Lust & Loyalty

by Shelly Ellis

  After she handed Shaun his dish, the waitress smiled down at the couple and placed two straws between them. “So, do we need anything else? Napkins? Ketchup?”

  “No,” Shaun said, still staring at C. J. “We’re good.”

  C. J’s throat tightened. But they weren’t good. They weren’t good at all.

  Chapter 5

  Evan

  Evan rushed up the staircase, glancing at his wristwatch and cursing under his breath as he did. He was late—very late. He had told Leila he would be back home nearly an hour ago to head to the obstetrician with her for her ultrasound appointment. He had missed the two previous appointments because he had had important business meetings—one with a Murdoch Conglomerated distributor and the other had required him to travel overseas at the last minute. But he refused to miss this appointment, not after they had already rescheduled it twice. Work obligations be damned! They were going to find out whether they were having a baby boy or girl, and he had to be there. Too bad rush-hour traffic hadn’t cooperated.

  “Lee!” he called out almost out of breath as he headed down the west wing corridor leading to their bedroom. He was at a near run. “Lee,” he said as he drew near the door and shoved it open. “Shit, baby, I’m sorry I’m so late. I—”

  His words drifted off when he saw who was in their darkened bedroom. It wasn’t Leila, but her daughter. The little girl was standing on the balls of her feet in front of her mother’s mahogany dresser holding a pair of diamond earrings. Evan watched as she quickly shoved the earrings into the pocket of her plaid jumper. He flicked a switch to turn on one of the overhead lights. Isabel turned around to face him.

  “What were you doing?” he asked.

  Isabel shook her head, sending her braids whipping around her shoulders. “N-nothing,” she stuttered.

  “It wasn’t nothing.” He walked toward her across the bedroom. “I saw you put your mother’s earrings into your pocket.”

  Her big, dark eyes went wide. She clamped her lips shut and began to fidget, pivoting from one foot to the other. One of her red knee-high socks slid down her skinny calf and slumped to her ankle.

  “Were you stealing your mother’s earrings, Izzy?”

  She furiously shook her head again. “No, I-I was just . . . just b-b-borrowing them. I was . . . I was going to wear them . . . to . . . to school!”

  “If you’re going to do something like that, you should probably ask first.” He held out his hand to her as he drew close. “Give them to me.”

  She hesitated before reaching into her pocket and pulling out the earrings. She dropped them into his open palm before lowering her gaze to her penny loafers in shame.

  Evan stared down at the earrings that he had purchased Leila for Christmas, four-carat diamond cluster teardrops. Leila had mentioned that other jewelry had gone missing in the past few weeks: a Tiffany bracelet and diamond studs. Evan had thought that maybe they had fallen behind her bureau, or one of the new maids had a case of sticky fingers and slipped them into her apron. He had told his housekeeper to keep an eye out for any suspicious behavior among the staff. But he’d had no clue that little Isabel might be the real culprit, the one they should have been watching.

  “I don’t think these will go very well with your school uniform,” he said dryly. “And your ears aren’t pierced. You wouldn’t be able to wear them anyway.” He set the diamonds back on the dresser top and scrutinized her more closely. “Now why did you really take them? Tell me the truth.”

  Isabel’s eyes began to fill with tears. “Daddy . . . Daddy asked me to,” she whispered.

  “Your father told you to take them?”

  She nodded.

  Brad, you asshole, he thought angrily. I should’ve known.

  Even though he had been sentenced to seven years for his embezzlement and fraud conviction, it seemed that Brad wasn’t going down without a fight. He was still trying to make Leila’s life miserable from a distance.

  “Daddy said Mommy wouldn’t care,” Isabel explained, sniffing. “He said she didn’t need that stuff, b-but . . . but he did! He said—”

  “Wait. You’ve been sending your mother’s jewelry to your father?” Evan asked in disbelief.

  “Daddy told me to put it in the box that we’re mailing to him for his birthday next week. He said it can be another one of his gifts. I’m . . . I’m supposed to stuff it with the . . . the teddy bear I got him.”

  “Jesus Christ,” Evan exhaled, feeling his stomach turn.

