The Baby Pact (Babies and Billions #5) - Holly Rayner Page 0,41

baby clothes and for parenting books. She needed to buy the vitamins the doctor had told her to get, and to stock her house with healthy foods that would be good for her growing baby.

All important things. All things that she would have been able to enjoy and take pleasure in under better circumstances.

But even as she drove to the mall, already visualizing the kinds of clothes she would try to find for her baby, she felt herself losing focus.

This was the kind of thing a person should be able to do with someone else. Not alone.

And she couldn’t help wishing that Zach was at her side, cooing over the cute outfits and helping her to ridicule the sillier ones, giving his opinions about things like hats and onesies.

She wished she wasn’t doing this alone.

But she would do it.

I might wish I had Zach with me, she told herself fiercely. But I don’t need him. I can handle this on my own.

Chapter 14

Zach

Thoughts of what Rhea had told him troubled Zach all night long, and all through the next day and night as well.

By the time the weekend came, he felt as if he were going mad. How could he believe the things she had said, the accusations she had leveled against his father? Zach and his father had been the only family each other had had for years, and they had been incredibly close. They had always told one another everything.

At least, Zach had told his father everything. But had his father reciprocated? Had the information really flowed both ways?

He never did tell me why he was fired.

That thought continued to worry away at the back of Zach’s mind.

Of course, it made sense that there were things his father hadn’t told him. Some things a parent just didn’t share with their child. Zach couldn’t be angry about that.

But it did mean that Zach had to rethink his perspective.

There might be things I never knew about my father. Things he never told me.

Could this be one of those things?

Could he really have stolen from Rhea’s family?

Zach tried to set his feelings aside and look at things analytically. Prior to his win, his father had never played the lottery. That part of the story had always been strange. That he could win a jackpot the very first time he ever bought a ticket—well, there was no reason that couldn’t happen, of course. But it did strike Zach as surprising.

Then there was the fact that there had never been any kind of news story about the lottery win. Zach would have remembered it if his father had been featured in the paper. And that did sound like something his father would do—sharing a story of his own good luck like that. He wouldn’t have kept it private.

He wished he had asked more questions, tried to find out more, at the time. Now it was too late.

Or was it? Maybe there was evidence somewhere in the house. He did have his father’s financial records. He hurried to the study, where he kept a file of important papers, and began to shuffle through them.

Here was a record of his father’s investments, all of them purchased around the same time. This confirmed the fact that he had come into a large amount of money—though really, Zach had only to look around to see confirmation of that fact.

This money hadn’t been in his family growing up. It had come from somewhere.

Was there some record of the payment from the lottery organization? There should be, Zach knew. His father had been meticulous about paperwork. There were electric bills from the 1980s in this file. His father wouldn’t have thrown away something that important.

Zach combed through the papers, determined to find it.

But it wasn’t there.

He grew increasingly desperate as he moved from file to file, looking in places there was no reason to believe that document would be after he’d exhausted the more predictable places. It had to be somewhere. It had to be.

But it wasn’t.

There was no record of any lottery win. There was no indication that Zach’s father had ever even played the lottery.

That’s not proof, Zach thought desperately. That doesn’t prove anything.

But it as good as proved it. If his father had won the lottery, he would have documented that fact. That he hadn’t done so showed Zach that the story he had been told was almost certainly false.

The money had come from somewhere else.

And the only reason Zach could think of to lie about