“One goddamn piece of paper isn’t enough to keep a mother away from her son,” Tiffany charged.
“It wouldn’t be,” Gavin said, ruminating over the cease-and-desist his father’s friend, Byron Strong, and a team of lawyers had helped him draft and send to his mother, “if it weren’t for that last PI you sent for me.”
Silence jammed into the connection. After all of Tiffany’s noise, the quiet was more deafening than the chatter. “Do you even remember his name?”
“I signed his damn checks, didn’t I?” she hissed.
“So you know he’s part of a pattern?” Gavin asked. “Once I tracked him down with some friends who trace phone records in DC, I learned that young Corbin Walker is an apprentice at his family’s private investigation office in Jacksonville, Florida. Not far from that place in St. Augustine you were bragging about last time we met.”
“So what?”
“So not only did I get good and acquainted with Corbin. I got to know three of his brothers, his stepfather and two uncles. All of whom, after learning how you sent Corbin off the books to track me down, informed me that they had all worked off the books for you at some point or another and were finally able to come clean about the things you’ve done through the years to me and a slew of other folks you’ve conned.”
Again, silence on the other end. Gavin let it stretch for a few seconds more. Bittersweet seconds. “It seems you can buy illegalities with sex. But when you mess with one of their own, a young gun like Corbin especially, you can’t buy loyalty.”
“They’ll only incriminate themselves by coming forward.”
Gavin had reached the fence. He turned to lean against it, looking back on the party lights. “They’ve got friends. In law enforcement, as it turns out. They’re willing to deal if the Walker boys testify.”
“This is insanity.”
“No,” Gavin said, the scowl wearing into the bones of his face. “Tracking your stings through the years, that was insanity. All those people you’ve tricked or sued out of their hard-earned property and earnings... It doesn’t help that you’re Douglas Howard’s daughter. You won’t get away from his reputation. You won’t get away from everything either of you have done. It hasn’t all come to light, but it will. Like dominoes.”
“Unless...?” Tiffany asked.
Looking for the bottom line. Always trolling for the bottom life. “I can’t promise it won’t come against you, especially if the Walkers decide to come forward without me. They can still do that, and I won’t stop them. But for me, you’re going to do two things.”
“What are they?” she snapped when he paused. “Let’s do this and be done with it.”
Gavin almost couldn’t believe it. She was willing to negotiate. His freedom was a few ultimatums away. “You leave my family alone. Dad, Briar, Bea, Harmony. The others, too. The Brackens, the Leightons, and every extended family and friend they call their own. Also, Benji.”
“Benji’s dead.”
“His dad,” Gavin said. “You said you had a source there. Not anymore.”
“You do cover your bases.”
He had to. She’d made him. “Finally...” Gavin started to pace in jutting strides. “I don’t want to see or hear from you ever again. No more visits. No texts, calls or emails. You won’t speak my name from this point forward. In fact, you never had a son. You’re dead to me and I’m dead to you. Is that clear?”
“Profoundly.” She was back to her glacial tones. “I won’t be there for you when that place you’re so desperate to be part of and those people you think you belong to teach you everything I’ve tried so hard to show you.”
“There’s something else I’ve learned,” Gavin said. “That I get to choose where I go and where I stay, who I talk to and who I walk beside, who I am and what I want to be. I choose all of it. Oh, and I keep my promises. I promise you that if you don’t follow through with everything we’ve talked about, I’ll make it my mission to have you locked up for as long as it takes you to get the message.”
“You strike a hard bargain,” she replied. “A heartless one, too. I wish I could be proud. You may be cutting ties with me, but you’ll always be my son.”
“I’ll live with it,” he pledged. “It’ll be easy because I won’t have to live with you. Not anymore.” He paused once more. Then, for emphasis, “Goodbye, Mom.”
* * *
“ARE YOU SURE it’s all right that we sleep here?”
Mavis folded the shirt she’d worn to the party on the chair in the corner of the guest bedroom of Errol’s house. She unclasped the earrings from one ear and set them on the bed table next to the double bed where she and Gavin would be crashing for the night. “Why not?” She watched him tug off his jeans, pausing to dig the items out of the pockets. The long blade went to the surface of his nightstand, along with his phone and wallet. She saw him frown at the phone for a moment before moving on to his cash clip and change. Looking away, Mavis undid the clasps on the other ear. “I thought you said you liked the place.”
“That was before you said we’d be sleeping here,” he pointed out.
The earrings clinked in the trinket dish next to the lamp. Amused, she plopped onto the bed. It gave a satisfying creeeak. She bounced once, twice before lifting her ankle to her knee to unzip her boot. She was floating a bit—on punch, and on the evening’s festivities. Errol knew how to give his Zelda a party, that was for sure. Also, her floating was one of the reasons they wouldn’t be driving back to the river tonight. She couldn’t risk it, even for Gavin’s wariness. “It isn’t that I told you this is one place we’ve confirmed paranormal activity, is it?”
“No,” he claimed.
