Forever an Eaton: Bittersweet LoveSweet Deception

by Rochelle Alers

  Zabrina smiled again, then her smile vanished when she spied the man she hadn’t expected to see until Belinda’s wedding. Myles Adam Eaton had walked into the restaurant with a beautiful, petite dark-skinned woman with her hand draped possessively over the sleeve of his suit jacket. Myles immediately glanced in her direction. Their eyes met, recognition dawned and then the moment passed when he dipped his head to listen to something the woman was saying. To say time had been kind to Myles was an understatement. Quickly averting her gaze so Belinda wouldn’t see what had gotten her attention, she signaled for the waiter.

  “I’ll take the check please.”

  Zabrina silently applauded herself for becoming quite the accomplished actress. It’d taken a decade of smiling when she hadn’t wanted to smile, uttering the appropriate phrases and responses when attending political events, even though she’d wanted to spew expletives. She didn’t know if the woman on Myles’s arm was his wife, fiancée or date for the evening, but it didn’t matter. Zabrina didn’t ever expect to become Mrs. Myles Eaton. Having his son was her consolation for having to give him up.

  “I told you I was treating tonight,” Belinda said between clenched teeth.

  Zabrina took the leather binder from the waiter. “You can treat the next time.”

  She didn’t tell Belinda that with all of Thomas Cooper’s so-called political and legal savvy he’d neglected to draw up a will, and she’d inherited a multimillion-dollar home, which she’d promptly sold, and investments of which she’d had no previous knowledge. She’d sold the shares before Wall Street bottomed out and deposited the proceeds into an account for her son’s education. Becoming a wealthy woman was a huge price to pay for having to give up the man she loved while denying her son his birthright.

  Zabrina settled the bill, pushed back her chair and walked out of the restaurant, Belinda following, without glancing over to where Myles sat with his dinner date. She waited with Belinda for the parking attendants to retrieve their cars from valet parking. Her car arrived first.

  She hugged her childhood friend. “I’ll see you next week.”

  “Next week,” Belinda repeated.

  Zabrina got into her late-model Lincoln sedan and maneuvered out of the restaurant parking lot. She hadn’t realized her hands were shaking until she stopped for a red light. She closed her eyes, inhaling a lungful of cool air flowing from the automobile’s air conditioner. When she opened her eyes the light had changed and she was back in control.

  * * *

  Myles Eaton pretended to be interested in the menu on the table in front of him to avoid staring at the table where Zabrina Mixon and his sister had been. A wry smile touched his mouth. He’d forgotten. She was no longer a Mixon. She was now Zabrina Cooper.

  As an attorney and professor of constitutional law, he’d memorized countless Supreme Court decisions, yet he had not, could not, did not want to remember the dozen words that had turned his world upside down.

  His fiancée, the woman to whom he’d pledged his life and his future had waited until two weeks before they were to be married to call and tell him she couldn’t marry him because she was in love with another man. And when he’d discovered the “other man” was none other than Thomas Cooper, his rage had escalated until he realized he had to leave Philadelphia or spend the rest of his life obsessing about the woman who’d broken his heart.

  Thomas Cooper used every opportunity to parade and flaunt his much younger wife. Myles could still recall the photographs of a very pregnant Zabrina with the councilman’s hand splayed over her swollen belly at a fundraiser. Then there was the official family photograph with the haunted look in Zabrina’s eyes when she’d stared directly into the camera lens. There were rumors that she’d been afflicted with chronic postpartum depression, while others hinted that marital problems had beset the Coopers and they were seeing a marriage counselor.

  All of the rumors ended for Myles when he requested and was granted a transfer to work out of the law firm’s New York office. Adjusting to the faster pace of New York had been the balm he needed to start over. The cramped studio apartment was a far cry from his spacious condo. But that hadn’t been important, because most nights when he came home after putting in a fourteen-hour day he’d shower and fall into bed, then get up and do it all over again.

