Stay (Dunham series #2)

by Moriah Jovan

  “So the right question is: Why did you decide to specialize in cooking weeds and roadkill?”

  Her eyes crinkled. “No matter what happens, I can go into the woods and have a decent meal.”

  “Esquire asked you that, too, and you just said you wanted to be unique.”

  She shrugged. “Guilty as charged.”

  “So that’s also why you learned how to butcher animals. But you don’t hunt.”

  “I can hunt, and I can fish with my bare hands. I just don’t like to. Anybody can kill the animal. Butchering it’s, well, it’s an art.”

  “And what you love most about cooking.”

  “Yes.”

  They strolled along, still holding hands, but Eric knew where he wanted to go next.

  “Pink,” he said as he handed her a saloon girl outfit at the tintype shop. “Not that anybody’ll be able to tell what color it is.”

  He watched her shimmy the outfit over her blouse and shorts, then put her hair up with the pins provided and slide a large feather into it. Instant hard-on. Eric loved undressing her, seeing her bare body, but it was when she dressed provocatively that he could barely resist her. The painting. The Maxim and Esquire covers. When he’d dressed her three weeks ago.

  That costume had him straining against his fly—and she was fully clothed underneath it!

  He chose the piano player costume and they posed for the camera in classic cheesy Americana nostalgia: he sitting on a chair and her standing beside him, her knee up, her booted foot on the chair between his legs.

  “Hold on,” Vanessa said abruptly and put her foot down on the floor. In front of the line of people behind them, she ripped open Eric’s fly and pulled out part of his shirttail, then rumpled his costume a bit more. She took the bowler hat off him, mussed his hair—

  —and all the while the people in the line behind them began to hoot.

  Eric rolled his eyes when she chuckled.

  “Okay,” she muttered as she arranged herself on his knee, spreading her legs wide and hiking her skirt almost to her torso. She chucked her neckline down until all that gorgeous golden skin was exposed almost to her nipples, then grasped Eric’s hand and drew it over her shoulder. “Here you go,” she breathed, sliding his hand into her bodice until she had it curled around her breast, her nipple nudging his thumb.

  “Uh, Vanessa . . . ”

  “I told you I was an exhibitionist,” she whispered and wiggled her butt against his hard-on. “Play along. You know you want to.”

  The photographer whistled as he waited for Vanessa to finish, and Eric really didn’t mind so much that she took his other hand and wrapped it high around the inside of her thigh. She draped the skirt fabric over his hand and he used the opportunity to slide it all the way up and inside her shorts and panties. She gasped and she looked at him, wide-eyed.

  Choked when he slipped his fingers up inside her, but then she regained some measure of composure.

  He looked straight back at her and raised an eyebrow.

  Smirked.

  The people in line hooted louder.

  “Turnabout, et cetera,” he purred, thinking there were worse kinks than this.

  She huffed and grasped his crotch, then looked at the photographer.

  “Ready now.”

  The wolf-whistling and hooting crowd had attracted even more attention and by the time Eric dragged Vanessa out of the shop, each with their digital “tintypes” in hand, he couldn’t think of much else but getting inside her.

  “Okay, you’ve adequately demonstrated your willingness to have fun,” he muttered. “Find me a place to fuck you silly where we won’t get arrested.”

  “Oh, no!” Vanessa squealed, laughing as she danced out of his reach. “Payback is hell, bad boy. Weren’t you the one all proud of your ability to control yourself?”

  “Yeah, that was before I found out my girlfriend was about to come in the middle of an amusement park while twenty people watched me finger-fuck her.”

  She stilled and her smile melted a little.

  Oh, shit.

  She tilted her head a bit. “Girlfriend?” she asked softly.

  Hard-on gone. Just like that. He looked at her. “I’d like to be able to say that about you, yes,” he answered carefully. “I thought we covered this out in the parking lot.”

