In The Arms of a Donovan: A Sexy BBW Billionaire Family Series Romance (The Donovans Book 13) (9 page)

He got up and showered, then dressed while his thoughts continued to roam. She hadn’t wanted any promises from him, which was good because he didn’t have any promises to make. Wasn’t that right? If so, then her leaving made sense. A clean break, like pulling the Band-Aid right off, no matter how much it stung.

Brandon dressed slowly before moving around the cabin to make sure he’d packed all of his belongings. He avoided going to the balcony one more time and looking out to the water because he didn’t think he’d find any answers there. Instead, there would be memories of the scent of the sea air, mixed with the scent of her. That would forever be the association, he knew, and in a solemn mood he left the cabin.

Four hours later, when Brandon grabbed his luggage and headed out the doors of the private air space at the William P. Hobby Airport, he didn’t want to be bothered by anyone. The flight from Florida to Houston had been peppered with conversations about the cruise and about work since the TJB staff all flew back on the company’s private jet. It was a Saturday and he’d decided on the flight that he would deal with business on Monday. He planned to check his personal email the moment he arrived at his apartment and handle them appropriately, but then he wanted the rest of today and tomorrow to himself. He needed the time to think and to wonder what if? What if he had gone to find Amber in her cabin before leaving the ship? What if he had ignored her words and promised to come visit her? Or promised that they could make a long distance relationship work? What if, he’d simply gone to see her one more time, for one more kiss?

He didn’t have the answers, but he was in a mood that dictated he at least entertain the questions. Brandon held tight to his bags, walking quickly away from the rest of the employees. His glasses were firm on his face, jaw set with his intentions as he stepped out into the early afternoon sun and humidity of Houston in the spring.

That’s when he heard his name.

“Brandon! Over here! Brandon!” she yelled.

His head turned quickly to the direction from which the voice came and he saw her running towards him.

“Bailey? What are you doing here?” he asked his sister when she came to a stop in front of him. “You didn’t answer my emails or Trent’s. But you’re here and not in Connecticut. Why?”

His sister stood in front of him, her large framed dark lens sunglasses covering the top half of her face, long caramel streaked hair flowing behind her.

“Daddy had a heart attack,” she said.

Chapter 7

LaGuardia Airport

New York

“Where do you think you’re going?” Dane asked her as he grasped her arm to keep her from walking away.

“To do what I should have done a long time ago,” Roslyn told him in a hushed tone.

With a shake of his head Dane pulled his mother off to the side. She’d been just about to board a plane and he was glad he’d caught her in time. As they walked away from the boarding gate she wanted to pull away from him, but she wouldn’t dare make a scene. Roslyn didn’t like people staring at her, she never had. While she usually craved attention like an addict would their next fix, the eyes of a person on her—especially persons she didn’t know—made her nervous. Or rather, it made her angry.

“There is nothing for you in Houston,” Dane told her, as he’d tried to do so many times before.

Still, no matter the promises he’d made that he would handle the Donovans, Roslyn kept her own investigators tailing the brothers so that she knew what they were doing at all times. It was beyond a fixation, but had become an intricate part of her life. For Dane, it meant he also had to pay someone to keep an eye on his mother.

“What if he dies?” she asked as they stopped in a far off corner near a bank of windows with a view to the runway. “What if they never find out the truth? What if all I’ve done, all I’ve ever wanted, is gone?”

Dane shook his head. “You have money, mother. You have cars and houses and whatever else can be bought.”

“What if he’s your father?” she asked then, her voice a little louder and much shakier.

Dane remained silent. He let his hand fall from his mother’s arm and simply stared at her through the lens of his dark glasses. He’d hated having to come here but knew there was no one else that could have stopped her. Jaydon had called him an hour ago to tell him what Roslyn planned to do.

“She’s going to do it this time,” Jaydon said in a hushed tone over the phone. “I don’t know how to talk her out of it.”

“What do you mean you can’t talk her out of it? That’s what you’re there for,” Dane had all but yelled from the other end.

“No! That’s what you’re supposed to be here to do. This is not my plan,” Jaydon told him. “None of this was.”

