The Billionaire's Baby (The Romero Brothers, Book 5) (19 page)

“Thanks, doc.”
Amber glanced at her watch. “Oh, no. I better get going. I have an appointment
at the hairdresser and then I have to pick up Crystal from my in-laws.”

“Well, I don’t
want to keep you.” Dr.
Danye
smiled warmly. “Best of
luck, Amber.”

“Thank you.”

Amber grabbed her
tote bag and headed out the door, glancing around in the reception area as she
walked out. There was no man in disguise.
No one following
her.
Yet, an odd feeling crept into her stomach. It was just a bunch of
nerves. Wasn’t that what the doc told her? She washed the doubt from her mind.
She was going to focus on making Jules proud at the family barbecue. She felt
like the First Lady of the Family Center! Image was everything. Her husband
was, after all, the new owner.

*
     
*
     
*

Jules sat in his
office at the Family Center tapping away on his laptop when someone knocked on the
door. “Enter,” he said, not looking up from the screen.

Brenda, his assistant,
appeared anxious.

“What is it? You
look like you’ve seen a ghost,” he noted. “Scrap that. You look like a
ghost,
the color has drained from you face. What’s wrong?”

“Oh, Jules. I…I’m
so sorry. It’s
all my
fault. I hope Amber doesn’t see
it. I’m trying to speak to the magazine’s IT department to do something about
it.”

“About what?”
Jules felt his blood pump hard. Why did he have the sinking his wife may be in
danger?

“I…well, have you
seen the Spring Magazine’s home page?”

Jules quickly
switched over to the company’s home screen page. There was the image of the
month of Jules, Amber and little Crystal in that PR pose for Family of the Month.
“What the…?”

Brenda bowed her
head in shame.

Below the picture
there were rude comments he’d rather not take in. But he couldn’t help but scan
the screen. One comment in particular, grated on his nerves:

“Some family of the month. He’s not even the baby’s daddy--LOL!”-
K.P
.

Who the heck was
KP
?

There were mostly
congratulatory comments but the one caustic comment seemed to stand out and
Jules’s gut clenched. Anger seethed through his blood. He felt his temperature boil
to the point where he felt as if he was in an inferno.

“Damn!”

“I’m sorry this
happened, Jules.”

“So am I.” Jules’s
tone of voice was razor sharp and pointed. “Get their team on the phone. The
last thing I need is for the local press to get wind of this. They’d distort
things and that would really piss me off.” He then asked Brenda to call his
family’s press secretary, Pamela, to prepare some damage control statements
just in case it was necessary.

The last thing he’d
want was for the media to go buzzing about who the biological father of Amber’s
child was. Damn it! He didn’t even know the answer to
that
question.

*
    
*
    
*

Amber sat at the salon,
trying to enjoy her treatment. Her mind was on little Crystal. She really
needed the break but she was always wondering how her baby was doing. She knew
Crystal was in good hands at the Romero residence with her grandparents so she
tried to squash any worries.

“Honey, what’s
this?”
Luckella
, the hairdresser, said to Amber after
she’d finished with her conditioner treatment.

“What’s what?” Amber’s
curiosity was piqued. She had given
Luckella
a copy
of the brochure, inviting her to the community barbecue and had told her about
her upcoming photo shoot at Spring Magazine.

Luckella had, of
course, gone online to see the photo op on the Spring Magazine website from her
smartphone. She then showed the display of her phone to
Amber
.
“Why haters gotta hate like that?” Luckella commented.

Amber felt sick
to her stomach. A wave of nausea slammed into her gut. “What?” she said, her
hair still dripping. She squeezed her eyes shut then re-opened them.

“You want me to
reply to that asshole?” Luckella got her phone ready to rip him (or her) apart.

“No. N-no.” Amber
couldn’t think. She was disgraced. Horrified. Who would have written such a
nasty remark?

*
    
*
    
*
  

An hour later,
Jules had his shirtsleeves rolled up.
 
Spring Magazine was on the phone with him
apologizing. They knew how generous and influential the Romero family was. It
was a small community magazine and often featured locals in the area but had never
had this happen on the website before.

The IT team from
the magazine traced the IP address from the so-called anonymous commenter.

“Well, you know
we have the person’s information if you’re interested.”

“I am,” he said,
anger curdling his blood.
If he ever got his hands on the
lowlife who did this.

“Do you know a
Mavis Murray?”

Jules almost wasn’t
surprised but the confirmation still came as a rude awakening. He grabbed his
jacket off the counter and told Dion to meet him at the café.

*
  
*
  
*
  

“Did you have
anything to do with Amber’s parents’ deaths?” Jules challenged Mavis later at
the Murray Café. Mavis stood by the window of her office, her chin up, her arms
secured across her chest.

“I admit I made a
mistake and wrote that…comment. But
I…,”
Mavis
appeared shaken and sat down in the chair beside her in her back office at the
Murray Café. “But I swear to you, I wasn’t the driver of the car who killed my
sister and her husband. I…I wasn’t.” she stammered. Her eyes barely met with
Jules.

“Well, you
certainly went out of your way to make Amber’s life miserable. Why?”

“It’s not what it
appears. I’m so sorry. You won’t tell
Amber
, will
you?”

Jules exchanged an
incredulous glance with his brother who stood in the corner like a bad cop
while Jules continued to interrogate Mavis.