Mavis pressed her lips together, unzipping the other boot before toeing the both of them off. She stretched out on the bed, head on the pillow, toes pointed to the ornate footboard. Stretching, she purred. “Hmm. Well, that’s a letdown.”
“How?” he asked.
She tilted her head in study. He did look good in briefs. “If you were nervous about making contact, it means you’ve come to believe in ghosts after all.”
The bed creaked again as he dropped to it. It dipped, making her tilt in his direction. He pressed his hands into the bed. “They still make beds this flimsy?”
“No,” she said. “This one’s at least fifty years old. Probably bought with the house. You dodged what I said there.”
“I know I did.” He lounged beside her, hesitating when he heard the protest from the springs. “Was it always like this?” he asked. “Always noisy?”
“I’m willing to bet nobody had discreet hanky-panky back in the day,” Mavis drawled.
He glanced at her. A slow, wide grin spread across his mouth. “Mavis Bracken. I do believe you’re tipsy.”
“I told you I do indulge,” she said, lifting a hand in a fanciful motion. The flash of her rings distracted her. Gold and silver clashing and shimmering. “Once every blue moon or so. Besides, my friend Zelda only turns...seventy-something-or-other every so often.”
He gave a short chuckle. He reached up to trace the point of her chin. Then he seemed to indulge, too, skimming the back of his knuckles across her opposite cheek.
Mavis shivered warmly. “You’re getting me all tingly...and we can’t have hanky-panky. Unless we want the birthday girl and her main man to know all about it.”
“Like they’re not doing it?” he said.
Mavis’s mouth formed into an O. “You think?”
“Well, yeah. Birthday sex.” He raised a brow. “The older you get, the more necessary it is. You never know how many more birthdays you have until...”
“So,” she said, turning further into him and nuzzling, “it’s like a celebration—of life.”
“Yeah,” he said, smiling.
She tugged at his shirt. “Does it have to be your birthday?”
“No,” she agreed sagely. “Because that’s not right.”
“So not right.”
“Gavin?”
He turned his face toward hers on the pillow. Reaching over his head with the opposite arm, he dipped his fingertips into the hair on the crown of her head. They massaged lightly across her scalp. “Yeah, baby?”
She saw the shadows, even now after it was all over. The chaos of the party. Whatever it was that had reinforced those shadows after their visit to the wolf enclosure. After the phone call he’d yet to mention. Who called you? What did they want? Are you hiding anything?
She forced the last question aside, and all the others that hinted at suspicion. Trust. If this was going to work...she had to trust him. “Is everything all right?” She settled for a whisper.
His eyes cleared of repose. He blinked, caught. His breath rushed over her face before he turned to look at the ceiling. “Everything’s fine.” Shifting away from her, he switched off the lamp on his side.
Mavis sat up in tandem with him so they could discard the shams and decorative pillows and get under the quilt. She stayed quiet, sensing a moratorium on personal talk. Sighing, she closed her eyes, laying one hand over the other on the quilt’s edge.
Gavin’s voice ventured into the bedroom quiet. “Mavis?”
“Yes?”
“Is that your hand?”
She glanced down at her hands on her breastbone. “Where?”
“On my thigh.”
Turning her head to him, she saw him white against the cream-colored pillowcase. “No.”
He didn’t so much get out of bed as leap out. The bed shrieked at the sudden thrashing of limbs. A thump on the other side told her he’d landed hard on the wood. “What the hell?” he exclaimed. “What the hell?”
“Don’t move, you meatball!” she cried, feeling along the now-empty covers.
He peered over the side of the bed, incredulous. “What?”
“Get back in,” she said, motioning to him quickly. “Let’s see if it happens again!”
His jaw hung loose. “I get felt up by a ghost and you want me to get back in the goddamn bed?”
“Well, what choice do you have?” she asked. “Are you going to sleep on the floor?”
“There’s a couch somewhere,” he said, climbing to his feet. He braced his hand against the wall. “I’ll sleep outside with Melvin to avoid that again.” He pointed to the bed in accusation.
“And leave me here all alone?”
“Oh, don’t do that,” he said, wincing.
“You can go,” she decided, slinking back down into the covers. “But I’m not moving.”
He shook his head. “How does this not bother you?”
She lifted a shoulder. “Just used to the idea, I suppose.”
Shaking his head again, he stood mutely in indecision.
It took several minutes, but he got back in bed. Mavis stemmed a smile. “We can switch sides.”
“I don’t want her touching you, either,” he said. “Scoot over.”
She did, moving to the edge so he could lie in the middle. She turned on her side and he spooned fast against her back.
She could feel the tension in his arms across her middle. “If she paws at me again...”
“What makes you think it’s a she?”
He stiffened further. “You said it was the wife. Errol’s wife.”
“That was just a guess. There’s no way to confirm that.”
“It touched me in a familiar way.”
“Even so, that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s a female,” she reasoned.
He spoke thinly now. “Thanks for that.”
Mavis took pity on him. He was planked against her, hard as a board, and she could feel his heartbeat drilling against her spine. As silly as it was, he was here for her protection. She shifted her hand back to his hip.
