Can't Buy Me Love (5 page)

Interesting that he dressed to see his father as if he were going to a lawyer. Or a funeral.

He moved with grace. Power. Precision. Nothing wasted. Nothing superfluous. He was like a blade, sharp and lethal.

Anger spiked her right through the chest. She wasn’t about to be threatened or bullied by a man who was only here for money. He could glower and threaten all he wanted.

There was nothing he could try that hadn’t been tried before.

“Well, now,” she said, stepping into the den where Luc paced like a caged panther, all dark hair and darker countenance. He exuded menace and when he turned to face her, she felt his anger like a punch in the stomach. “I trust y’all slept all right?” she asked, turning it on with the force of a locomotive. “Enjoyed your breakfast? I swear, Ruby makes about the best—”

“Where is my father?” Tara hadn’t seen Victoria by the window. Tall and thin as fishing line, she blended into the dark drapes. Victoria’s face—china white, as if she’d never seen a ray of sun in her life or just had the private number of the best dermatologist in New York City—was pinched. The arms she held across her chest were clutched tight as if she were just barely holding herself together.

Unwanted empathy twisted through Tara, who knew all too well what it felt like to have only yourself to protect you from the forces that wanted to tear you apart.

Empathy. What garbage
.

Tara reminded herself she had no allegiance to that woman—and her demons were her own. Perhaps if Victoria hadn’t walked away from Lyle ten years ago, never
to speak to him again, she wouldn’t be so damn wretched right now.

Tara still couldn’t believe the woman had a son. When the news hit about Victoria’s husband, Lyle had been in the hospital and Tara had read him the newspaper. When the first story about the Ponzi scheme broke, Lyle had laughed himself right into cardiac arrest.

After that, she’d stayed away from the news about Victoria and her husband and instead read Lyle the obituaries and crossword puzzle. Just as he liked.

If he’d known he had a grandson, Lyle would have moved heaven and earth to bring the boy here and would probably have killed himself in the process.

The memory of the kid sleeping in his mother’s lap last night, his dark curls damp against his forehead, knocked her sideways, but she took a deep breath and wrangled herself back to center.

“Well, now you’ll have to excuse sweet Lyle, but he doesn’t get around much anymore. He’d love to see you, but it will be in his quarters.”

“Fine,” snapped Luc and she could feel his gaze, those deep hazel eyes, rake over her body, reaching under her clothes to the skin and the blood and bone beneath.

Her body shook at the sensation, like a trailer in a tornado.

For years now, she’d been numb. Frozen deep. Unmoved.

But now, in the face of this man’s hate, she … quivered? Unbelievable. Shocking, even.

He stepped toward the door, as if ready to charge back down the hallway the way he had last night. But she stayed where she was, reaching one arm up to place a hand on the frame. His eyes sparked, his lips tightened, and he stopped a few inches away from her.

Lightning bolts flashed between them, and all the fine hair on her body trembled and lifted.

You can’t bully me
, she thought, planting her heels all the way through the earth. Her eyes locked on his and she smiled, just enough so that his eyes dropped to her red, red lips.

Sinner’s lips, Grant Wasinsky, the worst of Momma’s boyfriends, used to say, before Momma got wise to his intentions and kicked him out. Too late, as it happened. But points for trying.

And the heat in Luc’s gaze proved he wasn’t as immune or disgusted by her as he wanted to be.

“Behave yourself,” she whispered, and waited long enough for his dark eyes to crawl back to hers. Desire and disgust mingled in his expression. “I belong to your daddy.”

“Ignore her,” Victoria breathed as they followed Tara Jean’s perfect, denim-covered ass down the hallways. Tara Jean was blathering on about the house, as if they didn’t know a thing about it. As if they hadn’t run these hallways in their pajamas, their bare feet, their boots—searching for a place to hide from the old man’s belt.

“She’s baiting you,” Victoria added through pinched lips. “And you’re falling for it.”

Vicks was right and he knew it, which made him angrier. Tara Jean was nothing. Less than nothing.

They stopped in front of the bedroom door. Tara Jean paused as if she were about to say something, but he didn’t give her the chance. Whatever was about to happen, as bad as it might get—it was all between Luc and his sister. Just like it always had been.

“It’s bad,” he said to Victoria, taking her hand in his. He felt every bone, the pounding of her blood. “We don’t have to do this.”

