A Test of Love: Interracial Erotic Romance (Chasing Love) (8 page)

A door opened on the right, revealing a small room with the lights on. I peeked in. Two TV screens hung on the wall, but they weren’t on. A long couch sat at the end, next to a small coffee table. A stack of boxes lay on top. I headed in and closed the door behind me. Big binders filled the boxes. I caught Jazz’s name on one. Another one read Lucy.

This must be those binders Jazz was talking about when she found her birth certificate. I asked Chase to see them and he lied to me. This fool kept the evidence with him, when he told me that it was all in Italy.

Apparently, he’d already flown several men ahead of us to look at some area where he thought a gun was buried.

Why would a rich motherfucker bury a gun?

He acted real nervous about saying anything more, which told me that blood was on his hands somehow. That scared me. Anytime a guy with Chase’s power was nervous, I liked to get the fuck out of the way. It always meant that bigger players were in the game, ones that he couldn’t protect himself from. Whoever died from this gun that was buried had some big hitters in his or her corner. I didn’t like secrets when it concerned me or my sister.

I sat down on the couch and pulled the biggest box to me. “Hello, Lucy.”

Her binder sat heavy in my hands. Lots of pages stuck out as if someone had already been going through it over and over, but couldn’t find a particular item they needed. I opened the first page and a blond little girl smiled back at me. Her birth certificate read “Lucielle Pedrotti,” born to Alfonso Perdrotti and Serafina Stonetti. I flipped through her school records. She’d been to several different boarding schools until finally at thirteen she’d been switched to a personal tutor.

That’s weird. I wonder why they took her out of school.

She had top grades, yet teachers expressed that she didn’t communicate well with the others. Her last teacher made a point of saying that she would burst out in tears at any given moment which disrupted the class each time.

O-kay.

Next were her psych files. That served as the bulk of the binder. Large envelopes stuffed with flimsy papers. Charts and graphs from several tests that had been done on her, even a few X-rays of her brain.
Damn. This is what good health insurance gets you, huh?
Without knowledge of psychology, I couldn’t decipher through the doctors’ squiggly notes. It was like a maze of words and statements that together meant nothing and separate confused me even more. Lots of stuff came up as I browsed through those sheets.

Possible post-traumatic stress disorder from a major event that she refuses to discuss.

Continuous nightmares that deal with her as a tiny mouse trapped within a scientist’s lab, but she can never describe his or her face.

She has a fear of copper so extreme that she faints if it is brought around her.

I placed her records on the table. I’d have to let Jazz use her Harvard brain for some of this. I didn’t trust Chase to be real with me, not when he’d lied about the location of the files. Lucy’s medical records came up next. She had undergone typical physical examinations. Again, I wasn’t up to date on what should be there or not, but everything looked normal. I’d had most of the same things done in jail—blood tests and what not. What caught my eye was the only thing out of order, this thick discussion on reconstructive surgery called vaginoplasty.

What did she have done, something to her vagina? Please tell me this isn’t really about this girl’s vagina.

I read on and discovered I was right. There was explanation on the procedure focusing on her vaginal canal and its mucous membrane. The doctor went on to use words like genital enhancement and labia reduction. There were further descriptions on how excess vaginal lining had been removed and that the surrounding soft tissues and muscles had been tightened. The last notes declared that she would never be able to have kids, but could experience a functioning sexual life. I checked the dates of the surgery’s notes along with her age and realized they’d reconstructed her vagina at thirteen.

What happened to you at thirteen, baby girl? Something fucked up I bet.

No wonder Jazz suspected her. A kid going through stuff like that could be a monster of an adult. Why the government never regulated parenting, I would never know. Why not focus on the one thing that could determine whether the United States would be filled with criminals or intellects, killers or inventors? Not this country, they ignored our youth, gave most the crappiest education they could provide no matter what ZIP code the child lived in.

