Stay (Dunham series #2)

by Moriah Jovan

  It was hard to let go of his hand once they got to the motel, but she had to. Vachel dragged himself up to their room, fell on his bed, and immediately began snoring. Then Eric gently caught her hand again and led her outside.

  She had no time to say or do anything before Eric wrapped his arms around her, his hand in her hair, and kissed her—deeply, as if his entire future rode on this one kiss. His mouth opened hers and his tongue invited hers to play.

  Nothing had prepared her for the wave of pure emotion that surged through her. Desire and passion she knew well; this . . . was a whole different animal, so foreign to her, so . . . rich and broad and deep.

  Vanessa slid her hands around his ribs, under his suit coat, and splayed her hands out on his back. Her fingers brushed the metal of a handgun tucked in his waistband and it only heightened the feeling of foreignness, of . . . addiction, perhaps. She could taste the lemon on his tongue, smell his expensive cologne, feel his hard body and harder arousal pressed against her, hear his ragged breathing. If she opened her eyes, she knew she would see that magnificently carved face she had carried around in her memory for more than a year.

  Finally the kisses got lighter, sweeter, less intense.

  “The nice, pretty lady at Chouteau Elementary,” he murmured against her mouth. “That’s who I see. That’s who I want to get to know.”

  Her eyelids fluttered open to see him watching her as they kissed.

  “The woman who took in an abused kid and lets him hunt and dress in kilts, the woman who slapped her mother because she deserved it,” he continued, his voice raspy, jagged. “The one who was nice to a dinosaur of a reporter nobody likes. That’s who I see, who I want to talk to.” His hand swept down her torso, shoulder to waist, then back up again and he cupped her lace-and-silk-covered breast. His thumb stroked her bare skin where her blouse parted. “Talk, kiss, talk some more, make love. Slow. Easy. All night.”

  Attainable.

  Vanessa shivered with wanting, her body prepared for a full night of love—and she considered it, what he was offering her. She had gone from a thirteen-year-old girl who just wanted a peck on the cheek (maybe even the lips) from the badass of Chouteau County High School to a twenty-eight-year-old woman who wanted so much more from the Chouteau County prosecutor.

  Unattainable.

  “I want to,” she finally breathed, ragged, after many moments of staring into his eyes, feeling one hand making love to her breast and the other to her buttocks. “You know I do. But I can’t. Logistics. Timing. Thirteen-year-old boy. It would be completely irresponsible.”

  He swallowed. “I know. You’re right. When do you leave?”

  “Tomorrow morning. I have so much to do . . . I can’t possibly stay any longer.”

  “I want to come see you.”

  “Eric—”

  He kissed her and she fell into him once again. It was a long moment before he spoke again. “Vanessa, give me a chance, please. I know—” He put his finger against her mouth when she opened it. “I know. Different lives. Competing goals. Opposite career paths. Two hundred and fifty miles. I get that, but . . . I don’t want to live with ‘what if.’ I want to know if we wouldn’t make it. I want to know if we could’ve, but decided not to for whatever reason. I definitely want to know if we can and then try our best. I want the chance to fall in love with you. Give me that, Vanessa. Please.”

  Vanessa nearly wept with longing, and she nodded, almost too eagerly. “Yes,” she whispered. “I want that, too.”

  * * * * *

  21: First Rung on the Ladder

  Eric stopped at the threshold of his office on Wednesday morning and took a long, bleary-eyed look at it. He’d only been in it for fifteen months—

  —and it was his for another four years, if he wanted to stay that long. The election for attorney general was in two years, and he’d begin his campaign

  in earnest this weekend.

  “You’re going to be worthless today,” Connelly said too loudly, making Eric wince. “Where’d you go last night after the party?”

  “Westport,” Eric said, his chest swelling in spite of his hangover because he’d done two jobs well. “Kelly’s.”

  “You should have stayed home today. You look like shit.”

  Oh, no. Not after crushing his opponent at the polls and then drinking “Ford-slash-King Midas” under the table.