“You weren’t saying that back in Miami when she had you kill for her.”

He was still pissed off about that situation with Giovanni Morelli. There were supposed to be no more murders, not until he ordered it. They were all supposed to be following his orders. But Dane was no fool. He’d known that wouldn’t last. His mother had her own agenda, she had from the very start. And she’d killed before.

That’s what had him so nervous now. The thought that she might do something to one of them that would be irrevocable, and that Dane would not be able to fix. She was his mother after all.

“I’ll find out which one of them is my father and then we’ll put this all to rest,” he told her solemnly.

Roslyn was shaking her head. The long curly strands of her perfectly styled hair moved with the motion. She was wearing gray slacks and a white blouse, her black blazer fit her expertly and matched the black knee length high-heeled boots she wore. If he didn’t know better he’d think she was no more than thirty years old, a woman in her prime. A professional woman maybe, one with a whole world of success and fortune ahead of her. Yet, that was far from the truth. A truth that Dane suspected he should have been paying much more attention to.

“You won’t make them pay,” she said through gritted teeth. “They owe me! They owe you!”

“I know what the Donovans owe us, mother, and I told you long ago that I would handle them.”

“But you’re not! You’re sitting behind your desk or screwing those bitches and firing other guys that made the bad decision to screw the same bitches,” she spat. “You know that’s what happens all the time, don’t you? People get screwed, especially women! The moment they open their mouth to smile and say hello, they’re screwed.”

“That’s enough,” he said through clenched teeth because she was getting louder. “I’ll take you back to my place and get you settled.”

“No,” she said, this time pulling the arm he’d tried to grab away, stumbling and almost falling.

Dane caught her. “Mother, I’m not asking you.”

“What? You’re not asking me? I’m your mother! I’m the only thing you’ve ever had in this world that was true and honest with you. Don’t you dare start talking to me like you’re the one in control.”

He looked into her eyes and knew without any doubt that he was losing her, so Dane had to regroup.

“Okay,” he said. “We’ll go together. Let me call my pilot and we’ll take my jet and fly to Houston today, together. Doesn’t that sound better than this commercial flight with all those people you don’t know?”

Roslyn looked towards the boarding gate once more, saw the line of people heading through that tunnel to board the plane and then she looked back to Dane. She nodded slowly and Dane almost sighed with relief.

“Then let’s go back to my place. I’ll need to make a few phone calls and get some things set up so they’ll be ready when we arrive in Houston.”

“Right,” Roslyn said and started to walk beside her only son. “We’ll get their sorry asses. We’ll shock the spit out of them when we show up at that hospital. And if Albert Donovan dies, it’ll be after we find out once and for all if he’s your father. If he is, we’ll be right there to claim every penny of that oil company and anything else he had because it’s rightfully ours. All of it is ours!”

Dane listened to his mother as he had all his life. On his fifth birthday he’d asked her where his father was because all the boys on his little league team had fathers. She’d given him a name then, saying simply, “Your father is a Donovan.”

When he was thirteen he’d asked again. “Which one of them is my father?” Because Roslyn had showed him three pictures that looked like she’d clipped them from magazines. Henry, Albert and Bernard Donovan.

“I named you after him,” she’d replied and pointed to the one whose picture was attached to an article on a company called Donovan Oilwell Las Vegas.

He’d nodded because he knew that already. He’d been named after Henry Clayton Donovan.

Then his mother’s shaking hand—because she’d been drinking that day—had pointed to another picture and she’d said, “He’s the slick one. The one that thinks he knows everything and can do any damn thing he wants. But I fixed his black ass good!” She’d laughed even as her finger slid across the picture of Bernard Marshall Donovan, CEO of BMD Worldwide, a marketing firm in Seattle where he lived with his wife and daughter.

A tear had slipped down her face as she’d stared at the last picture. “He was the good one. The one I didn’t want to involve, but I had no choice.” She’d turned in her chair then, grabbing Dane by the football jersey he’d been wearing. It was a Pittsburg Steelers jersey because that’s where they’d been living at the time.