  He’d given New York City eight years of his life before he decided he didn’t want to practice law, but teach it. He contacted a former professor who told him of an opening at his law-school alma mater. He applied for the position, went through the interview process and when he received the letter of appointment to teach constitutional law at Duquesne’s law school in Pittsburgh, he finally found peace.

  “What are you having, Myles?”

  His head jerked up and he smiled at the woman who’d become his law-school mentor. Judge Stacey Greer-Monroe had graduated from high school at fifteen, college at eighteen and law school two months after her twenty-first birthday. Myles thought Stacey was one of the most brilliant legal minds he’d ever encountered, including his professors.

  “I think I’m going to order the crab cakes.”

  “What’s the matter, Professor Eaton? You can’t get good crab cakes in Steel City?” Stacey joked.

  His smile grew wider. “I get the best Maryland-style crab cakes west of the Alleghenies at a little restaurant owned by a woman who moved from Baltimore. Sadie G’s has become my favorite eating place.”

  Stacey lowered her gaze rather than stare openly at the man she’d tried unsuccessfully to get to think of her as more than a friend. But their every encounter ended with a hug and a kiss on the cheek. After he was jilted by his fiancée Myles continued to regard Stacey as friend and peer. Their relationship remained the same after he’d moved to New York and then Pittsburgh when they communicated with each other online.

  Stacey’s hopes of becoming Mrs. Myles Eaton ended when her biological clock began winding down and she married a neurosurgeon she’d dated off and on for years. She was now the mother of a two-year-old daughter.

  “So, you’re really serious about putting down roots in Pittsburgh?”

  Myles’s dark eyebrows framed his eyes in a lean mahogany-brown angular face that once seen wasn’t easily forgotten. “I’ve been house-hunting,” he admitted. The one-year lease on his rental would expire at the end of August. “And I’ve seen a few places I happen to like.”

  Stacey angled her head. “I thought you’d prefer a condo or co-op.”

  “I’d thought so, too. But after living in apartments the past nine years I’m looking to spread out. I don’t like entertaining only a few feet from where I have to sleep.”

  “You could buy a duplex.”

  Myles studied Stacey’s face, one of the youngest jurists elected to Philadelphia’s Supreme Court. Stacey Greer-Monroe had always reminded him of a fragile doll. But under the soft, delicate exterior was a tough but fair judge. Her grandfather was a judge, as was her father. And Stacey had continued the tradition when she was elected to the bench.

  “I miss waking up to the smell of freshly cut grass and firing up the grill during the warm weather.”

  Stacey smiled. “It sounds as if you’re ready to settle down and become a family man.”

  Myles wanted to tell her he’d been ready to settle down ten years before. Then he’d looked forward to marrying Zabrina and raising a family, but that changed when she’d married Thomas Cooper and gave him the son that should’ve been theirs.

  “Excuse me, Judge Monroe, but are you ready to order a cocktail?”

  Frowning slightly, Stacey shifted her attention from Myles to their waiter. Talk about bad timing. She was just about to ask him whether he was seeing a woman, and, if he was, was it serious? “Yes.” She smiled at Myles. “Do you mind if I order a bottle of champagne to celebrate your return to Philly?”

  “No
t at all, Judge.”

  He’d come back to Philadelphia to spend the summer and reconnect with his family. He’d checked into a hotel downtown for the week. After the wedding he would move into Belinda’s house for the summer. His sister hadn’t decided whether she wanted to sell or rent her house. It was to be the first time in a decade that he’d spend more than a few days with his parents, siblings and nieces.

  Waiting until the man walked away, Stacey said to Myles, “I told you never to call me that!”

  “Aren’t you a judge, Stacey?”

  “Yes, but only in the courtroom.”

  “I’ve never known you to be self-deprecating. When we met for the first time all you talked about was becoming a judge.”

  “I was all of twenty-six and I wanted to impress my very bright protégé. You had to know that I liked you.”

  “And I told you I was in love with someone else,” Myles countered.

  A beat passed. “Are you still in love with her, Myles?”

  His eyebrows flickered before settling back into place. “Yes,” he admitted truthfully. “A part of me will always love her.”

