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“I can’t marry Jennifer! I don’t love her!” Scott insisted.
“All right. I didn’t want to tell you this, but the team owners are worried about all of this negative publicity too; they think you’re giving the franchise a black eye, and they don’t like it. You don’t marry Jennifer, and you’re going to lose the football contract, too. The sponsors pay you more, but it all comes from the football contract, baby. It all comes from the game.
Are you willing to piss it all away just because you aren’t in love with Jennifer? Who cares if you’re in love with her? You get along with her, don’t you? That’s more than most married couples can say. Just marry her. Stay married a while.
If it doesn’t work, you can always divorce her later, but for right now, you’re in the middle a major storm, and the only thing that’s going to fix it is if you settle down and show the world that you’re responsible. You marry Jennifer. That’s your only option.” Harold laid it all out on the line.
“That’s no option,” Scott told him in a dark tone.
“Well it is, actually, and it’s the only real one you have if you want to keep working,” Harold answered him solemnly.
Chapter6
Eva walked back into the design firm the next morning and planted a newspaper down on Naomi’s desk without a word. Naomi glanced at it and looked away.
“I don’t want to read it. I don’t want to know what’s in it. I don’t care what’s in it. Every time I pick that damn thing up it’s bad news.” She continued to write on the page she was working on.
“You have to read it,” Eva replied to her sternly. “I didn’t drive over here to show this to you because it’s optional reading.”
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Naomi sighed and shook her head. “No. I made up my mind. I’m done with him this time. I’m done with the newspapers. I’m done with the whole damn thing.”
Eva placed both of her hands on the edge of the desk and leaned in close to Naomi. “Read the paper, Naomi,” she said firmly.
With a loud sigh and a dark glance up at her best friend, Naomi picked up the paper and began to flip through it. “What am I looking for?”
“I marked it for you,” Eva said quietly, reaching out to an earmarked page, and opening the newspaper to it.
The headline was so big that it took up the entire top of both the left and right pages. It was a centerfold. The bold letters read, “Jennifer Jones to marry Scott Thompson.” Beneath the headline was one big photograph of the couple walking hand in hand into an award show in some of the finest clothes that Naomi had ever seen.
There were a few other smaller photos of them together, and at the bottom of the center of the pages, there was a photograph of the other woman, Cora Evans, by herself, and another photograph of Scott and Naomi walking out of the obstetrician’s office hand-in-hand.
Beside the photos there was a long article about the engagement and the rough weeks leading up to it in which Scott was in turmoil with his two mistresses, both of whom claimed to be pregnant with his children. The article stated that the news of the engagement was a secret that had been leaked to the press, and while neither Scott Thompson nor Jennifer Jones was available for comment, the leaked story came from a reliable source close to the couple.
Naomi stared. She could not believe what she was reading. Her eyes moved over the words again and again, but her mind just could not comprehend what she was looking at. It couldn’t be real. It couldn’t be happening. She had just been setting up a nursery in Scott’s home with him right before that.
She blinked and gave her head one slight shake. “I can’t… I… can’t….” she trailed off and closed the newspaper, pushing it off her desk. Closing her eyes, she covered her face with her hands and tried to push the images of the photographs and the words from her mind, but it was to no avail.
Malaika came to the desk and picked the newspaper up off the floor, and opened it, reading the article. She silently folded it back up and dropped it in the wastebasket at the side of Naomi’s desk.
Naomi looked up at Malaika and Eva. “I’m still working on Jennifer’s house. What am I going to do about working on Jennifer’s house? I can’t go over there now! Not if they are…” she shook her head and closed her eyes again for a moment, struggling to hold back the tidal wave of emotion that was strangling her.
Opening her eyes again after a few long moments, she looked back at the two women before her. “We have to have Jennifer Jones’ account. We have to get paid from her job or we are going to lose this building. We’ve gotten a lot of business from the publicity of the articles, and when everyone found out that I was her decorator, they flocked to us, but not all of that money has come in fast enough for us to save this place.
What am I going to do? I thought they were just friends! They told me that they were just…” she choked back a sob, “just friends! Now they’re engaged? How did that even happen? How am I supposed to keep working over at her house and finish the job? It’s the biggest job we ever had! I’m still putting a nursery into Scott’s house! This is… this is horrible! I can’t understand it at all! How is it even possible?” She could no longer hold in the sobs.
They hit her with a ton of force, rocking her body as she tried to breathe and cry at the same time. Her frame could barely hold in the tremendous emotion that erupted inside of her. Eva came to her and held her close while she shook and wept, and after a long while, she was able to let go of Eva and sit back in her chair, trying to wipe the tears from her cheeks.
Malaika sat before her in one of the chairs at the front of her desk. “Naomi, I didn’t want to really mention this before, because it feels like a conflict of interest, but things are changing for Reggie and I. We’re officially seeing each other. He feels pretty strongly about me already, and I have to say that I am developing those same feelings for him as well.
I know he said that we had until the end of the month to pay him for the building, but if I was being honest, I think that he wouldn’t sell it out from underneath us, because he wouldn’t want to risk anything going wrong with us. I might be wrong about that, but I’d be willing to bet on it.”
Naomi didn’t even have to consider what Malaika was telling her. “I can’t do that, Malaika. Not to you, or to him. He made it very clear at the beginning of the month that we had until the end of the month to come up with the money to buy the building, or we were going to lose it. There is no other real option for us. I wouldn’t want to compromise your new relationship with him by using that as a bartering tool in trying to keep the business here.
He has already been generous enough with us, giving us a whole month to come up with the money to buy it, and not only that, but keeping the price at the original amount for us even when the other two buyers offered him more for it. I can’t ask him to wait, or to give us an extension.
I can’t do that! It’s not right. He gave us a month. We have a month. That’s it. We have to find a way to come up with it before then. Jennifer Jones and all the other jobs that we’ve gotten are the only way that we can do that.”
