by Moriah Jovan
Craig Wells, the Jackson County prosecutor—a man who bore a deep hatred of both Knox and Giselle, and hated Eric simply for his close association with them—found himself defending Eric in order to save his own reputation.
Was Vanessa a victim? Was Eric forcing her to front him somehow, using his mentor’s tricks? Was she a willing accomplice, out to further her own interests, whoring for Eric Cipriani the way she’d whored for King Midas-slash-Ford?
Vanessa’s apparent affair with Sebastian had been thoroughly dissected, although both Vanessa and Sebastian refused to comment.
Knox hadn’t escaped unscathed, either, though the charges leveled at him came as a devastating shock. Had Knox had a sexual interest in twelve-year-old Vanessa beyond the information she’d provided to prove Eric’s innocence? Had Knox delivered a naïve twenty-year-old Vanessa up for thirty-six-year-old Sebastian Taight’s usage when he was done with her? Was Knox’s interest in Whittaker House solely a business relationship or was there something else going on? Did Knox’s wife, conservative pundit Justice McKinley—younger than Vanessa by two days—have anything to do with it? But Justice had a mouth and an audience, and a brass-balls-to-the-wall approach she’d learned from her husband. It didn’t take long for detractors to wish they hadn’t attracted her attention.
Then Eric’s bigamist father, a broken old man begging for a scrap of attention from anybody, sat down with a reporter and poured out his whole sad history into a recorder. Clearly he was simply proud of his son, but the story had been sensationalized until it was unrecognizably filthy.
Eric’s mother refused to speak to the press at all, delivering her disdain for what they were doing to her son, Vanessa, and Knox in a well-articulated statement read by the chief of the Osage nation.
One Bozeman blogger, whose day job was delivering overnight packages, took one look at Nash Piper’s ex-wife and pointedly, publicly, wondered why Nash received so many shipments of food from Whittaker House. Where were you all those years, Nash? Shacking up with Doc Mel’s doppelgänger? Unfortunately, that story sprouted legs and walked on water.
Then the feminist groups weighed in. Was Vanessa simply a recurrent victim of older, more powerful men’s appetites, bouncing from one to another like a pinball with no way to free herself, always stuck in a repeating loop of learned self-destructive behavior thrust upon her before she even hit puberty? Should she be considered an object of pity instead of derision?
Vachel had suffered the most. At school—a place he hated anyway—he became a minor celebrity and the constant groups of people crowding him worsened his claustrophobia.
No, Vanessa is not my mother; she’s my aunt and my guardian. My mother is dead. I don’t know who my father is, just that it isn’t Eric Cipriani.
He changed his phone number twice, abandoned three email addresses, and went to great lengths to avoid the classmates who began to drop in at Whittaker House. Then one day Vachel had made a smart-ass quip in class that delighted his growing fan club so much they rushed him after class, making him the bottom of an overenthusiastic dogpile. Vanessa raced to school to get him when that triggered a full-blown panic attack.
The school nurse had him almost calm by the time she got there, but—
Please don’t make me go to school anymore, Aunt Vanessa. Please?
Laura had done it for Rose when school proved ineffective at best and destructive at worst. Vanessa could do no less for Vachel.
She took Vachel home, then turned right back around and stormed the principal’s office to un-enroll him.
I should call Cooper right now and have every one of those children charged with assault and then get Knox down here to sue the district.
You know good and well they didn’t mean any harm. They like him. They were playing.
I’ve already talked to you about this, Jason. More than a few times. And you know his history, so I can’t imagine how you could let this happen.
Let me tell you something right now, Vanessa Whittaker. I wasn’t there when it happened and I can’t be the kid’s personal bodyguard. Everybody likes him, God only knows why since he almost never speaks. What am I supposed to do? Order them to ignore him? Do you want me to splash his psych profile all over the school bulletin boards so people will know his issues and be sensitive to them?
