Red Hot Liar (9781617738654) (4 page)

“Ow! Ow! Ow! That
hurt
, Bunni!”

Even with Peaches choking the shit outta him Viceroy found the strength to open his mouth and laugh, but then he closed it again when another fist came flying at him and this one he couldn't duck.

Viceroy shrieked. Suddenly he was stone-cold sober as pain exploded in his bad eye, the one that had been swollen up bigger than an egg after the oil rig blast. He saw bright lights and he saw stars. He saw bursts of lightning and a rocket flare went off deep inside his pupil. The pain was so bad he saw a kaleidoscope of shapes and colors in the brightest and most agonizing images possible.

He saw all that shit and more, but what he heard was the voice of his youngest daughter as she stood over him with her fist cocked back and ready to bust the shit outta him in his other eye.

“Back up, Boy-o! You want another one? Get your goddamn hands off my mother! I hope she
did
mess around on you because you ain't shit, Daddy! You ain't shit!”

“Fallon?” Viceroy said incredulously as he loosened his grip on Selah and came back to his senses. “Baby girl?”

Fallon's twisted lips and the anger in her eyes did something to Viceroy that really messed him up. Pushing Selah out of his lap, he glared at Mrs. Katie and snapped his fingers twice.

“Go get me two servants. Two men! Tell them to grab some big baskets and bring them up to my suite. Now!”

He pushed himself up on his knees with a look on his face that none of them had ever seen before. His eyes raked over the room and scorched everybody as they swept by.

“
You
!” Viceroy turned and pointed at Peaches with pure disgust shooting out of his pupils. “I want your frilly ass the
fuck
outta my house! You hear me? Walking around here with ya balls dangling and ya dick print showing all through your skirt! I'm giving you one goddamn week, you hear me? One week and your ass better be
gone
!”

“But Papa Doo!” Bunni wailed. “Peaches ain't even do nothing! Selah and Fallon are the ones you mad at! Please, please, please, don't take it out on my
bruvah
!”

Viceroy wasn't even trying to hear it.

“Out!” he yelled, pointing toward the door. “All of y'all! Out!”

“B-b-but what about Okrah?” Selah squeaked, holding her eye. “She'll be here in a couple of hours! They're filming from our garden today!”

“
Fuck Okrah!
She can get the fuck out too!” Viceroy screamed as he stumbled to his feet and cast his hands over the entire lot of them. “Out, out, get the fuck
out
!”

“P
lease honey, I swear!” Selah pleaded, stumbling behind her husband as Viceroy stormed through her closet stripping all her designer gear off the hangers. Instead of her being the boss bitch up in the joint and pulling all the strings, the tables had suddenly turned and now she was the one caught with her hand in the cookie jar.

“I swear to God I don't know how Rodney Ruddman got my ring! There's got to be some rational explanation for it,” she lied, “but I swear on my dead mother's grave I didn't give it to him, baby. He didn't get it from
me
!”

Viceroy moved through their suite like a hurricane with the two male servants following him silently and holding a pair of extra-large baskets in their hands.

“Viceroy, please don't do this!” she cried out as he ripped at her ten-thousand-dollar dresses and flung boxes of her precious jewels around like they were Cracker Jack trinkets. Their fight had been hella nasty. After leaving poor Fallon downstairs crying uncontrollably, Selah had raced up the stairs behind Viceroy as he called for two male servants and stormed up to their bedroom suite.

“Your ass gots to go,” he growled as he filled up basket after basket, tossing her shit inside in big heaps. “You gots to get the fuck up outta here!”

For the first time in her married life Selah felt real fear. “W-w-where are you taking all my stuff, Viceroy? Where do you want me to go? Do you want me to move downstairs? Would you like me to put my things in another suite?”

“Hell no!” he spit. “I want you out the
door
! You ain't staying not one more night under my goddamn roof, Selah! Take your ass out there to the pool house!” he demanded. “You can stay out there while I decide if you're
ever
gonna be good enough to crawl up in my bed again!”

“Oh really?” Selah turned down her lip and hit him with a blast from the past. “I didn't pack up your shit when I caught my sister on her knees in your goddamn office! You must've forgotten how that low-down bitch sucked your dick!”

Viceroy's eyes got wide as he thought about the best head he had ever gotten in his life. “Oh I ain't never forgot that shit! I ain't gonna never,
ever
forget that shit!”

