by Lena Skye
“Oh my god…” Naomi said, and stopped as she continued reading in silence.
“What?” demanded Malaika as Eva handed a cup of tea to Naomi. “You can’t just say something like that and then stop reading it to us! What happened?” Even Keisha looked over while she was in the middle of a phone call, with one ear on the phone and one ear listening in to the conversation that she was too busy to join.
“She’s married!” Naomi gasped in amazement, looking around at the other ladies. “She is a married woman, and she says that Scott came on to her and that she had too much to drink and she couldn’t resist him. She says that she made a mistake and that she regrets it, but she doesn’t regret the baby. She says she’s glad that she wound up with his child, and that she hopes that the two of them can work it out because he wants her and he’s secretly in love with her! My god! She’s psychotic!”
Except for the phone call that Keisha was on, the rest of the room was silent, and Eva and Malaika both stared at her.
“I just can’t believe this!” She stared at the paper herself, trying to figure out if the woman, Cora Evans, was a complete whack job, or if there was some truth in the middle somehow.
Across town at his house, Scott had just gotten out of his swimming pool when he heard his cell phone ringing. At a glance he could see that he had missed several calls, and he could see that they were all from Harold. He knew that something must have gone very wrong. Harold was not a patient man, but at the opposite end of that spectrum, he wasn’t a totally impatient man, either.
“Hello?” Scott asked, wiping his head and face on his towel as he tried to keep his phone dry.
“Scotty! Where in the hell have you been? Do you know how many times I’ve tried to call you? Answer your damn phone when I call!” Harold snapped at him in irritation.
“Sorry, I was in the pool. What’s going on? Are you all right?” Scott asked as concern tugged at him.
“No I’m not all right! Have you looked at the paper this morning? Of course you haven’t looked at the paper this morning, or you wouldn’t be all right either,” Harold grumbled. “Get the paper. Now. Go out front and get it while you’re on the phone with me.”
Scott’s stomach began to twist, and he did as he was bidden to do, going outside at his front door to get his newspaper. “What am I looking for? What happened?” Any number of tragedies flitted through his mind.
“That dame you screwed… the one night stand. Well… she gave an exclusive interview to that jackass at the Times, and she told him more than you’re gonna believe.” Harold sounded completely disgusted.
“What are you talking about? What did she say? She couldn’t have said much, it was just one night… and it was just one time. There’s not that much to tell.” He felt a cold stone in the pit of his stomach.
“Well, I know that you’re going to read it, but I’ll give you the low down. For starters, she’s married,” he began, sounding as disgusted as Scott felt.
“She’s what? She… oh god. I didn’t know that she was married. She never told me that,” Scott replied quietly as he sat in a chair at the table on the patio by the pool. He set the newspaper on the table and opened it page by page, looking through it for the article as Harold continued to talk to him.
“She said that she’s glad that she’s having your kid and that she hopes that you two can work it out, because you’re in love with her, and that you asked her to leave her husband for you. Did you do that? Did you ask this broad to dump her husband and shack up with you?” Harold sounded as if he might threaten Scott if that were the case.
“No! God no! I mean… I was drunk, but I sure as hell am not in love with her and I never asked her to leave her husband for me. That’s outrageous! What is she doing? I have enough problems going on with that reporter and Naomi right now!” Scott flipped back and forth between the pages as he continued to search for the article.
“Oh… well, she brought up Naomi, too. She tore her apart and said she’s a fake and she’s trying to get to you for your money and fame by using a pregnancy from another guy. She didn’t have anything good to say about her or Jennifer. She made it sound like she is the love of your life.” Harold sighed and moaned miserably.
“Scotty, you better knock this crap of with these broads; they just aren’t worth it! We’ve worked way too hard to have some stupid chick sneak into the mix and screw it all up! Do you hear me? Your sponsors have already been calling me. They want to know what you’re doing. They’re seeing all of these stories and they don’t feel like you’re a good, moral, upstanding kind of man. They don’t think you’re a family man.
