by J. D. Mason
After Phyl explained all of this to her, Blaine sat and stared back at her. “I never expected Karma to come back looking like you.” Phyl braced herself.
“We were friends once,” Blaine began to explain. “Fiercely competitive in school and during our internship, but, we enjoyed the sparring. We made each other better.”
Phyl was practically holding her breath, hoping that this woman would tell her something about Robin that she hadn’t been able to find out on her own.
“I couldn’t live with myself after what happened,” she reluctantly admitted. “I certainly couldn’t bring myself to keep defending people.”
“What happened, Blaine?” Phyl probed.
Sadness washed over the woman’s face and then her features hardened. “I don’t know what she’s done. I don’t care to know. But you keep my name out of this. I’ll deny everything if you don’t and it’ll be your word against mine.”
Phyl was raised Catholic. And confession was everything to a Catholic. Phyl wasn’t a priest, but Blaine didn’t seem to care.
“He died in prison,” Blaine said sorrowfully. “That wasn’t supposed to happen.”
Answer Me
FIGHTING WAS WHAT HE DID. Being a fighter was what he was. A black man with balls big enough to jump into a white man’s game, and they hated him. But he was a fighter. Dammit to hell to anybody who tried to tell him what he could or couldn’t be, what he could or couldn’t have.
How long had he been marching? That cold, slate-gray sky pressed down on him the same way it always did. The road under his feet, muddied and thick, tried to pull him under like quicksand, but he wasn’t having it. He’d taken a wrong turn somewhere, which sometimes happened, but never enough to derail him for good. Nah. Up ahead. There it was. Home. Small and insignificant on the outside, but inside was his life. He kept coming back only to find it empty, but it didn’t matter. Everything he needed was inside that place. His next breath was inside that tiny house, and he’d keep on coming back until he caught it.
All he could ever remember was reaching for the handle on the door, but he could never remember pushing it open. He just appeared, like magic, inside that house. Standing there in the room, something was different.
A hollow.
No voices.
No shadows.
Or whispers.
Ida! he called out. Her name, soundless.
He closed his eyes and listened. Waited. Nothing.
Opening his eyes, he was suddenly overcome with confusion.
Where was he? These walls looked strange to him. No life. No breath. No heartbeat. Not hers. He turned in a slow circle, searching for the way out. He had to leave this place, but he couldn’t remember how. Trapped! Silent and violent panic began to erupt inside him.
He was lost. Disoriented. No, fear! A man like him was never afraid, but suddenly, he was—he was angry for having wasted too much time. Wandering and searching for what he couldn’t have. Searching … searching … searching! Memories dangling in his face, out of reach, scented with hints of what he desired the most. Looking good! Looking too damn good to turn away from. His palms itched to touch. To deny him was sinful! He knew what he wanted, and he had come so close!
Fuck!
His lips said the word, but the sound of it erupted only inside him, like an explosion. Where had his light gone? And who had hidden his path? He’d walked it. Walked it, yes, he did, following the trail of footsteps, leading him to his destiny like bread crumbs. And now it was gone? He was a prisoner in this tomb of gray walls and cold floors. And the one thing that he’d wanted most, that he’d needed most in his mind, body, and soul … was gone.
The thought began to crush him, pushed down on him like lead weights until he could barely stand. He’d fought and he’d lost? Had he lost? Her.
A Woman of Means
“THE RUMOR MILL IS CHURNING, my good friend,” Robin’s friend Liza Atkinson said lazily, wrapped in a towel and sitting across from Robin in the steam room at their favorite spa.
“Which rumor are you talking about, Liza?” Robin stretched her long legs out on the bench.
“The one circling about Mr. Gatewood’s new estimated net worth now that the ink is dry on those government contracts.”
Of course Robin had heard the rumors. She simply smiled.
“It’s being estimated that his personal net worth is about to rise to more than $4 billion.”
Robin pondered for a moment. “More like $4.7 billion,” she said casually.
