The Bad Boy Next Door: A Red Hot Bad Boy Romance (12 page)

We are going to the salon next weekend. My treat,
Ruby’s next text said.

Deal,
came the reply.

Ruby worked for a few more hours, until her fingers were tired and refused to type any more. Then she tried Isaac’s phone again, even though she knew she wouldn’t get through. She pulled the business card Isaac’s aunt Amanda had given her out of her purse and sent a text to what she assumed was the cell phone.

Hi, Amanda, It’s Ruby. Isaac still ignoring me. His voicemail is full. No answer when I knock. Partying every night.

A few minutes later Ruby’s phone rang. It was Amanda.  “Hi, Amanda. Sorry to bother you.”

“No bother at all, Ruby,” Amanda informed her, “I’m just wrapping cheese in cloth to press out the whey. But I have a few minutes. I’m a little bit surprised and a lot dismayed at the way my nephew is behaving. Do you think I should come back down there and try to talk sense into him?”

Ruby bit her bottom lip and looked out the office window, wishing she was as free to sway in the breeze as that willow tree. “Do you think he’d resent us? I mean, maybe I should just give up and write it off as an educational experience. I just don’t know.”

“No, Ruby. Please don’t give up on him. Isaac has had it tough. Not just Genie, either. These so-called friends of his started coming around, acting all chummy when he inherited, convincing him to spend his money on leisurely pursuits. These are the same little punks who treated him like shit in high school, understand.”

“Why would he let them into his life then?”

“He wants to be accepted, and he doesn’t have any frame of reference as to how to do that, so he parties, because hey everyone likes a party, right?” Amanda said, her statement ending in an edge of sarcasm.

“Yeah, I can see the appeal. To be honest, I’m starting to feel like an obsessive girlfriend. I keep calling, I keep looking out my window. I keep wanting to go over there when he’s having a party and confront him, but at the same time I don’t want to cause a scene in front of that crowd.”

Amanda was silent for a moment, thinking, “Go over there and confront him. That’s my advice. Go knock on his door, his windows, all that. Or wait until he’s having a party, and then go let yourself into the house and find him.”

“I don’t like the idea of causing a scene. Everyone will think I’m his crazy girlfriend.”

“Well, don’t cause a scene or start a screaming match, no. I just mean, if you go over there and you are face-to-face with him, then he has to talk to you. If he pushes you away, or refuses to talk to you, then I’ll come down and see if I can help. I can’t get away for a couple of days though; too much to do on the farm just now.” Amanda sighed.

“Well, okay. I’ll think about it,” Ruby finally said, “I was hoping he would just snap out of it.”

“So was I, but he can be stubborn and hard-headed from time to time,” Amanda said, resigned to the facts.

Ruby heard music coming from next door. “Sounds like the party is starting. I’m going to let you go and head over there. I’ll text you when I get back and let you know how it went.”

“Okay. Good luck.”

Ruby hung up her cell phone and tossed it on the desk. She powered down the computer knowing there was no way she’d be able to work now. Then she screwed up her courage and walked out her front door and across the small expanse of manicured lawn that separated her from the man she loved.

Chapter13

Ruby felt the bass reverberating through the air as she walked up the steps to Isaac’s front door. All of the windows were open and music was pouring out of it like water from a shattered glass. She questioned herself every step of the way, both wanting to confront him and wanting to run back to her house and just forget the whole thing. There were party-goers everywhere. Ruby smelled the scent of wood fire on the air, coming from the bonfire out back. Two women were bumping and grinding their hips against one another on the living room floor while onlookers cheered and dared them to make out. Ruby sighed and shoved past them.

There were several couples, plastic cups full of colorful liquids, slow dancing with one another. A woman wearing a bikini top, a short swimsuit skirt, and not much else, took a long drink from her cup and then leaned her head against her dance partner’s chest and closed her eyes. Ruby felt a tiny pang of envy that she wasn’t dancing with Isaac right now. In the dining room two women had set up portable dancing poles and were down to thongs that left nothing to the imagination. Someone had dragged the couches from the living room into the dining room and people were cheering the dancers, and putting money in their mouths.

“You wanna go, little lady?” one man asked, leering at Ruby.

“No thanks. I’m just here looking for my friend.”

“I’ll be your friend.” The man waved a twenty at her.

Ruby glared at him, flipping him the bird as she walked up the stairs. She heard the raucous laughter of the men on the couches following her up the stairs. The staircase seemed long and forbidding. No matter how many steps she gained, Ruby felt like a dozen more had been added on at the top, preventing her from ever reaching Isaac, whom she hadn’t seen anywhere downstairs. Nor was he at the back of the house around the bonfire. Wood smoke drifted through all of the open windows, creating an atmosphere that under other conditions Ruby could consider cozy, inviting, and even romantic. A vision of her and Isaac in front of a fire place, mugs of coffee or cocoa in hand came to her unbidden. Ruby felt tears squeezing into the corners of her eyes and dashed them away with her hand.

