“Deb!” Mom cried.
“I’m just saying if he heard something, we should know.” Deb looked back at Spence. “So? What did you hear?”
Spence wondered for a second what was happening with these two men here and what they would want with his mom, who could be nice. And could be cool. But mostly she was just Mom.
“They were talking about you,” he told her.
It took a second for Spence’s words to compute. “What do you mean?” Jennifer asked. “What were they saying?”
Spence shrugged and she knew he was uncomfortable having been caught and now being forced to tattle.
Frankly, she was uncomfortable, too. This went against all her parenting rules. But when Ian Greer is talking about you behind your back the rules are different.
“I don’t know,” Spence said. “He was talking about journalists and how he had a story.”
A story. Again, with her skin, itching and buzzing along her hairline, making her fingers numb.
It’s probably a story about how he screwed some actress. You’re not interested.
Oh, but she was. She really really was.
“The other guy was saying no one would believe him,” Madison offered, apparently comfortable in the role of tattle and spy.
“Yeah,” Spence said. “He said it was a big story.”
“He said it was a scoop!” Madison added helpfully.
Jennifer’s head spun. Perhaps it was a story about his father’s love life. Or political career. That would be big, but it would be dirty.
But a scoop?
Her blood pumped hard, deliciously hard, and she knew the man was devious. A liar, no doubt, but she couldn’t help herself. The journalist in her was salivating.
A scoop. From Ian Greer. She should at least hear him out.
“This whole thing is getting weirder the longer they’re here,” Deb said.
“You’re right,” Jennifer agreed, preoccupied with what this story could be. “I think I need to have a conversation with Ian Greer.”
“I’ll take the kids out back,” Deb said, ushering the three kids toward the exit. Jennifer charged right into the common room, smacking the door with her palm and interrupting whatever conversations about her Ian and Andille were having.
Ian looked startled before he put on his charming smile. A mask, she realized. That smile and that charm were all a mask.
A handsome one, her hormones reminded her, noting how the day’s sunlight seemed to gild Ian all over.
But what was he hiding behind all that charm?
“We need to talk,” she said.
Andille sighed wearily, and she wondered what had happened that had aged him since the last time she’d seen him, because he seemed older. Smaller somehow, like the weight he carried was wearing him down.
“I need to make a few calls,” he said to Ian and headed down the hallway.
“If it’s about the sink—” Ian gestured to the mess in the kitchen “—George went to get some parts. He assures me it will be fixed by tonight.”
“This is not about the sink.”
Ian turned up the wattage on his smile and she held up a hand to stop him before he could even get started.
“I want you to understand that we appreciate all that you do for Serenity.” That didn’t quite cover it and she wanted to be honest. Nothing but honest, so that hopefully he would do the same. “Without you and the money and the help you’re providing, we wouldn’t be here today. And we thank you.”
Ian looked slightly baffled. “It’s my pleasure,” he said. “Sincerely.”
Right, she thought, his record of helping shelters seemed oddly suspicious. Like a man desperate to balance his karmic scales.
“And we have no problem with you and Andille staying here should you need it.” She stressed the word need, because frankly, the guy could afford the penthouse suite at any Hilton within a hundred-mile radius. He didn’t need to be here.
“Ah.” Realization dawned across his handsome face and she knew that for all of his faults, the guy wasn’t dumb. “You’re wondering why a man of my wealth is choosing to sleep here? Right?”
“Well, you have to understand that your choosing to is…odd.” She smiled. “I’ve slept on those beds back there. And doing so for more than one night could be considered masochistic.”
He didn’t laugh. He didn’t even smile, this man who smiled through life. Instead, he watched her through suddenly cool blue eyes and she felt assessed by his gaze. As if he were taking her apart bit by bit and examining what he’d found.
Her skin prickled in sudden heat. She was all too aware of him, standing just an arm’s distance away, emanating a certain controlled speculation. A barely harnessed power. Her chest was tight and she’d never in her whole life felt so naked.
The guy was a shark and she had the distinct impression she was dinner.
“I saw that interview you had with my parents. It was good,” he said, changing the subject so totally it took her a second to regroup. But once she did, energy and adrenaline surged through her.
“Thank you.”
“But why you?” he said, tilting his head. “My parents didn’t give interviews after Dad left office. And Mother rarely did them during.”
“She was my husband’s godmother,” she said with a shrug. The words were sticky in her mouth and she realized she didn’t want to talk about Doug, not with Ian. Not with anyone. She’d left this grief behind. New life and old life were getting muddled and she didn’t like that. Wanted to run screaming from that.
Ian’s brow furrowed. “Godmother?” he murmured then smiled. “Doug Stern is your husband?”
Was, she thought, but didn’t say. Instead she nodded, because her throat was so tight. So dry.
“When I was little my mom and her best friend, Missy—”
“Doug’s mother,” she said, her voice reed-thin so she smiled to bolster it.
No one talks about him anymore, she realized. Not even Spence. So, it was doubly strange to talk about him with Ian.
“Right. We would spend a week on the shore every summer,” he said. “Doug’s a little older than me, but wow—” He laughed, incredulous. “Small world, huh?”