“Making him the wealthiest black man in the country,” Liza concluded.
It was true. Literally overnight, Jordan’s financial status had catapulted him to a new echelon of wealth. It was just a matter of time before it was officially announced to the rest of the world.
“Tell me that I’m going to be invited to a wedding soon,” Liza teased.
Robin had been pondering the possibilities. “I’m thinking of a destination wedding. Europe, maybe?”
“Italy’s always nice. Or Barcelona. I love Spain.”
Jordan hadn’t even given her a ring yet, but something like that was just a technicality. Robin had resigned herself to the fact that her relationship with this man, her life with this man, was not going to follow a path of normalcy. He was proud and stubborn and would put up resistance every step of the way, at least for a time. This wasn’t how she’d dreamed it would be with the man she spent the rest of her life with, but things changed. People changed. She held on to hope that he would, too.
“Maybe Barcelona,” Robin agreed.
“Then again, Greece is beautiful,” Liza offered with a chuckle.
Liza didn’t know the details of how Robin had reeled Jordan in, and she didn’t need to, but she knew that Robin had played a powerful hand in persuading him to come back to her and to be the attentive lover she’d always wanted him to be. He still hadn’t made love to her, though. Robin missed being intimate with him. Jordan was a beautiful lover, patient and accommodating, thorough.
“What is it?” Liza asked, reading the expression on Robin’s face.
Robin hadn’t wanted to openly discuss her thoughts on the matter, but keeping her concerns to herself was becoming more and more difficult.
“He still loves her,” Robin admitted. “I’m not sure that he’ll ever stop.”
Liza shrugged. “He’s not seeing her. Right?”
“No. He’s not.”
“Then it doesn’t matter, Robin. He might love her for the rest of his life, but it doesn’t mean shit if they’re not together. I’m a firm believer that time takes care of everything. In time, she’ll fade from his immediate memory, you’ll push out a few adorable babies, and life will go on.”
“She was no one special.” Melancholy washed over her. “There was nothing exceptional about the woman.”
And yet, he’d given her his whole heart. Of course it bothered Robin. It always would.
“To you, no, she is not special or exceptional, but who knows what men see in certain women? It’s not going to do you any good to dwell on it. I mean, maybe she reminds him of someone. Maybe she told him a joke that made him laugh or she gave goddess-caliber blow jobs, Robin. It doesn’t matter. You have him. She doesn’t. What you need to focus on now is making him see that he’s with the woman he’s meant to be with. That you are the better choice for his life, his career, his image.”
* * *
The spa visit had done wonders for Robin. She went home, slipped into her favorite silk pajamas, poured herself a glass of wine, sat on her sofa, and started flipping through the pages of half a dozen bridal magazines she’d bought on the way home. Robin stopped at a photograph of a bride and groom, newly married, standing on a white sand beach, facing the ocean, holding hands, and staring out at the water.
Liza had mentioned babies, and yes, Robin desperately wanted children. His children. It was time for the two of them to get busy building their new lives together. Jordan was resistant for now, but what choi
ce did he truly have but to move forward with her? Abigail Rhodes was out of his life now. He was a big boy, and it was time for him to get over it. Robin picked up her phone and dialed his number. Jordan was on the East Coast in D.C., but she didn’t want to wait for him to get back to Dallas to have this conversation.
“Yes?” he said abruptly when he answered.
Robin refused to let her feelings be hurt and decided to get straight to the point. “I want a ring, Jordan.” Robin held his dirty little secret in the palm of her hand, and she was going to use it to her advantage every single chance she got for as long as she had to. “A beautiful diamond that very clearly expresses your level of commitment to me, your fiancée.”
“Do you want me to pick up a loaf of bread and a gallon of milk, too, on my way home from the office, dear?” he asked sarcastically.
“I shouldn’t have to threaten you to marry me, Jordan.”
“No, you shouldn’t, Robin.”
