Lovers Premiere (Kimani Romance)

by Adrianne Byrd

  She’d rather gouge her own eyes out with a pitchfork, but it was time for the big Hollywood agent to put the acting chops she’d learned to work. After making Emmett wait for a couple of awkward seconds, she finally stepped into his embrace. However, she didn’t allow for his arms to stay around her for long as she quickly removed herself from his embrace. She caught Ramell’s frown from the corner of her eyes, but she refused to look at him. Instead, she forced her lips to curl back up so that she could ask to be excused.

  “I just need to dip into the ladies’ room for a second,” Sofia said, stepping away from Ramell’s side.

  “I’ll come with you,” Rachel offered. She gave her fiancé a brief kiss and then peeled herself out of his arms.

  The two sisters rushed from the small circle just shy of leaving skid marks. Seeing their speed most of their guests started parting like the Red Sea to avoid being run over. Sofia couldn’t get away fast enough and could barely manage to fill her collapsing lungs with much needed oxygen as she reached the ladies’ room.

  “Are you all right?” Rachel asked.

  “I will be,” Sofia said, pulling in several more deep breaths. “I swear I can’t stand that man!”

  “I know,” Rachel said, rubbing her back in hopes of calming her down. “It’s just for one evening. You can do this.”

  “And after tonight?” Sofia challenged. “What if he’s around all the time? What if Ram invites him over to dinner once or twice a week? What if they get together and hang out in the media room for football and basketball games?” Heat rushed up her chest and neck as she worked herself up into a frenzy. When she started feeling lightheaded and woozy, she grabbed a hold of the vanity to support herself.

  “Calm down, Sofia. Calm down,” Rachel urged. “Deep breaths. Take deep breaths.”

  After feeling the tips of her ears burning, Sofia took her sister’s suggestion and started taking in deep breaths and expelling them slowly.

  “That’s it. Calm down,” Rachel coached. “You can do it.”

  Bit by bit, Sofia’s face cooled as she calmed down.

  Rachel smiled. “There you go. Do you feel better?”

  Sofia nodded and then hugged her sister. “Yes. Thank you. I really appreciate it.”

  “You know I’m always here for you.” Her sister smiled. “But as far as dealing with your new father-in-law, I think you’re just going to have to talk to Ramell and tell him how you feel about Emmett.”

  “Yeah. I should really tell my new husband that I can’t stand his father. That should go over well.”

  “There’s something to be said for honesty. You can’t go the rest of your lives together trying to avoid the man. Ram is going to understand—he might even be able to help you two work this thing out.”

  Sofia stiffened. “I do not want to work anything out with that man.”

  Rachel tossed her hands up. “I understand. But you’re going to have to talk to Ramell about the situation regardless. There’s no getting around that.”

  She hesitated, but after her sister cocked her head and stretched her eyebrows up at her, Sofia had to admit that she was right. “I’ll do it tonight.”

  “Good,” Rachel said, giving her another hug. “Now are you ready to go back out there?”

  She sucked in one more deep breath and then nodded.

  “All right. Let’s go get them, tiger.” Rachel draped her arm around her older sister’s shoulders and then led her out of the ladies’ room.

  They hadn’t taken more than a couple of steps outside the door before Emmett Jordan cornered them.

  “Sofia, do you think that I can talk to you for a few minutes?”

  Sofia dropped all pretense of a smile. “I don’t think that now is a good time,” she said coldly. But when she attempted to step around him, he blocked her and Rachel’s path. “It will only take a minute.”

  “Then call my office and make an appointment.”

  Emmett shook his head. “My God. You really do hate me,” he said, frowning and shaking his head. “I think I’ve always suspected it since you had walked in on—”

  “I don’t want to talk about this right now!” Sofia yelled as she tried to move around him again, only for Emmett to pull the same stunt and block off her exit.

  “Wait!”

  “Will you stop doing that?” Sofia snapped and stomped her foot.

  When a few heads swiveled in their direction, Rachel leaned over and whispered, “Take a deep breath. It’s going to be all right.”

