Tempest Tossed: A Love Unexpected Novel (33 page)

Chapter 30—Dylan

The morning came and went. We ate, we walked, and we killed slow hours waiting for a call from Blake Harrington. The resolution of my inheritance couldn’t come soon enough. I wanted, more than anything, to get on with
life
. A few days in New York with Rene had been fun, but I sensed that she was hanging in limbo, too.

Rene was unusually quiet. She didn’t choose to share what was on her mind but I figured, like me, she was just waiting for the phone to ring. Right after lunch, it did.

The elevator crawled up to the floor where Harrington, Fields and Norman, Attorneys at Law worked their legal magic. I didn’t ‘have a seat’ as the receptionist suggested. I was too keyed up to sit down. Blake had enough sense not to keep me waiting long.

“I’m not going to keep you in suspense, Dylan. As I suspected, Austin Spencer has not been able to produce the documents I requested. I spoke with him on the phone this morning and he became evasive and defensive when I suggested that we’d need some proof of his authority as executor of your father’s will.”

“So, what’s next?”

“We’re going to have to talk to other people within the Monarch organization and try to determine who else has access to your father’s private papers. I’ll start with Jackson’s personal assistant.”

“When I was in London, his assistant was on leave. Something about a gall stone.”

“We’ll find her. I’ve also sent a request to some of the senior officers and board members of the Monarch group. I’m going to try to handle the situation diplomatically. We can’t accuse Spencer directly, until we have some proof.”

“Isn’t the fact that he can’t support his claim to be executor proof enough?”

“It’s proof enough for me. That and the fact that the will is so full of holes and omissions makes me about ninety-five percent sure that Spencer is trying to pull something.”

“I’d sure like to know what the reasoning is behind keeping me from finding my sister.”

“That is quite a little mystery, isn’t it?” Blake leaned back in his chair and drew his lips tightly against themselves. “Who do you know who would have intimate knowledge of your father’s private affairs?”

“I wish I could be more helpful. I wasn’t at all involved in my father’s life. If he had friends, I never met them.”

“And your mother?”

I choked on the thought of Francesca Cruz. “I don’t know where she is or even if she’s still alive.” Blake was wearing a poker face and didn’t react.

“Were your parents legally divorced?”

“I don’t know the answer to that, either. My mother disappeared from my life when I was thirteen. My father and I never talked about it. My father and I never talked about much of anything to tell you the truth.”

“Do you know your mother’s maiden name?”

“Alcott.”

“Middle name?”

“Penelope.”

“Place of birth?”

“Both of my parents were born in Pennsylvania. Wayne. It’s a suburb of Philly. They were high school sweethearts, if you can believe such a thing. When my father went off to college, my mother followed him.”

“That’s nice and old-fashioned,” Blake said. I reminded myself that Blake didn’t have any background on my mother or the way Dawn and I grew up. He was operating in the dark. “Is there anything you can tell me that would help me locate your mother? Last address? Other relatives? How about your father? Any living relatives?”

“My father’s sister lives in Ft. Lauderdale. Rebecca Rawlings. Her husband’s name is John. My cousin Phoebe is their only child.” I paused and composed myself before I went on. “If you are trying to locate my mother, a good place to start would be mental institutions. Pricey, private, high security institutions.”

Blake raised his eyebrows, but added that to his notes. “High security?”

I took a deep breath. “Blake, my mother was never prosecuted for her crimes, but she was a criminal nonetheless. If my father had her institutionalized against her will it would have been in the tightest lock up he could find.”

“I see. What was the nature of those crimes?”

“Felony child abuse.”

My lawyer was quiet for a moment and then simply said, “I’m sorry, Dylan.”

“Yeah,” I answered, “me too.”

“Was your sister . . .?”

“She and I were both my mother’s victims.”

“Is there anything you can tell me that might help me locate Dawn?”

“Are you sure that’s wise?”

“I’m ninety-five percent sure, like I said. Besides, from my reading of that poor excuse for a will, there’s nothing in there that says someone else can’t contact Dawn. It says
you
aren’t to have any contact with her. And you won’t until I’m one-hundred percent sure it’s safe for you both.”

“So you’re certain there’s nothing in there that would prevent you from locating her, talking to her?”

“That’s another clue it’s bogus. I’m sure I could have written a better clause if that was your father’s real intent.”

“I’ll go with your gut. Just tell me what my part in all of this is.”

“I’m going to have to hire a private investigator here and I need to send one of our junior partners over to London to talk to the pertinent folks. I hate to tell you this because I know how impatient you are, but right now, your part is to wait.”

“I was afraid of that.”

