SING ME HOME (Love Finds A Home - Book One)

by Jerri Corgiat

  Sadness seeped through her. “I love you. But not in the way you want me to.”

  He winced, but she couldn’t summon up any comfort to give him. She squared her shoulders. Right now she needed Jon. By God, she’d drag him off, tie him down if that’s what it took, and make him listen to her. Before she reached the doorway, Mari rushed in. She stood there, sides heaving, eyes wide with shock.

  “Mari! What is it?”

  Mari threw a crumpled newspaper on the table. “I can’t believe she did this!”

  Lil smoothed the paper flat. It was a copy of tomorrow morning’s Cordelia Daily Sun, still pliant and damp from the presses. Three photos splashed above the center fold. One pictured Belinda, plump with pregnancy, another was a copy of the contract Lil and Jon had signed the day before their wedding—and a third displayed Belinda’s bed. Her hand resting possessively on Jon’s thigh, Belinda smiled prettily at the camera. Jon lolled on thick pillows, eyes shut, a half smile on his lips. Despite the strategically placed little black boxes, both were obviously naked.

  A fist reached deep inside her and twisted. She’d imagined it, expected it even, but there was nothing like seeing it in stark black-and-white. She pushed down the nausea that rose in her throat and forced herself to study the lurid photo objectively. Her eyes narrowed. The casual eye might be fooled, but this was no candid photo. She knew Belinda had paid Walter to take pictures, but what Walter hadn’t seen and what seemed so obvious, was the posed artfulness. Jon’s mouth was slack, only a glimmer showed under his eyelids, and his limbs were limp, albeit cleverly arranged. He looked corpse-like. He looked…drugged. Her mind churned through the implications.

  She moved on to the article. The account was mostly conjecture and rumor. Except for the verbatim language of their contract. The contract she’d left in her kitchen drawer.

  She stalked to the counter, yanked open the drawer and rifled through it. The contract wasn’t there.

  Controlling her rising anger, she closed the drawer and turned to face Mari. “Where did the Sun get a copy of our contract?”

  “Don’t look at me!”

  Pinning her sister with a hard stare, Lil stayed silent.

  “All right! I did take your copy. I didn’t mean to snoop. Okay, I did mean to snoop. I took it when I watched Petunia last summer. That doesn’t mean I did anything with it.”

  Lil kept quiet and waited.

  “Quit looking at me like that! I was crazed over what you’d done. At Christmas, I was still upset, and when I came home, I went to talk to Seamus.” Her eyes widened, and she turned to Seamus. “You took the contract and said you’d return it.”

  Lil swiveled to look at Seamus.

  His gaze shifted from Mari to her. “That cretin doesn’t deserve you, and if you’re too stubborn to see it, then—”

  Lil crumpled the paper in her fist. “Then you planned to save me from myself.”

  “You’re a fool, Lil.”

  “Better a fool than a self-serving, egotistical jerk.”

  “Lil!” Mari squawked. “That’s not fair. Seamus was upset, too.”

  She whipped around to her sister. “Has Jon seen this?” She shook the paper at Mari. Mari retreated a step.

  “When I came in, he saw me, asked me what was wrong, so I—”

  “Where is he?”

  Mari lowered her eyes. “He took one look at it and left.”

  Her mind raced. He’d now believe Belinda had beat him because of events he’d blame himself for setting in motion. He was going to confront her. She knew it. He’d plead with her, offer to pay her off and when she laughed in his face, he’d…

  She didn’t know what he’d do. She shouldn’t have let her anger get in her way. She should have told him about her plan and the phone call she’d received from her investigator right after Jon had arrived.

  Grabbing the phone, she dialed Jon’s number. When nobody answered, she snatched up her purse and pushed past Seamus.

  “Where are you going?”

  “After him. It’s time to put an end to this entire mess.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  THE HOUR drive to Monaco had taken him forty-five minutes. Jon stood just inside the circle of light thrown by the porch lamp outside Dodo’s house. As though she’d been waiting for him, Belinda had stepped off the stoop when he’d yanked the car to a halt in the rutted drive. Neil hovered behind her. Around the house, the woods loomed, sounds dampened by the most recent burst of rain, which had sent the Mercedes fishtailing as he’d raced along the black ribbon of highway.

