Reserve My Curves 3

by BM Hardin

  Reserve My Curves 3: the finale

  B.M. Hardin

  All rights reserved.

  Copyrighted Material

  2015©David Weaver Presents

  This book is a work of fiction. All persons, events, places and locales are a product of the others imagination. The story is fictitious and any thoughts of similarities are merely coincidental.

  Table of contents

  Dedication

  Acknowledgements

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Dedication

  This book is dedicated to a few special superstar readers, Shatisha Nash, Kendra Huskey, LaToya Denton, Earline Hamell, Terry Langston, Alnita Gray Roane, Liz Doss, and Tiffany Hudson.

  Thank you all for your support and for following me on my writing journey. It is truly a blessing to have supporters like you in my corner. Thank you!

  Acknowledgements

  First and foremost, I want to thank my Heavenly Father for my talents and my gifts and each and every story that he has placed in me.

  It is an honor and a privilege to be living my dream and walking in my purpose and for that I am forever thankful.

  Also to all of my family, friends, critiques, supporters, readers and everyone else, thank you for believing in me and allowing me to share my gifts with you.

  Your support truly means the world to me!

  B.M. Hardin

  Author B.M. Hardin’s contact info:

  Facebook: http://www.facbook.com/authorbm

  Twitter: @BMHardin1

  Instagram: @bm_hardin

  Email:bmhardinbooks@gmail.com

  Reserve My Curves 3: The Finale

  Chapter ONE

  Grant.

  My sister’s, Josephine’s husband Grant, was the head boss at the hotel.

  My first thought when I saw his name was what the---well, you know what.

  I mean how, when?

  Like…what?

  I remembered staring at the papers for a long while, hoping that the names on them would either change or disappear.

  But they didn’t.

  They just didn’t.

  I was in so much shock, about both of them, that for a while, I’d actually stopped breathing.

  I mean turning blue in the face, about to die and everything.

  I just couldn’t believe it.

  I couldn’t believe it at all.

  Though the discovery about Silas being one of the bosses hurt me the most, finding out that Grant was the top boss damn near gave me a heart attack.

  He was so quiet and so humble.

  He hardly ever even spoke, so how in the hell could he be the ring leader of selling ass?

  It just didn’t make sense.

  Hell, I’d never even so much as heard him curse!

  Nope, I just couldn’t believe it.

  Something just had to be wrong.

  It wasn’t until I’d placed my hand on the door handle, at the police station, yesterday, that I’d decided to keep some of the papers and not turn Silas and Grant in.

  Why I did it?

  Hell I don’t know.

  I would love to give a logical reason, but I couldn’t come up with one even if I tried.

  Silas and Grant both deserved to go down, mainly because both of them had deceived me, but for some reason, I’d withheld all of the information pertaining to them.

  The smudges of dirt on the papers that I’d kept, the ones with their names on them, told me that they were some of the papers that I’d found at Carmen’s house in the vase, the day that I was shot.

  They were the same papers that were hidden under all of the dirt and the ones that I’d put into my purse.

  I knew Carmen had taken them.

  She must have gotten them out while I was lying on the ground, shot and passed out, or on the ride to the hospital I suppose.

  Knowing her, she’d been somewhere looking out of a window or something, the whole time and she’d probably seen me stash the papers in my bag from the very beginning.

  I wondered why she’d taken them back to the hotel instead of taken them back to her home.

  Maybe she forgot.

  And I’m glad that she had.

  Since the papers revealing the truth about Silas and Grant didn’t exactly belong at the hotel anyway, I was sure that keeping them wouldn’t raise any suspicions, since all of the other paper work was consistent.

  Oh, and I couldn’t forget the fact that there were already two other men in place to take the fall for Silas and Grant if anything happened.

  Now how about that?

  They had it all figured out.

  On some of the paperwork it named two other men as the head bosses of the hotel.

  But on the dirty papers that I still had in my possession, it had the dirty truth.

  There were signed agreements that if anything ever happened, or if problems were to arise, the two men had agreed to take the fall for Silas and Grant and in return, on top of the “salary” that they had already been receiving, for years, they would get the best legal representation that money could buy, any and every string pulled that was possible and them and their families would be taken care of forever, financially, if any convictions or prison time came into play.

  I couldn’t believe that they’d thought so far ahead.

  There was no way in the hell that I would give up my freedom for money, but there was no telling what reasons the two men had.

  Hell, there’s no telling what a person might do for money if they were all out of options.

  I was a prime example of that.

  So basically, the detective thought he had the head honchos, but really he had nothing at all, well except for the one person that he’d wanted the most…Carmen.

  Carmen was behind bars and I loved it!

