The Inheritance (The Donatelli Series) Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Blurb

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Epilogue

  Excerpt ~ The Inn at Dead Man’s Point

  Excerpt Con’t

  Backlist

  About the Author

  Author’s Note

  THE INHERITANCE

  Donatelli Family: Book Three

  by

  Sue Fineman

  Book Title

  Copyright © 2011 Sue Fineman

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. With the exception of quotes used in reviews, this book may not be reproduced or used in whole or in part by any means existing without written permission from Sue Fineman.

  Published by Amazon KDP

  Seattle, WA

  Electronic KDP Edition: October, 2011

  This book is a work of fiction and all characters exist solely in the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental. Any references to places, events or locales are used in a fictitious manner.

  Blade Banner inherits his grandfather’s estate, but it won’t all be his until he marries. He’s been alone since he was fifteen and has never had a long-term relationship. What woman would want to marry a man whose best friend is his Harley? He promised his grandfather he’d help maintain the integrity of the family shipping business, but he can’t get his hands on the company stock until he finds himself a wife. Another company wants to take over and gut the company, but without the stock, there’s nothing Blade can do to stop the takeover.

  After a bitter divorce, Maria Donatelli, mother of four, gets roped into working with Blade on a house plan. From the beginning, sparks fly between them, and even though she tries to keep her distance, she can’t stay away from him. She doesn’t tell him she can hear his thoughts, a gift she inherited from her mother.

  Blade tries to convince Maria to marry him to help him claim his entire inheritance, but he can’t tell her what she longs to hear—that he loves her and wants a real marriage. Without those words, Maria won’t even consider another marriage.

  But Maria isn’t Blade’s only problem. People are dying, and he’s sure the deaths have something to do with his inheritance. He’s afraid they’ll come after Maria and the kids, and he’ll do everything in his power to make sure that doesn’t happen.

  Chapter One

  Blade Banner booted up his computer and sipped his morning coffee. He’d been up half the night working on this project, and if he didn’t get it finished and delivered by the end of the day today, he wouldn’t get paid.

  The phone rang. Blade stared at the clock on the wall. Six o’clock in the morning. The client wouldn’t call him at this hour, and it was too early for telemarketers or pranksters. He grabbed the phone. “Yeah?”

  “Is this Blade Michael Banner?” a man asked.

  “That depends. If you’re selling something, I’m not interested.”

  “This is Colin Jacobs, Attorney at Law in Manhattan.”

  “I guess people in New York can’t tell time,” he muttered mostly to himself.

  “It’s nine here, and I wanted to catch you before you left for work.”

  “Yeah, okay, you caught me. What’s this about?”

  “Was your father John Edward Banner?”

  Blade groaned. “Don’t tell me the old man wants to play daddy now.”

  “This isn’t about your father. He is deceased.”

  “Oh, yeah? When?”

  “Twenty years ago.”

  Blade sucked in a breath and blew it out. He hadn’t seen his old man since he was five, and he had nothing but contempt for the man who’d beaten him and then abandoned him. “I guess that explains why I didn’t get any Christmas cards.”

  “Your grandfather would like you to come to New York to meet with him.”

  Blade froze. “What grandfather?” Nobody told him he had a grandfather.

  The attorney said, “I’ve taken the liberty of booking a first-class seat for you for this afternoon. I’ll have a limo waiting at the airport.”

  Grandfather? First class? Limo? Where was this grandfather when Blade was growing up, and why did he want to see him now? And who in the hell did this shyster think he was, taking ‘the liberty’ of booking a seat before he bothered to ask Blade if he wanted to come. “If my grandfather wants to speak with me, give him my phone number and remind him of the three-hour time difference. And tell him I have other plans for this afternoon.” Blade dropped the receiver in the cradle.

  Five minutes later, the phone rang, and he knew it had to be the attorney again. Blade let it ring three times before picking it up. “Blade Banner.”

  “Mr. Banner, have you heard of the Banner-Covington Shipping Corporation?”

  Who hadn’t? It was one of the biggest shipping companies in the world. “What about it?”

  “Your grandfather is Edward Banner, the former CEO of the company. He’s dying, and you are the only living member of his family.”

  When Blade found his voice, he said, “Can you make that ticket for tomorrow morning?”

  “Yes, sir. I’ll have my secretary call you with the details.”

  “Yeah, okay.”

  Blade spent the next hour researching the corporation and the Banner family on the Internet. John Banner came to this country from England in 1760 with his son, Martin. Martin ran a shipping company in Boston, which he later bought. A few generations later, they’d lost it all, and James Banner moved to New York City, where he studied law and eventually became a distinguished judge. His youngest child, Edward Banner, was born in 1918.

