Scottish Billionaire's Unwanted Baby Read online

  Table of Contents

  Scottish Billionaire’s Unwanted Baby

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Epilogue

  ANOTHER STORY YOU MAY ENJOY

  Billionaire Boss’s Unexpected Child

  Prologue

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Table of Contents

  Scottish Billionaire’s Unwanted Baby

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Epilogue

  ANOTHER STORY YOU MAY ENJOY

  Billionaire Boss’s Unexpected Child

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Epilogue

  Scottish Billionaire’s Unwanted Baby

  By Ella Brooke

  All Rights Reserved. Copyright 2017 Ella Brooke.

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  Chapter One

  Isla

  “Mr. Scott will see you now.”

  At the unexpected words, a shockwave of panic jolted through me. “M-Mr. Scott?” I echoed.

  I cursed myself for the stammering the moment the words left my mouth. Up until just a few seconds ago, I’d been feeling confident. Put together. Professional.

  I had earned my B.Arch. just six months ago from the New York Institute of Technology, and I’d spent the time since then working as an intern with a midsized architecture firm, and (in my too-rare spare time) building up the very best portfolio I could. I had a résumé and all my best work stored on the iPad in my briefcase, and I wore a navy-blue suit and a silk shirt that made me look—well, more grown-up than my usual jeans and flannel shirts, anyway. I looked, I thought, like a ‘serious architect’. I might have only been twenty-two, but I was more than ready to ace this interview and get this job.

  The truth was: after all the loans my parents had taken out to get me through college, not to mention the second mortgage they’d taken out on their farm, I needed a job. Not just a low-paying internship, but a real job. I owed them that much.

  And this wasn’t just a job. This was the job. The one that every architecture grad on the East Coast wanted. The junior architect position that could be the gateway to the career I’d always dreamed of.

  “Yes,” the receptionist said. She was an older woman, with graying dark hair piled elegantly on top of her head and gold-framed glasses perched daintily on her nose. She smiled at me, not without sympathy. “Ms. Bianchi has been unexpectedly detained, I’m afraid. So you will be interviewing with Mr. Scott himself.”

  I struggled to get any words out. Mr. Scott? The Mr. Scott? I glanced desperately around the huge waiting area on the twenty-second floor, as if I might find someone to help me, but it was empty. The space was decorated in a warm contemporary style—gray carpeting, chrome chairs, and modernist paintings mixing comfortably with antique French furniture and beautiful old-style light fixtures. Expansive windows let in the golden morning sunlight, along with a view of some of Park Avenue’s most grand and beautiful buildings. On the wall behind the desk, hardly noticeable amongst all this grandeur, I spotted the small, modest logo of the company.

  AS Architects—proclaimed silver letters over a background of the famous blue and green plaid.

  “Miss Blizzard?” the receptionist prompted. “Are you ready?”

  The panic climbed upward into my throat, choking me. Angus Scott was—well, he was a legend. Only ten years old than I was, but in a short period of time he’d become a world-renowned architect. The firm he’d founded had become so famous, so sought-after, that he’d become a billionaire by the time he was thirty, and most people seemed to agree that he was almost sure to receive the Pritzger Architecture Prize within the next decade.

  I’d read article after article about him while preparing for this interview, even though I certainly hadn’t expected to pass him in the hallway, let alone actually meet him. I knew he’d been born in Scotland, had emigrated here and used his family money to study architecture at Cornell, and that he’d shot to prominence in New York City, designing sleek, modern apartment buildings that looked like no one else’s. The thought of meeting him in the flesh—well, to be perfectly honest, it scared the hell out of me.

  And yet it also made a strange kind of heat run through me because not only was Angus Scott an amazing success story but, judging from the photos I’d seen of him, he was absolutely gorgeous.

  You see, I hadn’t been with a guy since my junior year when I decided men were just more trouble than they were worth and broke up with my then-boyfriend so I could dedicate all my attention to my studies. It had been a long, long dry spell, and mostly I’d been too busy to care that much.

  But giving up on guys was an intellectual decision, and my body was not always totally on board with it. Some days it was harder to stick to celibacy than others. And I suspected that the one guy who could make me really, really regret my no-men philosophy might just be Angus Scott.

  I remembered all the pictures I’d seen of him and felt myself shiver with irrepressible longing. The thought of those bright blue eyes looking into mine… those sculpted lips against my skin… those big hands on my body…

  Don’t be silly, Isla, I told myself, trying to push back the heat building deep inside me. He’s a billionaire running a multinational company, after all. Most likely he sits behind a desk all day long, and even if he was once good-looking, he’s probably flabby and pale now. Those pictures were most likely touched up with Photoshop, maybe even totally altered. Or maybe they were just old and out-of-date. He probably has a face like —what do they call that Scottish meat pudding again? Haggis, that’s it. I bet he has a face like haggis. Maybe a body like haggis, too.

