Jamaica Dreaming (Caribbean Heat) (2 page)

Julissa could not bear the thought of appearing at any of the nightclubs where she’d been popular and then having an attack. The critics might be understanding or, they might rip her to shreds. She didn’t want to give them that chance. The Jamaica gigs were a test. If she did okay then she’d take a chance on her hometown and start working the club scene again.

Sebastian Chung probably didn’t know it but he’d offered her a lifeline. Julissa had racked her brain trying to remember if any Chinese man stood out at any of the clubs she’d ever sung at but she’d drawn a blank. Then she remembered Google and did a search. At the top of the first page of results was a link to Chung Enterprises, Jamaica, and a click revealed that the company was involved in shipping and transportation. A look at the About Us page revealed that the company was founded in the early 1970s by Ray Chung and was now run by his son, Sebastian. The company was heavily involved in inter–island trucking, but also operated a small fleet of ships of various sizes and capabilities. The ships carried cargo between Jamaica and several countries including the United States, the Caribbean and much of Central and South America.

Julissa went back to the Google search results and found a Sebastian Chung on LinkedIn who was CEO of Chung Enterprises and owner of a coffee plantation, Flax Hall, in Jamaica. The privacy setting didn’t allow her to see a picture so she logged on. Her eyes widened at the photo of a drop–dead handsome man whose high cheekbones and thick, wavy hair spoke of his Asian heritage while his olive skin and full lower lip hinted at African blood. A little smile played on his face as if he knew a secret he was thinking of sharing.

Julissa’s first impulse on seeing him had been to call DJ or Shevonne and tell them to log on so they could see him for themselves. She’d already picked up her cell before she thought better of it. Instead, she scrolled through his profile to learn that he’d gone to school at the University of the West Indies where he’d graduated in 1998 with a Bachelor’s in Business Administration. A Master’s in Economics followed from Rutgers and then he’d worked as an operator at the firm’s Miami office before returning to Jamaica in 2005 as an Account Executive. He became CEO in 2010. Julissa wondered if he was married but LinkedIn profiles didn’t reveal marital status. Intrigued in spite of herself, she opened another browser window and logged into Facebook but, though she found two Sebastian Chungs, neither were in Jamaica or matched his LinkedIn picture.

Julissa shivered in the growing chill of the evening air. Her cellphone rang again. She struggled up from the couch and hurried inside.
Local Number
. When she answered, it was Lori calling to let her know she was waiting in the hotel’s reception area.

Julissa went into the bathroom to touch up her make–up and reapply her lipstick. As usual she was amazed by how little visible trace the attacks left on her face. Anybody who didn’t know her could easily miss the dark worry in her eyes and strangers, like the people in Jamaica, wouldn’t know the thin, faint lines on her forehead were new. Julissa grimaced at her reflection. She squared her shoulders, grabbed her clutch and exited the cottage.

Lori Farmer, Office Assistant at Chung Enterprises, was standing on the far side of Reception, near the shuttered double doors that led to the car park. A big smile lit her face when she saw Julissa. “Did you get a good rest today?” she asked in her musical Jamaican accent. She had called Julissa around nine to ask her how well she’d slept and to find out if she’d needed anything.

“Some, yes. I actually went for a walk. The grounds are lovely. So many beautiful plants and flowers.”

Lori beamed. “Sebastian figured you’d love Strawberry Hill.”

“Oh?”

“Well, I mean, everybody loves it, don’t they?” Lori said, looking awkward, as if she’d revealed more than she intended.

Everybody
would
love the beautiful hotel, but why should her mysterious employer care what Julissa felt about it? She was just here to do a job. Julissa frowned. Yes, there was definitely a mystery here but it would probably be solved when she met the generous Mr. Chung.

“All ready?” Lori asked.

“As I’ll ever be.”
And, please, please God, don’t let me have another attack today.

Her apprehension must have showed on her face because Lori smiled warmly. “Not to worry. You’ll be great.”