  Mary Elizabeth Covington Banner, the only child of the Covington shipping family, had passed away four years ago. She and Edward Banner had been married for sixty-eight years. They had three sons. The oldest became a priest. Father Michael died in Africa in 1980. The middle son, Matthew, died in a plane crash in 1992. And the youngest was Blade’s father, John Edward Banner, who passed away nearly twenty years ago from liver failure. He drank himself to death. No surprise there.

  With the merger of the two families and their fortunes, the Covington shipping business became the Banner-Covington Shipping Corporation. Edward Banner’s net worth now hovered around a half-billion dollars, and the old man had outlived his entire family, all but his only grandson, Blade Michael Banner, who stared at the computer screen in stunned disbelief.

  <>

  Blade finished the project and delivered it to the client late that afternoon. They had another assignment for him, but Blade didn’t take it. He had no idea how long this business in New York would take.

  Early the next morning, Blade strapped himself into a first class seat for the flight to JFK airport in New York. First class was a whole lot more comfortable than coach, and he decided he’d go first class all the time from now on. If someone else bought the ticket.

  Hours later, a uniformed limo driver met him at the airport and drove him through the gates of a massive brick home. A butler walked out to meet him, and a man took Blade’s bag and disappeared into the cavernous house.

  As he walked t
hrough the front door, Blade knew he should have gone shopping for clothes before he left Seattle. This was a formal home with uniformed servants, and he wore jeans and a well-worn leather jacket. He felt out of place here, like Jed in the Beverly Hillbillies.

  The house reminded him of a hotel, with a winding staircase in the grand entry that curved up three stories. The butler showed him to a suite on the second floor. The sitting room had dainty European furniture that might break if someone actually sat on it, the bathroom was bigger than his entire house in Gig Harbor, and the bed could sleep six people. Too bad it didn’t come with a woman.

  The butler bowed slightly. “Mr. Banner will see you in thirty minutes.”

  Blade unpacked a few things, ran his electric razor over his face, and changed into slacks, loafers, and his best pullover sweater. He’d left his only suit at home.

  The butler returned to escort Blade to his grandfather’s room, down the hallway on the other side of the house. The room was massive and the furnishings ornate. It looked like something out of an old gothic movie, beautiful and creepy at the same time.

  “Mr. Banner, your grandson is here to see you,” the butler announced.

  The nurse backed away from the bed and Blade got his first look at his grandfather. He was old and wrinkled, but the blue eyes he stared out of were the same eyes Blade saw in the mirror every morning. He felt an instant connection to the wizened old man lying in the big bed.

  “Come closer, boy.”

  Blade walked to the side of the big four-poster bed, where the old man stared at him. “So you’re my grandson.” He scanned Blade’s body and rested again on his eyes. “You look like my son, Matthew. How old are you?”

  “Thirty-nine, and you already knew that.”

  The old man’s face crinkled into a smile. “I wish I’d known about you when you were a boy,” the old man said gently. “What kind of work do you do?”

  “Contract work when I can get it, mostly technical writing and training seminars.”

  “You have a college degree?”

  “Yes, sir. I have a BA and an MBA.”

  The old man closed his eyes and breathed deeply, obviously in pain. “They tell me I’m dying.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that,” said Blade.

  His grandfather’s eyes opened. “So am I, but nobody lives forever.”

  The nurse came in and walked to the other side of the bed. “You need to rest now, Mr. Banner. Do you need a pain pill?”

  “Yes. Is my attorney here yet?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Bring Blade back when my attorney gets here.”

  Blade walked toward the door and the old man’s voice pulled him back. “Blade? I’m glad you’re here, son.”

  “So am I.” No man had ever called him son. His father called him ‘the little bastard’ and worse when he drank.

  His grandfather wasn’t exactly what Blade expected. The old guy seemed sharp, a man unafraid to say what he thought. Blade’s father had been a weak man, too weak to stop drinking and too mean to care. Blade was five when his father left, and he still had the scars on his legs and backside where his father hit him with his belt buckle before he left. Sunny gave him bourbon to stop him from screaming.

  It wasn’t the only time she’d poured liquor down his throat.

  <>

  The manager of the temp agency handed Maria Fredricks her final check. “Sorry, Maria. We can’t use you again without losing one of our biggest clients.”

  “But it was a family emergency.”

  “I know, but the attorney is still angry that you bailed out on him in the middle of the job. He said if we didn’t fire you, he’d use a different agency, and we can’t afford to lose his business.”

  The attorney was a rude jerk who didn’t care that Maria’s son had been injured at school. She’d told the attorney she’d come back and finish the job, and he told her not to bother. Maybe she should have called Mom and asked her to take care of Robbie that day, but the kids were her responsibility, not Mom’s.

  She took her paycheck and left. It wasn’t enough to buy groceries, and her car insurance was due next week.