She nodded.
“Where is he now?”
Jennifer sucked in a breath, wondering where all the oxygen had gone.
“Jennifer?” Ian placed his hand on the bare skin of her arm and it was as if every molecule of her body jumped. Leaped. She felt his heat through her blood, across her skin right to the tips of her hair, like an electrical current, and she jerked away from him.
To feel Ian while talking about Doug—what the hell was wrong with her?
“He’s dead,” she blurted, shocked by her body.
Ian stood there, his arm out as if he were still touching her, his face fallen. “I’m so sorry,” he whispered.
And God, it was all so real—his sincerity and remorse—that it infuriated her. She didn’t need this right now.
“I don’t understand what any of this has to do with why you’re choosing to stay at Serenity,” she snapped and his hand dropped. His face changed, all that warmth and earnestness vanished, and the shark was back.
“Did you know my father?”
She shook her head, clenching her hands together, trying to rub feeling into her fingers. “He was only part of the interview and even then he didn’t answer many of the questions.”
Ian took a deep breath and stepped toward her and she was locked in place by the appeal in his eyes. “What I am about to tell you, I haven’t told anyone, except Andille. Ever.”
The air was filled with thick heavy currents that she didn’t understand and she had the distinct impression that, whatever was about to happen, whatever was about to fall from his lips, might just change her life. She couldn’t have moved if she wanted to.
He was magnetic. Hypnotizing.
“Hello!” a woman cried from the hallway leading to the classrooms. “Anyone
home? Madison?”
But whatever life-changing event was going to happen was interrupted.
Jennifer sagged and Ian stepped back, all that magnetism banked. All his shrewdness gone. She blinked, stunned by his transformation. The shark was gone, affable Ian Greer was back.
She wanted to scream from the tension in her stomach.
“Anyone—Oh!” Laura burst into the kitchen in a cloud of long blond hair and sunglasses. “Jennifer,” she said, frowning slightly. “You’re here. I can’t find Madison.” She glanced over at Ian then did a double take. “Do I—”
“Madison is out back,” Jennifer said, directing Laura toward the door, for some reason wanting to protect all of them from the fact that Ian Greer was actually standing in her kitchen. She simply didn’t have the energy. “Deb has all the kids down by the pond.”
“Great. Thanks again for keeping her a little later,” Laura said, ruffling her bangs so they fell over her sunglasses in a fancy sweep.
“It’s not a problem, but we’re not a babysitting service,” Jennifer said, perhaps a bit more sharply than she intended, but she was having a pretty tough time keeping things all together.
Laura’s back went straight and her perfect smile faded.
“Right,” she said, subdued, and Jennifer felt bad. Truly bad. The woman was new in town.
“I’m sorry, Laura,” she said quickly. “It’s been one of those days. I really didn’t mean to take it out on you. Madison is welcome anytime, she and Spence have really hit it off.”
“Oh, I understand,” Laura said, her good graces seemingly restored, though it was hard to tell with those sunglasses. “I’ll go get her out of everyone’s hair.”
Laura left in a swirl of hair and perfume and Jennifer steeled herself before facing Ian.
“One of the shelter’s abused women?” Ian asked, his face a white mask. Expressionless.
“Laura?” she said, taken aback by his question and suddenly stony demeanor. “No. Not at all. She’s just new to town.”
“Is that what she told you?”
“Yes, but—”
Ian’s laugh was cold and they both turned to watch Laura and Madison walking through the backyard. Laura was practically dragging a reluctant Madison across the lawn.
It wasn’t a pretty scene.
“She was hiding bruises under those sunglasses,” Ian said and Jennifer turned to him, exasperated.
“Isn’t that a bit cliché?” she asked. “You see a woman at a shelter in sunglasses and you assume she’s hiding a black eye.”
Ian’s eyes were ice blue and they froze her to the spot. “It’s a cliché because it’s true. A woman has to go out in the world. Pick up her children. Get groceries. And when that woman has a black eye, sunglasses cover it up.”
“How would you even know?” she said. “Laura told me—”
“I know,” he said, stepping toward her, his voice a burning whisper, “because I saw it a million times. I know because my mother had to do it.”
Jennifer blinked, reeled back a step. So stunned by his sudden intensity, his sudden vulnerability, that the words he said didn’t make sense. “What are you saying?”
“My mother used to hide the bruises her husband gave her under sunglasses and high-necked suits and heavy makeup.”
“Her husband? You mean—”
“I mean Jackson Greer, former president of the United States, abused my mother. For years. And I want you to help me tell the world.”
7
Ian couldn’t feel his hands. Actually, the more he thought about it, he couldn’t feel his body. It was as if he’d vanished. Dissipated into mist.
He wanted to sag onto the floor and relish this freedom. Finally. Thirty years of harboring this terrible secret. Of carrying it like stones that only got heavier. That only got bigger. More and more unmanageable. Finally it was gone. He took deep breaths and fought the urge to laugh, knowing it would make him look even more crazy. Relief, adrenaline and a strange kind of fear bubbled through him like champagne and he wanted to hug Jennifer. Thank her for letting him tell her.