He jerked and made a noise in his throat.
She swallowed a laugh. “It’s me this time. Just relax. Errol says as long as the presence has been here, it’s never not been benign.”
“Did it feel him up, too?”
“Pretend it’s just you and me,” she told him instead. She kept her voice down to a monotone. “Pretend we’re back at the river house, in my bed... Breathe into me.”
He did, once. Then again. Long respirations that gradually eased his tension.
Good, she thought. Her pride in him, her meditation student, her lover, ballooned. She rubbed his arm, dragging the tips of her fingers through the hair that grew there. His heart rate was slowing. His arms had loosened their grip. Still, she sensed that he wouldn’t sleep even if she left the light on.
After a while of him breathing, her stroking, neither sleeping, she murmured, “Talk to me. If it helps.”
“About what?” he asked, his lips close enough to trickle the words across the nerves of her ear.
“Anything,” she said. “Whatever crosses your mind. Just talk to me.”
She heard his swallow. He was silent again for so long she thought he wouldn’t talk at all.
“I haven’t been honest with you.”
Mavis felt her lips part. She licked them, unable to stop the reverberations of dread inside her. Her stomach tightened. “Oh?” she replied.
“I told you I went to see Thomas Zaccoe but nothing about any of the other places I went while I was gone.”
“Want to tell me about those places now?”
“Yeah. But first...my mother would’ve come after you. She would’ve come after us. She saw we were together, at Zelda’s. I’ve never had a healthy relationship. Nothing long term, anyway. Over the years she had me followed, more times than I know. Whenever I found myself sticking to one place or person for any length of time, I’d look up and see a man or a car tailing me.”
“She stalked you?” she asked.
“She liked to hire out. Private investigators. Muscle. Anybody she could manipulate with the right amount of money or...”
“Has she had you followed recently?” she asked.
“I caught on to her man a couple weeks into my stay at the river. That day it was raining and you found me on your dock.”
“You were bleeding,” she remembered. “Did that person hurt you?”
“Not intentionally. He was jumpy, almost ran over Prometheus. I talked at him enough to get him to back off.”
“Why?” she asked. “Why can’t she just move on and let you do the same?”
“I think, growing up, she was a lot like me.”
“She’s nothing like you,” she said, her hate for Tiffany palpable.
“Her old man was a lot like who she is now. He moved her around, building his real estate portfolio. She never really had a home. Based on my knowledge of Douglas, I know she never had a happy home. My dad tried to make her happy, but I don’t think she knew happiness when she saw it. Even after she had me...”
She’d stopped stroking him and was gripping him. She’d asked him to talk to her, so she let his voice fill the blanks.
“I didn’t know what she did to Dad until years later, how much she’d hurt him just to establish a sense of control and self. Control was important to her. She used me to control him. She tried to control others.”
“Did she at least try to be a mother with you?” she asked. “No questions? No bottom line?”
He thought about it. “She used to tell me it was us against the world, that nothing could hurt us as long as we were a team. But whenever I reached out for anyone else—it didn’t matter who it was...friends, family—I’d see a change. She’d coddle me after, appeal to my better nature. As I got older, I saw the truth of her, t
hough. I saw the bitterness and the drive. I was in high school when I told her I wanted to move in with Dad so that I could graduate with Kyle and my friends in Fairhope...”
“What happened?” she asked, wary of the silence now.
“She hit me. Then she tried coddling me, promised she’d never do it again. By that point, she’d broken enough promises for me to know the truth. I was smart enough to walk away.”
“She kept coming at you,” she said, “in other ways.”
“Every way she could,” he said with a grim nod. “Until it wasn’t just her anymore who didn’t know what a happy home was. It was me, too.”
Mavis felt the anger coil into her fingers. She had to take several breaths to empty it out. “Was it her who called you tonight?”
“Yes. That week, before I went to see Thomas, I had a cease-and-desist letter drafted. With some help from Dad and friends of his and mine, we found enough evidence to incriminate her.”
“I can’t imagine she was happy.”
“Livid.”
“Can she find a way around it?” Mavis asked. If she knew anything about Tiffany, it was how tricky the woman was.
“Not on my terms. Not unless she wants to lose everything.”
“She’s already lost everything. She threw all of it away with you.” She’d been paying attention to more than just Gavin’s words. “You’ve won.”
A pause. “Yes.”
He didn’t sound like someone who had. Because Tiffany Howard would always be his mother, Mavis thought, no matter what she was. “You’re wondering why you were never enough,” she said, carefully. “You’re thinking that if you were enough, she would have dialed back the bitterness and the anger, in some small way at least.”
“Maybe.”
“You must know it has nothing to do with who you are and everything to do with who she is? A parent who can use a child the way she used you isn’t a parent at all. The fault, the sickness, lies with her alone. It has nothing to do with you.” Stroking him again, she tweaked her neck until she could see the hardness of his face. “I know who you are. Remember?”
Navy SEAL's Match Page 25
