A Special Relationship

by Yvonne Thomas

  A SPECIAL RELATIONSHIP

  by

  YVONNE THOMAS

  c2008

  All rights reserved. Any use of the materials contained in this book without the expressed written consent of the author and/or her affiliates, is strictly prohibited.

  ***

  AUSTIN BROOK PUBLISHING

  America’s stomping ground for romantic ebooks

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  This novel is a work of fiction. All characters are fictitious. Any similarities to anyone living or dead are completely accidental. The specific mention of known places or venues are not meant to be exact replicas of those places, but are purposely embellished or imagined for the story’s sake.

  ***

  INTERRACIAL ROMANCE

  FROM

  BESTSELLING AUTHOR

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  ROMANCING HER PROTECTOR

  ROMANCING THE BULLDOG

  IF YOU WANTED THE MOON

  ALSO FROM

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  KATHERINE CACHITORIE

  LOVING THE HEAD MAN

  SOME CAME DESPERATE:

  A LOVE SAGA

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  FROM

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  TERESA MCCLAIN-WATSON

  ***

  AFTER WHAT YOU DID

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  STAY IN MY CORNER

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  COMING SOON

  FROM

  AUSTIN BROOK PUBLISHING

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  THE PRESIDENT’S GIRLFRIEND 2:

  HIS WOMEN AND HIS WIFE

  MALLORY MONROE

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  ONE

  Robert Kincaid drove onto the horseshoe driveway of his big, brick, colonial-style home expecting to find some much needed peace and quiet after a grueling day of work. What he found, instead, was an unfamiliar SUV parked at his front door, and as he entered his home, a handsome set of all too familiar luggage parked in his foyer. His wife Gloria and daughter Ashley were bounding down the spiral staircase as soon as he stepped into the house, their long, blonde hair golden and healthy. And as an added bonus, a family friend from Maryland, Dr. Paul Hathaway, another blonde, came out of the kitchen chomping on a sandwich.

  Robert was senior vice president of the Dyson Corporation, one of the largest tech firms in Florida, and it was his job to expect the unexpected. But when his wife stood in that foyer and announced her intentions to divorce him, and the family friend placed his arm around her as if she was his, no job in this world could have prepared him for this.

  He stared at Gloria, at that regally beautiful woman who stole his heart nineteen years ago and still held it captive, and no manner of words could have expressed his downright shock.

  “Don’t look at me like that,” she said bitterly as she put on her pantsuit jacket, her perfectly proportioned frame still able to get her husband’s attention. “It’s been a long time coming, Robert, I don’t know why you’re acting so surprised. But of course how would you know what was coming, right? You’re always working, always too busy to pay any attention to something as trivial as your family. You’re Mister Vice President after all. You’re Mister Fix It, Mister Everything for Dyson.” She said this and then calmed herself, to avoid an emotional outburst.

  “What’s remarkable to me,” she continued, this time in a measured voice, “is that you can fix problems all around the world, from Singapore to Madrid, but none in your own home.” Then she frowned, as if the entire matter was too pointless to even discuss. She looked at Paul. “Let’s just go,” she said to him.

  “Go?” Robert finally said, astonished. “What are you talking about, Gloria? Where do you think you’re going?” His stern face was now unable to conceal his charring dismay. This was his wife, the woman he’d known and loved for all those years, and she was behaving as if she hardly knew him. Or owed him any kind of explanation. “Gloria!”

  “Don’t you yell at me!” she replied harshly, prompting Ashley, their seventeen-year-old daughter, to giggle. His entire world was crumbling before his very eyes, and his own daughter thought it amusing.

  He exhaled. “Will you please explain to me what this is about?” Then he frowned. “And why is Paul here?”

  “You need to settle down, Robert,” Paul suggested, but Robert fumed.

  “Somebody needs to explain to me what’s going on,” he warned.

  Gloria threw her head back and blew out an exhausted sigh. She didn’t want it to come to this, she would have preferred to have left long before Robert even showed up and let her lawyers handle him. But his early arrival home gave her no choice. To her surprise, however, his handsome face was petrified, as if it actually mattered to him that he was about to lose his family. “Paul and I are in love,” she said bluntly, to end this once and for all. “Is that a good enough explanation? I loved him before I even met you. The only reason we weren’t together was because he was already married to Eleanor. So I married you.”

  Robert stared his expressive gray eyes at his wife as if he’d just been slapped. “So you married me?” he said in a voice searing with incredulousness. Women fell at his feet daily, women far younger and even more seductive than his wife could ever be, but she was talking as if he was some second-rate consolation prize. “Are you trying to tell me that you didn’t, that you never loved me?”

  “I loved Paul. That’s what I’m telling you, Robert. I have always loved Paul. But he had small children, he couldn’t divorce his wife. So yes, I married you to get Paul out of my system. But I never got over him.”

  Robert couldn’t do anything but stand there. Paul Hathaway was one of his best friends, an older man Robert had always treated like an older brother, and the idea that this man, this brother, would come all the way from Maryland to stab him in the back and take his wife away from him was not something Robert could just accept. This had to be a joke. He just knew this had to be some kind of sick, twisted joke.

