The Alpha Billionaire's Unexpected Baby: A Billionaire BWWM Pregnancy Romance

by Joanna Jacobs

  “Really?”

  “Yes, really.” Mary-Ann shook her head. “I’ve been dating Robert O’Connor for the last couple of months.”

  “If I was to ask him he’d confirm that?”

  “He would.”

  “The last time Kevin and I spoke about you he told me he thought he might have finally convinced you to give things another try. I believed him, because I didn’t think it was possible he’d be lying to me, but, if you really are dating Robert O’Connor…” Peter ran his tongue over his bottom lip. “Obviously I was wrong.”

  “Who could it have been, Peter?”

  “I don’t know. If I did I would tell D.I. O’Connor, because I want to know who killed Kevin as much as you do, and I honestly thought it was you or Sally.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Surely you can understand why I would think that.”

  “I can understand, but I thought we knew each other well enough for you to wonder if I was the sort of person who would do something like that. Especially as it was Kevin. There was no reason for me to hurt him.”

  “Unless the two of you really were getting to the point where you might be getting back together. Him still being with Sally could have been the problem, which would be why the two of you were arguing, and it would have been easy enough for you to poison the cake.”

  “Yes, it would, but how was I meant to know Kevin would be the first to take a bite. There’s a chance it could have been one of the other judges and if it had been…”

  She shrugged. “It would have made the whole thing for nothing, and I would plan things out better if I really was going to kill someone.”

  Mary-Ann looked over at Darren and Kelly. “Do you think Sally could have killed Kevin?”

  “I don’t know.” Darren brushed a hand through his hair as he glanced at Kelly. “She seems like she’s in shock. If she was the one to kill Kevin I don’t think she’d be reacting that way, but then she might be a good enough actor to be able to make it appear as though she wasn’t the person who killed him.”

  “Anything is possible.” Her eyes met with Kelly’s. “Can either of you think of anyone else who might have wanted to hurt Kevin, because I can’t? I did think there was a chance it might have been his mom, but apparently she’s dead, which means that’s an impossibility.”

  “Does he have any siblings?”

  “Not that I know of, Kelly, but then there’s a chance he didn’t know about them either. His mom…” Talking about the woman was still hard, even though she wasn’t keeping it all to herself for Kevin. “She was an addict and it’s possible there was another child, one she had after she left Kevin’s dad. That’s something only Alex will be able to find out.”

  “Unless you find out who was calling Kevin, and then we call the same number to find out who it belongs to.”

  “There are no guarantees the person he was arguing with is the same person who killed him.” Mary-Ann shook her head. “At least with Paul we knew it had to be one of us. With Kevin… it could have been anyone at the show, but I still can’t think of anyone who might have wanted to hurt him, because everyone liked him.”

  “If someone really did think you were the one calling Kevin, and they believed the two of you were getting closer to becoming a couple again, there is one person who could be seen as a suspect.” Darren studied her. “Rob could have killed him.”

  Laughing, Mary-Ann shook her head. “I think everyone would know better than to think that.” She sobered. “Very few people know Rob and I are dating, because we don’t want people talking about us.” She knew they would, because they didn’t have anything better to do than gossip. “Kevin knew. I told him when it first happened, the same way he told me about Sally, and he was happy for me.”

  “Was he really happy for you?” Kelly sighed. “Is there a chance he might have taken poison so you’d be arrested for murder?”

  “No.” Both Mary-Ann and Darren spoke at the same time. “Kevin wasn’t that sort of person.” Mary-Ann looked at the coffee table. “I don’t believe he was that sort of person, anyway, and there was no way he could have known he’d be the first to try my cake. No one should have known which cake was which, apart from Sally and I, because we baked them.”

  ***

  Realising no one would have known which cake was which made it hard for Mary-Ann to sleep. That meant there were two possibilities. Someone had picked a random cake, and it was purely bad luck they’d chosen hers, which was the most logical option. Or Sally had been the one to poison the cake, but then there was a chance she would have hurt Kevin. It seemed unlikely she’d be willing to put someone she cared about in danger. If Kevin hadn’t been judging the cakes, in place of his father… maybe that was it. No, it couldn’t be. The cakes couldn’t have been poisoned until the day and that was when they found out Kevin was the one judging the cakes. Kevin, and two other people, who were both liked as much as Kevin, so it made it even less likely someone would have been willing to hurt them.

  Sighing, Mary-Ann rolled onto her side. As she did her phone rang and she answered it without stopping to check who it was. “I hate this.”

  “I know, Sal. I hate it too.”

  “Who would have wanted to kill Kevin?”

  “That’s a question I don’t have an answer to yet, but I’m going to find out who did it. He was getting phone calls from someone. Peter and Jack thought it was me, because Kevin said that, and I know it wasn’t.”

