But just as he said it, they were interrupted by one of the partygoers. “Bobby!” a man yelled from halfway across the room, and over the loud music and conversation.
Robert looked at him. “Yeah, what do you want?” he responded.
“A man here to see you.”
Robert, and his entire family, immediately looked toward the entrance. An older man in a tight slim suit was standing at the door. Charles looked at his son.
“I’ll catch up with you guys later,” Robert said to his family, and then began walking toward the entrance.
“Any of you know that guy?” Charles asked as he watched his son leave.
“Never seen him before,” Brent said, and Tony and Donald echoed him.
Charles exhaled. “Go and enjoy your reception,” he said to Donald.
“But Dad, about what I said---”
“Go mingle,” Charles insisted. “What are you hanging around me for anyway? Go. All of you. Go have some fun.”
“You sure?” Tony asked him.
“Positive. Go.”
They slowly began to move away, but they also kept looking back at their father. Especially Tony. But he kept it moving too. Charles even saw Tony hit Donald upside his head. “Idiot!” he heard him say. “Now he ran us off!”
They were all grown sons. Donald was the youngest at eighteen, and Brent was the oldest at twenty-two. But in a lot of ways, whenever they were around Charles, he felt as if they were still the little kids he used to take white water rafting and moose hunting.
He moved around the crowd, not mingling much himself, until he found an empty seating area near the floor-to-ceiling windows. He walked over to that area and stood at the window, looking out across the busy highway, and sipped from his dwindling drink. Then he searched out and found the main reason he was at that window at all: his son. Robert stood outside of that ballroom, on the hotel’s patio, talking to the man in the slim suit.
They seemed to be arguing at first, but then they calmed back down and began talking civilly. Soon, they seemed to come to some agreement and then slim suit went his separate way, and Robert headed back inside the ballroom. Charles looked over at him as he entered, as he straightened up his tie and pulled on his tux, and then he headed back to mingle with the other partygoers.
Of all of his sons, his two youngest, Donald and Robert, worried him the most. Tony had his issues, he had, after all, dropped out of college yet again last term, but he was overall a good kid. And Brent was his own man, as tough, Charles believed, as Charles himself. But Robert and Donald were different. He didn’t know if they were leaders yet. They were of age, they were eighteen and nineteen respectively, but he didn’t know if they fully understood that they were men now. When he was nineteen, he was a father of three children, and was working three jobs. But he also knew that it was a different day and time back then.
He looked around the room. Everybody was so festive. Yet he was alone again. Then he realized he actually preferred the solitude, although he was rarely able to enjoy it, and took a seat in one of the round, arch-top chairs and continued to observe the boisterous crowd. It wouldn’t take long, he knew, before somebody else would discover such a peaceful haven too, so he had to enjoy it while he could.
He sat back, unbuttoned his suit coat, and relaxed. He noticed several attractive women in the crowd, and spent most of his time watching them. He had to spend the night in Boston, to attend business meetings he had tomorrow morning in town, and having a nice, soft body to warm his bed wouldn’t be a bad option. But one body in particular, a woman with the most captivating smile, held his attention the most.
And when he saw her coming toward the haven, after admiring her from across the room, he crossed his legs and continued to enjoy the view. There was something about her that radiated warmth. Even her walk, where her feet veered slightly outward, as if she was almost slue-foot, amused him. She wore a blue skirt suit, not expensive by any stretch, but well-made, and matching high heels. The middle section of her jacket was buttoned up, revealing big breasts that jetted out beyond the form of the jacket, and a flat stomach that appeared toned and tucked in beneath the button. But despite the breasts, she was an overall small woman. But with curves. A slender woman with curves. He was going to enjoy this up close and personal view, he thought, as she arrived.
