The Billionaire's Twin Fever (MANHATTAN BACHELORS Book 1) Page 6

  “Uh… okay. I guess…” she trailed off, turning away from him and taking a few steps before she paused and looked over her shoulder at him doubtfully.

  He shook his head again and, with his hand on her back, ushered her toward the door. “No time to argue or worry about it. Let’s go. Come on. You can buy me lunch sometime for doing this for you.” He pressed her forward, and she went, walking in a daze toward her office to get her things.

  Minutes later, she was seated beside Kyle in his Tesla as they zipped through the streets and intersections on the way to her home. “I still think we should have taken my car.” She frowned, and he answered without looking back at her.

  “Why? It’s a safe bet that my car is faster, and you can take it to the appointment with Flanders. Come back and get me when you’re done, and we’ll go from there.” He was nonchalant, as if it wasn’t even a question in his mind that his car was the better option.

  Aleisha was still too surprised to say much of anything else. She looked out of the window and watched the city fly past her. She didn’t know what to say about Cara needing to leave so suddenly, or Kyle watching her babies, or her even driving his top of the line sports car to her meeting with a bus driver. It felt like her life had been in order that morning, and now, not one thing was the way that it was supposed to be. It was chaotic, as if she had suddenly fallen down a rabbit hole and everything had gone topsy turvy.

  They pulled up to the building where she lived, and he looked up at it and frowned. “You live here?” he said quietly as they got out of the car and headed into the main door.

  Feeling a little insulted by his astonishment, she gave him a narrow look. “Yes, I live here.”

  He looked a little sorry for having said it the way that he had. “I didn’t mean it like… I just meant that it’s so… small,” he finished uncomfortably.

  She lowered a brow and felt an edge come up inside of her. “I’m a single mother living within my means. This is the best I can do for myself and my kids right now. I’m hoping that will change in the future, and I’m willing to work hard for it, but for now, this is what I can do.”

  He nodded and looked down. “I didn’t mean to sound condescending. I’m sorry if I did. I’m just surprised, that’s all. I thought you’d be living somewhere with more room, you know, having two babies…” his voice grew soft, and she looked away from him.

  “Well, maybe with this new promotion, I can afford to make that change in the near future, but not right now. Right now, this is the best I can do.” She unlocked the apartment door, and they walked in.

  Cara was an emotional mess, and after a quick hug from Aleisha, she went straight out of the door. Aleisha sighed and turned to look at Kyle, who was taking in nearly every detail of the interior of her apartment.

  “Well, I guess we should introduce you.” She walked over to the playpen in the living room and lifted her daughter up. Hailey was dressed in a little, red jumpsuit that reached to her ankles and had straps over her shoulders. She wore a little, white blouse beneath it and a small, red barrette in her soft, curly, dark hair.

  Hailey grinned and squealed, happy to be held, happy to play, and happy to meet the man who was standing before her, staring at her as if he had never seen a child before in his life. Kyle reached his hands out for her slowly, taking her into his arms and moving his eyes all over her face and her small form, almost like he was memorizing every single thing about her and about the moment.

  “Hailey…” he said quietly as a smile grew over his face. “It’s wonderful to meet you.” He touched the tip of his finger to soft chubby cheek, and she giggled and reached for him, wrapping her tiny fingers around his forefinger.

  Aleisha watched him incredulously. He was completely taken with Hailey, and she got the distinct impression that he was going to do just fine with the babies. She lifted Harry from the playpen and held him in her arms. He was wearing a matching jumpsuit and a button-up white shirt with a slender, little, red bow tie at the neck. He wriggled and giggled, clapping his hands and touching his mother’s face with delight.

  “This is Harry,” Aleisha said with a widening smile as she turned toward Kyle. He grinned as he reached his hand out to the baby boy. Harry grabbed onto his hand and pulled it straight toward his mouth.

  “Oh, be careful. He’s teething. He’ll bite you,” Aleisha warned Kyle with an apologetic laugh. Kyle shook his head subtly.

  “I’m not worried at all about that. He can bite me if he needs to. I’m sure cutting teeth is painful.” He gazed at the boy and laughed softly, his blue eyes studying everything about the baby with utter delight.

  Aleisha chuckled quietly. “Well, I never would have guessed.” She watched him and the babies as they got to know each other, and he took Harry from her with his other arm and sat down on the sofa with them both, looking from one to the other and then back again.

  “You never would have guessed what?” he asked distractedly, his attention solely on the two little ones in his arms. Hailey was cuddling up against him, and Harry was climbing all over him and inspecting his face and his necktie and shirt.

  She shook her head. “I never would have guessed that you’d be a natural with kids. They like you. That’s… that’s just totally unexpected, and it’s a nice surprise. I wasn’t sure what to think about leaving them with you, but it looks like the three of you are going to get along alright.”

  “We’re going to be perfectly fine, aren’t we, guys?” he looked from Harry to Hailey and then finally turned his face up to Aleisha.

