Her Perfect Gift (16 page)

She looked at him, her eyes brimming with tears. “I love you,” she whispered.

“What?” he said, surprise written clearly across his normally passive face.

“I love you,” she said again. “I’m sorry it took me this long to tell you.”

He came to stand next to her, searching her face for several moments, before finally releasing her hair from its bun. It was so quiet between them, she could swear she heard his heartbeat, strong and steady. Then he pushed her hair behind her ear and said, “I love you, too.”

And this time it was she who threw herself at him, pushing him back on the bed, as she unbuttoned his shirt and stripped him out of his clothes as fast as she could.

“I love you so much.” She barely gave him time to get on the condom. It felt like everything in the world came down to her lifting her dress up and pulling him inside of her. “Touch me, please touch me,” she begged.

But he did more than that. He flipped her over onto her back and pushed into her with hard, strong thrusts, letting his hands roam her breasts, her sides, then down to her thighs as he did so. “I love you, too. You’re the first woman I’ve ever loved. The only woman…”

Then his words got lost when she pulled him down to kiss her. For once it didn’t feel like it was her warming him up, instead the heat of his passion flowed into her, filling her up with sweet light until she exploded with it into a thousand stars all pulsating with incredible feelings.

He came a few minutes later, swelling and releasing into the condom. “I love you, too,” he said again, kissing her until every drop of cum had shuddered out of him.

He settled down beside her in bed a few moments later. For a while they both basked in the after glow of their love, until she said, “I know you like my cooking, but I want to tell you, those are my father’s recipes. He taught me how to make them. He taught me almost everything I know. We were very close. You’re the first person I’ve ever told that to.”

Suro took her hand in his. “Your father’s dead, isn’t he?”

She clamped her lips and nodded. “Ten years ago. He died in a fire. I miss him everyday.”

He didn’t answer for a long time. “I’m planning to make some lifestyle changes. I’ll make it so you don’t ever have to miss me like you miss your father.”

For a moment, she was giddy with love, her heart swelling, because this man wanted something bigger with her. But then reality intruded, and she saw Candy, so proud of herself for giving the boss her come-uppance.

She rolled over and gave Suro a light kiss. “I think I’m going to get a glass of your scotch,” she said against his lips. “Do you want one, too?”

And there it was, that smile that turned his entire face into the most beautiful sight she had ever seen. “Yes, I’d like that,” he said, looking more content then she’d ever seen him.

CHAPTER 18

“DAD?
Dad? Are you awake?”

Suro had to put considerable effort into opening his eyes, which felt like they had been glued together, but Kenji’s voice compelled him to fight against the blackness that was trying to pull him back under, and eventually an out-of-focus picture of his son’s worried face came into view.

“What happened?” he asked. He shook his head to clear out some of the fogginess when the room finally came into clear focus. This was when he realized he was no longer in Lacey’s apartment. “Where am I?”

He tried to sit up, but the world spun on him, forcing him back down to his elbows.

“Don’t,” a pretty black woman, who Suro recognized as Ferrari, one of the dancers Lacey liked and considered a friend, stepped into his line of vision behind Kenji. “Lacey said you’d be out of it for a while, even after you woke up, so don’t try to overdo it too quickly.”

He had been drugged. And furthermore: “Lacey did this?”

He reached up to his chest to feel for the key, but of course it was gone.

“Where is she?” he said, fighting the spinning and sitting up anyway.

“She’s gone, Dad, and she took Sparkle,” Kenji told him. “She said to tell you sorry, but they had to go.”

“Why am I…wherever this is?” he asked, looking around the overly frilly room. The bed he was lying on was lined with stuffed animals, the windows were adorned with lace curtains, and there was a glass cabinet full of African-American Precious Moments figurines against the opposite wall.

“It’s my apartment,” said Ferrari. “Lacey brought you here because she said it wasn’t safe for you at her place.”

He gritted his teeth. “How long have I been out?”

“Dad, I’m sorry,” Kenji said. “I wouldn’t have helped them bring you over here if I knew you’d be out so long. But Sparkle’s mom said it was the only way to keep you safe while you slept.”