  Brad was getting his eight-year-old daughter to funnel stolen jewelry to him! That man was beyond evil. Evan inclined his head, considering the situation. Actually, Brad reminded Evan a lot of his own old man, which made Evan even more sympathetic to Isabel. He remembered being a kid powerless against his father’s lies and manipulations. No matter how angry Evan wanted to be right now, he couldn’t direct that anger at her.

  He sighed, dropped to his knee in front of Isabel, and placed a consoling hand on her thin shoulder. “Izzy, sweetheart, we talked about this, didn’t we? Remember when I told you—”

  “Talked about what?” Leila called out.

  Evan turned and Isabel looked up. Their eyes settled on Leila, who was standing in the doorway in an orange sundress and white cardigan with her purse draped on her shoulder. She was staring at them.

  “What did you guys talk about?” she repeated.

  Evan forced a smile and rose to his feet. “Oh, nothing! Nothing! I was . . . uh . . . just reminding Isabel that when she’s playing with things in here to put it back. She was doing a bit of dress-up with some of your jewelry.” He gestured to Leila’s dresser. “And dropped a pair of earrings. No big deal.”

  Leila squinted at them and crossed her arms over her chest. “Oh, really?” She didn’t look remotely convinced.

  “I forgot to put it back,” Isabel echoed, wiping her runny nose with the back of her hand. “I’m sorry.”

  Evan clapped his hands. “Well, now that that’s handled, we should get going, Lee. We’re going to be late for your appointment if we don’t hit the road soon, right?”

  “Yeah,” she said vaguely. “We should get going.”

  * * *

  “You’re lying,” Leila announced unceremoniously as they sat in the backseat of the Lincoln Town Car minutes later as the car pulled away from the curb and sailed down the driveway.

  Evan stared at her, startled. “Huh?”

  “You’re lying to me, Evan Murdoch.” She rubbed her belly in slow, circular motions. Her body was rigid. “You weren’t talking to Izzy about putting jewelry back where she found it. You think I’m stupid?”

  “No, of course not, baby! Where the hell is this coming from?”

  “You keep doing this. You keep . . . you keep lying to me, Ev. And it’s really pissing me off!”

  “What are you talking about? When did I lie to you?”

  “You didn’t tell me that Charisse refused to grant you a divorce. She told me that she told you a month ago.”

  He squinted. “When the hell did you talk to Charisse?”

  “At the lovely fund-raising committee meeting that I went to a couple of days ago. The one Paulette invited me to. Your wife ambushed me there! She made this big deal in front of everyone about how I shouldn’t be there because I wasn’t your wife, I was your whore! Charisse said she told you that she’s going to drag out your divorce until either you give up on the idea of us getting married or I give up. Why didn’t you tell me that, Ev?”

  Evan tiredly closed his eyes. He had wondered why Leila had been acting so strange since that day at the country club. She had been tight-lipped, almost aloof. This explained it.

  He didn’t know why Charisse had said those things to Leila. No, actually he did know why she had said it. She did it because she hated Leila with a passion. Unfortunately, he couldn’t work up too much rage against his wife, knowing what he knew about her—about her screwed-up childhood and the sexual abuse she had suffered at her father�
��s hands. Charisse had come to terms with her dark past in rehab and had revealed the truth to Evan soon after. He now saw Charisse as a wounded animal, and wounded animals fought the hardest when cornered.

  “I’m sorry, baby,” he said softly, opening his eyes and reaching out for Leila. He squeezed her hand reassuringly. “I’m sorry Charisse upset you. I wasn’t trying to lie to you. I just . . . I just knew that you’ve been looking forward to getting married. You’ve been looking at reception spaces, for Chrissake! You were designing our invitations. I didn’t want to burst your bubble.”

  “Yeah, well, it’s been burst,” she muttered, yanking her hand out of his grasp and glaring out the car’s tinted window. “So are you going to tell me the truth about your little conversation with Izzy, or are you going to make me pry the secret out of an eight-year-old girl instead?”

  He slouched back into the leather seat. “She was stealing your jewelry . . . a pair of your diamond earrings.”

  Leila’s brows furrowed. “Why would she steal from me? Izzy’s never stolen from me before in her life! She wouldn’t do—”

  “Because she was going to mail it to Brad. She was going to put it in the birthday gift you guys were going to send him. He asked her to mail it to him. I guess he planned to pawn it. Maybe he’s desperate for money.”

