Boston Avant-Garde 4: Encore (14 page)

“You better think about it. A bitch like you won’t get many offers like that.” He gave her a frank appraisal that made her skin crawl. “What’s it been, like two years since anyone’s been interested in that package? Maybe you should try dressing a little better. A man can’t even see what’s on the table with those jeans and sweaters you’re always wearing around.”

She was dying to tell him she was actually involved with someone—two someones, in fact—who could happily end his MMA aspirations in a one-sided brawl. Suri sighed, allowing herself the imagined luxury of watching Jericho and Dante rip Frankie to shreds right on her living room floor.

“Sweet sigh of anticipation, huh?”

“I’ll pass.”

She lugged her stuff past the tiny kitchen to the bedroom door. It was locked. Not bothering to knock, she reached up for the paperclip she kept stashed above the door frame. She stuck the end in the handle and jiggled it until she heard a click.

“Kim?” Suri pushed open the door and stepped inside their room.

It was an utter disaster. The room wasn’t big to begin with. Their single beds were shoved into the corners opposite the door. A battered dresser to the right of the entrance had been stripped of its drawers. The contents were scattered across the floor, along with all of Suri’s shoes.

“What’s going on, Kim?” Suri didn’t bother raising her voice. Yelling had no effect on her sister.

Kim was sitting in the middle of the floor with Suri’s scrapbooks in her lap. “Some guy came by here earlier. He was looking for you.”

Suri set her things down on her bed, the least cluttered portion of the room. “What guy?”

It didn’t seem likely that it would have been Dante or Jericho. She’d just left Dante an hour ago, and he’d said Jericho was running errands. She couldn’t imagine one of those involved checking out her address, because Dante would have mentioned it.

At least I think he would, wouldn’t he?

“You know, I always hated your dad.” Kim swiped at the page to turn it. “Ma never really got over him. She used to talk about him while you were at school, after she got really sick.”

That was news to Suri. She sank down on the sagging edge of her bed. She thought of the angry words she’d thrown at Liam O’Callaghan earlier. Apparently, she’d been off the mark.

“The guy who stopped by works for your dad.” Kim picked up an envelope and threw it to Suri. “He left you this.”

“You obviously opened it. What does he want?”

“He’s offering you money.” Kim’s face twisted into an ugly smile. “I told Frankie you wouldn’t take it. He was so mad that I wasn’t the senator’s bastard. He came in here and tore your shit apart. And that’s when he found it.”

Suri’s palms grew clammy, and her heart started to race. There was only one possible thing Frankie could have found. She would have prayed it wasn’t true, except God had stopped listening so long ago she couldn’t remember when.

“Good thing too. Frankie needed a lot of money to enter a tournament this weekend.” Kim stood up, the scrapbook tumbling to the floor.

Squeezing her eyes closed, Suri took deep breaths to control her anger. “How much did you take?”

“I took it all. You’re so special. You can go beg your precious daddy for money.” Kim kicked the album, sending it flying.

Suri looked at her sister, really looked, for the first time in ages. She and Kim bore a strong resemblance to each other because they were both the spitting image of Mellie Robertson. That was why the senator had so easily recognized her earlier that day. Lately, though, Kim was starting to look like the older sister.

Kim had always been slender, but now she was skinny. There were dark circles under her eyes, and her hair was lank. Her hip bones jutted out of her low-rise jeans, and her skin was pale. She’d been doing too much drinking and not enough sleeping or eating.

“That money wasn’t mine.”

“Damn straight. You been stealing from me!” Kim wasn’t feigning her outrage. Had Frankie really convinced her of something so idiotic?

“How can I steal from you when you haven’t had a job in almost three years?”

Confusion touched her features, and Suri’s anger faded to pity, then to panic. There had been nearly ten grand in the fire safe in her closet. She knew it was stupid to keep that kind of cash on hand, but it didn’t last long. The nursing home administrator cut her some slack if she paid in cash for her mother’s care two months at a time. Suri had made a withdrawal from the bank before she’d gone to the stupid wedding. After that, she’d been so distracted she’d forgotten to make the payment.

“Then it was Ma’s money,” Kim decided. “You stole it from her. Her stuff should belong to me, since you’re the one who can go mooch off Daddy Warbucks.”

