging out drinking wine and watching their favorite show together just like they did every Tuesday. But the minute Jade looked at the report, the evening had taken a sharp, unexpected turn.
“No,” she said with a shake of her head. “I’m not okay.”
How could she be okay? According to the report, she wasn’t closely related to any other users in the company’s database. Considering that she’d been the last of her family to mail in her DNA sample, that wasn’t possible. Both her parents and her brother had submitted their DNA weeks before she had. They should be showing under the family section of her report. And yet they weren’t.
Never mind the fact that her DNA showed she wasn’t Irish and German. She was coming up English, Swedish and Dutch. She’d seen her brother’s report and they didn’t align at all.
“What does it say?” Sophie pressed. She set down her wine and leaned in to lay a comforting hand on Jade’s shoulder. “Tell me, honey.”
Jade swallowed hard, trying to dislodge the lump that had suddenly formed in her throat. She couldn’t speak. In an instant, a lifetime of unfounded doubts had rushed into her mind. Years of being the family misfit. Insecurity about her physical differences. Jokes about being the milkman’s daughter, since she was blonde with dark brown eyes, and the rest of her family had dark, almost black hair and green eyes. The jokes were all too real now.
No matter how many times her mother had assured her that her grandmother was a blonde, no matter how many grainy old pictures were hauled out to prove that her willow-thin frame came from her father’s family, it didn’t help. Her grandmother’s hair had been a dishwater blond in her youth, not Jade’s pale, almost platinum color. The family in the old pictures were poor and undernourished, not naturally slim like Jade, with her ballerina’s body.
Jade had always felt like the odd one out. Now she had the cold, hard evidence to prove what she’d known all along. She was not a Nolan.
She stood up suddenly and the report slipped from her fingers, falling to the floor. Jade didn’t notice.
“I think I’m...adopted.” She was finally able to say the words aloud, but they sounded foreign to her ears.
Adopted. The reality of it was like a fist to the gut. Why had her parents kept this from her? She was almost thirty years old. She had married and divorced. When she and her ex-husband, Lance, were discussing children, her mother had even told her stories about her pregnancy with Jade. About how her father had fainted in the delivery room. Now Jade realized it was all a lie. An elaborate, complicated lie.
But why?
She didn’t understand what was going on. But she would get to the bottom of it one way or another.
One
Being the boss was boring as hell.
Harley Dalton sat on the top floor of his Washington, DC, office building and flipped through some reports. He wasn’t reading them. Managing a company wasn’t really his thing. He’d started one only because he didn’t want to take orders again after getting out of the navy.
He’d never expected it to be so successful. Dalton Security now had four offices in the US and one in London, with hundreds of employees. They were the company to call if you found yourself in a bind, or if a situation needed to be handled. Nothing outright illegal, of course, but things would be dealt with in a quick and efficient manner that sometimes fell into a fuzzy gray area.
One of the things his company had handled was the recent abduction of a fourteen-year-old girl. She’d run away with her soccer coach, who was nearly fifty. It was on the nationwide news as people hunted for the young girl across the Midwest. It was also on the news when Dalton Security successfully tracked down, apprehended and delivered the pervert who’d kidnapped her to the front door of the police station, a little worse for wear. The girl was returned home safely. Dalton’s stock prices had shot through the roof. All ended well.
At least well enough, considering Harley found himself in stuffy suits sitting at big desks talking to people all day. He wasn’t the one in the field anymore and it grated on him. He wasn’t toting a Glock and apprehending suspects. He was a damn paper pusher now.
He’d never imagined that being a millionaire would suck so hard.
“Mr. Dalton?” His assistant’s voice chimed over the intercom on his phone.
“Yes?” he replied, trying not to growl at Faye. It wasn’t her fault he was feeling strangled by his silk tie today.
“I have a Mr. Jeffries on the phone, sir.”
Jeffries? The name didn’t sound familiar. “Who is he?”
“He says he’s the CEO of St. Francis Hospital in Charleston.”
Now why would the CEO of a Charleston hospital be calling him? Harley had been born and raised in the city, but hadn’t been back in a decade. His mother still lived there. He’d bought her a beautiful old plantation house that he had yet to visit. The CEO wouldn’t be calling if something had happened to his mother. What could it be? Normally Harley didn’t take phone calls from people he didn’t know, but his curiosity was piqued.
“Put him through,” he told Faye.
The phone chimed a moment later and he picked up. “This is Dalton,” he said.
“Hello. This is Weston Jeffries. I’m the CEO of the St. Francis Hospital group in Charleston. I was hoping to speak with you about a...situation we’re having here.”
“Normally new cases are handled by our client intake department,” Harley said. If they wanted special surveillance equipment or needed to investigate pending hires, that didn’t need to come across his desk.
“I understand that,” Mr. Jeffries said. “But from one CEO to another, this is a really delicate situation for us. We’ve already gotten more media scrutiny than we care to.”
