Lawful Wife (Eternal Bachelors Club) (3 page)

From the look on Sabrina’s face he could tell that she was not pleased—and rightfully so. He should stay here and pull his weight, taking some of the pressure off her shoulders. “I’m sorry, Sabrina, but I’d much rather deal with this right now than a day or two before the wedding. I’ll make sure they know that after today, I’ll be unreachable.”

“Why can’t you just tell them that now?” Sabrina asked.

Daniel cupped her cheek and caressed her face with his thumb. “Please understand, baby. This is something I have to take care of. I promise you, I’ll be back tonight, and then the four of us can go out and do something.”

Sabrina sighed. “Okay. I guess it won’t matter.” She motioned to Holly and Tim. “At least Holly and Tim can help your mother and me out.”

“Perfect.”

Daniel hated having to leave, but he knew he had to. Because the more he thought about it, the more he knew what he had to do. He wouldn’t stand idly by and let this reporter get away with her lies. He would find out who exactly Claire Heart’s
reliable source
was, and get a retraction and an apology published. Only then would he feel at ease and know his and Sabrina’s happiness would be assured.

And by the time he and Sabrina got back from their honeymoon, things would have blown over, and everybody would have forgotten about the article. Another scandal would capture people’s attention. And Sabrina would never know.

3

Daniel jumped out of his sports car and stretched his legs. He’d practically raced from Montauk to Manhattan and was lucky not to have gotten any speeding tickets on the way.

The office building of the
New York Times
was located on Eighth Avenue in the center of Hell’s Kitchen. Daniel looked up at the glass wall that sported large black letters, spelling out the newspaper’s name in its trademark font. The sun reflected on the glass.

He straightened his tie and entered the building, heading straight for the security desk. The African American man in the impeccable dark suit looked at him.

“How may I help you, sir?” he said, his voice polite yet firm.

“I’d like to see Miss Claire Heart.”

He looked down at his computer screen, already typing something. “And your name, sir?”

“Daniel Sinclair.”

The man perused the screen for a few moments then looked up again. “I’m afraid I don’t have your appointment registered here. When—”

“I don’t have an appointment,” Daniel interrupted, leaning over the counter.

“I’m afraid I can only let you in if you have an appointment.”

“Miss Heart will want to speak to me. I assure you.”

“Be that as it may, the rules are the rules. Please come back when you have an appointment.”

Daniel pointed to the phone on his desk. “Call her. Now. She’s been looking for me to comment on her story, and she will be upset if you send me away. This is her only chance to get my comment,” he bluffed, underlining his words with a stoic expression that gave nothing away of the storm that still raged inside him. In fact, the storm had just hit hurricane strength.

For a moment, the security guard hesitated, clearly contemplating Daniel’s claim. Then he picked up the phone and dialed a number.

“Miss Heart, this is Barry from security downstairs. I’ve got a Mr. Sinclair here who wants to comment on one of your stories. He doesn’t have an appointment, but he claims—” Barry pulled back his shoulders, sitting up even straighter. “Yes, Ma’am.” He nodded. “Right away.” Then he put the phone down and looked down at his desk, writing something.

Impatiently, Daniel tapped his foot on the floor, when finally Barry looked up at him and handed him a visitor pass to pin to his jacket.

“Miss Heart is on the ninth floor. Please take elevator four.” He pointed to an elevator bank behind Daniel.

“Thank you.” Daniel pinned the visitor pass to the lapel of his jacket and walked to the elevator. It opened when he reached it, and he stepped inside.

He didn’t have to press the button for the ninth floor. It was already lit, and he knew that the security guard had programmed it so that Daniel could alight only on the ninth floor and not roam around anywhere else in the building. Most large office buildings had this security feature.

During the ride up, he tried to calm his mind. It would serve nobody if he yelled at the gossip columnist. He needed to get her onto his side, not alienate her.

The elevator doors opened on the ninth floor, and he stepped into the hallway.

“Mr. Sinclair,” a petite brunette greeted him. She was dressed in casual pants and a colorful blouse. Her hand was stretched toward him in greeting. “I’m Claire Heart.”