Finally, upon reaching the top step of the second floor, Ruby heard grunting and moaning coming from behind the closed door that led to the guest bathroom. The woman behind the door was evidently enjoying herself very much, Ruby thought as she moved past the door. Next she came to one of the guest bedrooms; empty. The second guest bedroom was occupied by multiple people. They smiled and waved her in without missing a beat.

“Join us,” one smiling woman said. “It’ll be amazing!”

Ruby smiled and backed out, closing the door firmly.
What in the world have I walked into?
She was reminded of the scene in the movie
Pinocchio
and his adventures on Pleasure Island.
It’s like a damn orgy in this place.
Ruby then briefly considered whether or not she would have joined them if she had been invited to the party under better circumstances.

Is this what Isaac gets up to at these shindigs?
Ruby felt her ire rise briefly. It boiled over completely however when she walked through the open door of the master bedroom and found Isaac lying next to a woman who definitely wasn’t Ruby. Ruby gasped, audibly, startling the occupants of the bed. Isaac’s eyes widened and he half sat up, one arm involuntarily lifting, as if reaching for Ruby.

“What the hell are you doing, Isaac?” Ruby screamed. She felt the table she had bumped into when she gasped and grabbed the first thing her fingers alighted on. Car keys. Whose, she didn’t know, nor did she care. She hauled back and chucked them as hard as she could, not caring who she hit with them. Then she spun on her heel and ran down the stairs and out the front door of the house, past the dancers, ignoring the leers of the men on the couch who were still stuffing dollar bills into thongs.

“Ow, dammit,” the woman in bed with Isaac shrieked. “The bitch hit me!”

“Dammit,” Isaac said more angry at himself than anything else. “There’s a first aid kit in the bathroom there. I’ll be back in a minute. I have to fix this.”

“Fix what?” the woman was demanding, even as she held a hand over her bleeding cheekbone. “Was that your girlfriend? Oh, my gosh,
you have a girlfriend?
” The woman ran into the bathroom and slammed the door behind herself.

Isaac ran down the steps, ignoring the dancers on the poles who reached for him as he passed. Out on his front porch, he could see that Ruby had already made it up her front steps. He yelled her name, but she ignored him. Or couldn’t hear him. He sprinted down the steps and across the lawn, up her steps just as she slammed the front door. He heard the knob lock and the dead bolt clicking into place.

Ruby stared out the window at him, glaring, tears running down her face. “You cheating asshole,” she shrieked through the glass. “If that’s the life you want, then you have no business being in mine!” Then she grasped the curtains and closed them, nearly ripping them from their rod.

Isaac pounded on the door. Ruby could hear him yelling apologies, but she ignored him, putting her hands over her ears to shut it out. Finally she stood up, opened the curtain to find him still standing there. She shrieked at him to go away and retreated to the kitchen to pour herself a spiked lemonade and hide out in her office. She huddled into a ball in the comfortable chair she had in the office’s corner and cried into her glass. Ruby ignored the phone, turning it off without looking to see who was calling.

“I hate him. I hate men. I
hate
him,” she whispered over and over to herself as she cried. She gulped the beverage and set the glass on the end table before pulling her knees to her chest and wrapping her arms around them.

***

Ruby stayed this way for a long time, maybe hours. It was well into the middle of the night when she woke suddenly, having fallen asleep. She looked at the clock and saw that it was one in the morning. There was no sound, except the night sounds of insects in the willow tree, which were loud enough to be heard through the closed window. Ruby sat up, stretching the kinks out of her trim body. Her face was streaked with salt and her eyes felt grimy. She went into the kitchen and scrubbed her face with a dish cloth dipped in cold water. Then she pressed it against her closed eyes.

After a few minutes, she went upstairs and rummaged in her medicine cabinet for the Visine. After dosing herself with the drops, she drank a glass of water, undressed and got into bed. She fell into a fitful sleep full of half-remembered dreams. Things chased her, taunted her; she woke several times feeling the stress of the dreams. After laying away for another hour or two, she finally fell asleep and slept through the morning and into the early afternoon.

***

Ruby turned on the coffee maker, feeling hung over. She had only drank the one glass of lemonade, but coupled with the stress of the confrontation with Isaac and the hours-long bout of crying, et cetera, she felt as if she had downed an entire keg by herself. Ruby downed some Aspirin with her coffee and then remembered that she had promised Amanda she would call her after talking to Isaac. She sighed, feeling tears threatening to fall again. Ruby fought them back though, and pressed a cold wash cloth against her eyes until the feeling passed, She didn’t think she could spare the moisture required to have another good crying jag. She made a mental note to drink a lot of water today and went into her office to retrieve her phone.

Sitting at her kitchen table, Ruby turned the device on and saw she had four text messages, all from Isaac and a voice mail. She ignored the text messages and listened to the voice mail. It was from Amanda. She had called around ten that morning, while Ruby was still fast asleep.