So she had not only drugged him, she’d gotten her son to help him drag his body to her friend’s apartment. “How long have I been out?” he asked again.

The pretty woman winced. “About twenty-four hours, I think?”

It took Suro fifteen more minutes before he was able to stand on steady feet and take care of practical matters like emptying his bladder. But as soon as he could, he made his way down the hall back to Lacey’s apartment.

“No, Dad,” Kenji said. “Sparkle’s mom said to tell you not to go back there. She said it was dangerous and that we both needed to stay at Miss Ferrari’s apartment until we could get a room somewhere.”

Suro ignored his son and kept walking until he got close enough to see that the door to Lacey’s apartment was standing open.

He stopped. “Get back to Ferrari’s apartment,” he said to his son in a quiet voice.

Kenji’s eyes widened. “Do you think someone’s in there?”

He’d done a lot to keep Kenji distanced from what he did, but that had come at a certain cost. His son didn’t know how to obey his father under life or death circumstances.

“Kenji,” he said, his voice very hard. “Lacey was right. It’s dangerous. I need to go in alone. Now get back to the apartment.”

“No, I’m coming with you. I can help.”

“You already helped enough!” Suro roared. “Now get back to the apartment.”

Kenji, who’d never been yelled at before by his father, looked hurt. His bottom lip shook, but he turned and ran back to Ferrari’s apartment, leaving Suro to feel like an ass.

Kenji’s advanced verbal skills and musical genius sometimes made him seem older than his years, but the truth was, he was still a little boy with special needs. One who Lacey had easily manipulated into helping her. A fresh well of fury rose up inside of him, and he pushed on to Lacey’s open door.

He found the apartment completely ransacked. Whoever had been here hadn’t found what they wanted and had angrily looked for clues of Lacey’s whereabouts. They’d overturned furniture and knifed open cushions, leaving shattered knick-knacks and appliances in their wake.

Suro didn’t sense anyone still in the apartment and he doubted his guns would still be where he’d hidden them in the closet. He was right on both counts.

The apartment was empty and the guns were nowhere to be found. They had also cracked his rattan bo staff, another treasured item lost, thanks to Lacey’s refusal to tell him the truth.

“I was just about to get in touch with you, man,” Dexter said when he answered Suro’s call fifteen minutes later.

“If it’s about a job, I don’t have time to talk about that now. I need to know if you found anything else out about Lacey.”

“Man, get this. It’s about her
and
a job,” Dexter said. “I caught up with that woman from the building fire three days ago, and she didn’t have a name for me, but she did say the man had definitely been from New Orleans. Though he said he’d been living up North for a while. She said he had a daughter and the daughter had a little girl of her own who was the same age as the child who died in the fire. I was like, ‘Bingo, we got her!’ But the trail went cold again, because they were paying their rent in cash and had given the landlord fake names. And I was thinking that was the end of it, but this morning, I get a call from one of my contacts. There’s a big contract out for the girl who killed Hector Mendez’s son.”

“Hector Mendez, the head of the tri-state Dominican mafia?” Suro asked. He’d never met the man himself, but he’d been around long enough to have garnered a reputation even outside of the criminal world.

“Yeah, him. And the money being offered is insane,” Dexter said. “I told him The Silence doesn’t take on mafia clients and he doesn’t kill women, but the guy was pressing me hard. Said this girl killed the Mendez’s son in cold-blood and disappeared. The son was an A+ student, had nothing to do with the business, a real pillar of the community, and this girl shot him without a second thought and disappeared.”

“The police never found her either?” Suro asked.

“The police never even got involved. According to my contact, the police declared it a suicide. The gun belonged to the son, his prints were all over it, and he’d been shot at close range. They closed the case quick, but Hector’s sure this girl did it. She split town in the middle night with her pops, and Hector’s been looking for her ever since.”

“How did they find her?” Suro asked, digesting this information.

“Some stripper named Candy tipped them off that this girl was living under another identity in Chicago. But when they went looking for her, she’d already run. The name Candy helped me put it all together.”

