Stay (Dunham series #2) (46 page)

Then the feminist groups weighed in. Was Vanessa
simply a recurrent victim of older, more powerful men’s appetites,
bouncing from one to another like a pinball with no way to free
herself, always stuck in a repeating loop of learned
self-destructive behavior thrust upon her before she even hit
puberty? Should she be considered an object of pity instead of
derision?

Vachel had suffered the most. At school—a place he
hated anyway—he became a minor celebrity and the constant groups of
people crowding him worsened his claustrophobia.

No, Vanessa is not my mother; she’s my aunt and my
guardian. My mother is dead. I don’t know who my father is, just
that it isn’t Eric Cipriani.

He changed his phone number twice, abandoned three
email addresses, and went to great lengths to avoid the classmates
who began to drop in at Whittaker House. Then one day Vachel had
made a smart-ass quip in class that delighted his growing fan club
so much they rushed him after class, making him the bottom of an
overenthusiastic dogpile. Vanessa raced to school to get him when
that triggered a full-blown panic attack.

The school nurse had him almost calm by the time she
got there, but—

Please don’t make me go to school anymore, Aunt
Vanessa. Please?

Laura had done it for Rose when school proved
ineffective at best and destructive at worst. Vanessa could do no
less for Vachel.

She took Vachel home, then turned right back around
and stormed the principal’s office to un-enroll him.

I should call Cooper right now and have every one of
those children charged with assault and then get Knox down here to
sue the district.

You know good and well they didn’t mean any harm.
They
like
him. They were
playing
.

I’ve already talked to you about this, Jason. More
than a few times. And you know his history, so I can’t imagine how
you could let this happen.

Let me tell you something right now, Vanessa
Whittaker. I wasn’t there when it happened and I can’t be the kid’s
personal bodyguard. Everybody likes him, God only knows why since
he almost never speaks. What am I supposed to do? Order them to
ignore him? Do you want me to splash his psych profile all over the
school bulletin boards so people will know his issues and be
sensitive
to them?

She hadn’t had a good answer for that. When she
found Vachel packing an ATV with his camping gear and weapons for
an angry retreat into the woods, she didn’t have the heart to tell
him he couldn’t.

All right, then. Take some books with you. Be in the
kitchen at six every night for dinner or I’ll come looking for you
and I guarantee you won’t like it when I find you.

LaVon seized the moment and gone on all the
television talk shows, feted and dressed and paid to . . . lie.
About everything. She likened Vanessa to Jodie Foster in
Taxi
Driver
. (Vanessa had to look that up to understand the
reference.) She cast Eric as a predator of very young girls, Knox’s
boy toy, setting up a protection racket in Chouteau County,
and
having Simone killed.

LaVon accused Vanessa of kidnapping her “precious
grandson, the only memory I have left of Simone,” then of
brainwashing him to despise the grandmother who’d taken care of
him. She accused Eric of facilitating the kidnapping.

Tom Parley’s murder once again rose to national
attention, but federal prosecutor John Riley had retired and
couldn’t be contacted. No one else involved in that investigation
would speak of it. LaVon took great delight in announcing to the
world that not only had Knox murdered Parley, but threatened her
with the same.

When confronted, Knox did what he’d always done:
ignored it.

To top it all off . . .

My daughter wouldn’t give me a roof if I were
homeless, which she told me to my face. I can only thank the good
Lord I’m not homeless, since I can’t count on the child I birthed
and raised and loved—the only child I’ve got left.

Whatever else Vanessa could say about her mother’s
television appearances, some PR person had worked a miracle to
shape LaVon’s deportment and speech into something devastatingly
credible.

LaVon had been waiting for a way to bring Eric down
since Simone had gone home crying about the way Eric had treated
her all those years ago.

After sixteen years, she’d finally succeeded in
hitting him where it counted, and getting back at Knox was a
delightfully unintended consequence for her.

Poor Eric— But he’d known. Some of it, anyway. It
didn’t make Vanessa feel any better that he was prepared for
it.

She wasn’t.

Nor was anyone else caught in the whirl of the F-5
tornado that was LaVon Whittaker and all the baby tornadoes
spinning around her.

