Scandalous Heroes Box Set (138 page)

Refreshed, a half hour later she joined both sets of twins in the living room. “Mom,” Abe called as if she were in another part of the house instead of nearby. “We were waiting for you so we could eat breakfast. Come on, I’m hungry.”

She met Blaine’s amused gaze as he stood, took her hand and kissed her forehead. “You look like you’ve been worked over. I hope you’re not too sore,” he murmured as he led her to the small dining area where everyone else waited.

“I need a day or two to recover,” she whispered.

“Oh, it was one of those… good.” He pulled out her chair and then sat on her right, Donnie was already in the seat to her left.

Adam said grace without being asked and then the food was passed around. “Mom, Adam and I were wondering if you would consider coming to visit dad while we’re there. Maybe come on the weekend or something?”

Frowning, she met his gaze. “Why?”

Abe shrugged as his gaze slid away. “I just think it’d be nice, you know. It’s not the same without you around.”

Adam nodded. “It’s not. I think I’m going to wait and come with you. I know you need to get granddaddy situated first, but he’ll be starting his therapy soon and will be able to get around more.”

“He can move to Pennsylvania with us,” Abe said and she could tell he was on a roll reorganizing everyone’s life to match his.

“He has a house here,” Adam said, frowning at Abe.

“He can sell it and live off the money anywhere, why not there?”

She opened her mouth to intervene, but Donnie shook his head while Blaine grabbed her thigh and squeezed lightly. Was this co-parenting?

“You can’t expect him to move just as he’s recovering from surgery, he’s too weak. It’ll be a while before he can live on his own,” Adam said to his twin, who glared at him.

Belinda picked up her fork and dug into her hash browns, listening to her sons plot and plan a course for her life. She wasn’t sure what Donnie and Blaine thought would be the conclusion, but they’d learn soon that selfishness was a benchmark of teenagers.

“Why do you want to wait for mom to come, she may not even come,” Abe grumbled. “You keep changing your mind. I can’t depend on you.”

Belinda stopped eating. Blaine and Donnie continued eating as if nothing out of the ordinary happened. Hadn’t they heard Abe say a hateful thing to Adam?

“What do you mean you can’t count on me? I didn’t say I was waiting for mom, I said I was thinking about it. There’s a difference,” Adam snapped.

“Yeah, well the last time we talked we agreed we – me and you…” Abe pointed between them. “We were going to go check things out. Visit our dads. It had nothing to do with mom. They have to work out their own relationship; we got nothing to do with that.”

Belinda stared at her plate as Donnie rubbed her other thigh.

“I don’t understand how we can be a family without mom. If she doesn’t come, how will that work?” Adam asked, staring at Abe.

“Mom, how will that work?” Abe asked her.

“Huh?” She wasn’t ready to jump in and hoped Donnie or Blaine had an answer.

“You told Adam when he ran off that we were a family, how does that work if you aren’t with us when we go to dad’s?”

“Are you moving in or visiting?” she asked, saying the first thing that came to mind.

No one spoke.

“Are you moving to Pennsylvania, Abe? Adam?” she asked again, determined to get to the bottom of this.

“No, not… not yet. But I was hoping we could all live together, you know, like a family,” Abe said hesitantly.

“You plan to move then, one day?”

“I hope so,” Abe said, looking at Donnie.

Her heart hurt at the yearning she heard in her son’s voice. All these years he’d hidden how much he wanted this.

She nodded. What else could she do? “Adam?”

“Well, I’d like to visit first and eventually move there, if it’s okay,” he said and fell silent.

“Donnie, Blaine, I know it’s okay with you if the boys come visit or stay. We haven’t really talked about it because of everything happening. Do you have space for them?
And me?”

“Yeah there’s plenty of room for everyone,” Blaine said, stressing the last word.

“Do you need to make arrangements with your housekeeper?”

“She knows we have our sons, and permanent rooms have been made available for them whenever they come. Everyone who lives and works at the house is excited and happy for us. There’s no problems there,” Donnie added.

She nodded and looked into the expectant gazes of her sons. They wanted this. Blaine and Donnie wanted this.

