Stay (Dunham series #2) (12 page)

She’d opened the bathroom door and tossed the
clothes in, not particularly caring that he squeaked with outraged
modesty.

And while he did as instructed, she’d picked her way
back into the living room to that ridiculous shrine, the largest
uninterrupted wall in the house covered in glossies and magazine
shots and newspaper clippings, over which a large hand-lettered
banner proclaimed:

R.I.P. NASH PIPER 3/15/72 – 1/1/07

Under the banner hung a spiral-bound deck of
three-by-five cards that served as a primitive counter for how many
months, weeks, and days it had been since Nash Piper had
disappeared. With a wicked chuckle, she’d whipped out her
BlackBerry, taken a picture, and sent it to the enshrined.

Once Nephew had finished showering and was dressed
presentably with minimal odor (she’d made him use the deodorant),
they’d left.

Now, in the middle of a school hall teeming with
vivacious children chattering at their parents, Vanessa looked at
this twelve-year-old boy who was Simone’s legacy to the world.
Turquoise eyes, olive complexion. Except for the blond hair—and who
knew where that had come from—he was a mini-Simone, complete with
shattered ego.

Suddenly she wondered if she would go to hell for
leaving him here with her mother.

“Did you— Uh, how’d you like it?”

“You did really well,” Vanessa lied, and was
rewarded with a cautiously hopeful expression. She didn’t really
know how well he’d done; he’d been buried somewhere in the middle
of the sixth-grade “tenor” section. Such as it was. “I’m very proud
of you.”

His shoulders came up a bit. “Do you— Uh, you wanna
go into the gym and see what I did in art class?”

Oh, hell no.

“Sure, after you tell me your name,” Vanessa said.
“’Cause I sure don’t know.”

“Oh. Um, it’s Eric,” he muttered and looked down at
the floor.

Vanessa’s throat stopped up. “Simone named you
Eric?”

“Cipriani,” he added, low enough that she thought
she’d misheard, then he sighed and she knew she hadn’t
misheard.

Vanessa closed her eyes and took a deep breath,
feeling as if she’d just stepped back into the trailer park. She
would definitely go to hell if she left this child here with her
mother. She couldn’t repay Dirk or Knox for their protection, but
she could—and should—pay it down the line.

“You want to come home with me and live?”

His head popped up and his eyes sparkled like Fourth
of July fireworks. “For real?”

“You understand I’m not your mother or your
grandmother, and I’ll ride your ass if you screw up, right?”

She could see the sudden doubt in his
expression.

“Uh huh. That’s the way it is with me. You won’t be
able to get away with anything, much less whatever it is you do
here. But. I also won’t slap you upside the head for no reason and
you won’t live in filth and you won’t go hungry.”

Nephew stared at her for a moment, as if wondering
how much worse his life could get with Vanessa demanding decent
behavior. “I guess I could try it out for a while,” he finally
said.

Vanessa shook her head. “Nope. No tryouts. You stay
or you come with me, but whichever you choose, it’s a done
deal.”

He was silent for a moment, then, decisively, “Okay,
yeah. Why not?”

“Because she’s not your guardian, that’s why
not.”

Nephew groaned at that stern male voice, and Vanessa
stiffened. She hadn’t heard it since January. Real, not out of a
speaker system, it was deeper, richer.

She slowly turned to face the Chouteau County
prosecutor and Annie.

His eyes widened and he gulped. “Vanessa.” It was a
whisper, a caress, and she felt it all the way to the depths of her
soul.

She looked at an equally stunned Annie and nodded
slightly in polite acknowledgment of her presence before turning
back to
him
. “Eric.” She
would
remain calm and
collected—no joy, no bitterness. Pride. Keep the chin up. Don’t
think about the trailer park. “What would I have to do to become
his guardian?”

Eric hesitated for a moment, his expression of
astonishment changing slowly to one of assessment, as if her
motives might not be pure, then he looked down at his namesake. She
wished she could tell what he was thinking. She was sure he knew
how she’d felt about him way back when; after all, she’d been just
thirteen. He’d been eighteen and laid half the girls in town by
that time. He’d have known all the signs.

Now she could only hope to hide her emotions as an
adult woman who was looking at an incredibly handsome, successful
man who had a knockout fiancée on his arm, a woman Vanessa had
always respected.