Sighing, I checked more of Lucy’s binder and placed it to the side. For now, I knew all I could. Lucy had some fucked-up shit happen to her at thirteen that she’d refused to tell her psychologist. But it obviously stemmed from sex in some way. She had to get her vagina redone, for god’s sake! That didn’t sit right in my gut. Something messed up happened to her body as a kid, and it couldn’t have been any accident. The perpetrator had wanted to mess her up. And as rich parents did, they took her out of her boarding school and spent the rest of her life hiding it.

I yanked out the other two broads’ binders, Wendy and Dawn.

Jazz and Viv have it in for Dawn.

I did a quick check of Dawn’s binder. It was the smallest of the four. Each note was typed and brief, nothing nowhere as exhaustive as the others. Not even as detailed as my sister’s had been.

Wasn’t Dawn the head chick in that arrangement? She’s probably the one that came up with the binder idea to begin with.

Dawn’s binder looked like a biography about an idolized person. Loads of cute baby pictures, yet no birth certificate or medical records. A few report cards hung inside, but not all of them, as if she’d been ashamed of the few bad grades she’d had.
You got to be perfect all the time, huh?
The binder skipped all of her high school years and returned to pictures of her in college, standing next to Chase and another woman. I squinted my eyes.

That’s Lucy, but instead of being blonde, she’s a redhead. So these three have known each other for a while?

Lucy ’wasn’t smiling. She did some sort of strained upturn of her mouth that made her seem more uncomfortable than happy to be there. Dawn, however, wore the biggest grin as she looked up into Chase’s brooding eyes.

This man got two hot women on each side of him and looks bored. Fucking rich guys.

Lists and articles on Dawn’s many charities filled the rest of the binder. I couldn’t discover anything about this chick that wasn’t good or that placed a crack in her polished armor. On paper, she was a humble angel that happened to be blessed with wealth. But I knew that no one got to the position she had reached without dirtying up a sleeve or two. One of the articles reported that she’d become a partner in her family’s law firm right out of law school.

There’s no way she had the experience to be a partner. Don’t know what you need, but there’s no way she learned it all in law school. Daddy must have just given it to her.

I checked back some of the earlier pages to see if I could find anything on her parents. Nothing. Not one mention of a father or mother, not even their names or where she’d been born.

Shady.

I tossed it back on the small coffee table. There would be no need to waste my time reading something that hid more than provided information.
But, what if what the binder is hiding is what’s really important?
I picked it back up and made a list in my head.

What does this chick not want the reader of this binder to know?

Her family. I couldn’t find anything, not even a photo that dealt with them. Her high school years had disappeared too. Most people did a lot of dumb things in high school. I surely did, given that I spent most of those years locked up for theft.

What did you do, Dawn?

I slung the binder back and picked up Wendy’s next. Hers was just as full as everyone else’s, except hers didn’t have the elegance of high-priced psychologists’ evaluations or discussions on boarding schools. Wendy lived like Jazz and I did. She was straight gutter.

I propped my feet on the table and sat back for an interesting read.

Wendy also known as Prudence Jacobs. Born in a small town in South Carolina. No father on the birth certificate. Home-schooled in a trailer with six other siblings, which meant no true education at all, not with all those babies running around. Stepdad is the pastor of a holiness church, which explains the home schooling. The only time she got to leave the house was for spiritual theater? What the fuck is that? Acting for God?

I flipped through some more of it. Tons of flyers from plays where Wendy held the leading role. She’d been Mary during a Christmas play. It looked like something churches put together for the parents. Some of the later programs appeared more professional and ended with several advertisements of her acting with the town’s religious troupe. Browsing the various flyers, I realized she’d acted out many religious characters. Some I knew. Others I’d never heard of—Queen Esther, John the Baptist’s mother, Elizabeth, and even Bathsheba. For some reason the ads and announcements of her theater involvement stopped when she turned seventeen.