She nodded once and squeezed his fingers. “Let’s go.”

He reached past Tara Jean, who’d been watching him
and Victoria with unreadable eyes, and opened the door, pushing it wide to reveal the bed, the machines, and the man served by all of it.

Victoria gasped.

“Well now,” said the skeleton on the bed. “Ain’t this something.”

Animated, the skeleton looked a lot more like the father Luc remembered. The bright eyes, the smile. The arrogance.

The king was dying, but he wasn’t dead yet.

“Why don’t y’all have a seat.” Tara stepped past them, toward the two chairs pulled up beside the bed. Luc held out his hand, stopping her. He didn’t touch her, but he could feel the heat from her ridiculous body. The silk of her shirt fluttered against his palm and a shot of electricity sizzled through him.

Behave yourself
, he seethed.

“You can go,” he said.

She smiled and leaned toward him slightly, pressing the silk of her shirt, and then the taut skin of her belly, into his hand. He went flush from the heat.

“Not on your life.”

She swept past him and walked around Lyle’s bed. She hitched a curvy hip onto it and curled her body around the old man’s. A vine suffocating the life it climbed all over, except Lyle smiled at her, running a frail hand over her thigh and leaving it there.

Luc’s fingers twitched.

“Wayne—” Lyle said.

“It’s Luc, Dad. Has been for years.”

“That’s not what it says on your birth certificate.”

“Well, it’s what it says on my checks.”

Luc managed to smile, rubbing it in, pleased that he was managing to stay calm. Delighted to see the bright spots of anger on the old man’s cheeks.

“How are you doing, Daddy?” Victoria asked, taking
a tentative step toward the bed. Lyle’s dark eyes swung to her and she stopped, as if repelled by a force field.

Luc stepped forward to protect his sister from the menace in the old man’s eyes.

“Where you been the last ten years?” Lyle asked as if Luc wasn’t even there. Victoria stiffened.

“You kicked me out, Dad,” she said, putting her hands at her side.

“Not for ten years I didn’t.”

“I can’t read your mind,” she said. “You told me if I married—”

“I know what I said.” A feral grin split his face. “And I was right, wasn’t I?”

Victoria flinched as if he’d punched her, and Luc reached for her hand. But she shook him off and stepped closer to the bed.

After this thing with Joel, she’d left amateur whippingpost status behind and gone pro. Every stranger on the street that recognized her name or her face from the news had something to say to her, and she just laid herself bare for their hatred and bile.

Luc couldn’t stop her. Couldn’t even figure out how.

“You were right,” Victoria said. “Joel was a crook. He …” She took a deep breath. “He left us with nothing.”

“And that’s why you’re crawling back here—”

“Stop it, Dad,” Luc intervened. “She’s been punished enough.”

Lyle’s eyes—sunken in his skull—blazed. “Not by me, she hasn’t. Your mother ruined you,” he snapped at Victoria. “You haven’t done a day’s work in your life—”

“We didn’t come down here to be abused by you, Dad,” he said.

“Still fighting your sister’s fights?” Lyle sneered.

“Daddy,” Victoria whispered.

“Stop hiding behind your brother, you coward!”

“This is ridiculous.” Luc grabbed his sister’s hand even though she resisted. “We’re leaving. We never should have come.”

“She has a son,” Tara whispered, running a long-fingered hand over the old man’s cheek. “A little boy.”

Lyle blinked. Blinked again, and Luc realized that the old man didn’t know about Jacob. Luc didn’t know whether to laugh or to grab Jacob and run back to Canada.

Victoria looked over her shoulder at him and Luc shrugged.

“How old?” Lyle barked. His pale hands shook against the sheets.

“Seven,” Victoria answered. “His name is Jacob.”

“A grandson?” A monitor next to Lyle beeped and beeped again. A red light flashed.

Tara turned, suddenly efficient, to check the computer’s readout.

“Sweetie,” she said, “you need to calm down.”

A nurse rushed in wearing a pair of pink scrubs with bunnies on them that seemed so ridiculous, so incongruous, Luc couldn’t look anywhere else. The bunnies wore sunglasses.

This wasn’t what he wanted. As much as he hated his father, he didn’t want to watch him die.

“Is he here?” Lyle asked, and Victoria, her eyes wide, just nodded and the monitors went berserk again.