  Sofia followed her sister’s instructions. “Look, Emmett. This isn’t the time or the place for this.”

  “I just want to clear the air. I think that there’s a huge misunderstanding that’s gone on for far too long. And now that…well, we’re family…”

  Sofia stiffened again. Why couldn’t this man get it through his head that she didn’t want to talk to him?

  “…And family is important to me…” he continued as he stepped into her personal space.

  Alarm bells rang in her head as she quickly jumped back and held up her hands like stop signs. “Emmett, we’re not about to have this conversation.”

  Rachel stepped forward. “Mr. Jordan, maybe this isn’t such a good time.”

  “Is there a problem over here?” Ramell asked, threading his way into the circle.

  “There’s no problem,” Sofia lied.

  “I think there’s a big problem,” Emmett contradicted. Ram frowned.

  “What’s going on?” Uncle Jacob and Aunt Lily now joined the loop.

  Sofia’s blood pressure shot up as she placed her slim fingers against her temples.

  “I was just trying to talk to Sofia about a few things,” Emmett pressed.

  “And I said that I didn’t want to talk right now,” Sofia hissed. “I don’t want to talk to you ever. Period. End of story.”

  “Sofia,” Ram said, stunned. “What’s gotten into you, sweetheart?” He moved closer to her and wrapped his arm back around her for support.

  “Nothing has gotten into me. Will you just drop it?” She tried to pull away, but he wouldn’t have it. “Will you let me go? Stop trying to control me!”

  “What?” Ramell’s arm fell away from her waist.

  “Maybe we just need to go into another room real quick so that we can talk,” Uncle Jacob suggested. “Clearly, we do need to clear the air about a few things.”

  What had gotten into everyone? Didn’t they just hear her say that she didn’t want to talk to this man?

  “I don’t know,” Rachel hedged. “Sofia is getting pretty upset. Maybe we should do this another time.”

  “Well, I, for one, want to know what the hell is going on,” Ram said, his gaze still searching his wife’s face for the harsh rebuke that she’d just lashed out on him.

  Sofia wanted to apologize, but at the same time she felt as if she was being cornered. And now that her family was all looking like she was the freak in a freak show, she relented so that she could just get this whole thing over with. “Fine.” She tossed up her hands. “Five minutes.”

  Emmett had the audacity to smile now that he’d gotten his way.

  “Let’s just go into this room over here,” Uncle Jacob said, pointing off to the side.

  Unbelievably, in the middle of their own wedding reception, the family smiled and excused themselves to their few friends and family so that they could dip into a room off from the grand room.

  Ram took a chance and swung his arm back around her waist. She allowed it, but she was still irritated. This was the very thing that she had hoped to avoid for years, now it was worse than she had ever imagined it. Instead of privately telling Ram her issues about his father, she now how to air her grievances in front of her whole family. Once they were all piled into the other room, Uncle Jacob closed the door.

  “First of all,” Jacob began, turning toward Sofia. “I’m sorry that we have to do this this evening, but clearly it’s time that we deal with a few things, a few thing
s that…your aunt and I had hoped to avoid.” He reached over for his wife’s hand.

  Sofia folded her arms. “My problem isn’t with you or Aunt Lily. This is about Emmett and him alone,” she stressed. “It’s about how he stabbed my father in the back. It’s about him sneaking around with my mother!”

  “What?” Ram thundered, turning toward his father.

  Emmett’s hands came up as he stepped back. “That is not true!”

  “Yes it is,” Sofia contradicted him. “I was there, remember?”

  “What? You saw them together or something?” Ram asked.

  “No.” Sofia shook her head. “I was there that day my father called him out on it.” Her gaze swung back to Emmett. “You remember that?”

  Emmett lowered his hands as sadness crept over his face. “Of course I remember that day. But you got it wrong, Sofia. Just like your father got it wrong. And in the end he didn’t believe any of that nonsense. He was just lashing out.”

  “No.” Sofia shook her head. “He called you out for the lying backstabber that you are!”

