The Playboy’s Unexpected Bride

“It isn’t. I mean, it is but—”

“Papa?”

A girl—obviously Marques’s daughter—stood silhouetted in the hallway just outside the room. Marques held out his hand.

“Ana. Come in, child.”

Linc smothered a groan. Damn, what a mess! Bad enough he had to tell Marques his high-tech security system had been compromised and he’d let the intruder slip away. Now he had to top that off by saying no, he wasn’t interested in marrying a sweet, well-bred innocent young woman while she stood by, listening.

Oh, yeah, this was definitely turning into a fun night, Linc thought glumly…and felt his jaw slide to his shoe tops as Marques’s daughter entered the well-lit room.

The sweet, well-bred innocent was the woman he’d just kissed.

The sexy black outfit had been subtly altered by the addition of a pale pink jacket, long and loose enough to hide all those feminine curves. The silky tousle of golden hair was drawn back in a severe knot. But it was she, and one look at her face told him she was as stunned as he was.

“Ana,” Marques said, “this is the man I’ve been telling you about. Lincoln, this is my beloved daughter, Ana Maria.”

For the first time in his life, Linc found himself struggling for words. What did you say to a man whose “beloved daughter” had been in your arms moments ago? Whose innocence was obviously a ruse only her father was foolish enough to believe?

His cell phone rang. Ordinarily, he’d have ignored it. Now, he yanked it from his pocket like a lifeline.

“Aldridge,” he barked.

“Lincoln,” he heard his lawyer say solemnly, “I’m afraid I’ve had word about your sister.”

Somehow, in that instant, he knew what was coming. He turned his back to the room, to Marques, to Marques’s daughter. The lawyer was hemming and hawing, stalling for time. Linc interrupted with a sharp command.

“Spit it out, man. What’s happened?”

A chartered plane had gone down in a mountain pass. The pilot, the passengers…all of them, gone.

Linc felt the blood drain from his head. Dimly, he heard Marques say something but he ignored him and stepped blindly into the night.

“No,” he said sharply. “Not Kath.”

“I’m sorry, Lincoln. Your sister and her husband both. But, miraculously, there was a survivor.”

One survivor. A baby. A two-month-old little girl.

A little girl who was Lincoln Aldridge’s niece.

CHAPTER TWO (#ulink_a5efee93-198b-5649-abeb-ac0136056ced)

New York City, two months later

IT TURNED out that some clichés were true.

Tragedy fell on a man without warning, but life went on. It changed, but it went on.

Somehow, you kept going. Somehow, you adapted.

You adapted, Linc thought groggily, as the piercing wail of the gorgeous, brilliant, impossible four-month-old hellion who now ruled his life shot him from sleep.

He threw out a hand, searched on the bedside table for his watch and peered blearily at the luminescent dial.

Oh, God!

It was five-oh-five. Five-oh-five in the a.m. He had a meeting at eight-thirty with his own people, another at eleven with the European clients he’d taken to dinner last night. He had to be sharp and focused and how could a man be either when he hadn’t had a solid night’s sleep?

He never had a solid night’s sleep anymore. And he rarely had a full day to devote to his work.

First there’d been the awful, sad details of Kath’s death to handle. When that was over, the baby—Kath’s secret—had taken center stage.

At first, he’d wondered why his sister had kept the child a secret but simple math had explained it. Kath had reversed the usual order of things. She’d gotten pregnant first, then married. Maybe she’d worried he’d have thought less of her for that reversal, which damned near broke his heart. Or maybe she just hadn’t known how to break the news to him long-distance.

Whatever the reason, all that mattered now was the baby’s welfare.

He had met with his attorney and, of course, immediately agreed to provide the baby a proper home. He didn’t know a damned thing about babies—how could he? But he hadn’t known a thing about running a business, either, when he’d started out.

No problem.

You didn’t know how to do something, you learned. Or, if it was more expedient, you hired people who did. That was what he’d done, what he’d assured the social worker whose job it was to make sure the baby was properly cared for he would do.

And he had.

He’d sent his PA shopping for baby clothes, a crib, a highchair, bottles, formula, diapers and the thousand other things an infant required. He’d had the interior designer who’d done his Fifth Avenue triplex turn the guest suite into a nursery. He’d contacted a nanny agency and interviewed more women eager to clean baby bottoms than he’d have imagined existed in the world, let alone New York.

And, last week, Kath’s mother-in-law had suddenly come on the scene. Nobody had even known she existed until then.

Would she ask for custody? If she did, should he fight her for it? Or would his niece be better off in her care?

Linc couldn’t come to a decision. On the one hand, women knew more about kids than he ever could. Wasn’t it in their DNA? On the other, the child was his blood. She was his only remaining connection to Kathryn.

What would Kath have wanted? She’d loved him the way he’d loved her. The circumstances of their lives—no father, a mother who drank and forgot they existed most of the time—had made them unusually close. Still, there was no way to know if she’d have wanted her baby raised by him or her mother-in-law. His attorney was checking things out.

The bottom line was that Kath was gone and a small, squalling stranger had dropped into his life. He’d had to leave increasing responsibility for running Aldridge Inc. in the hands of his people. They were all excellent managers, hand-selected by him, but Aldridge had grown into a multimillion-dollar company and he was integral to that growth.

He knew it was time to put the turmoil of the past months behind him and get back to the work he loved and maybe to some kind of social life, but you had to sleep nights to do that.

Right now, the baby’s screams were reaching a crescendo, carrying all the way from the guest-suiteturned-nursery on the second floor of the penthouse to his bedroom on the third.

Where in hell was the nanny?

Linc threw back the duvet and started to the door. Halfway there, he remembered he was wearing boxers, his usual sleeping apparel but not what you’d choose for an appearance before Nanny Crispin.

She was the fifth woman he’d hired and the first that seemed to be working out.

The first hadn’t lasted a week. Linc had come home an hour early one night and found her rolling on the Aubusson rug in the great room with a guy with studs in his ears, nose and lip and other places he’d glimpsed and tried to forget.