  She laughed. “Alright, well, their diapers and changing things are in their room. There’s a changing table in there. Their extra clothes are in there. There’s food for them on the top shelf in the refrigerator. They usually eat around one, and they’ll go down for a nap in their cribs after they eat. When they wake up, they’ll need a diaper change. I guess…” she watched them all playing with each other, “I guess that’s about it.”

  She could not believe that she was watching her boss get along so sweetly with her precious babies. It was as if the rabbit hole she had fallen into had no end in sight. Nothing was believable, even though she was looking at it and watching it happen right before her eyes.

  “Go on, get to your appointment. We’re going to be fine. Don’t you worry about us.” He reached into his coat pocket and pulled out his car keys, tossing them gently to her. “Enjoy the car.”

  Aleisha stood stunned for one more moment as she tried to wrap her head around what she was looking at, but finally, she took a deep breath and turned, walking out of the door and smiling to herself at what a strange turn everything had taken.

  Kyle leaned his face close to each of the babies and smiled at them. Hailey’s smile wavered as she looked at the door and then back at him, and then once more at the door, realizing that Aleisha had left them. Her smile turned upside down, and she began to cry, brokenhearted that her mother had left.

  As Kyle rubbed her small back and tried to soothe her, Harry clamored across his lap and up his chest, hiccupped, and then promptly threw up all over the front of Kyle’s tie, shirt, vest, and suit. Kyle looked down at his chest, covered in everything that had just left Harry’s stomach, and then he looked back up at the small boy.

  “This is a tailored Armani suit,” he began, but then he chuckled a little and shook his head as he rubbed Hailey’s back. “You know what? It’s okay. I have ten more just like this one.”

  It took Aleisha a few miles in the Tesla before she got even a little comfortable driving it. It wasn’t anything like her car at all, and it was nerve-wracking to her that the model she was driving was worth more than she made in a year, or at least more than she had been making. She had gotten a healthy raise when she had been promoted, but it still didn’t ease her mind about driving something as expensive as the wheel at her hands.

  She wound her way through the buzzing streets from her home to Jeremy Flander’s home in New Jersey. He lived on a quiet and h
umble street in a modest neighborhood. All of the cars were old, sitting on the street or in people’s driveways, some of them obviously junked but kept in the yard. The houses were worn down and had aged roughly. She felt as far out of place as she possibly could have, being there in the shiny, red Tesla she was driving, and she chastised herself for not insisting on taking her own car. Her vehicle would have fit in much better in Mr. Flander’s neighborhood.

  She parked in front of his house and looked around her closely as she locked the car and faced the home before her. It was a single-story home with two windows on the front framing either side of the old door. There was a scraggly-looking front yard that was more weeds than grass and still held much of the brown lawn from the year before. There was a driveway with an old Ford pickup truck in it and an open garage with a tired looking Dodge car parked inside.

  Taking her bag up on her shoulder, she straightened her pantsuit and walked up the sidewalk to the front door. She knocked a few times, but there was no answer. Frowning, she turned and walked toward the garage, wondering if he might be hidden in the dark depths of it, working on something.

  “Mr. Flanders?” she called out loudly. “Mr. Flanders?”

  A moment later, a man’s face slid out from beneath the car that was parked in the garage. He looked up at her, and she saw the grease smudges on his cheeks and forehead, while the rest of his face was covered with a beard and a moustache.

  “Yeah?” he asked, moving his eyes over her as he sized her up.

  “I’m Aleisha Kingston. I’m from Carrington, Peterson, Jansen, and Drake,” she said with a light smile.

  He frowned. “Oh… the lawyer.” Sliding back under the car, she was left alone in silence for a long moment.

  “Is this a good time to talk?” she asked, wondering what he was doing.

  “Yeah, I’ll be out in a minute. I just need to tighten this. Give me a second,” he called out from somewhere beneath the filthy, old engine block he was working on.

  She stood and waited patiently. A few minutes later, he slid back out from beneath the car and pushed himself up off of the creeper board that he had been lying on under the vehicle. Standing up, he pulled an old dirty rag from the back pocket of his coveralls and wiped his hands on it in an attempt to clean them, though the rag did little to remove any of the grime from his skin.

  He reached his hand out to her, and Aleisha ignored the grease and dirt and took his hand in hers, shaking it. “Thank you for taking the time to meet with me. I appreciate it. I can see that you’re busy, so I won’t stay too long. Is there somewhere that we could sit down and visit?”

  She kept her voice professional and friendly, and she hoped that he could detect the sincerity in her.

  “Yeah,” he nodded, looking away from her as he made another attempt at wiping his hands off again. “We can go in the house.”

  She followed him out of the garage and up the steps to the front door of the house. His living room was simply furnished. He had a couch, two chairs, and a worn coffee table that was spotted with water rings from glasses and mugs that had been left there over long periods of time. There were a few cigarette burns on it and a full ashtray of cigarette butts sitting at one end of it, beside the fatigued chair that was obviously his favorite.

