Blind Love (37 page)

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The next day, Tony drove Catherine to the property near San Simeon. He wanted to show her what he’d spent his money on.

On the way, Catherine said, “Henry wants to use the house in Santa Barbara for the next show, and my parents should be moved out by then.”

“What about your hotel business?”

“I don’t know, Tony. I wanted to start out smaller. I thought about buying the property you’re working on and starting a hotel there first, but you said Nick sold it to someone else. I really liked it, too.”

That was exactly what he wanted to hear. He pulled off the highway and drove up into the hills. As he pulled up in front of the gate, he watched her face.

The sign read:

Coming soon

Catherine’s Plantation Hotel

She squealed. “This is what you spent your money on?”

“It’s a gift for my bride-to-be. One of these days, when we’re raking in the money, I’ll buy you the prettiest ring you’ve ever seen.”

He stopped for a long, tender kiss. This place,
Catherine’s Plantation
, was a gift of love.

It wasn’t blind love.

They both had their eyes—and their hearts—wide open.

*Thank you for reading
Blind Love
. Please turn the page for an excerpt of
The Inheritance
, Book Three of the Donatelli Family series.*

THE INHERITANCE

by

Sue Fineman

Chapter One

B
lade Banner booted up his computer and sipped his morning coffee. He’d been up half the night working on this project, and if he didn’t get it finished and delivered by the end of the day today, he wouldn’t get paid.

The phone rang. Blade stared at the clock on the wall. Six o’clock in the morning. The client wouldn’t call him at this hour, and it was too early for telemarketers or pranksters. He grabbed the phone. “Yeah?”

“Is this Blade Michael Banner?” a man asked.

“That depends. If you’re selling something, I’m not interested.”

“This is Colin Jacobs, Attorney at Law in Manhattan.”

“I guess people in New York can’t tell time,” he muttered mostly to himself.

“It’s nine here, and I wanted to catch you before you left for work.”

“Yeah, okay, you caught me. What’s this about?”

“Was your father John Edward Banner?”

Blade groaned. “Don’t tell me the old man wants to play daddy now.”

“This isn’t about your father. He is deceased.”

“Oh, yeah? When?”

“Twenty years ago.”

Blade sucked in a breath and blew it out. He hadn’t seen his old man since he was five, and he had nothing but contempt for the man who’d beaten him and then abandoned him. “I guess that explains why I didn’t get any Christmas cards.”

“Your grandfather would like you to come to New York to meet with him.”

Blade froze. “What grandfather?” Nobody told him he had a grandfather.

The attorney said, “I’ve taken the liberty of booking a first-class seat for you for this afternoon. I’ll have a limo waiting at the airport.”

Grandfather?
First class
?
Limo
? Where was this grandfather when Blade was growing up, and why did he want to see him now? And who in the hell did this shyster think he was, taking ‘the liberty’ of booking a seat before he bothered to ask Blade if he wanted to come. “If my grandfather wants to speak with me, give him my phone number and remind him of the three-hour time difference. And tell him I have other plans for this afternoon.” Blade dropped the receiver in the cradle.

Five minutes later, the phone rang, and he knew it had to be the attorney again. Blade let it ring three times before picking it up. “Blade Banner.”

“Mr. Banner, have you heard of the Banner-Covington Shipping Corporation?”

Who hadn’t? It was one of the biggest shipping companies in the world. “What about it?”

“Your grandfather is Edward Banner, the former CEO of the company. He’s dying, and you are the only living member of his family.”

When Blade found his voice, he said, “Can you make that ticket for tomorrow morning?”

“Yes, sir. I’ll have my secretary call you with the details.”

“Yeah, okay.”

Blade spent the next hour researching the corporation and the Banner family on the Internet. John Banner came to this country from England in 1760 with his son, Martin. Martin ran a shipping company in Boston, which he later bought. A few generations later, they’d lost it all, and James Banner moved to New York City, where he studied law and eventually became a distinguished judge. His youngest child, Edward Banner, was born in 1918.

Mary Elizabeth Covington Banner, the only child of the Covington shipping family, had passed away four years ago. She and Edward Banner had been married for sixty-eight years. They had three sons. The oldest became a priest. Father Michael died in Africa in 1980. The middle son, Matthew, died in a plane crash in 1992. And the youngest was Blade’s father, John Edward Banner, who passed away nearly twenty years ago from liver failure. He drank himself to death. No surprise there.

With the merger of the two families and their fortunes, the Covington shipping business became the Banner-Covington Shipping Corporation. Edward Banner’s net worth now hovered around a half-billion dollars, and the old man had outlived his entire family, all but his only grandson, Blade Michael Banner, who stared at the computer screen in stunned disbelief.

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Blade finished the project and delivered it to the client late that afternoon. They had another assignment for him, but Blade didn’t take it. He had no idea how long this business in New York would take.

Early the next morning, Blade strapped himself into a first class seat for the flight to JFK airport in New York. First class was a whole lot more comfortable than coach, and he decided he’d go first class all the time from now on.
If
someone else bought the ticket.

Hours later, a uniformed limo driver met him at the airport and drove him through the gates of a massive brick home. A butler walked out to meet him, and a man took Blade’s bag and disappeared into the cavernous house.