“At least you got that right.” Suri laughed because it helped keep the tears at bay. “It was Ma’s money—the money to pay her bills. She doesn’t have anything for me to steal, Kim. I’m paying for her. I’m paying for you. And now I don’t fucking know how I’m going to pay for any of it!”

Suri had started dancing at Asylum after Kim stopped working altogether. Finding the job had been a total fluke—someone’s joking suggestion and Suri’s desperation all rolled into one last attempt to keep her mother from being tossed out of Our Lady. Since then it had been touch and go.

Now we are all screwed.

“Frankie and me are leaving tonight on a plane.” Kim gestured toward two giant suitcases, Suri’s, of course, that were stuffed to max capacity.

“Well, you’d better take anything you want with you, because this place won’t be here when you get back.”

Kim must’ve changed her mind about what to say midthought, because her mouth bobbed open like a fish’s. “Wait, what?”

“I can’t pay the rent. So unless you want to get my money back from Frankie and cancel your little vacation, I’m going to have to let this place go.” Suri felt oddly numb about becoming homeless.

“Guess that’s your problem, then.” There wasn’t quite as much bravado in Kim’s words this time. “Frankie is going to make it big in this tournament. We’ll probably come back and rent a big place down in the Back Bay or something.”

“Yeah, good luck with that.” Suri got up and bent over to retrieve her scrapbooks. She smoothed the rumpled pages before placing the two albums in her messenger bag.

“Frankie!” Kim yelled out the doorway. “Come get these bags. We gotta get to the airport if we’re going to make our flight!”

Suri had one more burst of sisterly concern. “Kim?”

“What?”

“You got a round-trip ticket, right?”

“I don’t know. I think so. It’s cheaper like that. Why?”

“Because I want you to have a way back to Boston when this dumb-ass gets his spine snapped.”

She closed her ears to Kim’s bluster about Frankie’s fighting prowess. The asshole-of-the-month made a big show of lifting her sister’s heavy luggage as if it weighed nothing and carried it down the hall while Kim admired his strong manliness. When the door finally shut behind them, Suri let the tears come.

Sometimes you had to let the dam spill over lest it break and the resulting flood drown everything in its path.

“Sugar, you look like someone done stomped you into the ground.” Nance came around the counter of the nurse’s station and gave Suri a giant hug.

Suri didn’t mean to rebuff the woman’s kindness, but if she let down her guard for thirty seconds, she was going to melt into a pity puddle. “I hate to ask this, but can I put some things in my mother’s storage area? I know we’re not really paying the extra fee for that, but the space is there, and I don’t have anywhere else to put my stuff.”

“You don’t worry about a thing! Is there a cab waiting outside?” Nance gestured to one of the PAs walking through the lobby. “Lucas, can you and Petey give us a hand with some boxes?”

“They’re right outside the back door. I had the driver let me off there so I didn’t make a scene.” Suri followed the two men through the corridors to the alley. When she pushed open the door, her little pile of boxes waited where she’d left it. Her stuff was even too pathetic to warrant theft.

“What’s going on, Jen?” Nance’s voice gained an edge. “It looks to me like you moved out of your apartment.”

“Well, Kim up and left with some guy. He’s some kind of martial arts badass who swears he’s about to make the big time. Since it’s just me, I figured I’d look around for something else.” Suri hoped Nance would take it to mean her move had been voluntary.

“Girl, I’ve known you more than ten years now. Don’t feed me that crap.” Nance grabbed Suri’s arm and steered her back down the hallway toward the main office and the staff break room. She tossed one last look over her shoulder at Lucas and Petey. “Put that stuff in Mellie’s locker down in the basement. And for heaven’s sake, be careful.”

The break room was blissfully empty. Suri sank into one of the padded folding chairs. She was so tired. She still had to call the landlord and explain about the lease. She’d lose her deposit, but after Kim’s string of bad houseguest boyfriends, it would’ve been unlikely she’d get it back anyway.

Nance plopped her ample backside into a chair across the table. “Okay, now tell me what’s going on.”

“Kim stole Ma’s rent for the next two months.”

“Sweet Jesus, what is
wrong
with that girl?”

Suri let her head thump to the tabletop. “It wasn’t her fault. It’s me. I shouldn’t have let that kind of cash lie around. I should’ve brought it right over to put it in Ma’s account.”

