A Beauty For The Billionaire. Elizabeth Bevarly
“Mr. Dempsey?” he heard from somewhere above the car.
It was a man’s voice, but not one he recognized. He looked to his right and saw a pair of legs to go with it, the kind that were covered in pinstripes and ended in a pair of dress shoes that probably cost more than Hogan made in a month.
“That’s me,” he said as he continued to work.
“My name is Gus Fiver,” the pinstripes said. “I’m an attorney with Tarrant, Fiver and Twigg. Is there someplace we could speak in private?”
Attorney? Hogan wondered. What did an attorney need with him? All of his affairs were in order, and he ran an honest shop. “We can talk here,” he said. “Pull up a creeper.”
To his surprise, Gus Fiver of Tarrant, Fiver and Twigg did just that. Most people wouldn’t even know what a creeper was, but the guy toed the one nearest him—a skateboard-type bit of genius that mechanics used to get under a car chassis—and lay down on it, pinstripes and all. Then he wheeled himself under the car beside Hogan. From the neck up, he didn’t look like the pinstripe type. He looked like a guy you’d grab a beer with on Astoria Boulevard after work. Blonder and better-looking than most, but he still had that working-class vibe about him that was impossible to hide completely.
And Hogan should know. He’d spent the better part of a year when he was a teenager trying to keep his blue collar under wraps, only to be reminded more than once that there was no way to escape his roots.
“Sweet ride,” Fiver said. “Four hundred and fifty-five CUs. V-8 engine. The seventy-six Trans Am was the best pony car Pontiac ever made.”
“Except for the sixty-four GTO,” Hogan said.
“Yeah, okay, I’ll give you that.”
The two men observed a moment of silence for the holy land of Detroit, then Fiver said, “Mr. Dempsey, are you familiar with the name Philip Amherst?”
Hogan went back to work on the car. “It’s Hogan. And nope. Should I be?”
“It’s the name of your grandfather,” Fiver said matter-of-factly.
Okay, obviously, Gus Fiver had the wrong Hogan Dempsey. He could barely remember any of his grandparents since cancer had been rampant on both sides of his family, but neither of his grandfathers had been named Philip Amherst. Fortunately for Hogan, he didn’t share his family’s medical histories because he’d been adopted as a newborn, and—
His brain halted there. Like any adopted kid, he’d been curious about the two people whose combined DNA had created him. But Bobby and Carol Dempsey had been the best parents he could have asked for, and the thought of someone else in that role had always felt wrong. He’d just never had a desire to locate any blood relations, even after losing what family he had. There wasn’t anyone else in the world who could ever be family to him like that.
He gazed at the attorney in silence. Philip Amherst must be one of his biological grandfathers. And if Gus Fiver was here looking for Hogan, it could only be because that grandfather wanted to find him. Hogan wasn’t sure how he felt about that. He needed a minute to—
“I’m afraid he passed away recently,” Fiver continued. “His wife, Irene, and his daughter, Susan, who was his only child and your biological mother, both preceded him in death. Susan never married or had any additional children, so he had no other direct heirs. After his daughter’s death in a boating accident last year, he changed his will so that his entire estate would pass to you.”
Not even a minute. Not even a minute for Hogan to consider a second family he might have come to know, because they were all gone, too. How else was Gus Fiver going to blindside him today?
He had his answer immediately. “Mr. Amherst’s estate is quite large,” Fiver said. “Normally, this is where I tell an inheritor to sit down, but under the circumstances, you might want to stand up?”
Fiver didn’t have to ask him twice. Hogan’s blood was surging like a geyser. With a single heave, he pushed himself out from under the car and began to pace. Quite large. That was what Fiver had called his grandfather’s estate. But quite large was one of those phrases that could mean a lot of different things. Quite large could be a hundred thousand dollars. Or, holy crap, even a million dollars.
Fiver had risen, too, and was opening a briefcase to withdraw a handful of documents. “Your grandfather was a banker and financier who invested very wisely. He left the world with no debt and scores of assets. His main residence was here in New York on the Upper East Side, but he also owned homes in Santa Fe, Palm Beach and Paris.”
Hogan was reeling. Although Fiver’s words were making it into his brain, it was like they immediately got lost and went wandering off in different directions.
“Please tell me you mean Paris, Texas,” he said.
Fiver grinned. “No. Paris, France. The Trocadéro, to be precise, in the sixteenth arrondissement.”
“I don’t know what that means.” Hell, Hogan didn’t know what any of this meant.
“It means your grandfather was a very rich man, Mr. Dempsey. And now, by both bequest and bloodline, so are you.”
Then he quoted an amount of money so big, it actually made Hogan take a step backward, as if doing that might somehow ward it off. No one could have that much money. Especially not someone like Hogan Dempsey.
Except that Hogan did have that much money. Over the course of the next thirty minutes, Gus Fiver made that clear. And as they were winding down what the attorney told him was only the first of a number of meetings they would have over the next few weeks, he said, “Mr. Dempsey, I’m sure you’ve heard stories about people who won the lottery, only to have their lives fall apart because they didn’t know how to handle the responsibility that comes with having a lot of money. I’d advise you to take some time to think about all this before you make any major decisions and that you proceed slowly.”
“I will,” Hogan assured him. “Weird thing is I’ve already given a lot of thought to what I’d do if I ever won the lottery. Because I’ve been playing it religiously since I was in high school.”
Fiver looked surprised. “You don’t seem like the lottery type to me.”
“I have my reasons.”
“So what did you always say you’d buy if you won the lottery?”
“Three things, ever since I was eighteen.” Hogan held up his left hand, index finger extended. “Number one, a 1965 Shelby Daytona Cobra.” His middle finger joined the first. “Number two, a house in Ocean City, New Jersey.” He added his ring finger—damned significant, now that he thought about it—to the others. “And number three…” He smiled. “Number three, Anabel Carlisle. Of the Park Avenue Carlisles.”
“You’re my new chef?”
Hogan eyed the young woman in his kitchen—his massive, white-enamel-and-blue-Italian-tile kitchen that would have taken up two full bays in his garage—with much suspicion. Chloe Merlin didn’t look like she was big enough to use blunt-tip scissors, let alone wield a butcher knife. She couldn’t be more than five-four in her plastic red clogs—Hogan knew this, because she stood nearly a foot shorter than him—and she was swallowed by her oversize white chef’s jacket and the baggy pants splattered with red chili peppers.
It was her gigantic glasses, he decided. Black-rimmed and obviously a men’s style, they overwhelmed her features, making her green eyes appear huge. Or maybe it was the way her white-blond hair was piled haphazardly on top of her head as if she’d just grabbed it in two fists and tied it there without even looking to see what she was doing. Or it could be the red lipstick. It was the only makeup she wore, as if she’d filched it from her