Leaning back into her chair, she looked at Adam and then Abe. “You understand that I cannot choose one, I love both of your fathers.” Blaine’s hand rubbed her thigh. Donnie patted her leg.

“Yes. I can see it,” Adam said with a small grin. “When you look at dad, it’s like there’s no one else in the room, until you look at Uncle Donnie. It’s like you light up when you’re with them. You never did that before.”

“I know, you noticed that too?” Abe said chuckling. “Dad’s no better. When Mom walks into the room, sometimes he forgets what he’s saying and just stares. It’s wild, I can’t help but laugh.”

Belinda’s cheeks warmed. Her intention had been to drive home what she considered to be a major problem, her love of two men, but her sons didn’t appear concerned.

“Yeah, dad stopped talking to me completely when mom walked in this morning,” Adam said. “You’re not the only one in love Mom. Dad and Uncle Donnie have it bad too. I think the only reason we’re still here is because they can’t leave you.”

Belinda blinked and then blinked again as Adam’s words sunk in. She looked at Blaine’s red face and then at Donnie’s equally red skin. Was Adam right? Were they waiting for her?

“Blaine?”

“Yeah, I admit I forgot what he was talking about when you walked into the room this morning,” he said with a crooked grin.

“That’s not what I meant. Are you waiting for me?” Her heart leapt in her chest as his eyes heated.

“I need to go take care of some business matters, but my heart is here and I haven’t been able to leave. I don’t want to pressure you.” He turned to Adam and Abe. “No one pressures her or tries to make her feel guilty either. She heard everything both of you had to say and she knows how I feel, how Donnie feels. We’ll all live with whatever she decides. Okay?”

“Yes,” Adam said as he returned to eating his food.

“Okay,” Abe agreed less graciously.

“Ms. Moore,” the nurse said from the entry.

Belinda slid her chair back and stood. “My dad’s awake?”

The nurse nodded. “He’s alert and asking for you.”

“Go ahead,” Donnie said, pushing away from the table. “After we clean up here, we’re going to some new movie the boys want to see. You have a nice long visit with your dad. We should be back in about four hours.”

Grateful for the help, she leaned forward and kissed his cheek. He wrapped his arms around her and held her tight. “Call us if you need a shoulder, okay?” he said softly as he released her.

Throat tight, she nodded. Blaine took her hand and walked with her to her father’s room. When they reached the door, he bent forward and brushed his lips across hers. “So sweet,” he murmured and then laid his forehead on hers. “We got the boys, don’t worry about them or anything. Spend time with your father, go to therapy with him, make sure you do all you can to help him. And then come home to us, we need you too.” With that, he kissed her thoroughly and walked back toward the kitchen.

Chapter 23

Exhaling, she pulled her frazzled thoughts together before entering the room. Her father wanted to talk about her brother. Hopefully they’d discuss her being shunned by her family as well.

She pasted a smile on as she entered the room. Sunlight streamed through the windows, making the room look cheery and not at all like the room of death from last week. Her dad was propped up in his bed, which was a pleasant surprise.

“Morning Daddy,” she said, placing a kiss on his forehead before pulling up the same chair she’d sat in yesterday.

“Morning cupcake.” He eyed the nurse, who lingered near the bed. “I need to talk to my daughter privately, could you step out the room until we call you, please?”

The nurse smiled as she picked up a large bag filled with all kinds of puzzles and electronic tablets. “No problem, I have a few calls to make. I’ll be back to give you your medication in two hours if you don’t need me before that.”

“Okay, thanks.” He waited until she left and looked up at Belinda. “Nice kid. She really likes taking care of old sick people.”

“Really? She told you that?”

“No. I can tell. I’ve met lots of 'em over the years. I can tell.” He closed his eyes and then opened them slowly. “I owe you an apology and I’m trying to decide where to start. The beginning is too long, so I’ll tell you the short version and answer any follow-up questions, okay?”

Tense, she nodded. “Okay.”

“First off, your daddy’s a whore. Always liked being with women. Tall, short, fat, skinny, light, dark… didn’t make me no difference to me. I never shoulda agreed to get married. But Ricca made me an offer and I didn’t refuse it.”

