The Stone Brothers: A Complete Romance Series (3-Book Box Set)

by Samantha Christy

  “Of course. Anything.” She smiles at me, running a finger across my three-day stubble.

  “Would you take me to meet your father?”

  Chapter Forty-two

  It took almost four weeks, but Charlie finally caved in to my pleading to call her father. If there’s even a small chance to salvage their relationship, I knew I had to try. As the father I once was and the father I’m about to become, I’m not sure I could live with myself knowing there is a man out there who loves his daughter but can never know her. Not if there’s something I can do about it.

  She’s nervous. She didn’t eat breakfast this morning. I’ve already got a catered lunch on standby, hoping all will go well and she’ll want to eat after our meeting.

  George Tate.

  I’ve stayed up many nights wondering about him. I’ve investigated him with Charlie’s approval. It was one of her conditions of meeting with him. The other conditions were that it was here, at our offices, and that I be in the room. She didn’t have to twist my arm on either of those points.

  Having Charlie work right down the hall from me is even better than I thought it would be. I gave her the largest unoccupied office, thinking we could stick a crib in the corner and bring the baby to work with us. Unless she wanted a nanny, of course. But the day we had the decorator come to put her office together, Charlie told her she wanted a rocking chair instead of a couch. That’s when I knew. I knew she wanted exactly what I wanted.

  It amazes me every day how the two of us found each other. If I searched the ends of the earth, I wouldn’t find a woman more perfect for me than Charlie.

  We have settled into our new routine since coming back from California. We come in to work together each morning. She works until noon and then I walk her home and we have lunch together before I return for the rest of my day. She will rest, or do something with Piper, or shop for baby clothes. And after I get home we will go for a swim and then cook dinner together.

  After Mrs. Buttermaker died, neither of us wanted to swim late at night anymore so we changed the time of our workout. In some strange way, it just wasn’t the same without her.

  And thanks to my mother’s crash course in cooking, Charlie has become pretty good at it. We muddle through together and have found it to be the best part of our day.

  Charlie isn’t the only nervous one today. I found myself picking at my breakfast as well. After all, I’m the one who demanded this meeting. I’m the one she’ll blame if it goes south. I’m the one who will have to deal with the fallout.

  As if on cue, Brittney, our new receptionist, buzzes me telling me there is a Mr. Tate here.

  “Please tell him to have a seat and we’ll be with him in a few minutes,” I say into the intercom.

  I head down the hall to Charlie’s office. She always keeps her door open in case anyone needs anything. She has fit right in as our new office manager. She’s proven to be even better at scheduling, coordinating and problem-solving than I thought she would be. Everyone is impressed with her professionalism, her candor and her quick wit.

  That’s my girl.

  I stand in the doorway for a minute before she notices me. She’s hard at work transferring our files to a new system she found that will handle the needs of our agency much more efficiently.

  “Hey,” I say.

  For a split second, she smiles at me. For a split second, she forgets what day it is and thinks I’m here to walk her home. But then her face falls and she leans back into her chair. “Is it too late to change my mind?”

  I walk over and rub her shoulders. “You can do this, Charlie. If it doesn’t work out, I’ll take full responsibility and you can punish me however you’d like later at home.” I lean down and whisper in her ear. “However you’d like.”

  I feel her relax a little and she reaches up to touch my hand.

  “If he turns out to be the bastard you’ve always thought him to be, he’ll be out of your life in thirty minutes. But what if the opposite happens, Charlie? What if he turns out to be the father you never knew you had? The father you never knew you wanted? It’s worth a twenty-minute conversation, right, snookums?”

  “Oh, my God.” She spins around in her chair. “That’s even worse than ‘peaches.’ If you ever call me that again, I won’t do that thing you like me to do. You know, that thing I did last week that drove you—”

  “Got it,” I say, interrupting her. “Never again.” I hold my hand out to her. At twenty-four weeks, she’s starting to get big enough that getting out of chairs is becoming a little more difficult. “Let’s do this.”

  Forty-five minutes and one very needed late-morning scotch later, I’m still trying to wrap my mind around what George has told us. He went over everything that he told Charlie a few months ago. He went over all of it in painful detail. As a man, I was a bit skeptical about another man being abused by his wife. But listening to his story, I get it. I get how it started out as Caroline being a controlling woman. She had him over a barrel with his career. With their finances. As he tells it, the abuse started out slowly. Months would go by between instances, so he thought maybe she had changed. By the time her attacks came on a more regular basis, she’d already worn him down so much he didn’t think he had a choice but to be with her. He loved her. Despite what she did to him, he thought he loved her. But now he knows he was really only in love with the women she would portray on the screen.

  His red-rimmed eyes look at Charlie as she sits beside me on the couch, holding onto my leg for dear life as he pours his heart and soul out to her from the chair across from us. “You will never know how sorry I am for not taking you with me. For not coming back to get you. I have no excuse for not fighting for you, Charlie. All I can say is that she was rich and powerful and I thought there wasn’t a chance in hell she’d let me have you. I knew no judge would give a child to an unemployed screenwriter whose only source of income was alimony from his ex-wife. If she’d had her way, I never would have gotten that, either.”

