BIG DADDY SINATRA
THERE WAS A RUTHLESS MAN
(The Sinatras of Jericho County)
BOOK ONE
By
MALLORY MONROE
Copyright©2014 Mallory Monroe
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MORE INTERRACIAL ROMANCE
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BOOK 8
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PROLOGUE
1998
Jenay Franklin knew she was running late, but she also knew she wasn’t so late that Quince would need to be called. But there he was, coming out of the front office with Ash and Carly, Jenay’s stepdaughters, by his side. She smiled and waved and slanted her bang across her forehead the way she was prone to do when she was unsettled, and hurried to them. She was always pleased to see Quince and the girls.
“Jenay!” the girls yelled as soon as they saw her coming. They broke away from their father and ran to her, throwing their arms around her.
“How are my two favorite little people in the whole wide world?” Jenay asked with a grin, as she balanced her shoulder bag and wrapped them in her arms too. Although they were only ten and eight, they were almost as big as she was.
“We built a castle today,” Ashley, the ten-year-old, informed her.
“You did?” Jenay asked in that sincere, but overly-sympathetic voice Quince hated. “Was it very pretty?”
“It was very big,” Carly, the eight-year-old, said. “Bigger than the Empire State building!”
“Very pretty too,” Ashley said. “Just like you.”
Jenay squeezed them both, and then looked up at Quince. But something wasn’t right. She could tell by that faraway look in his eyes. “I would have gotten here sooner, but Lynda was late again,” she said. “Marta knew I had to pick up the girls so she told me to wait five minutes and if Lynda didn’t show by then, I could leave. My shift would be over. I didn’t think I was so late that the school would have called you.”
She realized then that Quince wasn’t even looking at her, but was looking beyond her. She turned around and looked too. She saw a woman coming toward them. She was a big woman, about twice Jenay’s size, and very attractive.
“Girls,” Quince said to his little ones, “I want you to go with Miss Vernita. You remember Miss Vernita, don’t you?”
“But we wanna stay with Jenay,” Ashley complained.
“You remember Miss Vernita, don’t you?” Quince asked again.
Ashley didn’t want to respond, but she knew her father. “Yes, sir,” she said, her eyes looking down.
“Speak to her then.”
“Hello Miss Vernita,” the girls replied in unison.
“Hey girls,” Vernita said with a grand smile, and motioned for them to come to her. Both girls looked up at Jenay, as if even they knew this wasn’t right, but they obeyed their father. And went to the woman. Vernita pulled them into her arms. And then she looked at Quince.
“Give me a couple minutes,” he said.
Vernita glanced at Jenay, nodded at Quince, and then began ushering the girls toward a fancy sports car. Jenay drove a beat-up Ford that she shared with her husband. She knew that sports car didn’t belong to them. She looked back at him. For some reason, after the girls left her arms, she already felt alone.
“Who is she?” she wanted to kno
w. “A friend of their mother’s?”
But Quince wasn’t answering questions right now. He was giving answers. “It’s not going to work out, Nay,” he said to her.
That didn’t make sense to Jenay. “What’s not going to work out?”
“Our marriage,” he said. And as soon as he said those two words, it felt like a punch in the gut to Jenay.
“You and I,” he kept talking. Another punch. “It’s not working out. I’ve tried and you’ve tried, but it’s just not working for me.”
The suddenness of it! It felt so out of the blue that Jenay, at first, just stared at him. “What are you saying, Quince?” she eventually asked. “Are you telling me . . . you want a divorce?”
They had to step aside, as another parent entered the school’s front office door. “That’s what I’m telling you,” Quince said. “I think it’s time for us to go our separate ways.”
“Separate ways? What separate ways?” It felt like a thunderbolt kind of crazy to Jenay. She couldn’t begin to figure out where it came from. She couldn’t figure out where it was going! “I don’t understand, Quince. I know we’ve been bickering a lot lately, but I assumed it was because of the stress of your finals. You’re always grouchy during finals week. How could that translate into you suddenly wanting a divorce?”
“Because it’s over. All right? Let’s just leave it at that.”
When he made that statement, as if she had no right to even question his decision, Jenay went from confused, to angry. “Just leave it at that?” she asked with shock in her voice. “You tell me you want a divorce and I’m supposed to leave it at that?”
Quince exhaled, and touched her arm. “I don’t want to hurt you, Jenay,” he said.
Jenay snatched her arm away from him. “Then don’t hurt me! You don’t want to hurt me, then don’t do it!”
“That’s up to you. We can be adults about this, or you can show your ass. You show your ass, there will be pain.” He looked past her again, toward that sports car. “I’ve got to go,” he said with a frown.
Jenay knew where he had looked. She knew he had looked at that woman in that sports car again. “Who is she?” she asked. “You meet some skanky female, now you want a divorce? And how could you just turn our children over to her?”
“They’re not our children and you know it,” Quince quickly pointed out. “So don’t even go there, Nay. And she has nothing to do with this. I want a divorce. Me. This is all on me!”
“But why?” Jenay’s anger was turning into anguish now. She knew Quince. She knew when he meant it. “You can’t tell me why?”
It was obvious he didn’t want to go there. But, to Jenay’s shock, he wasn’t above going anywhere anymore. “Because you’re not on my level,” he said. “That’s why. All right? Satisfied?”
“Not on your level?” Jenay was frowning now. “What are you talking about? I’m working my ass off to help make ends meet while you finish law school. Then you’re going to put me through school. And then I’ll be on your level, if that’s the level you mean. Why are you acting like you don’t understand the plan, Quince?”
