BIG DADDY SINATRA 2: IF I CAN'T HAVE YOU, Book 2

by Mallory Monroe

  Aaron, again, spoke up. “As you know, we’re a collection of people who try to do the right thing for our town. We don’t want to create any problems for anybody. All we want to do is have a nice, safe club that our members can visit, relax with their families, and enjoy their time away from home. Be it golfing, or playing some tennis, or racquetball, or just enjoying a good meal, we try to make our environment as pure to our purpose, to who we are, as we possibly can.”

  Charles stared at Aaron.

  “The thing is,” Aaron went on, “we allowed you to let Jenay in.”

  Charles had to speak to that. “You allowed me to let her in? What is that supposed to mean? I’m a founding member of the club. I’m a member of the governing board. She’s my wife. Of course she was let in.”

  “We understand that, Charles,” Matt interjected. “But the thing is, she’s not. . . how do I put this? She’s not somebody who was born and raised right here in Jericho. She’s not a Jerichodian. She’s not one of us.”

  Charles just sat there and stared at the men in front of him. He knew where they were going with this, and they did too. But he wasn’t going to help them along.

  They didn’t need help. “Truth be told,” Joe stepped in, “it’s an uncomfortable situation we find ourselves in. That’s the bottom line.”

  Charles found the word odious. “Uncomfortable?” he asked.

  “Yes,” Aaron said. “Uncomfortable. Joe is right. We are uncomfortable with this situation. And we feel, as members of the governing board, that we should come ourselves like the men that we are and address this here with you. We didn’t want to ask our wives to do it. We didn’t want to ask any other members to do it. We felt, as leaders, that we should come to you and explain this here situation so that we could get it resolved. So that we can get this here squared away.”

  “What exactly is the situation?” Charles asked. “Make yourself plain, Aaron.”

  Aaron looked at his comrades, and then he looked at Charles. “It’s about Jenay,” he said. “When you’re not at the club, we don’t see why she has to be there.”

  Charles couldn’t believe what he heard. He frowned. “Let me get this straight.” He moved around in his seat. He was trying with all he had to keep his composure. “You’re saying to me that my wife can only come to the club when I’m there. A club that we pay full membership to. But she should never show up there without me. Is that what you’re saying?”

  Aaron nodded. “That’s exactly what we’re saying,” he said. “Yes. That’s what we mean.”

  “And your wife, Aaron, does she only come to the club when you’re there? What about you Joe, and Matt, and Billy? Does your wives come to the club only when you’re there?”

  The men looked at each other. They were hypocrites and they knew it. But they also knew what they wanted.

  “That’s beside the point,” Aaron said. “She’s not our wives. Every single solitary one of our wives was born and raised in Jericho. They are bona fide Jerichodians. Jenay is not. So let’s not try to pretend that she is. She is not. So what we’re saying to you is that we’ve got to resolve this matter, Charles.”

  “She not only came without you one night,” Matt said, “but she had the nerve to bring this flapping around gay person with her, and this young girl that was so loud and rude that it became a very disruptive situation.”

  Charles frowned. They were talking gibberish as far as he was concerned. “Disruptive? They went there for dinner. I showed up later. But they were there for dinner. How was that disruptive?”

  “You know what we mean, Charles,” Aaron said. “It didn’t look good, okay? It did not look good. We have sponsors to deal with. We have people who are threatening to resign their memberships if we don’t resolve this matter.”

  Charles had had enough. He stood up, prompting all of them to stand up too. “Okay, fine,” he said. “I’m out. You can take that club and shove it up your asses. I’m no longer a member of the Jericho Yacht and Country Club, my wife and her friends will no longer make you uncomfortable, and I’ll no longer have to put up with this bullshit. I’m out.”

  The men all looked at each other. That was not what they had expected to hear. Charles Sinatra resigning because they put his wife in her place? It was inexplicable to them.

  “Now hold on for a moment, Charles,” Aaron said.

