Tommy Gabrini 4: Dapper Tom Begin Again

by Mallory Monroe

  “What you find-ah

  What you feel-now

  What you know-a

  To be real!”

  Men began showing up seemingly out of the woodwork and surrounded Liz as she danced. Some were so awful that Carlton from Fresh Prince of Bel-Air could out-dance them. Tommy laughed as they tried to dance and tried even harder to jockey for position beside Liz. She was, without question, the queen of this backyard funfest. But Liz just wanted to dance. And she danced as hard as Cheryl Lynn was singing:

  “You know that your love is my love

  My love is your love

  Our love is here to stay a-a!”

  But the men wouldn’t let up. They wanted to dance with her exclusively, not as a group. Because they knew it too. She was dancing with each and every one of them, and none of them all at once. She was a pro, Tommy thought as he watched her, and her gift was not in seduction, but in self-possession. She was just being herself, and it was in her being, not in what she was doing, that was turning those men on.

  Tommy sat back and enjoyed the view. He enjoyed her enjoyment. But as he watched her cavort around that backyard with those men, it turned serious for him. Here was a woman he could respect, he thought. She had her challenges, she already admitted that running an international magazine was tough enough, but she didn’t let it get her down. She was moving and dancing as if she couldn’t have a better time. She saw that those men were jockeying for position beside her, but she kept on dancing. They had an agenda. Each one wanted her to stop focusing on the other guy in the dance group, and turn her complete attention to him. And only him. But they could forget that too, Tommy thought. She was his. He knew it like he knew his name.

  But as soon as he thought such a thought, alarm bells rang in his head. What in the world was he thinking? She was his? Was he kidding? He wasn’t going through that fire again! He was hitting and running these days, he wasn’t about to stick around! Not for her. Not for any woman. He wanted her physically, just as every blue-bloodied man in that backyard wanted her, but he also knew an ass like hers did not come cheap. As he watched that ass bounce around as she danced around, he knew nobody was going to play her cheap. She might give him some, she’d already shown some interest in that direction, but it was going to cost him. It was going to cost him, emotionally, a pretty penny. Problem was, he was emotionally bankrupt. He didn’t have it to give. He wasn’t paying that price ever again.

  He therefore got up before he lost himself over a piece of ass once more, and went inside the house.

  Liz was still dancing, and singing, and enjoying even the guys that surrounded her. But when she looked over to see if Tommy was enjoying the fun too, she was surprised to see that he had gone.

  That was a bit of a letdown, if she’d admit it. Not that she was interested in yet another smooth talking pretty boy who would wind and dine her, would wham and bam her, and then leave her high and dry. But he was, at least for now, a little more interesting than anybody else.

  But oh well, she thought, as she twirled around with her finger pointing skyward. His loss.

  And she continued to dance, and sing, and laugh.

  Tommy was once again in Rodney’s office making yet another round of business calls, including one to his pilot to ready the plane. His belly was full and his legs were crossed, and he was getting updates on various fronts. But just as he ended the call with his pilot, and was about to return a call to his CFO, he began hearing rising, angry voices. Concerned about Sal and Gemma, he immediately stood up with smartphone in hand, and walked from behind the desk and out of the office.

  Just as he slid open the double oak doors that led into the living room, Chelsey and Rodney were standing toe to toe. Cassie was standing beside Rodney, and Liz was standing beside Chelse. Sal and Gemma were in the room too, standing together as if this was a two-person fight and they were content to stay out of it, but that seemed unlikely.

  “Over and over,” Rodney was saying with fire in his voice. “Time and time again! Disappointment after disappointment! And now you’re here, on this special day?”

  “If you don’t want me here just say the word,” Chelsey said firmly. “I can leave.”

  “Then leave, gotdammit!” Rodney shot back. “Nobody asked you to come in the first place!”

  “Roddy,” Cassie said as she touched her husband’s arm.

  But Rodney wasn’t having it. He snatched away. His entire focus was on Chelse. “Four years you stayed away from us. Four long years! You didn’t hurt me. You could have stayed away four more for all I cared. But your mother. The way you stayed away from her. That’s unconscionable. That’s the real offense. For years your mother invited you to everything when we all told her to forget it. You were a lost cause. But she invited you anyway. Over and over. And then she’d get excited about your coming, and you never showed up. Not ever!”