  Though normally assiduous about tracking his investments—especially in this economy—Eric had for weeks used his campaigning to avoid sitting down with Sebastian to rearrange his portfolio. He simply couldn’t stomach looking at the man with that painting in his head and knowing . . .

  Last night, though, in the Chouteau City VFW Hall—with the Jelardes, the Kenards, the Taights, Annie and the new boyfriend she’d dragged down from Omaha, all the prosecutors and county employees turned out to wait for election results—Sebastian had cornered him.

  “Eric, you’re bleeding money. We have to have a sit-down to get this straightened out. I need to have your signatures on some of this shit, because I can’t move it around on my own like you seem to think I can. If you want me to do that, I will, but I gotta have your John Hancock.”

  The full force of Eric’s jealousy hit him in the sternum. Unattainable. Not only had he not expected it, but he thought himself above such pettiness. It still took everything he had not to plow his fist into Ford’s face right then for having had the temerity to be Vanessa’s first lover and, moreover, paint her and make their relationship clear to the world—except Eric could kill a man with one punch, and that wouldn’t look good on election night. Possibly not any other night, either.

  “Yeah, hey, can we do this by email or something? I’m really busy.”

  Sebastian studied him for a long moment, then said abruptly, “You got a problem with me?”

  “No problem. Busy, like I said. It’s good to be busy right now, right?”

  Annie poked her head into the conversation and said, “Vanessa Whittaker. That’s his problem with you.”

  Sebastian’s mouth dropped open.

  “Annie . . . ” Eric ground out, glaring at her.

  “Eric, zip it,” she snapped. “In case you forgot, some of those accounts are ones we hold jointly and I need you to quit jacking around. I didn’t come down here to congratulate you. I came down here to light a fire under you since you’d rather avoid Sebastian than stop losing money. I’m not going to tolerate another percentage point drop, and if that means I have to be the big bad bitch who lets the cat out of the bag, I’m okay with that.”

  Eric thought his head would explode, but Sebastian sighed, closed his eyes, pinched the bridge of his nose, and said, “Okay, look. I don’t know what the hell’s going on and I don’t care. We’ll go have a beer tomorrow, hash this out like men, get Annie’s money out from under your issues, and then we can all get on with making bank.”

  “My issues?”

  “Shut up,” Sebastian snapped. “Forget tomorrow. Tonight. Kelly’s. One o’clock or I’ll come looking for you.”

  The impending meeting dimmed any enjoyment Eric might have gleaned from the election-night festivities, yet he showed up at the appointed place and time. He saw Sebastian’s black Ferrari turn into the lot across from the Westport bar, and Eric followed him in to park thirty feet away.

  Other than his flirtation with imprisonment, Eric didn’t remember ever feeling so out of control or powerless in his life. It broke his martial discipline: His spirit deserted him, unable to quell his mounting illogical rage, leaving his body to do what came instinctively when rational men descended to animals, fighting over territory.

  Females.

  “Taight!” he bellowed across the lot and Sebastian turned. Eric took a step toward Sebastian, then another and another, faster—

  —until he stopped short when Sebastian yanked a baseball bat out of his car and gripped it in both hands, cocked to hit a grand slam.

  “Don’t even think about it, little boy,�
� Sebastian snarled. “I’ll bash your fucking head in if you come after me with those killer fists of yours. I told you we’d have a beer and talk it out. I’m damn sure not going to deal with your jealousy eight years after the fact, when I got a wife and three kids.”

  “Tequila,” Eric growled, his eyes narrowed.

  Sebastian lowered the bat slowly and watched him warily. “All right,” he drawled. “If you really need your ten paces at dawn, I guess tequila’s as good a weapon as anything.”

  They grabbed chairs at the bar and Eric ordered four double shots. He downed his two immediately and watched with great pleasure while Sebastian stared at his warily for a moment.

  “I’m not a hard drinker,” Sebastian muttered, and sipped his first shot. Eric smirked, already knowing how this would end.

  The conversation never actually rolled around to Vanessa, since Eric kept the liquor coming and Sebastian couldn’t hold it worth shit.