“Junior,” he said. “Do you want Vanessa to be your
guardian?”

“Anything to get away from
you
,” the boy
grumbled. “And grandma.”

Eric Original Recipe pursed his lips, then looked
back at Vanessa. She could feel the familiar heat gather within
her, as it had done from the first moment she had ever seen him—but
now she knew what it was: desire.

She couldn’t afford that and she flashed a politely
apologetic smile at Annie to ground herself. Unlike Eric, who
seemed oblivious to Vanessa’s distress, Annie appeared to know
exactly what was going on and simply watched, waiting patiently to
see how it would all shake out.

Annie was probably used to watching women drool over
her fiancé, anyway, and Vanessa couldn’t hope to compete with her
classic Scandinavian beauty.

Even if she wanted to.

Which she didn’t.

“I can’t see your mother letting him leave,” Eric
said finally. “She uses him like a knife against me and he suffers
more for it than I do.”

Yes, Vanessa knew very well how her mother reveled
in such nastiness. “She smacks him around. His room is disgusting
and he hasn’t had laundry done for him in— Well, I couldn’t say.
Months, maybe. He’s probably malnourished. I was at that age.”

She felt, rather than saw, Annie’s start of
surprise. No, Annie wouldn’t have known how miserable Vanessa’s
home life had been. Four years older than Vanessa and immersed in
her ruthless pursuit of her goals, Annie would’ve had no reason to
know or care how her youngest cheerleader fared at home.

“You know how Simone was,” Vanessa continued calmly,
refusing to allow the toxic stew of emotion inside her to bubble
up. “My mother’ll turn him into Simone, Boy Version. Probably
sooner than later.”

Eric nodded. “You’re right about that. When are you
leaving?”

“Tomorrow morning. I would have left this morning,
but he asked me to come tonight, so I stayed.”

She felt Nephew move closer to her when she said
that, and, surprised, she looked at him, then wrapped her arm
around his shoulders to pull him into her.

Eric had not missed the gesture and said, “Listen,
can you stick around a few days? I may be able to whip something up
for you. Get it fast-tracked through family court.”

Wow. Not only were they actually having an adult
conversation, he was offering to help a boy who had to be a thorn
in his side. It was remarkable they were having any kind of
conversation at all. She wondered what difference it might make if
Annie weren’t there listening, observing.

But she had to know. “Um— Is he—?” Vanessa could
feel herself blush. “Eric Two, is he—?”

“No,” Eric snapped, his face suddenly hard, his
nostrils flaring. “He’s not, and
you
should know that better
than anybody.”

Vanessa gasped, feeling as if her chest had caved
in.

Annie stared at Eric in shock. “Oh. My. God.”

His mouth tightened and he looked at the floor,
shoved his hand in his pocket. He took a deep breath. Held it. Let
it go. “I’m sorry,” he muttered. “You have a right to know if the
court grants your request.”

It was all Vanessa could do to keep her composure,
though her nose stung and she wanted to curl up into a ball in some
dark corner somewhere. But she couldn’t.

Hi. I’m Chef Granny Whittaker and it’s time to
whip up some
Vittles
.

Her alter ego wouldn’t let her.

“I’m sorry,” he said again. “It’s nothing he and I
both haven’t heard
ad nauseam
since I started working in the
prosecutor’s office and it’s just gotten worse in the last four
months or so. I’m sick of hearing it.”

Especially from you.

Vanessa started when her phone buzzed. “Excuse me,”
she murmured, and pulled out her BlackBerry to check the text
message:

I GOTCHA SHRINE RIGHT HERE DOLL—CUM SUCK IT.

Still fighting tears, it took her a long moment of
staring to process it, but once she had, she began to laugh,
feeling a strange combination of relief and irony and affection
wash over her.

Trust Nash to make her laugh right when she needed
it. She quickly thumbed a smart-ass reply, then put her gadget back
in her pocket, but her smile faded when she looked up at Eric
again.

“I have a meeting Wednesday afternoon I
must
go to,” Vanessa said, trying to stay on some sort of emotional
level. “Can we get this done by end of business Tuesday or so? Or
will I need to come back to get him?”

