The Bravo Billionaire Part 18

"Yep."

"Well, what do you know?"

She leaned over and kissed him. He kissed her back and that led where it usually led to soft moans and tender sighs.

They had breakfast together out on the loggia, the long roofed gallery not far from the pool. And at ten, they took Mandy and left for the zoo. The weather was perfect the kind of weather L.A. has always been famous for, bright and beautiful, the temperature in the low seventies.

Mandy had a ball. She rode on Jonas's shoulders a lot of the day, pointing and crowing in delight as she recognized the various animals. "Oh, look! Giraffe! See that? Monkeys!"

The best part of the zoo trip was what didn't happen. No one seemed to recognize them. Or if anyone did, they behaved like civilized human beings and respected their privacy. Not a single shutter-happy reporter stuck a camera in their faces the entire day.

They got back to Angel's Crest at a little after three. Mandy had fallen asleep in the car, so they took her right up to the nursery and turned her over to Claudia.

Jonas had a few things to deal with at Bravo, Incorporated, things that just couldn't wait another day. "If I'm lucky, I can get back by nine or so tonight."

Emma kissed him and told him she'd be waiting for him, whatever time he returned.

* * * He entered her rooms at nine on the nose. She had ordered a light supper for them. They ate and then they showered together, ending up making very wet love under the shower spray.

Jonas fell asleep in Emma's arms some time after midnight .

Some time after that, the dream came for him.

He woke as he always did when the dream got him sitting bolt upright, the sweat streaming off of him, shouting the word, "No!"

Chapter 15.

" J onas?" Emma was sitting up beside him. His heart was beating like a trip-hammer. He could not breathe.

"Jonas, what is it?"

He shoved her gentle hand away, threw back the sheet and jumped from the bed.

"Jonas..."

With superhuman effort, he tried to suck in air. It was like breathing through a flattened straw. Relax, he thought. Easy. It's all in your mind...

He bent at the waist, put his hands on his thighs, waited for his windpipe to open or to pa.s.s out.

All in your mind. Bad dream. Not real...

Still, his windpipe felt smashed flat. He sank to his knees. If he was going to lose consciousness, the closer to the floor the better.

Slowly, over a period of seconds that felt like years, his windpipe began to relax. The air started getting in. He sucked in one slow, careful breath. And then another.

All right. It appeared that he would not pa.s.s out this time, after all.

Carefully, he straightened to his height.

Emma was standing, very still, about two feet from him. He hadn't even heard her leave the bed.

"Better?" she asked softly.

He managed a nod and concentrated on the job of drawing one breath after another. It got easier with each one.

She waited, standing so still, naked as he was, her body like a white flame in the darkness, until he could breathe close to normally again.

Then she asked, "What can I get for you?"

He could smell himself the sour, cornered-animal smell of pure terror. His skin was still clammy with it, with nightmare sweat. "Shower," he croaked in a voice not his own.

"I'll get the water goin'." She turned and left him.

As soon as he was certain his legs wouldn't give out on him, he followed her. She had the water running. When he entered the bathroom, she pulled open the shower door. Welcoming steam billowed out. He got in there, in the heat and the steam, let the water cascade over him, even drank a few gulps of it, to ease his shredded throat.

When he got out, she was waiting with a towel. She dried him, ma.s.saging as she wiped the water away. By the time she was done, he felt almost human again.

"Come on." She took his hand, led him back to the bed. The Yorkies were there, sitting among the tangled sheets, looking up at them, tails thumping out a hopeful rhythm. They never gave up trying to reclaim the privilege of sleeping with Emma. Inevitably, they headed straight for the bed any time it was vacant.

Emma clicked her tongue. Droopy-eared and downcast, they rose on all fours to jump down.

"h.e.l.l," he said. "All right. They can stay but I don't want them on top of me."

Two sets of ears perked up. Emma sent him a tender smile and then snapped her fingers. The dogs moved to either corner at the end of the bed, each of them walking in a circle and then settling down, noses resting on front paws, eyes bright and grateful under all the eyebrow fringe.

