Her Perfect Gift (5 page)

Unfortunately, Lacey also had to drive back another forty-eight hours in order to be at work the next Monday, so there was no way she could stick around to talk to the bursar. She’d had to settle for leaving a message and waiting for the bursar to call her back which hadn’t happened until 9:45am mountain time, which was 10:45am her time, only fifteen minutes before the first half of her eleven a.m. to eight p.m. shift.

“If you’d like to write a thank you note, I’d be happy to pass it along to the donor.”

“Okay,” Lacey said, “I guess I’ll do that. “

She hung up the phone with her stomach churning. She should be over the moon that she’d no longer have to live hand to mouth to pay for Rise Academy next year, but something about this situation just didn’t sit right with her.

An image of Suro rose in her mind’s eye. It was him. It had to be him. But why after the way she had treated him?

She still felt guilty every time she thought about it. Sparkle had thrown the fit to end all fits in the back seat when she realized they were going back to Chicago, and not to have lunch with Kenji and Suro as she’d been promised. She could only imagine how Kenji had reacted. And the last thing she ever wanted to do was trigger another Aspie kid.

But she’d felt she had no choice. Despite the short time she’d known Suro, she had already pegged him as a man who didn’t take no for an answer. If she’d tried to turn down his lunch invitation, there would have been questions. But if she had accepted it, there would have been…

She let that thought trail off. She couldn’t afford to think of what might have been. She had lost that privilege long ago when she had defied her father and made the stupidest decision of her entire life and then gotten pregnant as a result.

“You’re too friendly, girl,”
she heard him say once again.

But she had been the opposite of friendly to Suro. She’d stood him up. So why then was she surer than sure he was the anonymous donor who’d paid Sparkle’s tuition? A sharp knock sounded on the door, interrupting her thoughts.

Tony Delano, the balding and gray owner of the club she worked at, didn’t wait for her to answer before barging in. “What’s up! What’s going on, kid?” he asked, his New York accent still in full affect even though he’d been living in Chicago for over half his life.

“Hey, Tony,” she said, unable to keep the dejection out of her voice.

His face fell. “Did you already hear? Who told you?”

She shook her head, confused. “Told me what?”

“Today’s my last day at the club,” he answered. “As of tomorrow. We’re under new ownership.”

“What?” she asked, her heart stopping. It was insanely hard to find a job that paid enough to put an autistic daughter through boarding school
and
could pay her under the table. The only reason she got paid as much as she did was because she not only managed the club and acted as a superintendent for the two floors of apartments above it, but also did all of its “creative accounting”—that was what Tony called it when he came in with shoe boxes of money that needed to disappear into the club’s coffers so the IRS couldn’t trace it.

She didn’t ask too many questions about the money and Tony didn’t ask too many questions about why someone with a background in accounting would be willing to work and manage a strip club for under-the-table pay. Relationships like theirs were hard to come by.

Tony, despite his shady side dealings, was a grandfatherly mensch. Who knew what the next guy would be like?

“What happened? And why didn’t you tell me sooner?”

“Because it
just
happened. Big black guy walks in here last night with a bag of cash, asks a few questions, says him and his partner will take the club and apartments off my hands for a very nice sum of money, if I do say so myself. I’d been thinking of retiring anyways, maybe going to one of them beaches in the Caribbean where the government don’t care where your money comes from as long as it’s green.” He shrugged both his shoulders. “So I says, ‘All right. Why not?’”

“Why not?” she repeated. “How about because you don’t know this guy from Adam?”

Another shrug. “His money’s green. That’s all I need to know.” He scanned her up and down. “Anyway, I just came in here to let you know. The new boss is coming by in a few minutes when the club opens. Wants to meet everybody, so I’m going around making sure the girls look extra clean, including the one I hired to run the joint, the one I told them would give them the full tour.”

He gave the hole in her sweater vest a pointed look. “If you’re going to dress like a librarian, kid, can you at least wear clothes that don’t got holes in them?”

But Lacey held up her hands. “Don’t even start. I’m still trying to get over the fact you just sold the club to some random guy off the street without even talking to me first.”