“They made me do it!” she yelled into his face, the scent of her cocktail of choice wafting into the air and up his nose. “I didn’t want to, baby. I just wanted…I just loved him…and then, it was too late. I wasn’t good enough for him. So I had to show them that I was good enough for all of them! Every last one of their freaky asses!”

But she hadn’t slept with every one of the Donovan brothers. It had been just these three and Dane had never been able to figure out why. Truth be told, he hadn’t really cared, not ever. The fact still remained that his father was one of them, and they knew it. They knew of his existence and they hadn’t done a damn thing about it. What type of man could do that to his child?

Later that night Dane had snuck into his mother’s room. She’d been fast asleep after drinking and taking the pills she claimed to hate. There were several photos of the Donovan men and Dane took one of each for himself. As the years passed, he’d started a folder for each one of them, collecting any newspaper or magazine clippings he could find at the library, and eventually using the Internet to complete his study of this family that was also his. He knew the names of all the brothers and their wives, how they looked, and how many children each of them had and claimed. Their family history had been committed to memory and when he’d entered college he’d decided it was time to keep tabs on their net worth. By the time he was twenty he’d started to plan. Now, at thirty-nine he was ready.

He only prayed they were too, because he was coming for the Donovans whether they liked it or not.

Chapter 8

Memorial Hospital

Katy, Texas

Brandon sucked in a breath as he looked down at his father. For the first time in his life he saw a frail man, his body withered and tired as it was flanked by the sterile white sheets. Tubes were everywhere, an IV taped to the back of his hand, oxygen coming from his nose, and the line of a catheter peeked from the side of the sheets disappearing to its connected perch somewhere under the bed. Machines were alight with bright numbers and noise, doing things Brandon suspected were keeping his father alive.

In actuality they were sending a message and Brandon could hear it loud and clear.

“I got here on Monday and he was complaining of being tired,” Bailey said softly. “He looked different than the last time I’d seen him. Older, I guess.”

Brandon slipped his hands into his pockets. A part of him wanted to touch his father. He wanted to feel the strength of the man that had taught him to throw a baseball, to touch the shoulders that Albert had always advised him to keep straight and back.

“Stand tall son and look a man right in the eye. That shows you’ve got character and dignity,” Albert used to say. “It also lets him know you’re not a man to be messed with.”

He frowned now at his father’s closed eyes and bowed shoulders.

“When did this happen?” he asked.

“Late last night,” she said. “I went out around eight and when I came back a little after midnight I found him in the study on the floor.”

In the study, Brandon thought, the last place where he’d talked to his father.

“Brock and Noelle should be here within the hour,” she continued after a few moments of silence.

“Did you call the Seniors?” Brandon asked, not because he was ready to see all his father’s brothers again, but because they deserved to know.

They were still a family. He had to keep telling himself that.

“I called Trent but Tia answered. She said she would call everyone else.”

The room smelled funny. Like medicine and sickness and quite possibly death. No, he shook his head slowly, not death. With a heavy sigh, Brandon looked over to his sister who had sat in an ugly green chair that seemed to swallow her slight frame. Bailey had always been slim and tall, but stronger than most boys Brandon ever knew. She was stubborn and bold, almost fearless. Almost.

Now, she looked toward the window—the not-so-clean window—staring out at the rooftop of another part of the hospital’s huge facility. 

“You were here all week,” he said to her. “Why didn’t you answer Trent’s email?”

She never hesitated, but said in that cool, don’t-think-about-questioning-me tone she often had, “I didn’t want to.”

This was not the place and from the slight tremble he’d seen in her hands as she brought them down to tuck under her legs, Brandon knew it certainly wasn’t the time to discuss that situation with his sister.

Instead, he moved around the hospital bed and found a matching ugly green chair to sit in. After rubbing his eyes, he leaned forward, resting his elbows on his knees. “What did the doctors say?”

Bailey sighed. “Acute myocardial infarction. He may need a stent. They’re supposed to do more tests later today, once he’s more stable, to see how much damage was done. When I left to come get you he was running a fever, so they’ve been watching that too.”

“A temperature? Is there some type of infection?” Brandon may have ended up working with numbers and money, but there’d been a time when he’d thought he would become a doctor.