Emma got into the bed and so did he. She settled the sheet over them and pulled him close, guiding his head to rest on her b.r.e.a.s.t.s. She stroked his hair.

"You want to talk about it?" She kissed his brow.

He started to answer no automatically, but the word stopped itself somewhere short of sound.

For the first time in thirty years, he found he did want to talk about it.

He moved back a little, so he wasn't resting right on top of her anymore. But he kept his hand on her, fingers wrapped around her ribcage, arm resting across the lower part of her chest, right under her b.r.e.a.s.t.s. It felt good, as always, to be touching her.

"It's a nightmare I've been having on and off, since the kidnapping. I know it has something to do with the kidnapping I believe it actually is the kidnapping. That I relive it, in the dream."

She asked gently, "You believe?"

"I can't say for sure. When I wake up, I don't remember what the nightmare was. I hear myself shouting the word, No. And then, once the word is out, I can't breathe. I run sweat. You saw it..."

She turned on her side. He moved his arm to accommodate her, sliding his hand down a little until it lay in the cove of her waist. She reached up, stroked the hair at his temple. "That's the real reason you sleep alone, isn't it? You don't want anyone to see you, to see what it's like for you, how awful it is for you. You think it makes you look weak."

"I don't just think it, Emma. It's a fact. I am weak, when the dream gets me." He was a little stunned he had said it, that he'd admitted it out loud.

But he had. And the world hadn't ended.

Emma was watching him tenderly, her palm resting against the side of his face. "If you could remember the dream, then you would be remembering what happened that night, right?"

"Could be. But I've learned not to get my hopes up." He took her hand, kissed it, twined his fingers with hers. "Tell me something."

"Anything."

"How much do you know about the kidnapping, anyway?"

She lifted her shoulder in a shrug. "Blythe used to talk about it sometimes. About how awful it was, about the terrible effects it had on your family."

"But I mean the specifics of what happened. Do you know that I went into my brother's room that night, that somehow I was knocked unconscious?"

"Yes. I know that."

"Apparently, I fought. There were bruises, on my arms and legs, over my ribs. And on my neck."

"As if someone had tried to strangle you ... and don't you think maybe that explains why, when you have that dream, you wake up and you can't breathe?"

"It's more than possible. But I don't remember. I don't remember a d.a.m.n thing about that night. And I've been questioned by the best, believe me, by what seemed like a never-ending chain of police detectives and police psychologists. And after the police were through with me, there were all the specialists my parents hired to try to pry open my mind and get to the secrets locked away in there everything from psychiatrists to hypnotists to a few fringe types who claimed to have psychic powers. Nothing worked."

"But Jonas, you do want to remember. Some part of you must. Some part of you has been tryin' to remember for thirty years."

"Maybe so. But the fact remains that I don't remember. And whoever took my brother didn't make many mistakes. The police never found any real evidence that they could use to track down whoever did it. Whoever it was broke the lock on the door to the east entry, apparently got up the servants' stairway there and got in to the nursery without being spotted. It wasn't that far, just a few feet down the hall once the kidnapper made it up the stairs. And then it would have been so easy, to go back by the same route. I was the only glitch in the plan. And not that much of glitch, the way it turned out. A good whack on the side of the head, and my memory of what happened was wiped out."

"Not completely wiped out. Just ... trapped inside your head."

"We a.s.sume. We don't even know that for certain, since I never remember the dream. It could be about something else altogether."

"You don't believe that."

"No. No, I don't."

She gently pulled her fingers from his. "It sounds like the kidnapper had been in the house before, knew where to go in, the straightest way to the nursery..."

"Yes, it does. Or maybe he or she or they bribed a servant. Though I have to say that the police found no evidence to that effect. And to open up a whole new chain of possibilities, there had been a piece in Gracious Homes magazine just a few months before, a ten-page spread on Angel's Crest including the basic floor plan and lots of pictures. It's possible that the kidnapper could have gotten enough information from that to get in and get to the nursery without being caught."