  “Oh,” she breathed, as if it hadn’t occurred to her that if he was her boyfriend, she was his girlfriend. “Um . . . ”

  “Look, Vanessa,” he said matter-of-factly, “the only evidence anybody has that you slept with Sebastian is that painting and he’s not admitting anything. Even if he did, it could be chalked up to a figment of his imagination. Loads of plausible deniability. Nobody knows about Piper except me because if they did, it would’ve been in the tabloids long before he left.

  “You’re here, with me, in public. You haven’t made any effort to hide me and we practically had sex in your dining room, where anybody could have walked in. Everybody at Whittaker House knows where I sleep when I’m here, including Knox and Justice and Vachel. If I didn’t mean something more to you, you’d have tucked me away somehow, minimized me to some secret little tryst the way you did Sebastian and Piper.”

  She opened her mouth, but he held up a hand and she snapped it shut again. “And I don’t want to hear about whatever gratitude complex you might think I have.”

  Vanessa’s expression hardened with irritation. “I don’t think that.”

  “Are you sure?”

  She stamped her foot. “Eric, I don’t know that boy. I don’t know what happened to him. Intellectually, I know you’re him, but . . . not. You— You are real. The more time I spend with you, the less real that boy is and I don’t care about him anymore. He’s gone. He doesn’t matter because he doesn’t exist and he may never have existed. Maybe it was a dream I had and can barely remember now.” Eric heard the urgency in her voice, watched her grand gestures to emphasize her words, and hope exploded in his chest.

  “And I’m not that little girl anymore, either, with a crush on the big badass of Chouteau High. I’m a woman, spending time with this, this wonderful man. But it . . . with you and me—because everything I have is because of you and everything you have is because of me—it feels different than I thought it would. It’s just— Girlfriend. It’s so . . . official. I’ve been a lover and a muse and a friend. I can maintain my independence. I have never been a girlfriend and I’ve never been with a man who wanted a girlfriend.”

  “Because you don’t do official.”

  “Not unless I declare it official myself, no. This,” she mumbled, waving a hand at him. “This is strange. We do things on your terms and I . . . I go along with it. I don’t know why.”

  “My terms?” he asked, incredulous. “If I asked you to come up to Chouteau City, just once, would you?”

  “Absolutely not,” she snapped, then rolled her eyes when he began to chuckle. Huffed again.

  Eric reached out, took her hand, pulled her into him. She relaxed against him when he wrapped his arms around her. He kissed the top of her head.

  “C’mon. We have rides to ride.”

  Two roller coasters and a plume ride later, they strolled toward the train depot, Vanessa curled up against Eric’s body, his right arm around her. She had his left hand enfolded in both of hers, pressed into the valley between her breasts.

  They kissed softly with nearly every slow step they took.

  “Tell me about your father,” she said whispered against his mouth.

  Shocked to his core, he stiffened and tried to withdraw from her, but she tightened her grip, kept him close. “Eric,” she murmured, “I thought you were all about the relationship? Please tell me.”

  Dammit, she was right. Annie had always known not to ask. Not even Knox had dared pursue it after Eric had snarled at him for asking.

  “He left when I was one,” he muttered. “Everybody in Chouteau County knows that.”

  “There’s more,” she returned, ju
st as quietly. “You’re too angry that I asked.”

  Yes, he was, he realized with some surprise. Yet . . . he knew that, too, would be up for grabs once he started campaigning in earnest. He might as well start practicing on a sympathetic audience.

  He shrugged. “My mother, she was young. Pretty, I guess. She says she had her head in the clouds, married him. What she didn’t know was that he was married to two other women in two other states—with other kids, to boot.”

  Vanessa tensed, but Eric only shrugged.

  “He says he had the intention of supporting us all, but I doubt he could’ve over the long haul. But he was caught, prosecuted for bigamy and fraud, racketeering. That’s why he left. He was on the run.”

  “Says? He’s alive? You’ve spoken with him?”

  “He’s in prison.” Eric laughed bitterly. “In Utah, of all places. He was running a few other scams. Ponzi schemes, multi-level marketing. Stuff like that. It’s easy to scam people in Utah.”