Belinda swallowed around the lump in her throat at the mention of her mother. “What kind of offer?”

“Well, she wanted to leave home in the worst way. She never did get along with her family. She was entitled to some money after she married and promised to buy us a home and allow me to continue with my wild ways if I married her. She did ask that I use discretion. I was young and had other women sweating me to marry them. But Ricca offered the best deal and my life wouldn’t change that much.”

“Really?” Belinda couldn’t imagine her strait-laced mom agreeing to the type of relationship her father talked about.

He nodded. “Yeah, things were good for a while until you arrived.”

The way he worded that sentence chilled her. “I arrived?”

“I came home drunk one night. I can’t remember why I wanted to have sex with her, we had only had sex once before and it really wasn’t good. But… well, she didn’t want me and I guess that spurred me on.”

Belinda released his hand and slid hers back onto her lap. “You raped her?”

“No…maybe. She said I did.”

Belinda shook her head to clear it. She knew her dad had been wild when she was younger, but never in a million years did she expect this.

“When she found out she was pregnant, she became unreasonable, made all kinds of threats. She left for a while, I thought she had gone and had the abortion like she threatened. When she returned, she moved all of her things to another room on the other side of the house. Sometimes I wished she had just divorced me.”

That answered a question she had asked her mom years ago. She had been curious why her mom didn’t share a room with her dad when she discovered from her friends that other parents shared a room.

“Once during an argument, I told her I wanted you
and
Chucky’s DNA tested. That shut her up. From then on, whenever she got on my nerves I threatened to take the boy for DNA testing. We stopped speaking for a while. Come to find out, you’re mine but he’s not.”

Belinda stared at her father. His lips were moving but her mind stumbled over the fact that her mom had a child from another man and lied about it for years. If anything, her mom should have understood what she was going through when she called home crying and upset that she was pregnant.

How could her mom tell her to get an abortion when she didn’t abort her? Even now she could hear the coldness in her mom’s voice as she told her to “get rid of the baby before it caused her a lifetime of suffering.” Is that how her mom saw her? Or her brother?

Her father was still talking. “She came clean when she was dying. Told me how much she hated me, had always hated you, and explained that she had cut you off all those years. I’d been told you ran off with some guy and abandoned us.”

“That’s a lie.”

He nodded slowly. “I know. If she wasn’t already dying, I woulda killed her for that alone. She was an evil miserable bitch. I shoulda divorced her before she got sick.”

Her chest heaved as old pains were resurrected and bled. “She called me a whore and told me never to come home again. I didn’t have any money, and was stuck, pregnant, in Georgia.”

“I’m not surprised, everyone was a whore to her. I think she only had sex three times in her life, old dried up prune,” he muttered. “I shoulda went looking for you or done more than believed her lies. But I didn’t, don’t have a reason why, I just let it be and you suffered.”

Belinda opened her mouth to make a remark, realized it wouldn’t make a difference, and snapped it shut. The past could not be undone.

“Once she told Chucky he wasn’t my son, the boy turned into an ass and grabbed the little money she had in her account and left. At some point she must’ve seen through him because she made me her sole beneficiary on her life insurance. He told me one too many times he wasn’t my son. So when he came sniffing around after her funeral to see if there was anything left for him, I told him I was leaving the bulk of the insurance money for my wife’s and my child. That hushed him up fast.” He snorted his disdain.

Belinda and her brother had never been close. Given the twelve years between them, it was as if they were both only kids. She'd had no idea why he was hanging around her parents' home when Blaine and Donnie came looking for her. Growing up he was always too busy and they hardly spent time together, even though they lived in the same house. Her brother was the star in his universe and she was glad her sons had other uncles to show them how an extended family worked.

“When I found out I was sick, I asked him to contact you for me. I wanted to apologize for not protecting you or being there all those years. I thought I was dying and wanted my slate clean, understand?”

She nodded and wondered if she should ask him about the two years since her mom had died. He hadn’t reached out to her then, so chances were he was heavily involved with some woman.

“The asshole wanted to charge me for making the call, and that’s after I paid someone to find you. Reminds me, I need to get that report from him.”