Suro’s hand tightened around the phone “Lacey was the girl who killed his son.”

“Yep. I asked my contact to send me the details, just in case I was wrong. But right now, I’m looking at a picture of ol’ Dead Girl with a perm taken about thirteen years ago. Her real name is Tasha. And Hector Sr. wants her dead, but he wants you to bring in Sparkle alive. It looks like she’s his granddaughter, but he didn’t know that til recently.”

“So that’s what she was keeping from me,” Suro’s hand tightened around his phone. “That she killed her baby’s father and then ran away trying to escape the wrath of his father?”

“It looks like you might have dodged a bullet. Literally. According to this file ol’ Dead Girl was crazy. Got jealous or something and shot the kid for no reason at all.“

Suro’s jaw set. “Tell your contact I’ll take the case.”

“Seriously?”

“Yes, seriously,” Suro answered, his heart a block of ice in his chest. “I’ve got to get Kenji situated back in school, but this will be over by Christmas. He has my word.”

CHAPTER 19

“NO!
No! No!” Lacey said, clutching her hair behind her head as a blue cross appeared on a pregnancy test for the second time in her life.

She had only arrived in Santa Fe three weeks ago. And she had finally gotten Sparkle—now Jennifer—enrolled in public school for the following semester. Getting her out of the house and into school would be a godsend, because Sparkle was more than a little angry with her for dragging her out of Chicago and making her cut her semester short at Rise Academy.

The twelve-year-old had been playing her electric keyboard non-stop, day and night, refusing to wear headphones, even when the neighbors started banging on their walls, yelling at her to cut it out already. Lacey had finally resorted to hiding the piano cord while Sparkle was asleep, but that hadn’t stopped her. Lacey now knew that the only thing creepier than a child revenge-playing a keyboard, was a child revenge-playing a keyboard that didn’t make any sound.

In a nutshell, she missed Chicago terribly and the new year couldn’t come soon enough.

Still, she was beginning to feel like she was finally settling into life in Santa Fe. This was her second week of work at the Greek diner, where she’d managed to find an under-the-table job. The pay was a joke, but it would have to do until she could find something else. The chances of her getting another gig like the one she had before were miniscule, but any money was better than no money until her daughter went to college.

Or at least that was what she had thought until she’d taken the pregnancy test during her fifteen-minute break.

This couldn’t be happening. This could NOT be happening. Not now, not under these circumstances. She needed the fatigue and nausea that had been dogging her ever since they moved to Santa Fe to be a prolonged version of a flu, a symptom of moving from Chicago, which had been in the forties when she left to the much warmer Santa Fe.

But it wasn’t the flu. The blue cross on the stick told her as much.

Her mind flashed back to the intense argument she and Suro had before they agreed to make nice until Christmas. Apparently more than a truce had come out of that session of brutally hot sex.

What was she going to do? Her mind reeled, trying to come up with possible scenarios, the first of which was getting the abortion she couldn’t agree to, even under the threat of violence, when she was eighteen.

She was in her thirties now, and though she still believed in God—the fact that she was still alive was enough to keep her a true believer—she was no longer a practicing Catholic.

She had learned the hard way that sometimes you had to bend the rules to survive. Still, despite all she had been through, she was only able to entertain this thought for a few seconds before her mind shut down.

Lacey had done a lot of awful things to survive, but she couldn’t get rid of this baby, not because of any belief system but because it was hers. Hers and Suro’s.

And she realized at that moment though she had done everything in her power to kill any love Suro had for her, she couldn’t just get rid of this last memento of him.

But how much longer could she survive like this? The money she’d saved would only go so far, especially when she factored in hospital bills and the cost of raising a newborn. Her mind reeled, overwhelmed by this latest twist in what was turning out to be a very, very ill fated story—until somebody pounded on the bathroom door.

“I don’t know what you’re doing in there, but we’ve got customers out here waiting,” Nestor, her new boss said, “And I’m not paying you to spend all your time in the bathroom!”

No, he was paying her peanuts to serve a clientele who were either too poor or too miserly to leave decent tips.