"Oh, Jonas. Any one of those explanations makes sense."

"That's what I'm telling you. We have never even gotten close to learning who took my brother, who claimed two million in diamonds as a ransom and then never brought him back to us."

"Two million in diamonds," Emma whispered in a musing tone.

"That's right. No one ever saw them again, either."

"What about the nanny I'm a.s.suming you and your brother had one?"

"We did. Like Claudia does now, she slept in a room right next to the baby's room. The police interrogated her. Extensively. They got nothing from her but tears and remorse that she didn't wake up when the whole thing went down."

Emma traced his eyebrows, one and then the other, and idly asked, "You've moved the nursery, since then?"

"h.e.l.l yes. We use those rooms for storage, have ever since we accepted the fact that Russell wasn't coming back."

"Russell," she repeated his brother's name softly. "Blythe said he was a good baby, big and healthy. That he had a cute little cleft in his chin..."

"Yeah," he said, not wanting to go any farther along that line. He didn't remember much about his baby brother. And what he did remember hurt. It was all loss and emptiness. Darkness. Fear. And in the end, a deep and abiding certainty that he should have done better, he should have done something to keep his brother safe.

He knew it was cla.s.sic stuff, that a six-year-old kid couldn't be expected to hold his own against an adult criminal with a two-million-dollar ransom on his or her mind. But unfortunately, what logic told him didn't go all that far toward allowing him to forgive himself.

Emma put her finger on the tip of his chin. "You have it, too. That cute cleft right here."

"FYI, a man is not thrilled when a woman calls him cute.""Oh, well, Jonas, whatever you say, especially since you are the most manly man...""That's better and it runs in the family.""Manliness?" She touched the groove in his chin a second time. "Or do you mean this cleft?"

He grunted. "My father had it. And I have a certain second cousin, met him in Wyoming years and years ago. Name's Zach. He's got it or he did when I was five and he was, oh about eight or nine, I guess..."

"I didn't know you had a cousin in Wyoming ."

"What? Something my mother didn't share with you?"

"That's right. Tell me about your Wyoming cousin."

"Cousins. Plural. My great-great-grandfather homesteaded there, in northeastern Wyoming . Near a little town called Medicine Creek. The original homesteader's cabin is still on the ranch or at least it was, when I was five. We only visited once, before Russell was born. I think we planned to go back, but then, well, life got pretty tough for the L.A. branch of the family. Somehow, years have gone by. Haven't been back yet."

"So your great-great-grandfather..."

"Had a son."

"Who had a son, who-"

"Uh-uh. My great-grandfather had four sons. Ross, Gregory, Jonas and James. Ross, who had a few sons of his own, stayed in Wyoming . The other three didn't. Can't tell you off-hand what happened to James. I think that Gregory ended up in northern California . He had a son, who had a son, who had two daughters. Maybe you remember that Blythe heard from one of those daughters not too long ago?"

Green eyes gleamed. "I do remember. Jenna's her name. Blythe told me all about her."

"What a surprise."

She went on, undaunted by his teasing. "Blythe said that Jenna even went to school here, at UCLA. And Jenna's sister lived in Los Angeles for a few years, too. But they didn't even realize they were kin to the L.A. Bravos. The connection had been broken over the years, Blythe said."

"My mother was an only child of older parents. She didn't have much family. I think she wanted to reestablish connections with the other branches of the Bravo family, especially the past few years."

"She and Jenna were plannin' to meet, weren't they? But then Blythe got so sick..."

"Death can do that. Really gets in the way."

She wrapped her hand around the back of his neck and threaded her fingers into his hair. "You have been doin' so well. Don't go gettin' cynical on me. Please..."

How the h.e.l.l could a man resist a request like that? For an answer, he moved his head close enough that he could kiss the tip of her nose.