One Night Stand (New Yorker III) by M.O. Kenyan Page A

fast as it would go without breaking
any limits. By the time she got to the estate everyone but Catalella seemed to
have already arrived. Even her doctor brother had managed to save a life and
get there in time for her family luncheon.
    As
usual, her mother met her at the door with a blessing and a kiss.
    “What
is this?” Her mother pressed her finger on the bruise and Catalella jumped back
with a yelp. “Did someone hit you? Have you been fighting?”
    “That’s
your other daughter, Mama.” Catalella said with a kiss to her mother’s cheek.
“I bumped my head on the bedpost when Lisette called.”
    “What
were you doing sleeping until this hour, mija?”
    Here
come the twenty-one questions. Catalella thought up her best lie. It hurt to
lie to her mother but she didn’t think dear Rosalinda Ross would want to know
what her youngest child had been up to the previous night.
    “Rosa.”
Catalella smiled when she heard her father’s deep voice. “Can you interrogate
the girl when she’s inside the house?”
    “Yeah,
Mama, it’s not like she was having sex.” Lisette snickered.
    “Papa!” Catalella hadn’t seen her
sister and hadn’t anticipated her attack.
    “Lisette,”
her father said sternly.
    “What,
Papa? All she does is work,” Lisette said as she winked at Catalella.
    Catalella
groaned in frustration as she stomped into her father’s waiting arms. It was
like they were kids again. Lisette would pick on her and their father would
intervene. Adrian Ross was over six foot three with dark chocolate skin. AJ,
her brother, was the only one who resembled him, while Lisette resembled their
mother. Lisette and AJ were both children from different marriages and it was
Catalella who brought the family together. She looked like both her father and
mother. She often wondered how her parents had been able to merge this family,
especially with AJ, who was six at the time, and Lisette, five, being so headstrong.
    “Peanut.”
Catalella chuckled when her brother’s booming voice bounced off the walls of
the house. He was the only one who called her that, because she was apparently
the smallest baby he had ever seen. That included his nephew and niece, both
from Lisette.
    “If
it isn’t the soon-to-be groom.” Catalella let her brother pick her up off the floor. “Where
is the unlucky lady?”
    “In the
back with Lisette’s unlucky husband,” he chuckled.
    “I need
to tell you something.” Lisette’s face took on an odd expression of regret.
    Catalella
could almost hear the words her sister was about to say. She braced herself for
the painful punch in the gut they were about to administer. You would think
having gone through this twice before she would have gotten used to it. But
soon AJ would be announcing the birth of his own children and she would have to
go through the pain of that too. She needed a stronger backbone.
    “Catalella.” Lisette began tearing up. It
was harder for her to say the words than it was for Catalella to hear them.
“I’m pregnant.”
    “Of
course you are.” She hated how hateful that sounded. Catalella smiled to hide
her pain. “When are you ever going to take a break?”
    “This
is my last one. If Reno wants more babies he’ll have to carry them himself.”
Lisette laughed, wiping away the tears.
    “Come
on, group hug.” Catalella bit back the tears as she waved in her family. “When
is the unlucky one joining this terrible family?”
    “About
eight months.”
    Catalella
felt her bottom lip tremble and they tightened the circle to give each other
hugs. She could feel her mother and her sister’s pain and to some extent their
pity. She bit down on her jaw to keep herself from crying out and cursing the
world at how unfair it had been. Instead, she let the her family's arms hold
her up as if they knew that all she wanted was to collapse on the floor,
broken. She had been broken every single day of her life.
    Survive . Those words were imprinted in
her