“Good afternoon, Miss Heart.” He shook her hand briefly. “Thank you for seeing me on such short notice. I’m here about your article that ran in today’s paper.”

Claire nodded. “Oh, I know why you’re here. Let’s go to my office where we can talk in private.”

He followed her as she led him down a long corridor, surprised that she was so accommodating. Moments later, she entered a tiny office with stacks of papers, magazines and files lining the walls and littering the floor.

“Excuse the mess. I’ve just moved offices.” She walked around the surprisingly empty desk with only a date book and a telephone on it and sat down on the chair behind it, pointing to the only other chair in the room. “Please, Mr. Sinclair.”

He took a seat and waited for a few seconds, trying to read her facial expression. But she gave nothing away. If she was aware that the story she’d printed was a lie, she didn’t let on.

“I want you to issue a retraction of your story.”

Claire leaned forward slightly. “And why would I do that?”

“Because the story is a lie. My fiancée is not a call girl. And had you bothered to ask for comment from me before you published the story, I could have cleared all this up beforehand and saved us all a lot of trouble.”

“I did ask for comment! You declined!” Claire insisted.

“I never even received a request for comment from you, Miss Heart! So, let’s stick to the truth here.”

She narrowed her eyes in displeasure. “I contacted your office, Mr. Sinclair, and was informed that you were unavailable for comment. Guess what: I took that to mean you were
unavailable for comment
,” she said snidely.

Daniel wasn’t sure the reporter was telling the truth. His assistant Frances was extremely reliable and would have passed a message like this along, even though he had instructed his office not to disturb him during the week before his wedding. “Never mind that now. The issue remains that you published a story that simply has no basis in fact.”

“I have a very credible source who convinced both me and my editor.”

Daniel leaned forward. “Who?”

“You know as well as I do that I have to protect the identity of my sources.”

“Your source is lying. My fiancée never was and never will be a call girl. She is a respectable attorney.”

Claire crossed her arms over her chest. “I’m afraid, Mr. Sinclair, I’ve been shown concrete proof that Miss Parker worked as a call girl in San Francisco. And I also have concrete proof that you hired her as such.”

Inside, Daniel was seething. “I will find out who your source is. My lawyers—”

The ringing of Claire’s phone interrupted him.

“One moment,” she said, looked at the number on the display, and reached for it. “I’ll have to take this.”

She lifted the receiver to her ear. “Yes, Rick, what is it now?” Impatience colored her voice.

Daniel heard a loud male voice through the line, but couldn’t make out the words.

Claire shoved a hand through her hair. “I told them already! I met my source on . . . hold on.” She leafed through the day planner on her desk, searching for an entry. Finally, she tapped onto a spot on the paper. “There! I met with my source on the twenty-third.”

Again, the man on the other line said something, while Daniel stared at the day planner. She noted her meetings with her sources on this calendar? Interesting.

Claire sighed. “Fine! I’ll be up in a few minutes.” Then she put down the receiver and looked back at him. “As I said, the story is solid. I won’t retract it, because it’s the truth. And just because you don’t like it, won’t make it otherwise.”

“Fine, Miss Heart. If that’s how you want to play this.” Daniel stood. “The
New York Times
wouldn’t be the first newspaper to get destroyed by a libel suit.”

“It’s not libel if it’s true. I stand by my article and my source.”

“Very well. I’ll see myself out.” He turned to the door and left her office, closing the door behind him.

His eyes scanned the doors along the corridor as he hurried in the direction of the elevator. Finally he saw what he was looking for: the men’s room. He dove into it and was relieved to find it empty. No sounds came from the three stalls.

Daniel remained at the door, keeping it ajar so he could spy into the corridor. He didn’t have to wait long. Moments later Claire Heart walked past the door in hasty steps, heading for the elevator. When he heard the elevator ping, he counted to five, then stepped back into the hallway, his eyes immediately scanning the area near the elevators. Claire was gone.

