“Leave who alone? Daniel?”
“No. Your other niggar. Who do you think?”
Her use of the N word cut Nikki short, especially since she sounded like a southern white woman. “You have a relationship with Daniel?” she asked the woman.
“We love each other, that’s what kind of relationship we have. We met in Portland five years ago, and we’ve been lovers since. He wines and dines me and makes love to me every night he can get away from you. He takes me on most of his trips out of town. That’s when we love each other the most. When it’s just us far away from you. That trip he took to Florida, I was with him. We were together the night he left you at that hospital. The only reason he went back to pick you up was because he didn’t want that other man to take you home. That’s the only reason. He loves hitting that ass of yours and doesn’t want anybody else getting a piece. But that’s it. That’s the only reason he bothers with you at all.”
Nikki’s heart dropped. She used to always wonder if her body, more than anything else, was what kept Daniel in her life.
“That’s right,” the woman went on. “He was with me, fucking my brains out, while you were sitting around in some pathetic hospital. After we came, he did me again. Then he went to see about you.”
Nikki closed her eyes. This wasn’t happening. Why was this woman calling her with all of this foolishness?
“I’m his woman,” the woman continued. “We share all the same interests. We’re so much alike. And unlike with you, when it comes to the bedroom, he doesn’t have to teach me a damn thing. He loves that about me. He just loves it. And don’t fool yourself into thinking that this is some one-sided affair and I’m just some crazy Fatal Attraction bitch, because it’s nothing like that. He loves me. You got it? He plans to marry me one day.”
Nikki frowned . “Marry you?”
“That’s right. That’s why he hasn’t asked you yet. Because he has no intentions of asking you! He was going to propose to me. He even told me so. ‘Jean,’ he said, ‘you’re the woman for me. You’re the woman I want to be my wife.’ But now you get caught in riots and pull the sympathy card and he wants to wait a while longer. Until he gets you settled back down. But he’s marrying me, bitch. I don’t care how long it takes.”
Nikki exhaled. She felt as if she could go to pieces if she allowed herself to believe this woman. “I don’t believe you,” she said firmly.
“And? Don’t believe me then. But you better stay away from Daniel!”
The phone went dead. “Wait!” Nikki said so loudly, so desperately, that others in the newsroom looked her way. She paused, and hung up too.
She sat back. Taking it all in. Jean, she said her name was. The same name of the naked woman in those photographs. And she couldn’t help it. She began re-living every word: how they met five years ago, how he wined and dined her, how he took her on his business trips, how he only wanted Nikki for her body, how he was with that woman the night he left Nikki at the hospital!
Suddenly she had to get away, to get some air.
She pulled her purse out of her desk drawer and began slinging items out of it, from combs to compacts to her wallet, until her cell phone came up. She grabbed the phone and moved quickly out of the newsroom, moved as if she’d pass out if she didn’t get in a hurry, and she stepped out of the heavy double doors and stood like a spooked basket case on the sidewalk of Saint Germaine.
Her suit coat was off and back inside the building, which meant she was wearing only her slacks and sleeveless vest. But the cold didn’t bother her. She was too excited. She was too devastated by the horror of another woman in Daniel’s life to even pay attention to the whip and whirl of the wind outside.
She was so outdone with that phone call that she actually forgot that his number was programmed into her phone. She pressed his numbers so fast that she pressed the wrong numbers twice, causing her to redial both times. When she finally got it right, and Whitney told her that Daniel was unavailable, her anger replaced her fear. “Listen to me, Whitney, and you listen good. I am not asking you to put Daniel on this phone, I am telling you. I don’t care if he’s in a meeting with President Obama, you get him on this phone! And you tell him that if he choose not to receive my call he’ll be sorry, because I’ll come to his office and show off my natural ass- you hear me? I’ve got to talk to him!”
There was a pause on the line as Whitney, Nikki was certain, was stunned that Nikki was talking to her that way. Then she asked her to hold on. Within a couple minutes tops, Daniel was on the line.
“Nikki?” he asked. And as soon as she heard his voice, that firm, hard voice of his, tears came to her eyes.
“Nikki?”
“She called me,” Nikki said, her voice emotionally hoarse already.
There was a hesitation in Daniel’s voice as well, which didn’t help. “Who called you?”
“She said she was your lover. She said y’all been together for five years. Five years, Daniel. She said you want to marry her. She even said she was with you that night you left me at the hospital.”
“Who told you this?”
“Jean,” Nikki said and waited for his explanation. But none came. He didn’t explain at all. Not at all. And his silence spoke volumes to Nikki.
She shook her head. What was she doing? She felt like a pure fool standing out there in the cold, feeling miserable and hurt, while he was playing dumb. “You know what,” she decided to say, “nobody told me anything. Nobody at all. Forget I even bothered calling your sorry ass!” And she killed the call.
The heavy double doors of the Gazette building crept open, and Luke, as if on cue, stepped out. Nikki had, by now, drifted away from the front door, to the end of the building. She stood there, her back to Luke, her behind round and firm underneath her tight pants.