  “Sofia,” Aunt Lily gasped.

  “It’s true, Aunt Lily. Come on. You were there, too.”

  Ram’s head swiveled to his father. “Dad, is it true?”

  “No,” Emmett said simply.

  Uncle Jacob stepped forward. “He’s telling the truth, Sofia. You were too young at the time to understand what was going on. For a long time I thought that you’d forgotten about that day. Heck, I have sometimes forgotten that you had walked in there that day. Given that the accident was just a couple of days later, we—your aunt and I—just concentrated on being there for you and your sister. And part of being there for you was also trying to shield something from both you and the crazy media attention we generated at the time. I knew that you were angry, but I didn’t understand the depth of this until the A.F.I. merger.”

  Sofia tried to keep up with the conversation, but none of it was making any sense yet.

  Jacob drew a deep breath. “What you walked in on that day…was an intervention.”

  “A what?” Sofia frowned.

  “An intervention for your father,” he said, moving closer. “There’s no easy way to say this, girls, but your father had a drinking problem.”

  Sofia started shaking her head. This was all a big lie.

  “We had all gathered there that day to confront him. At first I didn’t think anything of it. And I was his twin. I always thought that I knew everything about him. We’ve always had such a strong connection. You know that. We were best friends our entire lives. People used to label him the fun one and I was the serious one of the two. Then one day the cracks started to show and then there started to be too many to hide. He started losing money and the business we had poured all our blood, sweat and tears into was threatened. He was gambling, taking out loans I didn’t know about. The next thing I know we were surrounded by creditors.

  “Your mother, Lily, tried several times to convince him to go to AA, but your father wouldn’t hear of it. He didn’t think that he had a problem. When it was clear to all of us, except to John, that Limelight was teetering on the edge of bankruptcy, I approached Emmett about a possible merger. When John found out he became convinced that Emmett was trying to steal the company from him. Unfortunately, he found out the same evening that we had staged the intervention. And he came in drunk and belligerent. He said a whole lot of stuff that he didn’t mean.”

  Sofia kept shaking her head. “My father wasn’t a drunk. How can you say that?”

  Aunt Lily stepped forward. “Sofia, I know all of this is a big shock, but what you heard—”

  “What I heard was not the truth!” She pushed back out of Ram’s arms. “I remember my father and he was not a drunk. He was loving and caring—”

  “Yes,” Uncle Jacob said. “He was all those things—but he had a problem.” He drew a deep breath. “Which is why he finally agreed to go to rehab…in Colorado.”

  Both Sofia and Rachel gasped.

  Jacob nodded. “That was where he and your mother were going when their plane crashed. He was going to get help.”

  Aunt Lily wiped tears from her eyes. “There hasn’t been a day that any of us hasn’t wrestled with the cruel irony that the only reason that they were even on that plane was to try to save his life. I know how much you love and cherish the memory of your father, Sofia. That had a lot to do with our decision to not tell you about his problem. And it isn’t fair to Emmett for you to believe those wild accusations your father tossed at him. They weren’t true and he doesn’t deserve it.”

  “No.” Sofia continued shaking her head. “It’s not true. It’s not. My father was a good man. He was a hard worker and…”

  “Yes, yes, and yes,” Lily said. “But he was still just a man. A man that needed help.”

  Tears started pouring down Sofia’s face and she couldn’t stop shaking her head. “Why would you? How could you?” She placed a hand over her mouth.

  “Baby.” Ram reached for her but she jumped out of his grasp.

  “Don’t touch me,” she snapped and then tried to suck in a deep breath. Instead she started hyperventilating. “Don’t ever touch me.” Her gaze zoomed back to her aunt and uncle and she wanted to lash out at them too, but couldn’t get the mean words off her tongue.

  Rachel rushed to her side. “Sofia, honey. You’re turning red. Try to calm down.”

