“But Sal, finish your business first.”
“Yeah, right. I’m on my way. I’ll be there as fast as my plane can get me there. Do I need to call somebody to be there with you? Reno or Jimmy Mack?”
“No,” Gemma said emphatically. “It’s not that kind of problem. It’s personal,” she said.
Sal leaned back. Personal, he thought. That sounded worse to him. That sounded as if this problem of hers had more to do with their relationship than any external force. Was she ready to call it quits? Did she have enough of his absences and wanted out? Had she met somebody else?
“Can you tell me what it’s about?” he asked her.
“I can,” she said, “but I’d rather talk to you face to face. I have to tell this to you face to face.”
Sal felt a rush of pain. It was about them. No question about that now. And she had to tell him to his face, the way a woman like her would do. No Dear John letters for her. No texts or emails. She was going to face him like a man. “Okay,” he said. “I’ll see you soon.”
He stared at his phone, as if he was still trying to make rhyme or reason about that call, and then he ended the call. But the more he thought about it, the worse he felt. He even tossed his phone on his seat. He hated that another human being held so much power over his existence. Because Gemma, if he was to tell the truth, was a powerful force in his life. She had the power to make him feel high as the sky, and as low as a hole in the ground. If this was about a break-up, it could very well devastate him.
And that reality, to a man like Sal, was scarier than death itself.
Four hours later and Sal was coming through her front door. Gemma was seated on the sofa, Indian-style, in a pair of shorts and a tank top. When he closed the door, and saw her sitting there looking as if the will to live itself had abandoned her, he could feel his entire body clench and tense. He thought he was ready for this. He spent the entire flight from Missouri getting his heart and mind ready for this. But as he walked toward that sofa, toward his beautiful woman, a woman who might be about to tell him it was over, he realized he wasn’t ready for this at all. He could feel his legs shaking as he walked.
He still wore the same double-breasted suit he wore in St. Louis, and he kept his hands in his pockets. If she was going to break his heart, he knew he had to brace himself. And the way she was staring at him as he came toward her. Gone was that mischievous sparkle in her big, intelligent eyes. Her sparkle was gone. There was a storminess, a heaviness, in her eyes. “Hey,” he said when he reached her side.
“Thanks for coming.” Although she thanked him, her response was void of gratitude. Because she knew it wasn’t about the fact that he had come. It was all about why he had to come at all.
But Sal would not be deterred. If he was going to lose Gemma, it wouldn’t be without a fight. He was not the kind of man who would dream of begging a woman to stay with him, a man like that sickened him, but he realized to his own shame that he was prepared to beg Gemma. If it meant she would stay with him, he was willing to beg.
He leaned down and kissed her on the lips. He missed her sweet taste. He missed her sweet scent. And although she didn’t exactly draw back from his kiss, she wasn’t moving into it either, the way she usually did. There was trouble in paradise. No doubt about it now. Sal sat down beside her, before he fell.
He turned his body slightly toward her, leaned back, and crossed his legs. He always looked so distinguished to Gemma when he put on his serious look, like the major player he actually was in the corporate world, but it was the other part of Sal that concerned her. That part that put her on a pedestal. That part that made her feel as if the only reason he was with her at all was because she was so unlike him in one glaring way. He was a man who had blood on his hands; a man who had to skirt the law constantly for the sake of his very survivor. But she was, to him, the personification of morality. That was supposed to be her trump card. Her integrity. That, she felt, was the main reason he left all his over woman and elevated her. Now he was about to discover that she was no better than any of those other females. And, given what she had done, might be considered worse.
“Thanks for coming,” she said again.
But it annoyed him. “What do you keep thinking me for? You tell me you need me, of course I’m coming. What did you expect me to do? What are you thanking me for?”
“Why are you coming at me like that?”
“I’m not coming at you like anything.”
“Yes, you are.”
“Oh so now I can’t come at you a certain way? I’m supposed to walk on eggshells to avoid offending you? What are you, the Queen Bee all of a sudden?”
Gemma stared at him. “You can watch your tone, Sal.”
