Stay (Dunham series #2) (14 page)

Then
his
mouth dropped open.

Vanessa Whittaker, on the cover of
Esquire
’s
“Women We Love” issue, bending toward the camera, her glossy pink
lips in a pouty kiss, eyes half closed. Her long, thick,
blonde-streaked chestnut hair floated out behind her.

She clutched an unbuttoned chef’s coat to her
sternum with her left hand to keep it from blowing off completely,
leaving the lower curve of her breasts exposed. With her right
hand, she held a chef’s hat over her lower abdomen, but left none
of the rest of her golden skin and magnificently lush curves to the
imagination.

America’s hottest chef

serves up gourmet

roadkill and weeds

in the Missouri Ozarks

“Oh, my God,” Eric breathed.

“Yummy,” Annie purred.

“This is too fucking surreal,” he muttered, rubbing
his forehead. “Turn the page.” With a couple of touches, she found
the feature article.

“‘Ford muse catapulted to food stardom, then left
New York glamour for Ozark simplicity to build a five-star
resort,’” Annie read. “Ford, shit. She had an affair with
Sebastian? He turned me down flat; said I was too skinny.”

“Annie!”

“What? He’s gorgeous. That was before he was outed
as Ford, mind you. If I’d known, I would’ve tried harder because he
has
painted skinny women and everybody knows he loves
blondes. Let me see if I can find that painting.”

Eric didn’t know what was worse: finding out that
his financial advisor had had an affair with and painted Vanessa
Whittaker (he didn’t have to see the painting to know she’d be
nude) or that his fiancée (
ex
-fiancée, he reminded himself)
had propositioned same financial advisor.

Are you out of your
fucking
mind?!

“I think I’m going to puke.”

Pause. Key clicks. “Woah,” she breathed.

Eric thought he might have a heart attack, but he
couldn’t look away.

Vanessa lounged nude on a magenta velveteen chaise
in a classic odalisque pose, her back to the viewer, looking over
her shoulder with one eyebrow raised cockily. Her skin was flushed
and she wore a self-satisfied, heavy-lidded gaze that made no
secret of her relationship to the artist. Eric barely kept himself
from reaching out to touch the screen over her bare buttocks. Her
long streaked chestnut hair fell in tiny haphazard braids and
dreadlocks to pool on the floor. An enormous gray long-haired cat
crouched on the chaise by her feet.

“That’s Knox’s cat,” Eric croaked, feeling
betrayed.

Crowding the chaise was a vast array of
paraphernalia more suited to the lair of a voodoo priestess brewing
up potions and assembling gris gris bags than to a celebrity chef
with an obscure specialty.

They both stared in stunned silence. Looked at each
other in disbelief. Looked back at the painting.

It was titled
Wild, Wild West
, “an homage to
the stereotypical American frontier saloon paintings,” according to
Wikipedia.

“That resort she’s got, Whittaker House,” Annie said
slowly, unsympathetic with Eric’s misery, “do you s’pose that’s the
inn Knox owns?”

Eric had his cell out, speed dialed, and on speaker
before she finished her question.

“Yes or no,” he barked as soon as Knox answered.
“Whittaker House is yours.”

“Half,” Knox corrected with alacrity. Annie
chortled.

“Why didn’t you ever tell me that?”

“Why should I have?”

“Because I’m your lawyer.”

“Being my lawyer doesn’t entitle you to know every
single detail about my life,” Knox retorted. “I have a whole
’nother life at Whittaker House, which I like a whole lot, and I
wasn’t about to mix that one with this one, which sucked a big fat
cock about ninety-five percent of the time. And I sure as hell
wasn’t going to expose her to my taint and all the financial
scrutiny I’ve had to deal with for the last fifteen years.”

“Wait a minute. Why didn’t Whittaker House show up
in any of the financial records we turned over to the FBI?”

“Funneled it through my cousin Morgan.”

“Your family is the fucking Mormon Mafia,” Eric
grumbled.

“So what’s with the sudden interest?”

“We ran into Vanessa last night,” Annie offered,
“and he had an instant hard-on, so I dumped his ass. He went to ask
her to breakfast this morning and since he’s back in record time,
I’ll assume she shot him down cold.”