Dion slid his
hand in his pocket and extracted an old newspaper clipping to Jules. Jules took
the paper and showed it to Mavis.

Her eyes widened.
“H-how did you find this?”

“It wasn’t hard,
Mavis.” Jules’s voice softened a fraction but he was still riled up. “I
understand your…disappointment in your fiancé.”

Mavis snapped the
picture from him and glared at it. It was an engagement announcement in the
Mayberry Hill Times, over thirty years ago.
A picture of
Amber’s stepfather and a young woman—Mavis.

Mavis swallowed
hard and threw the picture on the table. Her lips were thinned but trembling.
“Yes, we were supposed to get married. But…” she paused, drawing in a deep
breath. “My sister decided my fiancé was good enough for her so she took him
instead. How do you think it makes me feel looking at…Amber year in and year out?
She was a reminder.”

“She was an
innocent party to this. She’s not even the product of their marriage. You know
that.”

“I know, but she
still looks just like her. My sister. I despise looking at her, okay? It hurts
me to look at her every day. And then when her parents got killed, I was forced
to look after her.”

“You really need
to get help, Mavis,” Jules said as sincerely as he could.

“I’m not the one
with the memory issues. She can’t even remember anything that happened that
night.”

Jules shot Mavis
a scorching glance. His patience was stretched to the limit. No more mister nice
guy.
 
“You need to get help,” he
repeated in a controlled voice. “Then you need to stay far away from my wife
from now on. Find another job, too. Do you hear me?”

Mavis responded to
Jules by glaring at him.

Jules was about
to walk away when something in his gut pulled him in a different direction. It
was something Mavis said. Mavis had mentioned she wasn’t the one driving the
car in the crash that killed her sister and her sister’s family. What did she
mean by that? Something else Amber told Jules was also making things fit into
place.

“How old was
Amber when she started her therapy?” he asked Mavis. He had his smartphone out
of his pocket ready to call JoJo from the agency. Something really wasn’t adding
up. He didn’t like the sinking feeling he was getting at all. But his gut was
telling him that Mavis was telling the truth. She was not the one driving the
car but she sure as hell could have been in the elusive car.

Just then, his
cell phone rang and he answered it. “Yeah?”

“I’ve got some
strong leads. We managed to track down that mystery witness that came forth
recently but then backed out of telling the cops everything,” his source
reported to him over the phone. “The guy was some storm watcher who took
snapshots at the time of the accident. Saw the whole thing before he came down
with a sudden case of amnesia. It’s not good news, Jules.”

“I’ll be right
there,” Jules confirmed with his source before finishing his call. “Better let
the boys down at the division know what’s going on,” Jules then said to his
brother, Dion.

An hour later,
after her session at the beauty parlor, Amber felt anything but beautiful. The
ugliness of the day clawed its way in.
That awful remark.
And Jules. Poor Jules. It had to be someone in the family circle who knew about
Crystal’s real father.

She received a
text from her aunt Mavis to meet her at the apartment above the café so she
decided to go straight there.

Amber walked up
the steps, feeling dreary. Was Aunt Mavis behind the comments? Was she going to
apologize? She saw a missed called from Jules but decided she would call him
right after she found out what her aunt had to say.

Amber knew she
would burst into tears if she spoke to Jules. She should have been upfront
about Amber’s real father. Was Jules disappointed in her?

She finally
reached her old unit and was surprised to see the door ajar. “Aunt Mavis?” Amber
continued inside.

She turned around
feeling something was a bit off; the place seemed eerily abandoned. But it was
too late to act, the door slammed shut behind her.

“You sure you’ve
got this all figured out?” Dion turned to Jules as Jules pushed on the gas
pedal of his SUV hoping to reach Amber’s old apartment in time. He tried her
cell phone again. No answer. That just wasn’t like her.

“Yeah,” Jules
said, distracted. His gaze blazed into the busy road as he weaved through
traffic. He’d already called the cops to check out the address at her apartment.

“It all makes
sense,” Jules said, “Mavis was having an affair with a married man. They were
driving from their cottage around the same time Amber and her family were. If
they’d done the right thing and stayed at the scene, dude’s wife would have
taken him to the cleaners with evidence of his unfaithfulness. He and his
mistress are in a crash so late into the early hours of the night from his
secluded cottage.”

“I hear you. But
hospital records didn’t report anyone coming in around that time with injuries
consistent with a car accident.”

“Yeah, but he was
injured all right.”

“Good thing we
got the goods on that storm watcher. The vehicle was a white BMW.”

“Of course, the
guy was loaded so he could have any private mechanic fix it. And as far as his
injuries…”

“The man
obviously went out of town have his leg operated on. But got a botched job.
That’s why he ended up with a permanent limp.”

“According to
that report, he told the officials he was involved in a fishing accident. Yeah,
right. Been limping ever since.”

“But didn’t Amber
tell you her doc had the injury from childhood?”

“He had an injury
from childhood but not that one. Amber started seeing him around the same time
he started using a walking cane.”

“So I don’t get
it. Why did he start treating her?”

“He wasn’t a real
doctor! He was a fake! And he wanted to make sure her memory never came back,”
Jules said in a deadly low voice, anger seething through him. Just the mere
thought of that hypocritical creep getting near Amber made his blood boil in
his veins.

“That’s creepy
all right. Man, I hope we’re wrong. Anyway, if Mavis was in the car with him,
she’d be charged as an accessory to manslaughter.”