You’re coming off as a playboy, and that might sound like a good time, but it’s going to cost you a fortune unless you start doing condom ads.” Harold sounded gruff and irritable.
Scott finally found the article on page two of the newspaper and skimmed through it, reading everything that Harold had just told him about. He was livid when he saw it all. “That bitch. I can’t believe she did this! How am I going to raise a kid with someone who lies like this? What am I going to do with her?”
“You’re not going to do nothin’ with her, do you hear me?” Harold told him seriously. “There’s one way to fix this, and that’s it. Are you listening to me? You wanna save your career? You listen to me. You are going to marry Jennifer Jones. That’s the only way to fix this,” Harold stated emphatically.
Scott gasped. “Marry Jennifer? Are you crazy? I’m not going to marry Jennifer!”
“If you want to save your career you are. She is the best thing that ever happened to your career, and you’ve just about got your entire career screwed up now because of all these other women and their babies and all this garbage… no. You stop it. You stop it right where it is now.
You get married to Jennifer Jones. Everyone loves her, and everyone loves you with her. You’re going to keep all of your sponsors if you do that; if you show them that you’re a family man, and you show them that you’re settling down. Hell, you’ll probably get a bunch more sponsors just from all the publicity from the engagement and the wedding.
Are you listening to me? You marry Jennifer Jones. That’s what you do. That’s how you fix this. There’s no other way to do it.” Harold sounded as if he had just declared a mandate.
“I can’t marry Jennifer! I don’t love her!” Scott insisted.
“All right. I didn’t want to tell you this, but the team owners are worried about all of this negative publicity too; they think you’re giving the franchise a black eye, and they don’t like it. You don’t marry Jennifer, and you’re going to lose the football contract, too. The sponsors pay you more, but it all comes from the football contract, baby. It all comes from the game.
Are you willing to piss it all away just because you aren’t in love with Jennifer? Who cares if you’re in love with her? You get along with her, don’t you? That’s more than most married couples can say. Just marry her. Stay married a while.
If it doesn’t work, you can always divorce her later, but for right now, you’re in the middle a major storm, and the only thing that’s going to fix it is if you settle down and show the world that you’re responsible. You marry Jennifer. That’s your only option.” Harold laid it all out on the line.
“That’s no option,” Scott told him in a dark tone.
“Well it is, actually, and it’s the only real one you have if you want to keep working,” Harold answered him solemnly.
Chapter6
Eva walked back into the design firm the next morning and planted a newspaper down on Naomi’s desk without a word. Naomi glanced at it and looked away.
“I don’t want to read it. I don’t want to know what’s in it. I don’t care what’s in it. Every time I pick that damn thing up it’s bad news.” She continued to write on the page she was working on.
“You have to read it,” Eva replied to her sternly. “I didn’t drive over here to show this to you because it’s optional reading.”
>
Naomi sighed and shook her head. “No. I made up my mind. I’m done with him this time. I’m done with the newspapers. I’m done with the whole damn thing.”
Eva placed both of her hands on the edge of the desk and leaned in close to Naomi. “Read the paper, Naomi,” she said firmly.
With a loud sigh and a dark glance up at her best friend, Naomi picked up the paper and began to flip through it. “What am I looking for?”
“I marked it for you,” Eva said quietly, reaching out to an earmarked page, and opening the newspaper to it.
The headline was so big that it took up the entire top of both the left and right pages. It was a centerfold. The bold letters read, “Jennifer Jones to marry Scott Thompson.” Beneath the headline was one big photograph of the couple walking hand in hand into an award show in some of the finest clothes that Naomi had ever seen.
There were a few other smaller photos of them together, and at the bottom of the center of the pages, there was a photograph of the other woman, Cora Evans, by herself, and another photograph of Scott and Naomi walking out of the obstetrician’s office hand-in-hand.