Tony leaned forward with his elbows in his lap. “Don’t be like that, kid. I’ve been thinking about getting out of the game for a while now. But I told the guy about our arrangement and I made him promise to keep you on after I left.”

“Thanks, Tony,” she said. She stood up behind her desk. “I’m sorry I snapped at you. It’s just…you’ve been like a second father to me, and I can’t believe I’m losing you.”

She didn’t add that she knew the earnings Tony brought in were too petty to be anything really serious, but this guy had just paid for Tony’s business in cash. Who knew what all he was into? Her stomach turned at the thought. She could reconcile cooking the books for a small time criminal, but someone selling drugs or women—no, she couldn’t do it. Even if her father was dead, she was still his daughter, and she’d never go against his legacy like that.

“I’ll be here until the end of the month at least. You can still come by and see me.”

She was about to respond that she’d definitely be taking him up on his offer when a stick-thin, caramel skinned, stripper with a balloon chest walked past the open door.

“Candy?” she called, jogging after her. “Is that you?”

Candy turned on her six-inch heels. She was wearing shiny, red, thigh-high boots that were actually longer than the entire outfit she was wearing above it.

“Hey girl,” Candy said, with the breezy smile that had made her a hit with the clientele as soon as she started at the club a few months ago. But then her smile turned upside down. “You know you’ve got a hole in your sweater, right?”

“What are you doing here?” Lacey asked, ignoring her question.

“I heard we under new ownership and it’s a black guy!” Dollar signs practically flashed in her eyes. “You think he’s single?”

Lacey shook her head at the dancer. When she’d applied for a job a couple of months ago, she’d hesitated to hire her because she said she’d gotten her start at a strip club located up the road from Cofi’s, her father’s old restaurant. Hiring a woman from her hometown seemed too close for comfort, not to mention safety.

But Tony, who’d also been sitting in on the interview loved her—“she’s got all the stuff guys pay for,” he’d said, “And a killer smile.”

And he was right. Candy made a lot in tips, more than any other African-American dancer at the club, and about even with a few of their popular blond dancers. Tony had even talked about putting her photo on some of the club’s internet ads.

But it had become clear to Lacey that Candy was more interested in finding her next sugar daddy than becoming a main attraction. She was forever lecturing the younger woman about not flirting too much with the customers, especially the rich ones. And even then, she knew Candy was accepting invitations to party with customers in different locations, which was against the rules and not a great idea since she had an eight-month old baby waiting for her at home.

“This is your morning at the co-op. You’re supposed to be on babysitting duty,” Lacey reminded her, because obviously Candy needed reminding. “Where’s your kid and Ben?”

Candy sucked on her teeth. “Girl, I put them in the playpen. It’s just for a few minutes. They’ll be all right.”

“No, they won’t be—“ Lacey closed her eyes, and took a moment to breathe. Technically the babysitting co-op she’d started back when Sparkle was still living with her and needed after-school supervision had been a rousing success and accounted for the low amount of turnover among their single mom dancers. But unfortunately, she’d had to deal with dancers leaving their babysitting duties to come downstairs “just for a few minutes” often enough that she now had an established protocol.

She walked away from Candy. She’d give the dancer a stern lecture about how babies were never to be left alone in the apartments upstairs, and how if Candy really felt the need to go out, she should drop the kids off at her office where she kept an extra playpen just for such occasions.

But right now her main concern was checking on the babies. So far, no child had been badly injured in the program, but there was always a first time for everything.

She let herself into Candy’s apartment with her master key just in time. Candy’s little boy, whose name was Leo but who they had all taken to calling Spiderbaby—“Spidey” for short—because of his early climbing skills, had one leg all the way over the playpen wall and was already teetering over the edge. He would have cracked his little head open on the hardwood floors if Lacey hadn’t dived, just in time, to catch him.

Spiderbaby giggled as if he hadn’t just been snatched from the gaping jaws of head trauma.

And despite the circumstances, Lacey’s heart couldn’t help but melt. If her life had turned out differently, she would have loved to have more than one baby. She’d given birth to Sparkle at eighteen under less than ideal circumstances, and she often thought about how nice it would be to have a baby now she was older.

