The Job Offer - By Eleanor Webb Page 0,31

father with another man's child even though her mother had been a virgin prior to her father entering the picture.

From there things got even uglier, and her grandfather threatened to disinherit her father if the marriage was not annulled immediately. Her father folded under the threat, and the marriage was soon annulled. Anne's mother was fired from the firm and kicked out on the street. She was devastated by losing her husband and job in a betrayal of her love and trust. But she learned an important lesson. Money and connections always came first with the Conners. Eventually, she made her way back to Orcas Island, where she was from, and moved in with her parents while she worked at a local resort. After Anne was born, she fell in love with and married Anne's stepfather, Jim, a Croatian immigrant who came from a long line of hoteliers and who was on the island looking for a place to invest in a new resort. The rest of their story was history.

It was not as nice for Anne. Except for the eyes and brows she shared with her mother, most of her looks came from her father's side of the family, namely her paternal grandmother. Anne’s life changed forever when a photo of her winning an all-state seventh grade science competition made it into the Seattle Times and was seen by her paternal grandfather. By that time, her father had married and divorced his third wife with no children coming from either the second or third marriages. This left her grandparents without any grandchildren and a sudden desire to meet Anne. At the urging of her grandfather, her father took her mother to court demanding full custody of Anne. After a long and nasty custody battle, her father lost. But while his bid for full custody failed, he was granted visitations on every other weekend, every other holiday, and a month every summer. The court ruling also required Anne to take back her father's last name of Conner, something that her grandfather fought hard for in court.

Anne was young and had not known that Jim was not her real father until the court case. Feeling confused and betrayed with her mother and stepfather for not being honest with the truth, Anne opened her heart unwisely to her father and grandparents. But what she did not know at the time was that her grandfather was dying of cancer, and he had set up a trust fund for Anne to be administered by her father. It was worth millions. The terms of the trust put her father in complete control of her money and left him with the belief that he could also control her young life.

Her father was overly critical of all of her choices and played so many mind games that it eventually ate at her self confidence until she was afraid to make even the smallest mistake for fear of how he would react. He even went so far as to arrange her boyfriends and an engagement while she was an undergrad in college. She finally saw the light at the beginning of her senior year and kicked her father out of her life for good. The money from the trust would become hers when she turned thirty next year, but she did not want any of it. She just wanted to forget her father ever existed.

Anne was so caught up in her thoughts that she did not hear the water being turned off, nor did she hear Ben moving around the bedroom until he came into the sitting room wearing only a pair of gray sweatpants. The sweatpants rested low on his hips. She could see the outline of his groin and knew that the sweatpants were all he wore. Ben was another issue, Anne thought. This was Ben Carlson, the boy that she was so sure she loved back when she was in high school. The man he became was sexy, smart, and had a great personality, and she responded to him in a manner so unlike her usual reserved manner with men. She laid awake for most of the night trying to reconcile her behavior when she was around him yesterday with that of the sensible woman she usually was and could not come up with an answer. The only thing she could think was that there were some residual feelings and urges left over from her teen years.

Sometime during the middle of the night, she decided