She hadn’t had a good answer for that. When she found Vachel packing an ATV with his camping gear and weapons for an angry retreat into the woods, she didn’t have the heart to tell him he couldn’t.
All right, then. Take some books with you. Be in the kitchen at six every night for dinner or I’ll come looking for you and I guarantee you won’t like it when I find you.
LaVon seized the moment and gone on all the television talk shows, feted and dressed and paid to . . . lie. About everything. She likened Vanessa to Jodie Foster in Taxi Driver. (Vanessa had to look that up to understand the reference.) She cast Eric as a predator of very young girls, Knox’s boy toy, setting up a protection racket in Chouteau County, and having Simone killed.
LaVon accused Vanessa of kidnapping her “precious grandson, the only memory I have left of Simone,” then of brainwashing him to despise the grandmother who’d taken care of him. She accused Eric of facilitating the kidnapping.
Tom Parley’s murder once again rose to national attention, but federal prosecutor John Riley had retired and couldn’t be contacted. No one else involved in that investigation would speak of it. LaVon took great delight in announcing to the world that not only had Knox murdered Parley, but threatened her with the same.
When confronted, Knox did what he’d always done: ignored it.
To top it all off . . .
My daughter wouldn’t give me a roof if I were homeless, which she told me to my face. I can only thank the good Lord I’m not homeless, since I can’t count on the child I birthed and raised and loved—the only child I’ve got left.
Whatever else Vanessa could say about her mother’s television appearances, some PR person had worked a miracle to shape LaVon’s deportment and speech into something devastatingly credible.
LaVon had been waiting for a way to bring Eric down since Simone had gone home crying about the way Eric had treated her all those years ago.
After sixteen years, she’d finally succeeded in hitting him where it counted, and getting back at Knox was a delightfully unintended consequence for her.
Poor Eric— But he’d known. Some of it, anyway. It didn’t make Vanessa feel any better that he was prepared for it.
She wasn’t.
Nor was anyone else caught in the whirl of the F-5 tornado that was LaVon Whittaker and all the baby tornadoes spinning around her.
Dirk stepped up to the plate to defend all of them—Eric, Knox, Vanessa, Sebastian—going so far as to grandstand on the Chouteau County courthouse steps. Sanguine and proper Bishop Dirk Jelarde had relayed the history in a booming performance worthy of a full-time Southern charismatic hellfire-and-brimstone preacher. Vanessa had never seen that side of him and she knew that he would never do that at church, but his theatrics seemed so well practiced, it confused her. “It’s his courtroom Hail Mary pass,” Knox had told her wryly. “He uses it when he knows he’s losing, and occasionally it works. He’s beaten me more than once with it.”
Church members rallied around Vanessa in the only way they could, which was to give her bracing hugs whenever they saw her in town. The ladies from the Rocky Ridge Farm gift shop dropped by during the week to give her cookies (which Vanessa decided to feature in the gourmet grocery across the highway because they were that good). The officials and citizens of Mansfield and Ava, not to mention the troopers and deputies, shielded Vanessa and Whittaker House as much as they could from strangers who didn’t have the look of inn guests about them.
Vanessa’s PR firm came out swinging, with no compunction about waging war on LaVon and the media that had turned her into the victim du jour.
Vanessa’s ad agency had ramped up three full-scale mar
keting blitzes to counterbalance the war that, at first glance, looked like a heartless and unwarranted attack on an old woman who had been betrayed by one daughter and pined for the grandson from her dead daughter.
It humiliated Vanessa to her core to have such a public catfight with LaVon, but . . .
The reservations for the holiday masquerades had poured in, forcing Vanessa to hire a full-time event planner and an assistant for him. Thus, February was booked solid for the romantic gimmick he’d come up with: Every day is Valentine’s Day at Whittaker House. There were five four-day women’s conferences booked between March and July, for which the spa across the street would have to be expanded and more massage therapists hired.