But that was never going to happen, could never happen, not with the mess she’d managed to make of her life.

Her phone vibrated and Lacey dug into her pocket to pull it out. It was a text from Tony:
“New owner’s here. Where the hell r u?”

Ben, the little boy who belonged to their only Filipina dancer, chose that moment to get jealous of all the attention Spiderbaby was getting. He burst out crying, raising his chubby little brown arms in a bid to be picked up, too.

So that was how Lacey ended up coming down the back stairs to the club with not one, but two babies in her arms, one of which immediately started tugging her dreads out of their haphazard bun, perhaps sensing she had no way to stop him, since her other arm was also full of baby.

The plan was to deposit both of them in her office and then invite the new owner to meet with her there, but she doubted she’d make it down the long hallway without dropping one of them. It felt like her arms were on fire under the strain of two fifteen-pound kids.

“Oww, Spidey!” she said, when he got a small handful of her hair out of the bun and yanked hard. “You need to stop.”

But then Lacey stopped in her tracks.

Suro was standing outside her office door, talking on the phone. However, when he saw her standing frozen at the end of the hallway, he said something to whoever was on the other end and dropped the phone into his suit pocket. He then turned to face her, his expression so stony she immediately intuited three things: He had tracked her down, he was the new owner of the club, and he was really, really pissed.

CHAPTER 6

AFTER
tracking down Lacey and buying the strip club where she worked and lived above, Suro had expected to have the upper hand when he next met the woman who had dared to not only lie to him, but also stand him up in Montana. But when he walked into the club with Dexter on hulking-black-guy duty beside him, he found a row of scantily clad and heavily busted women, none of which were Lacey.

“Where’s the manager?” Dexter asked Tony, the old goodfella they’d bought the place from. “I thought she was supposed to be giving us the tour.”

Tony pulled out his phone. “She had a last-minute emergency, but she should be back soon. Lemme text her.”

At that moment Suro’s own phone vibrated in his suit pocket. He pulled it out and checked the number. It was his son’s school.

Still not having said a word to the old owner or any of the strippers, he stepped into a nearby hallway to take the call. “Nakamura.”

“Hello, Mr. Nakamura. This is Kate Lowell, the bursar at Rise Academy. I’m sorry to call you out of the blue like this, but I just got off the phone with Sparkle Winters’s mother. While I’m sure she’s very grateful for your support, she was also very alarmed we couldn’t tell her the name of her anonymous donor. So I’m calling you to make sure you don’t want to reconsider letting her know who you are to help put her mind at rest.”

“No,” Suro answered.

“Oh, okay then,” Kate said, sounding a little taken aback by his short answer. “I’ll let her know I relayed her concerns but that you wish to remain anonymous. Are sure you won’t reconsider?”

Suro told her the truth. “I’m sure she’ll figure it out soon enough.”

“Oh, are you two acquainted?” Ms. Lowell asked.

“Ow, Spidey! You need to stop!” Lacey’s voice came down the hallway, still soft and unmistakable, despite the stern warning she was issuing.

“I’m hanging up now,” he said, and ended the call with the bursar without further explanation.

But when he turned to face Lacey, he found the unexpected sight of her with a baby in each arm, looking like an overwhelmed mother in a high-collar button up shirt, a sweater vest, and black slacks. This impression wasn’t helped by the fact that her sweater vest had a large, noticeable hole in it and one of the babies had a hand wrapped around a chunk of her hair and was practically hanging off of it like Tarzan, Lord of the Babies.

“What are you doing here?” she asked Suro, sounding less surprised than exasperated.

But before he could answer, she deposited the little light brown baby into his arms. “Here, can you just take Ben while I…”

She used her now free hand to pry little Tarzan’s hands out of her locks. “No, Spidey. I said no!”

Spidey immediately burst into angry tears.

“Oh, my goodness.” She checked her watch and yelled through the slatted wall that stood between the hallway and the main club floor, “Girls, get on stage, please. The club should have opened fifteen minutes ago. And Candy, please stop flirting and meet me in my office to pick up your child.”