  “Why did you do it, Belinda?” At his tone, Neil hastily backed up a step, but Belinda just thrust out her abdomen as though her—their—unborn child could protect her. It did.

  One of her hands fiddled with her stupid cigarette holder. “Ah. So you’ve seen tomorrow’s paper. Good shot, wasn’t it? And I have more.” The holder flipped out of her fingers and scudded across the cracked walkway to spin at his feet. “Oops.”

  Reflexively, Jon bent to pick it up. As he did, a memory flashed. “Oops,” she’d said at The Rooster, and he’d stooped to pick up her jacket. When he’d straightened, there’d been two beers on the bar, and she’d been slipping a vial of perfume back in her purse. Perfume. He’d only assumed it was perfume. Zeke had tried to tell him the whole thing was a lie, Lil had tried. But he’d been too pigheaded to listen. Now, the truth struck him right between the eyes.

  “You drugged me!” The words roared out of him, and Neil visibly trembled.

  Belinda didn’t flinch. She just snatched the holder from him. “Drugged you? That’s a pretty fairy tale. Try and prove it.”

  As fast as it reared up, his anger hit bottom.

  She was right.

  Squawking she’d used some kind of date rape drug on him sounded like a desperate lie, even to him, but he’d swear it was true. All the pieces fit. And since it was true, there was no way in hell that baby was his. Blacked out, he couldn’t have gotten it up. Whose baby was it? He glanced at Neil. The geek worshipped her, but Jon almost laughed at the thought Belinda had allowed that goofball in her bed. Use him, yes. Screw him, no.

  “You said you have more. What?”

  Belinda fit a cigarette into the holder. “Remember those pictures of little Glory?”

  He snorted. “Those are fake.”

  “So?” Belinda lit up. “Try and prove it before the judge sees them tomorrow.”

  Shit, shit, shit. Lil had been right. It wasn’t about money. He hadn’t listened, and now he lacked the time to prove anything. And unless he had proof, who’d believe him? Belinda’s pregnancy and tomorrow’s paper laid waste to his argument of a solid marriage to Lil. The sleazy photos would destroy his reputation. Her attorneys would make hash of him. Nothing he could say would look like more than protesting too much—and too late.

  Resisting the urge to throttle her, he shoveled both hands through his hair. “Leave me the kids, Belinda. I’ll pay you a helluva lot more than child support.”

  “You must think I’m pretty stupid. I’d be able to trust you only as long as it took for the ink to dry on the custody papers. Look what you did this last time.”

  “I mean it, Belinda. I’ll pay you anything, if you’ll leave the kids alone.” What did she want? More to the point, how much did she want?

  She studied him a moment. “You know, I really hate you, Jon.”

  He blinked.

  She laughed. “Isn’t that a hoot? I never even liked you. You were always so needy, so sad-eyed and pathetic. Me, everyone ignored. But, you? Poor little abused boy, but, my, my, isn’t he talented? Everyone stood in line to help you. Even my mother.” Eyes cold, she moved forward and thrust her face in his. “Yeah, I hated you, but I could see you’d go places, and I didn’t plan to get left behind. Carrying me was the least you could do, since you’d taken all my mother’s time and attention.”

  He stared down at her. Belinda had been jealous?

  “All the while we were ma
rried, you thought I couldn’t live without you. And I hated you. After the divorce, when you thought I was dying of loneliness from losing you, I hated you.” She grinned, stubbed the cigarette out. “You’re something else, thinking I drank and got high because of you. Hell, I did it because it was fun. F-U-N, Jon. And, God knew I needed some fun, living with you and all your moralizing and your pathetic self-pity over your childhood and your sad attempts to make us a family and your saintly patience over my…shall we say…little indiscretions. But you had what I knew you’d eventually have. Money. And lots of it.

  “So, I bore your stupid babies, then pushed the limits until you divorced me, knowing you’d be eaten up with guilt and knowing because of that, any brats I had with you would always be my meal ticket. I was happy just to take your money. Until you tried to double cross me with Little Mary Sunshine.” Her face darkened, words hissing through her teeth. “I’ll be damned if I let you take those kids away. Because it’ll kill you to know they’re with me.”