As he walked through the front door, Blade knew he should have gone shopping for clothes before he left Seattle. This was a formal home with uniformed servants, and he wore jeans and a well-worn leather jacket. He felt out of place here, like Jed in the
Beverly Hillbillies
.

The house reminded him of a hotel, with a winding staircase in the grand entry that curved up three stories. The butler showed him to a suite on the second floor. The sitting room had dainty European furniture that might break if someone actually sat on it, the bathroom was bigger than his entire house in Gig Harbor, and the bed could sleep six people. Too bad it didn’t come with a woman.

The butler bowed slightly. “Mr. Banner will see you in thirty minutes.”

Blade unpacked a few things, ran his electric razor over his face, and changed into slacks, loafers, and his best pullover sweater. He’d left his only suit at home.

The butler returned to escort Blade to his grandfather’s room, down the hallway on the other side of the house. The room was massive and the furnishings ornate. It looked like something out of an old gothic movie, beautiful and creepy at the same time.

“Mr. Banner, your grandson is here to see you,” the butler announced.

The nurse backed away from the bed and Blade got his first look at his grandfather. He was old and wrinkled, but the blue eyes he stared out of were the same eyes Blade saw in the mirror every morning. He felt an instant connection to the wizened old man lying in the big bed.

“Come closer, boy.”

Blade walked to the side of the big four-poster bed, where the old man stared at him. “So you’re my grandson.” He scanned Blade’s body and rested again on his eyes. “You look like my son, Matthew. How old are you?”

“Thirty-nine, and you already knew that.”

The old man’s face crinkled into a smile. “I wish I’d known about you when you were a boy,” the old man said gently. “What kind of work do you do?”

“Contract work when I can get it, mostly technical writing and training seminars.”

“You have a college degree?”

“Yes, sir. I have a BA and an MBA.”

The old man closed his eyes and breathed deeply, obviously in pain. “They tell me I’m dying.”

“I’m sorry to hear that,” said Blade.

His grandfather’s eyes opened. “So am I, but nobody lives forever.”

The nurse came in and walked to the other side of the bed. “You need to rest now, Mr. Banner. Do you need a pain pill?”

“Yes. Is my attorney here yet?”

“No, sir.”

“Bring Blade back when my attorney gets here.”

Blade walked toward the door and the old man’s voice pulled him back. “Blade? I’m glad you’re here, son.”

“So am I.” No man had ever called him son. His father called him ‘the little bastard’ and worse when he drank.

His grandfather wasn’t exactly what Blade expected. The old guy seemed sharp, a man unafraid to say what he thought. Blade’s father had been a weak man, too weak to stop drinking and too mean to care. Blade was five when his father left, and he still had the scars on his legs and backside where his father hit him with his belt buckle before he left. Sunny gave him bourbon to stop him from screaming.

It wasn’t the only time she’d poured liquor down his throat.

<>

The manager of the temp agency handed Maria Fredricks her final check. “Sorry, Maria. We can’t use you again without losing one of our biggest clients.”

“But it was a family emergency.”

“I know, but the attorney is still angry that you bailed out on him in the middle of the job. He said if we didn’t fire you, he’d use a different agency, and we can’t afford to lose his business.”

The attorney was a rude jerk who didn’t care that Maria’s son had been injured at school. She’d told the attorney she’d come back and finish the job, and he told her not to bother. Maybe she should have called Mom and asked her to take care of Robbie that day, but the kids were her responsibility, not Mom’s.

She took her paycheck and left. It wasn’t enough to buy groceries, and her car insurance was due next week.

She drove past the road to her mother’s house and down to the park three miles away. The rain had stopped and she needed to clear her head. Swapping her pumps for walking shoes, she locked the car and walked down the path to the waterfront. The water in Puget Sound was cold and gray, but being near the water calmed her. The past year had been a nightmare—telling Fred she’d given up on their marriage, moving in with Mom, and then the divorce proceedings.

The cool breeze off the water invigorated her as she walked down the deserted beach. Not many people came down here this time of year, but she needed quiet time.

If not for her mother giving her and the kids a place to live and taking care of the kids while Maria worked, she didn’t know how she’d get by. She had to work, but good jobs were hard to find in Gig Harbor. There were a few jobs in Seattle, but it was too far to drive every day, and she couldn’t afford to live there. Some of her temp jobs had been in Tacoma, but she spent way too much time sitting in traffic, and she was gone from six in the morning until six or seven in the evening, which didn’t give her any time with her kids.

As she watched the waves lap and suck at the shore, she prayed that the hard times would pass, that she’d find a decent job, the kids would settle in, and they’d be all right. Thank God for her family. Without them, she didn’t know what she’d do.

Shivering with the cold and damp, Maria pulled her jacket tighter around her and returned to her car. It was the first week of March, and although Spring would officially be here soon, the icy wind cut through her as though it were mid-January.

She drove home to find her cousin, Nick, drinking coffee with Mom. Maria gave him a big hug. “Hey, Nick, what’s happening? How’s business?”

“Business is good, and that’s why I’m here.
Max and Company
needs a decorator, someone to tell us what to use to finish off the spec homes we’re building. I talked it over with Angelo and Tony, and they said you’d be perfect for the job.”

“But I’m not a decorator.”

“You don’t need experience in decorating to do this job, Maria. We need your sense of style and your intuition.”