  “What? He really told her to steal from me? That . . . that son of a bitch!”

  “He’s done something like this before,” Evan continued, figuring if he was going to tell the truth, he might as well say everything. “Izzy told me when she ran away a month ago, he had talked her into it. He bought the ticket to L.A. for her. He arranged for a driver to pick her up near her school. He told her to come to him and not to tell us what she was doing.” He chuckled ruefully. “He told her he’d take her to Disneyland.”

  “I don’t find any of this funny, Ev,” she snapped.

  “Neither do I!”

  “Then why the hell are you laughing?” she shouted.

  He stared at her, thunderstruck. This whole conversation was going wrong, horribly wrong. They were heading to the doctor to learn the sex of their baby. This was supposed to be a joyous moment. They shouldn’t be arguing.

  “You knew that my daughter was coerced by her own father into running away and you didn’t mention it. You knew this whole damn time and didn’t breathe a word . . . not one single word to me! Do you know what level of betrayal that is?”

  “Lee,” he pleaded. “Baby, I was trying to protect you, not betray you! I knew how upset it would make you. You’re pregnant. It’s a delicate condition. You didn’t need the stress. Besides, Izzy was home—safe and sound. I talked to her and I took care of it. I didn’t think it was necessary to—”

  “But you don’t get to make those decisions! Not without consulting me!” she bellowed, pointing at her chest. “Brad used to do that shit to me all the time, Ev, and I’m not putting up with that again.”

  “You know damn well I’m not Brad. I won’t treat you the way he did. You know that!”

  “I want you to . . . no, I need you to respect me, Ev!” she continued, undaunted like she hadn’t heard him. Her chest heaved up and down as she spoke. “I’m not ‘delicate. ’ I’m not some china doll you might break or . . . or some helpless child, goddammit! I’m a grown woman! If our relationship is really going to work, you have to treat me like an adult, like an equal partner. You have to be straight with me. Okay?”

  At her words and her tone, Evan could feel his wrath awaken. It was a spark that ignited without him even trying. How could Leila be so furious at something he had done out of love? Leila couldn’t remember what she had been like the day Isabel had disappeared or the days after. She went from a complete sobbing basket case to a hovering mother who was loath to let Isabel out of her sight. She had only started to act relatively normal again recently, and he had worried that the stress might make her miscarry. Was he really supposed to tell her what Brad had done, to dump even more emotional turmoil onto her?

  And though she insisted he always be honest with her, she hadn’t done the same for him. Leila had known about Paulette’s affair and how Paulette’s lover was blackmailing her. She had known that Paulette was pregnant even before Paulette’s husband, Antonio, had discovered the truth. Had she told any of that to Evan? No! And he hadn’t raked her over the coals for it, so why the hell was she doing that to him now?

  He opened his mouth to say just that, then abruptly closed it.

  Evan decided to put a lid on his indignation and fury, opting to let them both simmer rather than boil over. Yelling back at her would serve no purpose. Besides, Leila wasn’t normally like this. Maybe it was just the pregnancy hormones taking her over again, making her normal good nature go haywire. He would just have to let this go—for now. Evan released a deep breath and nodded.

  “Okay,” he said, almost choking on the word. “I’m . . . I’m sorry I hurt you. That’s the last thing I wanted to do.”

  “I know you didn’t.” She lowered her eyes and nodded. “And I accept your apology. Just . . . just please don’t do it anymore, Ev.”

  “I won’t,” he said.

  Twenty minutes later they sat in a dimly lit doctor’s office with the shades drawn while a technician in white scrubs covered in Peanuts characters squeezed clear gel on Leila’s belly.

  “It’s a little cold. I know,” she said with a smile as she grabbed the ultrasound wand and Leila shuddered slightly. “But you know the drill, right?”

  “I know the drill,” Leila said with a resigned nod as she lay back on the examination table. The white paper crinkled underneath her as she shifted to get more comfortable.

  “All righty then,” the technician said as she climbed on top of her stool and lowered her ultrasound wand to Leila’s protruding belly. “Let’s start the show, shall we?”

