Dance for the Billionaire (7 page)

He had started helping his father restore and sell on properties from the age of sixteen.  By eighteen he had successfully sold on two properties and hadn’t seen the benefits of an Oxbridge education when he’d planned to be his own boss.  He’d gone to Imperial only because his father had insisted he needed a fallback plan.

“Mama’s bowy.” Shawn smirked again.

“I love my mother to bits.  I guess that makes me a mama’s boy,” Dominic admitted.  Shawn laughed outright and his younger sisters giggled.  “My nine brothers and sisters all accuse me of being one.  In my defense, I’m the baby of the family and there’s a ten year gap between me and my sister Rosalind.”

Chantelle smiled, reached across the table and patted his hand, “Good for you, Dominic.  I think there’s nothing wrong with a mama’s boy.”

But he could see that she was fighting to keep her smile from widening into a grin.

“I think I’ll get a T-shirt made that says, ‘Youngest of Ten & Proud Mama’s Boy’.”

Chantelle’s smile turned into a grin.

“Yuh da man!”  Shawn acknowledged, shaking his head in defeat as his second attempt to belittle Dominic fell flat.  He sliced a big chunk of chicken breast and popped it into his mouth.

Chantelle smiled as she bent her head over her plate.  Dominic had handled that well.  Shawn had been the man about the house since he was seven—he wouldn’t easily give up that position.  Instead of challenging him, Dominic had made himself an object of ridicule and it had won Shawn over.

Mama’s boy, indeed!  She would love to meet the ‘mama’ who could call Dominic her ‘boy’!

***

“Who’s this, darling?”  Chantelle cringed at the sound of the slurred voice.

Her sisters had helped her clear the table and wash the dishes before going up to bed.  Shawn had kept Dominic’ entertained, discussing the merits of the latest Bond movie.  Her brother had finally gone up to his room a few minutes ago, leaving them alone for the first time that evening.  Dominic had refused her offer of a hot drink and she had just settled on the sofa next to him to have a heart-to-heart talk.

She’d hoped he would have been long gone before her mother got up to do her night’s prowling and continue drinking where she’d left off early that morning.

*****

Chapter Five

“Mum, this is my boss, Dominic O’Brien.”  Chantelle turned to explain.

Her mother was a mess.  Her face was puffy and sleep lined, her eyes bloodshot.  The pink cotton dress she had fallen asleep wearing was creased and stained with a blob of what looked suspiciously like last night’s Curried Goat.

“Pretty mixed-race bowy.”  Her mother placed her hands on her hips and perused Dominic from head to toe and Chantelle cringed as her sexually aggressive manner.  “Just like the one who stole my man from me.  Are you sure he’s not a batty bowy, too?”

Oh fuck!

Praying that he didn’t understand that her mother had just asked if he was gay, Chantelle jumped up and grabbed her bag from the top of the cabinet which had once contained and displayed her mother’s best glassware, and reached for Dominic’s hand. “Mum, I’ll be back soon.  I’m going to give him a lift home.”

“There’s no need to…” Dominic began, then realized that Chantelle was desperate to leave.  He let her pull him towards the door, but turned when he got there to say,  “Bye Mrs. Payne.  It was a pleasure meeting you.”

“When you come again we will discuss your intention with—”

Even more mortified, Chantelle quickly pulled the door closed on the rest of her mother’s sentence.

“I’ll call my driver.”

As Dominic pulled out his phone, Chantelle hastily placed her hand over it to prevent him from dialing the number.  “I want to talk to you.”

“Is there somewhere…a pub…nearby where we can talk?”

“No.  Well, there’s one, but I don’t want to go there.”  Even casually dressed, Dominic would stand out like a sore thumb among the locals who frequented the place.  “I need to drive to clear my head.”

“Okay.”  Dominic wasn’t totally comfortable taking her away, leaving her siblings with her intoxicated mother in charge.  But Shawn at seventeen seemed sensible and responsible enough.

“Is this your car?” he asked in alarm when she crossed the road and stopped beside a 2002 model Ford Escort.

“Yes,” she responded, quickly opening the door and getting into the driver’s seat. “It may not look like much, but it’s very reliable.”

“I hope so!”  Dominic opened the front door on the passenger side and slid onto the seat, grateful to see at a quick glance that the car was at least spotless inside.  “I should really call my driver.  I don’t think this will get us to Knightsbridge.”

“Trust me, this little baby would get us safely to Land’s End and back.”  Chantelle  patted the steering wheel affectionately before she started the engine and pulled off smoothly.

The car’s engine sounded good, Dominic acknowledged, but there was no way he was going to let her keep driving around in the rust bucket.

“I’m sorry…about my mum.”  Chantelle’s voice was husky as she continued, “She used to be a beautiful, vibrant woman—Charmine looks like her—but she’s been this way since my father left her for the son of a family friend ten years ago.”

“Son?”  Dominic stared at her in surprise.  “I thought that I’d misunderstood what she was saying.”

“My father’s gay.”  Chantelle laughed at his stunned expression.  “My mother’s friend Pauline said that everyone in the neighborhood where they grew up in Jamaica thought Dad was gay…except Mum, of course.  She was a nurse and when she got the chance to come here due to a shortage of nursing staff, she asked Dad to marry her and brought him with her.  Dad told me, when he finally called for the first time after leaving on my eighteenth birthday, that he couldn’t have turned down the chance to come to the UK, although he’d known then that he liked men.”

