Page 38 of SEAL’S Baby Surprise (Lanes #2)
I turn the page, and there are pictures of Uncle Richard, Uncle Andrew, and Mama Lee. But there’s also a package of pictures that aren’t in the album. I open up the package.
There’s a picture of a beautiful, dark-skinned woman. She’s laughing at the camera, her brown eyes are wide with long eye-lashes, her eyebrows are natural, with a beautiful arch. She has a dimple in one cheek.
Her hair is covered by a headdress that looks a lot like the one on the Egyptian Queen Nefertiti. She’s standing beside a super young version of Grandpa Lane.
A little later on, there’s a picture of a boy. He’s lighter skinned than the lady, but he still has brown eyes. Somehow, he looks kind of like Grandpa Lane.
There’s a thin packet of letters. Could this be what they are looking for?
I close everything thing back up, then look around. The cousins and my sibs are all gathered around a game board. Looks like they found Chutes and Ladders, or something like it.
I ease out of my hiding place, and take my booty over to Mama Lee. “Momly,” I say, “Is this what everyone is looking for?”
She takes it in her hands, and opens it up. “I’m not sure,” she says. “But it certainly is a treasure.”
She looks at the pictures of people wearing funny clothes, then she gets to Grandpa and Grandma Lane. She turns the page, sees the envelope, and slides the pictures out.
Then she pulls out something I had not seen before. It looks like a marriage certificate, then a birth certificate for a Leland Eugene Lane. “Richard!” she calls out. “Come take a look at this!”
Uncle Richard comes over. He frowns at the picture of the beautiful woman and Grandpa Lane standing together.
He shuffles through more of the photographs. Then he carefully opens the bundle of letters, and slowly reads through each one of them. Then he pulls out one last piece of paper.
It’s a divorce decree.
He very carefully steps away from the table with all the papers and pictures. Then he picks up a kitchen chair and whacks it so hard against a filing cabinet that it breaks.
“Richard!” Aunt Kandis cries out. “What’s wrong?”
“That asshole!” he yells. “That double-died, sheep-dip, dirty asshole.”
My dad comes hurrying over, looks at the papers, and says, “Well, I’ll be. I had no idea that some of the Lanes were Dutch.”
I look at Mama Lee. “Dutch?” I ask.
“Dutch colonists in Africa,” she says. “One of those murky pieces of history from the days when the sun never set on the British Empire. The colonial period has cast a long shadow over current history, and it seems that our family is somehow connected to it. Now, some of the pieces that were in that stupid prenuptial agreement that I did not sign begin to make some sort of sense.”
“What agreement?” I ask. “I didn’t think you and Daddy did that.”
“We didn’t,” she says. “Your Daddy says everything he has is mine, and that everything that I have is mine, too. But there was this guy who tried to get me to marry him before your Daddy found me. And he wanted me to sign one. There was some stuff in it that didn’t make sense, but now it does.
I think that Andrew, Richard, and I have a half-brother we didn’t know about. ”
Thank you for reading SEAL’s Baby Surprise, please leave a review it helps me out a lot as a new Indie author.
If you enjoyed this book I know you will love Broken SEAL’s Secret Baby, A Brother’s Best Friend, Age Gap, Single Dad, Enemies to Lovers Romance.
It’s sure to pull at your heartstrings, you will find yourself cheering for Charles, Kate and his little girl Cece as they navigate a new sense of normalcy with their community.
It’s filled with angst, danger, grief, new forbidden love, and explosive chemistry that leaps off the pages.
Here is a special Excerpt just for you.
Kate
At 6:00 in the morning, I awake to a light tapping on my door. I throw on the terry cloth robe my mother had made for me, which was barely big enough to wrap around me. My flannel pajamas are comfy, but too threadbare to be decent.
I am completely unprepared to speak to anyone, let alone the ;ahem; vision that meets my gaze when I open the door. I feel heat rise from my navel to my hairline and possibly invade certain other regions.
Charles Emory stands there in home-office casual.
Which is to say, he is wearing a button-down shirt and tie with red plaid pajama bottoms. I try to keep my eyes on his face.
Those pj bottoms cling to him, not leaving much to imagination.
And boy, is he built! I can see a manly bulge beginning below his flapping shirt tails.
I am suddenly terribly conscious of just how much my old terry robe doesn’t cover, and how thin and possibly revealing my old pajamas are. My face grows even hotter, and I know I’m blushing.
Mr. Emory’s hair is damp, the longish part sticking out in all directions, and he is not wearing a mask. Although from the waist up he looks professional, he also looks flustered and a bit harried.