Mom, he thought, feeling so much he could hardly contain it. He wanted to laugh. Cry. Mom, I’m sorry, but I just can’t keep this secret anymore.
What he really wanted, more than anything, more than ever before, was to see his father. To look him right in those cold, callous eyes and tell him the truth was coming after him. Finally. The real Jackson Greer was going to be revealed to the world.
Ian had never realized it before, but he’d been living for this. Breathing. Sleeping. Working to start this ball in motion for thirty years. All of his efforts to embarrass his father, to bring terrible shame to the Greer family name, had been preparation for this plan. This moment. Thirty years. Since he realized what those sounds from his parents’ bedroom really were.
“You’re making this up,” Jennifer said. “This is just—” She stopped and stared at him, openmouthed. Bright red flags lit up her pale cheeks and her hands were clenched into hard, bone-white fists.
“Crazy?” he asked. “Preposterous?”
“Insane.”
“I know,” he agreed. “Trust me. I know.”
She shook her head. “This is some kind of trick of yours. Some kind of—”
“I wish it was.” He swallowed a lump in his throat. “You have no idea how many times in my life I wished I was wrong. That I had made it all up or dreamed it. But—”
Jennifer still wasn’t buying it and his emotions, wild and out of control, slowed down. His heart stopped pounding. He saw his situation for what it was—precarious. “I swear,” he told her looking as deeply into those guarded whiskey eyes as he could, “that this is true.”
“How could she have hidden it?” she asked. “He was the president!”
“By the time they got to the White House my father had stopped.” He thought of that summer between terms when he’d convinced his mother to come visit him in NewYork City and the bruise on her arm that they didn’t talk about. “Mostly.”
Jennifer stared at him then put her head in her palms, fisting her hair in her hands.
He’d expected this reaction. He’d have been stupid not to. And he knew that loading her down with this information then trying to force her to believe it wouldn’t work.
She would need space. Time.
But hopefully not too much.
“I know this is hard to assimilate,” he said. She laughed roughly in her throat. “I know you’ll need time—”
“Time will make me believe you?” she asked. “You showed up here drunk on the day of your mother’s funeral and now you’re telling me she was abused through her whole marriage. A marriage that the whole world saw. That millions emulated. That I emulated.” She laughed. “Let me tell you, time isn’t going to make me believe you.”
“What will?”
“Do you have proof? Doctors? Someone? Anyone?”
“Other than me?” he asked, knowing sadly that the reputation he’d cultivated was what was making it hard to believe him.
She nodded, her eyes hard and flinty, and he saw the journalist in her and it warmed him. This was the right decision. She would believe him, in time. She had to.
“Our family doctor has all our records,” he said, leaving it vague, scared of telling her more without her promise to tell the whole story. His way.
She stared at him, blinking, and he could see the wheels turning. “This is the story my son heard you talking about?”
Ian blinked, caught flat-footed. “I was talking about this, I wasn’t aware he was listening.”
I wasn’t aware you had a son.
“This is your big scoop?” she said, as if checking.
He nodded. “This is a big story.” He took a step toward her. “You know that.”
“If it were true it would be huge!”
They were at a standstill, and he knew there was nothing he could say right now that would convince her.
“I’m going
to check on Bob and the air-conditioning,” he said. “I would ask that you not talk to anyone about this.”
“Who would believe me?” she asked.
He chewed on his lip, feeling awkward. Vulnerable. “The press and most of the world believes the very worst about me,” he said. “And I live with that. But if this story got out in a way that I couldn’t control…” He thought of all the ways he’d hurt his mother, all the times she’d looked the other way while he tried to draw blood from Jackson Greer. If the world thought this was just another stunt of his, it would kill him. “I couldn’t live with myself,” he told her.
She didn’t say anything. She didn’t appear to be breathing. Or blinking.
“I’ll be around if you want to talk,” he told her, hoping he’d done enough. That he’d not made the biggest mistake of his life.
“Ian?” He turned back to her, hope surging in his chest.
“Did you love your mother?” she asked, stripping him bare.
His eyes burned and he had to look away from her, had to gather himself together because she’d scattered him to the wind, blown him into pieces. He couldn’t find himself anymore, not without the secret he’d harbored. The anger he’d cultivated and carried. But he knew the truth—his truth—like a bright, white light guiding him on. “More than anything,” he said and he left.
He left his entire fate in Jennifer Stern’s hands.
On autopilot Jennifer went upstairs, her mind blank, her body buzzing. She found herself standing in the middle of the living room, long afternoon shadows falling across her feet.
The entire world was skewed. As Jennifer looked out the window, the earth tilted under her feet and trees grew sideways and birds flew backward and nothing—absolutely nothing—was as it should be.
Annabelle Greer, First Lady Annie, had been abused by her husband, the president of the United States.
There was no part of that sentence that made sense, much less could be true. It was the height of ridiculousness. And really, considering Ian Greer’s track record with scandal and the truth, it made perfect sense that he would make up a story like that.
And Then There Was You (Serenity House Book 2) Page 7
