“Yeah, you are.” She’d left her mom’s house over ten years ago, bitter and determined to do her own thing. A mom who hadn’t given Lola much didn’t get to tell her how to live her life or shame her for how she chose to make a living. But Dina had been consistent. She’d always had some kind of dinner on the table and had never spent even one night away from the house when Lola was home.
“We fought a lot over my choices,” Lola said. “I used to think it was because you were trying to ruin my life. But you were just being a mom.”
“I wanted to be around more, believe it or not. When you told me about the stripping, I blamed myself. Thought it was because I did wrong.”
“I know.” Lola picked at nothing on the comforter. “You did the best you could, and I see that now.”
“How far along?” Dina never made apologies for changing the subject when it suited her. “You know the sex?”
“Only five weeks.” Every day since Lola’d seen the boy playing in the snow outside the motel, she’d thought of him. He’d made some kind of unshakable impression on her. The strange thing was, she’d been inexplicably drawn to him but hadn’t even known she was pregnant at the time. “It’ll be a boy. I’m pretty sure.”
“Lucky. They’re lots easier than little girls.” Dina laughed good-naturedly, and Lola giggled along with her.
“Come and see me when you get back? If you need a place to stay…” Dina hesitated. “You know. We’ll figure this out. You’re not alone, baby.”
Lola needed to get off the phone. She wouldn’t be able to keep the tears from spilling much longer. Her mom hadn’t called her “baby” since she was a teenager, since before she’d announced she was taking a job at Cat Shoppe and it wasn’t open for discussion. “I will. Night, Mom.”
Lola hung up and dried the corners of her eyes with her sleeves. Her burden was a little lighter knowing her mom would be there for her again.
Her relief was short-lived, though. Now, Lola had her confirmation—Beau was looking for her. She didn’t believe he was capable of hurting her, but Lola had purposely tried to drive him to the edge. And if he was there, he’d want her there with him. Lola glanced down at her hands, instinctively spread over her stomach.
15
Beau emptied his pockets into a small, circular tray and added his Rolex to the top of the pile.
A stocky security woman by the metal detector waved in the direction of his feet. “Shoes too.”
He slid off his Italian loafers and placed them on the conveyor belt. She nodded for him to pass.
On the other side, he put himself back together, tucking his wallet into his jacket, delicately twisting his feet into his shoes. He normally had a shoehorn in his carryon, but it only occurred to him now that he’d packed it away. He’d already held up the line at check-in, unable to find the airline confirmation in his e-mail. It took a phone call to his assistant to remember he hadn’t asked her to book anything.
The first flight out of New Orleans to Los Angeles was a redeye. Beau didn’t have to wait at the gate long before priority members were invited to board. He sat, his window rain-splattered, the runway misty. He looked away and checked his e-mail. There wasn’t enough to keep him occupied.
People filed by him. He actually hoped to get stuck next to someone chatty. Bonus if it was a beautiful woman. Nobody stopped, though, and eventually the cabin doors shut, the engines vibrated to life. A glassy-eyed flight attendant recited her safety speech.
When they were in the air, she made her way down the aisle. “Get you anything, Miss? Sir, would you like a drink? Do you need anything?”
She parked her cart next to his seat. He looked up at her. “Scotch, neat.”
“Right away, sir.”
She left it on the seatback tray in front of him. The cabin dimmed and went dark, leaving him alone with his drink. He punched on the light above his head and opened the inflight magazine to a random page.
“Ten Midwest Destinations You Can’t Miss.”
He’d been to three. What about Lola? Had she driven to the St. Louis Arch in her red sports car and tight leather pants? Where did she keep all that cash? Beau looked up at the low ceiling, stretching his legs out under the seat in front of him. If first class was this cramped, he didn’t think he’d survive in coach. He leaned into the aisle. “Miss? Hello?”
After a moment, the attendant appeared, bending over to whisper, “Yes, sir?”
“Another Scotch.”
“Certainly.” She turned away and within a minute, came to refill his cup.
