Enchanted Heart (36 page)

They both turned toward Jimmy, who'd been quietly watching the proceedings from his chair.

Lance had been so focused on his grandmother that he'd forgotten all about his great-uncle.

“What truth?” Lance asked.

“This isn't the time for that,” Virginia snapped.

Jimmy chomped on his cigar, then lit it. Virginia didn't say a word. “I'd say it is. If you don't tell him, I will.”

Lance looked from one to the other of his scheming relatives. “Tell me what?”

Virginia got up. “I don't have to sit here and listen to this.”

“Sit down.”

The command, as if from God, boomed so loud, and with such a threat that Virginia sat. So did Lance.

Jimmy stood. Working on the cigar, he walked to the mantel, fingered a few of the photographs.

“All your life you've been told a lie, Lance.”

“So what else is new?”

Shaking his head, Jimmy glanced at him. “Not that little mess. Yeah, we bought off that Gayla woman. What was it, twenty-five-thousand dollars? She disappeared quick enough. She was supposed to get an abortion not have the kid.”

“Well, she didn't. And that kid you tried to do away with is now almost eleven. My son, Grandmother. You had no right.”

“She wasn't the woman for you.”

“She was my wife and she was pregnant with my child.”

Virginia clutched her chest. “That boy,” she said, looking toward the door that Tarique had exited, her voice just barely above a whisper. “I didn't think she was even really pregnant.”

“We got married in Mexico.”

“I remember that,” Jimmy said on a chuckle. “That was a nice move.”

Two heads whipped around toward Jimmy. “You knew?” Twin accusations echoed in the room.

He tapped ashes in a vase. “Pure chance. I was in Tijuana for a . . . er, I was there. Saw you coming out of a little chapel.”

“Why didn't you say anything?” Virginia accused. “You knew and didn't try to stop them?”

Jimmy shrugged and grinned. “Just wanted to see how it'd play out.”

“What the hell is wrong with you people?” Lance yelled. “You can't just play with people's lives like this is a game.”

Ignoring the outburst, Virginia asked, “What ever happened to her?”

“She died,” Lance bit out. “No thanks to you.”

“You can't blame me for . . .”

Lance advanced on her. “I can and I do. Gayla was a crack addict, Virginia. She smoked drugs and lived in the projects and raised my son in filth. All because you decided to play God and gave her a little money to disappear from my life. Well, it didn't quite work out the way you planned.”

“Neither did some other things,” Jimmy said.

“James, please.”

Jimmy shook his head. “Time's up, Ginny. Either you tell him or I will. He needs to know.”

Lance turned to his grandmother. “I need to know what?”

When Virginia wouldn't meet his gaze, Lance turned to Uncle Jimmy.

“You're not who you think you are,” the older man said by way of explanation.

“Come again?”

The cigar dangled from the edge of Jimmy's mouth as he talked. “Did you ever wonder why you and Cole were so close, why you looked so much alike?”

A dawn of understanding flashed in Lance's eyes. He whipped around and looked at Virginia. She sat there, hands clasped tight in her lap, her face drawn and pinched, lines at her mouth.

“God, please don't tell me you're my mother.”

“Ha! Thank God for small favors.”

“No, Bev is your mama,” Uncle Jimmy said. “And she lit out of here lickety-split. Can't say I blame her though.”

“What then?”

“Thought you were quicker than that, boy.”

Lance's eyes narrowed. “Just spell it out.”

“Cole's your half-brother. Your mama and Coleman were . . . Well, you're the byproduct of a dalliance. It wasn't pretty. Bev was just sixteen.”

Closing her eyes, Virginia leaned back on the chair rest.

“Are you saying my mother was one of my grandfather's affairs?”

“Coleman wasn't your grandfather, Lance.”

Lance swore.

He stared first at Jimmy, then at Virginia as the implications raced through his mind. Lies. All lies. Everything he'd ever known . . . about himself. Everything he'd ever believed.

“Then I'm not even related to you.”

Virginia turned her head away from him.

Another thought slammed into Lance. Did his mother live in Florida because she'd been bought off? Sent there by the Hearts?

“Why does my mother live in Florida?” he demanded. “Was that a payoff too? Is that why I was forced to live with you?”

“You had a good life with us,” Virginia said, her voice almost a whisper.

“A life based on lies. And answer me!”

Virginia turned away again. Lance whirled around to Jimmy, who just shrugged. “Things were complicated, Lance. It was to save face and keep the police away. We were in the middle of some tough negotiations with the company at the time. There'd been that whole lawsuit with Sonja's mother. Another paternity suit or sexual harassment claim would have done us in. We agreed—”

“You agreed,” Virginia cut in.