“One thing you need to be aware of is the possibility that your father died intestate—without a will. If that’s the case, you’re going to have months of waiting. Assuming your parents never divorced, your mother would be entitled to a major share of the estate as will you and your sister.”

“That witch doesn’t deserve . . .”

Blake cut me off. “It isn’t a case of whether she
deserves
anything. The law is the law. I just want you to be prepared for all the possibilities. Right now, our first priorities are to locate both your mother and your sister and get access to whatever your father may have left in private files.”

I knew he was right. But I felt so helpless. And one of the worst parts of the situation was that I’d lost El Loco. I couldn’t sail off and forget myself on the ocean at a time when I needed it most. A thought flickered through my mind about chartering a boat and then the depressing reality hit me that I couldn’t afford to do that. Stephen and I had researched what El Loco would bring at charter. A week on a mega-yacht would eat up my entire net worth.

I wasn’t in the greatest mood when I got back to the St. Regis. I downloaded the conversation to Rene and she didn’t have much to offer in response until I got to the part about Blake searching for Dawn. Then she hit me right in the gut.

“Dylan, I have something I have to tell you about Dawn.” Rene’s eyes were wide. She looked very nervous. “I know you’re not going to like this. Well, you’ll like it, you just won’t like what I did. What I mean is  . . .”

“Cut to the chase, Rene. What have you been up to?”

“I found her.”

“You found her,” I said flatly. “Care to tell me how?” The part of me that wanted to jump for joy was held firmly down by the realization that my little detective had been at it again. Only this time was a lot more serious that researching a hotel on the internet. I resented her intrusion instantly.

“She goes by Dawn Jackson.”

“What inspired you to look for her by that name?” I knew my voice was cold, I meant it to be.

“It was just a hunch,” she said and didn’t meet my eyes.

“So, you looked up Dawn Jackson and found my sister on the internet?”

“Not exactly. There are quite a few Dawn Jacksons. I only found her when I used her middle name.” Rene looked at me directly. “I got her middle name from the will. You left your email open and I looked.”

“I wish you hadn’t done that,” I said quietly.

“Dylan, I’m sorry I snooped. I don’t know why I did it.”

“I know why. Because you can’t leave anything alone. It’s not one of your finer points.” I wanted her to leave. I didn’t want to hear another lame apology and I was too angry to be curious about what she found out.

“I know. But listen to me. She’s doing great. The reason you never heard from her is that your father told her
you
were dead.”

“Whoa. You mean you talked to her? You
called
my sister without talking to me first?”

“I went to see her,” she whispered.

“You
what?
.” I was stunned at the deception; steamrolled by it.

“She’s in Connecticut. Just graduated from nursing school. She looks just like you—she’s beautiful. She was so happy Dylan . . .”

“Stop. Just stop. You went up there when you told me you were going to the MoMa, didn’t you?” I picked the museum brochure from the coffee table. “You even covered your ass with this, didn’t you?” I hurled the magazine across the room, caught a lamp and it crashed to the floor.

“Please! I just thought I could help . . .”

“Help what, Rene? You didn’t know crap about anything. You risked my fortune, Dawn’s fortune and our relationship just because you’re so unbelievably nosey. In fact, you're out of control.”

“But you just told me Blake thinks the will is fake. And Dawn got a whole different story from Spencer. He didn’t say anything about you at all. He just told her she needed to stay quiet about her inheritance for three years. So Spencer
does
have some dirty dealings going on.”

“It seems he isn’t the only one.” The facts were seeping slowly through the red haze of my fury. Blake Harrington needed to talk to Dawn, like yesterday. I handed her my phone. “Call Blake Harrington right now. Tell him how to get in contact with Dawn.”

She reached for the phone, found Blake’s number and dialed. After she’d given him my sister’s phone number and an outline of their conversation, she handed the phone to me.

“Your girlfriend cut through a lot of the initial work for us, Dylan. Saved me some time. I might have to hire her in our research department. She has good instincts.”

“Yeah. She’s a real sleuth,” I said without taking my eyes off of Rene. She looked as uncomfortable as I intended for her to be.

“I’m going to call Dawn as soon as I get off the phone. I’m about at ninety-nine percent now, my friend. Spencer’s sloppy. I can’t imagine how he hoped to pull this scam off.”

“You’ll let me know, right?”

“As soon as I hang up, I’ll call you.”

“Thanks, man. And Blake, tell my sister I love her.”

“You got it.”

I hung up the phone and watched silently as Rene paced around the room trying very hard not to look like she was pacing. Part of me was exalting at the prospect of communication—even through a third party—with Dawn. But another part of me wanted to crawl into a hole and never come out.

What Rene had done was a betrayal. She’d pried into my private stuff, lied to me and deliberately gone against my specific wishes. I hadn’t been vague about telling her to leave the whole situation with my sister alone. She’d suggested and I’d rejected. There wasn’t any gray area.