  He takes a drink from the bottle of water I’d offered him, declining the stronger route I’d taken myself. “If I had known what she did to you after I left, I’d have found a way, Charlie. I would have kidnapped you. I would have figured something out. But I had no idea. I swear I had no idea she hurt you. I had no idea she . . . let men hurt you.” He looks physically pained when he reveals that, like I’d punched him in the gut.

  Charlie stiffens beside me. I know this is news to her. She told him about the hitting, the burns, but not about the men. But before either of us can ask him about it, he says, “I know about the men, Charlie. Or more specifically, one man. I can only assume there were more.”

  “How?” I ask, squeezing Charlie’s hand to remind her I’m here for her.

  “It was last December. Before your mom died. Before you came back to New York. I was sitting at a bar watching a football game when I overheard a drunken conversation at the table next to me.” He shakes his head in disgust, rubbing a hand across his jaw. I can tell he doesn’t want to say aloud the words he’s about to speak. “The men were comparing their sexual conquests. They were trying to one-up each other. It was an interesting conversation to say the least, so I found myself eavesdropping. One of the men said he’d not only slept with a movie star, but with her lookalike daughter. He told the other man if he’d never had a” —he looks at Charlie with tears pooling in his eyes— “sweet young girl, he needed to try it sometime. He said all he had to do to get the daughter was guarantee the mom an audition for his upcoming film. He said it was like taking candy from a baby.”

  George looks like he’s going to hyperventilate, and as a father, I feel every emotion I see cross his broken face. “When his friend asked him who the movie star was and he said your mother’s name, I had to run to the bathroom and throw up.”

  Charlie is pale. I make her drink some fruit juice while George gathers himself.

  “When I was cleaning myself up, I looked in the mirror, disgusted at myself f
or not protecting you. I knew you left home when you were eighteen so I knew it had to have happened before that. This guy was in his forties. It didn’t take much to put two and two together. I punched my reflection in the mirror, sending shards of glass to the floor. One of the pieces was jagged and in the perfect shape of a knife. So I rolled up some paper towels and bunched them around one end so I wouldn’t slice my hand open. I put it under my coat and walked back out into the bar. I wanted to kill him right then and there, but I knew his friend would jump me, so I went out front and waited for him to come out. I knew he would. The guy had been going outside to smoke every twenty minutes. I stood outside, planning his death. I saw it play out in my head, right down to the number of times I was going to stab him in the chest. I was insane with fury that just seemed to burn deeper every time someone walked out the front door.

  “When he finally came out, I watched him for a minute. I watched him light a cigarette. I watched him lean against the building. I watched him stare at women walking past the bar. All the while, my hand working itself around the makeshift handle of my knife.

  “I walked over to him and told him who I was and that I was Charlie Tate’s father. He had no idea who I was or what that should mean to him. Then I told him I was Charlie Anthony’s father and that I was sitting behind him in the bar ten minutes ago. Then I told him I was going to kill him.

  “Before I could even pull the knife out, he pushed me down and started running away, turning around to see if I was following. I was still trying to pick myself up off the ground when he ran right out into traffic and got hit by a car.”

  “Oh, God,” Charlie says. “Peter Elliot.”

  My jaw twitches at the revelation and for a moment, I find myself admiring the father sitting across from me.

  George nods. “I didn’t know his name until days later when I’d read about the accident in the paper. I read that he’d drunkenly stumbled into traffic, being struck by a car that caused massive damage, putting him in intensive care. I remember being upset the accident hadn’t killed him. I didn’t have one ounce of guilt that he ran into traffic because of me. I still don’t. He deserved that, Charlie. He deserved that and more.

  “I have a friend who works in the hospital so he was able to find out about his recovery. He’s still in rehab for his spinal injury and the guy may never walk again. He must have never told the authorities about me, because no one ever came around asking about him.”

  He lowers his head, resting his elbows on his knees as he slowly breathes in and out. He makes eye contact with Charlie. “I take it he wasn’t the only one, Charlie. How many of them were there? How many men did she let use you?”

  Charlie closes her eyes, a tear escaping one of them as she says, “Twelve.”

  George puts his head in his hands, sobbing quietly as he realizes the full extent of her nightmare. “I’m so sorry,” he chants over and over.

  I feel bad for the guy. What happened to Charlie is not his fault. He wasn’t the one who hit her, burned her, molested her. He didn’t even know it was happening. But I also know he’ll never look at it that way. He will blame himself forever.

  What if I’d taken Cat to daycare that day instead of a distracted Cara? What if I would have skipped class and spent the day in the park with her as I’d often done. What if I’d called Cara earlier in the day?

  I want to tell him it’s not his fault. That his only mistake was leaving without Charlie. That he had no way of knowing what would happen. But it’s not my place to offer him forgiveness.

  Charlie doesn’t say a word. Her body is frozen to mine as she stares blankly at the wall. I want to know what she’s feeling. What she’s thinking. But with George here, I know she won’t tell me.

  “You need to give her time” I say, standing up to dismiss him. “It took a lot of guts for her to agree to this meeting. And now, after hearing all this. Well, you just need to give her time.”