  Tommy could see a change in Chelsey’s eyes. She was still defiance, but a slither of regret was there too.

  “And then, out of the blue, you’re back,” Rodney continued. “And because you graced us with your presence we’re supposed to do belly flops and cartwheels? You show up and we’re supposed to forget all of those I’m coming and then I can’t come salutations as if they never occurred? To hell with you!”

  Tommy stared at Chelsey. Those last four words hit her hard, he could see it in her eyes. But she held her ground.

  “I’m the bureau chief in a region of this world that’s a war zone. Every time I told Ma I was coming, I was coming. But events dictate my life, not the other way around, and Ma knows that. If I could have made it those other times I would have made it. But I couldn’t!”

  “So you decide to just drop in?”

  “I didn’t want to get her hopes up again. Because events might have prevented me again.”

  “Oh please!” Rodney said. “Who do you think you’re talking to? I’m a banker and your mother is an attorney. We aren’t fools! We know good and well that if you wanted to be here you would have turned that cell phone off and got here, events be damned! You didn’t come because you didn’t want to come, so stop pretending otherwise!”

  “I don’t pretend.”

  “Like hell you don’t!” Rodney shot back. “Your ass is the great pretender and you’re pretending you don’t know it!”

  “You know what,” Chelsey said, as she turned toward the stairs. “I’m getting out of here. I’m not standing here taking this shit.”

  But as she turned to leave, Rodney flung her back around. Tommy immediately made steps toward the threesome when Rodney handled Chelse so roughly. Which pleased Liz, but it surprised Sal and Gemma. Dapper Tom was not the kind of man who would interfere in a family dispute. He would often let adults battle it out for themselves. But he was about to step to Chelsey’s defense, and it stunned both of them. But not nearly as much as it stunned Tommy.

  But Cassie intervened before he had to. “Just stop it, Roddy!” she said firmly, pulling him away from Chelse. “Stop it right now! She came to see us. She came thousands of miles to see us. We should be grateful for at least that.”

  “Grateful?” Rodney asked. “Grateful for what? That she made some grand appearance? That she finally showed up? She doesn’t give a damn about us! You know it and I know it too! She’s a cold, calculating, selfish bitch, and I can’t stand the sight of her! I wish she was dead and that’s the honest truth!”

  It felt like a sucker punch to every soul in that room. Especially to Tommy. He remembered when Rodney Jones had grave misgivings about Gemma’s decision to marry Sal, even after Sal had saved Rodney’s life, but he thought that was just an overly concerned dad being dad. But he’d never seen this side of Rodney before. Not ever.

  He looked at Chelsey. While Gemma was saying Dad don’t, and Sal was saying you don’t mean that, Mr. J, and while Cassie was admonishing her husband as well, Chelsey wasn’t saying a word. She was the recipient of Rodney’s venom, but she didn’t say a word. She stood there
staring at her father as if she was seeing him, not in any new light, but in the same light magnified.

  Liz moved closer to her friend, and placed an arm around her.

  But if anybody in that room thought Rodney was sorry for his harsh, venomous words, they were grossly mistaken. He didn’t double back. He doubled down. “This is our thirty-fifth wedding anniversary, Cass,” he said to his wife, as if she was the only one who deserved an explanation. “Our thirty-fifth anniversary. One of the most cherished days of our lives. And she pick this day to show her face again? This special day? Why is that, Cass? If she isn’t the bitch we know she is, why is that?”

  And then he ran his hand across his dark head, as if he knew the answer as surely as he knew his name, and it was an unpleasant knowledge. And then he headed out of the living room, and then out of the house altogether.

  But if that wasn’t enough drama in a day, Cassie turned, not to run after her husband, but to scold her daughter. “Go to him, Chelse,” she urged with an almost desperation in her voice. “Go apologize to that man.”

  “Apologize?” Liz asked suddenly, astounded by Cass.

  “Stay out of this, Liz,” Gemma said.