  “He’d get phone calls when he was with me, and he told me you were the one calling him. I thought the two of you were planning something, the way you used to at school, so I didn’t think anything of it. I knew how close the two of your still were and it wasn’t an impossibility the two of you would be planning a party together. As my birthday’s coming up I didn’t want to ask too many questions, just in case…” Sally sniffed. “Obviously he wasn’t planning a surprise party for me.”

  “Actually, he was, but we’d do that when he came into the shop. We thought it was less suspicious. I wouldn’t have told you about it, but I want you to know he did care enough about you to do that.” Mary-Ann wasn’t going to say anything about the ring, because that would just hurt her more. “If you want we can still go through with it, as a memorial to Kevin.”

  From the sounds on the other end of the phone it seemed like Sally was crying. “I would like that.” She sniffed again. “That does mean we still have those phone calls. I never paid too much attention to his phone, but I do know the password for his email account. I gave it to the police, but if you think it would help we could have a look together tomorrow.”

  “It would, I think.” Mary-Ann smiled. “Thank you for making the offer.”

  “The sooner we find out who killed Kevin the better it will be for everyone involved.”

  ***

  Sally and Mary-Ann sat next to each other in front of her computer. “They still have Kevin’s laptop, because they’re going through everything as carefully as possible. I like D.I. O’Connor.”

  “He’s a good man.” Mary-Ann smiled. “He has a difficult job, though, so there have been times when it got the better of him.”

  “When I first talked to him he mentioned the mistakes he made in Paul’s case and promised me he wasn’t going to make the same mistakes again. He’s going to look into everything, instead of putting blinkers on.”

  “The fact he even mentioned that is a good sign.” Their eyes met. “Let’s do this.”

  “Okay.” Sally turned to the computer and tapped in a password. When Mary-Ann watched her do it she realised Kevin hadn’t changed his password in the entire time they’d been apart. “I never wanted to have to do this, but Kevin gave me his passwords in case something happened to him. He said he was worried about accidents, because there’s no way of knowing what might happen, and now I can’t help wondering if he knew this might happen. Could he have known there was someone out there who was willing to poison him?”

  “I don’t know
. Kevin isn’t someone I would have believed was lying to both the woman he loved and his closest friends about who was calling him, so now I find myself wondering what he did and didn’t know. I wonder what else he might have kept from people. I…” Mary-Ann shook her head. “I never wanted to think this way about Kevin. I wanted this to be a nice simple case, but it’s not, because he was lying - to everyone.”

  “The only thing way I’ve been able to deal with that is to think there has to have been a good reason for the lies. I never thought he’d lie to me. I never thought he was the sort of person who could lie to me. Now…” She stared at the screen. “I wanted to do this before, to see if I could find anything out, but I didn’t want to do it alone. Thank you, for being here with me.”

  “I want to know the truth as much as you do, Sally.”

  “You did still love him, didn’t you?”

  “I wasn’t in love with him, but when you’re with someone for as long as I was with Kevin I think there’s always going to be some emotion there. I did care about him. I thought of him as one of my best friends, so I talked to him about things I wouldn’t have talked to anyone else about.”

  “He was worried about you when he found out you were dealing with a murder in your shop, and then you wouldn’t answer the phone when he called. If it hadn’t been for me he would have been knocking on your door.”

  “As he wasn’t a part of that I wanted to keep my distance, and I was too focused on working out who killed Paul. I never thought for a moment my experience with Paul would help with this, but I feel like I’m more capable of finding out who did kill Kevin thanks to that, even though I wish it hadn’t happened.”

  “Which bit do you wish hadn’t happened?”

  “Every part of it. I wish Paul hadn’t been murdered, I wish Tom hadn’t been arrested for it, I wish Kevin was still alive… when I came home I hoped my life would go back to normal, and it did, for a little while. Now I seem to have become the woman everything happens to.” She shook her head. “I hate it.”

  “You deal with it better than I think most people would do.” Sally touched Mary-Ann’s hand. “Thank you for doing everything you can to find out who killed Kevin.”

  “You don’t have to thank me.”

  “Maybe not, but I want to. If I was in your position I think I’d probably make the decision to leave Green Springs for good.”

  “That isn’t going to happen. I love it here too much.”

  “For a long time I thought about leaving everything here behind. Living in a small town, at times, is the most horrible thing in the world, because it seems like everyone knows the things you want to forget - and they keep bringing it up. All they’re doing is checking on you, but that’s more than enough.” Sally sighed. “Then I realised it might well be difficult to deal with, but it’s also a good thing, because you have people around you who are doing everything they can to make sure you are really okay. They care. They want to know you’re dealing with the thing you so want to forget.”

  “I take it that’s happening now.”

  “Yes. I have people coming to check on me all the time, bringing me food in case I didn’t feel like cooking, and I know it’s going to keep happening for a very long time. Grief is one of those things everyone understands.”