“My tone is fine.”
“No, it’s not.”
Sal settled down. “Let’s just get this over with. What do you want?”
He wasn’t making it any easier for her. But he was right. They needed to get on with it. But even as she thought about it, she found herself unable to deal with it. She began to twist around the tissue she had in her hands, and a distressed look appeared on her face.
Sal saw the distress on her face. He knew she was in pain, but it wasn’t until now did he realize just how much pain she was in. This was no picnic for her either. He took her hand and placed it in his. “Gemma, tell me what’s going on here. What happened?”
She looked from his hand and up to his face. His stern, gorgeous face. His hair was messy and all over his head, and his blue eyes, she now realized, were bloodshot. He looked awful. She was so caught up in her own situation that she didn’t realize just how badly he looked. And she frowned. “What’s wrong with you?” she asked him.
He couldn’t believe she asked that question. “What’s wrong with me? How could you ask me that?”
“Something happened in St. Louis?”
Sal frowned. “St. Louis? What the fuck does St. Louis have to do with us?”
“Us?” Gemma asked. “What about us?”
Sal stared at her in disbelief. “You called me here to tell me you wanted to dump me, to just leave me like I don’t mean shit to you, and you don’t think that has everything to do with us?”
Now Gemma was frowning. “Leave you?” She leaned up and then back down on her hind legs. “What are you talking about, Sal? I’m not leaving you!”
Sal couldn’t believe his ears. “You’re not?”
“No!”
“Then what the, then what the heck did you ask me to come here for?”
“Because I have a problem I need you to help me with.”
“A problem?”
“Yes!”
“A problem that has nothing to do with you leaving me?”
“Absolutely nothing!”
Sal fell back against the sofa, stretched out his legs, and stretched out both arms on either side of him. It was as if his entire body was so relieved that it was collectively exhaling.
But Gemma was still puzzled. “Why in the world would you think I was leaving you, Sal?”
Sal looked at her. “What do you mean why would I think it? My girlfriend calls me, crying, telling me she has something to say to me but she can’t say it over the phone, and I’m damn near ten states away! What did you think I was going to think?”
“Just what I told you. That I had a problem I needed you to help me with. I didn’t say anything about any breakup!”
Sal smiled and shook his head. He felt like an ass, but a happy one. “Just come here you!” He grabbed Gemma, pulled her onto his lap, and wrapped her into his big arms. He knew she still had a problem, but he also knew there was nothing they couldn’t tackle if they tackled it together.
Gemma knew she had a problem too. A major league problem. And she needed his help. But she also needed the warmth, the protection of Sal’s powerful embrace. And she drank it up. She closed her eyes, snuggled against him, and allowed him to baby her, even if it was only for a few moments, before he had to deal with the real story of
the real Gemma Jones.
CHAPTER SEVEN
They were now sitting side by side. Gemma, still wearing shorts, was turned toward Sal, with her legs dangling across his lap and Sal’s hand resting on one of her legs. And she told him about Donnell Lundy.
“So you fell for this guy?” Sal asked.
“Real hard, yeah,” Gemma said. “I thought he was somebody going somewhere. I was a lovesick college kid and he was this great looking black man who was a successful businessman too. And he was very kind to me. I loved him, my friends liked him. Even my parents liked him.”
“Your parents?” Sal asked. “Now that’s a switch. I had to damn near save their lives for them to like me. All that joker had to do was show them black skin, white teeth, and a big bank account, and they liked him.”
Gemma looked at Sal. He could be brutally honest sometimes. But he wasn’t wrong. “He was the kind of man they had hoped I would fall in love with,” she said. “So yeah. They thought he could be the one. And I thought so too. I thought Donnell was the total package.”
“So what changed?”
