“I must have looked like a nutcase,” she said low so only he could here.
“A beautiful, sexy nutcase.” He kissed the tip of her nose. “You’ve been getting panic attacks a lot, haven’t you?”
She searched his eyes. “How did you know?”
“Because I get the feeling we still have a lot to talk about.” He pressed his forehead to hers. “And I’ve experienced a few of my own.”
* * *
Instead of going to her hotel, Danni took Jaleen up on his offer to stay at his penthouse. He was glad she’d accepted his offer because if she hadn’t, he probably would have asked if he could stay with her instead. It hadn’t taken long to grab her belongings and check out of the hotel.
When he’d entered the Reeds’ backyard and seen everyone crowded around Danni, he’d thought his heart had literally stopped. However, when he’d reached her and was able to assess the situation, he knew exactly what was happening and had acted quickly.
“You didn’t tell me you were coming,” Danni said as she kicked off her shoes.
“I was trying my best to see if I could get away from work for a quick trip, but I wasn’t sure. The South Beach properties have been giving me hell. I hate that I still missed almost the entire party, but I’m glad I got there when I did.”
Danni smiled. “Me, too.”
You flew across several states to see that smile.
“Do you mind if I take a quick shower? Between the petting zoo, helping a few of the kids build ice cream sundaes and holding baby Emma while she threw up after Aiden spun her one too many times, I think it’s necessary.”
Jaleen quirked an eyebrow. “A petting zoo?”
“Oh, yeah,” she said with a laugh. “Equipped with an actual pony.”
“Crap, I missed the pony rides.”
Danni was laughing so hard, he could still hear her after she’d shut the bathroom door. Truthfully, Jaleen had wanted to see Danni, too, because he wasn’t sure he could go another day without clearing the air. He cared about her too much not to tell her what was going on. Whenever he thought about his situation, he just got angry.
Tonight, I’ll tell her everything. Even reinforcing the plans he’d spent his entire plane ride thinking about did little to ease his tension. The last thing he wanted was to lose her completely. That couldn’t happen. He wouldn’t let it.
She’d be out of the shower any minute now and when she came out, he had to ease into the conversation as he’d practiced.
Jaleen stood to pour two glasses of the wine he’d picked up after landing, when something caught his eye.
He glanced at the folded sheet of paper sticking out of her open suitcase. That’s got to be her list. The creases in the paper were worn, as if it had been opened and refolded numerous times before. He’d been curious about the last couple items on it ever since she’d mentioned they were items she wouldn’t share with him because she kept them too close to her heart.
Although he was anxious to know what those extremely personal items were, he refused to betray her trust by reading her list without her permission. Given how much their relationship had matured over the past few weeks, he hoped she would eventually feel comfortable enough to discuss the rest of her list. If not, he’d have to settle for not knowing.
“Were you debating on reading my list?” she asked, coming out the bathroom wrapped in only a towel. She’d washed her hair so her natural curls were clipped atop her head in a messy bun that made him want to discard the clip and busy his fingers within. Her natural Danni glow combined with the way her skin glistened from her shower was beyond sexy. His eyes left her face, stopping briefly at her mouth before trailing down to her legs. He wanted to take her again. Right there.
“Um, no. I noticed it was your list, but I promised you I wouldn’t look at it without your permission and I plan on keeping my promise.”
A look of disappointment crossed her face, but that didn’t make any sense. She was the one who’d made him promise. “That’s the promise you asked me to make, right?”
“Yes, you’re right,” she said, making her way to the bed. “I was just wondering if maybe I should discuss that last item with you...but I’m nervous.”
He studied her face, trying to see if she was being serious. She is... She needs to talk to someone. He understood how she would feel that way after her panic attack. Hell, it was probably the same reason he wanted to talk to her.
“Maybe this will help.” He handed her a glass of wine, then sat in a nearby chair while Danni sat on the bed.
“Thanks,” she said, taking a sip before placing it on the table. “Let me just put on some clothes.”
As he watched her walk away, he wanted to tell her that clothes were overrated. But she already seemed nervous to discuss whatever was on her list. He’d let her discuss what she needed to tell him and then he’d tell her what he should have told her months before.
Chapter 14
“Okay, Danni. You can do this,” she chanted to the bathroom mirror for a third time, trying to boost her confidence. A few hours ago she wasn’t even sure what was going on with Jaleen. She hadn’t seen him in a week and although she hadn’t said it aloud, she’d feared he was already thinking things were moving too fast. And, who knows, he could still be feeling that way.
But she couldn’t worry about that right now because, after the last panic attack, she knew her problem had escalated to an all-time high. She needed to talk to someone. Her mom only knew half the story and, quite frankly, she didn’t want her mom to worry about her any more than she already did.
Jaleen was someone she could lean on for support and advice, but only if he didn’t push her away after he learned the truth. “Am I really about to do this?” she asked herself. After years of keeping the information to herself, was she really about to reveal the truth to Jaleen? A man who, up until a year ago, was holding down the number-one spot on her “People I Often Want to Strangle” list? Well, maybe not the number-one spot, but he was definitely in the top three.