  I was so happy about her being locked up that I wanted to jump for joy, but she wasn’t the only one that deserved to be sitting in a cell.

  I mean of course she knew the truth, and though she’d been arrested, I was willing to bet that she wouldn’t utter a single word about Silas or Grant.

  And now I guess I would be keeping the truth to myself too.

  But maybe I should have thought this whole thing through just a little more.

  Maybe I should have turned their asses in!

  Silas had lied to me, deceived me and betrayed me.

  I was no saint, but what he’d done to me just didn’t make sense.

  He’d known exactly who I was when he’d approached me, obviously. He’d known exactly what I was doing the entire time at the hotel and hadn’t said a word.

  But why?

  What man in their right mind would do something like that?

  How could he even want to touch me knowing that I would spend hours most days being touched by someone else?

  Ooh, I was so angry at him!

  And I was frustrated because I didn’t have all of the answers, but I so desperately wanted them, and I’d be damned if he wasn’t going to give them to me.

  But how was I going to be able to believe anything that he said?

  At that thought, I came back from my thoughts, to see that Silas was still standing in front of me with the papers that I had given him still in his hands.

  At the sight of the dumbfounded look on his face, I started to see red.

  Before I could stop myself, I smacked the spit bubbles out of his mouth, stuck my middle finger up at him and headed to the bedroom.

  Bastard!

  Silas stomped behind me as though
he was coming to push me down or something and I almost wanted to run.

  “Envy, let me explain,” he growled.

  I grabbed a bag and headed to the dresser.

  As I opened the drawers, Silas started to talk.

  “It isn’t what you think.”

  I gave him a look that could have sent him straight to the pits of Hell, with gasoline drawers on.

  How isn’t it what I think?

  I’d always known that it was something, something a little strange or mysterious about him, but I just couldn’t put my finger on it.

  But never could I have imagined that this was his big secret.

  I continued to pack my bag and Silas continued to reach his hand into it and take the clothes back out of it.

  “Move Silas!”

  “No. You’re not leaving me. I would never let you leave me, especially without you knowing the truth. It isn’t what you think.”

  I rolled my eyes at him.

  He couldn’t talk himself out of this one no matter how hard he tried; this hole was way too deep.

  I glanced at his other hand and noticed that he was no longer holding the papers.

  What had he done with them?

  Those papers were the only proof that I had, just in case I changed my mind about turning both of their lying asses in. Or at the very least the papers gave me some kind of leverage.

  Why did I even give them to him in the first place?

  What was I thinking?

  “Envy.”

  Silas continued to pull the clothes out of the bag until finally I gave up and headed to the closet.

  I grabbed the step stool and looked for my bag full of money on the top shelf, but it wasn’t there.

  What?

  “Silas where the hell is my money?”

  He didn’t say a word.

  I got down and hurriedly went to check my other two hiding spots for the other two bags of cash, but they weren’t there either.

  What?

  What the hell is going on here?

  Silas was right behind me.

  “Silas where is my money? You can have the house and everything in it, just give me my money. You know the money that you allowed me to lay on my back to make without so much as saying a damn word! You make me sick. Where is my money Silas, huh?” I asked him again.

  “You’re not leaving me Envy,” he said.

  I didn’t have time to play with him.

  If he really thought that I was going to stay with him after finding out that he’d known about the thirteenth floor the whole time and about me, he was just as looney as everybody else had been lately.

  Silas grabbed my hand and literally pulled me towards the living room.

  I pushed and pulled, but he didn’t let up.

  He forced me to take a seat and he sat down beside me.

  Why couldn’t he have just been the one?

  Why couldn’t he have been my dream come true like I’d thought that he was?

  My emotions started to take over and once I started to cry, Silas decided to speak.

  “I couldn’t tell you who I was Envy. How would I have looked telling you something like that? You didn’t need to know. You were never even supposed to know. The business was handed over to me. I became a boss, the boss, around the same time that I’d met Carmen. To be honest, she wasn’t already at the hotel when I met her, I brought her on. It’s all hard to explain.”

  I’d stop crying to make sure that I didn’t miss one word that he’d said.

  I was so disappointed and angry that I thought that my head was going to explode.

  I should have known that he and Carmen still had some kind of dealings.

  I should have known that they were some kind of team.

  She was his backbone in the operation, which is why she’d always thought that she had some kind of rights to him.

  It explained why she gave me hell, and definitely explained why she felt like she couldn’t and would never be replaced.

  It all made sense.

  Everything that he’d ever said to me was one big lie.

  I was such a fool.

  “I’ve been tired of the business for a long time. It was handed over to me, and I stepped down and handed it over to Grant a while ago. Grant and I are as close as brothers. His mother and my mother are actually fairly close. They’d met when my mother was in the States. They kept in touch, and my family even flew them out for vacations with us a few times. It was my idea to keep our friendship from both you and Josephine. It just made it easier,” Silas said.

