Whatever It Takes (14 page)

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Authors: Gwynne Forster

BOOK: Whatever It Takes
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“I see. Would you mind turning your back while I dress? Where's the bathroom?”
“Over there.” He pointed to a door near the closet. “Look, sweetheart, this is New Year's Eve. What's done is done. Let's make the best of it.”
“That's precisely what I had in mind. Talking about going from wine to vinegar . . .” She left the thought hanging, for she knew that nothing she added would tell him more succinctly how she felt.
“Does this mean I can't see you again?” he asked later, standing in the foyer of the parsonage.
She looked him in the eye. “That's what it means. I don't hold this against you, Jefferson. It's my fault that I didn't ask if you were married. But you see, I was lonely, and I needed a good ego boost, but finding out that you were married right after you set me on fire was like a kick in the teeth. I don't ever want to lay eyes on you again.”
He stood there long enough to know that she meant it, turned and left. She climbed the stairs slowly, reliving the evening, churning in her mind what she regarded as her folly. She hadn't let herself think beyond the fact that such a seemingly eligible man had chosen her from among the pack of single women milling around the hotel. “And face it,” she said to herself, “you enjoyed being with a man you knew Kellie would want. You gloried in making her jealous, in turning the screw as she had so often turned it on you.”
I got what I asked for.
Mind-blowing sex such as she hadn't previously experienced, but it left her empty; he was skilled beyond anything she had imagined, but he made no attempt to let her feel adored. She pulled off the dress and threw it across a chair, certain that she would never wear it again. The man had at least one virtue, though: he hadn't lied to her, not even when he was buried deep inside her body. And when the subject of his marriage arose, he did not offer excuses for himself or spin illusions for her.
“I ought to be grateful that he didn't pretend to care,” she said aloud, shaking her head as if astonished. “A wizard in the bed is a dangerous man.” She showered, slipped on a short gown and lay down.
“Thank God, I'm in my own bed,” she said and turned out the light on her night table. She didn't make New Year's resolutions because, like most people she knew, she forgot them before the year was a month old. But after tossing, sleepless, for over an hour she sat up and repeated as if it were a mantra the words, “Never again, as long as I live, am I going to be a sucker for anybody, not my mother, my father, my sister, or any man. Especially not a man.” She slid beneath the covers and went to sleep.
 
 
At that moment, Kellie was scheming to get the coveted brooch. “Gramma knew I wanted that brooch,” she told her New Year's Eve date, “and I'm sure she meant for me to have it.” She shifted in her chair. Mealey's wasn't the place in which she would have preferred to welcome the New Year, but she had a date with a respectable, decent-looking man, and, such men were hard to come by.
“If you get the brooch, won't that mean you have to give Lacette that diamond on your finger?” Matt Simmons, who owned a chain of garages in and around Frederick, asked Kellie.
Kellie spread the long tapered fingers of her right hand and looked at the ring. “I don't see why I should. Who knows how much money was in that bank account Gramma gave Lacette?”
Matt rubbed his chin and spoke in a way that suggested he spelled every word before uttering it. “Doesn't seem right to me, Kellie. How you gonna manage it?”
“Leave it to me.” She raised her glass of wine, nodded to him and took a few sips. “You ought to know by now that I'm clever.”
His left shoulder flexed in a quick shrug. “Yeah, so was Il Duce, but thanks to the anger of his Italian constituency, he died hanging upside down. If I were you, I'd think again before doing something like that.”
“Oh, don't be a drag, Matt. I'm only after what's rightfully mine.”
He lifted his glass, clicked hers and swallowed the remainder of his wine. “Up to you, babe. It's no skin off my teeth. Let's call it a night.”
Anger began its slow sizzle, and she took in a deep breath, intent upon stifling her ire, for she needed Matt when a more desirable date wasn't available. Still, she didn't remember a time when a man called an evening with her to a halt; it was she who announced the end of a date. Maybe Matt had a woman and she didn't know about it.
She pasted a smile on her face and said. “Yes, let's. Nights like this can be tiring.” Earlier in the evening, she had hoped he would suggest they stop by his apartment, but she no longer felt up to tussling with him while he readied himself for a sexual romp. Once he got started, he was a gem, but getting him to that point could be trying. And if he wasn't already stirred, it would be that much worse.
“It's been a lovely evening,” she said, standing at the door of the parsonage.
“Yes, it's been interesting. Earlier, I'd thought we might finish the evening at my place, but . . . well . . . I don't want us to get in any deeper. What you're doing to your sister is a little too much for my stomach. So . . . well . . . I'll be seeing you.”
When he turned to go, she grabbed his coat sleeve. “You're giving me the brush off? Who do you think you are? I don't need you. All you've ever been to me is a convenience.”
To her surprise he let out a harsh laugh. “No kidding. And exactly what do you think you've been to me? If I cared two cents for you, we wouldn't have such clumsy, disgusting sex. See you around.”
She wanted to slam the door behind him, but she couldn't risk awakening her mother, and she didn't want Lacette to know how her evening turned out. “Oh, hell!” she said after thinking about it, “he was just saving face, and he has a right to that. Hal sure isn't in love with me, but he's ready the minute he sees me.”
 