Eric slouched and glared at Annie, but Knox began to
chuckle, which turned into a rolling guffaw. “Shit. That’s the
funniest thing I’ve heard in a long time.”

“She’s on the cover of
Esquire
,” Annie
said.

“Yeah, and
Maxim
.”

Annie immediately turned back to the computer.

“And Sebastian painted her.”

“He sure did.”

“Which means he fucked her.”

“Yes. She was his last lover before he met Eilis. By
the way, both of them think I’m too stupid and/or oblivious to have
figured that out, so I allow them to continue to think that.”

Annie sat back and began to laugh in earnest and
Eric thought this must be the next-to-worst day of his life.

“You’re taking this awfully well, Annie,” Knox said
politely.

“Little bump in my road, is all. Does Vanessa switch
hit possibly? Say yes.”

“I’d really rather not think about those things, but
I don’t believe so, no.”

“Damn.”

“So, uh, Eric, do you have anything to contribute to
this conversation or am I stuck with trying to fix Annie and
Vanessa up?”

“Fuck you,” Eric muttered. “She wouldn’t even talk
to me this morning.”

“Well, no wonder,” Annie said, “after what you said
to her last night. Damn near made her cry.”

“What did you say to her, Eric?” Knox asked calmly,
although that sudden edge to his voice meant he’d gone into
protective mode.

Eric reluctantly began to relay the
conversation—

“She’s taking Junior home with her?” Knox asked
incredulously. “Why didn’t I think of that? It’s the perfect
solution for everybody.”

“And then he insulted her when she asked if Junior
really was his kid.”

Knox groaned intermittently throughout Annie’s
recitation. Eric had never felt like such a bastard in his life,
but it had all been so sudden—

“You know, Hilliard,” he burst out, angry and
frustrated beyond bearing, “this bites. The girl saves my life and
you just . . . never tell me any of this?”

“Look,” Knox said, “I don’t know why you’re mad at
me
. You never said a word about her, so I assumed you didn’t
want to dig up old history. I was respecting your privacy. If you’d
told me you had something you wanted to get squared away with her
and would I grease the wheels a little bit, I’d’ve helped you. But
you didn’t. You’ve got deputies and troopers and the FBI available
as your personal Google and you know how to work a computer. And
it’s not like she’s a nobody. She’s fucking famous and if you’d
googled just
once
, you’d have found all this out on your
own, so I thought you were deliberately avoiding her. But then you
got an eyeful. Don’t call me up on a Sunday morning to yell at me
for not reading your mind and anticipating your needs.”

“Yeah, that’s on you,” Annie agreed, now staring at
the cover of
Maxim
that Vanessa graced, lying on wet grass,
her eyes closed, her hair—again in those braids and dreadlocks—all
her most interesting parts covered by pink and white blossoms . .
.

. . . her pouty mouth around a hot pink
popsicle.

Sucking it.

“Why wasn’t she at the wedding?” Eric demanded.

There was a slight pause. “We, uh, put on a
masquerade on New Year’s Eve,” Knox said almost reluctantly. “It
brings in a third of our yearly revenue. Celebrities go, the
überwealthy. They go for her, so she has to be there. Part of what
makes Whittaker House so popular is that a famous chef—who also
happens to be a Ford model—meets and greets, serves personally,
parties with everyone else. Her fame was about half our collateral
when we started out. The painting itself was the other half.”

“Yeah, okay, I’ll buy that, but there’s something
you’re not telling me.”

Deep breath. “Justice wanted her to be her third
bridesmaid and I wanted you to be my groomsman,” he said
quietly.

Annie gasped. “That would’ve put her and Eric
together.”

“Yes. And she declined.”

Eric felt pain slice through him and he closed his
eyes. Now, the only version of Vanessa he saw in his mind was the
little girl who’d saved his life, who’d only wanted a little
attention from the bad boy of Chouteau High.

The look of devastation on her little face.

The hurt in her turquoise eyes last night.

The anger this morning.

“Well, could you—”

“No, I couldn’t. I’m not going to. You’re going to
have to figure out what you want to do about it and how. If
anything. And good luck with that if you try. She’s not the most
accessible woman who ever lived. If she has a love life at all,
nobody knows about it.”

