Can't Buy Me Love (19 page)

“Only the cheapest.”

Celeste’s beautiful lips that could only be maintained by the grace of God, or the careful and subtle application of collagen on a regular basis, curled into a smile.

“Ruby,” Tara said, ignoring Celeste and getting back to the matters of her kingdom. “Does your niece still live in Springfield?”

Ruby nodded, tuna clinging for life to her wide bottom lip.

“Remember last year when she helped me with some fittings? Do you think she could do it again?”

Ruby rolled her eyes. “She made us all crazy for weeks talking about her big modeling break, and three weeks later she was back working doubles at Dairy Queen. I’m sure she’d love to do it. I can call her.”

“It’s two weeks, not much notice—”

“We’ll see.” Ruby relaxed back into her seat. “If you want tuna salad, there’s more in the fridge.”

“No, thank you,” Tara said, but her stomach growled in protest. Celeste smirked.

In the kitchen, she filled a bowl and grabbed some grapes and crackers, and then lingered in the quiet room, suffering a strange attack of indecision.

She could go to her room, or back out to the workshop—there was always work to be done. But for some reason the den seemed more appealing. She wasn’t invested in the TV show, and Lyle’s ex-wife clearly didn’t like her. But still, it seemed more interesting than being by herself.

Feeling oddly defiant, she went back into the den and sat in the oversized chair.

By the time the show was over, Tara Jean was fully committed to the young break dancer from Los Angeles, and Ruby had brought out a box of chocolate chip cookies that totally negated the virtuousness of the tuna fish.

But Celeste ate two and it seemed like a party.

The front door slammed open, smashing the encapsulated peace of the den, and Tara Jean leapt out of her chair, her heart in her throat.

“Hello!” Jacob yelled, and Tara crumpled slightly in relief.

Celeste was staring at her, her brilliant eyes missing nothing.

“We’re in here!” Celeste yelled, and it sounded as if a
herd of elephants stampeded toward them. Such was the power of one excited kid.

“Hey,” Jacob said, charging into the room, his face flushed and his hair askew. His eyes were bright, and Tara Jean smiled in response to the electric joy that radiated out of him like sunshine. She wanted to tilt her head back and bathe in that boy’s sunlight.

Luc followed, his eyes finding her right away, and the smile froze on her face. He wore jeans and a gray T-shirt that stretched over his shoulders and flirted with the strong muscles of his chest. The shirt was indecent. The shirt should be arrested.

But his face was a warning flag, tense and lined, as if he were waiting for an outcome that was bad either way.

“Tara Jean,” Jacob said, jumping on one foot. “You’ll never guess.”

She jerked back, surprised that the boy was talking to her.

“Guess what?” she stammered.

“We ran into an old friend of yours,” Victoria said, stepping into the room. She looked changed too. Gone was the weariness, replaced by a manic brightness, totally manufactured and slightly scary.

“Hello, Tara Jean,” the devil cooed, looking smug and rotten. A cancer in this house.

It was Dennis.

Mr. Beanfang had
taught Tara a lesson about security. All of them had, but because Mr. Beanfang was first, he was tattooed into her brain with the ink of shame and regret. God, she’d been a kid, fresh from her sixteenth birthday, though she’d probably been the oldest sixteen-year-old around.

She’d just met Dennis at one of the lowest points in her whole life and he’d seemed like … a rainbow. A promise sent from heaven that the bad times were over.

Mr. Beanfang had been Dennis’s idea. Dennis had convinced her to take part in his scam because Mr. Beanfang was dying and he was rich and most importantly, he was alone. No one would care who he gave his money away to.

And Mr. Beanfang had so much money it didn’t seem to matter. It was as if the dollar bills were litter on his bedside table, his dresser, stuffed into the pockets of his robe. He gave it away to everyone—to the orderlies, the woman who came in to cut his toenails and trim his nose hair.

Those good and honest people tried to refuse, but he insisted. Tara didn’t even try to refuse.