“We agreed that the best thing would be to pretend that Bev was one of Coleman's by-blows and that the father of her baby was some unknown who'd slinked off in the night. It made things easier.”

“And she went for this?”

Jimmy glanced at Virginia. “Certain people wanted all access cut off. But your mother insisted that she have full and unhindered visitation and access to you. And you wanted to stay here.”

Lance remembered that part. Being bribed with toys and horses and the dog he'd wanted so very much. He remembered the day his mother told him she was moving to Florida. He'd been about Tarique's age, maybe a little older. She said he could visit whenever he wanted, that Grandma and Grandpop would take care of him.

He swore.

“It's no wonder Heart Federated was a day away from Chapter Eleven when Cole took it over. You'd run it into the ground, siphoning revenue for hush money.”

Jimmy shrugged as if that truth held no import.

Lance turned to Virginia. “I don't get it. What did you have to gain from all of this pretending?”

She cast grief-stricken eyes at him. “I got my husband back,” she said, the words hollow. “Excuse me.” She got up and walked out of the room, her head held high but her bearing broken.

“She loved him,” Jimmy said. “I never understood why, but Virginia was crazy in love with Coleman. He never appreciated her though. Not the way I did.”

Lance looked up.

“All she ever wanted was for him to love her as much as she loved him. She wanted him to be faithful, too. But that wasn't gonna happen.” Jimmy wagged the cigar between them. “We Heart men, we're just not hard-wired that way. Don't know a single one of us who's a one-woman man.”

“You're wrong, Uncle. I'm a one-woman man.”

Lance was struck by the fact that underneath it all, Virginia had been the victim. All the lies, the deceit, and the manipulation had been a useless attempt to regain some measure of control in a life that had been shot to hell by a man who didn't have it in him to promise and maintain fidelity to her.

Jimmy nodded. “If you love her, don't let this one get away. Ginny tried to buy her off, but your underwear lady told her to go to hell.” Jimmy chuckled. “Wish I could have seen that.”

He reached in his pocket and pulled out a brown banker's envelope. “I was going to swing by your place today. I thought it was time for us to have a little talk, especially now that the boy is a factor.” Lance eyed the envelope as Jimmy held it out. The edges were a bit frayed but the contents were sealed within a looped closure.

“What's this?”

“The rest of your legacy. Your father had some property and investments set aside just for you.”

Lance looked at the brown envelope but didn't touch it. “Does Cole know about this? I mean that we're brothers?”

Jimmy shook his head. “I'm sure he figured it out somewhere along the way. His daddy's interest in you through the years was too high for you to be just a grandson. And if he didn't know for certain, your portion in Coleman's will, almost equal to Cole's, indicated more than just a casual inheritance to a grandson.”

“Cole was always like a big brother to me.”

“Take it,” Jimmy said, proffering the envelope again. “If you don't want it, maintain it for your son.”

Without looking at the contents, Lance pocketed the envelope.

Outside in the driveway, he caught up with Tarique. Watching his son, he thought about something Uncle Jimmy had said and wondered what lies and tangled webs Vivienne had gotten caught up in. She'd tried to tell him something—something important. But he hadn't listened. His own hurt and anger didn't allow him to give her a chance to explain.

His heart cried out for her though. Even now he wanted her at his side.

“Who was that woman with the wrinkled mouth?”

“No one you need to be concerned with,” Lance said. He opened the door of the Escalade for Tarique and shut it on his association with Virginia Heart.

30

S
he'd put off logging on to her personal e-mail account for days now. The excuse of needing to be there for Viv finally worn thin, Vicki keyed in her password and opened the electronic mailbox. Three messages flashed from Clay. She ignored all the others. Working from the bottom, she clicked on the first message he'd sent.

Vicki closed her eyes as it popped up on her monitor. She didn't want to face the rejection she knew she'd find. From the digital camera on her computer she'd sent him a real-time photo of herself. Three poses: left profile, right profile and dead-on.

Lance Heart Smith's involuntary reaction, and that scumbag Dean Khan's deliberately vile one had offered her a pretty good indication of how men saw her—as some kind of freak.

Why she had ever thought she'd be able to have a normal relationship eluded her. Vicki glanced at a beautiful bouquet of yellow-orange roses that sat in a short bowl filled with crystal pebbles.

The apology had come Monday afternoon courtesy of Lance Heart Smith.