CHAPTER THREE
She nodded her hello as she sat down in the chair across from him, but it was obvious she wasn’t there for chitchat. She slanted her shapely legs sideways, removed one of her high heels, and began massaging her slender toes. Relief washed over her pretty face as she massaged. He first noticed her when she kept declining various invitations to dance from the men in attendance. He noticed her within minutes of his arrival at the reception. The music was loud, the ballroom was festive, but she was moving in and out of the crowd like a woman with more than a party on her mind. She was talking and smiling when it suited her; listening and looking serious when it didn’t. He noticed her throughout the evening. And it wasn’t just because she was the only African-American in the room, even though that very distinction made her noticeable in and of itself. But mainly because, even from his vantage point far away from her, he thought her stunning.
“Feet bothering you?” he asked her.
Jenay Franklin looked up at the man across from her. His legs were crossed, he had a glass of wine in his hand, and his suit was far too expensive to mistake him as Staff. “I do believe my feet have grown a full inch since I purchased this particular pair of shoes,” she replied.
Charles nodded his head. “I’m sure that’s the answer.”
Jenay grinned. “Yes, they are killing me. And I know it looks strange, massaging my toes in the middle of a wedding reception, but I couldn’t hold out another second.”
“Damn right,” Charles replied. “If I had to walk around in those stilts all day long I’d be rubbing toes too. Rub away,” he added, lifted his glass in a toast, and took a sip.
Jenay rubbed away, and was pleased that he didn’t find her behavior objectionable. But she also took a peep at him as he sipped his drink. Late thirties. Average height. Athletically built. A square-lined jaw and strong chin. But it was his vivid green eyes and fair skin, contrasted with his wavy jet-black hair slicked back, that garnered most of her attention. Movie stars had nothing on this man.
She wondered which side was he on, because that was the feel in the room. Two sides coming together, not because they wanted to, but because they had to. The bride’s side were, by and large from what she could decipher, Irish. And the groom’s side was almost all Italian. It would have been easy for her to assume that he was with the Italians, but she learned later in life to never assume anything. “Bride or groom?” she asked him.
“Groom,” Charles said. “I’m the father of the groom.”
“Oh the father,” Jenay said, surprised. The wedding was held at a different location, at a church rather than the hotel’s ballroom, and she didn’t attend the wedding. She heard talk and loads of gossip about the groom’s father as she moved around the room, mainly from the bride’s side of the wedding party, but she never bothered to seek out who this man was. Now she was sitting in front of him. She was surprised she hadn’t noticed him earlier, because he definitely stood out. “Congratulations,” she said to him. “Now I see my observation was right. To have a father your age, the groom has to be very young.”
“He’s eighteen,” Charles responded. “So yeah, you’ve got that right. He’s very young.”
“Very,” she said. She got married young, when she was twenty-two. But eighteen? “I don’t think my father would have allowed me to even think about getting married at eighteen.”
“It’s not that unusual where I come from,” Charles pointed out, “but that doesn’t mean it would have been my preference for him. It wasn’t. I talked to him about it. But he was sooo in love with the girl he considered to be the catch of the century, that he made it clear if I objected, he was goin
g to run off and get married and I would never see him again.”
“Oh my,” Jenay said. “What did you do?”
“I slapped the shit out of him,” Charles said, and Jenay laughed. When she realized he wasn’t kidding at all, she turned serious too. “I still noted my objection,” Charles continued, “but I didn’t stand in his way. You marry young when you blow it. My son got carried away one night and got his cute little girlfriend knocked up. Now the kid’s expecting a kid. He blew it. He played the piper, now he’s got to pay the piper. Her old man is some judge of some sort, and he wasn’t about to let his daughter shame their supposedly blue blood name, so he’s shot-gunning this wedding as if he had sharpshooters on the roof.”
Jenay was surprised that he would be so candid. She wasn’t quite sure how to take it.
“Don’t worry,” he said. “It’s no secret. It’s like a point of pride with young people nowadays. They know all about condoms and birth control, but they don’t use either.” He looked at Jenay, at those sizeable breasts of hers, and then into her big, gorgeous gray eyes. “I’d bet you wouldn’t be so reckless.”
