God Only Knows (16 page)

“I’m not telling you again!” His back pressed against the nearest wall, Whitlock spat his words into the younger man’s face.
“I am an officer of the law! You better be a legal immigrant, boy!”

A youthful-looking man in a shirt and tie broke through the crowd, coming to Whitlock’s side. “Sir,” he said respectfully,
“I’ll have to ask you to calm down right now. If you are a policeman, you’ll have a chance to prove it. Greene County police
are on their way here right now.”

“I’m the one who was attacked!” Whitlock’s eyes bulged with indignation as he jammed a finger toward the restroom. “I had
just spent good money in this restaurant, innocently went to use the bathroom, and this maniac was waiting outside my stall
when I stepped out.”

“Tell it right!” A husky voice boomed out in response from inside the men’s room. Cassie’s heart sank immediately with recognition,
but it didn’t stop the horror that filled her when the other busboy emerged with Marcus following a step behind, his suit
jacket ripped down one shoulder and his tie askew. Though he was calmer in spirit than Whitlock, Cassie could sense her husband’s
struggle to hold himself together. Loitering behind the busboy, he stayed on the opposite side of the hallway, but he kept
his eyes locked to Whitlock’s fiery glare.

His back to Cassie, Marcus directed his comments to the restaurant manager. “I didn’t lay a hand on him, sir. I was just having
a conversation.”

The air filled with police sirens, and Cassie and Julia turned to see the front door fly open. Three police officers hustled
toward them, bringing the restaurant to a hush as they came closer.

Despair overtaking her, Cassie could no longer see or hear Julia as she turned back toward the arguing men. “Marcus!”

As if he hadn’t realized she might still be in the restaurant, Cassie’s husband froze in midsentence. Pivoting toward the
sound of her voice, he softened his glare momentarily as their eyes met. “Baby.”

“What are you doing? I was handling it, Marcus. I really was.”

Marcus’s eyes now focused over the top of Cassie’s head, likely on the officers shoving their way through the crowd beside
her. His eyes were once again an impenetrable shield. “I’m a man, Cassie,” he said as an officer yanked him back against a
wall, “and a man protects his family.”

A
s was often the case, Maxwell found himself alone in a room with a bare-chested woman. Lala Jackson was twenty-six, tall enough
to play in the WNBA, and had a figure designed to torment any man who dared look on her without lust. As Lala’s bra fell to
the floor, Maxwell struggled valiantly to focus on the undergarment instead of on the young woman’s breasts.

Unlike most patients, Lala had suddenly disrobed without invitation.

“I thought you said you have a sore throat,” Maxwell said weakly, eyes dancing between the floor and the spotless chocolate-brown
skin on Lala’s beaming face.

“Well, yes,” the Wright State graduate student replied, sighing and arching her back as she settled against the examination
chair. “It’s not just that, though, Doctor. My breasts have been a little sore too. Would that be related?”

“To the sore throat?” As Lala’s honeysuckle perfume teased his nostrils, Maxwell scratched the tip of his nose, frustrated
with himself. He knew good and well that the smirk he had just barely stifled had already traveled into his eyes, was probably
encouraging the flirty looks this woman was shooting him.
“Totally unprofessional,”
the Spirit said within.
“You want another lawsuit on your hands?”

“I doubt there’s any relationship,” he said, fully intending to heed the voice as soon as he could do so with a little sensitivity.
“Get her out of here.”
The only question was whether he should step out right this minute and get a staffer in here for extra protection. He was
only alone with Lala because Imani, his assigned nurse, had called in sick this morning.

“Shouldn’t you touch them now, Doctor?” Lala glanced between her chest and Maxwell, the invitation setting him on fire as
his eyes danced across the drop of sweat budding on one breast. “I mean, I thought that’s what you do when any area of the
body’s ailing a patient.”

“Time to bail.”

“Lala,” Maxwell said, sighing, “I think you should know that this makes me uncomfortable. You never mentioned anything about
sore breasts, not when you called to schedule the appointment, nor when you spoke with the nurse who took your blood pressure.
Can you tell me what’s going on here?”