Dirk stepped up to the plate to defend all of
them—Eric, Knox, Vanessa, Sebastian—going so far as to grandstand
on the Chouteau County courthouse steps. Sanguine and proper Bishop
Dirk Jelarde had relayed the history in a booming performance
worthy of a full-time Southern charismatic hellfire-and-brimstone
preacher. Vanessa had never seen that side of him and she knew that
he would never do that at church, but his theatrics seemed so well
practiced, it confused her. “It’s his courtroom Hail Mary pass,”
Knox had told her wryly. “He uses it when he knows he’s losing, and
occasionally it works. He’s beaten me more than once with it.”

Church members rallied around Vanessa in the only
way they could, which was to give her bracing hugs whenever they
saw her in town. The ladies from the Rocky Ridge Farm gift shop
dropped by during the week to give
her
cookies (which
Vanessa decided to feature in the gourmet grocery across the
highway because they were that good). The officials and citizens of
Mansfield and Ava, not to mention the troopers and deputies,
shielded Vanessa and Whittaker House as much as they could from
strangers who didn’t have the look of inn guests about them.

Vanessa’s PR firm came out swinging, with no
compunction about waging war on LaVon and the media that had turned
her into the victim
du jour
.

Vanessa’s ad agency had ramped up three full-scale
marketing blitzes to counterbalance the war that, at first glance,
looked like a heartless and unwarranted attack on an old woman who
had been betrayed by one daughter and pined for the grandson from
her dead daughter.

It humiliated Vanessa to her core to have such a
public catfight with LaVon, but . . .

The reservations for the holiday masquerades had
poured in, forcing Vanessa to hire a full-time event planner and an
assistant for him. Thus, February was booked solid for the romantic
gimmick he’d come up with:
Every day is Valentine’s Day at
Whittaker House
. There were five four-day women’s conferences
booked between March and July, for which the spa across the street
would have to be expanded and more massage therapists hired.

Construction had begun and the golf course was
scheduled to open in eighteen months, immediately after which she
had four week-long corporate retreats booked back to back. Three
pro golf tours had put Whittaker House on their short list for
desirable venues for televised tournaments based on the design by
Corey Leonard and Eric Cipriani and Whittaker House’s grandeur.

Vittles
’s ratings had gone through the
roof.

The dress Vanessa had worn to the governor’s
birthday celebration made a star out of its designer, a local—and
very young—seamstress overflowing with talent, who had big dreams
but little money. Over the years, the girl had designed and
stitched Vanessa’s entire cocktail and formal wardrobe, so she
would be presenting the collection in New York as The Vanessa
Collection.

The
Maxim
and
Esquire
covers had
become collectibles.

So had the photograph Eric and Vanessa posed for in
Silver Dollar City, which zoomed into production and circulation
immediately.

Unsolicited offers for
Wild, Wild West
were
rolling in, the amounts of which had astonished her.

“Oh, Eric,” she whispered at her reflection. How
naïve he’d been that night, thinking it’d all blow back on him and
him alone. No, Eric’s enemies couldn’t get to him with a full
frontal attack, but they could get to him by attacking his loved
ones.

No, there was no dirt to be dug, but plenty that
could be manufactured.

Glenn had risen to some journalistic prominence
after he had posted a series of articles and documents concerning
Senator Afton’s financial schemes from the late 1980s onward. He
still couldn’t prove the identity of Afton’s mistress, but as he
always had, he reported provable facts and let his audience draw
its own conclusions. The general consensus amongst the population
was, “Eeww,” and Vanessa didn’t think it would be long before Afton
would feel enough heat for him to resign his position. And if not .
. . Glenn had muttered the words “grand jury” to her just that
morning.

“VANESSA! GET YOUR ASS IN GEAR!”

Vanessa heaved a great sigh and swept down the
stairs, out onto her porch to see Knox holding an umbrella for
her.

He put his hand on her back to propel her down the
driveway and started in. “Shit, Vanessa—”

“Stop nagging at me,” she huffed. “Can’t you see I’m
having a hard time?”