“Don’t you dare take that on yourself!” Nance nibbled a fingernail, deep in thought. “Can you get this month’s money?”

“I don’t know. I think so. If I work every shift, I might get close.”
Or I can work a few private parties for Flaherty.

Suri blinked hard to keep the tears from starting all over again. She wouldn’t cry anymore. It wouldn’t do any good. But the idea of letting Flaherty paw her for money was so disgusting it made her physically sick. Dancing was fine. Selling her dignity was something else. How would she even arrange something like that? Did she have to talk to Dante about it?

The thought made her cold with dread. Hours ago, she’d been looking forward to a night spent having decadent sex with two lovers who were willing to rock her world and let her play in theirs. Now she couldn’t even think about them without feeling as if her heart were being ripped in two.

This isn’t about me. It’s about Ma.

“I can get it.” Suri lifted her head to meet Nance’s gaze. “Can you keep us out of trouble with the office dragons for a few days? I’ll have it by next Thursday. I swear.”

“What about next month?” Nance touched her hand. “And Dr. O’Neil asked them to work up a payment plan for your Ma’s new meds too.”

I just became a really expensive whore. “I’ll get that too. By next Thursday.”

“Don’t work yourself to death, sugar. That won’t help anyone.”

Suri stood up, pushing her hair behind her ears. “I’ve got to get started if I’m going to make this work. Give Ma my love, please?”

“I wish I could convince them to give you an extension.”

Suri had already imposed on Nance’s goodwill enough for one day. The woman had her own life to live. It wasn’t up to her to fix Suri’s problems. “You’ve got a wedding to deal with. Which reminds me, you tell that boy of yours that if they want good classical music at their wedding, we’d be happy to provide that as a gift to them.”

Nance jumped to her feet and squished Suri into a warm hug. “Your Ma is a lucky, lucky lady. Now go on.”

* * * *

Jericho paced the main floor, feeling unaccountably restless. The earlier conversation with his mother weighed on him more than it should have. He’d learned years ago he couldn’t please the woman, no matter what he did. His half siblings didn’t seem to mind her domineering presence in their lives. He refused to let her dictate his job, his love life, and his future.

Although, he wondered what his mother would have to say about this new twist to his relationship status. Suri was an incredible woman. She was everything he would have ever wanted in a wife, had he been itching to take a walk down the aisle. But the idea of settling down with her and excluding Dante from the rest of his life was unacceptable.

“Look at her go. Have you ever seen anything like that before?” The blue-nosed heir to a Fortune 500 company nudged his companion, their eyes glued to the main stage in the center of the long wall.

Stepping into a clear line of sight, Jericho bit back a groan. Suri had managed to get ahold of a real belly dancer’s costume complete with tiny bells. The DJ had foregone the usual hard rock in favor of Moroccan music that ebbed and swelled with the movements of her body.

She drifted sinuously from one side of the stage to the other. Stretching tall, she shook her hips until her costume shivered with teasing music. Hands aloft, she began to spin, her tiny feet hitting the stage with a staccato beat that had her audience clapping and hooting with enthusiasm.

They were entranced, their money littering the stage. Bending over, she let her fingers brush the floor. She picked up the money before flipping completely over. The walkover bared a hint of pussy and enticed them to open their wallets and give her more.

Sex, lust, beauty, and the promise of more, the visual feast continued long past the point it should have. Suri grabbed the pole at center stage and whirled around. She kept her veil, her eyes rimmed in black peeking over the top as if she were tempting a lover to come take what he wanted.

Jericho took a step forward, a streak of possessiveness taking him completely by surprise. Shaking if off, he crossed his arms and tried to remain impassive. It was damn near impossible.

She took off her tiny top, pulling her arms through the sleeves and letting it slip through her fingers while she swung around the pole, the sheer fabric of her skirt flying. She lifted her arms, her breasts hanging free. Her pink nipples hardened, the areolas tightening right before Jericho’s eyes.

“Fuck.” Someone beside him was groaning. “I want a lap dance.”

He wasn’t the only one. As Jericho watched, she crooked her finger at a rich flunky who’d managed to snag a spot stageside, and invited him up. The guy’s cronies were whistling and catcalling as Suri approached him, hips swinging provocatively.