Relieved, he walked back in the direction of her office, adrenalin pumping through his veins. He’d never in his life done anything illegal, but he had no choice today. He needed to find out who the reporter’s source was. He felt like a burglar when he slid back into Claire’s office and walked around her desk. With one eye he scanned the pages of her day planner, with the other he watched the door.

The annotations in Miss Heart’s calendar were cryptic. She used lots of abbreviations, and the names of her sources, or whomever she met with, were only initials. Clearly, she wanted to make sure that if this date book fell into the wrong hands, she wouldn’t reveal the names of her confidential sources.

Daniel worked backwards, knowing that no reporter sat on a juicy story for very long. Claire would have to have met her source sometime within the last two weeks. It would have given her enough time to verify whatever evidence had been presented to her. Evidence? He huffed. There was no evidence. Whatever Claire had received was fabricated. Daniel would find the source and prove that the claims were a lie.

With determination, he read each and every entry for the last two weeks, when he suddenly stumbled over initials that triggered a memory in him. A suitcase with the initials
AH
engraved on the lock appeared before his mind’s eye. He’d seen that suitcase so many times, had in fact carried it often.

The entry was on the tenth of the month at two thirty in the afternoon and read:
AH re: DS cg.

He could only interpret this to mean:
Audrey Hawkins regarding Daniel Sinclair, call girl.

Who else could it be? It had to be Audrey! She was the only one who still held such a deep grudge against him that she would try to destroy his happiness with Sabrina. He and Audrey had once been an item. With Audrey being the quintessential socialite, he’d once thought that they were the perfect couple. After all, they both belonged to the same upper class circles of New York. But for all her beauty and obvious charms, he’d never truly been in love with Audrey and had often traded dinner and sex with her for late-night business meetings.

Their breakup had been inevitable, though the way it had happened had surprised even Daniel: he’d found Audrey fucking his attorney. Daniel had broken it off right there and then and fired his attorney in the same instant. But Audrey hadn’t given up so easily.

When she’d followed him on a business trip to San Francisco in the hope of winning him back, she’d discovered him with Sabrina. Things had gotten ugly and nearly destroyed his already-shaky beginnings with Sabrina. And it appeared now that Audrey was still not done. She was still trying to destroy his relationship with Sabrina.

But he wouldn’t let her succeed.

Daniel charged out of the office, not caring if anybody saw him now. He’d gotten the information he needed. Nobody could stop him now.

Outside, he rushed to where he’d parked his car and sped away.

He could of course call Audrey on the phone, but what would be the point? She wouldn’t pick up the phone when she recognized the number. Besides, he wanted to confront her in person, because it was much easier to intimidate her face-to-face.

During the entire drive to her midtown co-op, rage tore through him. He’d thought that after the last confrontation with Audrey, which had nearly destroyed his relationship with Sabrina, she would have finally given up. However, it appeared that Audrey wasn’t done with her games.

The doorman in Audrey’s building called up to her apartment and then allowed him to ride upstairs. If Audrey was trying to pull the same seduction scene she’d tried on him once before, then she would get a nasty surprise. He wasn’t susceptible to her charms anymore. He hadn’t been for a long time.

At the door to her apartment, Daniel was greeted by Audrey’s housekeeper, Betty. Her face lit up when she saw him. He liked the older woman and felt sorry for her that she had to work for somebody like Audrey, who couldn’t possibly be a pleasant employer.

“Oh, Mr. Sinclair, how nice to see you again!”

He forced himself to be civil to her. After all, it wasn’t her fault that her employer was devious and heartless. “Hi, Betty. It’s nice to see you, too. I’m here to see Audrey. It’s important.”

“I’m sorry, but she’s not here.”

“Not here?” He stepped past Betty, entering the foyer that opened up to a large sunken living room. He cast a look around, but the room was empty and looking just as gaudy as ever. He’d never shared Audrey’s taste for over-the-top extravagance.

Behind him, Betty closed the door. “Did she know you were coming? She must have forgotten. I’m afraid she left rather abruptly two days ago.”

He turned to Betty. “Where to?”

The housekeeper shrugged. “She said she was going on a trip, that she needed some time to sort things out. But she didn’t mention where to. And I know better than to ask. You know Miss Audrey.”