Construction had begun and the golf course was scheduled to open in eighteen months, immediately after which she had four week-long corporate retreats booked back to back. Three pro golf tours had put Whittaker House on their short list for desirable venues for televised tournaments based on the design by Corey Leonard and Eric Cipriani and Whittaker House’s grandeur.
Vittles’s ratings had gone through the roof.
The dress Vanessa had worn to the governor’s birthday celebration made a star out of its designer, a local—and very young—seamstress overflowing with talent, who had big dreams but little money. Over the years, the girl had designed and stitched Vanessa’s entire cocktail and formal wardrobe, so she would be presenting the collection in New York as The Vanessa Collection.
The Maxim and Esquire covers had become collectibles.
So had the photograph Eric and Vanessa posed for in Silver Dollar City, which zoomed into production and circulation immediately.
Unsolicited offers for Wild, Wild West were rolling in, the amounts of which had astonished her.
“Oh, Eric,” she whispered at her reflection. How naïve he’d been that night, thinking it’d all blow back on him and him alone. No, Eric’s enemies couldn’t get to him with a full frontal attack, but they could get to him by attacking his loved ones.
No, there was no dirt to be dug, but plenty that could be manufactured.
Glenn had risen to some journalistic prominence after he had posted a series of articles and documents concerning Senator Afton’s financial schemes from the late 1980s onward. He still couldn’t prove the identity of Afton’s mistress, but as he always had, he reported provable facts and let his audience draw its own conclusions. The general consensus amongst the population was, “Eeww,” and Vanessa didn’t think it would be long before Afton would feel enough heat for him to resign his position. And if not . . . Glenn had muttered the words “grand jury” to her just that morning.
“VANESSA! GET YOUR ASS IN GEAR!”
Vanessa heaved a great sigh and swept down the stairs, out onto her porch to see Knox holding an umbrella for her.
He put his hand on her back to propel her down the driveway and started in. “Shit, Vanessa—”
“Stop nagging at me,” she huffed. “Can’t you see I’m having a hard time?”
He said nothing for a moment while they hurried toward the mansion, from which they could already hear and feel the hum and thrum of the revelers. “I’m sorry,” he muttered. “About everything.”
She glanced at him, surprised. “Everything what?”
“Well, Sebastian mostly. I would never have let you near him if I’d known he’d do what he did. I don’t . . . see you that way, so it didn’t occur to me how he would see you. I had no idea until I saw the painting and I was pissed, but you were an adult and he wouldn’t have cared what I thought. But now the press is on you about it and— I’ve kept my mouth shut for years, but I couldn’t anymore. Don’t think I didn’t rip him a new one, but you know, it’s eight years later and I . . . should’ve protected you better back then. It’s all my fault.”
Her eyes widened. “Oh, Knox,” she breathed. “Please don’t. I— Sebastian was—” She bit her lip, unwilling to talk about that with her dad. “I will never regret that, no matter what the press says. It was one of the best things that could’ve ever happened to me, and I don’t mean about the painting or getting famous.”
Knox glanced at her. “I don’t understand.”
She took a deep breath. “I think,” she said slowly, “that if every girl’s first lover was like Sebastian, she would never settle for anything less than the best. Being with him kept me from making all the stupid mistakes that my girlfriends made.”
“It wasn’t right,” he growled. “He’s almost twice your age—”
“You have no room to talk, Knox Hilliard,” Vanessa flared. “Your wife is younger than I am, and Sebastian didn’t blackmail me or threaten me at gunpoint. He seduced me. That’s more than I can say for how you got two of your women into bed.”
Knox snapped his mouth shut and looked away. “Point taken,” he muttered. “Sometimes I don’t think.” No, he didn’t, but he’d been at her beck and call every weekend for months, and he was here now. Not only that, but he’d brought his entire squadron of family and friends with him to deal with both the publicity and the extra business that her abrupt upsurge in celebrity had garnered. It didn’t matter anymore that Knox had left her to follow his bliss for a year; it only mattered that he was alive and had come through when she needed him as he always had.
She slipped her hand in his.
