From Mistake To Millions (Switched! Book 1) Read online

  The only thing more dangerous than discovering her life is a lie?

  Falling for Harley Dalton again.

  Reeling from the discovery she was switched at birth, Jade Nolan reluctantly joins forces with her ex-lover, security specialist Harley Dalton, to find her birth family. As they search for answers amid lies, Jade and Harley quickly rekindle long-denied passions. But will finding out the truth—and a secret worth billions—jeopardize their precious second chance?

  “Lying here next to you after all this time makes me wish I’d gotten one last kiss before I let you go. I regret that more than anything else.”

  Without thinking, Harley surged forward and his lips pressed to hers. He’d had those regrets, too, and now, having her so near, he couldn’t fight it anymore. He had to touch her, taste her, even if it was just to convince himself that his memories of her were wrong. She couldn’t possibly be everything he’d built her up to be in his mind. She’d become a fantasy he couldn’t have. He hoped that once the kiss was done he could put aside his attraction to her and focus on the case.

  He couldn’t have been more wrong. Jade melted into his arms, moaning softly against his mouth. She wrapped her body around him, pulling him close.

  There was no going back.

  She was everything he remembered and more.

  * * *

  From Mistake to Millions is the first book

  of the Switched! duet.

  Dear Reader,

  As much as I’ve loved hanging out in the Millionaires of Manhattan world for the last year or so, it was time to start something new! Don’t worry, that series will continue at some point, but I decided it was time to trade in the hustle and bustle of New York for the sultry Southern style of Charleston.

  The idea for this new series started with all those commercials for DNA testing kits on television. I thought that was going to dig up some skeletons, for sure. And that’s where Switched! begins. Jade Nolan has only ever wanted a happy, ordinary life, always striving for quiet and simple pleasures. Her first love, bad boy Harley Dalton, never fit into those tidy plans. She made the tough choice to leave him behind, only to find him back on her doorstep more than ten years later. She can’t turn away from him now if she wants to get to the truth about her family. And to be honest, there’s no way she can walk away from this sexy chapter from her past.

  If you enjoy Jade and Harley’s story, tell me by visiting my website at andrealaurence.com, liking my fan page on Facebook or following me on Twitter or Instagram. I’d love to hear from you!

  Enjoy,

  Andrea

  Andrea Laurence

  From Mistake to Millions

  Andrea Laurence is an award-winning author of contemporary romances filled with seduction and sass. She has been a lover of reading and writing stories since she was young. A dedicated West Coast girl transplanted into the Deep South, she is thrilled to share her special blend of sensuality and dry, sarcastic humor with readers.

  Books by Andrea Laurence

  Harlequin Desire

  Millionaires of Manhattan

  What Lies Beneath

  More Than He Expected

  His Lover’s Little Secret

  The CEO’s Unexpected Child

  Little Secrets: Secretly Pregnant

  Rags to Riches Baby

  One Unforgettable Weekend

  The Boyfriend Arrangement

  Switched!

  From Mistake to Millions

  Visit her Author Profile page at Harlequin.com, or andrealaurence.com, for more titles.

  You can find Andrea Laurence on Facebook, along with other Harlequin Desire authors, at Facebook.com/harlequindesireauthors!

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  Contents

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Epilogue

  Excerpt from Star-Crossed Scandal by Kimberley Troutte

  Prologue

  This couldn’t be right.

  Jade Nolan studied the genetic test report she’d just received in the mail. The DNA kit had been a Christmas gift from her younger brother, Dean. He’d gotten it for everyone in the family this year. He thought it would be fun to see what parts of the world they’d come from. They were fairly certain of the family’s Irish and German heritage, so there weren’t going to be many surprises.

  But the words Jade was looking at were a surprise and then some. They were actually a shock.

  “Jade? Are you okay?”

  She looked up from the paper in her hand and stared blankly at her best friend, Sophie Kane. They were hanging out drinking wine and watching their favorite show together just like they did every Tuesday. But the minute Jade looked at the report, the evening had taken a sharp, unexpected turn.

  “No,” she said with a shake of her head. “I’m not okay.”

  How could she be okay? According to the report, she wasn’t closely related to any other users in the company’s database. Considering that she’d been the last of her family to mail in her DNA sample, that wasn’t possible. Both her parents and her brother had submitted their DNA weeks before she had. They should be showing under the family section of her report. And yet they weren’t.

  Never mind the fact that her DNA showed she wasn’t Irish and German. She was coming up English, Swedish and Dutch. She’d seen her brother’s report and they didn’t align at all.

  “What does it say?” Sophie pressed. She set down her wine and leaned in to lay a comforting hand on Jade’s shoulder. “Tell me, honey.”

  Jade swallowed hard, trying to dislodge the lump that had suddenly formed in her throat. She couldn’t speak. In an instant, a lifetime of unfounded doubts had rushed into her mind. Years of being the family misfit. Insecurity about her physical differences. Jokes about being the milkman’s daughter, since she was blonde with dark brown eyes, and the rest of her family had dark, almost black hair and green eyes. The jokes were all too real now.