Beside the photos there was a long article about the engagement and the rough weeks leading up to it in which Scott was in turmoil with his two mistresses, both of whom claimed to be pregnant with his children. The article stated that the news of the engagement was a secret that had been leaked to the press, and while neither Scott Thompson nor Jennifer Jones was available for comment, the leaked story came from a reliable source close to the couple.
Naomi stared. She could not believe what she was reading. Her eyes moved over the words again and again, but her mind just could not comprehend what she was looking at. It couldn’t be real. It couldn’t be happening. She had just been setting up a nursery in Scott’s home with him right before that.
She blinked and gave her head one slight shake. “I can’t… I… can’t….” she trailed off and closed the newspaper, pushing it off her desk. Closing her eyes, she covered her face with her hands and tried to push the images of the photographs and the words from her mind, but it was to no avail.
Malaika came to the desk and picked the newspaper up off the floor, and opened it, reading the article. She silently folded it back up and dropped it in the wastebasket at the side of Naomi’s desk.
Naomi looked up at Malaika and Eva. “I’m still working on Jennifer’s house. What am I going to do about working on Jennifer’s house? I can’t go over there now! Not if they are…” she shook her head and closed her eyes again for a moment, struggling to hold back the tidal wave of emotion that was strangling her.
Opening her eyes again after a few long moments, she looked back at the two women before her. “We have to have Jennifer Jones’ account. We have to get paid from her job or we are going to lose this building. We’ve gotten a lot of business from the publicity of the articles, and when everyone found out that I was her decorator, they flocked to us, but not all of that money has come in fast enough for us to save this place.
What am I going to do? I thought they were just friends! They told me that they were just…” she choked back a sob, “just friends! Now they’re engaged? How did that even happen? How am I supposed to keep working over at her house and finish the job? It’s the biggest job we ever had! I’m still putting a nursery into Scott’s house! This is… this is horrible! I can’t understand it at all! How is it even possible?” She could no longer hold in the sobs.
They hit her with a ton of force, rocking her body as she tried to breathe and cry at the same time. Her frame could barely hold in the tremendous emotion that erupted inside of her. Eva came to her and held her close while she shook and wept, and after a long while, she was able to let go of Eva and sit back in her chair, trying to wipe the tears from her cheeks.
Malaika sat before her in one of the chairs at the front of her desk. “Naomi, I didn’t want to really mention this before, because it feels like a conflict of interest, but things are changing for Reggie and I. We’re officially seeing each other. He feels pretty strongly about me already, and I have to say that I am developing those same feelings for him as well.
I know he said that we had until the end of the month to pay him for the building, but if I was being honest, I think that he wouldn’t sell it out from underneath us, because he wouldn’t want to risk anything going wrong with us. I might be wrong about that, but I’d be willing to bet on it.”
Naomi didn’t even have to consider what Malaika was telling her. “I can’t do that, Malaika. Not to you, or to him. He made it very clear at the beginning of the month that we had until the end of the month to come up with the money to buy the building, or we were going to lose it. There is no other real option for us. I wouldn’t want to compromise your new relationship with him by using that as a bartering tool in trying to keep the business here.
He has already been generous enough with us, giving us a whole month to come up with the money to buy it, and not only that, but keeping the price at the original amount for us even when the other two buyers offered him more for it. I can’t ask him to wait, or to give us an extension.
I can’t do that! It’s not right. He gave us a month. We have a month. That’s it. We have to find a way to come up with it before then. Jennifer Jones and all the other jobs that we’ve gotten are the only way that we can do that.”
Malaika looked at her sympathetically. “What if I took the Jones job for you? What if I did it? Would that work?”
Naomi closed her eyes and shook her head. “No,” she said just above a whisper. “It wouldn’t. She thinks we have this great bond and that we’re so similar to each other. We’re new friends. She wants me to do it. It’s a huge project, and it’s going to take me probably two months or more to get it done, but with what she wants to pay me now, we would have enough with the other jobs to buy the building.