  But nobody was laughing. Not Gloria, who stood there as if she was ready to take on anything anybody could throw her way. Not Paul, who seemed to gloat in his friend’s distress. And certainly not Robert. The reality killed the joke for Robert. Packed bags in the foyer, Paul’s arm around Gloria’s waist, and Gloria’s blunt request for a divorce squashed any hope that there could be some lighthearted explanation for this nightmare. And even Ashley seemed to relish her father’s humiliation as if she couldn’t believe he didn’t see it coming. But he didn’t. And that was what was killing him.

  “What about your relationship with God?” he finally asked his wife, and both she and Ashley let out angry sighs.

  “See what I’m talking about?” Gloria said bitterly. “But that’s just you, isn’t it, Robert? The strong Christian man who never does anything wrong. Heaven forbid your wife should leave you. Not you. Not Mister Perfect. It has to be something wrong with her, something wrong with her faith in God, for her to even think about leaving you.”

  “That’s not what I’m saying.”

  “Then why did you even bring it up? This is about us. You and me. Period. My relationship with God has nothing to do with this.”

  “It has everything to do with this, Gloria, what are you talking about? You profess Christ as your Savior,
in case you’ve forgotten, yet you’re willing to leave your husband as if it’s okay? You were the one who led me to the Lord. I became a born again Christian because I saw the example of Christ in your life.”

  “That was ages ago, Robert, will you stop living in the past for once? We’re thirty-seven years old now. We were kids then. We were young and dumb back then.”

  “Young and dumb?” Robert said, stunned by his wife’s new boldness. “Because we accepted Christ as Lord of our lives that made us dumb? What in the world is wrong with you, woman? God hasn’t changed.”

  “I know that. But I have! I changed so long ago and you never even noticed. You never had time for me and Ash. It was always work, work, work. And Lord only knows what else.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “We could have walked out of your life ten years ago and it would have probably been another ten years before you even realized we were gone.”

  Robert shook his head. He could not believe how little his wife really knew him. “And I’m sure that during all of your grief over being with some low-life like me Paul’s understanding shoulder was waiting right there for you to cry on.”

  “She never loved you, man,” Paul said firmly. “You can’t blame me for that.”

  “What about Eleanor?” Robert asked Paul, and Paul, a man almost as tall as Robert’s six feet, looked at him angrily.

  “What about her?” he asked.

  “Last I heard she was still your wife.”

  “That’ll change,” Gloria quickly interjected. “Paul’s divorcing her too.”

  “I see,” Robert said with a painful smile. “A clean sweep. You divorce me, he divorces Eleanor, and the two of you live happily ever after.”

  “That’s right.”

  “You think you’re going to live happily ever after with a man who doesn’t even fear the wrath of God?”

  Gloria hesitated, upset that Robert would force her hand this way. “Well maybe I don’t fear it either,” she finally said, shocking her own self, and Robert was once again astounded by this new woman standing before him. “Don’t look at me like that,” she added. “What kind of God would have allowed our innocent son to die?”

  “He didn’t allow—”

  “He did allow it! Our child didn’t have to die.”

  “He was born too premature, Gloria, too small to survive and you know it. Now who’s living in the past? That was twelve years ago.”

  “I don’t care! I still feel it like it was yesterday.” Then she exhaled and looked at her husband. He was still so perfect, she thought, his big, beautiful body and stunningly gorgeous face getting even better looking as the days go by, but she couldn’t help how she felt. “Just don’t fight this, Robert, all right?” she said. “All these women ‘round here be throwing themselves at you every day of the week. You can easily find you somebody else. But I don’t want this anymore. I want to be with Paul and I will be with Paul no matter what.”

  Robert’s heart dropped. Her mind was made up, he could see it all over her face. She was going to leave him. The love of his life was about to walk out of that door and leave him. “Gloria,” he said with a plea in his voice. He’d beg her to stay if he had to.

  But she wouldn’t allow it. She placed her hand up and halted him before he could say another word. “It’s over, Robert. Just accept it. Please.”

  Now she was pleading with him, and he knew better than anybody that nothing was about to change her mind. She was even cocky with her confidence, as if she’d just found the answer to her entire existence and it started with getting rid of him. He thought they were happy. He thought they had a marriage that was strong and secure and rooted and grounded in faith and love. But now she was behaving as if nothing could be farther from the truth. As if it was all a sham to begin with.

  And he just couldn’t accept that.

  He looked at Gloria. She was looking at him with an anger and, yes, a hatred he didn’t even know she possessed. He thought he was a good husband to her, a man who took care of his business, worshiped his Lord, and gave his family everything their hearts desired. But it wasn’t enough. None of it, apparently, was anywhere near enough.

  He opened his suit coat, placed his hands on his hips, and sighed in anguish. “Where will you live?” he asked her, unable to suppress a sudden and urgent concern for her welfare. The idea of his aging wife running off with some unfaithfully married man like Paul Hathaway was too distressing for him to even think about. She had no idea what she was getting into. She had no idea just how big a mistake she was about to make.