  Stacey curbed the urge to reach across the table to grasp Myles’s hand. “I’m glad I married when I did, because I’d still be waiting for you to notice me.”

  He angled his head and stared directly at his dining partner. “I noticed you, Stacey, only because you were trying too hard. The flirtatious looks, the indiscriminate touching and the occasional kiss on the lips instead of the cheek were obvious.”

  Stacey’s lashes fluttered as she tried to bring her emotions under control. She’d always thought she’d been subtle in her attempts to seduce Myles Eaton, but evidently she had been anything but. “You knew?”

  He nodded. “I knew, and I promise I won’t tell your husband.”

  “You must have thought me a real idiot.”

  Reaching across the table, Myles covered her hand with his. “No, Stacey. We weren’t that different. We both wanted someone we couldn’t have.”

  He’d wanted Zabrina at eighteen, and at thirty-eight he still wanted her.

  Chapter 4

  It was a picture-perfect day in late June when two ushers opened the French doors and Dr. Dwight Eaton escorted his daughter over a pink runner monogrammed in green with the couple’s initials. Light and dark pink rose petals littering the runner had been placed there by the bride’s nieces wearing pink-and-green dresses and headbands with green button mums and pink nerines, the colors representing Belinda’s sorority, Alpha Kappa Alpha.

  The one hundred and twenty guests, welcomed with champagne and caviar into a Bucks County château built on a rise that overlooked the Delaware River, stood as the intro to the Wedding March filled the room where the ceremony was to take place. The restored castle and all of the estate’s thirty-two rooms were filled with out-of-town guests and those who didn’t want to make the hour-long drive back to Philadelphia after a night of frivolity.

  Zabrina felt her heart lurch when she saw Belinda. Her childhood friend and sorority sister was ravishing in an ivory Chantilly lace empire gown with a floral appliqué-and-satin bodice. Embroidered petals flowed around the sweeping hem and train of the ethereal garment. She’d forgone a veil in lieu of tiny white rosebuds pinned into the elegant chignon on the nape of her long, graceful neck.

  At that moment Zabrina was reliving her past—she should have walked down the aisle on her father’s arm as Myles waited to make her his wife. Blinking back tears, she stared at his distinctive profile as he stood on Griffin Rice’s right.

  She noticed changes she hadn’t been able to discern the week before. His face was thinner, there were flecks of gray in his close-cropped hair and there was a stubborn set to his lean jaw that made him appear as if he’d been carved from a piece of smooth, dark mahogany. Her gaze dropped to his left hand. She smiled. He wasn’t wearing a ring.

  Zabrina had searched her memory for days until she matched the face of the woman clinging to Myles’s arm with a name. The woman was Judge Stacey Greer-Monroe.

  She smiled when the rich, deep voice of the black-robed judge punctuated the silence. Griffin Rice, devastatingly handsome in formal attire, stared directly into the eyes of his bride as he repeated his vows. There was a twitter of laughter when the judge pronounced them husband and wife and Griffin pumped his fist in the air. It was over. Belinda was now Mrs. Belinda Rice.

  The wedding party proceeded along the carpet to the reception. Zabrina didn’t notice Belinda, Griffin, Keith Ennis, Chandra or Denise Eaton. Her gaze was fixed on Myles as he came closer and closer, and then their eyes met and fused. His eyes grew wider as a wry smile parted his firm lips.

  The smile, Myles and his powerful presence were there. Then they vanished as he moved past her. Emerging from her trance, she followed the crowd as the hotel staff ushered everyone down a wide tunnel that led outside where an enormous tent had been erected. Belinda and Griffin stood in a receiving line, greeting family members and friends who’d come to witness and celebrate their special day.

  Belinda’s eyebrows shot up when she saw her friend. Zabrina had cut her hair in a style that drew one’s attention to her luminous eyes. Raven-black waves were brushed off her face. The style would’ve been too severe for some with less delicate features. She was stunning in a silk chiffon off-the-shoulder black dress that hugged her upper body, nipping her slender waist with a wide silk sash before flaring around her knees. Stilettos added several inches to her impressive five-foot-seven-inch height.