Luke walked slowly toward her, cautiously, until she turned his way. Luke stared at her. “You okay?” he asked, but as soon as he spoke, the sounds of welding metal from the salvage yard across the street began to be heard, causing him to ask if she was okay again, this time louder than his normal voice.
But Nikki didn’t respond either time.
“You looked pretty upset when you left out. I was just checking.”
Still nothing from Nikki.
“Okay. I know when I’m licked. Didn’t mean to get in your business.” He said this and then made a slow move to turn around and leave.
“I got a phone call,” Nikki said above the noise from the salvage yard. Luke turned back around. She and Luke had worked together for months now. She considered him, not just her boss, but her friend.
“Some woman, she wouldn’t give her name, phoned me. He loves her, according to her.”
Luke wondered if he should ask who the he was, just to show spontaneity, but found it unnecessary. Daniel Crane was the center of Nikki’s existence, and she knew he knew that. “He denies it, of course,” he said instead.
Nikki frowned. “Yes,” she said. “I guess. I don’t know. I don’t care! How could I have been so dumb?”
“Now hold on, Nikki. Don’t start beating yourself up. Just because some woman called doesn’t mean it’s true. She could have been lying.”
Nikki let out a sigh of frustration and then, as the tears threatened to return, turned her back to Luke.
Luke looked at her bone-thin back, and he wanted to reach out and touch her, but he knew he couldn’t. He was winning. She was seeing that bastard Crane for who he really was, and things were going his way. But he had to tread lightly.
“I know you’re upset, Nikki. But you can’t,” he said this still in his loud voice, but he stopped suddenly as the noise across the street stopped too. “You can’t let something like this devastate you.”
Nikki looked at Luke after he said that. She looked into his sympathetic, understanding, big blue eyes. And they were so sympathetic, and so understanding, that she couldn’t contain her emotions any longer. The tears returned. And she fell. She fell into Luke Finley’s
arms.
She spent the remainder of the afternoon trying her best to stay busy. And this time Luke did give her assignments, as if he wanted to keep her busy too. She covered a pro-life rally, interviewed the sister of a murder victim, and then sat behind her desk writing up both stories although Luke had told her long ago to take her behind home.
But she wasn’t about to do that. She wasn’t about to go home and sit around crying her eyes out over some man who couldn’t even be faithful to her. No way, she thought. She wasn’t even trying to deal with that craziness right now. At least at work she could focus on other people’s problems. At least at work she was too busy delving into other people’s lives to worry about just how pitiful her own life really was.
But Daniel showed up. It was late, after six, and Nikki was one of the few reporters still working inside the newsroom. She was at her computer, pecking away feverishly, when she saw, through her periphery, somebody approaching her desk. She glanced away from her computer screen, to see who it was, but when she realized it was Daniel she did a double take.
He was in a gray suit and tie, and moved at a very deliberate pace. His eyes looked at her with a hard, cold stare, and they didn’t so much as blink or glance away. He was upset and she could see it all over his face. He was the one with the bitch on the side, but he was upset? Nikki wanted to puke.
Luke saw him too. He saw him from the prism of the glass door in his office. He stood up, when Daniel walked past, and stood at his opened door for a better view. He never figured Crane to be the type to show up. A woman bust a brother like that, Luke figured he’d just accept his fate and move on to the next conquest. But Luke knew better too. Nikki was involved. She was worth the trip. Crane may have been a lot of things, but Luke never figured him to be a fool.
Daniel stood at Nikki’s desk without saying a word. He had both hands in his pants pockets and was staring intensely at her. He looked drained and angry at the same time, she thought, a man just one wrong word away from losing it, and she tried to stare back, because he wasn’t about to lay some guilt trip on her as if she did something wrong.
But looking into those hazel eyes of his made her too emotional. She loved him so much! She decided to get on with it. That staring routine, like he was the great wise man and she was some hopeless case, wasn’t going to work this time.
“Did you come here for a reason, or just to stare at me?” she asked him.
He remained still. He didn’t so much as bat an eye.
“Which is it? To stare at me? Is that it? Because if it is I can tell you now that it won’t work.”
“What’s wrong with you, Nikki?” he asked her, his face seemingly pained to understand just what drives this woman sometimes. “You receive a phone call from some woman you know nothing about, some anonymous phone call, and that’s all it takes?”
“You can minimize it all you want. You can act like it’s no big deal all you care to. But I know better.”
“You don’t know shit!”
Nikki hesitated, surprised by Daniel’s tone. But she couldn’t keep giving in so easily. “I know more than you think,” she finally said.
“You need to stop it, Nikki, you understand me? You need to stop this nonsense right here and right now.”
“What nonsense? All I did was finally face the truth.”
“What the hell kind of truth do you keep talking about?! That same truth some woman told you? That kind? Truth based on lies? But that’s all it takes with you, isn’t it? If it has the least plausibility then you’re off and running. That’s all you need.”
“Right. That’s all I need. You don’t do shit. It’s all in my imagination.”
Daniel was offended. “Don’t you talk to me that way.”
“I’ll talk to you any way I damn well please! Who the hell are you?”
Daniel sighed and folded his arms. If she didn’t wear him out he didn’t know what could. “I don’t have a lot of patience, Nikki. And you’re pushing it.”