 
“What did you do last night, Mama?” Kellie asked Cynthia as she carried a plate of scrambled eggs to the table. Her mother didn't like eating in the kitchen, but she acquiesced when Kellie made it clear that she wasn't going to clean the dining room after they ate.
I went to the Weinberg Center with a friend to see a modern dance company. After that, we went to Isabella's for a while. The place was crowded.”
“Really? Who's the friend?”
“A friend. Would you believe we ran into old deacon Moody? I guess the woman with him was his wife, but if she was she's gained a hundred pounds since they used to go to your father's church in Baltimore.”
Kellie nearly choked on the bacon she'd just put in her mouth. God forbid that man should have moved to Frederick. “Did he recognize you?”
“Uh . . . no, but you wouldn't expect him to. I looked a lot different in those days.”
“True,” She could no longer focus on the conversation with her mother. After the fiasco with Matt the previous evening, she didn't need to be reminded of her foolish adolescent behavior with old man Moody. She made a pretense of eating, and cleaned the kitchen. She wished she could call Hal.
“Maybe I'm a slut, and maybe I've always been,” she said to herself as she tripped up the stairs remembering the way in which Melvin Moody introduced her to her body's potential, how she, a fourteen-year-old virgin, had enjoyed teasing and playing with him.
Well, what the heck. I'll only be young once.
She dressed in woolen pants, a sweater, and her storm coat and headed for her grandmother's house. Anxiety streaked through her when she saw Hal's truck, but it subsided at once, for a different man worked on a downstairs window.
She walked over to the window and waited until he acknowledged her presence. “I'm Kellie Graham, and this house belongs to my father. Would you please throw me the front door key?”
The tobacco juice that he spit out missed her by a dozen inches. “And they call me Jocko. Sorry. I didn't realize it was so windy today. I've been warned about you, lady. You gets nothing here. If you want the key, ask your daddy for it. I ain't losing my job over you.” She wanted to ask him if Hal had been fired, but thought better of it.
“I really need to get into the house,” she said, pouting.
“I don't care where you got to go, you ain't getting into this house on my watch. I'll report you to your father.”
She laughed and made it as joyous as she could. “Come on. I'm the apple of my father's eye. What good would that do you?”
She unbuttoned her coat and put her hands in the pockets of her jeans, pushing the coat back and risking the cold air in order to give the man a look at her high, rounded breast.
“Might as well button up your coat, cause I don't mix work with what you offering.” He put the spatula aside and stared at her. “Does your daddy know how you act?”
“What's it worth to you?” she asked him.
He spat more tobacco juice. “Not a damned thing.”
She plodded back to the parsonage.
First last night and then today, men who are not on my social level turned me down. Well, I don't care about either of them; I want that brooch, and I intend to get it.
Monday afternoon after work, she walked around her grandmother's house looking for an opportunity to get inside and found one. With the door to the back porch unlocked, she went in, and from the porch broke a pane in the kitchen window, unlocked the window and climbed inside. She rummaged through the room in which her grandmother slept, the guest room, and the den.
“It's here somewhere,” she said aloud, tossing out the content of drawers, throwing things from closets onto chairs and the floor.
When she heard what sounded like a door opening, she raced down the stairs and out the kitchen window, leaving behind the wreckage of her misdemeanor. Dashing around the house to the street as fast as she could, she collided with Hal.
“What were you doing around there?”
“None of your business.”
“But it
is
my business.” He grabbed her arm and pulled her along with him as he headed to the back of the house. “I wouldn't trust you any farther than I can throw you. You've been up to something. What's this?” he asked when he saw the screen door of the back porch open.
“Turn me loose. I'll have you put
into
the jail for manhandling me. Let go.”
“Well, I'll be damned if you didn't break that window.”
“I didn't, and you turn me loose, you hear?”
“You're not sticking me with this, babe. Breaking and entering is a felony.”
“Nobody will believe you. And you let go of my arm.”
“The police will believe me when they find your fingerprints on that windowpane.”
She hadn't thought about fingerprints or any other incriminating evidence she might have left. Counting on Hal's weakness for her, she switched tactics. “I came here looking for you, but I didn't see you or your truck, so I walked around the house hoping to find you back there. Come on, let's go inside. I haven't . . . uh . . . we haven't been together since before Christmas, and for me, that's a long time.”
His laugh, loud and boisterous, stunned her. Appearing to gaze down his nose at her, he removed his baseball cap and ran his fingers over his tight curls. “You really are a piece of work, babe, and just as transparent as clear glass. You think you can get anything you want just by spreading your legs, but you're not sticking this on me. Your father was here this morning, and he knows that window wasn't broken. He checked out the house, too, and he's aware that I'm the only person due to work here today, so I'm shoring up my behind, babe. You're good in the bed but not so good that I'd willingly take the rap for you.”
He opened the passenger door of his van, lifted her and sat her in the front seat. Before she could solve the problem of the lock, he got in the driver's seat, locked both doors and started the motor. “Your daddy can get you out of this, babe, but right now, I'm covering my ass.”
A decent man, one of her own class, wouldn't leave a woman to take the rap. Well, she'd show him. Determined not to go to the police precinct, she reached for the steering wheel, but he grabbed her arm. “I'd rather not hurt you, but I'm not going to let you cause a wreck and get me killed either.”
She sat back in the seat and folded her arms. This was a scenario that she hadn't counted on. Only the Lord knew how her father would react when he discovered what she'd done. She sucked her teeth in disgust at her own clumsiness. She'd spent over an hour in that house, and she should have left as soon as she went through her gramma's bedroom. But she'd thought it safe to be there late on a Monday afternoon.
She reached over, rubbed his thigh and spoke in a soft, pouting voice. “Where're you taking me?”
“I haven't decided whether to take you to the police or to your daddy; but you need more'n a slap on your wrist for what you did. He glanced at her from the corner of his eye. “The police station is closer. And get your hand off my thigh,” he added the latter almost as if in afterthought.

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