  No matter how many times her mother had assured her that her grandmother was a blonde, no matter how many grainy old pictures were hauled out to prove that her willow-thin frame came from her father’s family, it didn’t help. Her grandmother’s hair had been a dishwater blond in her youth, not Jade’s pale, almost platinum color. The family in the old pictures were poor and undernourished, not naturally slim like Jade, with her ballerina’s body.

  Jade had always felt like the odd one out. Now she had the cold, hard evidence to prove what she’d known all along. She was not a Nolan.

  She stood up suddenly and the report slipped from her fingers, falling to the floor. Jade didn’t notice.

  “I think I’m...adopted.” She was finally able to say the words aloud, but they sounded foreign to her ears.

  Adopted. The reality of it was like a fist to the gut. Why had her parents kept this from her? She was almost thirty years old. She had married and divorced. When she and her ex-husband, Lance, were discussing children, her mother had even told her stories about her pregnancy with Jade. A bout how her father had fainted in the delivery room. Now Jade realized it was all a lie. An elaborate, complicated lie.

  But why?

  She didn’t understand what was going on. But she would get to the bottom of it one way or another.

  One

  Being the boss was boring as hell.

  Harley Dalton sat on the top floor of his Washington, DC, office building and flipped through some reports. He wasn’t reading them. Managing a company wasn’t really his thing. He’d started one only because he didn’t want to take orders again after getting out of the navy.

  He’d never expected it to be so successful. Dalton Security now had four offices in the US and one in London, with hundreds of employees. They were the company to call if you found yourself in a bind, or if a situation needed to be handled. Nothing outright illegal, of course, but things would be dealt with in a quick and efficient manner that sometimes fell into a fuzzy gray area.

  One of the things his company had handled was the recent abduction of a fourteen-year-old girl. She’d run away with her soccer coach, who was nearly fifty. It was on the nationwide news as people hunted for the young girl across the Midwest. It was also on the news when Dalton Security successfully tracked down, apprehended and delivered the pervert who’d kidnapped her to the front door of the police station, a little worse for wear. The girl was returned home safely. Dalton’s stock prices had shot through the roof. All ended well.

  At least well enough, considering Harley found himself in stuffy suits sitting at big desks talking to people all day. He wasn’t the one in the field anymore and it grated on him. He wasn’t toting a Glock and apprehending suspects. He was a damn paper pusher now.

  He’d never imagined that being a millionaire would suck so hard.

  “Mr. Dalton?” His assistant’s voice chimed over the intercom on his phone.

  “Yes?” he replied, trying not to growl at Faye. It wasn’t her fault he was feeling strangled by his silk tie today.

  “I have a Mr. Jeffries on the phone, sir.”

  Jeffries? The name didn’t sound familiar. “Who is he?”

  “He says he’s the CEO of St. Francis Hospital in Charleston.”

  Now why would the CEO of a Charleston hospital be calling him? Harley had been born and raised in the city, but hadn’t been back in a decade. His mother still lived there. He’d bought her a beautiful old plantation house that he had yet to visit. The CEO wouldn’t be calling if something had happened to his mother. What could it be? Normally Harley didn’t take phone calls from people he didn’t know, but his curiosity was piqued.

  “Put him through,” he told Faye.

  The phone chimed a moment later and he picked up. “This is Dalton,” he said.

  “Hello. This is Weston Jeffries. I’m the CEO of the St. Francis Hospital group in Charleston. I was hoping to speak with you about a...situation we’re having here.”

  “Normally new cases are handled by our client intake department,” Harley said. If they wanted special surveillance equipment or needed to investigate pending hires, that didn’t need to come across his desk.

  “I understand that,” Mr. Jeffries said. “But from one CEO to another, this is a really delicate situation for us. We’ve already gotten more media scrutiny than we care to.”

  Media scrutiny? Apparently he needed to pay more attention to what was going on back home. “Well, why don’t you tell me what’s happening and I’ll see what we can do.”

  “We’ve been contacted by a woman who claims she was switched at birth when she was born at our hospital here in 1989. She’d thought at first maybe she’d been adopted, but her parents are adamant that they delivered a daughter at St. Francis that day. She believes them, so in her mind, that only leaves the possibility that she was switched as an infant here. We are looking for someone to investigate what happened, as quietly as possible. The woman has already gone to the local news and we don’t want to make the situation worse than it already is.”

  While someone being switched at birth was interesting and potentially damaging to the hospital, he still wasn’t sure why the man insisted on speaking to him about it. Then again, Harley was bored to tears. He might as well listen. “Do you believe the hospital was at fault?”

  “It’s hard to say. Our technology and security weren’t as good back then as they are now. The woman was also born in the middle of Hurricane Hugo, so it wasn’t exactly business as usual around the hospital at that time.”