“Nothing with him, at least not at first. It was his ex-girlfriend. This girl named Kilani. She started harassing us as soon as I hooked up with him. She kept insisting Donnell was her man and I stole him from her and she was going to get him back, whoo, whoo whoo. I mean she was ridiculous. They broke up months before I even met the man. But according to her, I took him from her. And she wouldn’t let up either. Donnell told me to forget her, that she was always blowing smoke, but I wasn’t stupid. I kept my guard up. And then one day she confronted me on campus. Right in front of my friends too. She said I can’t have him and how she was going to hurt him and take him away from me. And I don’t know, Sal, but that chick scared me. I saw Fatal Attraction all over that girl. So as soon as she made her little threats, I blew up Donnell’s phone trying to get through to him, until he finally answered. I told him to go to the cops. I told him Kilani wasn’t playing anymore. But he told me to chill and he’ll take care of her and that she’s always blowing smoke. That’s what he loved to say about her. She’s always blowing smoke.”
“But not this time I take it,” Sal said, his big, blue eyes focused on Gemma like a laser beam.
“Not this time,” Gemma agreed. “Because that very next day, Miss Kilani cried rape. She claimed that Donnell physically attacked her and viciously raped her. Now this shit is serious because I know good and well Donnell Lundy didn’t rape that woman. I wasn’t buying it. I just wasn’t. Not that bitch. But the cops believed her, and Don was arrested.”
Sal was staring at Gemma. It was as if her commitment to Donnell said something about her commitment to him.
She could feel his stare. But he had to know the whole sordid story. “And the D.A. was serious,” she continued. “He was talking about giving Donnell ten-to-twenty years for what he allegedly did to Kilani. After he made bail, he was scared. He came crying to me, begging me to help him. He was certain the jury was going to believe her if it ever went to trial, because Kilani could be very convincing, and he would lose everything.”
Gemma shook her head. “That would have been the real crime. That would have been a miscarriage of justice, because that chick was lying, Sal.”
Sal’s stare was unrelenting. “What did you do?” he asked her.
Gemma braced herself. She still hated to admit it, even after all these years. “I lied for him,” she admitted, and then she looked at Sal. But Sal continued to stare at her.
“He begged me to alibi him,” she went on, “and so I did. I told the cops he was with me that night and couldn’t possibly have raped her because he was nowhere near her. Since there was no DNA linking Donnell to Kilani, it was no longer her word against his. And because a lot of the prosecutors and cops knew me as one of the college kids who volunteered at Juvenile Justice, they believed me. And they dropped the charges against him.”
“On the strength of your word.”
Gemma frowned, and then nodded. “Right,” she said. “On the strength of my word.”
“But why, Gem? Why would you put your good name out like that? For him?”
“Because he was innocent, Sal. I believed he was innocent.”
“But was he worth putting your rep on the line?”
“He wasn’t,” she admitted. “Only I didn’t find that out until a few months later. It was like my antennae went up after all of that drama with Kilani. I started paying attention more. It wasn’t blind love for me anymore. I had to make sure he was the man I thought he was. Then the next thing I know he’s arrested by the Feds. The Feds, Sal!” She exhaled. “Then that’s when I found out about the drug dealing and gun running.”
“Damn,” Sal said.
“Yeah,” Gemma admitted. “It shocked everybody. He wasn’t even on the Feds radar screen until a month before his arrest. He served over seven years for his crimes. Just recently got out.”
“Did he ever admit that he raped that girl?”
“No. But she admitted she lied.”
Sal looked at her. “She admitted it?”
“She did. It was like two years later, when she saw me in the mall. She came up to me, all sassy, talking about how she lied about Donnell raping her, but how he still went down anyway. How I still lost him anyway. Then she laughed, talked about how karma was a bitch, and left. So yeah, I was right about that. He didn’t rape her. But that doesn’t excuse what I did.”
Sal didn’t like the idea of her lying about anything, not his Gemma, but she did what she had to do. “You didn’t want to go there, but you had to go there. You knew that girl was lying, and you didn’t want to see an innocent man going to prison on trumped up charges. You did the right thing.”
Gemma hadn’t expected him to say that. “But I lied to the cops,” she said. “I should have let justice take its’ course. I was this college kid who was going to be an attorney, an officer of the law, yet I lied to the law. It still devastates me to think I did something like that. And for a creep like Donnell Lundy.”