“That was a seriously underhand move,” Dominic said politely.  Privately he thought the man sounded a real bastard.

“He said that he’d received several death threats from the men in the village after he’d gotten close to an older man whose wife lived in the States.  He said he got a lucky escape when he came to London.  I think he did try to make the marriage work.  He was a great father.”  Chantelle was surprised to find herself smiling fondly in remembrance—usually thoughts of her father triggered memories of the harrowing times they had endured after he’d left them abruptly to follow his heart’s desires.  “He worked at the local barber shop and used to braid our hair.  We had the best cornrow styles for miles.  He was a good cook, too—much better than Mum—and each night he used to tell us funny stories about growing up in Jamaica.”

Chantelle paused, looking pensive for several moment.  Dominic didn’t attempt to break the silence.

“I don’t blame him for marrying Mum.  From what I’ve heard there was a lack of tolerance for homosexuals in Jamaica at the time…even now it’s not really accepted.  He probably did have a lucky escape.  But I can never forgive him for leaving without saying goodbye.”

“He didn’t call for seven years?” Dominic confirmed.

“No.  He said he was too embarrassed at first and then it got harder and harder to pick up the phone.”

“But did you know that he was alive?” That was the part that would have torn Dominic up—the not knowing if his father was dead or alive.

“Oh, we knew he was alive.”

Chantelle’s answer was laced with hurt and Dominic suddenly realized that the knowledge could probably be as bad as the not knowing.  Her father had deliberately ignored her and her siblings and his responsibility to them.

“When he first disappeared Mum was convinced that someone had murdered him.  She was furious  with the police for not taking the necessary action.  But, apparently they had managed to contact my father as soon as she’d reported him missing.  He had switched off his phone but not taken out the SIM card—the police can still contact you when you do that—they knew he was alive.  They weren’t legally bound to let Mum know.  It was only when Paul, my father’s young boyfriend, called his parents weeks later to tell them that he was in Leicester with Dad that Mum found out the truth.  I think she’d begun to wonder if he was with another woman when his body wasn’t found, but she hadn’t been prepared for the news that he’d left her for a man…someone who had grown up close to our family.  She had a nervous breakdown, I think.  She started drinking heavily.  The hospital fired her because she didn’t turn up for work or report sick.  We ended up living on benefits.

“It was fun for the first week or two.  Mum didn’t cook and we had Chicken & Chips practically everyday.  But one day a social worker visited and found the house in a mess.  Dishes piled high in the sink, the bathroom filthy, our bed sheets hadn’t been changed in weeks and almost every piece of clothing we owned dirty.  By then we had begun sniffing clothes to see which ones could be worn again.  Mum had sent us to play in the back garden when the social worker had arrived, but I came back in to get us ice lollies and heard the woman say that she would have us put in foster care if she returned and found the house in the same condition the following week.  Mum told her to ‘f-off’, that we were
her
children and no one could take us from her.

“I felt proud of Mum for standing up for us, but when I realized she didn’t intend to tidy up or stop drinking, I started to clean up myself.  I had no idea what to do at first—she and Dad had spoiled us.  I’d never done any housework—but by the time the woman visited again I had the place in some sort of order.”

“You said this has been going on for ten years?” Dominic asked her quietly.  He couldn’t imagine a mother not looking after her children properly.  His mother would still fuss over him if he gave her a chance.

“Almost eleven now,” Chantelle confirmed.  “At least she doesn’t go drinking at the local pub anymore.  We used to get worried when she staggered home alone.  Though that was better than when she staggered home with some strange man.  She sobered up a bit when she got pregnant with Charmine, but went back to her ‘bottle of vodka a day’ before Charmine was one.  If she knows who my sister’s father is, she’s not telling.”

“Didn’t you have any relatives who could have helped you?” he asked, reaching across and gently pushing a few strands of her Sisterlocks behind her ear to get an unobstructed view of her profile.  He couldn’t resist stroking the soft skin of her jaw line before pulling his hand back and allowing her to concentrate on her driving.

“Everyone’s in Jamaica.  My grandparents want Mum to go back home.  She wants to go back too, but her brother renovated the house my grandparents lived in and added a couple of bedrooms upstairs.  Now he acts like the house belongs to him.  He said he’s a Christian and doesn’t want ‘a drunkard’ living under his roof.  I sent more than half of that money…the money I got from you to my grandparents to buy a plot of land and build a house for them and Mum to live in, but the contractor doubled the original estimate once the work had started and I didn’t have any more to send to him.  My grandfather believes that my uncle somehow got involved with the contractor and that the man and my uncle split the extra money he demanded.”

“Your uncle sounds like a piece of work.”

“He is,” Chantelle agreed.  “I didn’t want him involved, but my grandparents are farmers.  They are barely literate.  He took over their land, saying that it was time they didn’t work as hard, but he now keeps the money when he sells the animals and the produce.  They have very little money of their own.”

“So what’s the state of play with the house right now.”

“The roof is on, thank God, so the structure is not exposed to the elements, but there are no windows and the interior needs to be completed.  I’m planning to go there myself at Christmas.  I can’t afford it right now and I have to take Shawn and the girls, so I can’t go term time.  Hopefully, I can get it all straightened out.”

“No, no.”  Chantelle looked at him sharply before quickly turning back to the road.  “I have a friend who will take care of it for me.  All I need is the name of the contractor and the location of the property.”