  “I will not stay out of it!” Liz shot back. “Let’s call a thing a thing here. Your father has treated you like a princess and Chelse like shit her entire life, and every one of us have sat back and allowed it. Chelse allowed it too, but that doesn’t make it right. You’re his shining light, while Chelse is his disgrace. Let’s call a thing a thing here!”

  But Gemma wasn’t ready to throw her father under anybody’s bus. “Careful, Liz,” she said. “I hear what you’re saying, but that’s my father you’re talking about.”

  “But what about your sister, Gem?” Liz asked her. “She doesn’t matter? Only he does?”

  “They both matter and you know it.”

  Then Sal pulled Gemma closer, as if to remind her that this was not her fight. Her father could stand up for himself. Her sister needed to do the same.

  Cassie, however, was all-in with Rodney. “Apologize to him,” she said to Chelsey again. “For once in your life stop being so stubborn and go talk to that man. Comfort him! Behave the way a daughter should. None of this is his fault!”

  Chelsey frowned. “But it’s my fault?” she asked with incredulity in her voice.

  “It’s not his fault,” was all Cassie would commit to.

  Tommy’s heart grew faint. Because he knew the signs. He’d seen it all his life. The lines had been drawn, probably years ago, between her daughter and her husband. Somebody had to win, somebody had to lose. Her daughter didn’t win.

  “Go talk to him,” Cassie said again. “Go tell him that he’s right and you’re wrong. Beg his forgiveness. Get on your knees and beg that man if you have to!”

  Chelse smiled that smile of astonishment and looked at Liz. “Can you believe this?” she asked her. “She says I should beg him. I should go to him!”

  “You should go all right,” Liz suggested. “You should go up those stairs, get your shit, and get the hell out of here! That’s what you should do. That’s what I would do.”

  Sal stepped up too. “You’re out of line, lady,” he said.

  “I don’t think I’m out of line at all,” Liz shot back.

  “You need to shut it,” Sal said.

  Liz placed her hand on her hip. “Make me,” she said.

  “It’s all right,” Chelsey said. “She didn’t say anything I wasn’t going to say myself.” Then Chelsey began heading up the stairs. “I’m getting out of here.”

  Liz followed her up the stairs. Tommy was pleased with Liz for standing up for her friend, and Chelsey for standing up for herself. That’s right, he found himself saying to himself as they walked up those stairs. Don’t let anybody diminish your humanity!

  Gemma broke away from Sal and followed Chelsey and Liz up those stairs, which pleased Tommy too. A man who would call his daughter the names that man called Chelse, didn’t deserve her presence. Gemma had to know that. He was proud of her.

  Then he looked at Cassie. He knew she was only fighting for her husband’s dignity, and she might have even agreed with a lot of what he said. But she loved her daughter too. Not nearly as much as she loved Rodney apparently, but he could see the love.

  He looked at Sal, who was standing there as if he was as lost as Cassie. He saw the irony too. Only people like he and Tommy had family drama like this. Rodney and Cassie didn’t deal in this kind of dirt. They were the salt-of-the-earth as far as Tommy and Sal were concerned. What was happening here? It flipped the script on them and neither one of them liked it. Because they both knew, from vast experience, that there was true trouble in paradise when even salt could lose its’ flavor.

  “You okay, Ma?” Sal asked his mother-in-law. Sal wasn’t the touchy-feely type, and didn’t like to be put in this position. Tommy knew it too. He went over to Cassie, and placed his arm around her.

  “I’m okay,” Cassie said with an attempt at a smile. “Roddy and Chelse, they just don’t mix. They’re both stubborn and set in their own ways and half the time I can’t get a word in edgewise. It can be very unsettling.”

  “Certainly,” Tommy said. “But,” he added softly, as if he was a man who truly knew how to comfort a woman, “it’s been my experience that you have to let adults be adults. You have to let them make, and also live by, their own decisions.”

  Cassie looked up at him. He always seemed like such an easygoing, likeable man to her. So much so that she used to secretly wish Gemma had chosen him instead of Sal. Not that she didn’t find Sal likeable. She did. She loved her son-in-law! But where Sal was still rough around the edges, Tommy was already smooth.

  But then Chelsey and Liz came roaring back down the stairs, only this time Chelse had her suitcase with her. Gem was far behind them.