Sal rubbed one hand across his forehead, and rubbed her leg with his other hand. Gemma could feel his anguish. “I know you’re disappointed in me,” she said. “I’m disappointed in myself.”
“It’s not disappointment, Gemma,” Sal said, a distressed look on his face. “What you did was what love makes you do. You loved that guy and believed in him at the time, so a high-class, highly moral girl like you were willing to lie for him. I understand that. I understand what you did. If it had been me, and you had gotten in a jam, even if it was of your own making, I would have lied too. What you did isn’t the problem. It’s what the dude did. Because of his lifestyle, because of all that shit he was into, he put you in a position where you had to risk your freedom and lie for his ass.”
“But Kilani admitted she wasn’t telling the truth.”
“Ah, come on, Gem, he fucked her. He might not have raped her, but he fucked her. He cheated on you with her. That’s why she was still so hot under the collar about their relationship. He wasn’t putting his foot down. He was giving her mixed messages. He wanted you, but he wanted a piece of her ass too. Trust me on that. I know these things.”
Then Sal’s face turned almost solemn, as he looked into Gemma’s eyes. “And here I am,” he said, “into my own shit, doing my own thing, and putting you in the same position.”
Gemma’s heart pounded. “You’re cheating on me too?”
“No! But let’s face it. I’m no choir boy, and I don’t do angelic things.”
But Gemma was shaking her head. “It’s not the same thing, Sal.”
“Yes, it is! It’s the exact same thing! If I get my ass in a jam, you’d get on that stand today and lie for me, Gem. Wouldn’t you? If I needed you to?”
But Gemma couldn’t even allow herself to think about that. “Why are you comparing yourself to a jackass like Donnell Lundy? You’re nothing like him!”
But Sal couldn’t be dissuaded. “And everyb
ody’s wondering why I don’t just rush you to the altar. They’re always asking me that. Why don’t you marry that wonderful girl? Because I’ve got shit to clean up first, that’s why! Because I’m not about to allow you to become some shield for me ever. Not ever.” He squeezed her leg. “So if you think what you did for that boyfriend of yours is shocking to me, think again sister. It’s not. But if you would not have lied for the man you loved, then yeah, that would have been a shock. I just don’t like the fact that the asshole put you in that position to begin with. I don’t like the fact that I’m doing the same damn thing.”
Gemma looked at Sal. This wasn’t the reaction she had expected AT ALL. “I put you in positions too, Sal. It’s not just you.”
“What are you talking? What position have you ever put me in?”
“Like right now. Like the fact that Donnell came to my office and showed me that tape and now I’m asking you to do something about it.”
Sal frowned. “What tape?”
Gemma hesitated. “That’s the thing,” she said. “When Donnell came to my office today, he showed me a tape. He taped it, Sal.”
Sal sensed there had to be more to this story. There had to be. “He taped what?” he asked. The first thing that came to his mind was some tape of the two of them having sex.
“He taped the conversation I had with him. He taped me telling him that I would lie for him.”
Sal nearly jumped from his seat. “He taped it? Are you telling me that asshole taped it?”
“That’s what I’m saying. He wants two million dollars in exchange for my silence. I’m on tape agreeing to lie to the cops for him. It’s all on tape. I can be disbarred for that, Sal. Or worse.”
Sal’s heart dropped. “Give me that asshole’s full name, and anything else you know about him, and give it to me right now,” he ordered.
“But Sal, what are you going to do?”
“What do you want me to do, Gemma? Tell me that. This fucker just got out of prison, but instead of celebrating his freedom, he’s trying to get paid. He kept this treasure of a tape stored up so that he can get paid by blackmailing you. You want me to rough him up, tell him not to do it again? That what you want? You think that’s going to stop a man who’s expecting a two million dollar payday? First, it’s the tape. Then, if that fails, they kidnap your ass for the ransom. Maybe kill you in the bargain. That’s where this is going. You understand that, right? You understand that a man like him, a man who used to deal drugs and run guns, a man who wants a two million dollar payday, isn’t playing with you, right?”
Sal Gabrini 3: Hard Love Page 7