“They haven’t been able to find it,” she answered.

That wasn’t good.

Brandon stared down at the floor.

The quiet stretched on for what seemed like hours before either of them spoke again. When she did, it was about the situation that had been hovering over them like dark storm clouds.

“He had all these boxes in the study. Some of them were already opened. I think there were pictures in one. I didn’t really get a chance to look. I saw him lying there and I kept calling him.”

Bailey was talking so quietly Brandon barely heard her. What he did hear and what made him sick to his stomach to realize was the fear.

“‘Daddy’ I said. ‘Please, daddy, get up’ but he didn’t. I touched him…I mean, I kissed him right on his nose the way he used to do me when I was sick. He didn’t move, Brandon,” she whispered. “He didn’t move.”

Brandon was up then, going to the chair where she sat and pulling her up into his arms. She held on tight, so tight Brandon almost couldn’t breathe.

“He didn’t move,” she said again. “His eyes didn’t open and he didn’t answer me. What if he never answers me? I can’t…I don’t know how…I just…”

“Stop,” Brandon said, holding his sister tightly. “He will. Say it, Bailey. He will.”

Her body trembled as she tried to hold back the tears even then, but there was no use. She sobbed softly in his arms.

“Bailey,” he said again after a few moments.

She nodded, her head still on his shoulder. “He will.”

#

Forty-five minutes later Brock and Noelle came into the room and Bailey repeated how she’d found their father and what the doctors were saying so far. A nurse came in during that time to check Albert’s vitals and informed them that the doctor would be in to speak with them soon. Bailey had not left Brandon’s side, their hands remaining clenched, just as they had right after they were born. Darla had told them stories and shown them so many pictures of the times they were holding hands as babies. The first time was while they were still in the hospital and had been put into the same bassinet. Although bundled in their blankets, they’d found a way, so that when Darla looked over to her sleeping infants the next time, their little arms had come out of the wrapping and their hands were entwined. Later, Bailey had never wanted to sleep in her own crib, Darla said she would cry and cry until she put her in the other crib beside Brandon. He would immediately take her hand and she would stop crying. As toddlers Bailey had fallen off the swing in their backyard and while Darla had held her, cradling her, whispering that she would be alright, Bailey had continued to cry. Until Brandon had taken her hand.

When they were sixteen and Cliff Botega had ripped her shirt in an effort to get her clothes off in the backseat of his car, Bailey had broken his nose. So proud that she’d been eager to learn when he and Brock had taught her how to fight, Brandon had listened to her recount the story with no tears present. She’d only told him because she’d had to call for a ride home and when he’d arrived she’d been sitting on the side of the road all by herself. Brandon had listened and raged on the inside, but simply held out his hand to her and helped her off the ground. He’d driven home with one hand on the steering wheel, the other holding hers gently as her knuckles were cut and bruised. The next day he and Brock caught up with Cliff Botega. They gave him matching black eyes to go with his broken nose and a warning to never so much as look in Bailey’s direction again.

Noelle wept softly as she stood close to the bed touching Albert’s hand.

“We should talk,” Brock said after hearing Bailey’s story and looking down at his father. “Not here though.”

“He was looking for something in those boxes,” Bailey said. “I want to know what it was.”

Brock nodded. “There’s a lot we all should know.”

“Don’t talk about that here,” Noelle told them. “He can hear you.”

So they remained silent, all of them, sitting and standing in the room until two hours later, when Henry and Everette arrived.

“Take her home,” Aunt Beverly had said immediately upon entering the room. “She’s tired and she looks frail. Feed her and make her sleep.”

Those were the instructions given to Brandon regarding Bailey.

“I’m fine,” Bailey had attempted to say only to have that protestation cut immediately short by Aunt Beverly’s cool stare.

Alma, who was one of the more low key aunts, but could still bring them to task when necessary, had touched a hand to Brock’s shoulder. “You should take your brother and sister home. We’ll stay here until you all return.”

“I want to stay,” Noelle said immediately.