  “Yer a pussy,” Eric slurred at some point after his thirteenth shot.

  “Yesh,” Sebastian slurred in return, still on his seventh. “Yesh, I yam. An’ yer a fuckin’ idiot.” Thus saying, Sebastian promptly passed out on the bar. Eric paid the tab, wrote Bryce Kenard’s number on a napkin for the bartender, then managed to walk a straight line out the door and get in a cab without hitting his head.

  “So what are you going to do now, Mr. Cipriani?” one of the county employees yelled up the stairs at him, pulling Eric’s pounding head out of last night and into this morning.

  “Going on vacation!” he yelled back, splitting his head in four more parts. The gales of laughter from everywhere in the courthouse drifting upstairs were worth the pain, though, and he grinned.

  Glenn walked in Eric’s office that afternoon and plopped himself in front of Eric’s desk, making himself at home.

  “You’re early, Glenn,” Eric intoned absently, buried in a case file.

  “I know who proved you innocent.”

  “Sure you do.”

  “Vanessa Whittaker.”

  Once again, Eric had to call on his years of karate training not to react to that in any way. “Go back to your morgue, Glenn.”

  “What I don’t know,” he went on as if Eric hadn’t spoken, “is why, last year, she was so chilly to you and then this year, she was slightly less chilly. You know, when you brought her and your namesake back to her motel, and you groped her ass on the balcony for anyone to see.”

  Eric’s head snapped up and he glared at Glenn from under his brow, furious. It was one thing to contemplate breaking Sebastian’s head open; he and Eric were the same size. Glenn wouldn’t stand a chance, but oh, did Eric want to reach over his desk—

  “Glenn,” Eric growled.

  Glenn smirked. “Old man Whittaker’s wake. Quote, ‘I chose Eric over you when I was twelve years old.’ Remember that?”

  Shit.

  “Annie left you right after Vanessa showed up last year,” he continued. “Vanessa shows up this year and all hell breaks loose, but then it ends up with you and her going at it in public.”

  It was with great effort that Eric kept his voice even. “Vanessa was nice to you,” he said, low. “Invited you to Whittaker House. You took her up on that.”

  Glenn stared at Eric, then at the edge of Eric’s desk.

  “You got a series of articles out of her and you sold out of every one of those papers. Had everybody in Chouteau City begging for more. Your little fledgling blog is doing just fine, thanks to your apparently endless supply of articles on her. You should be able to close the paper for good and switch to full-time blogging for your income in, what? A year? Two years?”

  His mouth tightened.

  “So fuck her, right? You got what you wanted out of her, and who the hell cares anyway because you’re here and she’s there and whatever the hell— She’s an adult, right? It doesn’t matter that her name was redacted from the trial transcripts because it was fifteen years ago and who cares, right? And so what if she was nice to you. It must have been an act anyway, because nobody else likes you.”

  His nostrils flared. “All right. You made your point.”

  “I’m asking you, as a favor to this office, not to publish her name.”

  “I’m not stupid, Eric. This is about you and your campaign. You know how that’s going to get spun if it comes out.”

  Eric stared at Glenn, stunned. “I—” But what could he say? He’d never thought about it that way.

  “Lord, it didn’t even occur to you, did it?” Glenn breathed, clearly as surprised as Eric. “All right. Look. Whatever’s in the past, I’ll keep in the past, I give you my word on that. But if you and her start up . . . I’ll report that. Whoever you date is newsworthy, and I’m not going to pass it by on the off chance somebody makes the connection from what I write.”

  “Oh, so you’re going to turn the Recorder into a gossip rag?”

  “No,” he snapped. “I’m going to report the news. Think about it for a while, Eric. She was Ford’s mistress. Esquire. Maxim. That would take a good chunk of the conservative vote away from you. At least Stacy Afton’s got her old man behind her.”

  “Literally,” Eric growled.

  “I’m not printing that without proof.”

  “You know what, Glenn?” Eric said. “I’m going to do what I damn well please and to hell with you and your advice.”

  “So you are going to pursue her.”