“Then leave, dammit. I don’t have no patience either!”
“All right, that’s it,” Daniel said as he unfolded his arms. “Get your things and let’s go.”
Nikki looked at him as if he had fangs. “What?”
“Get your things and let’s go.”
“You must be out of your mind. I’m not about to go anywhere with you!”
Daniel’s anger came swiftly as he lunged over Nikki’s desk and pointed his finger within an inch of her face. “Get your things, Nikki, and let’s go. And I mean now!”
He grabbed her by the arm and slung her to her feet. He was boiling over with almost more anger than he could contain, and everybody in the newsroom had stopped what they were doing to see the anger unleashed.
Nikki knew she had to do something. She either had to agree to go with Daniel, or boil in anger right along with him, because he wasn’t going to just leave.
But then Luke came out of his office as if he were some conquering hero coming to the rescue, and that only made it worse. The last thing Nikki needed was to have Luke provoking Daniel, whose anger was almost chilling when it was fully realized, and Luke was exactly the kind of man who would love to see the big man fall.
But Nikki wasn’t going to allow any escalation of this already bad scene. And she was angry with herself because she couldn’t even be upset with Daniel without defending him too. She still loved the asshole. She still wanted to believe every word he said. And that was why she decided to go.
“I think you need to leave this building, partner,” Luke said as he couldn’t seem to get to Nikki’s side fast enough.
“It’s all right, Luke,” she said, to head off his advance. “We’re leaving now.”
“You don’t have to go anywhere with him,” Luke said, staring at Daniel. Daniel exhaled, his stomach boiling in pain.
“I said it’s okay,” Nikki said. “Just go on back to your office. I’m fine.”
Luke stared at Daniel, checking him out from head to toe, and then he looked at Nikki. “You’re certain about that?”
“Yes.”
“You don’t have to be afraid of him around here.”
“I know that, Luke. I’m not afraid.”
“Okay. But call me if you need me.”
“I will.”
“I mean no matter what.”
“I will, Luke.”
Luke nodded. “Okay,” he said. Then he looked at Crane one more time, looked at Nikki, whom he just couldn’t read sometimes, and went back to the cold confines of his small office.
Daniel stared at Luke as he walked back to that office, and he could only shake his head. The way Nikki had him so crazy sometimes he wondered why he didn’t just let Luke have her. They matched. They were both impulsive and excitable and ready to leap to conclusions at the drop of a hat.
But then he looked at Nikki, at the woman who soothe him and angered him to heights he’d never experienced. And he knew he wasn’t about to give her up.
“Where are we going?” she asked as she grabbed her purse from her desk drawer.
“Away from here.”
“I know that, Daniel. What about my car?”
“We’ll get it later.”
Nikki paused and stared at him. Why she didn’t tell him to take a hike with all of his demands she would never know. But she didn’t tell him a thing. She went right along with him. She grabbed her briefcase with her purse and then led him toward the exit doors. Love, she thought. All this shit for love.
Luke remained in his office, watching them as they left the building. Watching that smooth asshole take Nikki away to fill her up with lies of his fidelity. And Nikki was so in love, and so naive, that she would believe anything he told her. Luke would give both arms to be right where Daniel Crane was. He would give anything to have Nikki’s complete and unshakable loyalty. But he would. Luke believed in his soul that one day very soon the tables would turn and he would take Daniel Crane’s place. And Nikki would still be loyal, b
ut she’d be completely and unshakably loyal to him.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Nikki leaned back against the headrest of Daniel’s Jaguar and watched the dark road ahead. What she thought was going to be a short drive to his house turned out to be an hour-long trip through the back roads of Indiana. She turned her head toward him and watched him as he drove. He’d drive slowly and then faster as if he was distracted, as if he was thinking about some heavy duty issues and had forgotten that she was even in the car. He took slow drags on his electronic cigarette, listened to his jazz, and stared straight ahead.
Nikki had so many questions to ask him that she felt as if she could burst if she didn’t get some answers soon. But she also knew she had to hear him out first. Was that woman telling the truth when she called and told her story, or was it a pack of lies? And if it were true, if there were indeed another woman, was it all true? Was he really in love with her? Did he really plan to marry her?
Nikki looked away from him. If he was in love with that woman, who claimed to be that older, more sophisticated and experienced kind of woman that used to turn him on, Nikki didn’t know how she would respond. Crying wasn’t cutting it. She was through with the tears. She made up her mind about that earlier, when she interviewed the sister of a murder victim. The woman was hurting bad, and was devastated that somebody could be so cruel, but she didn’t shed a tear. Nikki asked her about it. How could she be so strong in the face of so much tragedy? But she didn’t flinch. She talked about how her sister didn’t need her tears because she was in a better place now. And then she added: “The murderer wins if I sit around crying. I loved my sister too much, and have too much pride in myself, to let him win.”
They ended up in Delmar, Indiana. Delmar was a small, wooded, lakeside town some fifty miles out of Wakefield, a town Nikki never visited before.
DANIEL'S GIRL: ROMANCING AN OLDER MAN Page 19