Julissa tried to rustle up an answering smile but gave it up as a bad job. She had always gotten a slight case of the jitters before a concert but now it was worse because it was mixed with sharp fear. If a panic attack struck while she was on stage, she wouldn’t be able to go on. She might even collapse. She would have let her employer and her audience down. Most of all, she didn’t want people to know anything was wrong with her. It was hard enough rebuilding a professional singing career after a year’s absence but, if club owners and promoters heard she couldn’t get through a set, it would be all over for her comeback plans. Not that she didn’t sometimes wonder if she really
wanted
a comeback. She still loved singing, that hadn’t changed, but, since her accident, she just wasn’t sure that was all she wanted to do with her life. The money from the Jamaica gigs would give her some breathing space to figure things out.

Lori led the way to the silver BMW her boss had loaned her while Julissa was on the island. Lori had told her she could drive it herself, but Julissa wasn’t interested. She hadn’t driven since The Event and didn’t plan to start on an island full of narrow roads and steep hillsides. No way was she ready for that. She was content to let Lori do all the driving. Lori had collected her from the airport yesterday morning and, later, had taken her to the Kingston studio where she met Troy Evans, the pianist who was going to accompany her. A thin, older man with grey dreadlocks, he had played that old grand piano with lively virtuosity.

As they pulled out of the parking lot, Lori reached over to put on the stereo, but Julissa stopped her.

“Please, if you don’t mind, I’d rather just have quiet.” Other people might think it strange but Julissa never listened to music, not even her own, on the day of a performance. Music meant so much to her, it was almost like she became the notes, the words. She needed silence now, a clearing of her heart and mind so that when she stepped up to the mike she would be a pure instrument, clear and sparkling like a mountain spring.

Sebastian watched as Lori and Julissa threaded their way through the small knots of people on the North Lawn at Devon House where the concert was slated to take place in about forty–five minutes. They paused for a minute as Lori scanned the crowd, looking for him or for the organizers, probably. He sauntered deeper into the shadows on the lawn’s periphery, his heart hammering.

When he turned back, the two women were standing near the shallow temporary platform built for the event. Julissa wore a high–necked, midnight–blue dress that hugged her breasts and hips before falling in loose folds to her ankles. She’d lost some weight since he’d last seen her but she was still filled out in all the right places. Her hair was different, too. It framed her heart–shaped face in a loose, inky cloud.

Sebastian willed the tumult of apprehension and desire flowing through him to recede, glad that Lori had not yet spotted him. If Lori brought her to him before he was back in control of himself Julissa would surely sense what was going on in him and he had no idea what her reaction would be. She had a fiancé he knew, but the engagement was going on two years now. If he, Sebastian Chung, had proposed to the stunning singer and she’d accepted, he wouldn’t have wasted any time getting her to the altar. They would have been married the same day!

After her profile appeared on GigSalad, he’d swung into action, determined to bring her to him. He could have gone to Chicago, followed her around from club to club, but he would have been just one of her many admirers. In the past, she’d hardly ever allowed people backstage to see her and he doubted she’d have changed after her accident. That was part of her allure, he thought, her reserve. One and a half years ago when he first saw her, she had been poised for the big time, everyone who heard her knew it. Then came her accident. He’d booked a flight to Chicago minutes after his friend, Benjamin who lived there, told him about it, but he might as well have stayed in Jamaica because he never got to see her.

He’d gone to Northwestern Memorial Hospital the same afternoon he landed, stopping only to pick up an extravagant arrangement of bi–colored orange roses and pale yellow orchids, but her family didn’t know him and refused to allow him to see her. He supposed that, in their place, he’d have been just as protective, maybe even more so, but it stung. An older woman identified herself as Julissa’s sister and took the bouquet from him as she eyed him curiously. She promised to put the flowers in Julissa’s room but wouldn’t answer any of his questions about her condition.

He came back the next day with more flowers, calla lilies and white hydrangeas, but this time, it was the nurses who turned him away. They wouldn’t take his flowers, either, so he’d looked for directions to the geriatric ward and left them in a room with two sleeping old men.