  “None of your business. Get out.”

  Glenn arose and went to the door, but turned. “It wasn’t advice, Eric,” he said soberly. “Just giving you the facts of life. If you want that job, attorney general, governor, president, whatever, your life won’t be yours anymore. People will make up what they can’t find.”

  “I know. I’ve been dealing with you for the last seven years.”

  “I’m not your enemy, Eric, and I told you before: I never made up anything about Knox or you or anybody else. I just reported what was there. If you had asked for my advice, I would have told you to be careful. That’s all.”

  * * * * *

  22: Come Into My Parlor

  It took Eric more than four weeks of bribery, cajoling, extortion, threatening, begging, and blackmail to get his trial and class schedules squared away enough that he could go to Mansfield to see Vanessa for a week, though he did call her first to find out when it would be best.

  He couldn’t afford to surprise her so much that she’d turn him away after he’d gone to so much trouble.

  Which is why this relationship won’t work. You’ll have to do this every single time you want to go see her.

  And she’d have to do the same if she were to visit him, plus she’d have a bored thirteen-year-old boy on her hands. Bored thirteen-year-old boys were a scourge on society and he didn’t care how smart and responsible they were.

  Eric emailed Vanessa every day, but she very rarely returned his messages; when she did, they tended to be quite short. He called every evening, and though she usually couldn’t talk long, he needed to hear that soft husky voice, even if only for a few seconds.

  Eric, you realize that just because you’ll be on vacation, I won’t be, right? Whittaker House is overflowing, and that’s not including Friday and Saturday night dinner. I have to work and my days are eighteen hours or more. I’ll do my best to minimize that while you’re here, but I won’t be able to entertain you. I don’t want to give you a false impression.

  No, I understand. It’s okay, Vanessa. I want to watch you in your environment, see what you do.

  He drove through Mansfield, Missouri at eleven on a Friday morning in late May, looking at it with small-town eyes and saw that it wasn’t much different from Chouteau City, except a lot smaller. He turned around when he realized he was going the wrong way, then followed the signs to Ava.

  When he finally came upon Whittaker House, he slowed and stopped in awe because the website pictures didn’t begin to touch on its grandeur.

  On ample acreage, it was l
ike every description of Zion he’d ever heard at BYU. It was more beautiful than Temple Square in Salt Lake and much more grand. He’d never seen anything so lush, so . . . perfect. In the middle of it all reigned the most glorious example of a stripped-down gothic revival mansion he’d ever seen. At four stories with three steeply pitched gables—one of which rose far above the roof line—it was enormous. It was antique brick, a light terra cotta, with simple white trim and curved-top shutters that matched the Palladian windows. A deep veranda wrapped all the way around it. It had little extraneous ornamentation along its gables and eaves. The veranda eaves and ceiling dripped baskets of colorful flowers.

  The roof was clad in square glossy black shingles with a strange geometric pattern. They didn’t look like asphalt, ceramic, or wood, but Eric couldn’t figure out just what they were.

  The lawn was immense, with a large, flower-bounded boulder toward the front, modestly carved with “Whittaker House” and its street number on both sides. There were sheep grazing on pickets!

  Eric drove up the long cobblestone horseshoe drive, down and around to a precisely landscaped parking lot. Planters filled with flowers between pairs of parking spaces and different-colored cobblestones marked each space. Strategically planted apple trees had made the whole thing disappear from the highway.

  “She hid a parking lot in plain sight,” he marveled.

  Another car zipped by on another well-hidden drive right in front of him, headed south to what appeared to be a long, low stable off in the distance, but knew it had to be valet parking once he saw a young man jogging back to the mansion.

  Eric got out and stood by his car. He looked across the highway to a collection of gothic revival shops the same brick as the mansion, roofed in the same material, all meticulously landscaped and arranged around a half-moon-shaped courtyard. Fishing gear and custom fly-tying. Needlecrafts. Clothing boutique of a local designer-tailor. Salon and spa. Gourmet grocer, featuring locally made foods. Hunting outfitter. Stationery.