So intent on making sure she signed in the right place, the floral driver didn't even look up.
The pizza guy doesn't care what you look like,
her conscience taunted. Neither did the regular UPS and FedEx drivers who frequently made deliveries at the house.

They're paid to be nice to the customers, no matter what they look like,
the evil-twin conscience jeered.

“Shut up, both of you,” she said aloud in the empty room.

Then, steeling herself for the worst, Vicki looked at the message from Clay. It was blank.

Frowning, she went back to the mailbox and clicked on the second message that carried the subject header: SORRY . . .

Vicki sighed. She didn't know what to say either. He'd been so frazzled by her photos that he hadn't taken time to do even a cursory spell check or to capitalize his sentences.

The third and final message from Clay was time-dated a couple of hours after the first two. He probably had to go get drunk before he could compose a Dear Ugly Woman, Get-the-hell out-of-my-life letter.

She shifted the mouse to the message, then lost her nerve.

A moment later, she returned with a bottle of wine and a corkscrew. No glass.

Vicki rubbed her eyes and thought about all the good things Viv had said about her. In the last few days, their relationship had taken a new, closer turn. All the guilty secrets between them were out in the open.

She could sit here all day thinking about Viv and Lance and delivery drivers and never get to the point of what she'd come to do. Realizing she couldn't avoid the inevitable, Vicki took a deep breath and clicked on Clay's final e-mail.

Vicki stopped reading, opened the bottle of wine and took a long chug. If she drank hard liquor, she'd have downed a couple of shots. Since she didn't, she had to make do with a good Reisling.

She wiped a tear from her eye, took another swallow of wine and turned her attention back to the Dear Vicki missive.

“Oh, God.” Vicki knew people lied online. She braced herself for news that he was a woman, or a prisoner, or a six-year-old playing grown-up.

“That's your big confession?” Vicki took another swig of wine. “How lame is that?” She scrolled down to view the next several paragraphs.

Vicki carefully put the wine bottle on the desktop. She leaned forward, reread the paragraph.
I'm blind
reverberated in her head.

Vicki clicked on the jpeg image that she'd attached as wallpaper and stared at the man she'd come to consider one of her closest friends.

“Oh, Clay. What a mess we've made.”

He closed with his full name Clayton Alphonso Rollings, and his phone number—a number that Vicki immediately recognized as an Ahoskie, North Carolina, exchange. He really was just barely an hour away. And he didn't care what she looked like.

Laughing through tears, Vicki reached for the telephone.

 

 

In her bedroom, Viv stared at Sirgal, the yellow, red and purple stuffed dragon that Lance had won for her at the fair. Through her current heartache, that so-long-ago night seemed as though it'd happened to two other people. In many respects, they were two different people then. Viv had been cautious but intrigued, slowly falling for the man who'd charmed her like no other, and made love to her as if she were, indeed, a cherished goddess.

What a difference a couple of months could make.

Now she was merely The Other Woman. The Other Pregnant Woman.

She pulled a pillow from her canopy bed, tugged off the sham and went to the cheval mirror. She stuffed the pillow under her shirt and examined her profile in an attempt to see what she'd look like fat with a baby.

The sight depressed her.

Yanking the pillow out, she went to her chaise and settled on it, her arms wrapped around one of its small rolled pillows.

She'd never imagined herself in this situation, never once thought that an unplanned pregnancy, or any pregnancy for that matter, would be a part of the scenario known as her life.

Maybe, she thought, she should have never left modeling. Maybe she should have continued the life that kept her airborne and in foreign locales. Never anywhere long enough to get attached.

Viv bit her lip. Had she continued her modeling career, Vicki would have been stuck in a bleak institution, her depression and phobias misdiagnosed as mental retardation or worse.

No. She'd made the right choice then, and even though she missed the fast life sometimes, starting Guilty Pleasures had been the right move.

But she'd continued to make bad choices in every other aspect of her life.

Wallowing in misery wouldn't do her or her baby much good. But she didn't feel like doing anything else. Her life—again—lay in ruins. And once again the blame and fault lay squarely at her feet and in her choice of man.

The only constant in her life, the one man who really cared about her as a person rather than as a sex object, or a means to an end was the one she'd spurned. Julian didn't deserve to be treated the way she'd done him. Maybe it wasn't too late to mend that relationship.

She still didn't want to marry him, but she could use his friendship, a familiarity that she craved in a world that had turned topsy-turvy.

Reaching for the cordless receiver on an antique table next to the chaise, she dialed Julian's number.

His machine picked up.