Sebastian tried to see the singer once more but a slim, light–skinned man barred his way. The man hadn’t believed Sebastian when he’d lied and said he was a friend of Julissa’s, that they were in theatre class together in high school.

“Who was the drama teacher?” the man had asked, arching a sharply defined brow.

Sebastian racked his brains trying to remember something, anything, from the online bios he’d read about her, but he’d drawn a blank.

“I thought so,” the man snapped, turning on his heels to go back in her room. Sebastian only managed to get a glimpse of Julissa, outlined beneath a sheet, an oxygen mask over her face, tubes running into her arms, before the man closed the door firmly behind him.

Anger had flashed through Sebastian. Why wouldn’t they let him just see her? All he wanted to do was let her know he was praying for her. He forced his rage back down and walked away. He didn’t know Julissa. He had no rights here. He was a stranger to her and to her family though, if asked, he could list where she’d lived, the schools she’d attended, her favorite song, even her favorite dish, Chilean sea bass. So could any stalker. Maybe that was what they were afraid of, that he was a stalker.

He received a call that afternoon that a fire had broken out at a Chung warehouse in Port Antonio and firefighters were on the scene. The manager told him it was a small fire, already under control and Sebastian would have let the Deputy CEO, his sister, Emeka, handle it, but her father–in–law was in the hospital with a stroke. He caught the next plane out and arrived back in Jamaica late in the night, tired and frustrated.

Two days later, with the crisis at the warehouse over, he checked the Chicago news sites and read that the doctors had induced a coma to give Julissa’s body time to recover. Sebastian scoured the internet every morning, searching for news of her, praying that she hadn’t died while he slept, that she would win this fight for her life. Before he went to bed at eleven or twelve, he’d do another survey of the Net, making sure she was still alive. The doctors had declared themselves optimistic, but they’d had to do one surgery after another.

Then, three weeks later, the
Chicago Tribune
reported that she was out of the coma and responding to her family. The news brought tears to Sebastian’s eyes. Julissa was discharged a month after that and then Chicago lost interest in its sultry songbird and there were no more stories. Undeterred, Sebastian had hit the Net until he found out where her parents lived and sent her a bouquet of yellow roses. But, when he called the house, the man who answered, an older man from his voice, perhaps her father or an older brother, told him she wasn’t there and hung up before Sebastian could say anything else. She needed time to heal. He understood that, so he didn’t try to make contact again for more than a month. This time a mechanical voice informed him that the number he’d dialed did not exist.

Sebastian had turned to the World Wide Web again, but found no listing for Julissa Morgan or for her parents, Henry and Malinda Morgan. He’d toyed with the idea of hiring a private investigator to find them but then rejected it. He was definitely beginning to veer into stalker territory. She was gone. He had to accept it.

He’d thrown himself into the family business with a ferocity that startled everyone around him. In the nine months since Julissa was released from the hospital, he expanded the company’s warehouse operations in Ocho Rios and Montego Bay, replaced two of their aging ships and opened up Chung Enterprises’ first South American office in Argentina.

Despite the global recession, profits soared at Chung Enterprises but Sebastian never forgot the dark, curvy singer with the big doe eyes and pillowy lips. When Carly Nelson approached him about sponsoring a series of fundraising concerts for the Ananda Alert system for missing children Sebastian had readily agreed. Then, a week later, Julissa’s Gig Salad profile came up when he did one of his periodic Google searches.

God was speaking to him and Sebastian wasn’t slow to understand what He was saying. He’d called Benjamin, his childhood friend from their schooldays at Wolmer’s, and now a senior partner at Hall and Nelson. Benjamin had one of his assistants contact her and set everything up but had warned Sebastian that the fees seemed a bit steep. Sebastian barely heard him – “lock her in,” he said, “do it.” There’d been a pause on the other end and then Benjamin had chuckled. “So, it’s like that, is it? Man, you’ve got it bad. You’ve got to hit it and get out, or you’ll be well and truly pussy–whipped for life.”