Because of You

by Rochelle Alers

  “Please tell my mother to begin serving without me. I want to get out of these wet clothes,” Jordan said, not breaking stride.

  He made his way across the expansive space his parents used as a reception hall whenever they hosted a gathering of less than fifty to an alcove where an elevator would take him to the private apartments.

  His grandfather had claimed the entire first floor, Jordan and his brothers Noah and Rhett had bedroom suites on the second floor, his father, mother and sister Chanel had the third floor, and the three suites on the top floor were set aside for houseguests.

  It took Jordan less than ten minutes to change out of his slacks and into a pair of charcoal-gray flannel with a black cashmere mock turtleneck sweater and imported slip-ons. Although he’d told Walter to instruct Christiane to begin dinner without him, he knew she would wait for him to put in an appearance. Her mantra was never begin a meal unless everyone was seated at the table. The exception was whenever Edward called to inform her that he would be working late.

  He took the staircase instead of the elevator, and, after walking through a narrow hallway to the opposite wing of the house, he entered the brightly lit dining room. It was the smaller of two dining rooms in the mansion. Christiane held family dinners in this room because she claimed it was less formal and more intimate. Who was his mother kidding? A table for sixteen wasn’t what Jordan thought of as intimate. After all, there were six people who lived at the house: his parents, his grandfather, his two brothers and his sister.

  Everyone was seated, awaiting his arrival: his mother, father, grandfather, sister, her friend Paige Anderson and his brothers Noah and Rhett. A pretty dark-haired woman with sparkling light brown eyes clung to Rhett as if she feared he would disappear. It was only the second time Jordan could recall Rhett bringing a woman to a family get-together.

  Rounding the table, he leaned over, kissing his mother softly on her cheek. “Sorry I’m late.”

  Christiane reached up and patted his arm. “That’s okay, darling.” Her shimmering emerald-green eyes met her eldest son’s. There was a hint of laughter in his hazel orbs. “Did you change out of your wet clothes?”

  Jordan winked at her. “I changed upstairs.”

  He wanted to tell his mother that she had to stop treating him as if he were six years old, but knew it was futile. Christiane said “once a mother, always a mother,” regardless of how old her children were. She was the mother of four and still without grandchildren—something that had become a bane of her existence. Many of the women in her social circle were grandmothers or had married children. Although three of her four children were in their twenties and thirties, none seemed remotely interested in exchanging vows.

  “Grandpa,” he said, acknowledging Wyatt Wainwright sitting at the head as the family’s patriarch.

  “We’re so glad you decided to drag yourself away from Harlem to visit with your family,” Wyatt drawled facetiously.

  “Grandpa, why do you always have to start with Jordan?” Noah Wainwright asked.

  “Watch your mouth, son.” Edward Wainwright glared at his middle son, who was his spitting image in every way except temperament. Noah’s mood swings kept everyone off balance and on guard because of his sharp tongue. “After all, we have guests present.”

  A pale eyebrow lifted a fraction when twenty-three-year-old Noah leaned back from the table. Shaggy ash-blond hair framed a deeply tanned face. He’d cut short his stay in the Caribbean to return to the States to share Christmas with his family. His blue eyes changed color depending on his mood. Noah was very angry because he’d been coerced into joining the family’s real estate firm after Jordan had refused to take over the reins from their father.

  “That has never stopped Grandpa from saying what he had to say.”

  Jordan gave Noah a look that he had no trouble interpreting. He wanted his brother to drop it. A barely discernible smile parted Noah’s lips as he nodded. Shifting his gaze, he glared at the elderly man with a shock of thick white hair and sharp, piercing sky-blue orbs that hadn’t faded despite having lived seven decades. The coal-black eyebrows of his youth remained. The less he said to Wyatt the better it was for grandfather and grandson. He nodded to the young woman sitting beside his youngest brother. Rhett would celebrate his twenty-first birthday in another month, and he was just beginning to assert himself.