“But—”

“Shut it, Eric. You’re pissed ’cause you got caught
with your pants down and your dick in your hand.”

Click.

“Eric,” Annie said with a chuckle, arising to
continue packing. “I don’t know what you’ve been doing with women
all these years besides putting it in and pulling it out, but you
better get a clue before you can’t even do that anymore.”

* * * * *

14: Last Call

Monday morning saw two of Bryce’s attorneys on
Eric’s doorstep, salivating for the chance to get back into a
courtroom. He divvied up the caseload as he always had and saw the
top of his desk for the first time in almost four months, which

enabled him to start the paperwork for Vanessa’s
guardianship of Junior.

Eric had spent the night on YouTube watching
episodes of
Vittles
:
Gourmet Weeds and Roadkill
,
featuring Vanessa “Granny” Whittaker in her own studio kitchen in
the Ozarks, preparing all sorts of wild vegetation and exotic
animals. On her premiere episode, she’d made a third of the
outrageously disgusting dishes mentioned in
The Beverly
Hillbillies
.

Utterly telegenic, her smoky voice cheerful, her
hair clipped haphazardly on top of her head, clad in jeans and a
pink tee shirt, she walked around her kitchen barefoot while she
chopped, mixed, baked, and did what television chefs did—only with
weeds.

And raccoon.

And skunk.

And ’possum.

And coyote.

“’Possums are mean things,” she tossed out
conversationally as she cubed the meat in front of the camera for a
stew. “So don’t shed any tears. And coyotes eat cats, but they tend
to be rangy. We have a whole coyote episode coming up, and we’ll
make a couple of terrific marinades you can use for cheap cuts of
domestic meat, too.”

Eric dressed for work with a combination of dread
and anticipation.

“Oh, hey, Eric,” Annie had called to him on his way
out the door. “Give her my phone number, ’kay?” She’d laughed when
he flipped her off over his shoulder.

At nine, Vanessa strutted into the courthouse
dressed in an ankle-length pale pink linen skirt that emphasized
the generous curve of her hips. The long slit up the back showed
off the beautiful curve of her legs, made more so by the pink suede
sandals on her feet. She wore a nicely tailored white linen
button-down blouse with fine white embroidery and French cuffs.

Her streaked hair was in a prim twist at the back of
her head and studded with pearls— businesslike enough to be taken
seriously; flashy enough to let everyone know they were dealing
with wealth and class and that yes, she
would
get her
way.

In his mind, all her personae began to blend and
morph into a repeating loop: The hurt little girl. The angry woman.
The cover girl chef. The television personality. The regal
businesswoman.

The nice, pretty lady he’d met at Chouteau
Elementary.

LaVon had been subpoenaed to present Junior
immediately with a deputy escort in case she felt like thumbing her
nose at Eric. Dirk volunteered to be appointed the boy’s guardian
ad litem. Considering Dirk had grown up in the same trailer park
with Vanessa, occasionally serving as her bodyguard when things got
a little rough with LaVon or various neighborhood thugs, he was
eager to argue Vanessa’s case once again.

That was something else Eric hadn’t known until Dirk
gave him a rundown of his own history with the Whittakers.

“Why didn’t you motherfuckers ever tell me any of
this?”

“By ‘em-effers,’
plural
,” Dirk drawled, “I’m
taking that to mean Knox, as well?”

Vanessa didn’t deign to speak to or look at Eric,
preferring instead to communicate through Dirk, but Eric
surreptitiously watched her as much as he could and got caught by
Dirk’s sharp eye more than once. He would make sure to wipe that
smug grin off his face the next time they sparred.

Vanessa was exquisitely gracious with everyone to
whom she spoke, though it seemed few people in the courthouse knew
what she’d done with her life. Every one of the few who did worked
in the county clerk’s office, where Vanessa signed autographs with
a smile, and happily wrote down a couple of her recipes. She
answered questions about everything from cooking to television to
New York to the Ozarks, and never once lost that charm. Judge
Wilson would damn near trip over his warm-and-fuzzy old heart to
give her anything she wanted.

Glenn Shinkle had, of course, caught wind of this
turn of events. When Eric saw him approach Vanessa, he expected to
see her send the little weasel on his way, but instead . . .