  He staggered back a step, belly cramping from the words that made a mockery of all the years he’d tried to help her, all the years he’d blamed himself for what she’d become, all the years he’d thought she loved him, and he just didn’t have what it took to love her enough. He’d never suspected he’d been played for a fool.

  A fool—a total fool—but not a villain.

  Bewilderment, anger, confusion all mixed with a surreal sense of elation. He shook his head and listened. There was no mocking voice. For once, his old man was silent.

  His father had been wrong. The thought made him dizzy, and his body grew surprisingly light. Lil. Lil had been right. He wasn’t a flawed excuse for a human being. He was the man she believed in but was it too late to convince Lil he knew that now?

  ***

  Lil glanced in the side-view mirror of Seamus’s pickup. The twin eyes of the old Studebaker glowed back. She looked sideways at Seamus. He stared straight ahead, harshly shadowed in the dashboard lights. She didn’t think he realized Walter and his camera were following.

  From the media’s milling confusion outside her house, Jon must have eluded them just as Seamus had, with a few twists and shortcuts through a town the media didn’t know. Walter, though, had an advantage—since she’d told him where they were headed.

  They’d barreled through the dark in total silence for the last forty miles, the headlights throwing the spiked grasses edging the road into sharp relief. Mile markers flashed silver and disappeared. As they’d traveled southeast, the farmland surrounding Cordelia had broken into stonier ground. The highway, lined with ribbons of hard-packed red clay glistening from the rain, carved through the rocky, wooded hills that butted up to Monaco.

  She couldn’t stand the silence any longer. Besides, she wanted answers. “You could have just loaned me the truck.”

  He didn’t look at her. “Don’t be stupid. You were too upset to drive, and you don’t know where she lives. I do.”

  Seamus was the last person she’d wanted with her, but since Jon had taken her car and Roy needed to stay with the children, she hadn’t seen any options that didn’t involve tortured explanations to her family. So, she’d left Mari to explain, calculating by the time they unraveled Mari’s tangled narration, she’d be halfway to Monaco and nobody would follow. She’d briefly toyed with the idea of relying on Walter, but decided against it. If she showed up in his car, Belinda would be immediately suspicious.

  She made a conscious effort to relax and glanced at Seamus again. She was still furious with him. But she wanted answers and outright anger wasn’t going to get them. “It was you, wasn’t it?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “I think you do.” He didn’t answer. His profile was a pale slash against the rain-spattered window. “Don’t lie to me. If I mean anything to you, don’t lie. That night at The Rooster. When Jon came in. Why did you call Belinda?”

  There was a long silence, and she held her breath.

  “He deserved it.” His hand fisted on the seat between them. “He wrecked her life. He neglected her, fed her a steady diet of coke to keep her quiet about the degenerate life he led, dependent on him for her next snort. Did you think I’d just stand back and let the same thing happen to you?”

  Incredulity snatched her breath. “You mean you believed all that stuff you read when they were divorced?”

  “I didn’t read it. She told me. In rehab. It was the year before their divorce. He’d just filed. I was there a few weeks when she showed up. Good God, Lil. You should’ve seen her. Emaciated, all eyes, a broken doll. She was out of her mind. Afraid she’d lose her children, bewildered at how he treated her. We talked. We became…friends.”

  “And you believed her? Just like that?”’

  “What reason would she have to lie? I was nobody. Just another drunk. And she had pictures.” Seamus shot a glance at her. “Smut. Your cowboy screwing a teenaged girl.”

  “They were lies!” Her blood heated thinking about Belinda. “She lies because she hates Jon. She lies for the hell of it. Damn you, Seamus Ryan. You’ve known me all my life, yet you never once asked me what I thought. Never once questioned me about Jon. Did you forget I lived with him? Or did you think I was such a mealy-mouthed, helpless little twit that I wouldn’t see what was right in front of me?”

  “I only wanted to help you.” He reached over and laid a hand on her arm.

  She jerked away. “Don’t you dare tell me you were trying to help. You wanted me for yourself, so you believed what you wanted to believe. In your single-minded pursuit of wrecking my marriage, in trying to serve Jon his just desserts according to the judgment of Seamus Ryan, did it cross your mind the lives you’d destroy?”