  “How can I calm down when they’re saying…” She shook her head. “I don’t believe it. I refuse to believe it. My father was not a drunk. He was a good man and I’m not about to just stand here while you all drag his name and his memory through the mud! I won’t! I—” Just then the room started spinning and there didn’t seem to be enough oxygen for Sofia to breathe.

  Ram rushed forward to his wife just as she started to sink toward the floor. “Sofia!”

  Chapter 17

  Ramell didn’t wait for the paramedics to be called. Once Sofia collapsed, he spent a full minute trying to wake her up. When she wouldn’t wake he swept her into his arms and raced out of the room. “Please get out of the way.”

  A collective gasp rose above the glittering Hollywood elite while they quickly jumped out of the way. The Wellesleys and Ethan Chambers all raced right behind him as Ram jetted out of the Wilshire. Less than twenty minutes later, they all piled into Cedars-Sinai Hospital Emergency Room. Upon seeing an unconscious woman draped in his arms, doctors and nurses rushed toward him and then pried her out of his arms.

  “What happened?” A young man, dressed in a pair of blue scrubs, who looked like he was barely old enough to have a driver’s license, started checking Sofia over.

  “I’m not quite sure. She just fainted,” Ram said and then a memory flashed. “It might have something to do with her blood pressure. I know that she’s taking something for it.”

  The young man nodded, placed her on a rolling gurney and then pushed Sofia’s eyelids open.

  “Is she going to be all right?” Ram asked, hovering over the doctor’s shoulders.

  “She’s going to be fine, sir,” the man said, plugging his ears with his stethoscope and then checking Sofia’s heartbeat.

  Everyone was rushing around at warp speed, but Ram made sure that he stayed on top of everything that was going on. It was difficult because every time he looked down at Sofia lying on the gurney, she looked so small and vulnerable that it was causing a tight restriction in his chest and his eyes to feel as if someone had poured battery acid in them. He didn’t like seeing his wife like this and he was angry about his part in getting her so upset. She had made it very clear that she didn’t want to talk to his father and they had all insisted that they try to clear the air about her father’s past.

  It was a lot of startling information about a man she had spent her entire life idolizing. Ramell had known about Limelight’s near bankruptcy once upon a time, but his father certainly never told him that it was because John Wellesley had a gambling and alcohol problem
. Maybe because his father always knew about his feelings toward Sofia and possibly feared he would tell her about it. Apparently they had all agreed to bury John’s demons in order to protect his children.

  The media coverage was intense when John and Vivian passed, but the paparazzi back then was a different animal and not every rock was overturned on their personal life. If it had been, surely John’s problems would have been splashed everywhere. Instead the coverage just focused on the tragedy and the fate of the children. Now he wished he would’ve known. Knowing now that she had walked into that intense intervention and misunderstood all that she heard, it made sense why she fought their companies’ merger as hard as she did.

  Now he finally understood why she had ended their friendship. All those years he thought it was because of something he had done.

  Twenty minutes later, Sofia was wheeled into a private room and their entire clan followed closed behind. Not long after that, Sofia moaned and her eyelashes started fluttering.

  “She’s waking up,” Lily said, clutching her left hand.

  Ram held her right one. When Sofia opened her beautiful brown eyes he was finally able to pull in his first full breath and offer up a prayer of gratitude. He lifted her hand and brushed a kiss against the back of it before smiling and speaking softly, “Hey, baby. You gave us quite a scare. How are you feeling?”

  Their eyes locked and a string of pear-shaped tears slid down the side of her face. But instead of answering, she pulled her hand free from his and then turned away from him.

  His smile melted as confusion and disbelief crashed in on his hopeful expression.

  Lily swept Sofia’s hair from her face while Rachel and Jacob crowded around the bed. “The doctor says that you’re going to be all right,” Lily informed her. “Your blood pressure was elevated pretty high and…well, baby. We’re so sorry. We didn’t mean to upset you so badly. We just—”

  “I don’t want to talk about it,” Sofia croaked, but then started coughing.

  Ram turned toward the small table next to the bed and quickly poured her a small plastic cup of water and then offered it to her.