The young lady slipped down off the examination chair, her glide so fast that Maxwell barely caught it until she was inches
from him. “Okay, Dr. Simon. I didn’t come here to disrespect your place of business. Nothing has to happen here, but I thought
I’d at least let you see what I’ve got going on. How else can I make sure you ask me out?”

Maxwell set her folder aside, then nodded toward Lala’s bra and blouse. “Why don’t you make use of those while we continue
this conversation?”

By the time the young woman was fully dressed again and primping her hair in the room’s corner mirror, Maxwell checked his
watch but asked, “Can I ask why you thought I’d respond to such an inappropriate move? I hope there aren’t rumors floating
around about how I treat my female patients.”

“No, no,” Lala replied, turning and grabbing his elbow. “Doctor, please don’t hate me. I really hope you’ll take my number
and give me a call soon. I’m not a hoochie, really.”

“So again I ask,” Maxwell quipped, allowing himself the repressed smirk from earlier, “who gave you the idea I’d respond to
such a risqué move?”

Lala shrugged as she said, “You know Lyle Sharp?”

“He’s only one of my best friends.” Maxwell shook his head. What a surprise —Lyle had sent a likely former conquest toward
his pitiful single friend. “How do you know him?”

“I met him through my pastor, actually,” Lala said, chuckling. “Jake Campbell? I had told him about my need to meet some ‘black
men working,’ and he and Lyle told me about you. They told me about all your important work here, and how you’re looking to
start dating sisters.”

Maxwell raised an eyebrow, trying to believe what he was hearing. “Jake is a pastor, Lala, a full-time servant of God. Did
you tell him you were going to win me over with a striptease?”

“Oh, no!” Lala put a hand to her mouth in shock. “Pastor Jake would never be down with that. This just kind of . . . came
to me on the way over here.”

“Mmm-hmm.”

Even if his friend hadn’t sanctioned Lala’s nude seduction, Jake’s involvement still rubbed Maxwell the wrong way. He hadn’t
forgotten the testy conversation he’d had with the pastor a week earlier, shortly after he had first told both friends that
he intended to take Julia out on a date.

“Don’t do it,” Jake had said when they had met for an early Saturday breakfast. “Don’t sell yourself short, man. You’re Maxwell
Simon, you hear me? Why would you want to date a woman you barely knew existed back in the day?”

“People grow up, Jake,” Maxwell replied, his eyes growing wide as his friend slathered his pancakes in butter and syrup. “Slow
down there, big boy. The body’s a temple, Pastor.”

Jake poured another dollop of syrup onto his plate, seemingly oblivious. “Were you, uh, hiding some attraction to Julia and
her girls all these years? I seem to recall you laughing at all the jokes Lyle and I made about how tore-down looking they
were back then.”

“We were children,” Maxwell replied.

“Well, time may have passed, but not all that much has changed. You told me yourself the woman had a major chip on her shoulder
the first time you reintroduced yourself to her. Julia, Toya, Terry —all of them were always mean. Angry black women.”

“I think ‘angry’ is the right word,” Maxwell said. “And let’s not act like they didn’t have reason to be. We treated them
like they were invisible, Jake.”

“Like you just said, Doc, we were kids back then,” Jake said, his eyes on his fork and knife as they sliced and diced his
food into cubes. “God covered that and has long since forgiven. You don’t need to atone by dating one of them, Maxwell.”

“Why don’t you mind your own business?” Maxwell had heard his own voice rise but didn’t lower it. “Maybe you’re happy never
having even dated a black woman, but some of us might like to experience dating one of our own.”

“Oh, really?” Jake shoved his plate aside, clearly offended. “And exactly what would you know about dating black women, Maxwell
Simon? School me.”

• • •

“Dr. Simon?” Lala’s tentative tone pulled Maxwell back to the pressing demands of the workday, and he opened the examination
room door for her.

“You can see yourself out down this hall,” he said, shepherding her gently across the threshold. “Thank you for your number,
Lala. If you have any valid health care needs in the future, keep us in mind.”

“Thank you, Doctor.”