For her entire life she’d equated money with security. But none of Mr. Beanfang’s money kept him safe.

That first day when she’d come in pretending to look
for her own grandfather, he’d asked her to sit, told her that she looked like his long dead wife. They’d talked, and when she offered to read him the paper, his big blue eyes went watery and his hands shook with gratitude.

The plan had worked so well it felt like fate. Like God saying it was all right to take some of this man’s excess for all the years of nothing she’d had.

He gave her money. Watches. A pearl ring that had belonged to his wife.

And she made him a victim.

Security was a sham. That was Mr. Beanfang’s lesson.

Forty percent of a company didn’t make Tara Jean secure. Leaving that hospital four years ago, running away from Dennis with a concussion and three broken ribs, an eye so swollen she couldn’t see out of it, to come out here with Lyle didn’t make her secure.

Money. The apartment with the locks. Changing her name.

None of it had worked.

Staring at Dennis in the TV room of the Crooked Creek Ranch, she realized she hadn’t scared away the devil. She’d waved a red flag in front of his eyes.

She’d invited him here with her brave fuck-off.

Fear was a sandstorm obliterating the landscape.

Her ears buzzed while handshakes were exchanged. Friendly greetings. She heard, through the deafening drone of her panic and fear, Dennis talk about being in town on a real-estate business deal.

An old lie. Threadbare and full of holes.

He was desperate, working off the dimming wattage of his smile. His slick suit and finely polished shoes.

A high-gloss patina on a fake.

But the act still played. Even Celeste seemed to be buying it.

And Victoria, Christ—Victoria was eating it up as fast as Dennis could spoon it out.

“Can I talk to you?” It was as if she’d screamed into a tin can—her voice was too loud, too sharp. Everyone stared at her, as though she was the one poisoning the air. “It’s been so long,” she said with a smooth smile, sliding her arm under Dennis’s. Her skin crawled at the touch; her stomach heaved at his nearness.

“Of course,” he said, smiling down at her fondly and then back up at the gathered Bakers. “It was a pleasure.”

Again, friendly exchanges. Polite and civilized all the way around, and inside Tara was begging for mercy. Finally, she was able to lead him out into the hallway.

“Nice place you got here,” he murmured, his eyes missing nothing. Not the paintings or the rugs. He could put price tags on the light fixtures.

She led him out of the house and down the verandah steps, across the yard to the door of the greenhouse.

The gate to her kingdom.

For a moment, she hesitated, unsure of how she could clean this place of him once he’d stepped inside.

But he was here and she had to handle it.

She unlocked the door and flipped on the light, and as soon as he was in the greenhouse, she dropped his arm, getting as far away from him as she could.

“Surprised you, didn’t I?” He grinned at her as if he’d brought an unexpected bouquet of flowers instead of ruination.

“What are you doing here?”

“You can’t run from me, Jane.” He shook his head, as if she were a bad student. He stepped farther into the studio and ran his hands over the cutting table, trailing his fingers across the white leather bustier on the tailor dummy.

Don’t look
, the demon whispered, the way she used to when one of her boyfriends would trash their trailer.
Don’t let yourself see what he touches
.

The weight of his filth, of his malice, turned the air to mud and she couldn’t breathe. But she’d stared this man down once; she could do it again.

“We’re done, Dennis.”

“Well, now, I think my being here changes that, doesn’t it?”

It did. It really did.

Because it proved that she wasn’t going to be able to sever herself from him without payment. She should have known that to begin with.

“Fine.” With hands that shook, she took out her checkbook. The company checkbook, big and black, representative of so much more money than she had, sat under it. She left it there, slamming shut the desk drawer. “I gave ten thousand dollars back to Terry Dickow—”

“I don’t want ten grand.” He slid toward her like a snail on his own malevolence.

“All I have in my savings is twelve thousand dollars.” The closer he got, the harder it was to hide her fear, and she wanted to stand there and be strong, impervious, but when he cleared the corner of her desk she sidestepped.