“Dad,” Luc said. “You need to calm—”

Tara Jean’s eyes narrowed with a fury so palpable he could taste smoke and fire in the back of his throat.

“You need to leave.” All that Southern peach was gone. She stood, her arms wide, corralling them from the room.

“Is he okay?” Victoria asked.

“Mr. Baker,” the nurse said as she lowered the mattress. “Can you hear me?”

“Oh my God,” Victoria breathed.

“Get. Out,” Tara said, and Luc reluctantly realized she was right. They were in the way, and Lyle’s wild eyes kept seeking out Victoria.

He put his arm around his sister, leading her out of the room. Once they stood on the navy-blue runner in the hallway, the bedroom door slammed shut behind them.

The hallway buzzed with silence, all the sounds from the bedroom eaten by the thick wooden door.

“This is a nightmare,” Victoria whispered.

The thin white lines of strain around her mouth tore at him. “Vicks,” he whispered. “You don’t need this man’s money. We can—”

“I do.” Her midnight eyes were bright, feverish. “I know you don’t understand that. But I need his money.”

“That stuff he said—”

“He’s said it all before. I’ve never understood why he was even with Mom when he hated her so much.”

“He didn’t know about Jacob?”

“He kicked me out, Luc. It’s not like I was sending him Christmas cards.” The sarcasm was a nice change, and he stroked her arm.

“But with all the press last year?”

“I kept Jacob out of it as much as I could.” She wrapped her arms around herself. “He probably wasn’t following all that closely, just enough to know he was right and the rest of the world, especially me, was wrong.”

“He’s been keeping tabs on me for twenty years.”

“ESPN practically does that for him.” Her smile was the saddest thing he’d ever seen. “And it’s no secret he likes you better.”

There was nothing he could say, so he didn’t even bother.

She glanced back at the door. “I had no idea he didn’t know.” After a long moment she shook her head, as if
getting rid of her maudlin thoughts. “I’m going to go find Jacob; I’m sure he’s bored out of his head. What are you going to do?”

“Wait,” he said, thinking of Tara Jean Sweet and the buried steel beneath all that blond bimbo. “I’m gonna wait.”

Victoria found Ruby and Jacob on the front porch. He was showing the housekeeper his Transformers and Ruby, wearing a rhinestone Minnie Mouse T-shirt, one size too small, was pretending to be interested.

Victoria had one of those out-of-body experiences looking down at her son. Just a few months ago—the worst night of her life, worse than the night Joel told her what he’d done, worse than the night he’d killed himself—she stared down at him in his hospital bed, so small, so tender and vulnerable, lost among the sheets.

The doctors had told her to prepare herself for the worst, that the H1N1 virus was too strong, and his lungs, already compromised by his asthma, were just too weak.

So she’d lain in bed with him and told him about the morning he was born and how he used to curl up in her arms and play with her hair. She read him all his favorite stories and she held him as close as she could, feeling every young bone beneath his thin skin.

And she wished she could die too.

But she woke up the next morning and stared into his open eyes. “I’m thirsty,” he’d said, and she’d wept buckets of tears.

The doctors warned that he wasn’t out of the woods yet, but every morning he woke up and she knew, despite the way her life had been stripped down to the bone, that she was blessed.

But now, she looked at Jacob and she was tired. Tired
of worrying. Of doubt. Of fear. Of being inadequate to every task.

He was her blessing, and she wasn’t sure how to take care of him.

Her mother would say she needed a man. Someone to replace Joel as a payer of bills, a provider of security. That had been her mother’s solution to every problem.

“Thank you,” she said, and Ruby stood, wincing when her knees creaked, pulling the hem of her shirt down past her tummy. “I know this isn’t your job.”

“You’re right.” Victoria gaped at the woman; honestly, she wasn’t like any housekeeper Victoria had ever known—and she’d known her share. It was amazing the woman had a job.

“But it’s nice to have a child here.” Her round face creased with a wide smile and Victoria relaxed. “He’s a good boy.”

“Yes, he is,” she whispered, feeling fragile against the glare of the sun, the slight cool breeze. Her father’s words, while not unexpected, had stripped her raw. Left her sore.

“Hey, Mom,” Jacob said, barely looking up from his small army of Autobots.

“Heya, bud, how you feeling?”

Jacob just rolled his eyes, no doubt tired of the question.