Free Reclaiming His Pregnant Widow by Tessa Radley Page A

already had him declared dead.
    While he’d been thinking about her every day, consumed by how to find his way back home to her, she’d been planning how to bury him alive.
    â€œCan’t you drive faster?”
    The cabdriver obliged. Brand stared blindly out the window as the city flashed past. In his old life he’d been impatient. Maybe too impatient. But his captivity—where minutes had stretched into hours and hours into days—had changed that. He’d acquired the ability to block out everything except what he most wanted: to survive.
    The cab stopped outside a brownstone in a tree-lined avenue. Brand paid the cabbie with the last of the dollars Akam had lent him and headed for the house he’d bought for Clea back in what seemed like another lifetime. On the front door, brass letters spelled out Welcome Home.
    Brand pressed the buzzer.
    He didn’t recognize the short, bald manservant who opened the front door. “Where is Bright?” Brand demanded, surprised not to see the elegant, stooped man he and Clea had hired in happier times.
    â€œBright retired last year, s—”
    The butler ran his assessing gaze over Brand’s no-label jeans and the black T-shirt that hugged his muscled torso and biceps before biting back the rest of the automatically polite sir . Having priced and dismissed Brand’s clothing, he stated, “We’re not employing bodyguards.”
    Brand gave the stranger barring the way into his home a lethal glare. “I’m not looking for a job. I’m Brandon Noble.”
    The butler stood firm, his solid body filling the doorway, disbelief glittering in his eyes. “Mr. Noble is dead.”
    Was he never going to escape that myth?
    While the butler’s pugnacious attitude rankled, the man was only doing his job. Brand finally took pity on him and extracted a passport so new the dark cover was still stiff.
    He flipped it open and flashed the identification page at the man. “Satisfied?”
    The butler glanced at the photo taken less than a week ago in the back room of Akam’s cousin’s house and then back to Brand. His throat worked and he said thinly, “It appears I must apologize, Mr. Noble.”
    With mordant humor, Brand suspected the butler was torn between evicting a possible interloper and risking his job if Brand’s claim proved to be true. Just as well the man wasn’t versed in detecting excellently crafted fakes.
    â€œNo apology necessary.” Brand pocketed the fraudulent passport and raised an eyebrow. “I didn’t catch your name.”
    Both of them knew the butler hadn’t supplied it.
    Discomfort crossed the butler’s face. “My name is Curtis. The doctor is still at the museum, sir.”
    The doctor.
    The butler was referring to Clea. That was another piece of information she’d neglected to share with him—she’d gotten her PhD. Graduated. Something else he’d missed out on. He ought to have been beside her, celebrating her success. Brand tamped down his frustration at the tragic unfairness of it all. If he allowed resentment and anger to bubble over, he’d go mad.
    â€œI know she is,” he said calmly. “I’ve just come from there.”
    Relief relaxed the butler’s frown. “Then you’ll come back when the doctor is home?”
    To prevent a pointless standoff, Brand asked, “Is Smythe still on the staff?”
    It galled him to have to ask a man he didn’t know if the chauffeur still worked for him. One day he’d been in control of every element of his life, and the following day he hadn’t known where the next meal was coming from, even if it would come at all…or what his fate would be.
    Death. Or life.
    For four years the balance had hung in the hands of his captors.
    The butler nodded, but he still blocked the doorway. Brand stepped forward. “Find him, Curtis,” he snapped. “I’m