Almost A Bravo

Her brothers got right back to her. They would all three be there at the brewpub at seven o’clock.

That made her cry again. Who had such great brothers—big, handsome guys who dropped everything to be there if their sister needed them? They were the best. What if it turned out they really weren’t even hers?

* * *

Beach Street Brews was a barnlike place with scuffed wide-plank floors and rows of high-sided wooden booths lining the tin-paneled walls. The acoustics were terrible. On the weekends when they had live music, conversation was impossible.

But early on a Wednesday evening, it wasn’t so bad. Matthias had gotten there first. Matt was ex-military. Now he worked as a game warden with the Oregon State Police.

He was out of uniform tonight. When Aislinn slipped into the booth next to him, he poured her a beer from the pitcher he’d already ordered.

“You okay, Ais?” he asked. “You look kinda down.”

“Been better,” she admitted.

His golden-brown eyebrows drew together in concern, but before he could say anything more, Connor and Liam showed up.

Matt poured them beers and they talked about the warm weather and how Connor was doing over at Valentine Logging. He was running the family company while Daniel was on his honeymoon. Aislinn sipped her beer and watched their dear faces, their gold-kissed eyebrows and tawny hair.

George Bravo had had dark brown hair and blue eyes. Marie was blue-eyed, too, and a natural blonde. All of their children had blue eyes and none of them had hair any darker than medium brown.

Except Aislinn.

Her mom had always claimed that she was special, different. And her dad used to say she took after the Bravo side of the family. He’d had six brothers and a couple of them were dark-eyed with almost-black hair. Her mom used to say she looked French—a little French princess, born in a villa on the Cote d’Azur. Aislinn had loved that, loved being the different one.

Until today.

Matt asked, “So, what’s going on with you, Ais?”

“Is everything okay?” asked Liam, burnished eyebrows drawing together.

At home, she’d debated whether or not to tell all and decided she ought to be totally honest, offer full disclosure. But now, sitting in that booth, her gaze bouncing from one well-loved face to another, she just couldn’t go there, couldn’t tell them outright that she might not be their sister, that she’d taken their real sister’s place, while the true Aislinn had gone off to California to become Hollywood royalty.

Later for all that.

“I’ve been thinking about Mom,” she began. “About the story she always told me, that I was born in Montedoro.”

“The Montedoro trip.” Connor mock-saluted with his glass of beer. “Mom just had to go there, even though she was almost eight months’ pregnant with you.”

“And, of course,” Liam added, “she and Dad took us along—not that I remember a thing about it. I was what, three?”

And Matt had been five, Connor four. Daniel, seven at the time, would probably remember the most of the four of them. Too bad he was off somewhere in paradise with Keely.

Matt volunteered, “I kind of remember the Prince’s Palace. Huge and white, up there on that hill overlooking the harbor. And I remember meeting Uncle Evan and his wife, the princess.” Their dad’s brother, once an actor, had married Montedoro’s ruling princess. Matt went on, “But I’m drawing a complete blank on the villa we stayed at—the one where you were born, I mean. Didn’t you go to Montedoro to check it out, after college?”

She licked the beer mustache from her upper lip. “I did, yeah, the summer after my senior year. The old count and countess had died. The people living at Villa Della Torre invited me in for coffee and listened politely when I told them that I’d been born in their house. But they had nothing to tell me. They’d never even met the count or the countess. I stayed at the palace during that trip. Uncle Evan and Her Serene Highness were so nice to me. They remembered your visit all those years before, remembered that Mom had been pregnant, but they said that they hadn’t realized that Mom had given birth there, in the principality.” At the time, Aislinn had been kind of disappointed that they didn’t remember—disappointed, but not the least alarmed.

Not like now, when her whole world felt turned upside down, spinning in dizzying circles, way too fast.

She glanced at Connor again. “You sure you don’t remember anything?”

He took a gulp of beer. “Mom and Dad were always hauling us along with them to the far corners of the earth. The trips are kind of a blur to me. Sorry, I’ve got nothing.”

Liam said, “Something’s off with you...”

“Yeah,” Connor agreed. “What’s going on?”

Guilt took a good poke at her, for keeping them in the dark. But she just couldn’t go there. Not yet. “I was only wondering about how it all happened, you know, on the day I was born?”

Matt tipped his head to the side, studying her. “You’ve got a problem, haven’t you, Ais? And you don’t want to tell us what.”

She couldn’t outright lie to them—but she just wasn’t ready to tell what she knew. “It’s complicated. I don’t want to get into it, not right yet.”

“Anything we can do?” asked Liam.

She caught her lower lip between her teeth and shook her head.

Matt put his massive arm around her. “You call. We’re there.”

She let herself lean into him, as if he could ground her somehow, keep her tethered to dry land so she wouldn’t go bobbing wildly off into nowhere, a tiny boat set adrift in a churning, angry sea.

* * *

After the disastrous visit to Kircher and Anders, Jax had gone straight back to Wild River and spent several hours in his study finding out everything he could about Aislinn Bravo. She kept public profiles on social media, so he learned a lot there. He also called a few people he knew in Valentine Bay and pumped them for anything they knew about Aislinn and the Bravo family.

The next day, he returned to Kircher and Anders. Kip ushered him back to his corner office and shut the door.

“I’ve got questions,” Jax said, as he settled into a leather guest chair. “Starting with, can the will be broken?”

“I’m sorry, but no. Martin Durand had an absolute right to disburse his worldly goods in any way he chose and his will is legally airtight.”

“Wild River belonged to my aunt. She left it to Martin, but it was always supposed to go to me when he died.”

Anders adjusted his glasses, braced his elbows on the arms of his swivel chair and steepled his fingers. “There’s not a lot of hope in trying to hang a case on that.”

“But in his last letter, Martin admitted outright that he and my aunt had an understanding that the ranch should go to me.”

“Yes. You could argue that. And the rebuttal would be that he did leave you Wild River, just with certain stipulations.”

“What about Aislinn Bravo? Is she really his daughter?”

“Jaxon, I have no idea if she is or she isn’t. You would need a paternity test to get a definitive answer to that question. And even if such a test proved that she and Martin shared no DNA, the will would most likely stand.”

Was Anders hinting at an angle there? “‘Most likely’?”

“If you proved she wasn’t his daughter, then you could use his last letter as evidence that he included her in his will believing she was his biological child. It’s a stretch, but you might challenge the will by arguing that Martin would never have left her anything if he knew she wasn’t his.”

“That sounds weak.”