  Huh?

  What a minute, so Grant and Silas were like best friends or something?

  How could that be?

  They surely never acted like it around each other.

  I was so confused.

  “So you and Grant are best friends? This whole time y’all have known each other?”

  Silas nodded.

  “But why hide it?”

  “It was just easier that way. Let me back up. My family actually gave the family, who owned the hotel, the money to start and open it many years ago as a favor to a white man that saved my great, great grandfather’s life a long time ago. So, with my families money tied to the hotel and once the idea of the extracurricular activities came about, and by that I mean the thirteenth floor, there’s always someone from my family in America to somewhat oversee their investment, so to speak. They got paid. We got paid. My mother had come over with my step-father, to help with hotel business many years ago. She’d met Grant’s mother and my mother raved of how close their friendship was, and how much she loved her cooking. Some issues came up and my parents headed back to Africa and someone else was sent in their place. But she never forgot about Grant’s family. And she made sure that they didn’t forget about her. They spent many of summers with us and I’d even come to stay with them here for a summer or two. Our families are very close, which is why they didn’t have a problem with letting me hand the top position over to Grant.”

  Silas had always been fairly private about his family. He didn’t speak of them much, and when he did, it was always short and simple.

  He led me to believe that he had been cut off and that they despised him, but listening to him now, I was sure that he had just used that as a part of his sad ass cover up.

  “I loved to be here in America. A life of royalty was fine. But I wanted a little more freedom than that life allowed. When it was time for me to be groomed to take over at the hotel, I did it with no hesitation. Of course I’d told Grant a long time ago the truth about the hotel, and he’d begged to get in on it, for the money, for his family. Your sister actually seen me a few times, years ago, but she didn’t seem to remember me. I think she’d thought that I was one of Silas’s co-workers when he had a real job. I thought it was best to keep my distance from his family.”

  I let out a deep breath.

  I had my lies, my secrets, and my flaws, but damn!

  And he wasn’t even done telling me the whole story yet.

  “I’d played my part as the top dog for a few years, and Grant helped with finances. And after a while, I’d wanted out. I craved a normal life. So I handed it over to Grant. Grant is the top dog in charge. Or should I say was? Grant loved the power and the money. I taught him everything that I knew. I stayed around to oversee, though he had it down pact. It was just a matter of timing. Soon I was cutting all ties. To be honest, had we not became an item, I would’ve been gone over a year ago, but since you were already on board, I was just waiting on you. I felt better about being in the mix while you were still there. Strange but true. You could have quit at any time, and I would have made sure that you were fine, but you never took my advice. I would’ve handled the contract and Carmen.”

  Oh now you tell me!

  I just didn’t know what to say so I didn’t say anything.

  Silas was stupid and so was Grant.

  I mean, they acted like complete strangers in the beginning!

 
I mean, yes, they were cordial now, and talked about guy stuff here and there when they were around each other, but they didn’t act like the best buds that they actually were.

  Pitiful! Just down right ridiculous!

  It was all just stupid, and I didn’t know which one of them I wanted to stab the most.

  I’d known Grant since he and Josephine was all of seventeen years old. He was Josephine’s second guy friend, and right after their high school graduation, they got married.

  He’d always been the same; hardworking, kind, quiet and passive.

  He’d surely never mentioned an African friend or second-like family.

  And if he had, Josephine had managed to leave that out of our conversations.

  I’d always thought that he had a regular job.

  He was always professionally dressed and he had always taken good care of Josephine and the kids.

  He just seemed regular. A regular ole’ average Joe.

  But the truth was that he was just damn good at pretending.

  Unbelievable!

  And I was telling on his ass too!

  I surely was.

  My sister deserved to know the truth about the man that she called her husband…right?

  But they were doing so good.

  She was finally being faithful to him and they were about to renew their wedding vows.

  I couldn’t mess all of that up could I?

  Those thoughts had been part of the reason that I’d kept the papers from the detective in the first place.

  I’d already loss two of my sisters, no matter how you looked at it, and I didn’t want to lose the only one that I had left.

  If she felt like I ruined her marriage, or took her husband away from her in a sense, I was sure that Josephine would never forgive me.

  So, what was I going to do?

  And getting back to Silas, here he was telling me all of this, yet saying that he didn’t want me to leave him.

  The nerve of him!

  I’m sorry, but if knowing that I was lying down with random men for money four days a week, wasn’t enough to make him showcase his love for me by putting a stop to it, I had to reevaluate if what he felt for me was love at all.

  Why would any man accept that?