In The Arms of a Donovan: A Sexy BBW Billionaire Family Series Romance (The Donovans Book 13) Read Free Page A

angry.”
    “But they do not have a right to be disrespectful. We’re still the elders in this room,” Beverly added.
    “Did you sleep with this woman too, dad?” Keysa asked quietly. She was holding her husband Ian’s hand, but looked directly at her father.
    Bernard, like his brother Henry, did not falter. “I’m not proud of that fact. I was drunk and she was wearing a disguise and it just happened.”
    “It just happened,” Brynne said and then chuckled. “How does something like that just happen? You get drunk and fall between your brother’s ex-girlfriend’s legs.”
    “Brynne, there’s no need to be crude,” Jocelyn, Brynne’s mother admonished.
    “This entire situation is crude and unbelievable. Do you know how long I’ve had the words ‘Donovan legacy’, ‘Donovan integrity’, and ‘Donovan loyalty’ drilled into my head? Now I get to sit here and find out that it all means nothing. Just a bunch of words repeated by a bunch of lying old men!” Brynne yelled before storming out of the room.
    “That’s not all,” Al spoke up then.
    “Sonofabitch!” Brandon cursed.
    The Senior wives looked to each other, realizing now that there was no way they could hope for a normal discussion in this instance. Their children were adults now and they were angry adults. There was nothing any of them could do about that at this point.
    Al stood, wiping a hand down his face. “Darla rushed me to the hospital that night and almost fainted when they told her they’d found traces of some Rohypnol in my blood and urine.”
    “Are you about to tell us that this woman raped you?” Bailey asked from where she sat beside him.
    “Unbelievable!” Brandon shouted again. “You all are a bunch of hypocritical bastards not only for what you did back then, but for keeping all of this from us.”
    “So was it just the three of you?” Dion asked. “Or did all of you get a piece of her?”
    Janean leaned over and smacked her son’s face. “You will not! I don’t care how angry you are, you just will not speak that way!”
    Everette spoke up at that point. “It was just the three older brothers, but we all knew. We all decided to keep it a secret when that Ausby woman made the claim about one of them fathering her baby.”
    “You all decided?” Max asked. “How could you all decide to turn your back on an innocent child? At the very least you could have taken a blood test.”
    “She was a tramp!” Bernard insisted. “Why should we be knuckled under by a slut who didn’t know who she was sleeping with from one day to the next?”
    “Because she wasn’t a stupid tramp,” Trent said. “She knew she was sleeping with a Donovan man. Three of them to be exact.”
    “So it was a set-up,” Jenise said.
    Tia was already nodding. “It had to be.”
    “What did you give her to keep quiet all this time?” Bailey asked. “Why is he coming after us now? What do they want if he’s a grown man, it can’t be child support.”
    “We paid her,” Bruce spoke up. “One time, we gave her five hundred thousand dollars.”
    The tension could be cut with a razor in the room.
    “You paid her half a million dollars when you didn’t even know if this kid belonged to either of you?” Sean asked. “Why? If she’s as promiscuous as you all say, anyone could have been the father.”
    “We couldn’t risk her going to the press,” Everette replied. “Regardless of who turned out to be the father, the Donovan name would have been dragged through the mud before paternity was established. We couldn’t risk that.”
    Ben was shaking his head. He’d been quiet all this time, but Bruce knew his nephew was reacting to everything he’d heard. Ben was a defense attorney, so this probably was not the strangest thing he’d ever heard. It was the first time he’d heard something of this magnitude from his family.
    “She set you up, then she blackmailed you. And let me guess, you thought it was only going to be once. But