The moment she moved, he was on her. His hand a clamp around her throat, lifting her chin. His eyes bored into hers and he pushed her against the wall, her head ricocheting off the wall.

“You don’t tell me to fuck off. You don’t walk away from me.”

“Okay. Okay.” She clutched his hands, trying to get him to stop.

“You and me, we’re never done. Change your name. Move. It doesn’t matter.” He leaned close, his chin grazing her neck, and she swallowed a whimper. “I could smell you, Jane. A hundred miles away. In jail. At night. I could taste you.”

She swallowed back bile and shut her eyes, gathering her forces as best she could.

“How much … how much money, Dennis?”

“Two hundred thousand dollars.”

Her eyes flew open. “What?”

He squeezed her throat, shook her, like she was a rag doll and he was a dinosaur. Stupid theory about holding her own in a fight with smaller men. She was just so stupid sometimes.

“Two hundred,” he cooed in her face, leaning forward so his breath spilled like a minty-fresh garbage dump over her mouth.

“Or what?” she spat.

This was how she’d ended up in the hospital. He could beat her, but he couldn’t break her. She could fight. So she would.

He stepped closer until his body pressed against hers and she could feel his erection, like a knife against her stomach.

The fear became so dense, so all-encompassing, that she was suddenly lifted free of it, carried on the painless wings of shock.

“I don’t have two hundred thousand dollars,” she said. “Rape me. Beat me. That won’t change.”

“But you can get it.” That anger in his eyes changed to triumph. Dennis wasn’t stupid. He was mean as a snake and evil down to his toes, but he was smart. And looking at him, she knew she was suddenly in more trouble than she’d ever been in before. “Look at this place. You could probably get more.”

“I’m an employee, Dennis. I don’t own—” He got back in her face and she licked her dry lips with a drier tongue.

“Remember my friend Carl?” Terrified, she nodded. Carl was the man who’d beat her up alongside Dennis. The man who did the hard work Dennis didn’t have the
stomach for. “He asks about you. Wouldn’t mind seeing you again. How would you like that?”

Terror pushed her down new roads, roads she’d been too scared and selfish to use before, but things were getting critical.

“How would you like it if I went to the cops? Because I’ll do it, Dennis. I swear I will.”

“Look at you and your empty threats.” His patronizing smile made her sick. “You know, you’re just a kid, so I’ll explain something to you. What you did to those old men, it’s called fraud. And you go to the cops and you’ll have to tell them what you did, and they will put you away, Jane. And a woman like you in jail …” He whistled long and low, pushing that erection against her. “What those women will do to you? It will make you wish for me. So, cut that crap. You’re a coward, Jane. Deep down, you’re chicken shit. You couldn’t tell your mama when you were in trouble when you were a kid; you couldn’t say no to me, even though you pretended you wanted to. And you’re not going to risk your own neck to put me away. Now, get back to reality.”

His thumb stroked the hammering pulse in her throat and then, as she held out, staring him in the eye, he pressed hard on that pulse. Her vision went sparkly at the edges, her head light, but still she dared him to take it one step further, because she didn’t want to be the woman he’d just described.

“Look at you,” he sighed, smiling slightly. “So tough. I swear, Jane, you ask for it. If you’d just lie down like a good dog—”

But in the end, she was exactly who he said she was. A coward, selfish and greedy. Because she was too scared to risk her freedom just to put him away. Conceding, she looked away, sagging against the wall where he’d pushed her.

“That’s what I thought. So, Jane, as I was saying, two hundred thousand dollars.”

“Or what?”

“Or … I do to Victoria what you did to all those little old men.”

“She has nothing, Dennis,” she said, frantically trying to change the course of this particular river. “Not a single penny. And no access to any, not for a long time, and she wouldn’t give it to you anyway. Not with her son …” She stopped. Bringing Jacob into this situation, even by saying his name, felt vile. “Leave them alone.”