  Taking his seat, he leaned to his right and pressed a kiss to his sister’s hair. “What’s up, Charlie?”

  Chanel Wainwright flushed a bright pink. Jordan had promised never to call her Charlie within earshot of their mother. “Don’t call me that around Mother,” she whispered with clenched teeth.

  Jordan wanted to tell his sister that if their mother hadn’t named her children after a character from Gone with the Wind and her favorite fragrance, she wouldn’t have a problem explaining her name.

  “Hi, Jordan,” said a soft girlish voice.

  He leaned forward, smiling at Paige. “Hello, Paige. Where are your parents?”

  “It’s all right, Jordan,” Christiane said, as she signaled for the first course to be served. “Paige’s folks went to Monte Carlo for the holiday and I told them Paige could stay with us rather than with a sitter.”

  Jordan resisted the urge to roll his eyes. He couldn’t and would never understand why people had children only to hand them over to a nanny or sitter, while they continued to live their lives as if by their leave. Only parents without a conscience would leave their only child—a sixteen-year-old girl—with the family of her friend to fly across an ocean to gamble and party on the French Riviera.

  When—no, if—he married and had a family, he would make certain to play an active role in the lives of his children. That was where Christiane differed from her peers; she hadn’t left child-rearing to nannies, housekeepers or au pairs. Her face was the first one Jordan had seen when he woke up and the last one before he’d closed his eyes at night. Even Edward had become a more involved parent. Jordan didn’t agree with everything his parents said or did, but there was never a question as to their unwavering support when it concerned their children.

  The mood lightened considerably after several glasses of wine accompanied by asparagus soup, a radicchio, fennel and walnut salad, rib eye roast with a mustard and black peppercorn sauce, winter greens with pancetta and potatoes au gratin. Chanel and Paige asked to be excused before dessert was served. The chef had outdone himself when he’d prepared Apple Charlotte with whipped cream.

  Jordan was amused when Rhett, who was not yet legal, refilled his wineglass. He knew his brother had begun drinking before he’d celebrated his twenty-first birthday, but usually not in front of their parents. He, on the other hand, had raided the liquor cabinet at fourteen and had drunk so much that he had been sick for more than a week. It was another ten years before he took another drink.

  “Jordan, are you currently dating anyone?” Christiane asked, breaking into his thoughts.

  Tracing the rim of the wineglass with a forefinger, he stared at the prisms of color on the glass reflected from the chandelier. “No, Mother.”

  “Didn’t you tell me you were seeing a girl?” Edward said, accepting a cigar from the engraved silver case Wyatt had handed him. “Thanks, Dad.”

  “I was,” Jordan said truthfully, “but it was nothing more than a summer fling.”

  Christiane sat up straighter. “Who was she, darling? Do I know her family?”

  A pregnant pause ensued before he said, “Her name is Natasha Parker, and I doubt whether you’d know her family.”

  All traces of color disappeared from his mother’s face, leaving it frighteningly pale. “Not that girl who worked with Jean-Paul for a few days.” Her words were a breathless whisper.

  “She’s a woman, not a girl, Mother.”

  Wyatt did something he rarely did in the dining room. He lit his cigar, inhaled deeply and blew out a perfect smoke ring. A gray haze obscured the sneer around his mouth. “It didn’t take long, did it, Jo
rdan? I had no idea you liked dark meat. But then I really shouldn’t be surprised, because what else is there in Harlem.”

  Noah flashed a white-tooth smile. “Does she have a sister?”

  “Don’t you mean a brother?” Wyatt drawled.

  Touching the corners of his mouth with a damask napkin, Noah pushed back his chair and stood up. He pointed to his parents. “Now you see why I don’t bring a woman into this.” He shifted his angry gaze to Rhett. “Get your girlfriend out of here before she finds herself with a bull’s-eye on her back.”

  The young woman whom Rhett had introduced as Amelia pressed a hand to her chest. “Please don’t mind me. I grew up with my folks going at each other like cats and dogs. After a while, I learned to tune them out.”

