The Teacher's Billionaire

seemed to tilt and spin. Callie clutched the closest desk to steady herself, as she took a few deep breaths. Lauren was right. Warren Sherbrooke and his wife had two children in their mid-twenties. She should have realized sooner that she had half siblings. Somehow though her brain hadn’t let her make the connection. It was so focused on her mother’s lie and Warren himself that she hadn’t thought of the bigger picture. This new development only added to her emotional turmoil.
    “I’ll talk to you later.” Lauren’s voice broke through the fog just as Callie’s students came barreling into the classroom. Sending her friend a little wave, she tried to focus on her afternoon lessons.
    That night she found herself scrolling through the hits her Internet search had found. When she’d sat down, Callie only intended to write a few email messages before losing herself in a book. Instead she’d brought up her favorite search engine and typed in her father’s name. She’d done a very brief Internet search after learning the truth about her father, but this time she intended to do a more thorough job. In seconds the Internet came up with well over one million hits.
    Thank goodness for modern technology.
    Like most of America, she already knew the basics about Warren Sherbrooke. While that meant she knew more about him than she did any other stranger, she still didn’t know a lot about him. While the Internet couldn’t give her all the answers, it could help fill in some of the gaps.
    Dylan Talbot could tell me even more.
Callie eyed his business card. At first she considered throwing it away, but at the last minute she changed her mind. Now the card sat on her end table near the phone.
    “For now this will have to do,” she muttered aloud refusing to allow herself to call him. If she called him it would look as if she wanted a meeting with her father. And she still had not made up her mind yet.
    Moving the cursor over the first Internet link, she double clicked. Instantly, an official political website popped up.
    Over the next hour Callie scanned through the various sites. Many of them contained the same information, much of which she already knew. As she read the articles regarding Warren and the Sherbrooke family the same question kept plaguing her. How had her parents ever met? They came from completely opposite backgrounds. Callie couldn’t see anything that would’ve brought them in contact with each other let alone allowed them to be intimate.
    He came from a wealthy, well-connected family. Ruth Taylor, on the other hand, had grown up in Rhode Island where her parents had owned a small deli and convenience store in Newport. Sometime before Callie’s birth, her mom moved to Massachusetts. So how had it happened? She was dying to know. And the only person who could tell her for certain was her father.
    ***
    The proper thing would’ve been to call, Dylan thought as he rapped his knuckles on Callie Taylor’s weathered apartment door three days later. He considered calling but decided against it, although he didn’t know why. Perhaps it was because he knew she might refuse to see him. How could he persuade her to change her mind if she wouldn’t see him? He was good but not that good. Dylan knew how important this was to his stepfather. And even though he was against them meeting before the election he didn’t want to disappoint Warren. It would be like disappointing his own father.
    Inside the apartment, he could hear her dog barking and then her voice scolding the silly mutt. Without asking who it was first, she pulled open the door.
    Since their first meeting, he hadn’t thought much about Callie’s appearance. Rather, he’d been focused on how he could change her mind. Yet with her standing only a few feet away, he couldn’t ignore what a beautiful woman she was. Silently he watched her lips form a smile, which didn’t quite reach her eyes.
    “It’s nice to see you again.” Callie paused for a moment and Dylan wondered if she would invite him in or not. “Please come in,” she finally said.
    Dylan could tell she wasn’t pleased to see him again. Although her words were polite and friendly, her body language gave away her true feelings. He doubted she realized just how much her rigid stance and crossed arms told him about her feelings regarding his visit. Dylan knew most people didn’t know how much their body language revealed, but he’d taken a sociology course as an undergrad that