She studied her reflection once more before exiting the bathroom. She found Jaleen still sitting in the chair with what she assumed was his second glass of wine. She retrieved her glass and sat on the bed, facing him directly. She glanced at the folded sheet of paper that was in her suitcase as she took a sip of wine.
“Do you want your list?” he asked.
She shook her head. “Don’t need it.” They sat in silence for what felt like an hour, which in reality had only been about five minutes. He was patiently waiting for her to talk, but she didn’t feel anywhere near ready to.
Jaleen put down his glass and moved the chair closer toward her. He touched her thighs, rubbing his thumb in soothing circles before his hands settled on her knees. “Is there anything I can do to make this easier for you?”
God, I must look like such a baby. She was a grown woman holding on to her secret as if saying it out loud would be the end of the world. But she supposed in some ways, it would. There are a lot of people who would be hurt if she delivered the news in the wrong way, including the man sitting across from her.
“I still don’t want you to see my entire list... So what if I write down number thirty since I’ve memorized it?”
“Okay,” Jaleen said. “Whatever you want to do is fine with me. Danni, I’ve done a lot of things, seen a lot of things. It’s probably not as bad a secret as you think. I’m not saying that your nervousness isn’t warranted, but I know the type of woman you are, so whatever it is, I’ll support you.”
She instantly closed her eyes to block out the tears she felt would creep in any minute. “You’re speaking prematurely... You may think you know me, but maybe you should wait to make promises until you know what it is.”
She grabbed her notepad out of her suitcase instead. Even as she began writin
g, her hands were shaking. She only had to write five words. Five words. Yet the meaning behind them was life changing.
Slowly she handed Jaleen the notepad.
“Should I read it out loud?”
She nodded her head.
“Okay, it says...‘tell my sisters the truth.’”
He looked up at her, confusion evident on his face. “I didn’t know you had sisters. What do you have to tell them?”
He’s not going to make this easy. “I have to tell them that I’m their sister.” She fidgeted with the pen in her hand and looked at him expectantly.
“You don’t know them?”
“I do now.” Go ahead, Danni! Tell him! “Years ago, they didn’t have a name.” She noticed the moment he began to piece it together. “But now, I know them as Winter, Autumn and Summer.”
Jaleen’s hand flew to his face as his mouth dropped. She’d never seen his eyes that big before. “Oh, shit,” he finally said.
“I know.” She searched his eyes for any emotion other than shock. “Shit would be an accurate word.”
“You’re their sister.”
“Yes.”
“Blood sister.”
She squinted in confusion. “Yes, we share a parent.” He still looked shocked, which was doing little to ease her discomfort.
“You have the same father?”
Danni glanced out the bedroom window before looking back at Jaleen. “No, we share the same mother.”
“That god-awful woman I’ve been hearing about for years is your mother?” Anger replaced the shock in his eyes so quickly she didn’t have time to react.
The tears began to well in Danni’s eyes. I’d never call that horrible woman “mother.”
“She may not have given birth to me, but Regina Allison is my mom in all the ways that matter.”
Jaleen rose from the chair and sat right next to her on the bed, pulling her into his embrace. As her tears began to fall, she felt him pull her in even tighter, offering her comfort that she desperately needed.
“She’s the reason you’re having panic attacks, isn’t she?”
Danni lifted her tear-streaked face to Jaleen. “What makes you say that?”
He wiped a few of her tears away. “Because even though I had no idea that you were sisters with Winter, Autumn and Summer, I can smell blackmail a mile away. Last week, when I spent the night at your place, I heard the end of your phone conversation. Was she the person you were speaking to?”
She hadn’t planned on telling him this much tonight and she definitely didn’t want to discuss Sonia Dupree. But he’d asked and she wanted to give him an honest answer. She’d spent too many years trying to cover up lies, so it was time she started telling the truth.
“Yes, Sonia was the person I was talking to.” Danni sighed deeply. “She’s still trying to blackmail me and for almost two years, she’s been doing a damn good job at it. The call you heard was me telling her that I was done being blackmailed. Needless to say, the call didn’t go that well and now I’m afraid I’ve only made matters worse.”
* * *
Jaleen looked from Danni to the five words written on the paper as if they would give him clarity that he could only get from asking her more questions. Danni is Winter, Autumn and Summer’s sister? He still couldn’t believe it. When she’d been agonizing over an item on her list, he had no idea that it would have been such a huge secret.
There’s no way you can tell her what you wanted to now. After the bomb she’d just dropped on him, he couldn’t imagine dropping one on her in the same night.
“When did you find out that Sonia was your mother?”
Danni adjusted herself on the bed. “When my dad got sick seven years ago, he kept telling me that he had something important to discuss. But I was so worried about his health that I kept disregarding his wishes, diverting the subject any chance I got.”
“You had a feeling it was something huge, didn’t you?”
“Yes, I did. Even though my dad was sick, my mom and older brother had been extra attentive to me. It was almost like they knew what was coming and they were trying to let me know I had their love and support no matter what. On the day my parents told me that Regina wasn’t my birth mom, he had been sick for two years. I cried, yelled, cried some more, yelled some more.