  “And,” Charles added, ignoring Aaron, “since I’m out, so is my property. It goes where I go.”

  Aaron frowned. “What are you talking about? What goes where you go?”

  “The property. You don’t want my wife in the club, therefore you don’t want me in your club. Then fine. I don’t want to be in your club and I don’t want you on my land.”

  They all stared at Charles. “What land?’ Aaron asked.

  “Oh, you forgot that little detail, did you? I own the land that club happens to sit on, and I own every structure on the land that club happens to sit on. The only part of the Jericho Yacht and Country Club that you, the governing board, actually own, is the name. The Jericho Yacht and Country Club. That’s it. Everything else I own. So you take your name and get the hell off of my property.”

  “Wait a minute,” Aaron said, moving up to the desk. The other men moved closer too. This news had floored them. “What are you saying?”

  “There’s an old adage,” Charles said. “‘I don’t want to be in a club,’ the old saying goes, ‘that would have me as a member.’ Well I say just the reverse. I don’t want to be in a club that would have you as members. Now get the fuck out of my office!”

  The men could not believe it. They had walked into it and didn’t realize how knee-deep they really were. Until now.

  Aaron actually tried to smile. “Charles,” he said, as if he was going to insist they were only joking.

  But Charles was not the man to joke with. “Get out,” he ordered.

  Aaron’s smile was gone. He was in a fighting mood now. But he got out.

  Quince Franklin looked through the window of his motel room, and then back at Ash and Carly, his two young daughters. “Be on your best behavior,” he said to them.

  “Yes, sir,” they responded to him.

  They loved their father above any human being alive, and they would do anything he told them to do. Everybody else had abandoned them, including their own biological mother, who stopped taking their calls, or coming around to see them nearly two years ago. Their father, even now in his reduced circumstances, was all they ever had. Their loyalty was now and always would be with him.

  Quince rubbed his kinky hair back with a brush of his big hands, and tried his best to look dignified in his wrinkled suit and tie. But even his youngest daughter, Carly, knew that was impossible. Between his bloodshot eyes and all of the needle marks in his arms, he looked as if he would fit right in with the bums and the homeless people on the streets of Richmond. He was a mess, his life was upside down, and his daughters knew it.

  He opened the door before anybody could knock, and then Arianna Sinatra and her investigator, Ed Anderson, the man who had tracked Quince down, entered the shabby room. Ed closed the door while Arianna took in the room itself, and the pretty black girls sitting on one of the two double beds.

  “It stinks in here,” she said flatly.

  Quince immediately took umbrage. “Now wait a minute! It doesn’t stink in here.”

  “It doesn’t stink in here to you because you’ve been in this monkey house for days on end. I just got here. It stinks.” Then she looked Quince up and down. “And I see why. Your official photos, before the fall, showed an elegant man. But my how the mighty have fallen.”

  Quince looked at Ed. “When I agreed to this meeting, I wasn’t agreeing to be disrespected. I’m no slouch, you know. I’m a reputable attorney---”

  “You’re a barely working attorney,” Arianna said. “And you’re on the verge of being disbarred. So let’s not play the game of pretense. This is serious business.” She looked at the daughters. “W
hat are their ages?”

  Quince hesitated, but he remembered how Ed said this meeting just might make him rich. “One’s fifteen, almost sixteen. My baby girl is fourteen.”

  “And Jenay still loves them, no?”

  “Jenay?” Carly asked with hope in her voice. “You know Jenay?”

  Arianna smiled. Those girls certainly still loved Jenay. “Tell them to wait outside,” she said to Quince.

  “Why do they have to wait outside?” Quince asked. “I don’t keep anything from them.”

  Arianna looked at Quince. He was pretending again, and he knew it. “Wait outside,” he said to his daughters, and they jumped at his command.

  “You wait outside with them,” Arianna said to Ed, and he and the girls left the room.

  Arianna began pacing the small space. “They still love her, it is obvious. But what about her? Do you think she would still love them?”