  “Have you talked to Kevin’s father?”

  “No, the two of them had a falling out not long ago, and I didn’t know if I’d be welcome.”

  “Kevin didn’t mention anything about it to me.”

  “He said he wasn’t going to tell you until he was ready for forgive his dad for whatever it was, because he knew what you’d tell him to do, and he wasn’t ready to let go of whatever argument it was they had. I didn’t push too hard. I wanted to know more, but I was going to to wait until he was ready to tell me. Now I wish I hadn’t, because if I had known what it was I’d know if I was welcome.”

  “I’ll talk to him and see how things are.” Mary-Ann squeezed Sally’s hand. “I’ll call you after I’ve seen him, as I think you could do with the support.”

  Knocking on the door to a house she’d been to more times than she could remember was a strange sensation for Mary-Ann. For a moment she was sixteen again, meeting her boyfriend’s dad properly for the first time, and panicking, because she was certain she was going to screw everything up. Then he opened the door and she was an adult again. “Hello, Mr. Thompson.”

  “I wondered when I’d see you, Mare.” He smiled. “How are you?”

  “As well as can be expected. You?”

  “The same.” He stepped back to let her in. “I never thought I’d end up burying my own son, and the fact it’s murder…” He shook his head. “This is Green Springs. Things like this don’t happen here.”

  “Unfortunately things like this happen everywhere.” She sighed. “I’ve been doing what I can to find out what happened to Kevin and Sally mentioned the two of you had fallen out.”

  “Over his mother, as unusual. She died a while ago now and we both went to the funeral. I thought it was the best thing we could do, to be able to let go of it all, but it didn’t work out the way I wanted it to. Kevin… he didn’t hate her for the choices he’d made. I didn’t hate her, either, and yet he seemed to think I did. For a little while I think he thought I was the one who’d killed her. He made the decision he wanted to find out who it was. I asked him not to, because I was worried about him. I didn’t want him to lose himself in the hunt for his mom’s killer. We stopped talking about it for a while, as it seemed like the simplest thing to do, but then I brought it up a little while ago, and he told me to keep my nose out of things that didn’t concern me.”

  “That’s not like Kev.”

  “No, it’s not. I knew he was getting phone calls from some female. He said it was you, but I know your voice well enough to be certain it wasn’t you who was calling him, which I think means the woman in question must have had something to do with his mom.” He shrugged. “I don’t know anything more than that. I don’t know how far he got with his investigation into his mom’s death and I think that’s for the best.”

  Mary-Ann nodded. “Are you happy to see Sally?”

  “Of course I am. She never had anything to do with what happened between us, and I know this isn’t going to be easy for her. I wanted to call her before, but I didn’t know what Kevin had told her, so I thought it was best to wait until she made a move in my direction.” He studied her. “You are coming to his funeral, aren’t you?”

  “I am. Do you know when it will be?”

  “Soon. When the body’s released I want to get it over and done with, as horrible as that must sound.”

  ***

  “What have you found?”

  Alex sighed. “Kevin was a very busy young man. I take it you know he was investigating a death that happened in the city.”

  “His mom.”

  “Really? That wasn’t in the information I have here. Are you certain of that?”

  “Yes, I am.” Mary-Ann brushed a hand through her hair. “I just talked to Kevin’s dad about it.”

  “That’s interesting. According to the birth certificates I have in front of me she had three children, two sons and a daughter, but none of them were called Kevin. I’m going to have to look into that.” He sounded like he was smiling. “The phone number that’s been calling Kevin belongs to the daughter in question, which means I have someone else to talk to.”

  “Are you Mary-Ann?” A female voice came from behind her, and Mary-Ann turned to find someone who looked like Kevin was behind her. “I was told to find you if I needed someone and I haven’t been able to get hold of Kevin in days.”

  “Let me do it.”

  “She’s there?”

  “I believe so. I’ll talk to you later, Alex.” Without giving him a chance to answer she hung up on him. “I am Mary-Ann. You’re Kevin’s sister.”

  “Phoebe.” She stepped forwards. “Do you know what happened to Kevin?”

  “Yes,
but that’s not a conversation we should be having here. Let’s get you a nice hot drink.”

  ***

  Tears streamed down Phoebe’s cheeks. “We didn’t meet that long ago. Mom didn’t tell me I had another brother. She and I… we weren’t close, but I did what I could to look out for her, even though nothing I did was ever going to be enough. The drugs meant more to her than anything else and things had always been that way.”

  “You didn’t go to the funeral.”

  “No, I didn’t, because I was angry with her for dying. I don’t regret it, because I know it wouldn’t have worked out the way I needed it to. I said goodbye in my own way a couple of days later and that’s when I met Kevin. It was obvious from the moment I looked at him he was my brother.”