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“Don’t ever forget the things he said to you the night Janie was born.”
Throughout her lecturing,Randi never seemed to have a problem with the fact that Jenna never told Eric he was a father.
How were you supposed to tell him? By writing a fucking fan letter?
Randi, still humming what Jenna identified as a nettlesome song from a children’s show, served pancakes and took over the job of getting Janie off to school. Jenna kissed her daughter goodbye and trudged upstairs to shower.
Later, through a downpour of spring rain, she and Randi drove to the shop. Around noon, Eric walked through the door.
Jenna introduced him to Randi, who for all of her tough talk, still acted like a smitten fan and fidgeted like a schoolgirl when he took her hand to shake it.
“Jen used to talk about you so much, I feel like I already know you.”
“I…I’m just going to have a look around the store,” Randi said. As she walked away, she made a gesture with her fist that said, “be firm, hold your ground.” Jenna put on a serious face and answered by making the okay signal with her thumb and forefinger. She and Eric walked to her office in the back.
With her arms folded, she leaned against her desk, her posture intentionally stern.The kiss meant nothing. It meant nothing.She cleared her throat and swept the “nothing” from her mind. “Eric, don’t you realize if you stay here people are going to notice you? Someone is going to make the connection and realize who I used to be. I value my privacy. You have to leave.”
“Not until we settle up.”
“All right, but now isn’t the time. There’s too much media focus on you right now. Go home.Settleyour own affairs first, and let me worry about mine.”
His head pivoted around the room. Jenna’s office was an intimate space with a velvet couch similar to the one he’d found her sleeping on the night they met. She saw his eyes settle there and moved as far away as possible. “Wipe the grin off your face.”
He nodded. “I’m here strictly for business. I’ve been sitting on a lot of money that belongs to you. Money for your daughter, too.”
His daughter. Jenna felt her eyes expanding to the size of hula hoops. It was how she’d look when her body was found after her stress-induced heart attack.
“My…my daughter, why?”
“Because she was born Jane Marie Laine and I have a legal responsibility toward her.”
A legalrightto her was what he actually had. Jenna’s stomach cramped. A stiff collar that restricts the ability to both breathe and swallow was suddenly tight around her throat.
She fought the pressure and willed herself to speak calmly. “I already told you, I don’t want anything from you. I may not be as rich as I was, but I can take care of my child. I put money in a trust for her right after she was born.” Jenna, the actress, was a model of serenity even though her conscience screamed.Good God what the hell is wrong with you? You have to tell him the truth!
She opened her mouth, her confession ready at her tongue, when Eric groaned and plowed his hands through his hair. The gesture was a foreboding of bad news. “I didn’t come here today just to discuss money,” he admitted. “True Hollywood Scandalsis planning a feature about you.”
Jenna felt her whole body chill as if hit by an arctic blast. Eric stood uniformly still and didn’t resume speaking till she blinked. “The producer got it into his head to do a story about your disappearance after I announced I was getting divorced again. I’m sorry.”
Poised stiff as a doll anchored to a display stand, she stood frozen except for the steady curl and uncurl of her fists. “Let me get this straight. I’m going to be the topic of a ‘whatever happened to’documentary because of you? Some sleaze cable show is going to report everything that happened a decade ago. They’re going to drag up Mark and the whole filthy mess because of you?” Jenna slapped him. “Get out of my life. Once and for all please just get the hell out of my life!”
Chapter Twelve
Eric felt as pained and exhausted as if he’d been beaten up. The only person in the world he truly cared about was the person he always managed to hurt. He didn’t blame Jenna for slapping him.
He pulled into Ina’s mud-soaked driveway. Rain that customarily cleared away soot and grime from country roads did nothing to improve the appearance of the Cummings’ residence. The downpour splattered mud and crumbling concrete into her flower beds and soaked a good part of the foundation because the ancient gutters leaked. Old, rotted wood absorbed the moisture like a sponge, and he had to push forcefully on the front door to open it.
Ina was at her desk, a massive block of oak, old and magnificently detailed. By a window a steady plink of water dripped from the molding and into a large glass bowl. She was intently studying a piece of paper in her hand but looked above the wire-rimmed glasses perched on her nose when she saw him. “How’d it go?”
“Not real well. She threw me out of her store.”
“Today’s not your day then. Looks like I’m going to have to throw you out of here too.”
Eric stepped around a puddle accumulating at the base of another window to make his way to where his distracted landlady sat. He glanced at the paper in her trembling hand. “That bad news?”
“The bastards have condemned my house.”
He carefully pried the notice from her wrinkled fingers to read it.So, Ash Baldwin was a scumbag of the first order. He’d gotten his good old boys to do his dirty work for him. Ina would have no choice but to sell the land, and Ash, Eric was sure, would not be offering top dollar.