  “Yes,” he said. “Jenay was devastated when Vernita, that was my girlfriend at the time and later my wife, forced me to break off all contact between her and the girls. She still loves them, I’m certain of it.”

  “Good,” Arianna said. “I’m depending on that love. They will be our bargaining chips. She can have the girls in exchange for the divorce.”

  Quince frowned. “I don’t know if you realize this, but she’s married to a very wealthy man. Why would she give him and that lifestyle up?”

  “I know what she has. She’s married to my husband.”

  “You mean your ex-husband.”

  “My husband!” Arianna fired back. “I was his first, and I shall be his last. She’s nothing more than a gold digger he dredged up while he was on the rebound.”

  Quince looked at her. Was she insane? Ed told him the story. She and that man were divorced well over a decade ago, and she was still acting as if it was yesterday. And on the rebound? How could a man be on the rebound for over ten years? She was nuts!

  But she was also rich, according to Ed. And that was all Quince was interested in. The money.

  “She’ll bargain, don’t worry,” Arianna said. “There’s no prenuptial agreement. She can take him to the cleaners and be free of his tyranny too. And, in exchange, she’ll have those lovely two little girls back to raise along with her new little girl. And you’re be rich to do whatever the hell you want to do. Especially when you and those girls make it clear to Jenay how much they need her. She’ll want to adopt them when all is said and done. And you’re going to let her. You’re going to take your nice little fortune, and let her. Because guess what? They’re be rich. And you, as their father, will always be rich too.”

  Quince exhaled. “I hear you,” he said. “But there’s just one slight complication.”

  “Their mother?” Arianna asked.

  Quince nodded. “Their mother.”

  Who is she?”

  “The bane of my existence,” he said. “She doesn’t want to have anything to do with them, but she doesn’t want me to have anything to do with them either. She figures they’re better off in foster care than with me. She’s always calling child protective services on me and lying about abuse. Every time we turn around, it’s the same allegation.”

  “What’s the allegation?”

  “She claims I’m beating the crap out of them. It’s all lies.”

  Arianna stared at Quince. It was the truth, she decided. But that was beside the point. “So you think this mother will stand in our way?”

  “Oh, yeah. She wouldn’t mind strangers raising our daughters, but she’ll have a problem with Jenay raising them. She hates every woman I ever slept with. My two ex-wives, Jenay and Vernita, are at the top of her list.”

  Arianna nodded. “We’ll have to take care of her then.”

  Quince looked at her. “Take care of her? Financially you mean?”

  “And have that blackmailer keep returning to the well? Oh, no. I won’t be giving her a penny.”

  “Then how are you going to take care of her?”

  Arianna stared at him. “How do you think?” she asked.

  Quince was a mixture of excitement and alarm. “You can do that?” he asked her.

  “I’m rich. I can do anything. We get rid of the pesky mother. We clean you up. We prepare to stake our claims.”

  “And what claims are those?”

  “Jenay will divorce my husband, take him for half of what he’s worth, and adopt your daughters. You’ll be paid handsomely by me, and just may, if you play your cards right, get Jenay back. Or, I should say, given who you are, get Jenay, along with her new found money, back. That will give a come-upper like you all the security you will ever need. Because knowing your slick ass, you’ll remarry her, insisting on no pre-nup, and then take her to the cleaners too. A win-win no matter how you slice it for yourself.”

  Quince loved those odds. “And what’s in it for you?” he asked her.

  She smiled. “Now that my husband, Richard, has passed on and left me all of his riches, I feel, for the first time in my life, that I am completely free and in a position to get exactly what I want. So be happy, Mr. Franklin, that I came into your life. That I am now your temporary sugar mama on your way to your permanent one. This is most definitely your lucky day.”

  Quince did smile. He was a desperate man at the end of his rope. Any day above ground was a lucky day for him. Any day where he could finally get back into that fast lane he now craved, was a miraculous day for him.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  “Late again,” Tony said as Brent made his way into the dining hall of his father’s large home.