  He nods, getting up off the chair to make his way to the door. But before he leaves, Charlie surprises us both by speaking. “I’ve read your books,” she says.

  We both whip around and look at her. This is news to me. I had no idea she had done that.

  “You have?” he asks, a glimmer of hope shining through the pain in his eyes.

  “They’re good,” she says. “But I have a question.”

  “Anything. Ask me anything,” he says.

  “You claim you didn’t know I was being abused until I told you earlier this year, and you say you didn’t know I was molested until last December. But how is it then, that you wrote all these children’s books about those very subjects?”

  “The books started out to be more about helping myself than others,” he says. “I knew that as a man, if it was that easy for me to live with and deny being abused, that it must be even worse for women and children. So I wrote a book about abuse, only I geared it towards children. I wanted them to know it wasn’t okay. None of it—the yelling, the slapping, the controlling. I thought that maybe if someone had educated me on the subject as a child, I’d have never gotten myself in that situation. Or at the very least, I never would have allowed it to continue.

  “Writing that book was therapy for me. So after that, I researched other issues that might help children. Bullying, peer pressure, divorce. And I just started writing, making it a complete series, funny and interesting enough for kids to follow, but with clear messages about the sensitive subjects I wanted them to learn about.”

  “But you named your main character after me,” she says.

  He nods. “I did. I guess it was my way of keeping you with me somehow.”

  She looks down at her stomach, rubbing her hands over it. “I’ll read them to him someday.”

  “Or her,” I say, helping her up off the couch.

  Tears fall from George’s eyes and for the first time, I think they might be happy ones.

  She walks towards him but still keeps her distance. “Ethan is right. I still need time. I’m not sure what to do with all this information. So please give me some space. Someday, I might be ready to talk more. Someday I might be ready to see if we can be more than strangers. But please don’t ask me to call you Dad.”

  He sighs, relief rolling across his body from head to toe. “Okay,” he says, offering her his hand. “How about we just start with George.”

  She reaches her hand out to shake his. My own hand comes up to cover my heart, or more specifically the tattoo etched over the top of it.

  Chapter Forty-three

  I look at my stunning fiancée as we ride in the cab to dinner. She is dressed to the nines for our night out with the guys and their Mitchell ladies. Even as big as her belly has gotten, she’ll still be the most beautiful woman in the room.

  Charlie is breathing a bit easier these days, which is ironic considering she’s thirty-two weeks pregnant and the baby is taking up a lot more room in her body, pressing up against her lungs.

  We haven’t heard from Zach Thompson or his attorney in three months. The hope is, he’s given up and moved on to some other scam. The nagging feeling in the back of my mind tells me differently. This guy wants money, and he’ll do anything to get it. And I’m sure his attorney has been able to estimate how much Charlie is worth by now. She’s sold her mom’s apartment, received another life insurance payout, and the estate has been closed, with all money and future royalties put in her name. In the past eight months, she’s amassed her own small fortune, albeit one she never wanted. Add that to mine and Thompson is probably drooling all over himself.

  When we arrive at the restaurant, the girls hug and kiss and fawn over each other’s dresses and shoes while the guys stand back and watch in amusement. You’d think they haven’t seen each other in years, not days.

  Over dinner, I catch up with the guys to find out what’s happened since last Monday’s poker game. Gavin’s production company just contracted with a popular Iraqi author whose memoirs of the war have become a best-selling novel. He’s
excited to get the opportunity to produce something other than chick flicks. He started Mad Max Productions by producing a movie based on one of Baylor’s romance novels. I felt obligated to watch it after Charlie and I got together. It earned Gavin some high-fives, but I couldn’t look Baylor in the eye for months. The movie he produced was based on their own story. And it was very, very, um . . . R-rated.

  Griffin tells us about his latest photo shoot, and Mason is still on a high from getting to play more than half of the game last Sunday after the starting quarterback got injured. They won, largely because of Mason’s performance, and we all secretly hope Johnny Henley’s days as starting quarterback are numbered. Henley is good, but he’s getting up there in years. Mason is young and strong and has paid his dues.

  Charlie and I have gone to every home game, and it’s nice to see her enjoy football again. She’s even started to open up to me more about the times she and her dad bonded over the sport.

  Although she hasn’t seen George since that day at the office, they have been corresponding by email. Emails she shares with me, and I’m more than delighted to see a relationship blossoming between the two of them. My hope is she will see him again soon. Maybe even when the baby comes.

  “Are you guys up for some drinks?” Griffin asks after dinner. “I know a great club down the street. That is if Charlie isn’t too tired.”

  “I’m not,” she says. “That sounds fun.” She rubs her belly. “Obviously, I won’t be drinking though.”

  “Well, if Charlie’s not drinking, neither am I,” Skylar says. “You shouldn’t have to be the only sober one there.”

  “I’m with you two,” Baylor says. “It’ll be fun watching everyone else make asses out of themselves.”

  “Did you just call us asses, darlin’?” Gavin drawls.

  “Not you,” she says, laughing. “Everyone else at the club.”

  “How about it, Piper,” Skylar asks. “Are you with us? You know, one for all?”