Humiliation washed over her, but Robin was pushing a bigger agenda that required her to sacrifice her ego. “Fuck your disrespect, Jordan,” she snapped. “I’m not the one stepping over the bodies of dead women. I will not have you ruin what I have always dreamed would be a happy day for me. You don’t love me. I get it. But fake it, gotdammit!”
Robin took several deep breaths to calm herself while Jordan remained quiet on the other end. “Don’t force me to do what I don’t want to do,” she said sadly. “Despite what you want to believe, I do care for you. I always have.”
“You’ll forgive me if I find that hard to believe considering the circumstances. You’re playing an ugly game, Robin. And yes. I do resent you for it.”
“But it’s the nature of the beast, Jordan. Our beasts are more savage than most. Truthfully, I have loved you from the moment we met, and I won’t apologize for that.”
Jordan spoke after a long pause. “I wouldn’t call this love.”
She dried her eyes. “But in this case, I do. The most desperate kind. And if I have to call my bluff to prove it to you, I can. I have.”
He hesitated before finally speaking. “What the hell does that mean?”
She sighed deeply. “Detective Bobby Randolph worked the Lonnie Adebayo murder case.”
Again, Jordan was silent.
“He remembers speaking to you several times about Lonnie’s murder.” Robin swallowed.
Jordan hadn’t been taking her seriously. And Robin desperately wanted to announce their engagement.
“We’ll talk when I get home,” he finally said.
“We will,” she assured him.
Robin didn’t want the next twenty years with him to be a wrestling match. The last thing she wanted to do was to ruin the man she loved, and she did absolutely love him. But would he ever love her in return? The better question was, could she live with knowing that he never would?
I’ll Take You There
JORDAN HAD BEEN BACK in town from his trip to D.C. for two days when he called Robin and told her that he was on his way over to see her.
Detective Randolph. The only reason that man had backed off from suspecting that Jordan had murdered Lonnie was because Jordan had called in a favor with the police commissioner. Jordan had called her bluff, and she’d delivered. If either Robin or Bobby Randolph decided to take their suspicions to the media …
“I’ll leave the door unlocked,” she said seductively over the phone. “Let yourself in.”
Soft music and lighting in her posh apartment had been staged to set the mood. Jordan immediately made his way over to the bar and filled two glasses with ice and bourbon. He took a deep breath, turned up his glass, and finished it in one gulp, then immediately filled it again, swirling the ice this time to give the liquid a chance to cool.
Robin appeared in the hallway, barefoot, wearing a simple, sheer white and flowing sheath, with her hair parted down the middle, flowing long and luxuriously past her shoulders. She wore no makeup and looked like something out of a dream. Just not his. Anything he’d once found beautiful about her had soured in his stomach a long time ago.
“Can you tell that I’ve missed you?” she asked softly, standing an arm’s length away from him.
Robin took a step closer, pressed her elegant hands against his chest as she leaned in, and kissed him softly.
Robin took her drink from his hand. “Believe it or not, I am happy to see you, Jordan,” she said sincerely, gazing up at him with hypnotic hazel eyes.
Perplexed, he stared at her. “After all the things that I have said to you, hurtful and inconsiderate things, Robin, you are still determined to go through with this?”
She stared back. Jordan was taken aback by what looked like sympathy filling her eyes. Confusion filled him. Did she feel sorry for him?
Robin pressed a warm hand to his cheek. “It’s not how I dreamed it would be. But it’s something I’m coming to terms with.”
“Because you love me?”
Sadness filled her eyes. “I need you,” she whispered. “Love? Yes. I want to possess you. To keep you, even at the expense of losing myself.” Robin laughed bitterly. “They say love makes you crazy. I guess it does.”
It seemed strange to him that he should be the kind of man that women sacrificed so much of themselves for. Claire had sacrificed her happiness and any hopes of ever finding it outside of what she believed of their marriage. Jordan believed that Claire held on to that hope, searching for him, wishing and praying for it until she was finally emptied of every other emotion. She died void because of him. A sacrifice far too noble for a man like him.