  Gloria could feel the concern in Robert’s voice, and she could see the painful look in his beautiful gray eyes, but she quickly dismissed his distress as a wake up call that was way too late to make any difference now. “We’re going back to Maryland with Paul,” she said brusquely, as if she couldn’t care less. “He has a lucrative medical practice there and it doesn’t make sense for him to have to give that up. After the divorce, we’ll see. But we definitely won’t be coming back to Jacksonville.”

  “You want to get away from me that badly?”

  “You know what, Robert, I’m not going to stand here and argue with you.” She touched Paul’s arm. “Get the luggage, honey, and let’s just go,” she said to him. Then she told Ashley to go to the car too. Robert, however, grabbed hold of his daughter’s arm.

  “She’s staying with me,” he said.

  “No, I’m not!” Ashley said, snatching away from his grasp.

  “As long as she’s still a minor, Gloria, I will not have her following you and your married lover around.”

  “I’m seventeen years old,” Ashley said, fearful of even the prospect of having to remain behind with somebody as strict as Robert. With her mother she could get away with murder. Anything she wanted, she got. But Robert always had rules and regulations, always made her go to church every Sunday morning and Bible study every Wednesday night and to all of those boring motivational seminars with him as if he was determined to make her conform to his image of some all-American good Christian girl. She couldn’t wait to get away from him.

  “You’re still a minor,” Robert said to her. “And this is still your home.”

  “She’s going with me, Robert,” Gloria said.

  “And I said she’s not. I’ll fight for custody if I have to.”

  “She’s going with me and her father, Robert.”

  Robert began to speak again, to continue to voice his firm resolve, but when he realized what Gloria had just said, when he realized the meaning of the words that had just come out of her mouth, he was dumbstruck. “What?” he finally asked.

  “Go on out to the car with Paul,” Gloria said to Ashley and Ashley, unable to conceal her relief, hurriedly followed Paul, who had gathered up the last of the luggage and was heading out of the house too.

  Robert, however, could not stop glaring at this stranger of a wife that stood before him. He should have been angry with Paul. He should have decked him before he even had a chance to get away. But he couldn’t stop staring at Gloria. “What did you just say to me?” he asked her.

  She looked at him, at the man who always knew he had it all figured out, and a sudden feeling of triumph rushed through her body. “She’s not your daughter, Robert,” she said.

  Robert ran his hand through his rich black hair, a sense of great sadness beginning to overtake him. “Don’t do this, Gloria.”

  “I’m not doing anything. Paul is her father, that’s just a fact. We took a DNA test, I’ll provide your attorneys with the results. We took it when she was fifteen years old and it confirmed what I had suspected all along.”

  “Wait a minute. Wait a minute here. You mean to tell me you’ve known the truth about this for two years? Since Ashley was fifteen?”

  Gloria regretted the deception but at the time she felt it was best. Paul was married with children. She was married. What else could they have done? “Yes,” she said.

  Ro
bert was devastated. Had his entire married life been a lie? A web of lies? He swallowed hard. “Ash knows the results too?” he asked.

  Gloria nodded. “Yes. That’s why we took her in for the DNA, when she first started rebelling against your authority. Paul was able to keep her in line.”

  “Paul?”

  “Yes, Robert, Paul. Her father. Now I’m sorry but that’s just the way it is. If you would have paid me more attention then you would have realized something was wrong. But you never had time for me.”

  Robert just stood there, staring at his wife. At this woman he thought he knew. At this woman he thought had loved him. “And Robert, Jr.?” he asked nervously, painfully. “Was he mine?”

  Gloria shook her head. “What difference does it make?” she said bitterly. “He’s dead anyway.” She said this knowing full well how insensitive it sounded, how hurtful it would be to her husband, but she didn’t care. She wanted him to hate her. She wanted him to understand that their sham of a marriage could never be repaired again. She had no regrets whatsoever with what she said. She, in fact, felt a sense of relief after saying it. And she left his presence equally empowered. She left without looking back.

  When she had gone, when she and Paul and the daughter he had never even considered could not be his, finally left the premises, Robert Kincaid, the man who was supposed to be able to fix any disaster that loomed large on any horizon, stood dumbfounded in his foyer. His strong body was weak with exhaustion. His expressive eyes were wide in disbelief. And his chest, his powerful, broad chest, pounded in and out in hyperventilation like the syncopated beat of a haunting, distant drum.

  TWO

  Two years later, two years to the day that Robert Kincaid stood in his foyer stunned witless by his wife’s shocking news, Carrie Banks, only a couple hundred miles away but in a world apart, received a shock of her own. Earlier that day she and her mother, Honey Banks, were seated out on the porch of their shack of a house in tiny Attapulgus, Georgia. They were trying to enjoy the sun before it became too hot, and to ignore the flies and mosquitos before they became too onerous to ignore. Dale Mosley, Carrie’s fiancé of only three weeks, a dark-skinned, handsome young man with a winning smile and an abrupt, some would say arrogant manner, drove up in his shiny Mustang, walked up the steps of the porch, and told her without shame or hesitation that she either give him a sample, or there would be no marriage.