  “Have you always known where he was?”

  “I started looking for him when I went to BYU, and turned out he was right up the road.”

  “And you went to visit him?”

  “I did. A couple of times. He’s just a broken old man. He cried when he met me, he was so happy, and I couldn’t hate him. I just . . . pitied him. I write to him sometimes because he seems to appreciate it so much, desperate for any attention from his kids. Proud of me, what I’ve done. Brags on me to his cellmates. I don’t know any of my other siblings, where or who they are or how to find them. Not that I’ve tried,” he admitted.

  “You look— In high school, you didn’t look Italian. Now you do. I think— It’s however long your hair is.”

  “Let’s just say my mom wasn’t happy when I got my hair cut right before I left for college.”

  “Because you look like your dad?”

  “Exactly like him, she said. Except taller.”

  “I bet she’s proud of you now, though.”

  “Oh, yeah. She’d like it if I participated in the tribe more, but they’re in Oklahoma and I have a life that I established before I really got interested in what the tribe does.”

  They continued their walk and suddenly Eric realized they were in their own little bubble in the middle of an amusement park packed with adults and screeching children. The currents of people flowed around them harmlessly, like water around a rock in the middle of the stream.

  “Your mother changed her name. Why didn’t you change yours?”

  “Oh, I did. The minute I turned twenty-one. BYU’s crawling with linguists, so I found one to help me choose an Osage name. I officially ditched Niccolò and took Tsexobe as my middle name. It’s the Osage word for spider.”

  “Oh, that’s pretty.”

  “My mother was disappointed I didn’t change my whole name, but by that time, I’d met my father, and considering I didn’t end up in prison the way I figured I was going to, I got some idea I could turn the name around.”

  He stopped. Took a deep breath. Remembered. “I sat there in those mandatory religion classes at BYU, and listened to my professors talk about heritage and genealogy. I started poking around. There’s an artist. Giovanni Battista Cipriani. He’s my however-many-greats-grandfather. I don’t care for the art much, but if people know the name Cipriani, it’s because of him, not my father, and his name is worth something. He might have been an asshole. I don’t know. At least he contributed something to the world.”

  “But you identify with your mother’s people.”

  “And my mother’s religion, yes,” he said slowly. “My ancestors. The warriors. The Osage were a very sophisticated people.”

  “The tattoo?”

  He cast her a grin then. “The spider,” he said, “is patient. She watches and waits and lets things come to her.”

  Vanessa’s mouth melted into a delighted smile. “That’s you!”

  “For the most part, except . . . ” He took a deep breath. “Why don’t you want to talk to me on the phone during the week, return my emails?”

  Her smile vanished and she looked away. “I’m busy,” she muttered.

  He tucked a finger under her chin and directed her to look up at him. “Try again.”

  “I—” She pressed a hand to her mouth, tears suddenly glimmering in her eyes.

  When she didn’t continue, he said, “You’re scared.” She gulped. “You don’t like the word ‘girlfriend.’ You think if you get attached, you’ll lose control of your life. You get involved with men who don’t ask anything of you emotionally and aren’t prepared to give you anything, either. You said so yourself.”

  “That’s fine for you to talk,” she snapped, jerking away from him. “Annie? Friends with benefits? Only not so honest as me, all done up with an engagement ring and wedding plans.”

  “Okay, you got me there,” he snapped back, irritated that she’d pegged it so fast, irritated that they’d gone from simpatico to scrimmage in a heartbeat. “But at least we had a relationship.”

  “Oh? Does she know about your father?”

  Eric’s head exploded. “Don’t throw that back at me.”

  “Ding ding ding, and the answer is no, she doesn’t.” Vanessa pointed at him. Glared. “Don’t you lecture me on my emotional unavailability when you don’t have a decent track record, either. We are poor trailer trash, both of us. I don’t know about you, but I don’t want some random attachment to drag me back into that kind of drama. I hate drama.

