Free Royal Seduction by Donna Clayton Page B

search all those years ago. And that she would never be content until she finally got the chance to see Richard and tell him that he had a son.
    Jason had grown quiet, his feelings about Richard obviously mixed. However, he hadn’t told his mother not to go.
    So here she was in Oregon, having found a tiny apartment, a job as a hostess at La Grenouille Dorée, one of Portland’s fanciest restaurants. She’d been visiting the Healthy Living Clinic and had even attended some of Richard’s seminars.
    When she’d first seen him up there on that stage, his personality had appeared to be too slick, almost shifty, and she hadn’t been sure she wanted to reveal herself to him at all. But she sensed pain in the depths of his dark eyes. Pain…and what she took as loneliness.
    Her weeks in Portland had been roller-coaster-crazy on her emotions. She’d ping-ponged between feeling sympathetic toward the man she’d once been married to, and wanting to rip his handsome face off for so thoroughly forgetting her, wiping her right out of his past.
    And it was during one of these terrible moments of raging resentment that she’d stood up and lambasted him right in the middle of one of his workshops.
    She couldn’t have embarrassed either of them more had she painstakingly planned it.
    He’d stormed out of the room, out of the clinic and gone into hiding. That had been over a week ago.
    Because of her, he was in a frightful mess and his job at the clinic was on the line. The new director… What was his name? Dr. Riley Jacobs, she remembered. He’d been nice enough with his promise of finding Richard so he could help with the planned testing of NoWait.
    Suddenly, though, doubt set in. What if Dr. Jacobs’s story was all a lie and the clinic wanted to lure Richard in there to publicly fire him? All because she’d—
    Hold on! The voice that had chided her only a moment before was now softer and more consoling. This fix Richard is in is his own doing. He’s the one who’d rewritten his past for those who hired him. He’s the one who came up with the crazy idea of that NoWait oil.
    â€œHomeopathic therapy, my butt,” Carrie muttered. Why, Richard couldn’t mix his way out of a child’s chemistry set, let alone come up with a topical weight-loss treatment that would actually work.
    Users of NoWait had become perceptibly passionate, and there was no way to hide the fact that it was that damned oil that was causing it. The NoWait zealots didn’t seem to care that kissing complete strangers simply wasn’t done. Why, she’d even read one newspaper article about a married couple she’d seen buying NoWait at the clinic. The man and his wife had become so overcome with their desire for each other that they had done the dirty deed in broad daylight—in a public park, no less. They’d been arrested, of course, but so far neither the authorities nor the reporter who had written the article had put all the pieces together.
    But it was only a matter of time before the truth would be exposed.
    The people running the clinic knew. That was why they were attempting to confiscate all the NoWait. That’s why they wanted to find Richard, too. She hoped and prayed that Dr. Jacobs had been telling her the truth about wanting Richard to help in the lab with the tests.
    Yes, Richard, with his rash schemes to become famous, had been his own worst enemy.
    Carrie set the glass on the end table, her fingers trembling. Then she snapped on the light. Sitting in the dark was only contributing to her bad mood.
    There was no way around feeling guilty for the way she’d acted. For the awful accusations she’d flung at Richard right in front of his colleagues and all those despairing people who needed his help losing weight.
    Carrie desperately wanted to find Richard. To tell him she was sorry. To tell him the clinic wanted him. Needed him.
    To tell him