He and Jenay exchanged a glance. Whatever passed between them when their eyes met, caused a searing heat to rise within her. Which, her experience taught her, meant that it was time to go. Although her feet were still killing her, she began putting back on her shoe. “I’m sure they love each other very much,” she said as an aside.
“Love each other my foot,” Charles responded as a fact. “They lust each other. They want it and want it all the time. This isn’t about love. This has lust written all over it.” He glanced at the curvature of Jenay’s waist. And then at her breasts again. So plump and tight. He could suck the life out of those two breasts.
He leaned forward, as his dick began to throb. “What would an eighteen year old kid know about love?” he continued. “But I’m sure it’s all my fault, so what can I complain about? They say these things are cyclical; that they run in a vicious cycle. My oldest son is twenty-two. I was seventeen when I knocked up his mother so definitively that she was showing within a week.”
Jenay laughed. “Yeah, right.”
“No lie,” he said with a smile of his own. “And her old man was the same way. ‘You impregnated my daughter,’ he said to me, ‘you’re going to marry her.’ So I called myself doing the right thing and we got married. A shot-gun affair too. Now my boy, my youngest, is in the same predicament.”
His smile dissolved. “Other than the sons my marriage produced,” he said as he looked across the room at one of those sons, “it was the worst mistake of my life.”
Jenay was taken aback by the man’s bluntness. Rarely did she get to hear raw truth anymore. It was refreshing. She looked across the room where he was now looking. His son, the groom, an upbeat young man still in his tuxedo, was grinning like a kid as his new bride shoved a handful of cake into his mouth.
“Probably going to be the worst mistake of his life too,” Charles said as he watched his son. “Poor kid.” He had sadness in his voice. Jenay looked back at him. He had sadness in his eyes too.
“But what can you do?” Charles added regrettably. “He’s a grown man now. He came to me mildly, told me what he needed to do, so I didn’t object.”
Jenay smiled. “Mildly? Why would you say he came to you mildly?”
“My sons know the deal. They come to me right, or not at all. He came to me respectfully, I guest would be the better word.” Charles had a flashback, of his children as little children again, and they were running away from him. He kept trying to catch them, but they kept running away. They kept telling him they had to go.
Then he dismissed such thoughts as unproductive, and looked, once again, at the woman across from him. “That’s my excuse for being here,” he said to her. “What’s your excuse? Classy broad like you?” Jenay smiled. “You’re with the bride’s party then?”
“Neither party,” Jenay said. “I’m Staff. Well, sort of. My job is to make sure there are no problems or delays or any disagreements. And since there hasn’t been any, I guess I’m doing my job. I guess I’m passing the test.”
“So you work here at this hotel then?”
“I’m actually a student at the Boston Hospitality Institute.”
“The Boston what?”
She smiled. “The Boston Hospitality Institute. BHI. I’m studying hotel management. I’m finishing up my internship. I’m interning at this hotel. This reception is my mid-term exam.”
“You’re an intern?”
“That’s right.”
Charles couldn’t relate to that on any level. “Aren’t you a little old to be somebody’s intern?”
Jenay smiled. Raw truth indeed!
But Charles saw something else in her eyes, beyond her smile. Something that told him he had hurt her. And, for some reason, that disturbed him mightily. “I didn’t mean to be cruel,” he suddenly said. “Please forgive me. I thought you could take it.”
“You weren’t being cruel at all,” Jenay reassured him. “ And I can take it! You were only stating the obvious. I’m not exactly twenty-two or twenty-three anymore.”
“More like thirty-two or thirty-three?”
“Thirty-two, yes,” she said. Then she smiled. “Most men wouldn’t have the nerve to suggest an age like that. They’d be too afraid they would get it wrong. On the too old side of wrong.”
“I know. My sons are always telling me I’m too blunt, I’m too hard, I need to calibrate.”
“To lie, in other words,” Jenay said.