  Jordan joined Noah when he, too, stood up. “Excuse me.”

  Turning on his heels, he walked out of the dining room, his brother following in his footsteps. He knew if he’d stayed what would’ve ensued would have been an argument that would have been certain to pit him and Noah against their parents and grandfather. Edward was fifty-five, yet he still hadn’t been able to stand up to his tyrannical, controlling father. Wyatt had clawed his way out of poverty on New York City’s Lower East Side to create a real estate dynasty second only to Douglas Elliman in New York City, and now at seventy-eight, he was tough as steel and wasn’t above using his fists when necessary to prove a point.

  “When are you going to learn not to entertain Grandfather’s taunting?” he asked Noah.

  “I just can’t stand it when he comes off so condescending. And just because I won’t subject a woman to his holier-than-thou attitude he thinks I’m gay.”

  “He is who he is,” Jordan said, taking the spiral staircase instead of the elevator to the second floor and their suites. “After I had that dust-up with him last year I made myself a promise never to let him see me that angry again.”

  “How do you hold your temper?”

  Jordan pushed open the door to his apartment that included an en suite bath, dressing room, living/dining room area and a utility kitchen. He probably would’ve lived in the mansion until he married if he hadn’t had such an angry confrontation with his grandfather. The apartment suite afforded him complete privacy, and a full-time household staff was on hand to provide him with whatever he needed regardless of the day or the hour. However, purchasing the maisonette less than a mile away gave him something he hadn’t been able to achieve living under the same roof as his family—independence. Noah preceded him, flopping down on a club chair with a matching footstool, while he draped his long frame over a sofa.

  “Remember, Noah, I’ve got ten years and a lot more experience, and with that comes maturity. I learned more working as a litigator protecting the interest of well-heeled clients than I had in three years of law school. And now working in Harlem with clients whose needs are as great or even greater than those at Trilling, Carlyle and Browne has forced me to examine who I am and what I want for my future.”

  “What do you want, Jordan?”

  “I want the best for the clients of Chatham and Wainwright.”

  Noah gave him a long, penetrating stare. Ten years his senior, Jordan was considered tall, dark and handsome. His black hair and olive coloring was a dramatic contrast in a family where everyone was blond. However, whenever he saw photographs of their grandfather in his youth, the resemblance between Wyatt and Jordan was uncanny. Wyatt Wainwright had been quite the rake with his raven hair and penetrating blue eyes.

  “What about your personal life?” he questioned again.

  “What about it, Noah?”

  “Don’t you want to get married? Start a family?”

  Jordan rested his head on folded arms as he lay across the sofa. “I suppose I do one of these days.”

  “Why are you so ambivalent?”

  “I’m not ambivalent. It’s just that I haven’t met the right woman.”

  “You haven’t met the right woman and I have.”

  Sitting up as if he were pulled by a taut wire, Jordan planted his feet on the carpet. “Who is she?”

  “You’ll meet her if you come down to the Bahamas with me.”

  “When are you leaving?”

  “Tomorrow night. I’m not coming back until January the third.”

  Jordan shook his head. “I wish I could. I promised Brandt I would attend his New Year’s Eve party.” Their professional football player cousin hosted a New Year’s Eve bash at his penthouse every two years.

  “Damn! I forgot about that,” Noah said under his breath. “Well, maybe you’ll meet her another time. Now, tell me about your summer liaison.”

  Leaning back, Jordan stared at objects in the room that were as familiar as the back of his hand: the suede and leather seating grouping, the marble fireplace with the mantelpiece lined with family photographs, the floor-to-ceiling windows with glorious views of Central Park. As a child he’d spent countless hours sitting on the padded window seats watching the change of seasons.

  The park had become his personal playground when he’d ice skated at Wollman Rink and walked the 86th Street transverse road to the West Side to visit the American Museum of National History several times a month.