He said nothing for a moment while they hurried
toward the mansion, from which they could already hear and feel the
hum and thrum of the revelers. “I’m sorry,” he muttered. “About
everything.”

She glanced at him, surprised. “Everything
what?”

“Well, Sebastian mostly. I would never have let you
near him if I’d known he’d do what he did. I don’t . . . see you
that way, so it didn’t occur to me how he would see you. I had no
idea until I saw the painting and I was pissed, but you were an
adult and he wouldn’t have cared what I thought. But now the press
is on you about it and— I’ve kept my mouth shut for years, but I
couldn’t anymore. Don’t think I didn’t rip him a new one, but you
know, it’s eight years later and I . . . should’ve protected you
better back then. It’s all my fault.”

Her eyes widened. “Oh, Knox,” she breathed. “Please
don’t. I— Sebastian was—” She bit her lip, unwilling to talk about
that
with her
dad
. “I will never regret that, no
matter what the press says. It was one of the best things that
could’ve ever happened to me, and I don’t mean about the painting
or getting famous.”

Knox glanced at her. “I don’t understand.”

She took a deep breath. “I think,” she said slowly,
“that if every girl’s first lover was like Sebastian, she would
never settle for anything less than the best. Being with him kept
me from making all the stupid mistakes that my girlfriends
made.”

“It wasn’t right,” he growled. “He’s almost twice
your age—”

“You have no room to talk, Knox Hilliard,” Vanessa
flared. “Your wife is younger than I am, and Sebastian didn’t
blackmail me or threaten me at gunpoint. He
seduced
me.
That’s more than I can say for how you got two of your women into
bed.”

Knox snapped his mouth shut and looked away. “Point
taken,” he muttered. “Sometimes I don’t think.” No, he didn’t, but
he’d been at her beck and call every weekend for months, and he was
here now. Not only that, but he’d brought his entire squadron of
family and friends with him to deal with both the publicity and the
extra business that her abrupt upsurge in celebrity had garnered.
It didn’t matter anymore that Knox had left her to follow his bliss
for a year; it only mattered that he was alive and had come through
when she needed him as he always had.

She slipped her hand in his.

“You are the best daughter a man could have ever
asked for,” he said low, his voice heavy with emotion she’d never
heard before. “If my biological children turn out as well as you,
I’ll feel like I did a good job, like I left something good to the
world besides death and destruction.”

“You’ve been good to me, Knox. I never wanted to
disappoint you.”

“Not possible.”

They said nothing more until they’d reached the back
of the mansion and entered the bustling kitchen.

Justice swept in from the dining room, wearing an
iridescent babydoll dress that emphasized her very pregnant belly,
and floated when she moved. It displayed an impressive amount of
her cleavage and her long bare legs, and it seemed every square
inch of her exposed skin—and her hair—sparkled with glitter. She
had fairy wings attached to the back of her teensy bodice, and her
face had an elaborately decorated mask painted on it. Knox glanced
at his wife and scowled. “Did you wear that to piss me off?”

“Of course I did.”

“Mercy?”

“Gave her a snack. Read her a story. Put her to bed.
Giselle and Eilis are, at this moment, putting their own spawn to
bed. The nice young women Vanessa has recruited to babysit are
spread out all over our suite in their jammies and sleeping bags,
eating pizza, drinking caffeine-free Coke, and watching movies. You
are free to double-check my work if you don’t trust me with
your
child.
Doctor
Hilliard.
Sir
. You’ll have
to take my word for it that I’m gestating properly.”

“Shit, Iustitia, you don’t have to be so
touchy.”

“You’re being an asshole because you don’t like the
way I’m dressed.”

“Oh, I
love
the way you’re dressed. So will a
hundred other men.”

“Exactly. Thank you for your insight.”

He curled his lip at her, then looked back at
Vanessa. “You gonna be okay?”

She took a deep breath and said, “Yeah. I think
so.”

Knox, dressed in a simple dinner-jacket tux like the
rest of the staff, brushed by Justice on his way out. He cast her a
lust-filled glance that made her preen and snicker wickedly.
Vanessa looked away, unwilling to think of Knox
that
way.