  Anyway, he can’t possibly be as hot as he looked in those photos.

  The thought stiffened my spine a bit. I rose to my feet, smoothed my black hair (which I’d confined in a professional-looking upsweep, but which had a bad habit of springing loose at the worst possible times), and straightened my shoulders.

  “I’m ready,” I answered.

  The receptionist smiled reassuringly at me as if she was accustomed to seeing people freak out at the prospect of meeting Mr. Scott. She probably was. I mean, the man was a billionaire, not to mention a god of the architecture world. Who wouldn’t be a little freaked out?

  She picked up a folded piece of paper and then escorted me down a long hallway lined with black and white photographs of Manhattan buildings, while I focused on not wobbling in my high heels. A life spent working on my family’s farm accustomed me to work boots, not dress shoes, and even five years spent in New York City hadn’t ever managed to make me fee
l really comfortable in heels. But I’d learned to walk in them—not gracefully, exactly, but at least I didn’t tip over in them. Much.

  The receptionist stopped in front of two massive wooden doors and knocked.

  “Mr. Scott?”

  I heard a low rumble from behind the door, and my stomach tightened in spite of myself. The way his voice sounded… it was deep and resonant, like thunder in the distance on a summer afternoon. I imagined the sound of his voice growling in my ear as he loomed over me, those sapphire eyes burning into mine—

  No, Isla. Stop it. This is not the time.

  It was very definitely not the time when my entire career, my entire future, was riding on the good graces of the man on the other side of those doors. Obviously, I’d somehow managed to develop a silly little crush on the man (without ever having actually seen him, which made it particularly absurd for me to be reacting this way), but I needed to keep that little piece of information to myself. This was a professional encounter and absolutely nothing else.

  At any rate, after this interview, I would probably never see Mr. Scott again. He was, after all, the head of the entire firm, whereas even if I got hired as a junior architect, I would be a very tiny cog in an enormous large machine. There were over two thousand employees at AS Architects, and the chance that I would even run into Angus Scott again in the elevator was minuscule.

  Even so, I couldn’t stop the shivery, hot anticipation dancing in the pit of my stomach as the doors swung open.

  The office beyond the doors was truly enormous, with floor-to-ceiling windows lining two walls, and a huge Aubusson-style carpet that looked approximately the size of the back forty on our family farm. A large glass and chrome desk sat at the far end of the room, and behind it, a tall, powerfully built man with rumpled auburn hair was just rising smoothly to his feet. He wore khakis and a white button down shirt, the sleeves pushed casually up to show powerful forearms, with a blue and green plaid tie. The famous Scott plaid.

  Instantly the heat in my stomach migrated south, to a spot directly between my legs.

  Because Angus Scott did not bear even the slightest resemblance to haggis.

  Chapter Two

  Angus

  Behave yourself, you Scottish barbarian, and keep your kilt firmly in place. This one’s too sweet and innocent for the likes of you. Leave her be, and keep it professional.

  Not for the first time, I scowled at the hastily scrawled note my assistant had handed me when she brought in Isla Blizzard for her interview. Nell Evans had been with me since the very day I founded AS Architects, and with her graying hair, kind eyes, and no-nonsense attitude, she reminded me more than a little of my mother, whom I hadn’t seen in many long years. Nell acted as my conscience as frequently as she did my assistant.

  This was extremely useful—since I apparently was born without a conscience—but it could be deeply annoying as well.

  I noticed the way she’d underscored professional three times to make her point, and sighed. Nell knew me too well, damn it. I could have virtually any burd I wanted, and in point of fact, I’d been with many of the most beautiful women in the world—models, actresses, and singers, among others. Yet I generally tried to keep things on a professional footing with the women who worked under me (so to speak). Office romances, or even quickies on a desk, were fraught with more drama than they were worth. I’d long ago recognized that getting mixed up with one’s employees was the sort of foolish thing only a numpty would do.

  But this young woman—well, even on first acquaintance, there was something special about this one.

  Despite her high heels, the top of Ilsa’s head came barely up to my chin. She was a wee slip of a thing, small and slender as a deer, and despite her name, there was no hint of chilliness in her demeanor. Her hair was a glossy black, piled neatly on top of her head, but a few tendrils had escaped to wave around her bonnie face. Her lips were full and lush, and she seemed to smile easily. Her eyes were a mossy shade of green, fringed with impossibly thick lashes, and her body… well…

  She wore a navy suit of cheap fabric and a high-cut silk blouse, which meant she was dressed about as sexily as a nun. But even so, I couldn’t quite prevent my gaze from dropping to her diddies.

  Her breasts, that is. They weren’t large—there was nothing large about this young woman—but something about the way they filled out the unremarkable navy fabric made my tadger swell a bit in my slacks.