“Viceroy!”
Selah sobbed, knowing the pain and humiliation of what she was about to face was going to be way too much for her to bear. “But are you seriously putting me
out
, baby? I'm your wife and you're putting me out of our home?”

“You shoulda thought about whose wife you were when you decided to climb your ass in the sack with that grisly bastard Ruddman!”

“I didn't—” Selah started to lie again but then changed her strategy. “What about Fallon? You scared the hell out of her, Viceroy! Her and Jock are supposed to be flying out to their young leaders' camp today and instead she's downstairs crying her eyes out because of you! And what about the rest of the kids?” she wailed. “What are they gonna think when they find out you put their mother out of her home and forced her to go live in some wretched-ass pool house!”

“The kids?” Viceroy whirled around and glared like her tears didn't faze him one damn bit. “The goddamn kids are
grown
, Selah! If they got a problem with what I do in my house then they can carry their asses out to the pool house right along with you! Matter fact,” he said with a dark, crazed glint in his eyes. “I'm about to tighten up my will and put the brakes on all these muthafuckas who been up in here milking my nuts! I'm about to cut every damn body off, so the kids better learn how to start scrapping for their
god
damn selves!”

That there shut Selah right the hell up. Viceroy wasn't bullshitting. He had never in his maddest moments threatened to cut all his kids off financially before, and if he could do that to them then Selah knew exactly what he could do to her.

“Baby
please,
” she tried one more time. “I understand you're upset and you don't have a lot of faith in me right now. But do you have to go about it like this, Viceroy? Isn't there some other way we can work this out?”

The ice-cold smirk on his face damn near cut her heart in two, and with tears of shame running down her face she hung her head and followed the servants—and all her shit—out to the pool house.

 

Barron Dominion's muscular ebony body was drenched in sweat. He bench-pressed two hundred seventy pounds of free weights as he tried to quiet his raging mind and burn off some stress. His headphones were blasting a Yo Gotti cut that fueled him to push past the pain in his muscles and embrace the steady burn. Ever since he could remember he had been a thinker and planner. From the time he was a kid he had overanalyzed every detail of every situation from the top to the bottom, and then took it back up to the top again.

In most cases having such a razor-sharp mind was a great thing to possess, and he could remember quite a few times when his ability to think his way out of a box had saved his ass from a burning hot fire. But sometimes all that thinking could put you in a bad spot. It could overload a dude's brain and fuck with all his circuits.

Right now he was thinking that ever since Mink had busted up on the scene funking things up, life in the Dominion Estate had gone to the dogs. She might've been his sister but it was hard to forget about all the grimy lies she'd told and the underhanded schemes she'd pulled trying to get her ass next to that inheritance money. And it was even harder to believe that even after all the low-down con artist shit she'd been running, he had still wanted to bang her sexy lights out from every position possible.

The truth was, he still had some major issues with the girl. Even though he had promised his mother he would be a real brother to her, he just wasn't feeling the ratchet flavor that Mink had added to the Dominion family stew. She was a big shit stain on the smooth, respectable family image that Viceroy had spent his whole life building, and nowadays every which way you looked the Dominion brand was totally out of order. The last few months had stressed his mother out so bad that she had picked up the bottle and started back sipping again, and his father had awakened from his coma and come home acting like a hotheaded thug who was still scrambling for respect on the streets of Houston.

Barron knew he couldn't put the blame on Mink for everything that had gone down, but she was damn sure responsible for a big part of it. He was cool with the fact that she really was his long-lost sister Sable, but he couldn't stand all the drama and disorder that had come down on the entire family and seemed to follow her wherever she went.

He shook his head. The girl was just like a project roach. Them suckers never traveled alone. Thanks to Mink and her entourage they had more hood niggas living under the Dominion roof than a little bit, and if he'd thought Mink's sidekick Bunni was a fooligan, she was a lightweight compared to her flamboyant brother Peaches.

Barron grimaced as he set the bar in the rack and sat up with his entire shirt soaked. He was about fed up with all the bullshit, and if something didn't give in the Dominion household he might just blow his top.

When his father had gotten hurt in that oil rig blast, it was Barron who had taken over as the man of the house, and he had kept things running with an iron fist too. He had stepped into Viceroy's big shoes as the CEO of Dominion Oil and he'd filled those suckers up without missing a beat, if he had to say so himself.