“Leave the bottle,” he said.
“I’m sorry, but—”
“I’ll pay.” He shifted to get his wallet. “How much is it?”
“We aren’t allowed, sir. Are you all right? Do you need a barf bag?”
Beau grimaced, leaning away from her as if she were about to be sick. “I feel fine. I just don’t—fly well.” He flew all the time and had never had an issue. Beau took a too-big sip of his drink as the stewardess stood there. He needed a barf bag for his life. He wanted to tell her the story of how a gravely bad decision had rippled through his neatly-packaged world and turned it into shit. Not even thinking about his healthy bank account gave him comfort at that moment. She was a woman—maybe she could tell him what the fuck he didn’t understand about the female gender.
Beau finished the drink and held out his cup. “One more. Then I can sleep.”
She looked around the cabin, quiet except for one snoring idiot. She filled his drink to the brim and left.
What a magic trick Lola had pulled, disappearing into thin air, reappearing in the backwoods of Missouri. She couldn’t run forever, though. At some point, she’d have to get a job, pay rent or a mortgage, charge things to her credit card like every other living, breathing American. He could wait in the wings, fading into one of her distant memories. He wouldn’t pounce until she thought she was safe.
He didn’t want to pounce, though, and he didn’t want to be a memory. He could picture her now, sleeping next to him in bed, opening her eyes every few minutes as if to check he was still there. What was real, and what had she faked? Lola in his bed, wearing that piece-of-shit nightgown he passionately hated.
Beau thumped his head back against the leathery cushion. Everything began to spin. He tossed the magazine into the seat next to him and switched off the light, praying he wouldn’t need that barf bag after all.
Face to face with the woman in New Orleans who was paying forward Lola’s favor, Beau’d never felt more like he was standing in ruins he’d caused. Lola didn’t want to be found. It wasn’t that he thought he deserved her anymore. The opposite, in fact. But that’d never stopped him from pursuing anything. He’d negotiated business deals with men even more powerful than him and regularly took on entire boardrooms. Yet the girl in cat ears unraveled him. He would always be weak when it came to her.
This wasn’t business. It wasn’t a game. Lola wanted him out of her life and after the way he’d treated her, she had every right. The way to love her was to respect what she was telling him, not demand that she do things his way. The couple had paid it forward, and now it was his turn. He could sit and think up a million ways to make her happy, but it wouldn’t matter, because she’d only actually left him one option—leave her alone.
The plane’s engines hummed him a lullaby, his consciousness circling the drain. He glided his hand over the smooth surface of the seat’s armrest. He could still appreciate her skin, the way she wore an evening gown, or had one ripped off. Thighs spread, tits pointed to the moon, firm but soft ass—and all this against the midnight hair on her head, between her legs.
Her eyelids would fall just as she’d catch her orgasm, never fully closing. She watched him watching her. Lola in her dresses, black and gold and peach. Turning her head over her shoulder and making eye contact with him. Smiling in the seat next to him at the theater, her polite applause. On the stage at Cat Shoppe, pirouetting around the pole in pink,
arched ballet slippers, legs bowed, arms bent. A female audience member turned to him. “As we begin our descent, please make sure your seatbelt is securely fastened…”
Beau walked out of the strip club into a desert, sand crunching under the soles of his dress shoes as he stepped over fat succulent plants. “Where am I?”
“Local time in Phoenix is 4:05 in the morning. The temperature is sixty degrees.”
“I’m not supposed to be here.”
“She knows that,” said a female voice.
“Who?”
A camera shutter clicked, a light flashed. He squinted across a canyon at a young Lola, four or five years old, as she shielded her eyes from the sun. The horizon rippled.
“How could you not recognize her?” Lola’s voice asked from behind him. “Your own daughter?”
He turned around. Lola stood in Beau’s kitchen. A little girl clutched her leg. They both wore leotards and ballet slippers, fabric bunched at their ankles. The child’s hair was as dark as her mother’s, her cheeks flushed pink.
