Donovans 03 - Pearl Cove

no money in a room I couldn’t pay for. I couldn’t speak the language. I couldn’t even read the signs. He didn’t come back for six days. I never asked about his family again.”
    Archer hoped the impotent rage he felt didn’t show in any way. That kind of rage was as corrosive as it was useless. Yet he couldn’t dodge a truth that was even more corrosive: by leaving Hannah with Len, he had doomed her as certainly as if he had stripped her naked and sold her on a street corner in Rio.
    He hadn’t been good enough to keep his own attraction to Hannah hidden from Len. That had made her a perfect target, a sideways kind of vengeance for the bastard half brother to take on the legitimate son. And if an innocent girl got chewed up in the process, well, too bad, how sad, and nobody asked to be born anyway. Len sure as hell hadn’t.
    Yet Len hadn’t always been vicious. That was what had hurt Archer then and still hurt him now. All those bittersweet memories of the first few years he had known Len, the quiet conversations about how to size up a man or a situation, his patient demonstration of survival skills, his deep laughter and easy silences, the smile that could melt glaciers, like his brother Lawe’s smile, and Len a blond Viking just like Archer’s other brother Justin . . . Even Len’s way of raking his fingers through his hair was like his father’s, just like Archer’s, a genetic echo rolling down the years between generations.
    “My father didn’t marry Len’s mother,” Archer said neutrally. “Dad was sixteen and in full rebellion against his father, who was a wild man by the name of Robert Donald Donovan. Layla was eight years older than Dad and going for the Donovan bank accounts.”
    “Sixteen.” Hannah’s smile was as bittersweet as Archer’s memories. “Must be something dangerous about that age. I was wild to get away from my parents. I would have done anything, even marry a stranger. Three years later I did.”
    Archer’s mouth turned down at one corner. He knew all about being a teenager and determined to get out from under the old man. The good news was that most kids survived it, and the dumb choices they made. The bad news was that some of them didn’t live and learn.
    He walked back toward the safe, drawn by its massive bulk in the midst of ruin. How like Len to pour concrete and raise steel walls and defy the gods of sea and storm. Had he lived to see his metal roof rolled up like the top of an anchovy tin?
    “Dad wasn’t desperate enough to marry a stranger,” Archer said, probing pools of black with his flashlight. “Life in the Robert Donovan household was loud and overbearing, but it was also warm and full of love. Probably a lot like what I grew up in.”
    “So Layla made her play for the gold ring and got turned down, is that it?”
    “Even if Dad wanted to marry her—and I doubt that he did—he was too young to do it without his father’s permission. Grandfather certainly wasn’t stupid enough to give that permission. Layla thought Dad was nineteen, not sixteen. She was furious. Then she was pregnant and demanding money. When the blood tests came back with Donovan written all over them, my grandfather offered Layla thirty thousand a year until the kid was eighteen, or a cash settlement of a quarter of a million. She took the cash and ran.”
    “And that was that?” Hannah asked from just behind Archer.
    “Until I was born, yes.” He stood on tiptoe and shined the light through a break in the tangle of smashed tables, broken chairs, and other less identifiable debris. “Dad was about twenty-five then. Seeing me grow made him think about the son he had never known. He hired people to track Layla down. It took seven years to find her. She was dying of alcoholism. She didn’t have Len. He had run away.”
    “How old was he?”
    “Fourteen,” Archer said absently. There were scratch marks on the drawers. No surprise there. The vault had taken a hell of a hammering from flying metal chairs, among other things. “Dad started looking for Len. He was still looking when I graduated from college with a lot of language skills and a restlessness that could only be satisfied by roaming.”
    “You found Len.”
    “Did he tell you?”
    “No. I just can’t imagine you not getting what you want.”
    “Imagine it. It happens five times a day.” And it had been happening a hell of a lot more frequently since he had landed in Broome and seen Hannah