  Hurricane Hugo? That was an odd coincidence. His girlfriend back in high school had been born during Hurricane Hugo. His mind was suddenly flooded with memories of the willowy blonde who had headlined his teenage fantasies. She had been beautiful, smart and way out of his league. After she’d dumped him, he’d tried to put the memory of her in the past where it belonged, but he found that thoughts of her crept into his mind more often than he liked.

  Like now.

  He wasn’t listening to a word the man was saying. “What was the woman’s name?” he interrupted.

  “Jade Nolan.”

  Upon hearing her name, Harley felt as if someone had reached out and punched him in the gut. Jade. Of all the women in Charleston, it had to be her case that dropped in his lap. Against his better judgment, he knew in that moment that his company would take the case. He also knew that for the first time in several years, he was going to handle it personally.

  It might not be the healthiest thing to do, emotionally, but he had to see her again. It had been almost twelve years since she’d broken up with him and run off with that insipid little weasel, Lance Rhodes. He’d heard that she’d married him. Maybe she was still married to him. He’d seemed to be everything she wanted. Everything Harley wasn’t.

  Call it morbid curiosity. Call it a reason to get out of this office with the walls closing in on him like a Star Wars trash compactor. But he was driving to Charleston in the morning.

  “Mr. Dalton?”

  Harley again realized he’d been sitting silently on the line for too long. “I’m sorry, Mr. Jeffries. We’ll take the case. Someone will be calling you back to get more details, but I will be down in Charleston within the week.”

  “You’re going to handle it personally?”

  “In this situation, yes.”

  “Thank you so much, Mr. Dalton. I look forward to speaking to you when you come into town.”

  The call ended and Harley sat back in his chair to consider the ramifications of what he’d just done. Taking the case on wasn’t the problem. He had no doubt that his team would uncover the truth of what had happened, if anything had happened at all. Going down personally was another matter. He could tell himself it was a good excuse to visit his mother and see his old stomping grounds, but anyone who knew him back then would know that he was going down there to see Jade.

  She wasn’t the right kind of girl for him. He’d known that back in high school. He’d spent a lot of time in detention, while she was the treasurer of the National Honor Society. They ran in completely different social circles—Jade with the smart kids and him with the juvenile delinquents. And yet the first moment he’d laid eyes on her in their French class, he knew he was done for.

  Maybe it was those big Bambi eyes that stood out against her pale skin and ice-blond hair. Even now, he remembered what it felt like to rub those silky strands between his fingers. She’d always looked at him with a touch of curiosity and anxiety hidden beneath thick lashes. The anxiety he was used to; he’d had quite the reputation around their high school. It was the curiosity that intrigued him.

  Although he was doing fine in French, he’d pretended he wasn’t and had approached her about tutoring him after school for some extra cash. He knew her family didn’t have a lot of money. Neither did he, but he was willing to part with what little he had to spend some time with her.

  Harley had paid her ten dollars a week for the rest of the semester to sit with him and practice French. He’d ended up getting an A in the class, which wasn’t his goal, but it hadn’t hurt. He’d just wanted to spend time with Jade, and he didn’t think she would do it otherwise. He was wrong. One sultry summer night in Charleston, he’d worked up the nerve to kiss her, and everything had changed. Including him.

  He had spent most of his youth running wild. His mother, a single mom, had worked two jobs to keep them afloat, so he’d spent most of his time without adult supervision. When he was with Jade, his usual pastimes didn’t seem as exciting anymore. He’d found he much preferred the rush of kissing her, or nearly being caught by her parents when he’d sneak in through her bedroom window at night. She was everything he hadn’t thought he would want. His previous romantic experiences had involved girls with too much makeup and too much time on their hands.

  Jade thought about nothing but the future. She’d been so desperate to avoid the struggles of her parents that she was constantly worried about her grades, which college she might get into and what she was going to do with her life. He had no doubt that one day she would be Dr. Jade Nolan.

  What Harley wasn’t so sure about was how he might fit into Jade’s future. Apparently, she had the same concerns. Not long after she’d started college, she broke things off with him. He knew as well as anybody that they weren’t right for each other—or more accurately, that he wasn’t good enough for her. So he hadn’t fought to keep her. That was one of his biggest regrets, if he admitted to any at all. He preferred to look forward. And that’s what he’d done.

  A week later, he’d walked into the navy recruiting office and never looked back. He hadn’t seen Jade since that day they broke up, despite her being on his mind all the time.

  Glancing down now at the information he’d copied into his notebook during the call, he figured that was all about to change.

  * * *

  The doorbell rang.

  Jade knew the investigator the hospital had hired was coming to interview her today, so she leaped up from the couch when she heard the chime ring through the house. Someone from St. Francis had called to make sure she would be home. She wasn’t entirely sure what she would tell the investigator, since she’d been literally just born at the time the incident took place, but at the very least, she could get an idea of who this person was and how he or she would handle things.