“My daughter?” he asked.
“Isn’t that why you’re here?” Lola sounded angry. “I don’t think you’re supposed to be here. You should leave.”
“But I’ve been looking for you.” She was trying to leave again. He lunged for her.
“Help,” she screamed, backing into a refrigerator. “Somebody help. Hello? Sir?”
Beau woke up to blinding fluorescence. He blinked up at the flight attendant, whose eyebrows were wrinkled with concern. “Sir? Are you feeling okay? We’ve landed in Phoenix. If you have a connection to make, you should go now.”
Beau sat up in his seat. He was sweating through his suit, his hairline damp. Someone had taken his empty glass and raised his tray. He rubbed his face, his stubbly chin. When he blinked, the little girl was there in her bubblegum-colored outfit, a carbon copy of her mother.
He hadn’t just lost Lola when he’d hurt her—he’d given up a life with her. Already, memories he’d never get were tormenting him. Beau stood and took his carryon from the overhead bin. The airport was midnight-quiet, Phoenix’s dry desert air in his chest, his throat. Choking him.
16
Beau straightened his tie and exited the town car. Even through his sunglasses, the California sun seemed excessively bright. Or maybe it was because of the pulsing in his head. Partway up the sidewalk, a car door slammed behind him.
“You can wait here,” Beau called back to Warner. “I’ll only be a few minutes.”
“I’d like to come with you.”
Beau stopped and turned around, curious. Warner didn’t ‘like’ to do things Beau hadn’t asked him to—or at least, he never expressed it. “Why?”
Warner shifted from one foot to the other. “The same reason you’re here instead of just sending me to pick Brigitte up. For support.”
Beau walked back until he was face to face with Warner. He removed his sunglasses to look him in the eye. “Don’t think I haven’t noticed your behavior the past few weeks.”
Warner’s spine straightened as if trying to meet Beau’s height. “Sir?”
“Defending her behavior to me. Sticking your nose where it doesn’t belong. I should’ve suspected earlier. You’ve always been the only one who can stand to listen to her babble senselessly for hours.”
“If you’re suggesting I’m in love with your sister,” Warner said, hesitating only a moment, “you’d be right.”
“How long?”
“Years.”
Beau pulled at the knot around his neck. The sun was unforgiving today. “You should tell her that.”
“I did.” He glanced away briefly. “While you were away. I needed to distract her the night you left for Missouri. She wasn’t doing well.”
“She never does while I’m away.” Beau sighed, nodding back toward the doctor’s office. “Is that why we’re here?”
Warner nodded. “She came to me after your argument. Nothing unusual there, except this time when she tried to call and beg you not to go after Lola, I put my foot down.”
Beau frowned at Warner, his employee who exhibited less emotion than a robot. “And how did that go?”
“She’d told me what you’d said about me having feelings for her, so I said it was true. And I asked her why she wanted to be second in your eyes when she was first in mine.”
Beau couldn’t remember Brigitte ever responding to romantic gestures, though he suspected she didn’t care to share them with him. He almost didn’t want to ask. “What’d she say?”
“We had an honest talk. She was young when she moved here and hadn’t dealt with losing her mother the way a young girl should. She replaced one family with another before she ever had a chance to feel anything.”
Warner was always in the background, but Beau hadn’t realized how closely he must’ve been paying attention to them over the years. “She’s terrified I’ll leave her too,” Beau said, “and she’ll end up alone.”
“She won’t, and I told her so. Said she’s always had two people who would never abandon her, she just needs help seeing that.”
Beau gave Warner a heartfelt nod. He was grateful, for once, to have someone else looking out for Brigitte’s best interest. “Let’s go inside.”
They walked side by side to the therapist’s office, where they sat in the waiting room. Beau had nothing else to say to Warner. He kept quiet, wiped sweat from his temple with his shoulder sleeve.
His phone broke the silence, but he checked the screen and put it back in his pocket.
“You can take it,” Warner said. “We have a few minutes.”