  “I still can’t look at Vachel without feeling like I just dropped back into the trailer park. Every time I see him, I hurt because there’s nothing I can do to help him. He has to climb out himself and you know what? He never will. He’s an insomniac. He wears kilts and buckskins and wishes he’d been born in 1790 in Scotland, and spends most of his time in the woods hunting. He has no friends his age because he doesn’t want them and his only real friend is a man who was old when the Civil War started. He rarely speaks. He sleeps in trees. He’s only thirteen, but he’s a complete mess. God only knows how he’s going to turn out.

  “And when Knox died—” She choked, putting one shaking hand over her mouth and staring at Eric, tears streaming down her face. “Justice called me that night to tell me. I couldn’t move. I just sat in the middle of my office and cried but then— He wasn’t dead. But I still couldn’t do my job very well, and I was in the middle of my busiest season, my masquerades. The man who’d rescued me, educated me, fed me—my dad—was hovering between life and death for two weeks, in and out of the operating room, after he died once already. I couldn’t imagine my life without him in it and if he had— No matter how mad I get at him, I think about that night and it . . . doesn’t matter. Because I’d rather have him alive and not helping than dead and not helping.”

  Eric felt every word, sharp and hot, slicing through armor he didn’t know he had.

  “This weekend stuff and, and emails and, and phone calls— Text messages? What the hell is that all about? Do real people in real relationships communicate that way? I don’t want that. It’s not real. It’s just fantasy and I don’t have time to waste on fantasy. Two hundred and fifty miles, Eric. Me with Whittaker House and you with the White House. I refuse to play that long-distance game and call it a relationship.

  “If you want a real relationship with me, you’re going to have to give up everything you have—your goals, your dreams, everything—and move here and convince me that you, that a relationship with you, is worth the kind of hurt that love brings with it. If you can’t do that, you can just go home right now and stay out of my life because it killed me when you left the first time, and again when you left the second time. And it’s going to kill me now. You make me have drama! Do you understand that? I don’t want drama. Don’t bother taking me home. I’ll find my own way and I’ll box up your stuff and ship it back to you.”

  She turned and walked off, holding her tintype in one hand and dashing tears away from her face with the other. He
r streaked ponytail bounced in time to the angry stride of her long golden legs. He watched her go, unable to stop her, the words she’d sighed into her pillow last night as she fell asleep under his hands echoing in his head.

  I love you, Eric. Stay with me.

  * * * * *

  37: Lawyer Barnes

  October 2010

  “Got an overnight order, Boss. You’re gonna have to tell me what to do because it looks like a prank to me.”

  Vanessa nodded at her assistant, then skillfully flipped the mess of wild onions, apples, black walnuts, and cranberries sautéed in lemon-infused

  lard. She drizzled a sweet white from Stone Hill Winery over her concoction, then lit it up.

  “You want to try this, Curtis?” she called over her shoulder where he sat at the staff table watching Fox News.

  “Shore, honey.”

  The kitchen ran on skeleton staff on weekdays in the fall, and right now, things were especially slow. There were no families at Whittaker House and few enough other guests that only six tables sat in the dining room. The permanent residents usually ate in the kitchen with the staff and the missionaries. Right now, Vanessa had lots of time to experiment and tape a year’s worth of Vittles, the production crew ensconced in the cottages and their meals provided. Why had she never thought of it?

  With both a night and day concierge (the one Eric had surprised her with), she didn’t have to personally greet many of the guests or see to their needs herself.

  With Knox coming every weekend to help her again (Uh, yeah, Eric kind of kicked my ass. I’m really sorry, Vanessa. I wish you’d said something.), she had caught up with those items on her to-do list that only she could do and—

  “Have you ever thought about writing a cookbook?” Knox asked her one Saturday afternoon.

  Vanessa paused. “Yes,” she said slowly. “But I’ve never had time.”

  “Eh, well, Justice is second chair on that case Eric has, so I never see her, and my last class on Friday is at eleven. If you want, Mercy and I can come down early on Fridays. That should give you time to work on it. Would you like that?”