He holds a pair of slacks away from him in one hand and carries a notebook that has what looked suspiciously like tooth marks in the corner. The incongruity has me speechless for a moment.
“Is everything all right?” I ask.
“That depends on how you define ‘all right’,” he replies. “Cece is still asleep, the cat anointed my favorite slacks, and the dog ate the phone book.”
I take in this lump of information with as much equanimity as I could manage. But three things come to mind. “You have a cat and a dog? And no other slacks? You are telling me this, why?”
Mr. Emory closes his eyes, takes a deep breath, and says, “I’ve started this off badly.
Manuela has called in. There is a novel coronavirus case in her apartment building, and it is on lockdown.
Sherry called almost immediately after that and said that her mother has forbade her to leave the house for fear of illness.
The front desk called up and let me know that a woman in the hotel portion of this building was taken to the emergency room this morning, so we could be next. ”
He pauses, then confesses, “I don’t know how to get the stain and odor out of my slacks, or even if they can be washed. I suppose they could be sent downstairs to the laundry, but there’s no one there right now, and I don’t know if they will show up for work.”
My mind blanks for a moment, unable to get past the realization that I am standing in the doorway of my room wearing threadbare pajamas and that my employer is wearing way too form fitting pajama bottoms.
More than that, he emits an aroma of Irish Spring and Old Spice, an oddly heady combination that indicates a recent shower. He is what my friend Grace would call “sex on a stick” although I wasn’t quite sure what that meant.
But then his comment about the slacks lands, and I nearly giggle. That is the Charles Emory I remember: demanding and clueless. He is the head honcho of a billion dollar business but can’t figure out what to do about the cat pee on his pants.
Suppressing giggles gets me past the observation that he has broad shoulders, muscular arms, and narrow hips.
Those red plaid pajamas do little to disguise the powerful muscles in his legs or the hint of growing tumescence behind the flapping tails of his shirt, or the red flush that is creeping up his neck. It seems that he is embarrassed, too.
I get myself together and go into emergency management mode. “Give me five minutes to get dressed. Do you know how to make coffee?” I use the voice that got part-time daycare workers moving in the right direction.
Mr. Emory blushes even brighter, like a kid caught unprepared for an exam. “No,” he admits. “At least not in a kitchen. I can make camp coffee.”
“I’ll make it,” I say. “Go find the coffee beans, grind, or instant — whatever you have. I’ll be right there.”
I close the door, not quite in his face. I grab my suitcase and pull out campus casual dress — a pair of khaki-colored Bermuda shorts, a T-shirt stenciled with ‘I love trees,’ and sandals. I run a brush through my hair and leave it loose. I could braid it up later.
Just as I am nearly ready to step out the door, my phone buzzed. It is a text from Grace.
Grace: Where are you? James says you won’t be home for a while.
Me: I’m in the penthouse at Agri-Oil.
Grace: The Penthouse? Really? Why?
Me: Live-in nanny for Cece. Remember Cece? I told you about her.
Grace: The Emory kid? Live-in? Isn’t Mr. Emory recently a widower?
Me: Yeah, but I’m here for the girl. Gotta go. The housekeeper called, and Mr. Clueless doesn’t know how to make coffee.
Grace: Goggly eyed emoji. Ok. Laters
Me: Laters.
Grace always did have the best timing…not.
As an afterthought, I pull my favorite pen out of my book bag and my steno book for taking notes. This sounds like it might be a note-taking session, especially if the housekeeper isn’t going to be available.
I find Mr. Emory bemusedly looking into cabinets. “I can’t find the coffee,” he says. “I know there should be some. It was on the list Manuela ordered.”
I think about the midnight snack he had given me. All easy stuff, mostly from the refrigerator or from a cabinet set up to provide nibbles for a four-year-old. That meant there had to be storage for staples either in or near the kitchen. I look around the layout of the ultra-modern cooking area.
Yes, there. A narrow door beside the refrigerator. I open it and discover a compartment well filled with dry goods. It is spotlessly clean. Each container is labeled and stowed in an order that would group like staples together.
I find sugar, creamer, an electric coffee grinder, three different kinds of gourmet coffee beans, and a can of ground coffee. There is a neat card detailing how to use the grinder, the espresso machine, the drip coffee maker, the cold press, and four more devices that do not sound familiar to me.
“Do you know what kind of coffee you want?” I ask, noticing that there was hazelnut, raspberry, Arabic, and Folger pre-grind.