She’d still stood at Albert’s bedside, rubbing his hand or his leg at measured intervals, talking to him at times. His father and Noelle had immediately bonded when Brock brought her home to meet them. Just before meeting Brock, Noelle had lost her grandmother. Brandon figured this was bringing the memory of that time filled with grief to the forefront for her.

Brock looked worried at that statement, but Alma simply nodded. “You three go, get yourselves together and then come back. He’s good right here with family.”

Bailey was ready to protest again, but Brandon held tight to her hand and said, “Come on.”

He walked towards the door with her, Brock followed.

“Let’s go to the house and see what he was looking for,” the older of Albert’s children said.

Brandon nodded. “You up for that?” he asked Bailey.

“Yes. I’m sick of these secrets and knowing looks from the Seniors. Aunt Beverly acts like she didn’t even hear what they’d said at the table that day. That her husband could have fathered another child. Who the hell reacts like that when they find out their husband has been unfaithful?” Bailey continued as they walked down the hallway.

“They weren’t married when Uncle Henry slept with Roslyn Ausby,” Brock said calmly.

“Bullshit! They were weeks away from being married, that’s close enough for me. Why isn’t she raging? Why didn’t she walk out on his sorry ass?” Bailey asked when they came to a stop near the elevators.

“Why didn’t mom?” Brandon asked.

None of them answered. They all simply stood in front of the elevator doors and waited until they opened. They boarded and rode down to the first floor then went their separate ways in the garage to get their cars.

They arrived at the house at the same time, getting out and walking inside only to come to a stop in the foyer.

“I didn’t see this when I came in last night,” Bailey said.

The pictures that had been hanging in the study—the one of Darla and of their family—were stacked against the wall.

“Did he say anything about moving?” Brock asked.

He’d walked further into the house so that he could see into the living room. Brandon followed him. There were boxes in there as well as pictures that were taken off the walls.

“None of this was here when I left the house last night. If he started packing it was after eight. When I came back I didn’t turn on all these lights. I was going to go upstairs and go to bed but I saw the light on in his study so I went back there to see what he was doing up,” Bailey said as she too now looked around the living room.

“What was he doing?” she asked.

Brock shook his head. “Let’s find out.”

The foyer was in a circular shape with the main staircase winding at its center. Beige marble floors with an intricate dark brown mosaic design at its center gleamed as the brothers and sister walked back toward the room that was their father’s study. Stepping inside each of them noted all the boxes around the room.

“He was lying right here,” Bailey said when she stood in front of that old burgundy leather couch.

Brock nodded. “Then let’s start looking through these boxes. We’ll see what he was packing up.”

“You mean what he was trying to hide this time that ended up causing his heart attack?”

“Don’t say that,” Bailey said vehemently. “This did not cause his heart…he’s going to wake up. He will,” she said and opened a box.

Brock looked at Brandon, who did not say a word, simply opened the box in front of him and began going through it.

About a half hour in, there was a curse. Loud, long and fluent Brandon cursed again as he read the words of a letter.

“Hello Darla,” he began to read out loud when he’d looked up to see his brother and sister staring at him.

“I am writing to tell you about a little secret your husband and I share. He’s grown into such an intelligent young man, with dark brown eyes like his daddy. He likes football and barbeque ribs, especially the Kenner’s Sweet ‘n Spicy sauce. You like that Kenner’s sauce too, don’t you? I mean, you should since you own a good chunk of stock in your daddy’s company. You’ll also inherit your husband’s fortune if anything should happen to him. You and your two darling twins. A boy and a girl, but that wasn’t enough. No, you had to go out and get another son. I often wondered why you did that when your husband has known for years about a little boy who needs his daddy. But how lucky for you that you now have the perfect family. Well, it’s my turn to make my family perfect. Ask your husband about that day. If he doesn’t remember show him these pictures and maybe it’ll all come back to him.”

Brandon turned the envelope upside down and watched as pictures scattered across the carpeted floor. For endless moments the three of them simply stared down at the pictures, none of them moving to pick them up. It was as if those dark storm clouds hanging over their heads had just started to erupt.

Brock was the first to break the silence. “What was the date of the letter?”