Hired to Carry the Alpha's Heir, I Read the Last Page Too Late novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Last Page
Jamie signs forty pages with the client's name covered and the last one unread; in a Malibu glass house the most feared man in Hollywood reads it aloud, says the door is unlocked, and Jamie's heat starts early.
Jamie signed page nine, and the lawyer's hand slid across to cover the client's name again.
It was a dry, square hand with a gold signet ring on the little finger.
It had covered the top third of every page since page one.
"Initial the margin, Mr. Hendry," Dennis Marlin said. "Don't look up there."
"I wasn't looking."
"You were looking a little."
Jamie had been looking a lot.
He was twenty-four years old and had slept four hours.
He was signing a year of his life away in a glass office in Century City.
The agency's director sat across the table, smiling the smile of a woman paid by the page.
"Five hundred thousand dollars," she said, for the third time. "Fifty at signing, the rest at the birth."
"I can count," Jamie said.
He could also count to a hundred and eighty-three thousand, four hundred and twelve.
That was what his mother's hospital said she had owed when she died, and it had moved to his name in the spring.
Page twenty. Page thirty.
"One heat," the director said. "Natural conception, as the client requires. Then a year in his house."
"And he doesn't want to meet me first."
"He wants whoever signs to be signing for the money," Marlin said. "Not the name."
"Is the name that bad?"
Marlin's hand did not move.
"Initial here, Mr. Hendry."
Jamie initialed, and the phone buzzed against his thigh.
He knew the number without looking, because it had called nine times that week.
It was the collection firm, and the message under it said his mother's account went to judgment in the morning.
"Last page," Marlin said. "Page forty-one."
He turned it over, and this time the hand covered the whole sheet.
Jamie noticed that the hand had gone very still.
"Do I get to read it?"
"The client revised it last night. He would rather you heard it from him."
"That's the most sinister sentence I've ever been told."
"It's a closing page," the director said brightly. "Nobody reads the closing page."
The phone buzzed again on Jamie's leg.
He took the pen and signed his name at the bottom, under Marlin's fingers, without reading a single word.
The driver took him up the coast in a black car that smelled of nothing at all.
The sun was going down into the Pacific when the road ended at a gate, and the gate opened on a house made of glass.
It sat on the lip of a cliff, three stories of window with the sea underneath it.
Jamie got out with his duffel bag and his chipped tooth and his whole life on his back.
The front door was already open.
A man stood in the glass hall with his back to the light.
He was enormous, a black henley stretched across his chest, his sleeves shoved to the elbows.
His hair was black going grey, and his eyes were the color of a winter sky.
The left side of his face and neck was one long burn scar, old and shiny, running down into his collar.
Jamie's step stuttered, a half-step, for a single heartbeat.
The man saw it.
Jamie knew the face from a magazine cover in a dentist's waiting room.
"You're Aldecott," he said. "You own the studio. You're the guy who made a director cry in a screening room."
"He cried on his own," Roman Aldecott said.
His voice was low and rough and quiet, and his scent rolled across the hall, smoke and cedar and something warmer under both.
It hit Jamie behind the knees.
"Mr. Hendry. You signed."
"I signed everything."
"Everything?"
"Forty-one pages. I'm very thorough."
Roman held out his hand, and Jamie put the folder in it.
Their fingers brushed, and the touch ran up Jamie's arm.
Roman went still, then turned the folder over and opened it to the last page.
"You didn't read this."
"I was busy."
"Page forty-one," Roman said, and read it aloud, flat and clear.
"If conception is confirmed, the Alpha shall complete the bond at the scent gland during the same heat."
"The bond is permanent. It cannot be dissolved by either party."
"The Omega shall remain in the Alpha's house, and under the Alpha's hand, for the rest of his life."
The sea went on breaking at the bottom of the cliff.
Jamie heard his own pulse, loud in both ears.
"That's a bond," he said.
"That's a bond."
"You can't put that in a surrogacy contract."
"I put it in the night before you came," Roman said. "It's signed. It's binding. It's yours."
Jamie looked at the man, and at the scar, and at the huge careful hands holding the page.
He thought about the judgment in the morning.
"You can still walk out," Roman said. "The door's unlocked."
Jamie turned and looked at it.
It was a plain glass door, and the lever was right there under his hand.
He did not push it.
"I signed," he said. "I'm not walking anywhere. When does the baby thing start, tonight, or do I get dinner?"
"Your heat is three days off. You'll have the guest wing until then."
"Great. I brought snacks."
He took one step toward the stairs, and the floor tilted.
A cramp folded him in half, low and hot, and slick ran down the inside of his thigh.
Roman's scent changed, and Jamie's knees went.
Roman caught him by the back of the neck, his palm closing over the exact place that page forty-one had named.
His heat broke over Jamie three days early, in the hands of the man who had just told him he could leave.
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