“Hi, Jules. It's me. I've been thinking about you and wondered. . .”

“Vivienne?”

She smiled, glad to hear his voice despite the way they'd last parted. “Yes. It's me.”

“What do you want?”

Viv blinked at the coldness in his tone. He'd been short with her before, but usually after she'd provoked him in some way. “I just wanted to talk to you.”

“Well, I'm busy,” he said. “Too busy to deal with you.”

In the background, Viv heard the clink of ice as well as soft music, the sort that would be in a sound system as white noise. “You're having a party and you didn't invite me?” She deliberately put the pout in her voice, knowing that it never failed to sway him.

“You can skip the Anna Nicole routine, Vivienne. And yes, I'm having a party. A party for two, and you're not invited. Good-bye.”

If she hadn't already been feeling like a wounded animal, Viv would have laughed it off and then gone straight to Julian's to crash the supposed tête-à-tête. But coming on top of Lance's deception, Julian's rejection hurt all the more.

She replaced the phone wondering why she'd even bothered to call him. She didn't want Julian. She just didn't want to be alone like this—feeling as if she might drown in hurt. Vivienne closed her eyes letting the pain wash through her like the surge of tide from the ocean.

 

 

Cole had asked that Sonja send any personal mail along to him, not that he ever got that much. Most of the mail arriving at the Williamsburg home of Sonja Pride and Coleman Heart III had more to do with business than pleasure. So Sonja didn't quite know what to make of the pink envelope with the flowery handwriting that arrived for Cole.

She sniffed it, looking for perfume or any other scent of a woman. She flipped it over and saw the return address: Virginia's address.

Sonja carried the letter from his mother to Cole's home office and put it on top of the short pile of mail she'd FedEx to him in the morning. The fax machine pinged that an incoming fax was coming through.

A moment later, the complete letter appeared. Sonja scanned it to determine if it should be forwarded to Cole. And then her eyes landed on one short paragraph that sent chills down her spine, and struck true fear in her heart.

She read the alert again, then sat in Cole's chair.

Was Cole in trouble or doing something illegal in Brazil? Everything he'd worked for could be ruined.

 

 

The tenuous bond between Lance and Tarique stretched and then snapped when Lance asserted some parental discipline. He felt like a hypocrite since he knew full well that he'd given his mother, his grandmother and Cole grief about the same kinds of things. Lights out at 11:00
P.M.
to start. That went over about as well as a barbecue grill in hell. Then came the dictum about the summer school program.

Through T.J. Lance had found a two-week enrichment course at one of the local colleges. Lance paid the hefty late fee, then told T.J. he'd be starting first thing Monday morning. While Tarique was off learning about the arts and archaeology, Lance planned to spend the day working on his business plan and getting himself divested of Vivienne and Guilty Pleasures.

“I don't care about a bunch of bones in the dirt!”

“It'll be interesting.”

Tarique snorted. “You go, then.”

“It'll be good for you.” God, did those words just come out of my mouth?

Tarique rolled his eyes and poured a big bowl of cereal. For the first time, Lance realized how much families spent on groceries. Tarique had been there all of a week, and they'd gone through what had to be a pallet of Cinnamon Toast Crunch, gallons of chocolate milk and white milk and he didn't know how many bags of Doritos. Tarique hated the food that Lance liked, so dinner was frequently pizza or burgers.

Lance's housekeeper refused to set foot in the room where Tarique lived. In a few short days, the once immaculate bedroom looked just like the one Tarique had had at the Granger Shores apartment.

Lance had allowed the boy some privacy, but it was time to put his foot down on some things.

This school program would be the first.

“You're going and that's final.”

“Whatever.” Tarique reached for the gallon of whole milk.

Lance pulled it away from him. “I'm serious, Tarique.”

The two glared at each other. For the first time, Lance wondered how he'd gotten through his own adolescence without giving his mother a heart attack. He made a mental note to send her some flowers to apologize for being a bratty and mouthy kid, particularly during his visits south.

“You don't know me.” Tarique jumped from the barstool, knocking it and the milk jug over. “You don't know anything about me so don't start playing like you so concerned. If you hadda gived a goddamn you wouldn't have walked out on my mama.”

“I didn't walk . . .”

“You killed her!” Tarique screamed. “You gave her the money. If it hadn't been for you, she never would have had the money to buy that shit. It's all your fault!”

The boy ran to his room and slammed the door.

Lance swore. Then kicked the barstool.

When Sonja called saying she needed to talk to him about something, Lance welcomed the distraction.