Lovers and Takers (5 page)

“It’s not a question of support, Pammie.
 
It’s a question of Dad.
 
I don’t think he’s all into Druce the way Druce thinks he is.”

Pam looked worried.
 
“What makes you say that?
 
Daddy said something to you?”

“No, but Dad sees things about people that you and I can’t even conceive of.”

“And what’s that supposed to mean?
 
You talk like Daddy hates Druce or something.”

“I never said he hated him.
 
I’m just saying I don’t think Dad’s as easy to be manipulated as Druce thinks he is.”

“Manipulated!”
Pam said just as the doorbell chimed.
 
“What are you talking about?
 
Druce isn’t trying to manipulate anyone.”

“Yes, he is,” Aubrey said as Pam walked over to the front bay window to see who it could be.
 
“He’s trying to manipulate all three of us, little girl, and don’t you forget that.”

“He’s here!” Pam yelled when she saw Druce’s Corvette on the circular driveway.

But Aubrey was perturbed.
 
“Who gave him permission to just come onto this estate?
 
Security hadn’t contacted us.”

“Dad’s
upstairs,
remember?” she said as she raced around the side wall of the foyer and to the front door, out of sight of Aubrey.
 
“They always contact him when he’s at home,” he heard her add.
 

“That’s stupid,” he said, but then picked back up his phone and continued to check his emails.

Pam flung open the front door.
 
“Oh, Druce!” she said with such passion that it always caused Druce to flinch, and to feel a slight tug of dread.
 
Then she leaped into his arms.
 

They kissed passionately as he moved her inside the foyer and closed the door behind them.
 
He loved the way she kissed, loved everything about her, but this wasn’t the night for this.
 
He had a future father-in-law to convince, and he knew it was going to take all of his skills of persuasion to do it.
 
But Pam was so insistent, and so determined to get every ounce of passion out of him, that he couldn’t exactly resist.
 
She pulled him along, into the powder room off from the foyer, and quickly shut the door.
 

“What about your old man?” Druce asked nervously as Pam continued to kiss him and back herself up against the sink.

“He’s still upstairs,” she said.
 
“Come on, I need it bad.”

“But Aubrey--”

“Aubrey’s got work on his mind.
 
He’s not thinking about us.”

“Pammie, not tonight.”

“Yes, tonight!” she insisted and began unlatching his belt, unbuttoning his pants, zipping them down and then pulling it out.
 
Her eyes turned lustful as soon as she pulled it out.

She then lifted her dress, revealing no underwear at all, and sat atop the elongated vanity counter.
 
She opened her legs.

And although Druce’s dick was still aching from the pounding he’d put on Troy, he took her right there anyway.
 
And because he wanted her pregnant badly, he entered her raw, and began banging her furiously.
 
He banged her so hard that Pam had to put a wash cloth in her mouth to keep from screaming.
 
She loved the way Druce did her, loved it to the roots of her long, raven hair, and her green eyes almost rolled to the back of her head as he banged her.
 

Druce enjoyed it too.
 
He always enjoyed good sex with anything moving.
 
But he wasn’t thinking about Pam as he fucked her.
 
He was thinking about Troy, and those big, innocent eyes of his.
 
And what Troy had done to him earlier, and the way he’d done it.
 
He banged harder just thinking about it, and began to salivate at the thought of what all he was going to do to Troy when he returned to his apartment later that night.
 
And just thinking about it, and watching Pam scream in her rag-in-mouth, clenched release, made him come, too.

While his daughter was silently screaming downstairs, Jake Varnadore was upstairs, at the mirror inside his massive bedroom, slowly looping his tie.
 
His exhaustion was showing,
causing
 
him
to stop and rest his palms on his dressing table.
 
He had too many irons in the fire and he knew it.
 
Especially at work, where an imminent threat of a hostile takeover had him working his butt off to avert a disaster.
 

There had been threats in the past, by companies that didn’t stand a chance against his mighty cabal of loyal shareholders, but this threat was on another level.
 
This time it was billionaire industrialist Craig Halprin taking the plunge, and everybody on Wall Street knew that Halprin played for keeps.
 
He saw a vulnerability there that Jake had missed, an opportunity to sneak in and grab wavering shareholders when Jake didn’t even realize they were up for grabs.
 
Now he had to play catch-up, spending practically all of his time, day and night, making sure his remaining loyalists remained in line.

He stood erect again and continued to loop the tie that hung around his neck.
 
His eyes, usually so blue they looked like sapphire, looked dull tonight.
  
His body itself, normally the picture of good health, tall, strong, muscular, appeared to him to be almost stooped.
 
What he needed to do was get in that big bed of his and get some shut-eye, but he was expected downstairs to spend some quality time with his two children.
 
At least that was the original idea behind his decision years ago to have these weekly family dinners.
 
It used to work beautifully, with the three of them chatting and enjoying the others’ company.
 
And all of his ever-present concerns about all things corporate evaporated before the crisp, inspiring eyes of the two people that meant the most to him in this entire world.

But lately it had all changed.
 
Now they always had to bring dates, or friends as Aubrey called them.
 