To avoid the specter of watching Lala saunter away, Maxwell hustled into his office. Given that he had the young lady’s number
in his pocket, he saw no sense prolonging the temptation to use it. Sure, he’d been surprised to feel something pulling him
away from Lala, something tied to his growing feelings for Julia. Without the promise of that potential relationship, though,
Maxwell knew his flesh would have him strung out on a pretty young thing like Lala. He wondered if Jake and Lyle knew how
close they’d come to trapping him.

“I’ll show them.” Plans formulating quickly, Maxwell grabbed his phone and dialed Julia’s office number.

Y
ou have made a bad situation worse, Marcus,” Cassie said through pursed lips as she turned into their subdivision. It was
a painful truth she had avoided speaking aloud from the minute Marcus was hauled off to the police station from Bar Louie,
but after twenty minutes of silence during their drive home from the Greene County Jail, her patience was shot. They would
have it out sooner or later, so why not get it over with.

“You’re right,” Marcus replied finally as they idled in their driveway while the garage door rose. “As with everything in
your life, Cassie, none of your troubles are your own fault.”

Cassie winced internally.
That
hurt, but he’d have to do better to get a rise out of her. She was keeping the focus on him. “What did you think you were
going to accomplish, exactly, sneaking up on Whitlock and threatening him like that? Marcus, he said you promised to kill
him if he didn’t leave me alone!”

Marcus let a beat pass as Cassie parked and removed her key from the ignition. “
You
know I was bluffing,” he said, “but he didn’t need to know that. Law of the streets. The way to back someone off you is make
them believe you’re willing to put it all on the line —kill or be killed.”

Cassie rolled her eyes despite herself. “What do you know about the street, Marcus? You’ve barely set foot into West Dayton
since you left home for college.”

“Things haven’t changed that much,” he replied. “I’m not a babe in the woods; I made enough calls to friends in the police
department to know Whitlock has a young son and visits his mother several times a week. He values life enough that a death
threat will change his behavior.”

“And that’s why he responded to your threat by hitting you?”

“No,” Marcus replied, climbing from the car, “that was pure male adrenaline, a defensive response with no thought. If he had
thought,
he would have realized he’d wind up with a broken nose and several lost teeth.”

“None of this is funny,” Cassie insisted over the roar of the garage door as it shut. Approaching the door leading inside,
she placed her hands on her hips and stared her husband down. “We were working a plan to convince him that there was nothing
to be gained by harassing us, Marcus. He was cagey, but I think he was impressed that we retained defense attorneys. If we’d
had a little more time, I think we could have convinced him that he’d finally get what he wanted —a new investigation into
what really happened to his brother. Now he probably just wants our whole family dead.”

A hand on the doorknob, Marcus gazed lazily at his wife as he said, “Do you really want to argue this in front of the kids,
or are you expecting me to talk this out in the garage? Because hashing through this will take hours.”

“The kids aren’t here,” Cassie replied, bumping him aside with a hip and using her key to open the door. Shutting off the
alarm system, she glared back at him as they stood in the foyer. “While you’ve been gone the past two nights, I decided not
to tell the kids their father was locked up with common criminals. I told them you had an emergency meeting and would be back
today.”

Marcus raised an eyebrow. “They’re old enough to know where I really was, Cassie.”

“And we can tell them tonight,” she replied, turning back to face him, “once we’ve had it out. I did not want to tell them
the truth in anger, okay? So they’re not here right now because I had Julia pick up the twins and take them to dinner with
Amber. M.J.’s over at some little hot girl’s house —I can’t keep up with their names anymore.”

“So you have me all to yourself, huh?” Shrugging out of his coat and taking Cassie’s, he took care of business in the hall
closet before turning back to her. “Well, settle in, my queen.”

“Ohh.”
A ragged sigh escaped from Cassie as she planted both hands deep into her hairdo. “I know, Marcus. I know I should have told
you I was meeting with Whitlock on Saturday. I just didn’t want you to get in the middle of it. I knew any confrontation between
you two would end just like it did.”

“You,” Marcus said, a sudden jab of his finger accentuating the word, “don’t get to decide in advance what my reaction will
be to anything, not when it comes to this situation. Do you understand me, Cassie? You kept me in the dark about all this
for twenty years, when I’m supposed to be your life partner, your closest friend, your protector. Keeping secrets like that
keeps me from doing my job, from being the protector you deserve.”