One Night With the Founder: A Secret Baby Age Gap Billionaire Romance
On a ferry that wouldn't leave the dock, a stranger told me the one thing he'd never said out loud: no wife, no kids, not ever.
Almost five years later he walked into my audit late, with rain on his shoulders, and our son was already four.
CASEY
I'm thirty-one. I climb trees for a living, and I read how they're going to fall so they don't land on anybody.
Almost five years ago I shared a table on a Seattle ferry with a man who wasn't looking at his phone. He made maps of trees from an airplane. I climbed the ones his map got wrong. Two hours in, he told me his father had died of Huntington's disease, that it was "fifty-fifty whether I have it," and that his result had been sitting in a file since October. He had an appointment to hear it at ten the next morning. He was going to cancel it. He wasn't handing anybody a coin flip.
First names only, I said. One night. Nobody looks anybody up.
The condom broke. He told me right away. I took the pill in my truck the next morning, and it didn't work.
A genetic counselor drew it for me on a whiteboard: if I tested the baby and it came back positive, I'd know something about his father that he had chosen not to know. Then a magazine quoted him. No kids. That was decided a long time ago. I stood in his lobby for twenty minutes with a letter in my coat, and I went home.
Now the stranger has a last name. Soren Nygaard. His company's model says which four thousand one hundred trees near the power lines should come down, and I'm the independent arborist hired to check it. Eighty-six thousand four hundred dollars. My whole year. He just made himself the liaison, which puts him in the middle of my bench seat at every site. Until somebody finds out why.
Otis says he's got twelve years on me and a billion dollars. He lives on a houseboat, and he's never used a chainsaw.
If I so much as have a beer with him, my report's garbage. So we don't.
He still hasn't opened that file. And he has no idea about Niko.
SOREN
I kept your rule. I never typed your name into anything, and I knew how to find a thing that did not want to be found.
I rode the boat instead. Six Tuesdays, the evening boat to Bainbridge and back, standing at the rail on the outer deck where you had kissed me. If you came up the stairs, it would be because you chose to. You did not come. Six was a man asking. A seventh would have been a man insisting.
Almost five years later the audit agreement said C. Radich, and it meant nothing to me. Then I opened a door in Shoreline and you were on the far side of the table with your braid over one shoulder.
In the parking lot you drew the line. Not a beer. Not a ride home. Not the boat. I said it back to you so you would know I meant it.
Then a boy in a dinosaur raincoat opened your front door with a stuffed sea lion under his arm and asked me if I was the laser man. The sea lion was named Herschel.
I had told the story of Herschel to one person in my life.
Tropes:
Age gap: he's 43, I'm 31
One night with a stranger on a Seattle ferry
Secret baby, with a reason to keep it that holds up
Second chance, almost five years later
Forced proximity: one bench seat, until she has to tell
Forbidden: I'm the auditor, he's the vendor
He falls first (six Tuesdays on the ferry)
Present, hands-on dad
Protective, never controlling
Grovel, on the page
No cheating, OW-safe
Guaranteed happily ever after
A Secret Baby Age Gap Billionaire Romance. Rain City Founders, Book One. Every book follows a different couple and reads as a standalone. Steamy: open-door, on the page, and fully consensual between adults. Includes a parent's death from Huntington's disease (off the page), genetic testing, and an on-page chainsaw injury and aerial rescue. 18+.
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