  He turned to look at her, expressionless. “Can I get you anything to drink?”

  “No, I’m fine, thank you.” She gave him a smile and a nod. He disappeared into the kitchen and came back a minute later with a beer in his hand. He cracked it open and sank down into his chair, nodding to her to sit on the sofa near him. She did.

  “Mr. Flanders,” she began, but he looked up at her and gave his head a little shake.

  “Just call me Jeremy,” he said flatly.

  “Okay, thank you. Jeremy, there’s another family in the lawsuit that is refusing to sign the settlement, like you are, because they say that the company is aware of problems with their bus line, but they’re refusing to do anything about it. They’re turning a blind eye. That sounds sort of like what you were telling me on the phone. What is your reason for not signing the settlement?” she asked, hoping to get answers out of him without leading him too much.

  He furrowed his brow and took a long swig from his beer. “They’re liars. They aren’t taking care of anything. That other family is right. The company is turning a blind eye. I was with them a long time, and I know what’s going on there. I seen it. The brakes are bad on all of their buses, and they won’t get ‘em fixed. They’re too damn cheap to keep up the maintenance on their bus line. They aren’t worried about the safety of their passengers or their employees.”

  She listened quietly and reached for the pen and notebook in her bag, jotting down everything that he was telling her. He didn’t seem to mind that she was writing, because he kept right on talking.

  “They knew that the brakes they were using weren’t good, and they kept on using them. They didn’t change them, even after the last three wrecks.” He scowled and took another long pull off of his beer.

  Aleisha looked at him in surprise. “Three wrecks?” she asked as she lifted a brow.

  Jeremy turned his eyes back to her. “Yeah. Three wrecks in the last year, all of them from brakes. Four wrecks the year before that. Go back every single year, and you’re going to find multiple wrecks each year, and all of them are due to bad brakes... Bunch of white collar idiots. You’d think they’d figure out that it’s cheaper to just put new brakes on the buses than to keep paying people off every year. Except I guess maybe that’s what the insurance company keeps doing, and they just keep letting the insurance company pay it, so it doesn’t really come out of their pocket.” He twisted his face in disgust.

  “They don’t care about anything but money.” He lifted his beer and pointed it at Aleisha as he continued to talk. “All us drivers knew that we were driving a gamble. It was gonna be one or another of us at some point. I just happened to be driving that day. The brakes got soft, and I knew what was coming. I had a hunch. I hoped I could make it back to the station after that route, but the brakes gave out, and I had no way to stop the bus. There was nothing that I could do.”

  He looked down at his other arm, and for the first time since Aleisha had met Jeremy, she noticed that it hadn’t moved. It had been still the entire time, slightly bent at the elbow, his fingers still as if he had been relaxed.

  “Lost the use of this arm in that wreck. Can’t do a damn thing with it now, or with my hand. Can’t be fixed. Going to have to spend the rest of my life like this. You think that company cared about me or my arm? No way. You want to know what they did? They fired me and blamed me for the wreck. I was a model employee for them. I drove for them for ten years, and look at me now, sitting here on my ass, working on cars.” He lifted his beer and pointed it at the far wall.

  She looked up and saw a row of plaques, ten in total, all of them covered in layers of dust with gold ink on the papers beneath the musty glass. “You see them? Those are awards. Special commendations that the company gave me every year for being a model employee. I showed up every day. I never called in sick. I did everything they asked me to, everything by the book. Then, when this wreck happened, they fired me immediately. No letter of recommendation.

  “You know how hard it is to get another job after you been at the same one for a decade and you don’t have a letter of recommendation? It’s impossible. No one wants to hire you when you come off a decade of work with nothin’ in your hand to show what kind of work you done.”

  He shook his head sadly and finished off his beer, partially trying to cover a burp. “Pardon,” he said quietly as he cracked open the second can. “Then that lawsuit came up, and I joined it, thinking it might be at least something to go right with all of it, but then I saw what they were offering everyone. It’s an insult. It’s a joke. They’re offering everyone scraps for what we all went through. There were two people killed on that bus that day. I bet you seen that in your file. They were killed. An
old lady and a young girl.”

  Tears formed at the corners of his eyes. “I tried to help them. I did what I could until the ambulance got there, but it was too late. They couldn’t be saved.” He was staring off into space, into the past. “You ever seen someone die, Aleisha? You ever held on to someone, begging and pleading with them to live just long enough for the ambulance to get there, and they die in your arms, and there’s not a damn thing you can do?” He turned his gaze and looked up at her then.

  She felt her stomach tighten, and a wave of nausea came over her. “No, Jeremy. I’ve never been through anything like that, but I did lose my parents in a car accident, and I know what it’s like to lose someone who means everything to you. I can’t imagine what you went through, and what you’re still going through. We didn’t know about all these other accidents. We didn’t know about the company ignoring the brake issues.”