  She drove past the road to her mother’s house and down to the park three miles away. The rain had stopped and she needed to clear her head. Swapping her pumps for walking shoes, she locked the car and walked down the path to the waterfront. The water in Puget Sound was cold and gray, but being near the water calmed her. The past year had been a nightmare—telling Fred she’d given up on their marriage, moving in with Mom, and then the divorce proceedings.

  The cool breeze off the water invigorated her as she walked down the deserted beach. Not many people came down here this time of year, but she needed quiet time.

  If not for her mother giving her and the kids a place to live and taking care of the kids while Maria worked, she didn’t know how she’d get by. She had to work, but good jobs were hard to find in Gig Harbor. There were a few jobs in Seattle, but it was too far to drive every day, and she couldn’t afford to live there. Some of her temp jobs had been in Tacoma, but she spent way too much time sitting in traffic, and she was gone from six in the morning until six or seven in the evening, which didn’t give her any time with her kids.

  As she watched the waves lap and suck at the shore, she prayed that the hard times would pass, that she’d find a decent job, the kids would settle in, and they’d be all right. Thank God for her family. Without them, she didn’t know what she’d do.

  Shivering with the cold and damp, Maria pulled her jacket tighter around her and returned to her car. It was the first week in March, and although Spring would officially be here soon, the icy wind cut through her as though it were mid-January.

  She drove home to find her cousin, Nick, drinking coffee with Mom. Maria gave him a big hug. “Hey, Nick, what’s happening? How’s business?”

  “Business is good, and that’s why I’m here. Max and Company needs a decorator, someone to tell us what to use to finish off the spec homes we’re building. I talked it over with Angelo and Tony, and they said you’d be perfect for the job.”

  “But I’m not a decorator.”

  “You don’t need experience in decorating to do this job, Maria. We need your sense of style and your intuition.”

  He’d created a job for her, and she loved him for it, but she didn’t want his charity. “You don’t need to make work for me, Nick. I’ll find a job.”

  “I know you will, but we need you, Maria. The last decorator we used did a shitty job. You helped me and Cara figure out how to finish our house, and I want you to do the same thing for Max and Company. I figure the job would be part-time, about twenty hours a week, give or take, so you can work it around the kids’ schedules.”

  “If Fred paid child support, part-time would be enough, but you know Fred.”

  “Yeah, I know Fred. Take him to court again. We’ll help you out until you get things settled.”

  She swallowed her pride and accepted the job. The work sounded interesting, and the hours were perfect for a working mother. “Thanks, Nick. I don’t know what I’d do without you.”

  “You’d do fine. Fred was a fool to give you up.”

  Fred hadn’t given her up. She’d given up on him. He’d beaten her down and cheated not with one woman, but with many. If his next wife thought he’d be faithful to her, she’d better think again. Knowing Fred, he was already scoping out his next conquest. If not for the kids, Maria would have left him years ago, but if she had, she wouldn’t have Andy and Jimmy, and she couldn’t imagine life without her two little boys.

  At fourteen, Molly was her oldest, and then came Robbie. He was eleven, with the intelligence of a college freshman. Andy and Jimmy were seven and six. Four kids and no child support. She loved her kids, but if she’d known her marriage would end up like this, she wouldn’t have married so young. She would have waited and built a career, something that paid enough to support herself and her children, and she would have c
hosen her husband more wisely.

  <>

  Maria started her new job the next morning. Thursday mornings, the local real estate agents held their brokers’ opens. She drove around, following the open house signs, and toured the homes along with the agents. Listening to the comments about things the agents liked and didn’t like opened her eyes. They liked some color, but too much strong color drew buyers’ focus away from other aspects of the home. Beige and white were safe, blank slates for buyers to work with. Wood floors got raves, and so did granite and marble in the bathrooms and kitchens. Clean and clutter-free brought the best comments on resale homes.

  She picked up the kids at the bus stop on the way home. After she got them settled with snacks and put the dog out, Maria left the kids with her mother and went to look at the homes Max and Company had under construction now. Two homes were nearly finished, and Nick was right. They definitely needed help. The countertops and cabinets clashed in one house, and the wood cabinets didn’t go with the wood floors in the other one.

  She found her brother, Angelo, in the third house. He’d been working for Nick since the company began four years ago. “Angelo, have you ordered any countertops or cabinets for this house?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Don’t order anything else until I see the samples.”

  “No problem,” said Angelo. “Tony used to do that stuff, and with him in California, Nick gave the job to me. I usually end up with whatever the vendor wants to get rid of. Teresa says I have no taste.”

  Maria laughed a little. “Listen to your wife. I’ll need a list of vendors and what they sell, lead times, and whatever else you think I need to know.”

  Angelo kissed her on the cheek. “I’m glad you’re working with us, Maria.”