Their latest main squeezes being Kara Wingate and that conniving Druce Lincoln.
 
He often sat in horror at the thought of his children’s judgment, given the people they decided to latch onto, but he knew he was hardly a role model in that department, either.
 
He, after all, picked their mother, and she was a doozie.
 
Smart, savvy, beautiful beyond description, she meant everything to Jake.
 
The way she broke his heart still sent shivers down his spine.
 

But to make matters worse tonight, his wonderful children had also invited a new woman to dinner, this one supposedly some cousin of Kara’s.
 
It was another one of Pam’s lame attempts to finally get him attached again.
 
Only she was wasting her time, he thought as he took the comb off of the dressing table and began combing through his thick, brown hair.
 
The only woman to ever gain any attachment to him was their mother, and that attachment nearly killed him.
 

His private cell phone began ringing.
 
His two children were the only two people allowed to use that number, and they were both downstairs.
 
At least that was where he assumed they were.
 
He pulled out his cell and looked at the caller ID.
 
Unknown name/unknown number.
 
Probably some wrong number, he thought, and answered it quickly to ensure they not phone that number again.
 

“You have the wrong number,” he said, without saying hello.
 
On the other end, however, was nothing but silence.
 
He waited.
 
Continued silence.
 
Then the person on the other end clicked off.
 

Only one other person had that number as well, but she wouldn’t dare . . .

He frowned, and clicked off, too.
 

Then the security monitor on his desk buzzed and he looked at the screen.
 
His entire estate was wired with closed circuit surveillance, including the front gate of his home.
 
Whenever anyone arrived at the gate, even though the front gate staff had been notified that such a person was expected, Jake, or in his absence his children, still had to personally give the all-clear.

This extra layer of security was instituted when, during a renovation project, a strange man who had no business being there, was cleared to enter.
 
This lapse was only discovered when the man attempted to break into one of the guess houses on the estate.
 
Jake had already cleared Druce Lincoln through.
 
Now it appeared to be Kara at the gate.

He therefore pressed the intercom, gave his permission, and then watched the security monitor as a pearl-white Mercedes S-class drove through the gate and then snaked its way up to the circular steps that led to his front door.

The car was Kara’s, he knew that much.
 
She even bragged to him once that she paid a cool eighty grand for it.
 
But if that was how she wanted to spend her hard-earned money, then fine.
 
That was her business.
 
That was her right.
 
But that constant need of hers to live above her means in some misguided attempt at impressing Aubrey or him or both of them, made him like her even less.

The doors to the Mercedes opened and Kara stepped out first, on the driver’s side.
 
She was a very pretty young lady, with a very alluring slender body.
 
But she was as
fake
to Jake as a nine-dollar bill.

He wondered if the cousin was just as obvious when she finally stepped out of the passenger side.
 
He was putting on his suit coat when she stepped out, but as soon as he saw her, all of his movement stopped.
 
For she was nothing, not anything at all, like he had expected.
 

She wore a very nice blue dress that crisscrossed at her very ample breasts and hung just above the knees of her very shapely legs.
 
And unlike her cousin Kara, there was nothing small about this girl.
 
She was all
woman
, voluptuous and curvaceous.
 
He had expected a Kara clone: tall, thin, pretty.
 
That kind of woman, after all, was what everybody, including his own children, thought he liked.
 
But what he really liked, and did all he could to stay away from because he liked them, was curves.
 
And this woman had them in all the right places.

He continued putting on his suit coat as he watched Kara and her cousin make their way up the steps to his front door.
 
Or, rather, he continued to watch the cousin make her way up those steps.
 
And that ass of hers, so tight and full, made his dick throb just watching her on screen.
 
He could only imagine what that joystick of his was going to do when he got her in his bed.
 
Which kind of thrilled him.
 
He hadn’t been aroused like this by the mere sight of a woman in a very long time.

But he knew he had to shut it down now.
 
That woman, like every woman he’d ever had anything to do with, was just looking for a gravy train.
 
An easy ride.
 
A sugar daddy.
 
But she could forget that notion.
 
She was getting no sugar from him.

Yet, he couldn’t take his eyes off of her. . .

THREE

Roni sat on the sofa beside Kara with a fixed smile on her face.
 
Aubrey was nice as usual, and every time Roni was around him she understood why she admired him so.
 
For a young man to shun the offers of all of those Ivy League Colleges that recruited him heavily, and attend a smaller, historically black and academically superb school like Florida Memorial University in Miami Gardens, was saying something to her.
 
That was how he met Kara in the first place.
 
On the campus of FMU.
 
Kara would tell her all about it.
 
While the other girls were trying to win Aubrey’s attention, she was trying to win his heart.
 
“I was light years ahead of those skanky girls,” Kara used to boast.

And apparently she was right, Roni thought, as she looked at her cousin.
 
Kara and Aubrey became fast friends and, when they graduated, Aubrey continued to look out for her.
 
He gave her a job when she didn’t have the contacts to break into the Miami-Dade teaching system.
 
Not that Kara tried very hard to break through, Roni would also admit, but Aubrey didn’t have to offer her anything.