  And that’s when he heard it—a heartbeat. It was loud, strong, and clear. It played over speakers, filling up the room with its reverberation. Evan blinked in surprise and breathed in audibly. Was that really their baby he was hearing?

  “Let’s see what we’ve got here,” the technician whispered, pushing aside her fluffy blonde bangs as she looked over her shoulder at the black-and-white screen.

  Evan stared, transfixed, at a TV screen on the other side of the room that simultaneously showed the ultrasound. He had missed the other appointments, so all he had seen in the past were the printouts Leila had brought home. Each one had shown amorphous blobs that could be anything from a baby to a chicken to those little peeps you got in Easter egg baskets when you were a little kid. But this was different. This looked like a real baby that would one day cry, crawl, and take its first toddling steps. This was his son or daughter.

  “There’s the head,” the technician said, speaking more loudly to be heard over the thud and whoosh of the baby’s heartbeat. “And there’s the heart. Oh, there’s the hand! Look, the baby’s waving. ‘Hi, Mommy and Daddy!’”

  Evan felt overwhelmed with a flood of emotion as he watched his child’s image on the monitor, as he watched it wave then shift to the side.

  He flashed back to the days long ago when Charisse was going through IVF treatments and she’d rushed into their bedroom with a positive pregnancy test. They had been so happy, musing about baby names and whether the baby would look more like him or her. And then a few weeks later she had miscarried. Charisse had become quiet and withdrawn, and because he hadn’t wanted to burden her with his feelings, he’d quietly mourned the loss alone. And he hadn’t just mourned the loss of the baby, but the chance to make things right, to be a better father than his father ever had been, to raise a child who felt wanted and loved.

  Evan and Charisse had played out that scenario over and over again, and each time he became less jubilant when he saw the positive pregnancy test. Instead, his stomach would clench with a sense of foreboding and he would have to tell himself not to lose hope, that one day Charisse would hold a baby in her arms. But finding that
balance between hope and resigned acceptance of disappointment had been a challenge that Evan had never quite mastered. And with each miscarriage, Charisse fared even worse than Evan. She became moodier and more sullen, shutting herself away in one of the mansion’s rooms for hours at a time, drinking and watching television. Finally, they had decided to stop trying—it wasn’t worth it anymore. Of course, by then the damage to their marriage had been done, so maybe having a baby in that environment wouldn’t have been the best idea anyway.

  But now, here he was, looking at a baby with a heartbeat, a baby that moved and shifted. He blinked furiously when he realized he was actually getting teary-eyed.

  Goddamn, he thought with amazement. Am I about to break down in tears in the damn doctor’s office?

  He reached for Leila’s hand, grabbed it, and squeezed it tight. She turned slightly to look at him, frowning. But when she saw the expression on his face, she smiled.

  “Okay, it looks like the little one has decided to moon us,” the tech said with a laugh. “But that makes my job a lot easier. You guys ready to hear what you’re having?”

  “Of course!” Leila said.

  Evan’s throat tightened. He couldn’t utter a word so he only nodded.

  “You are having a girl!” the tech said. “Congratulations, Mom and Dad.”

  A girl, Evan thought.

  And that’s when he knew he would have to break the promise that he had made to Leila only twenty minutes ago during their car ride. He would do whatever he had to do—lie, cheat, steal, and kill if it came to it—to protect their daughter, and for her, Leila. Leila might be angry about it, might even resent him for it, but she would have to deal with it. There was no going back now.

  That night, Evan stared at the bedroom ceiling, remembering the sound of their daughter’s . . . his little girl’s heartbeat and the silhouette of her little face in the black-and-white image on the screen. He felt the protectiveness swell inside of him again. He turned to Leila, who was slumbering softly beside him in the faint moonlight.

  Despite holding hands during their appointment, they hadn’t talked much after. They shared stilted conversation during the ride back and went their separate ways once they arrived home. He sought out his study and unfinished work, and she went looking for Isabel and her mother. He had eaten dinner alone, feeling uneasy, like he had a fishbone from the salmon he was eating caught in his molars. He couldn’t figure out what it was until he realized that he missed her, he physically and emotionally missed Leila. Despite them moving in and having a baby together, she felt further away from him now than she had before. But he couldn’t let that happen. There was too much at stake now. This was his family.