The Bravo Billionaire. Christine Rimmer

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      He told Palmer that he’d have a light meal in the small dining room in one hour and then he climbed the curving iron staircase to the second floor.

      He visited his sister in the nursery. As usual lately, she babbled nonstop. It was all two-year-old talk, that phase of language development consisting in the main of instructions and demands.

      “Jonah”—she always called him Jonah, he assumed because the “s” at the end of his name was as yet beyond her—“come here,” and “Jonah, sit there,” and “I like this story. Read it to me.”

      He felt better. Soothed. Just to see her round, smiling face, her mop of dark curls and those big brown eyes. To know that she was safe. Always, he would keep her safe. He employed round-the-clock security at Angel’s Crest. What had happened to his brother would never happen to the sprite.

      She did say, “Jonah, I want Mama,” looking up at him solemnly, with absolute trust—and a sadness that tore at his heart.

      He took her on his lap and explained for—what was it? The tenth time? The eleventh?—that Mama had been very sick and had to go away and would not be coming back.

      Claudia, the nanny, reappeared at eight-thirty with a shy smile and a questioning look.

      “Bath time,” he told Mandy. “Be good for Claudia.”

      With a minimum of fuss, Mandy allowed him to say good-night.

      He stopped in his private suite of rooms for a quick shower and a change of clothes, then he went on down to the smaller of the house’s two dining rooms, where Palmer served him his meal. He ate, reminding himself not to dwell on how damn huge and quiet even the small dining room seemed without Blythe’s easy laughter and teasing chatter to liven things up a little.

      The food, as always, was excellent. He told Palmer to be sure to give the cook his compliments.

      It was after ten when Jonas retreated to his study, a comfortable room of tall, well-filled walnut bookcases, arching leaded-glass windows, intricate crown moldings and big, inviting chairs upholstered in green and blood-red velvet. He sat at his inlaid mahogany desk, opened the laptop and dug into the file on Emma Hewitt again.

      What he read didn’t tell him any more than he already knew. She was an orphan from Texas with two years in a nowhere college under her belt. At the time he’d had her followed she had been twenty-one, working the morning shift at the restaurant where she’d met his mother and keeping a stray cat and an iguana in her studio apartment, unbeknownst to the landlord. There had been no boyfriend at the time, though Jonas thought he remembered Blythe telling him there had been someone last year—or was it the year before?

      And if there had been someone, was that someone still around? Jonas shrugged. Since he didn’t have a clue what the woman planned to do about Blythe’s will, he supposed, at this point, that the possibility of a boyfriend was pretty much a nonissue.

      The file—or, technically, the series of files—contained a number of pictures snapped on the sly by one of the detectives he’d hired. There she was in her little white blouse and short black skirt, grinning at a customer, her order pad poised, pen ready to roll. And there she was at some Hollywood nightspot, with what looked like a strawberry daiquiri in front of her and a wide, happy smile on her face. And at Venice Beach, wearing cutoff shorts, a skimpy little nothing of a top and inline skates, being pulled along by a high stepping, beautifully groomed pair of Afghan hounds. In that picture, he couldn’t help but notice, her legs looked especially long, her breasts particularly high and full.

      Jonas sat back for a minute and rubbed at his eyes. Full breasts and long legs, he reminded himself, were not the issue here.

      He looked at the screen again, began bringing up the pictures one by one, noting as he did so that the love of animals came through good and clear. The cat and the iguana. The Afghan hounds. A shot taken in a pet store, with a parakeet on her head and a mynah bird on her shoulder, one at what looked like Griffith Park with someone’s tiny Chihuahua balanced on her outstretched hand.

      Jonas stared off in the direction of the limestone mantel, thinking of Bob and Ted, the pair of miniature Yorkshire terriers his mother had owned. Though as a general rule, Jonas had no liking for small dogs, Bob and Ted had surprised him. They were smart and obedient and not particularly prone to yipping. And they’d been fiercely dedicated to their mistress.

      Not too long ago, Bob and Ted had moved in with Emma Hewitt. Blythe, in the hospital then for what would be her final stay, had told Jonas she wanted the woman to have the dogs. He hadn’t objected. He’d figured that the kennel keeper was an appropriate choice to inherit the Yorkies. At that point he hadn’t known that the Yorkies weren’t everything his mother intended for Emma Lynn Hewitt to inherit.

      Jonas scrolled through the personal information file. The phone numbers had not been updated. There was the number of the deli where she’d worked five years ago, and the number of that studio apartment in East Hollywood where she’d lived when she first came to Los Angeles.

      He had the current numbers somewhere, didn’t he? The business number, at least, should be easy enough to find in the phone book or online.

      But he knew where he would be certain to find them both.

      He got his palm planner from his briefcase, left the study and went upstairs again, this time to his mother’s suite. In her white, pink and gold sitting room, which Blythe had recently redone in grand Louis XVI style, he picked up the phone. As he’d expected, she had the kennel keeper on autodial. There were three numbers: home, mobile and business.

      Jonas wasn’t about to talk to the Hewitt woman on his mother’s phone in his mother’s rooms with his mother’s things around him, reminding him all too poignantly of what he’d told his little sister earlier that evening: that Blythe was not coming back.

      He found a white leather address book in a drawer beneath the phone and got the numbers from it, entering all three in the palm planner. Then he returned to his study.

      He sat down at his desk again, picked up the phone and glanced at the serpentine clock on the mantel. It was nearing eleven. He called the home number.

      She answered on the third ring. “Hello?” He heard fuzziness in her voice, a slight slurring, as if he’d wakened her. An image flashed through his mind: the kennel keeper in bed, wearing something skimpy and eyeflayingly bright, the Yorkies snuggled in close, one on either side of her.

      He blinked to clear the image. “How long is ‘a few days’?” he asked in a gentle and reasonable tone.

      Evidently, the sound of his voice was enough to banish sleep, because she said his name—his given name—flatly, all traces of fuzziness gone. “Jonas.”

      “How long is ‘a few days’?”

      He heard her take in a breath and sigh as she let it out.

      He began again. “I asked how—”

      “I heard you.” She heaved another sigh. “I’m sorry. I just don’t know yet. I have to think this over. I have to…consider what all this will mean.”

      “What’s to consider?”

      “Plenty. I know you don’t believe me, but this was a pretty СКАЧАТЬ