Page 1 of The Playboy's Most Unexpected Baby

CHAPTER1

CHARLIE

“Fashionably late as usual, Charlie?”

His sister Caitlin smirked up at him from her seat at the conference room table. Charlie couldn’t help noticing that she was surrounded by her three children — apparently she had seen fit to bring her whole family to the reading of Aunt Marge’s will. As the oldest of the siblings, he knew she was probably counting on receiving Aunt Marge’s coastal estate in Old Prescott, Massachusetts. Hell, she’d probably already started planning her redecorations.

Cait drove Charlie crazy. He glanced at his phone. “I’m not even late,” he pointed out. “This was supposed to start at four thirty. It’s four twenty-eight.”

“Well, we all got here early so we could look over the list of Aunt Marge’s assets,” Cait said. “Scott and John knew enough to show up on time without my having to tell them.”

Charlie glanced at his brothers, who were also sitting at the conference room table. They, at least, had had the sense not to bring their kids along, although both of them had wives who didn’t work, so that had probably been easier for them than it would have been for Cait.

“Do I get to sit down?” he asked, pushing his untidy blond hair back out of his eyes.

“Seats are taken,” Scott pointed out, a smirk on his face. “If you wanted one, you should have gotten here earlier.”

“Surely the kids can play on the floor,” Charlie said to his sister. Anna, Freddie and Vance, ages seven, five and four, had spread building blocks over the table in front of them and hadn’t bothered to look up or greet Charlie when he’d come into the room.

“They’re all set up,” Cait said. “I’m not going to move them now.”

Charlie sighed and leaned back against the wall, folding his arms across his chest. “Whatever.”

He wished he didn’t have to be here. He had come out of respect for his aunt, and in hopes of keeping things polite and civil. He fully expected his three siblings to behave like jackals as her will was read. Aunt Marge had never had children, so they all knew that the three of them would be inheriting everything. It was just a matter of how it was all going to be divided up.

This meeting could have been an email, he thought unhappily as the executor walked into the room and took the one remaining empty seat at the head of the table, a chair that had obviously been reserved for him by the folders set in front of it.

“Thank you all for coming in today,” he said. “My name is Carl Rogan. I’m so sorry for your loss.”

No one said anything. Charlie could practically hear what his siblings were thinking —Get to the will.

His hands tightened into fists. The sooner he was able to get out of here, the better.

“All right,” Rogan said. “As you know, your aunt had a sizable collection of assets, and you four are the only ones who have been named in the will. Now, to begin with, there’s a stipulation here that anything overlooked should be relegated to Scott, and that he should take responsibility for distributing it fairly. Are you able to take on that responsibility?”

“It should be me doing that,” Cait said with a frown. “I’m the oldest.”

“Legally, we need to go by what it says in the will, although Scott is more than welcome to seek assistance from anyone he chooses,” Rogan said.

“I’ll help you figure things out,” Cait said authoritatively.

Scott didn’t answer. He was the third born of the family and had always had a good instinct for staying out of drama. Charlie suspected that was why he’d been chosen to mediate things that had been overlooked by the will. He thought Aunt Marge had probably made a good choice. Scott would be fair. Cait would have been domineering if she’d been put in charge of the project.

“Your aunt’s monetary assets are to be split up between the four of you,” Rogan said.

“Not split equally, surely?” John said. “I have four children to take care of.”

“It’s not a twenty-five percent split, no,” Rogan said. “The exact ratio is in the folders here.”

“Let me see that,” Cait said.

Rogan opened one of the folders, pulled out a piece of paper, and passed it to Cait. She looked at it, then nodded. “This seems fair.” She handed the paper to Scott.

He looked it over. “Twenty percent for each of us, and then the remaining twenty is divided up among the kids and allocated to the parents,” he said. “Yeah, that seems all right to me.”

It meant that Charlie would receive the least, since he was the only one who didn’t have children, but that didn’t bother him. He actually thought it was pretty fair too. “Is that all?”

“No,” Rogan said. “There’s a car — that’s been left to John.”

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