Beau glanced at him and leaned his elbows on his knees. “It’s fine.” It rang again and didn’t stop until Beau finally answered it. “What is it?”
“What do Texas, New Mexico and Arizona have in common?” Detective Bragg asked, sounding more joyful than Beau thought possible.
“A lot, actually,” Beau said.
“They’re all on the way back to Los Angeles. She should be on our turf by tomorrow.”
Beau looked at the ground, bouncing his knee up and down. He’d learned his lesson—finally—when it came to assuming anything about Lola. Yet the promise he’d made himself to walk away was tenuous, something that could easily be broken if he wasn’t careful. A memory nagged at him—Texas, New Mexico, Arizona—but he shook his head quickly to deflect it.
“You hear what I said?” Bragg continued. “She’s coming home.”
That was a blow. Lola might be coming back to California, but if she considered Beau her home, she wouldn’t have left him this way. He massaged his forehead. “We decided to drop this.”
“That was before I knew we were at the end.”
“You were right, though. She wants to be…” It wasn’t a memory nagging him—it was his dream from the airplane. The details were fuzzy, but he could clearly picture Lola in the desert with their daughter. He stilled his leg. “Did you say Arizona?”
“Got a pending motel charge in Tucson just now. That’s why I called.”
The doctor’s office door opened, and a woman spoke. “See you in a few days, Brigitte?”
“I have to go,” Beau said, pulling his phone away.
“Maybe I was wrong.” Bragg cleared his throat. “About her not wanting to be found. Maybe I had it wrong.”
Beau didn’t think it could be that simple. “Congratulations on your second retirement, Bragg. Thanks for all your help.”
He hung up the phone as Brigitte entered the waiting room and stopped when she saw them. She turned a balled-up tissue over in her hand, a watery smile on her face. “You both came.”
Beau stood, and she went directly to him. She hugged him, melting against his body only a second before she pulled back. She narrowed her red-rimmed eyes. “You’ve been drinking.”
“Not yet.”
She shook her head. “Then you’re wildly hungover.”
“It’s been a rough couple weeks.”
B
rigitte frowned, but for once it didn’t alarm him, since it was purely concern. She looked about to speak but then closed her mouth. Beau had gotten off the airplane and had a voicemail from Brigitte—she was going into therapy, for real this time. Careful not to upset her, he hadn’t yet mentioned any details about Lola or his trip, and Brigitte hadn’t asked.
“Your big meeting with VenTech is tomorrow. Shouldn’t you be at work prepping?”
Beau definitely should’ve been with his team, which was locked in a conference room surrounded by Subway sandwich wrappers. Things’d happened so quickly that the staff had been taking turns pulling all-nighters. Beau was having a hard time remembering why he needed VenTech so badly, though, and as a result, had been avoiding the office. That, and he was proud of Brigitte for finally making a good decision.
“I thought maybe my soeurette could use me more,” he said. “And I wanted to congratulate you.”
She shrugged. “It wasn’t an easy decision, but with some urging from—”
“Not about that.” He jerked his head fractionally in Warner’s direction.
“Oh.” She looked down between them, but it was hard to miss the pink flush of her pale skin. “I don’t know where I was all these years. I must’ve been blinded by some—thing.”
Beau nodded that he understood. In her reality, she and Beau were linked for life. Whether it was simply familial for her or something more, Beau’d never asked, in case he didn’t like the answer. Her fear of loneliness was strong enough to shut out the truth. Beau was fine being pushed aside so Warner could take his place.
“We’ll have to figure out a new arrangement,” Beau said, loud enough for Warner to hear. “I’m not having my sister’s boyfriend drive me around.”
“Fire me.”
Beau and Brigitte both turned to him. She disengaged from Beau to go hug Warner instead. “But, Brandon, darling, you love what you do.”
Beau made a face. Brandon? He looked between them, suppressing his reflex to stop them from touching. He’d practically pushed Brigitte into Warner’s arms, but seeing them together would take some getting used to.
Explicitly Yours Series Page 55