“
Hi there, Ruby. It’s Mandy. Just wanted to touch base with you and see how you’re doing. Isaac called me last night and basically told me what happened between you two. I am
so
sorry. I never should have advised you to go over there. Please call me if you aren’t too angry at me.”

Ruby smiled, touched that Amanda had the consideration to call her. She felt a little embarrassed as well because she didn’t know how much detail Isaac had gone into. Did he tell his aunt that Ruby had thrown keys at his date? Or that she had shrieked at him several times like a banshee?
His aunt understands,
Ruby decided. She called Amanda Johnson and listened to the phone ring twice before the woman answered on the other end.

“Hi, Ruby! I’m so sorry,” Amanda began.

“No. Don’t apologize, Mandy. This wasn’t your fault. Isaac made his choice; this is all on him. I had to confront him at some point,” Ruby tried to assure the older woman that she wasn’t at fault.

“I still feel bad. If I’d had any inkling that little brat was seeing someone else, I would have tried to break it to you gently and certainly wouldn’t have sent you over there to confront him about his childishness. This whole thing is out of hand if you ask me,” Amanda continued. “I can understand his grief about Reggie, but this is just too much.”

“I was up all night with bad dreams, crying, and the like,” Ruby admitted. “I just woke up a little bit ago actually. I shut the phone off so Isaac couldn’t call me. He sent four texts but I’ve not read them yet.” Then she told Amanda in detail what had happened when she went next door the night before.

“That’s it. I’m on my way,” Amanda proclaimed in a tone of voice that left no room for dickering. “Isaac is out of hand, and this has got to stop.”

“But what can we do?” Ruby asked. “Do you happen to have any control at all over his trust fund? Maybe if you threaten to cut him off he’ll straighten out?” Ruby was at a loss for what should be done.

“No. I would have to prove that he’s not mentally competent to take care of himself. Besides, I’d rather resolve it as peacefully as possible and without causing any further drama if at all possible,” Amanda explained.

“Okay. How long does it take to get here?”

“About ten hours, so don’t expect me until tomorrow late in the morning,” Amanda responded. “I’m going to get my assistant here to oversee the farm until I can get back.”

“Okay. Just come to my house when you get here. I’m home every day,” Ruby said.

The two women hung up and Ruby called Julia to relay the story of the Isaac Confrontation once more. Julia was boiling mad by the end.

“That little weasel. I’ll run his ass over next time I see him crossing the street,” Julia said with venom in her voice.

“You don’t need to wind up in jail,” Ruby said. She was touched nevertheless by her friend’s willingness to kill for her should the need arise.

“Then I’ll egg his house in the middle of the night. I’ll egg his house and throw a rocks through a few windows.”

Ruby laughed. “What are we, twelve now? We are not committing any felonies, Julia. His aunt is on her way and will be here tomorrow morning some time. Until then, I’m holing up in my office and finishing my damn book. Then I’m outlining the last book in the trilogy and jotting down plot ideas for the thriller I’m publishing.” Ruby tried to speak matter-of-factly though she felt sick to her stomach about everything that had happened in the last fourteen hours. What she really wanted was to curl up with a large cheese pizza and a pint of Ben & Jerry’s and watch tear jerkers all day on the DVD player. She knew Julia would support this pity party if she asked her to, but Ruby wanted to shove passed it all for once and not wallow in it.

I wallowed in it enough last night and early this morning. Time to get moving.

Julia insisted on taking Ruby out that night to a posh night club for which she was organizing the grand opening. Reluctantly Ruby agreed. “I don’t have anything to wear to a posh night club.”

“You can borrow something of mine. It’ll be great, you’ll see,” Julia promised.  “I’ll be there at five to dress you.”

Ruby went back to her office after hanging up the phone and got back to work on her writing. A reminder popped up on her computer’s desktop:
Unread Emails
was all it said. Ruby remembered then that just as she had shut down her computer the night before, an email from Blanca had appeared in her Inbox. She opened the email and read it.

Hi, Ruby!

I think the idea of branching out is a great idea. Just don’t alienate your current fans by giving up the romance genre altogether, okay?

Publishing under your own name is fine. In fact, if you’re changing genres I recommend using your name or another pen name.

If you want to send me your outline I can shop it around and see if I can get a bite. If I can’t then I will refer you to a good friend of mine who works in that genre on a regular basis.

Also: the network owner who was personally interested in
Love and Old Lace
has accepted the invite to your launch party! I am so giddy right now.

We are moving it to the Hilton down town Dallas. One of the penthouse suites. Julia is handling all the arrangements, like the darling that she is.

-Blanca

Ruby’s breath caught in her throat and she could hardly breathe as she read and reread the email a third and fourth time. Her mind raced aimlessly in circles. She felt like flapping her hands and dancing in circles and screaming, “Omigosh, omigosh, omigosh.” Instead she took several deep breaths to calm her racing nerves and calmly sent a text to Julia regarding the confirmation of a certain network owner coming to the launch party. She laughed aloud at Julia’s response: