At times, he felt he didn’t deserve her. His guilt and grief remained, but they were not as all-consuming and intense. The stranglehold on his life was lighter.
He could breathe.
Lance reached for Samira’s hand where they sat aboard the private jet together preparing for their flight from Milan to New York. She was reading a report on her tablet and talking on her cell phone, but she gripped his hand tightly and gave him a look as if she knew—with those instincts of hers—that he needed her at that moment.
He didn’t know what he’d done to deserve two great loves in his life or what he’d done to suffer such great losses.
And if he was honest, there was a thin thread of fear that he would lose Samira as well.
Like Belle.
Like Emma Belle.
“I love you,” Samira mouthed.
He gave her a warm smile and tipped his hat with his free hand before he raised their entwined hands and kissed the back of hers with a silent prayer that his luck had changed for the better.
* * *
Samira sat on a swinging cedar rocker bench on the large deck of Lance’s home. They had been back from Milan for a few days, and he had invited his tiny tribe over for dinner to meet her. He was frying fish for his guests and having grilled chicken for himself. There was his father, Lawrence, a charmer who couldn’t help but flirt—even with his thirtysomething girlfriend, Koi, at his side; his mother, Helena, a peaceful spirit with a soft voice, the only wildness about her being her shoulder-length Afro of curls; his agent and friend, Annalise, who clearly wanted pleasure more than business; and his little five-year-old brother, Law.
She was just happy to meet them and know that Lance had people in his life who cared for him as well.
“He’s hasn’t looked this happy in a long time.”
Samira looked up at Helena standing beside where she sat, offering a new glass of rosé wine. She took it, setting her empty glass on the table beside her. “Good,” she said. “He told me about his wife and daughter.”
Helena claimed the seat next to her on the bench. “Tough times,” she admitted, cradling her own glass of wine in her wrinkled hands. “Grief can be all-consuming. Lord knows we all struggled after the accident, but he finally seems to be breaking through to the other side of it, where you learn to accept and learn from it even if you never completely heal from it.”
“I couldn’t imagine going through it...for any of you,” Samira added, acknowledging the woman’s loss as well.
“Like I said...tough times.”
“I like my fish fried hard, son,” Lawrence said, his voice seeming to bellow into the summer night air.
Samira looked to the tall, bald-headed seventysomething man with his arm wrapped around his date’s waist. “Question?” she asked.
“Fire away,” Helena said.
“That doesn’t bother you to be here with him and her?”
“We’ve been divorced since Lance was a teenager, but we had him in our forties and we shared a lot of years together. More good than bad, actually,” Helena said, crossing one leg over the other in the floor-length caftan she wore. “We were of that ’60s mind-set of free love and happiness by any means, but when we had Lance—and we were older—I didn’t want him to be of that same mind-set. Suddenly I changed the rules, and Lawrence didn’t want to adjust. I took my ball and didn’t want to play anymore, and we decided to let the marriage go and live our lives separately.”
Helena paused to take a sip of her wine. “When you have shared more than twenty years of your life with someone and you accept that you are just not right for each other anymore, then it should end well. No anger. No bitterness. No war. We share a son. We’ve shared loss. And now in our elder years, we share a friendship—a platonic friendship,” she added. “And now we laugh about his exploits and failing body parts and life. He was my one great love, and now he is my best friend. So, no, none of that bothers me.”
She liked Lance’s mother. She was so calm. So peaceful. So unbothered.
Samira eyed Lance as he lifted his bucket hat enough to wipe at the sweat on his brow with a paper towel before balling it up and tossing it away into the nearby receptacle. She squinted a bit when his agent said something to him and lightly touched his arm as he continued frying up a huge batch of fish and hush puppies. Then they both laughed.
“Don’t worry. Lance looks like his father, but he has my loyal heart,” Helena assured her.
She had been watching as his agent, Annalise, a shortbread cutie with waist-length blondish dreads and freckles, found yet another reason to touch him. “She’s pretty,” Samira said, crossing her legs in the strapless emerald-green jumpsuit she wore.
“Prettier than her have tried to catch his eyes over these last few years,” Helena said. “You succeeded.”
Samira took a sip of her drink as she forced herself to look at the lake in the distance and away from the man she loved and a woman who obviously wanted his adoration.
“I’m happy to meet you, Samira...the woman my son so obviously loves,” Helena said, nudging her shoulder with her own.
Samira followed her line of vision to find Lance’s eyes steadily on her. Butterflies seemed to flutter in her stomach. He raised his glass in a toast to her, and she did the same.
Annalise looked up at him and then over at her, following his line of vision.
Samira saw the understanding fill the woman’s face before it was replaced with respect and perhaps a touch of regret. The two women shared a look before Annalise raised her glass to her as well as if to surrender her one-sided fight for Lance.
“I feel silly,” Samira admitted to his mother.
“What you feel is love, and when it’s the right kind of love ain’t shit wrong with that,” Helena said.
“Nothing at all,” Samira agreed.
* * *
“Turn it up, Daddy. Pleeeeease! That’s my favorite song.”
As they sat at a red light, Lance smiled over at Belle sitting in the passenger seat of their Lamborghini crossover, then in the rearview mirror at their daughter sitting in the middle of the rear seat securely strapped in her booster seat. Her face was so like his own. His mini-me save for her mother’s dimples and curly hair.
He used the volume control on the steering wheel to turn up “Watch Me (Whip/Nae Nae)” by Silentó.
Emma Belle instantly began singing along to the catchy tune and doing the dances along to the music with all the abandon a lively six-year-old could have.
“Probably too much sugar in her dessert,” Belle said with a laugh.
“A double scoop of ice cream with all the works will do that,” he said.
“You had ice cream, too, Daddy,” Emma Belle said.
He looked over his shoulder at her. “You know what? I sure did,” he said, seconds before he began to whip and nae nae, too.
“You had a little scoop, Mommy!”
“I did,” Belle agreed.
She joined them in singing along to the song and dancing in her seat.
He winked at her before he turned to look back at Emma.
“Lance!”
He whirled around just as the bright lights of an oncoming car glared into his eyes.
Boom!
Lance awakened, startled. He sat up straight in bed as he exhaled in puffs through his mouth and fought hard to erase the sounds of metal meeting metal as the SUV hit them head-on and sent their car—their world—toppling over into a series of flips down the highway and landing on the roof. The dream was over, but he was still deep in the clutches of the nightmare.
“Shit,” he swore, moving to sit on the side of the bed. “Shit. Shit. Shit. Shit. Shit.”
“Lance,” Samira said, shifting on the bed in the darkness to ease her arms around his back so she could hold him tightly from behind.
He reached for the hand she had pressed to his palm and held it tightly as he waited for normalcy to reign.
She pressed her lips to his spine. “It’s okay. It will be okay,” she said, and he felt her whispers blow against his skin.
“I miss them,” he said aloud as pain tightened his throat. “I hate the way that they died. I hate it.”
“I know you do,” she said. “I never met them, but I hate it, too. I really do hate that happened to them.”
He looked back over his shoulder and although he couldn’t see her face, he knew there was nothing but truth in her words.
He tilted his head back until it rested against the top of hers.
“Tell me about them,” she said, more whispers that caressed him. “Talk about them. Remember them with me. Please.”
“You’re the best mommy and daddy in the world.”
He smiled at the memory of Emma Belle jumping into the middle of their bed between him and Belle. As he allowed himself to think of them—remember them—more memories came flooding back. Big moments. Little details. All of it. For years he had forced himself not to think of them.
As Samira continued to hold him, he began to talk to her about his Belle and Emma Belle long into the night.
* * *
“Did I ruin your fishing?” Samira asked as she and Lance walked together down Main Street for lunch at La Boulangerie after a lazy Sunday morning of fishing on the lake.
He chuckled. “It was...different,” he said. “It was your first time, right?”
Samira flung her head back and laughed. “Um...yeah,” she said, looking up at him. “And probably my last, if you have your say.”
“Fishing is my solace. My peace,” he explained.
“And my headache, so you can have all the peace and solace on your boat that you want, Lance,” she said.
He looked relieved.
She stepped in front of him to jump up a little and kiss his mouth. He picked her up by the waist until their faces were aligned. “Will you miss me when I go home tonight?” she asked as she set her hands on his shoulders.
The weekend was coming to an end, and she had an early-morning flight to Paris for business.
“Of course,” he assured her.
“Good,” she said.
They shared a brief but heated kiss before he set her back down on her feet.
“Passion Grove really is a beautiful town,” she said as they both checked for oncoming traffic before they crossed the street.
As they stepped up onto the curb, the town’s police chief, Harley Ransom, was climbing from his cruiser and crossing the sidewalk to climb the porch steps of the Victorian home that had once served as the town’s mercantile during the early days of its creation in the 1900s. For the last fifty years, it had served as the small town’s police station.
“Good afternoon, Chief,” Lance said pleasantly to the portly man as they passed him.
“Huh?”
Lance paused and looked back at him with a hint of a smile. “I said, good afternoon, Chief,” he repeated.
Harley looked perplexed by the salutation.
Samira covered her mouth with her hand to refrain from laughing at the man’s comical expression.
“Uh...um...uh...hello. Uh...good afternoon,” he said.
Lance tipped his hat and turned to continue on his way with a whistle.
“You almost gave the man a heart attack just by being cordial,” she said, sliding her arm around his.
Lance chuckled. “Let’s rile up some more of my neighbors,” he said.
For the next block, he made a point of speaking to every person he passed. Many returned the favor, but a few that were familiar with him and his usual bad temperament were unable to hide their shock.
His eyes were lit with humor as he held the door to the bakery open for her to enter. “I really was a grouch, huh?” he asked.
“Are you just realizing that, my love?” she asked, arching of her brow.
“I knew. I didn’t care,” he admitted with a shrug of one broad shoulder.
“And then?” she asked as they got in line in the Parisian bistro–styled bakery.
Lance stroked her chin with his thumb. “And then came you, Samira Ansah,” he said warmly.
“Oh, you do have a way with words, Lance Millner.”
* * *
A week later Lance entered the walk-in closet/dressing room of his master suite and passed through it to reach his bathroom. He turned on the lights and looked over at the copper-framed mirror above the double sink. With a slight grimace, he padded barefoot over to it but kept his eyes down on the sink.
His book Danger was being released in less than ninety days, and his publisher’s marketing and PR team were in full publicity mode, wanting to secure television and magazine interviews, book signings, blurbs, and panel discussions. Since the accident, he had not agreed to any public appearances. His team was aware of that, but with every new book, they extended the offers. The truth was, the more reclusive he became, the more media outlets vied to book him.
How could he do appearances when he still felt uncomfortable with the scar and the questions he knew it would evoke?
“Trust me. You have nothing to be ashamed of. Nothing at all.”
He patted his hand against the edge of the sink and shook his head with a slight chortle as Samira’s compliment came back to him. She was the only person, outside of his doctors, to see his scar. To really see him. The person he hid from the world—even from his family and friends. And Lord knows she had no aversion to it. It had done nothing to quell her desire for him. She would look him in the face, kiss him, express her love for him as if the scar was not there.
He reached up and removed his boonie hat, letting it fall onto the vanity. For the first time in three years, Lance looked up at his reflection. His eyes focused on every zone of his face except the scar slashing across his brow. He’d lost weight—that he knew from the fit of his clothes—but he hadn’t realized his face had become leaner over the years. He actually liked it.
He touched the scar as he finally let his eyes settle on it. It ran from the side of his forehead and down across his brow. He’d been given fifteen stitches to repair the deep wound. The scar remained. It wasn’t as protruding as he remembered, but it was there all the same. Where the glass had cut him, the hair of his brow had never grown back, and the scar created a pale slash through the rest of his medium brown complexion, pulling his lid at the corner tighter than his other eye. He hated it.
His readers reached out via email and his various social media accounts to let him know they wanted their books signed and to see him personally. But he knew they wanted to see the face in his headshots, not the scarred oddity he’d become.
“You honestly are a beauty, not a beast, Lance.”
He closed his eyes and shook his head trying to free himself of Samira’s voice. “It’s easy for her to say,” he drawled.
Bzzzzzz. Bzzzzzz. Bzzzzzz.
Lance turned from the mirror, removing his phone from the pocket of his navy cotton pajama bottoms as he pressed his buttocks against the sink to lean against it. A FaceTime from Samira. She was with friends from college in the city for an epic girls’ night out—as she put it. He reached behind him for his hat and slapped it on before he answered.
Her face filled the screen. Her hair was pulled back into a ponytail, and her makeup was glamorous. “Are you in the bathroom?” she asked.
“Are you?” he asked, hearing the muted thump of bass music as he looked at her background as well.
“Yes. I wanted to call you and let you know I’m good. I know you worry about me when I’m out,” she said.
He did. He was working on not letting his fear of losing her make him a certified nut. Her recent trip to Paris had been a true test of his will. “Thank you, but
I won’t relax until I get your call or text that you’re home,” he admitted.
“I know and I will,” she promised.
“What are you wearing?” he asked as he walked out of the bathroom and through the dressing room.
She panned the phone down to show the strapless sequined rose-gold jumpsuit she wore with strappy metallic heels. “You like?” she asked, moving to stand in front of the mirror to show off the view of her plump buttocks in the wide-leg pants as well.
“Hell yeah,” he said.
Samira jiggled her rear a little before placing the phone back in front of her face.
“Are you having fun?” he asked.
“I am. It was good to get out, dance and have a few strong cocktails with friends.”
“I agree.”
They fell silent.
“Is that the elusive master suite?” she asked.
Lance stiffened. “Uh...yeah. Yup. It is,” he said, looking around.
They still used the in-law suite downstairs. He just couldn’t accept being intimate with her in the same bed he’d once shared with his wife. “Samira—”
“Listen, Lance, thank you for letting me into your heart,” she said, her eyes serious. “I know that it wasn’t easy with everything you’ve been through and... I feel honored that you made room for me in your life.”
Her words were understanding, but there was some emotion he couldn’t gauge that clouded her eyes.
He sat down on the bed and rested his head against the padded leather headboard. His eyes were sad. “Samira, you knew some of this wasn’t—isn’t—easy for me,” he said.
“Right, I did know that,” she said with a smile that was vacant from her eyes.
“Samira, I love you—”
“I know,” she said, cutting him off. “I better get back to the girls before they think I left. I’ll text you when I get home. ’Bye.”
The call ended.
Lance dropped his phone onto the bed and reached for his hat to ball into his hand and throw across the room.
Christmas with the Billionaire ; A Tiara for Christmas Page 12