Ethan Cole had no choice. His daughter was burning with fever and he had nowhere else to turn. So he brought her to work, hid her in an empty office, and prayed no one would notice. But when Lily’s cries echoed through the executive floor, he ran. What he found stopped him cold. Victoria Hail, the most feared CEO in the building, was holding his daughter in her arms.
Not with anger, with something else entirely. Three weeks later, she made him an offer no one saw coming. Marry me. Why him? 3 weeks earlier, Ethan Cole woke to the sound of his daughter crying. It was 4:00 in the morning, and the small apartment was dark except for the glow of the street lamp bleeding through the thin curtains.
He reached for Lily before his eyes fully opened, his hand finding her forehead in the crib beside his bed. She was burning. Not warm. Burning. His chest tightened as he lifted her, feeling the heat radiate through her cotton onesie. 8 months old. And she was all he had left in this world. His wife Sarah had been dead for 5 months now.
A car accident on a rainy night. The kind of tragedy that happened to other people until it happened to him. But Sarah’s death was not the only thing Ethan was running from. Her family, the Harringtons, were wealthy, connected, and dangerous. They had never approved of him, a nobody with no money and no name.
And when Sarah died, they made their intentions clear. They wanted Lily. They believed the child belonged with them, raised in their world of power and privilege, not in a cramped one-bedroom apartment with a father who could barely afford daycare. Ethan had taken Lily and disappeared. New city, new name on the lease.
A low-level data entry job at Hail Industries, one of the largest corporations on the East Coast. He kept his head down, did his work, and never drew attention to himself. That was the only way to survive. If the Harringtons found him, they would use every lawyer, every judge, every resource at their disposal to take his daughter.
And Ethan would lose the only thing that still made him want to wake up in the morning. He held Lily against his chest and checked her temperature with the digital thermometer he kept in the nightstand drawer, 103.6°. His stomach dropped. He gave her infant acetaminophen, changed her diaper, and walked her around the apartment until the sun came up.