Lonnie had sacrificed peace for Jordan and the chance to get even with him for hurting her the way he did. In his anger for what he felt was betrayal, Jordan tortured her, physically brutalized her, stripping her of her dignity, pride. God! He still ached deep in his core for what he’d done to her in a rage of madness and revenge. He had never hurt a woman like that before, and he would die before ever doing it again. But she died because of him, still at war with him. He owed Lonnie his soul.
Robin took a sip of her drink, took hold of Jordan’s hand, and led him over to the sofa, where the two of them sat down close to each other.
“You’ll spend the night?” she asked demurely.
He raised her hand to his lips, and kissed it.
Robin sank deeper into her seat next to him, pressed closer to him, and moaned. “This feels right, Jordan. I know you’re angry with me for probing into matters that you’d rather keep private. I know that you don’t want to have to keep reliving the past, and I promise you that I will not continue to remind you of those dark and painful memories,” she said earnestly. Robin kissed him and stroked her fingers softly against his low-cut beard. “This doesn’t have to be ugly. It can be like it was before. Don’t you remember? We were so good together.” She blinked away tears. “You still love someone else.” She swallowed. “I’ll respect that. But you could love me, too. I know you can.”
Jordan stared perplexed at Robin. “You can accept that I’m in love with another woman?”
Robin took a deep breath and gave his question some thought before responding. “What choice do I have? But I’m convinced that in time your feelings for her will fade.”
“And if they don’t?”
He didn’t mean for the question to be offensive. It was a genuine query.
“I’m here,” she said pensively. “She’s not.”
“That’s enough for you?” he asked sincerely. “Just to be here in my life and not my heart?”
Robin’s eyes were filled with pain in reaction to his question.
“I don’t mean to hurt you, Robin, I’m just—”
“But that’s what you do, Jordan,” she said abruptly. “You hurt me.”
“And you let me. Why?”
She seemed to be surprised by what he’d just said. But it was a legitimate statement and question.
“Claire loved me even though I hurt her time and time again. I never unders
tood why. I’d like to know.”
Robin quickly gathered her thoughts. “It’s because of who you are.”
“An asshole? Selfish? Inconsiderate?” He shook his head and shrugged. “Who do you think I am?”
She stared at him with a glazed look in her eyes. “You’re beautiful, Jordan. Handsome, strong, and … you’re Jordan Gatewood,” she said as if those two words together were indicative of some kind of wizard. “You’re everything.”
She had given him absolutely nothing. Robin hadn’t said one gotdamn thing to him that explained this blind sense of so-called love she felt for him. It wasn’t a man that she loved. It was an image, a persona—status. She didn’t love him. She loved a concept, and it was time to end this.
“Langston Riley,” he said and paused, looking back at her, gauging her for her reaction, which was instantaneous.
A stunned, helpless expression shadowed her pretty face, and recognition filled her eyes as the realization set in that Jordan was about to crush her. But in anger. Not in an act of revenge.
“I understand why you did it,” he said carefully and empathetically.
Robin slowly backed away from him.
“You love your father. And he required a sacrifice. You gave him that,” he explained evenly, unemotionally.
Robin shook her head slightly. “Wh-what are you talking about?” she asked, forcing back the fear in her voice.
The specifics were ugly. Jordan had spent the last two days combing through every sordid detail that Phyl had found on that case and on Robin’s past. Daddy, Montgomery Sinclair, was a rich CEO of a pharmaceutical company named MonClair Pharmaceuticals. They had developed and sold heart medication that ended up costing him a fortune in lawsuits to the point of nearly bankrupting him.
“I’m talking about drug trafficking, Robin. I’m talking about how your father could afford his fancy houses, private boarding schools, his car collection.”
Color washed from her beautiful, golden complexion. “You don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said, her voice shaking. She was trembling as she stood up and moved away from him, taking a seat in the chair on the other side of the coffee table.