  She’d taken my outstretched hand in a warm, firm grip, her mouth curved into a friendly smile as she gazed up at me, and despite myself, I’d been impressed by her self-possession. Most women were either intimidated by me or tried to fling themselves at me. This one seemed coolly unimpressed by my fearsome reputation, nor did she seem to care a lick for my braw face. The only hint she gave of nervousness was the rapid-fire pace of her words.

  “I started sketching buildings when I was six years old,” she was saying now. She was seated beside me, earnestly showing me her portfolio on her iPad. It was filled with the usual renderings of elevations, floor plans, and site plans, all rendered competently with the help of AutoCAD, the computer-aided design program that every architect on the planet used nowadays. She was good, that was clear. “I loved to ride around the countryside with my parents and look at the old farmhouses. Then I’d hide in the hayloft and sketch them when I was supposed to be feeding the horses.”

  That caught my attention. “The hayloft?”

  “I grew up on a farm.” She smiled again, crinkling her green eyes. “That’s something we have in common, you know. We both grew up near Kilmarnock.”

  I blinked. Despite long years spent deliberately grinding the thickest parts of my Scottish accent away and learning to speak American, I found myself falling easily back into my native Ayrshire accent. “Lassie, that’s a load o’ pish. Ye’ve never set foot outside this country, have ye?”

  “No. I was born in Kilmarnock, Virginia.”

  I snorted. Typical Americans—borrowing town names rather than making up their own. “I must admit, I dinnae know there was such a place.”

  “It’s a very small spot on the map. I guess it’s named after your hometown.”

  “No doubt. And you worked on a farm there?” I couldn’t quite imagine this fragile, dainty creature doing hard labor, but she nodded.

  “A horse farm. About a hundred acres along Indian Creek. My family still lives there. We board horses, offer lessons. Breed some of our own, too.”

  “So as a wee bairn you spent your time scribbling pictures… to get out of shoveling horse shite? Aye, there’s a misspent youth indeed.”

  She burst out laughing. She had a merry laugh, and for some reason the happy, musical sound made my cock twitch in my trousers. “I suppose that’s about the size of it. I always loved drawing more than anything else in the world. Don’t get me wrong, I loved our farm, and I adore riding horses, but… well, farm life just wasn’t for me.”

  “So you came to New York,” I said, shifting back into my carefully cultivated American (or at least less Scottish) accent. “But you’re only twenty-two. A B.Arch. is a five-year degree.”

  “I graduated from high school a year early, and went to NYIT at seventeen.”

  So she was smart as well as artistic. I felt a strange kinship with this young lady, who’d broken away from her family so young, knowing precisely what she wanted out of life, and had headed bravely off to somewhere completely new, somewhere exciting. In an odd way she reminded me of myself, or rather the boy I used to be, long ago.

  She went on. “I love New York. It’s so exciting. So busy. There’s always something going on, something new to see. So many buildings to look at and sketch. But…” She sighed, and a note of wistfulness crept into her voice, echoing a gentle sorrow I sometimes felt deep in my own heart. “I suppose I miss home, too. I miss my parents and my brothers. And I love the country too. In its way, it’s just as beautiful as the city. The air is fresh there, the sun is brighter, and
you have space to move without running into someone.”

  For some reason, the image of my father’s country estate in Ayrshire—constructed of rough-hewn gray stone, stately and proud, standing tall amidst green fields and mist-shrouded hills—ran through my mind. She’d love it, I thought, but dismissed the thought almost as quickly as I’d had it.

  This girl was never going to see my familial estate, for Chrissake. I hadn’t been home in years or taken a single one of the many beautiful women I’d dated home for my parents’ approval. I certainly wasn’t about to take this wee slip of a lass back to meet them. The mere thought was ludicrous.

  I looked down at the screen she held, seeing the rendering of a restaurant’s façade. Very professional, it was, but I wanted to see something more. Something other than one of the typical computer-generated pictures that all decent architects had in their portfolio. Something that had her soul in it.

  “Why don’t you show me one of your drawings, Miss Blizzard? A real sketch, something done with pencil and paper.”

  “Oh.” She frowned at the screen like she hadn’t expected that, and seemed to hesitate for a moment as if considering what to show me. At last, she sorted rapidly through her pictures and pulled up a beautifully done elevation of a spectacular modern house.

  “Is this a building you saw somewhere, or one you designed?” I inquired.

  “This is my dream house,” she said, her voice soft. “I’ve spent years thinking about it, imagining it, trying to make it perfect. One day I’d like to build it, and live in it.”

  I studied it for a long moment. It seemed to be mostly made of glass, and I imagined that she had designed it to be built along the creek she’d mentioned back home, to provide optimal views of the water. It was the sort of house that somehow managed to appear homey and a showplace, all at once. It would, I thought, make a wonderful vacation home.

  I studied it a few moments longer, admiring the little details she’d worked in, from the wood-carven door to the boldly curving front steps, and at last upgraded her work in my mind from ‘very good’ to ‘brilliant’.