Trust is one of those things that’s hard to win and way too easy to lose. My trust in Rene was part of what made me know I truly loved her. Without it, I didn’t know if I could.

Chapter 31—Rene

Say something! Yell, scream, beat your chest, but say something
. Dylan’s silent treatment was killing me. His face was like stone—hard and cold. He went over to the mini-bar and removed the two tiny bottles of vodka, opened one and drained it straight. He did the same with the other. Then he went into the bathroom with his phone and locked the door.

I was at a loss. I picked up the museum catalog and put the lamp back on the side table. I sat in the chair by the window and numbly watched the traffic crawl past on the street below the hotel. It was rush hour and the cars moved at the same pace as the minutes. It was an agony of slow motion.

He was waiting in the john for Blake to call him back. I was sure of that. He wanted to hear the skinny on his sister and then he’d deal with me.

It wasn’t
that
big of a deal. It wasn’t like I cheated on him or stole from him. I had his best interests at heart when I went looking for her. Weren’t we supposed to be a ‘couple’? Wasn’t I entitled to do what I thought was best for him and for us?

Unfortunately, even I couldn’t make a right out of my wrongs. Best interests and good intentions did not trump snooping, lying and deceiving. If I was in his shoes, I’d probably be just as mad. Or maybe not. I loved Dylan enough to forgive him almost anything. I had to face the fact that maybe he didn’t feel as strongly about me.

I don’t know how long I waited until the phone behind the bathroom door rang. It was long enough for me to decide that if Dylan chose to be unforgiving about the whole Dawn incident, then he wasn’t for me. Love forgives. There are very few things I could think of that were worth losing the love of my life over. My behavior didn’t qualify me for termination.

By the time the bathroom door opened, I’d worked my way into a righteous state of justification. It made it a lot easier to keep my composure. I had told him I was sorry but I wasn’t going to grovel. If sorry wasn’t good enough, too bad for us.

Wordlessly, he went to the closet and got one of our smaller suitcases. He packed a few things never once making eye contact with me. The longer he gave me the silent treatment, the angrier I became. Apparently he had nothing more to say to me. I was dismissed. It was his usual method of dealing with conflict. We had gone over it and he’d promised me he wouldn’t pull this act again. He had said he’d understood.

So that’s how it is. That’s all I’m worth to you. You’re going to walk out that door without another word just like you have every other time things didn’t go your way. Well fine then, you damaged son of a bitch who can’t even get over this bump in the road. Leave then!.

I crossed my arms over my chest and didn’t take my eyes off of him. I was amazed at his behavior. He was actually going to leave without saying a thing. And he did.

Without so much as a glance in my direction he left me staring at his back, alone in our fancy hotel room in fancy New York City. My love. My ‘stay with me forever’ Dylan. My ‘I like the sound of
our
life’ boyfriend. Yeah, right.

As I threw my things into our bigger bag, I decided it was a damn good thing I found out how fragile his love was now, instead of later. I could have married the guy, had three kids and then found out what a reactionary baby he was. I could have been ten years down the road, my youth behind me and learned how little I meant to the man. Lucky me.

The last thing I did before I left the room was lay the diamond necklace over ‘his’ pillow. If the maid wanted to pocket it in the morning, so be it. If he ever did come back to the room, I wanted his precious gift to be waiting for him.

I was on the last flight out of LaGuardia bound for Ft. Lauderdale before the first tears came. The cabin lights were low and I was crammed into a window seat back in ‘coach’ again. I put my hot cheek up against the cool fuselage and let the tears just flow. Big silent fat drops poured out of my eyes and I felt sorrier for myself than I ever thought possible. Whoever made up that saying about it is better to have loved and lost was full of it. I would rather never have loved.

I’d phoned Hannah from the airport and told her I was on my way home, tail between my legs. She didn’t ask me a lot of questions, she just got the flight information and told me she’d be there to pick me up. At least I had someone to count on. I sure had been way wrong about counting on Dylan. Bailing out. Walking away. What a guy. What a wonderful, understanding man I had fallen for. What a jerk.

The tears gave way to anger. I was angry at Dylan for abandoning ‘us’ without a backward glance. I was angry at myself for not believing him when he said he didn’t know how to love someone. I should have taken his word for it. He
didn’t
know how to love someone. His expectations were unrealistic and his standards were far too high.

I had allowed myself to be seduced by too many things that weren’t real. Dylan was too handsome, too charming and too sexy for someone like me. He dazzled me right out of any common sense and seduced me body and soul. I let it happen and I blamed myself for making yet another painful mistake. He may have been a jerk, but I was a fool.

