Impact (Suncoast Society #32)(53)

Cris unlocked Landry’s door and headed for his own office down the hall. He had the corner office, but it wasn’t as large as Landry’s. Landry had given him the choice. Cris preferred the more panoramic view than Landry’s offered.

He sat down at his desk just as a second voice mail notification came in.

Here we go.

It turned out to be from Santino, his aunt and uncle’s oldest son.

“Hey, Cris, it’s Santino. Please give me a call. I want to talk to you about Sofia’s baby. My wife and I want to adopt her.” He listed his number.

Over my dead body.

Cris jotted the number down anyway.

Whether or not he added it to his blocked list remained to be seen.

The second caller was his mother.

“Cristo, please call me. You cannot raise that child and you know that. Santino and Paula have been trying to have children and can’t. They would be amazing parents, and she should be placed with family. Call me, please.”

What am I, chopped liver?

Oh, wait. To them, I am.

He jotted down her number, which was different than the one he’d remembered. Must be a cell.

He was going to delete the voice mails and then decided to keep them. He might need them.

It was interesting how they’d all written Sofia and him off, until they realized she had a baby they might be interested in and he had custody.

He’d laugh if it wasn’t so sad.

As he looked at the time, he realized it wasn’t even one o’clock yet. Hell, it felt like a week had passed since he’d gotten up that morning.

He received three more calls before four o’clock, one each from Santino, his mom, and his aunt.

He sent them all to voice mail. His mother sounded far more strident in that call. At least his aunt and cousin had sounded reasonably…sane.

Against his better judgment, he called his cousin back. The man answered on the first ring, almost sounding out of breath. “Cris?”

“Hello, Santino.”

“I…” The man faltered. “I want to talk to you about Sofia’s baby.”

“You don’t even know her name.”

“Look, please. Paula and I have tried. They said she can’t have kids. We want to—”

“My wife can’t have children, either,” he said.

There was a long moment of silence.

“What?” Santino finally said. “I thought you were gay?”

“No, I’m bi. That’s what I kept trying to tell you people, and Uncle Gonzalo tried to beat the gayness out of me. If you think I’d let any of you have custody of her, think again. Sofia called me. She reached out to me. I was the only one who’d help her. She went to your mom and dad a few months back. Did they tell you that?”

He hesitated. “No.” Now he sounded uncertain.

“Your parents told me that this morning when I went to break the news. They turned their backs on her then and they knew she was pregnant. What makes you think I’d let a child be raised in that family, huh?”

“Cris, I—”

He knew he shouldn’t let his emotions run away with him, but he couldn’t help it. “We have money, Santino. A whole lot of money. We have a successful company, and my wife works for a movie producer making a good salary. You want to come after me, then bring it. I’d love to have it on official record how your father beat the crap out of me when I was a kid.”

“Don’t paint me with that brush, Cris.”

“Why not? Every one of you except Sofia painted me with one. Well, except Dante. He was decent to me. Did you know he brought Sofia to my high school graduation so she could cheer for me?”

“No, I—”

“Sofia called me. She wanted to change, wanted to get her life together. She gave us custody of the baby to protect her not just from people in her life, but from all of you. She specifically told us that. Especially from your father.”

He went silent again. “She…she did?”

“Yeah. She did. You can ask my attorney if she did. It’s part of the official transcript of the hearing. She told the judge herself she wanted us to have custody so that none of you could get custody.”

“Cris, please. She’s family.”

“Yeah? Well, I’m tired of all of you forgetting that so am I. And so was Sofia, until she became an inconvenience. My attorney’s name is Dale Waters. He’s here in LA. Your attorney can talk to him. Be prepared to spend a lot of money for the privilege, because I’ll tell him to drag it out for years, just for fun.”

Cris punched the button to end the call and fought the urge to slam the phone down onto his desk.

When it immediately rang again from the same number, he sent it to voice mail.

He was done talking with them. He hated feeling the slightest bit guilty about how he’d spoken to them, but it pissed him off that they didn’t give a shit about Sofia until there was something they wanted from her. That she’d been disposable until she was useful.

That he’d been disposable.

Before his father’s death, his mother had tried to argue that the brothers were products of their upbringing, that their mother and father had been raised like that in Spain. That when they moved to the United States, that’s how their children had been raised.