“My older brother came to me and told me that he remembered the first day he’d met me and knew in that moment I’d forever be his sister even though we didn’t share the same birth parents. Unlike me, he knew my dad wasn’t his birth father. The only person that knew less than me was my younger brother. After hours of feeling as if I no longer knew my place in my family, I thought about the first time I’d suspected that the mom I knew and loved wasn’t actually my birth mother.”
Jaleen began stroking her legs.
“When I was twelve,” she continued, “I was messing around in my dad’s shed. The shed he’d never wanted us to go into. I remember climbing this ladder he kept in the corner and looking frantically on his shelf for something I’d thought he’d put there when he placed me on punishment. I can’t even remember what I’d been looking for anymore.”
Danni brush a few curls from her face. “I remember knocking a box to the ground and stuff splattering everywhere. When I went to pick it all up, there were four pictures scattered around that I hadn’t seen before. Two of the pictures were of my dad with this woman who had long, dark hair. I flipped over the back of the photo and it said ‘Sonia.’ That was it. They looked so happy and I remember thinking that my dad had never mentioned an ex named Sonia before. But it was the last two pictures that had given me chills. They were of Sonia pregnant. Both of her by herself. I remember looking at the pictures of her swollen belly and thinking about the fact that I’d never seen pictures of my mom pregnant with me, yet my dad had pictures of this woman? I felt close to the picture somehow, which hadn’t made any sense. At twelve, I didn’t understand, so I put them back exactly how I’d found them and rushed out of the shed.”
“That must have been so hard to discover,” Jaleen said. “Being twelve and not knowing how to decipher something important that you stumbled upon.”
“It was. I’d never forgotten what I saw and in a way, I guess it happened that way for a reason. My dad met my mom Regina when I was only three months old. She was a single mother with her own babysitting business. Whoever was supposed to watch me called in sick, so she came instead. They’d never really discussed the details of how they met before, so it was nice to finally hear the true story.”
“So you and Summer are extremely close in age,” Jaleen said, doing a few mental calculations.
“Yes, we’re actually thirteen months apart. I guess Sonia had Summer and then ran off when she was a baby. She met my dad, got pregnant with me a month later, then took off when I wasn’t even three months old and went back to her family.”
That woman is a piece of work. Jaleen remembered Taheim talking about Sonia Dupree after the one and only time he’d met her. Jaleen hadn’t liked anything he’d heard. “Danni, what is she blackmailing you for? How did she even find you, because from what I heard, she isn’t the type of mother to seek out her daughters?”
“You’re right,” Danni said. “She is definitely not the type to seek out her daughters, however, she is the type to exploit them. She didn’t have to find me because I went looking for her after my dad passed away. I wanted to hear her side of the story. My dad didn’t know her as the Sonia we hear about, so I didn’t know what I was getting into before I tracked her down. She was easy to find since a quick Google search lead me to the Vegas show she was headlining. So I went there to meet her.”
“Wait a second,” Jaleen said, piecing even more together. “You knew she was headlining at that show before Winter and her sisters knew?”
“Yes,” Dan
ni said sheepishly. “And she is as horrible as you’ve heard. The meeting was so bad, I vowed to never look up anyone else with the last name Dupree.”
Jaleen searched her eyes. “But, instead, you decided to give your search one more try and then you found the Dupree sisters, right?”
“Right,” she said, nodding her head. “More specifically, I found the Bare Sophistication website announcing that a new boutique was coming to Chicago. I majored in business management and had worked at numerous retail and boutique stores, so when I noticed the opening for the store manager position, I figured that was my chance to meet my birth sisters.”
“Only Sonia had left a bad taste in your mouth.”
“Exactly. There was no way I was walking into the store and announcing who I was. I figured I could work with them for a week or two, get to know them, then tell them the truth.”
Danni briefly glanced at the ceiling with a faraway look in her eyes. “I never expected them to end up being some of the best friends I’ve ever had. Suddenly I was making up excuses to myself as to why I couldn’t tell them the truth.”
Jaleen cringed, knowing all too well exactly what she meant. He was going through his own inner struggles deciding the right time to tell Danni his secrets. “I understand,” he said. “More than you probably realize.”
When she turned back to face him, he saw the years of struggling to tell the truth written on her face. He also saw a hint of relief that she’d been able to tell the truth to at least one person.
“How is Sonia blackmailing you?”
Danni sighed. “She found out I had gotten the job at Bare Sophistication. I assumed it was because there were a couple of PR announcements that had my name and they had me added to the website. I’d left my cell phone number and name with one of the security guards for her show when I didn’t think I would get a chance to meet her. I assume she got my number from him. After I’d been working there for about three months, she called to ask if I’d said anything to Winter, Autumn and Summer. I said no and didn’t hear from her until almost two years ago, when her Vegas show began struggling to produce numbers. She called and threatened to tell Winter, Autumn and Summer who I was and the only way for her to keep her silence was for me to pay her a monthly fee.”
Nights of Fantasy Page 14