When I saw my sweet buddy waiting for me at the baggage check, I started crying all over again. Hannah threw her arms around me and let me sob a minute on her shoulder. Then she held me at arm’s length and said, “You look like an old hairball Tiger left on the rug.”

“Thanks, it’s great to see you too.” I put my arm around her waist and gave her a squeeze. “Thanks for coming to get me on such short notice.”

“Of course. You checked a bag?”

“The one he left me was too big to carry on. Look for the Louis Vuitton,” I told her as the luggage carousel started up with an obnoxious beep, beep, beep.

“You’ve got to be kidding me. How so totally cliché. Couldn’t you have managed something a bit more subtle?”

I laughed as I grabbed the ‘steal me now’ suitcase from the conveyor belt. “We were kind of on a money-spending high.”

“I’m not sure I can put that thing in the trunk of my humble car. It could be illegal.” Hannah took the bag from my hand. “It’s awfully light. Didn’t you bring the gold bullion I requested?”

“Joke all you want, but there actually was some gold bullion involved in the last few days. And a couple of hideous gold watches. All of which is tucked away in a hotel safe along with all those gift cards.”

“I haven’t touched your room. There’s probably an inch of dust covering everything. Sorry, I didn’t expect you to just pop on home so fast.”

Hannah had been known to iron the collar, cuffs and only the part that ‘showed’ on a blouse if she was going to wear a sweater over it. Her modus operandi was always to get the results she wanted with the least effort. From my slightly OCD perspective, her take on life was admirable. I would have been in that empty room at least once a week tidying up.

“Not a problem. I’m too tired to notice. I just want to be somewhere familiar. I’m so beat, Hann.”

“I’m all ears when you’re ready to talk about it.”

“There’s not that much to say, really. I made a mistake that he can’t forgive. The bottom line is that he doesn’t love me enough to forgive it.”

“What was the mistake?”

“I read his email, searched for his sister and met up with her after he told me not to.”

Hannah was silent for a very long minute. “You realize that’s pretty serious, right?”

“Yes, I do. But the result is that he now has his sister back in his life. Doesn’t that count for anything?”

“I don’t know. Would he have found her without your ‘help’?”

“Probably. I hate to admit it but, yes. I just accelerated the process, I guess.” I sighed and tears began to roll from the corners of my eyes. “I just can’t believe it was enough to make him quit on us all together. I didn’t do anything malicious. I didn’t
cheat
on him.”

“How did he end it?”

“What do you mean? He packed a bag and walked out of the hotel room.”

“Where was he going?”

“He didn’t speak to me after I got off the phone telling his lawyer what I knew about Dawn. Not one word. He wouldn’t even look at me. That’s the way he’s handled every conflict we’ve ever had—stonewalling. He just shuts off. I hate it.”

“That does sound pretty harsh. So you left right after?”

“Was there any reason for me to stay? How can someone just turn love off like that, Hannah? How can you take one incident and just flip the switch? This was the guy who was talking about ‘forever’ just twenty-four hours ago.”

“I can’t say I wouldn’t be mad at you myself. So, I hope you don’t start reading my email.” I shot her a look. “But if you did, I probably would forgive you. I think sometimes when people fall too fast and say things too quickly, it can get overwhelming. Maybe Dylan just took the first opportunity he had to cut his losses.”

“But, I swear to God, I never pushed him into saying anything or making any commitment. In fact, he did all the pushing. I gave him a zillion chances to dial back on all the heavy stuff. I know that’s hard to believe coming from me, but it’s true.”

“It’s possible that he’ll change his mind once he has time to think things through. Maybe this is just a knee-jerk reaction.”

“Well, guess what? Maybe I don’t want to be with the kind of man who behaves like this. Maybe I want someone who doesn’t just toss love away over one mistake. You know, spending a lifetime with someone means there are going to be things that go wrong. Can you imagine how it would be to spend your life knowing your mate would just walk out on you if you crossed
his
line?”

“This is why I largely stay unattached. Love is way too demanding.”

“And,” I said, getting on a roll, “what about children?”

“Children? You talked about children? Whew. That is pretty heavy.”

“Yes we did talk about having kids. But what kind of father would he be? Kids mess up all the time. Can you imagine what he’d do if one of our kids got caught lying to him? Would he just stop speaking to the kid and pretend he didn’t exist? Would he disown him and throw him out in the street?”

“You have a good point there. If he’s rigid with you, he’ll be rigid with his kids, too.”

“I wish I’d never taken the job. Wish I’d never met the man. I hate starting all over again.”

“It bites the big one, buddy.” She patted my knee. “You’ll survive, though. We always do.”

“This time, I’m not so sure.”