If I walk out on the job, we don’t get paid for it, and we lose the building. I have to commit to spending the next two to three months at her home, constantly working on redesigning the whole thing. I can’t walk away from it, or I lose everything.”
Malaika nodded and pressed her lips together tightly as she held back all of the things that she wanted to say about it.
Eva reached her hand to Naomi’s back and rubbed it soothingly.
“What are you going to do?” Malaika asked quietly.
Naomi’s shoulders slumped and she stared off listlessly into oblivion. “There’s nothing that I can do other than go to work at Jennifer’s house, and finish the job. I can tell Scott that he has to get someone else to do the nursery, and maybe he’ll understand, but I can’t back out of the job with Jennifer.
I can ask her if I can work there when she isn’t home, and maybe she’ll understand too… unless she gets upset about the fact that I’m carrying her fiancé’s baby. That could end the job, too, if she’s mad enough about it. I never told her that I had anything to do with him other than decorating his house.
She’s going to find out that there is a lot more between us now, and that could very well change things. I guess we’ll wait and see what she wants to do. For now, I will plan on doing what I was going to do: work on her house and make the money I need to keep this building.”
Malaika gave her a nod. “If I can do anything to help you, or if there’s anything you need, please let me know.”
Naomi nodded in return and went back to the work at her desk. Eva hugged her shoulders and said goodbye to her.
Scott was sitting in his office at his home when he heard the doorbell ring and he looked up in surprise. He hadn’t been expecting any company. Getting up from his desk, he went to the door and answered it, only to find himself staring in shock at the visage of a gorgeous blonde woman standing in the doorway, smiling at him. Her belly was rounded and she was wearing a short sundress that barely came to the middle of her thighs.
She had big blue eyes and her lips and nails were painted red. Her frosty blonde hair was piled up on h
er head in an intricate hairdo that had been carefully designed to look somewhat messy. She smiled widely and walked through the door, sliding her arms around Scott’s neck, and kissing him softly on the mouth.
“Hello love, it’s so nice to see you again!” she winked at him and ran her hands over the muscled wall of his chest, subtly fingering the buttons on his shirt before letting her hands fall and walking past him into the living room.
“Cora...” he said in shock, turning his head and watching her as she walked away from him. He couldn’t believe that she was at his house. He closed the door and followed her into the living room, finding her nestling herself comfortably into the thickly cushioned sofa there. She patted the empty space beside her and smiled at him like a Cheshire Cat.
“Come sit beside me darling, we have so much to talk about,” she purred, giving him an enticing glance.
Every nerve in him sharpened and went on edge. He wanted to sit somewhere else, but he didn’t want to be rude, either. He walked to the sofa and sat near her, but not as close as she had indicated with her pat.
Pouting slightly, she scooted closer to him and turned to face him, curling her bare legs up beside her and laying her arm along the back of the sofa so that she could reach him with her hand. She slipped her red tipped fingernails into his hair and toyed with it a moment until he pulled his head away from her.
“What do you want to talk about?” he asked cautiously.
She tipped her head sideways and spoke with a gentle, almost sultry voice. “Well, we need to talk about the baby, and you… and me… and everything that’s going on right now.”
He frowned at her. “I read the article in the Times… that exclusive interview that you gave to them. Why did you tell that reporter all of those lies? Why didn’t you tell me you were married? Are you married?” he asked, looking at her darkly.
She shrugged indifferently. “Yes, but that doesn’t have anything to do with us.” She pushed her botox-infused lower lip out into a fat pout. “He’s an old man, and he’s no fun. I needed someone… younger.” She smiled naughtily at him again. “I needed someone passionate and strong, and someone who knew how to be an incredible lover… I needed you.” She reached her fingertip to his face and trailed it down his cheek. He pushed her hand away.