“That’s your plan,” Quince made clear. “That’s not my plan. My plan is for my girls and I to go our way, and for you to go yours. That’s the deal. That’s the plan.”
Jenay had been warned. Seven years ago, when she first met Quince, her mother, her father, everybody she knew and loved told her she was making a big mistake. Her mother was especially stern. She reminded her that she’d been in one bad relationship after another one even before she graduated high school. Now she was looking to marry this Quincy guy? She was far too young to saddle herself with a man with two babies, her mother told her, she didn’t care how nice he seemed. At twenty-two, she had too much life to live to marry him and become his babysitter, and maid in essence, while he pursued his dreams. Live a little, her mother had begged her. Go to college herself. Pursue her own dreams. Do you, her mother had said, before you don’t know you anymore!
But she ignored every warning. Because Quince was supposedly so different. He was a single father raising his two beautiful daughters alone. He was a special man. He wasn’t super-gorgeous and self-centered like those other guys that misused her. He was a nerd for crying out loud! A guy like him wouldn’t break her heart. A guy like him wouldn’t be so self-absorbed that he couldn’t see her wants and needs and desires. They would be a happy family together if people would only give them a chance. Quince, she convinced herself, was so different!
“I’ve already gotten our things out of the apartment,” Quince went on.
Even that infuriated Jenay. “You did what?”
“I already got our things,” Quince made clear. “I did it while you were at work and the kids were at school.”
“Oh. So you planned this shit. This wasn’t some random act of weakness. You’ve been planning this decision for what? Days? Weeks? Months?”
I’ll initiate the divorce right away,” Quince said, determined to keep his dignity intact, despite her anger. “Since we don’t have anything to contest, there won’t be any problems. It should be quite painless.”
Painless? No problems? Nothing to contest? “But what about the girls?” Jenay asked him. How could he say they had nothing between them? What about love? What about their vows? What about those precious children! She was so overwhelmed that her heart was racing. She couldn’t understand her own emotions.
But Quince understood his. “What about them?” he wanted to know. “It’s over. That means your relationship with my children is over too. They’re too attached to you anyway. I never liked that. You’re not their mother, and given seven years of marriage and you haven’t been able to get pregnant in any of that time, you’ll never be a mother. So forget about my kids, you hear me? I’m not going to let their attachment to you spoil a relationship they might have with anybody else.”
“Like that bitch in the car?” Jenay asked.
“Anybody else,” was all Quince would say. “It’s over, Jenay. I’m sorry, but it’s over. You have got to go on with your life, and accept that hard truth.”
And just like that, he began walking away to that fancy sports car too. Jenay watched him leave. She watched the man she thought would be her forever man leave just like those previous forever men left too. A part of her wanted to lash out. A part of her wanted to run to him, turn his spineless ass around, and scratch his eyeballs out. She wanted to run to that fat bitch in the sports car, and scratch hers out too.
But that wasn’t going to bring him back. That wasn’t going to bring those sweet children back. That wasn’t going to make any difference whatsoever. Because at the end of the day, she still was going to be alone. By herself. With nothing but seven long years of waste and stagnation: bitterness, as her companion. She wasn’t about to make a fool out of herself too.
Not that she hadn’t played the fool already. Because Quince not only wasn’t different, he was more predictable than any man she had ever fallen for. Within weeks of the finalization of their divorce, a divorce that specified she was to have no contact with his children ever again, he was married to Miss Vernita. And driving her sports car. And well on his way to driving it all the way to that law degree and success Jenay so faithfully helped him achieve.
She was devastated. His betrayal staggered her for years on end. But then she got up, got busy, and got on with it. And vowed to herself that she wasn’t looking back, and that she wasn’t allowing Quince, or any of those other men who broke her heart, to break her spirit too.
CHAPTER ONE
Three Years Later
“We’re simple people, Big Daddy.” He kept twisting the baseball cap he held in his hands. He felt foolish, calling a man who wasn’t even forty yet Big Daddy, a man younger than he was, but that was what the people called him. “We don’t try to be anything but who we are. Simple, decent folk. All we ever had was that land my granddaddy left us.”
His wife was by his side: skinny as a ree
d, tight-lipped, pinched face. She knew what brought them to this lowest point of their lives, but she had to play the role.
Charles Sinatra leaned back in the chair behind his desk and looked from her, back to her husband. He was playing a role too. The role of a patient man, a man every soul in town knew he most definitely was not. He even looked at his watch. Not out of disrespect to his visitors, but out of expediency. He had a wedding to attend in Boston this afternoon: his youngest son’s wedding. He didn’t have time for this.
But his visitors, Russ and Trish Ferraway, had their own problem. And in their view, he was it.
“If your bank takes our land,” Russ went on, “we’ll have nothing left. Nothing! What will we have left?”
He was tall like his wife, Charles noted, but unlike her, he was fat as a hog at the county fair. This man hadn’t missed any meals, or any chance to squander that supposedly cherished land his granddaddy left him.
“What will we have to sustain us?” Russ asked. “We aren’t young anymore. All we have is that land my granddaddy worked day and night to maintain. And when he died, he handed it to me. I can’t lose it like this! What will my granddaddy think? He’ll turn over in his grave! You’re a man with property. I’m sure you were given possessions to look after too when your daddy died. Look at all of the varied and sundry businesses you own around town; all of these grand businesses your daddy left you.”
Big Daddy Sinatra: There Was a Ruthless Man (The Sinatras of Jericho County Book 1) Page 1