  “You look incredible,” Belinda gushed.

  “Thank you. And you’re an amazing bride, Lindy.”

  Zabrina stole a glance at Griffin Rice as he leaned down to whisper something in the ear of an elderly woman who giggled like a teenage girl. She’d thought him breathtakingly handsome when she was a teenager, and her opinion hadn’t changed. His deep-set dark eyes and cleft chin had most women lusting after him. But Griffin had always seemed totally oblivious to their attention. It was apparent he’d been waiting for his brother’s sister-in-law.

  Griffin turned his attention to Zabrina. She looked nothing like the young woman he remembered. “Thank you for coming.” Leaning forward, he pressed a light kiss to her cheek.

  “Thank you for inviting me.” Zabrina knew she couldn’t hold up the receiving line. “I’ll be in touch with you guys after you come back from your honeymoon.” When she’d married Thomas Cooper he’d made certain to isolate her from everyone in her past.

  “Your name, miss?” asked a hotel staffer as she stood in front of a table stacked with butler boxes.

  “Zabrina Cooper.”

  He handed her a box. “Your table number and menu are in the box, Ms. Cooper.”

  In lieu of a guest card, each guest was given a personalized butler box with a leaf-colored letterpressed menu and table number. The pink-and-green color scheme was repeated in the pastel-toned chiffon on the ceiling of the tent, table linens and carpet. The lights from strategically placed chandeliers provided a soft glow as the afternoon sun cast shadows over the elegantly dressed guests as they found their way to their respective tables.

  Waiters were positioned at each table to pull out chairs and assist everyone as they sat on pink-cushioned bamboo-gilded chairs. And because Zabrina had returned her response card for one, she was seated at a table with other single guests. She offered a smile to the two men flanking her. The one on her right extended his hand.

  “Bailey Mercer.”

  She stared at the young man with flaming red hair and blue-green eyes, then took his hand. It was soft and moist. As discreetly as she could without offending him, she withdrew her hand. “It’s nice meeting you, Bailey. I’m Zabrina.”

  He draped an arm over the back of her chair. “Are you a guest of the bride or the groom?”

  “The br
ide,” she said.

  “Are you a teacher?”

  “No. I’m a nurse.” Zabrina realized he just wanted to make polite conversation. “Are you a guest of the bride or groom?” she asked.

  “Griffin and I were college roommates.”

  “Are you also an attorney?”

  Bailey leaned closer. “I’m a forensic criminologist.”

  Suddenly her curiosity was piqued. “Who do you work for?”

  “I’m stationed in Quantico.”

  “You work for the Bureau?” she asked. The FBI was the only law-enforcement agency that she knew of in Quantico, Virginia.

  Bailey nodded. “I’m going to the bar to get something to drink. Would you like me to bring you something?”

  Zabrina smiled. He’d segued from one topic to another without pausing to take a breath. “Yes, please.”

  “What would you like?”

  “I’ll have a cosmopolitan.”

  Music from speakers mounted overhead filled the tent as guests filed in and sat at their assigned tables. Bailey returned with Zabrina’s cocktail and a glass filled with an amber liquid. Smiling, they touched glasses.

  * * *

  Myles returned from posing for photographs with the wedding party to find Zabrina smiling and talking to a man with strawberry-blond hair. Sitting at the bridal table afforded him an unobscured view of everything and everyone in the large tent.

  There was something in the way she angled her head while staring up at the man through her lashes that reminded him of how she’d look at him just before he’d make love to her. It was a come-hither look that he hadn’t been able to resist.

  What Myles hadn’t been able to understand was how he and Zabrina were able to communicate without words. It could be a single glance, a slight lifting of an eyebrow, a shrug of a shoulder or a smile. It was as if they were able to communicate telepathically, reading each other’s thoughts. Right now he knew she would be shocked if she saw the lust in his eyes. The spell was broken when a waiter took his dinner and beverage request.