“I hope so, yeah,” he replied, clearly chagrined. He
swallowed, then said with forced decisiveness, “So, uh, yeah. All
right. Yeah. Uh, come on up to my office Monday morning. I’ll send
a deputy out for your mother and Eric, Ju—uh, Two.”

“Thank you.”

Eric cast Vanessa a short nod without actually
looking at her and turned, his hand splayed out over Annie’s
back.

But Nephew reached out hesitantly to touch Original
Recipe, halting him. “Thanks, Eric,” he said quietly.

Eric One finally smiled as he looked at the boy—that
genuine, wonderful smile that had always made Vanessa catch her
breath and want to smile, too. “You’re welcome, kid. Now you won’t
have to get yourself arrested to get a hot meal.”

Vanessa saw Nephew’s face redden, and she bit her
lip. Looked down. Blinked away the tears.

“Nice to see you again, Vanessa,” Annie said with
the exactly appropriate tone of voice to extricate all of them as
gracefully as possible from this tangled moment in time.

“You, too, Annie.” Again polite nods between Vanessa
and Annie. Again Vanessa feeling like she’d just crawled back into
the Darwinian goo of the trailer park.

. . . you
should know that better than
anybody.

She hadn’t felt that low, that inferior—that
classless
—since she’d left this godforsaken town.

* * * * *

13: Not a Moment Too Soon

Damn Simone.

Eric escorted Annie toward the exit, which was where
they’d been headed when he’d stumbled into that conversation. Eric
hadn’t recognized the woman from behind, and had only meant to head
off a possible abduction.
Damn Simone to hell.

And damn Vanessa for having turned into the most
beautiful woman he’d ever seen.

Eric slid a look at Annie, whose demeanor confused
him. He didn’t think he’d ever seen Annie so positively livid—and
never at him.

“All right, Annie, which part pissed you off the
most?” he sighed.

She grabbed a handful of his lapel and dragged him
off the school’s sidewalk and across the lawn toward the parking
lot. Once they were alone in a copse of trees, she stopped, planted
her hands on her hips and started to pace, her head down. Eric
waited, because whatever she had to say, he deserved. Finally she
stopped, held up a hand, and said, “I want to make something very
clear right up front. I like Vanessa. I’ve always liked her. I have
no quarrel with her. Per se.”

“Okay,” Eric said warily.

“You and me,” she said pointing between them. “We
don’t love each other.”

“Right.”

“We get along and live together without fighting. We
have good sex. We think alike and we’re both very well educated. We
have history.”

“Right.”

“You need a trophy wife to get elected, and I need
to be First Lady so I can get a head start on my early
globetrotting retirement.” She stopped. Thought. He braced himself
for whatever she meant to throw at him. “All this time,” she said,
“you never said a word. I knew you had issues about whoever it was
that proved you were innocent, mostly because of that fucking guilt
trip Knox put you on to make sure you did something with your life.
But I never thought— And you never told me— What, did you think I
was going to go to Glenn and give him her name?”

“So that’s what you’re pissed about?” he demanded,
immediately incensed. “That I kept it to myself? Because I was
obligated to?
Legally
?”

“No, I’m upset that you kept from me that it was
Vanessa
.”

Eric stared at her, suddenly confused. “Okay . . .
?”

Her nostrils flared and her voice was tight with
anger when she spoke. “I want,” she ground out, “something of
my
own
without having to take the crumbs off Vanessa Whittaker’s
table.”

Eric’s head spun. A—it wasn’t what he’d expected her
to say and B—it seemed she was talking about a lot more than the
fact that he’d wanted to kiss Vanessa in front of Annie and Junior
and God and everybody.

“So she’s pretty,” he began, trying to sort out what
the hell Annie was getting at. “I haven’t seen her since I left for
college and she surprised me. That shouldn’t make any difference
between you and me.”

“
Surprised
you?” Annie screeched. “What the
fuck? You know, I wouldn’t even care if it weren’t Vanessa.”

“You’re
jealous
of her?” he asked,
incredulous. Jealousy wasn’t part of Annie’s emotional
repertoire.

“Yes! Yes, I am. But not because of this. This is a
just another in a long line of reasons, and then I find out she’s
the one who— That you of all the people in my life—” She took a
deep breath and then began. “My entire adolescence was spent
listening to my mother talk about how to cozy up to Vanessa
Whittaker so she could have an in with Knox.”