“You are the best daughter a man could have ever asked for,” he said low, his voice heavy with emotion she’d never heard before. “If my biological children turn out as well as you, I’ll feel like I did a good job, like I left something good to the world besides death and destruction.”
“You’ve been good to me, Knox. I never wanted to disappoint you.”
“Not possible.”
They said nothing more until they’d reached the back of the mansion and entered the bustling kitchen.
Justice swept in from the dining room, wearing an iridescent babydoll dress that emphasized her very pregnant belly, and floated when she moved. It displayed an impressive amount of her cleavage and her long bare legs, and it seemed every square inch of her exposed skin—and her hair—sparkled with glitter. She had fairy wings attached to the back of her teensy bodice, and her face had an elaborately decorated mask painted on it. Knox glanced at his wife and scowled. “Did you wear that to piss me off?”
“Of course I did.”
“Mercy?”
“Gave her a snack. Read her a story. Put her to bed. Giselle and Eilis are, at this moment, putting their own spawn to bed. The nice young women Vanessa has recruited to babysit are spread out all over our suite in their jammies and sleeping bags, eating pizza, drinking caffeine-free Coke, and watching movies. You are free to double-check my work if you don’t trust me with your child. Doctor Hilliard. Sir. You’ll have to take my word for it that I’m gestating properly.”
“Shit, Iustitia, you don’t have to be so touchy.”
“You’re being an asshole because you don’t like the way I’m dressed.”
“Oh, I love the way you’re dressed. So will a hundred other men.”
“Exactly. Thank you for your insight.”
He curled his lip at her, then looked back at Vanessa. “You gonna be okay?”
She took a deep breath and said, “Yeah. I think so.”
Knox, dressed in a simple dinner-jacket tux like the rest of the staff, brushed by Justice on his way out. He cast her a lust-filled glance that made her preen and snicker wickedly. Vanessa looked away, unwilling to think of Knox that way.
“Are you sure about that costume?” Justice asked her. “The tintype’s still fresh in everyone’s mind.”
Vanessa knew that. She knew what it would cost her to wear it, to flaunt her sexuality, her affairs with Sebastian and Nash and Eric, to invite ridicule now when it seemed the whole world expected her to crawl into a hole and hide.
I can be a bit of an exhibitionist.
No, it wasn’t the media she’d dressed for tonight, but she’d take whatever it dished out.
; “Here,” Justice said, reaching up to straighten the feather in Vanessa’s hair, but her kindness made tears sting her eyes. “Oh, my friend,” Justice whispered. Vanessa held herself together by the barest thread, and only when she called up Chef Granny. “We can find a way.”
“There is no way. I’m in too deep. Whittaker House is in too deep.”
“Um,” Justice said hesitantly, “I have an idea. Kind of. I haven’t thought it through all the way yet.”
Vanessa looked at her suspiciously.
“We can talk about it later. You better go before Knox comes back in here and drags you out by the hair.”
Vanessa walked to the doors between the kitchen and dining room. Took a deep breath and steeled her spine. Plastered a delighted smile on her face.
She didn’t flinch when she opened the doors and strutted out, hands on her swinging hips. Cameras flashed. Women gasped. Men whistled.
She stopped for the cameras.
Posed for them.
Smiled at them.
Blew kisses their way.
Once the cameras had had their fill, she continued deeper into the mêlée, peppy, laughing, smiling, gracious. She greeted her masqueraders like the saloon girl that she was. Most of her guests were masked, though she could tell at least half the time who was who. Most of the revelers would pair up tonight—and not with their own significant others. That was the nature of a masquerade, if not its purpose—and she capitalized on it shamelessly.
The dining room and grand parlor were so packed the waiters could barely squeeze through. People had stationed themselves all the way up the staircase, around the second-floor sitting area, and outside on the veranda to chat and dance. Vanessa could expect a visit from Cooper later tonight to request she clear some of these people out, but that was a formality. She wouldn’t even try and he wouldn’t force the issue.