Things got interesting once she left home after eighteen. I checked the date. Her birthday fell on the day after her high school graduation. Three years were missing after that. The investigator’s reports have all types of logical explanations, probably to cover his ass on why he couldn’t dig anything up after that time. Next blot of information began when Prudence appears in a driver’s license as Wendy Jacobs. Three other driver’s licenses from three other states all show that same name.

Why did you need four different driver’s licenses that year? What were you doing?

It had to be shady. I knew enough to understand that multiple identities translated to many different hustles.

What’s yours, Wendy?

Sighing, I rubbed my eyes, not really sure I’d learned anymore about the situation from going over their binders. I needed more time to read and dissect them, more moments by myself to really get to know these chicks. It would’ve taken far less time to actually meet each one, sit down and talk to her for a few minutes, and discover who was doing what. I barely needed five minutes alone with them to know.

Recognizing a killer was something I had a knack for. I’d lived with killers all my life, in and out of jail. Some in my county would say my brothers were the top killers of all, but then most never met Benny. Murderers had a different swag about them. Violence radiated from their flesh even when their faces were twisted into a grin.

And their eyes were never right.

My brother Sherman said I philosophized too much, but that wasn’t it. I swore I really could see the difference from a sane person and one not all there. It was like this movie where aliens took over humans, but it was hard for most people to tell who was human and who wasn’t. If I remembered correctly, the humans who had been taken over by aliens had these red dots on the whites of their human eyes, so most wore glasses. That was how I spotted a killer. Each one had these metaphorical red dots on their eyes, and if I could just take their glasses off for a few moments of conversations, those dots would be revealed.

It was how I felt when I talked to Chase in the hospital about that gun. His red dots appeared. I could see the murderer in his eyes. He’d taken a life, maybe more than one. He didn’t seem proud of it, but the motherfucker didn’t seem displeased either.

Maybe he’s the one killing them. How much do I really know about that cat?

My stomach rumbled with unease as I glanced out at the hallway that led to where Jazz now cuddled with him.

Chapter 9

JASMINE

I opened my eyes the next morning and noticed two things. One, we were no longer on the plane and definitely in a house.
How the hell does he not disturb my sleep when he’s transporting me around?
My body lay on top of a soft bed. Chase rested right next to me. He opened his eyes as I rose. Sunlight seeped in through parted turquoise curtains that lifted on the breeze. A salty scent mingled with the fragrance of flowers, as if the house were on a beach surrounded by a garden. I didn’t get a chance to peek a little more at the balcony or the view.

Something else distracted me.

The second thing I realized was that, waking up next to a naked Chase was like stumbling into a porno set. You tried not to look, but the moans tempted your eyes. The slapping sounds enticed the libido and sex permeated the air. Boom. Instant hormone overdrive.

Damn him. He could’ve worn clothes.

But he didn’t. Not even sheets could conceal that erection as it lifted the silky material and pointed in my direction. That wicked smile of his spread across his face. Chase’s muscular arms were folded back while his head lay on his hands.

“Good morning.” Piercing green eyes dared me to move away the sheet. “Can I help you with something?”

“I’m fine.”

“You don’t look fine. You look hungry.”

“Which is why I’m going to take a shower and then go find your kitchen, where I assume somebody will be cooking, or I’ll have to prepare something for myself.”

“You’ll never have to prepare anything when you’re around me.”

“That sounds boring.”

“I’ll keep you busy with other things,” he rolled over to his side, “but that wasn’t the hunger I was referring to anyway.”

“I gathered that from your very hard dick.” I pointed.

He sneered. “Say that again for me.”

“What?”

“Tell me how hard my dick is.” That wicked smile brightened.

“Absolutely not.”

“You’re such a tease.”

“You’re really good at kidnapping.”

“Thank you.”

“It wasn’t a compliment.” I slipped out of the bed. “How are you able to move me around while I’m asleep? This is the third time. The first was when you got me from the plane to the hotel room in Paris, the second from the hospital yesterday, and here we go again.”