Yeah, Barron thought as he stood up and stretched his hamstrings to get ready for his dead lifts, he could admit that the clout and notoriety that came with such a high-powered position might have swelled his head up a little bit while his father was gone. That type of dominance and authority over a multi-billion-dollar company and its personnel was exactly the type of job Barron had been born to do. But when his father woke up and started bitching about the way he had handled things without giving up any props or even so much as a thank-you for keeping everybody's head out of water, it had left Barron pissed off and more than a little bit offended.

He needed his father to know that stepping into a job like that hadn't been easy. Shit had gotten real tight a couple of times and even now Barron couldn't believe he had messed around and got caught in a sucker move when somebody slipped a tab in his drink at a frat party. It had been one of the worst nights of his whole fucking life, and before it was all over he had driven around town drunk as hell, hit a little kid, crashed into a bunch of cars, and had his mugshot snapped wearing lipstick and a mini-skirt.

If it wasn't for Suge, Barron's nuts could've been crushed in a vise grip for the rest of his miserable fuckin' life, and he thanked God that his uncle was the type of dragon-slaying nigga who could slump the boogey-man and make a nightmare disappear.

“
Grrahhhhh
!”

Barron grunted and exhaled as he bent over and picked up the heavily weighted bar then straightened his legs and came to an upright stand. He was punishing himself with the weights, but feeling the physical pain was better than feeling the restlessness and the resentment that was weighing heavy on his chest. He didn't deserve all the cheap gut shots Viceroy had been throwing at him, and he damn sure shouldn't have handed over the reigns to Dominion Oil to a man whose head was still fucked up and whose judgment was suspect.

From the outside looking in, Barron knew he looked like the type of dude who had it going on. As a successful black attorney who was a member of one of the most powerful families in Texas, he was living the kind of life that a lot of men would have killed for. But it wasn't the shiny cars, or the hand-tailored clothes, or even the beautiful women that motivated him anymore. None of that came close to the thrill of power he had felt when he was in complete control of his father's empire. And now that he'd gotten himself a nice big bite of that power he missed the shit out of it, and he knew he had to get it back again. Some way, some fuckin' how. He had to get that feeling back again.

Consumed with his desire to guide Viceroy's money-making machine into future glory, Barron grabbed his cell phone and water bottle and went over to the treadmill to get some cardio work in. He returned the nods of a few people who he saw there regularly, knowing none of them recognized him or realized that he was the heir to a multi-billion-dollar throne.

Barron set the treadmill to the steepest uphill incline and dug in and pushed his body as hard as it could go as his legs flew and he imagined himself running to the top of a mountain and screaming, “
I want my spot back! I'm not my goddamn father! I'm my own fucking man! My time is now and I'm going to seize my moment! I'm Barron Dominion, bitches, and I will not be denied!”

The sight of his cell phone flashing in a distinct pattern brought him tumbling down from the mountaintop with a quickness. He slapped the emergency stop button on the treadmill panel and snatched it up.

“Ma? What's wrong, Ma?” Barron frowned as he pressed his phone to his sweaty ear. Selah was on the other end crying and babbling so hard that he could barely make out a word she was saying.

“What do you mean Pops put you out? Put you out of where?” Barron's face was pinched as he listened for a few short moments.

“He put you out of the house? Out of
our
house? What are you talking about, Ma? The
pool house
? Are you fuckin' serious? Pops kicked you out of your bedroom and put all your stuff in the pool house? Where is he?” Barron demanded. “Put him on the goddamn phone!”

Barron fell quiet as Selah let loose with another barrage of tears and shrieks. He picked up enough of what she was saying to figure out that Viceroy had already gone back to the main house and that his mother was alone in the pool house crying her heart out.

“It's okay, Mama. Don't cry. Please don't cry. Just hold on, Ma. Let me call Daddy and then I'll call you right back. Don't worry, we'll get this straightened out and I'll get you back inside the house. You know how he's been acting ever since he woke up. The doctors warned us he might get crazy sometimes, remember? It's his head injury,” Barron soothed her. “It's not you or anything you did wrong, Mama. It's just his head injury, that's all.”

Barron closed his eyes and nodded several times as he listened to Selah babble. “Okay, okay. I understand. Just let me handle it, Ma. I'll have you back in the house in no time, I promise. Just let me handle it.”

Muthafucka!

Barron picked up his water bottle and hurled it against the wall. Ignoring the startled looks from the other patrons, he dug down in his sock for his car key and then stormed toward the front door in a rage. He couldn't believe it! That nigga actually put his mother out of her own goddamn house? His father was trippin! He was out of his goddamn mind! That bastard had gone too far this time!

Way too goddamn far!