Dangerous Disguise by Marie Ferrarella Read Free Book Online Page A

Johnson had pointed out. “I guess it’s a lucky thing I didn’t talk you into going back to the restaurant.” He held the door open for her. “I haven’t got a clue when it comes to insurance.”
    Maren stepped through, nodding her thanks. She sincerely doubted that Jared Stevens was clueless on any subject.

Chapter 4
    “I hear the new guy’s pretty resourceful.”
    Maren had barely touched the doorknob before she heard the deep voice. She grinned as she entered the office she shared with her favorite person in the whole world.
    As she opened the door Joe Collins turned to face her. It was the accountant’s first visit to the office in two days. Things never seemed quite right without him. In his later fifties, Joe still gave the impression of being larger than life. His very presence filled up a room for her, the way it had from the very beginning when he had been her entire world.
    She owed him everything.
    Maren paused to kiss his cheek before tossing her purse onto her desk and stripping off her jacket. “Nobody told me you were coming in today.”
    “I sneaked in like the wind,” he said, winking.
    After hanging up her jacket, she pulled her chair away from the desk and sat down. Slowly she felt the tension leach from her body, the way it always did whenever Papa Joe was around. He made her feel that everything was going to be all right, as long as he was close by.
    “The wind, huh?” She raised one amused eyebrow. “Then how did you hear about the new guy?”
    “Wind with ears?”
    His big, booming laugh wrapped itself around her, just as his arms had all those years ago when he had taken her home from the hospital. From the hospital and into his heart and life. He’d saved her from a system that could have very easily stripped her soul if she’d been placed with the wrong people. Or put her in one foster home after another.
    She never tired of hearing the story, even though it had gone through many phases over the years. When she’d first asked the man she always thought of as her father why she didn’t have a mother when all the other girls in her kindergarten class had one, he’d told her that she was secretly a princess.
    As she listened with wide eyes, he’d gone on to tell her that her mother had been a queen in a distant land. A queen who had saved her from a big, bad ogre, but she’d gotten mortally wounded in doing so. He was the knight who had come by, found her and slain the ogre. Maren remembered always applauding when he came to this part. The dying queen entrusted her infant daughter to him, making the knight pledge to guard her always.
    Periodically, as she grew older and brought her questions to him, Papa Joe would revise the story, trimming away the fairy tale and replacing it with a little more of the truth. Then came the time when she’d turned thirteen. After he had swallowed his embarrassment and gone with her to purchase her very first bra, because she’d pressed so hard, he’d told her the complete truth.
    Taking a shortcut through a dimly lit alley to his apartment one rainy night, he’d happened across a teenage prostitute named Glory just after she’d given birth. Her pulse was reedy and she’d lost a great deal of blood. He’d known she was dying. Without hesitation, he’d hailed a cab and taken both mother and child to the hospital. He’d left the complaining cabdriver with a huge tip.
    But it had been too late for Glory. She’d lost too much blood and had died within the hour. Because there’d been some misunderstanding at the hospital, the attending physician and emergency room nurse had both thought that he was the newborn’s father. Something had stopped him from setting the record straight. Alone, with no family of his own, he’d impulsively gone along with the error.
    “You wrapped your perfect little hand around my finger and I was just a goner,” he told her time and again. That part of the story never changed.
    For three days, he’d come back