Stepbrother Bad Boy's Baby Boxed Set(52)

Thankfully I didn't have to wait long, as the door to the room opened and Dwayne came in. He looked at me and knelt next to me, holding a cup in his hand. "Slow now. If you'd been out much longer I was going to call 911, regardless of if you'd ended up in the society pages again or not."

He wet my lips with a damp sponge, and I sucked water from it like a baby. It was glorious, the best thing I'd ever drunk in my life, and I nodded gratefully once he took it away. "How long?" I finally asked once the moisture hit my throat and I could form words again. "It's still dark, I can't have been out too long."

"It's dark because you've been out twenty seven hours," Dwayne said quietly. "Just be glad Erica and Liz aren't around, you'd have woken up in the hospital either way. Now rest, have some more water, and we'll talk in the morning."

He gave me the cup, with a flexible straw sticking out of the top, and raised my head to put a cushion more comfortably underneath it. "Thank you Dwayne. But why?"

"Tomorrow, man. Relax, go back to sleep, and we'll talk then. Don't worry, I'll check on you during the night, you'll have plenty of water and anything else you need."

Considering I'd been unconscious for over a whole day, there should have been no reason I'd go back to sleep. But as soon as I finished the cup of water and closed my eyes, I slipped back to sleep, and although my dreams were of heartbreak and sadness, I still slept until the next morning.



* * *



Julian



"So what the hell were you doing going all Castaway on Miami Beach, man?" Dwayne asked the next day. He'd brought me a very simple breakfast of fruits and watery oatmeal, both because my body needed the fluids still, and because he was worried I'd vomit anything stronger. "Seriously, you looked like a homeless guy there, with your bag on the sand next to you, your eyes blinded almost, and as red as a lobster."

I slowly chewed at the piece of mango that was currently on my fork, swallowing carefully before answering. "I think I was trying to kill myself," I said. "I don't really know, I was just kind of walking until I gave out."

Dwayne sat across from me in the dining room, still carefully studying me. I was wearing a pair of shorts and a t-shirt from my bag, both of which hung on my body. I'd probably lost close to twenty pounds in the three days since I'd left Castelbon Manor, mostly water weight though, and my hands still shook slightly from the effort of trying to feed myself. "So what happened? This isn't the same Julian that I knew years ago."

I thought back to soon after I'd left college for the second time. Wanting to get away again, I'd flown to the Virgin Islands, where I'd met Dwayne Forrester. The youngest son of the Forrester Hotel empire, he and I had hit it off well, with a lot of second hand familiar connections. He was a few years older than me, and we formed a kind of mentor-apprentice friendship. We'd spent close to three months partying it up among the islands, hopping from place to place probably about two steps ahead of the local constabulary. "Yeah, Curacao was pretty wild, wasn't it?"

Dwayne nodded and gave me a ghost of a grin. "And Trinidad, and Maracaibo, and St. Kitts, and Santiago. Hell, by the end of it I was wondering if we were just going to become a pair of buccaneers and start raiding the Spanish Main again."

"Well, we did plunder quite a few bootys," I joked, feeling a bit of strength return. "Although I don't remember who got more."

"Doesn't really matter," he replied. "But what's up with you now? I mean, I've read your name from time to time, you seem to have kept your penchant for getting yourself in trouble."

I nodded. "Yeah, I have at that. Meanwhile, the little I've read about you has been nothing but good news. Congratulations on taking over the Forrester chain. By the way, what's this about Erica and Liz? Is your sister living with you or something?"

Dwayne shook his head and got up, getting a photo from the kitchen. "Here, take a look."

I looked at the simple snapshot, and was blown away. The woman with Dwayne was tall, easily five ten, and beautiful in a lot of the same ways Krystal is. Their bodies weren't at all alike, Krystal being shorter and more voluptuous, but they both had a quality to their eyes that told me she was a good person. Held between them was a precious little girl that looked maybe a year old, I wasn't too sure. "You're married?"

"I am," Dwayne told me, a huge grin on his face. "The picture's a little old, but that's Liz in between me and Erica."

I shook my head in disbelief. "Wow man. You found yourself a beautiful woman too. Just your type, tall, leggy.... she looks like she should be a model or something."

"Would you believe she was? She then went into designing, and we met through a fashion show in London. There were a lot of bumps along the road, but we found happiness together. Now that you look a little more like a human being, I wish she and Liz were in town. But, they're overseas in France right now. I'd be with them, but I have a quarterly shareholders meeting I have to go to tomorrow, and frankly I can't miss that. I'm flying to Paris the day after tomorrow though."

"I see. Wow, you've got your life on the right track. Jesus," I said, before the enormity of my crisis crashed down on me. I sat there, emotion choking my throat so that I could barely even make a noise, and told Dwayne everything. I had to give it to him, he didn't once interrupt me or look at me in any way that would make me think he was being disparaging towards what I'd laid out. Instead, he waited until my words trickled off, making sure I was done.