By the time the sheriff’s car screeched to a stop at the edge of the gated community outside Seattle, the kidnapper was already lying face-down in the pine needles, hands tied behind his back with a worn leather belt, a furious old gamekeeper standing over him with a stick. The would-be kidnapper’s name was Nick. And three years earlier, he’d married the woman whose baby boy he’d just tried to steal.
Nick hadn’t married Jolie for love. He told everyone he had, of course. He told her she was his soulmate, that God Himself must’ve pushed them together under those glass chandeliers at her father’s New York launch party.
He told her she was the only person who really saw him. What Nick really saw was the number of zeros in her inheritance. Jolie McMillan was the only child of Conrad McMillan, a Florida-born tech and logistics tycoon who’d moved his headquarters to Seattle to be closer to venture capital and the West Coast buzz.
Conrad was in his early fifties, ran five miles a day, drank green juice, and looked like the sort of man who would live to ninety and still answer emails. So when he dropped dead of a sudden stroke in his Lake Washington mansion, the shock rippled through the business pages from coast to coast. It nearly destroyed Jolie.
It also handed her, overnight, the controlling stake in McMillan Freight Systems, three warehouses, a portfolio of downtown properties, and an investment account that could buy half a block in Manhattan in cash. Nick read all that in an online article on his phone as he lay on the couch of his then-girlfriend’s condo in Miami, one hand lazily scrolling, the other picking at the label on a beer bottle. “She must be devastated,” the girlfriend sighed, watching the news.
Nick only heard: only child, sole heir. Nick was handsome in the easy, careless way that looks good in Instagram selfies: tall, gym-built, dark hair always just artfully messy enough to look “natural.” For most of his adult life he’d drifted from one wealthy woman to another: a lonely dentist in Dallas paying off his credit cards, a divorced real estate broker in Atlanta buying him watches, a hotel manager in Vegas paying his rent “just until he got on his feet.”
He never got on his feet. He didn’t need to.
In America, he’d learned, there was always another woman like that. Money, loneliness, and the need to feel adored were a combination he’d built a career on. But Jolie was in a different league.
The story doesn’t end here –
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