  “You live here,” Brent said. “It takes effort for me to get to these weekly family dinners. All you have to do is be home.”

  Tony laughed. “For your information, big brother, I used to live here. I have my own apartment now. Thank-you very much.”

  “Miss Mary just drove up.”

  This surprised Charles. “Mary Stalworth? My secretary?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “She knows better than to interrupt me at dinner.”

  “She’s not here to see you. She’s here to see your wife.” Brent looked at Jenay. “She said she needs to show you some fabrics?”

  “Oh, yes,” Jenay said, remembering that she told her to come. She stood up and handed baby Bonita to Charles. She placed her napkin on the table. “Where is she now?” she asked.

  “I told her to wait in the living room.”

  “Thanks, Brent.”

  “Wait a minute now,” Charles said, holding his suddenly rambunctious baby girl and looking at his wife. “What business does my secretary have with you? And at dinner time no less?”

  “I told you she’s helping me redesign the lobby at the B & B,” Jenay reminded him. “I told her to bring by some fabrics this evening.”

  “Miss Mary is helping you redesign the lobby?” Tony asked. “Since when is she an interior designer?”

  “Since five years ago,” Jenay said.

  “What?” Tony said, surprised.

  “She mainly helps out with private homes,” Jenay went on. “This will be her first commercial contract.”

  “Just make sure it doesn’t interfere with her real job,” Charles warned, “or I’ll pull that plug on that in a heartbeat.”

  “It won’t interfere,” Jenay said. “She’ll be ready for your abuse bright and early tomorrow morning.”

  Tony and Brent laughed. Charles couldn’t help but smile either and rock his baby. Jenay headed to the living room.

  Brent took a seat next to Tony. Donald was seated across from them.

  “Why are you always late?” Donald asked his older brother.

  “Just as he’s always late for the family dinner,” Tony agreed, “he’ll be late for his own funeral. Which, by the by, amounts to the same thing.”

  “Don’t compare having dinner with me with a funeral,” Charles said jokingly.

  “I’m trying, Dad,” Tony responded. “But you aren’t exactly a paragon of conv
ersation. It’s hard.” Brent and Donald laughed.

  The chef staff served Brent his dinner and then the men, and Bonita, began eating vigorously. Jenay spent less than five minutes with Mary Stalworth, as all she did was drop off fabrics, and soon she was back at the table eating too.

  “Guess who phoned me today?” she asked as they ate.

  Her husband looked at her, and so did his sons. “Who?”

  “Kerstin,” she said. “Of all people.”

  Brent couldn’t believe it. “What did she want?”

  “You know what she wanted,” Tony said. “She wants you back.”

  “Well she can’t have me back. I’m done with her. She knows that. What is she disturbing Jenay for?”

  Charles looked at Jenay. “What did she want from you?”

  “Just what Tony said. She asked me to put in a good word for her to Brent.”

  Brent rolled his eyes. “That girl!” he said.

  “She seems highly offended that Brent would want some waitress,” Jenay went on. “When I asked what waitress was she referring to, she said the new one at the Hot Spot.” Jenay looked at Brent. “But I thought to myself: why, that can’t be right. The only new waitress I’ve hired at the Hot Spot is my friend Denise. And that’s only until temporary, until she can decide what she wants to do with her life. She just broke up with her boyfriend. I know Brent wouldn’t want to get caught up in that.”

  Brent shook his head. “It’s not that serious,” he said.

  “Oh, Kerstin seems to think it’s very serious,” Jenay replied. “She said you behaved as if you were head over heels.”

  “So you’re fooling around with Denise?” Charles asked him.

  “I’m not fooling around with her. I’ve only seen the girl twice, and both times were at the Hot Spot. It’s not that serious, I’m telling you.”

  “She’s a hot girl,” Tony said, “that’s all I know. And yes, Kerstin’s exaggerating the way she always does about how he’s head over heels. He was never even head over heels about her, and they dated for years. But Brent’s lying too. He likes Denise. He likes her a lot.”