  It was at the Museum of the City of New York, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Natural History, where he’d lost himself in art and history, where he’d escaped the orderly life his mother had created to mold him into someone he hadn’t wanted to be. Christiane Wainwright had wanted him to attend the boarding school where countless Johnston men had received an exemplary education. But it was Jordan’s first memory of his father asserting his authority when he told his wife that he refused to warehouse his son in a drafty New England school where he would act and react like a robot instead of a six-year-old boy. He’d been quick to remind her that their son was a Wainwright, not a Johnston. His parents had finally reached a compromise, and he had been enrolled in a prestigious Upper East Side preparatory school, where all of the students arrived and were picked up in chauffeur-driven limousines.

  Life as Jordan knew it changed the year he’d celebrated his tenth birthday. With Noah’s birth he was no longer an only child. Rhett was born less than two years later, and Chanel five years later. He was seventeen when his sister was born, and her birth was a mixture of delight and sadness for Jordan. The joy of having a baby sister had softened him. But because he’d left for college, then enrolled in law school he’d missed seeing her first steps, hearing her talk in sentences and other important milestones during the first seven years of her life.

  “Jordan!”

  He jumped as if coming out a trance. “What’s up?”

  A frown marred Noah’s handsome features. “I asked you about Natasha Parker.”

  Jordan closed his eyes. “There’s not much to tell. She needed money for tuition for her last year in culinary school, so I hired her to teach me to cook—”

  “Did you learn how to cook?” Noah interrupted, smiling.

  He nodded. “I can put together a nice breakfast and grill steaks and fish. We got close, real close, but we both knew it was going to end once she returned to school.”

  “Where’s she in school?”

  “Rhode Island.”

  “Come on, Jordan. It’s not as if Rhode Island is halfway across the country. You could still see her.”

  Jordan shook his head. “No, I can’t. She’s married. I didn’t know it at the time, but she and her husband were separated.”

  “When did you find out?”

  “He was involved in an accident, and that’s when she told me.”

  “Were you in love with her?”

  The sweep hand on the clock on the mantelpiece made a full revolution before Jordan spoke again. “No. If I was, I would’ve fought to keep her. What’s up with you asking if she had a sister?”

  Noah closed his eyes for several seconds, long pale lashes brushing the top of his cheekbones. “I don’t have a particular type when it comes to women.”


  Attractive lines fanned out around Jordan’s eyes when he smiled. “I take it you like a little diversity.”

  “It’s more than a little, big brother.”

  Jordan sat up, leaned over and bumped fists with his brother. He knew instinctually when Noah did decide to marry, the woman he would choose was certain to change the complexion of the family in more ways than one.

  The brothers talked for hours about the women they’d dated and those they wished they hadn’t. It was close to ten when Noah retreated to his own apartment and Jordan went into the bathroom to shower before climbing into bed. He was asleep within minutes of his head touching the pillow. He’d promised his mother he would spend the week with her, but chided himself for giving into her plea that she didn’t see him enough. He loved Christiane, but could only take his grandfather in small doses. Hopefully the week would go quickly, and after the first of the year he wouldn’t be obligated to hang out with his family again until the Easter break.

  Chapter 2

  Aziza Fleming pulled the cashmere shawl tighter around her shoulders before settling back against the Town Car’s leather seat. It was New Year’s Eve and she was on her way to a party when she wanted nothing more than to be at home, in front of the television watching the ball drop, while toasting the new year with a glass of champagne.

  Instead of stockings, a pair of designer stilettos, a dress that revealed more than it concealed, she would’ve preferred a pair of lounging pajamas and thick cotton socks. However, she’d caved when her brother threatened to come to Westchester and forcibly drag her out of the house to attend a party hosted by his pro ball teammate on New Year’s Eve at an Upper East Side penthouse.

  Her brother Alexander Fleming claimed she worked too hard and was alone much too much. But what her football player brother failed to realize or understand was that she was content being alone. It wasn’t as if she couldn’t find a date—if she needed one. It was that she didn’t want to date anyone. She had a career she loved, owned a house in a community she liked and enjoyed decorating it, and most of all she’d learned to love herself.