  Cassie moved away from Tommy toward her charging daughter. That smile that Tommy had suspected all along was plastered on Chelsey’s face to get her through this day, was gone. She was dead serious now. Sal walked toward the stairs too when she saw Gemma, who was hurrying down behind her sister, looking anguished too.

  “You can’t just leave, Chelse,” Gemma was insisting.

  “Watch me,” Chelsey said defiantly. She inadvertently brushed against Tommy as she hugged Cassie’s neck, and kissed her on the cheek. “I’ll call you, Ma,” she said.

  “But what plane are you going to catch?” Gemma asked. “You weren’t leaving tonight.”

  “I’ll stay in a hotel until tomorrow,” Chelsey said firmly. “I’ve got to get out of here .” Then she actually looked at Gemma. She saw the distress in her sister’s eyes. She went over to her. “I know you mean well, Gem, I know you do. But I made a mistake coming here. I shouldn’t have come. I should have stayed away. But I thought . . .” Then she shook her head as if she was dismissing such a thought. “I shouldn’t have come.”

  “It was just all such a surprise, dear,” Cassie said. “Your father wasn’t expecting you today. It threw him, that’s all. Why don’t you stay longer, like you planned, and try to work things out?”

  Liz looked at her. “Work things out with a man who hate her guts? Work things out with a man who wishes she was dead?”

  “No thanks,” Chelsey said firmly, and she and Liz headed for the front door.

  Tommy knew he shouldn’t get involved. He knew he should have let them sail their asses out that door exactly the way they were doing. And if it was just Chelsey, he probably would have stayed out of it. That daddy-daughter drama was between daddy and daughter as far as he was concerned. But Liz was with her. And as much as he hated to admit it, he wasn’t ready to let her go.

  “Chelsey, Liz,” he said.

  Liz and Chelsey both stopped, which surprised Sal and Gemma given the way they were so determinedly charging out of there, and then they turned around.

  “I’m flying out to Rome tonight,” Tommy said. “Will that get you two closer to where you need to go
?”

  Tommy could see the immediate acceptance from Chelsey’s body language alone. She just wanted to get away from there. But she was accustomed to taking her cues from Liz. She looked at Liz.

  But Liz, Tommy also noticed, was not so easily persuaded. She wanted out too, but she wasn’t going to leave any kind of way. “So does that mean you have a private jet that will take us there?” Liz asked him.

  But now Sal took offense. “What are you asking questions for?” he asked her. “My brother is offering you a ride, lady. What difference does it make in what? He’s not gonna load you on the back of a turnip truck and take you there, if that’s what you’re thinking.”

  Liz inwardly smiled at Sal’s snide remark, but she had her game face on right now. The fact that Tommy had offered them this lift was huge. Chelsey was hurting, and needed to get away, and he intervened to help. She liked that. “It’ll get us closer to be sure,” she said. “Yes.”

  Sal nodded and Gemma smiled. “Well at least that,” she said. She didn’t want her sister languishing all night in some hotel. Then she rubbed her brother-in-law’s arm. “Thanks, Tommy,” she said. “Thank-you so very much.”

  Although Tommy accepted her thanks, he had the oddest feeling that he didn’t need it. He had the oddest sensation that he was the one who should be thankful.

  CHAPTER SIX

  He stood at the bar inside his private jet and poured two glasses of wine. But his eyes were primarily on Liz. Chelsey was in one of the back cabins fast asleep. She said she was a little tired and needed some shut-eye, but Tommy and Liz both knew better than that. She was emotionally spent after the kind of day she spent at her father’s house. She’d be out all night.

  They were in the air for a couple hours already, flying high above the clouds. Tommy had been in the conference room, preoccupied with phone calls and videoconferences he could not avoid, and he was just getting a chance to relax at all. And although Chelsey was in one of the private cabins fast asleep, Liz was in the open cabin wide awake. She had her iPhone sitting beside her, on top of a small stack of files, and she had her iPad on her lap, thumbing through what was undoubtedly her magazine’s articles she needed to review. Tommy noticed how she would occasionally stop thumbing through her iPad and look out the window, at the blackness that surrounded them, as if her mind had drifted away in the clouds, and then she’d get back to work.