  “I wasn’t trying to destroy you. I only—”

  “Not me, idiot. The children!”

  Seamus’s massaged the back of his neck. “I didn’t think—”

  “No, you didn’t. And tomorrow, I expect you to be in court. Ready to tell the truth. And if Judge Dougherty even thinks about awarding those children to Belinda, I’ll—”

  A high voice sounded behind the front seat. “She can’t take us back! She can’t!”

  Lil gasped and fumbled to undo her seat belt. As Seamus took a turn off the highway, jolting onto a gravel road, she twisted to her knees and peered in back where Melanie huddled on the narrow seat of the extended cab.

  The girl’s eyes were scared orbs. “Don’t be mad at me, please, Lil. When Daddy left, I knew something was wrong and when I heard you tell Aunt Mari you were going with Mr. Ryan, I was scared for Daddy, so I hid and I know it was wrong, but—” Her voice broke. “We don’t have to go back to her, do we? I want to stay with you.”

  “Oh, sweetie.” Lil reached down, hooked her hands under Melanie’s arms and helped her scramble over the seat. In a tangle of limbs, the child fell into her lap and wrapped her arms tight around Lil’s neck. “Don’t you worry. Everything will be okay. You’ll see.”

  “We’re here,” Seamus said.

  Seamus drove past a rutted driveway where the Mercedes was parked and braked alongside a ditch that ran in front of a worn, white, two-story house.

  Continuing the soothing patter of words in Melanie’s ear, Lil studied the situation.

  Jon, Belinda and Neil were like figures on a stage in the circle of light off the front stoop. She heaved a sigh of relief. No press, and it didn’t look like words had escalated to blows. Yet. She glanced back and saw Walter pull to a stop some yards before the driveway where he couldn’t be seen. He doused his lights.

  She shifted, and Melanie raised her head, stiffening when she saw where they were. Lil opened the door, stepped out, then reached back to squeeze Mel’s hand. The rain had cooled the air, and she shivered. “It’s all right, sweetie. You just stay right here and wait for us, okay? Seamus will let the truck run, and you’ll be nice and warm.”

  She looked at Seamus, and he nodded briefly before exiting the cab. Melanie
bit her lip and tried to smile.

  Lil returned the smile, swiped up a newspaper from the floorboard and shut the door. Looking back at Walter, she tipped her head briefly toward the tableau on the front yard.

  She watched until the photographer had edged from his car, then pushed back her shoulders and fastened her eyes on Belinda.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  OVER BELINDA’S shoulder, Jon had seen headlights wash the woods before a steel-gray pickup bypassed the drive and rolled to a stop in front of Dodo’s house. Three heads were silhouetted in front, but he couldn’t make out who they were. Press?

  Hearing a scrunch of gravel under the thrum of the truck, he squinted beyond the drive at another vehicle. That car he did recognize. Out of Belinda’s direct vision, he saw Wart-nose get out and sidle alongside the Mercedes, his movements furtive. Although he was puzzled at the man’s behavior, Wart-nose’s presence was enough to warn him it was time to make his exit before more media appeared.

  Belinda hadn’t given him what he came for. She wouldn’t drop her fight. She held all the cards. He had no defense against the barrage of hate she’d leveled at him.

  But, idiotically, he still felt like grinning.

  Underneath the humiliating knowledge that she’d made an ass out of him and the dread of what tomorrow’s hearing would bring, the knot of guilt he’d carried had unraveled, loosened by Lil, untied by Belinda.

  Belinda had glanced around as the truck halted, then fixed her attention back on him, stance defiant. “You remember what I said, Jonathan Brumley. Those brats are mine.”

  That’s what she thought. He’d get them away from her if he had to kidnap them and run off to Borneo. Relief made him giddy; he felt capable of anything. Now if he could just convince Lil. She’d balked at Nashville, but maybe Borneo was more to her taste.

  He almost smiled, then Seamus ambled into the ring of light, and his mood soured. The proprietary way Seamus had treated Lil all evening hadn’t escaped him. Wart-nose still hovered near his car. What was going on here?