“Exactly,” Charles said with a smile. He liked this girl. “I told them what they can do with their calibration.”
Jenay laughed. Charles looked down, at her thighs. They almost opened when she laughed. He could hardly wait to taste what was between them. And he decided right then and there: he was going to taste her. “As I’m sure you’ve already surmised,” he went on, “I embarrass my children to no end.”
“That’s the nature of parenthood,” Jenay agreed. “They can take you, or leave you. How many children do you have?”
“That I know of?”
Jenay laughed. “Yes, that you know of.”
“Four sons. Stair-steps, except for my oldest. But the good news,” he said with a smile, “is that all of them are grown and gone. Except for Anthony, he’s my twenty-year-old. He dropped out of college and thinks he’s going to travel the world, on my dime, with some Christian missionary group. He’ll be back in school next term.”
“College is important to you.”
“Very. I didn’t get to go, but my sons will. That is, if they don’t do like Donald did and throw a curve, in the form of a pregnant girlfriend, in the plan. So what about you? You have any kids?”
“No, none of my own.”
Charles didn’t understand.
Jenay didn’t plan to discuss anything with him when she first sat down, but his candor seemed to awaken hers. “While I was married,” she said, “I had two stepchildren that I loved dearly. They were one and three years old when I first married their father, and just a joy to know. I was a stay-at-home mom until they got in school. Stay-at-home stepmom, that is. Then I worked as a cashier at a grocery store while my husband went to law school.”
“So you’re no longer married and no longer a stay-at-home mom?”
“Or a mom at all,” she said. “Part of the divorce settlement: I’m to stay away from his children.”
Charles frowned. “Why?”
Jenay hesitated. It was three years ago but it was still raw with her. “He felt, my ex-husband that is, that his children loved me more than they should have. He felt I would be disruptive to his relationship with his children, and since he had every intention of marrying his mistress as soon as the ink dried on the divorce decree, he felt I would be disruptive to his new bride’s relationship with his children as well. And the judge agreed.”
Charles was shocked. “The judge agreed?” he asked loudly. “Are you kidd
ing me? So he didn’t give a damn how the children felt about it?”
“Right, yeah? I couldn’t believe it either.”
Charles considered her. “You raised his kids while he was off getting his career together, while he was cheating on you, and then he treats you as if you’re the problem? That must have been a pretty bitter pill to swallow.”
She could never remember that hellish time without feeling an ache deep within. “I was devastated,” she replied. “To say the least.”
“And here you are now, thirty-two years old, and just beginning your career. It has to be, on some level at least, bewildering.”
“It’s scary as hell,” Jenay said honestly. And it wasn’t as if, a mere three years later, she had it all together. She didn’t. She wasn’t just nervous about her future, she was terrified. “But it’s done now,” she said.
“Yeah, sure,” Charles said. “You’re living with it now. You’re turning lemons into lemonade. You’re making the best of a bad situation. Or whatever other soothing cliché people who never been through shit love to throw your way.”
Jenay laughed. This man was too much!
“As if words are going to make you feel any better,” Charles went on. “Your ex-husband was an asshole, that’s all there is to it, and he ruined your life. At least the life you thought you were going to have.”
Jenay looked at Charles. And her laughter was gone. Never, not when she found out he was cheating, not during or after the divorce, had anybody blamed Quince. It was all about her and her bad decision to marry him in the first place. Nobody blamed Quince and his bad decisions. Until now.
“And you thought that prick was faithful as a birddog,” Charles went on. “Didn’t you?”
“Yes,” Jenay admitted. “That’s what I thought.” But reliving all of that past pain wasn’t helping anything, and she had a life to get on with. She stood up.
Charles, surprised, stood up too. “What? You’re leaving?”
“I need to get back to work, yes, sir. Unlike you, Father of the Groom, I’m not a guest at this reception.”
Big Daddy Sinatra: There Was a Ruthless Man (The Sinatras of Jericho County Book 1) Page 3
