“You hope,” Charles said.
But Donald gave his father a firm gaze. “It’s my baby,” he said.
Charles didn’t respond. Because it didn’t matter what Donald said. Baby pop out, a paternity test was going to be ordered.
“You taught me,” Donald continued, “that even if I messed up, I had to do the right thing.”
Charles squeezed his son’s small arm. “Yes, I did,” he said.
Then tears appeared in Donald’s eyes again. “What am I going to do now, Dad?” he asked.
“I don’t know, son.”
Donald looked at Charles. “If it was you, what would you do?”
Charles didn’t mix words. “Leave her,” he said.
“But I love her!” Donald shot back.
“Then you’re fucked. Because she’s going to fuck. Don’t think this beat-down you put on boyfriend is going to do the trick. If she couldn’t keep her legs closed two months after her marriage to you, don’t expect her to keep them closed two years after the wedding. So if you can live with that reality, that your wife is going to screw you, then stay with her. If you can’t live like that, son, cut your losses now.”
Charles looked at his son, as Donald jerked away from his grasp and walked over to the window, undoubtedly to cry again and feel sorry for himself again, and reaffirm his love to Susan again. Because Charles knew the type. Donald wasn’t going anywhere. Same thing happened to Charles early in his young marriage. He stayed too. He stayed for years after her initial indiscretion. He stayed until it hurt too much to stay. Then he kicked her ass to the curb.
But he knew his son. Donald wasn’t going anywhere right now. And telling him to leave his wife was like telling a baby not to cry. Because that apple, no matter how delicious, never fell far from that tree.
An hour later, Abigail Ridge, sitting on her patio while Reeva, her assistant, gave her a manicure, received the call she’d been waiting to receive for weeks. “Stress reliever?” she asked him.
“Big time,” he responded.
She smiled. “I can’t wait,” she said, bit her bottom lip, and then ended the call.
Reeva smiled as she continued to file her boss’s nails. “Big Daddy?” she asked.
Abby grinned. “Finally, yes.”
“It’s been weeks. A long time.”
“Too long.”
“You’d better take the pill today. You know that’s the first thing he’s going to ask you.”
But Abby had been thinking about that too. She’d been thinking long and hard about that. She was thirty-nine years old. In a matter of months, she’d be forty. And she was still Charles Sinatra’s piece on the side. He had no main course, and granted she was his number one piece, but she was still a piece of his life. She was still a secret in his life. She was still, if she were to tell the truth of it, his whore.
To be his number one side bitch at twenty-six was a cute and powerful position to have in Jericho. She was thrilled to be that girl. And she was discreet about it too. But a side bitch at forty wasn’t cute, nor powerful. It was pitiful. And nothing in Charles’s DNA was going to urge him to elevate her position at this late stage. If anything, he was coming around less and less frequently, and was staying shorter times when he did come around. He could demote her soon. It was now or never.
“What’s the matter, Abby?” Reeva asked as she continued to file away. “You want to go take it now?”
But Abby sipped more tea and decided against taking anything. “I’m good,” she said, and then she grinned. “I am so good!”
CHAPTER EIGHT
Three Days Later
“Three gorgeous hunks just sat in your section,” one of the servers said to Jenay as she entered the restaurant’s kitchen with her now-empty tray.
“I’d better get on it,” Jenay said as she hurriedly began to grab three menus and her order pad. “I don’t want Luke screaming at me for not moving fast enough.”
“And I mean he screams,” her fellow waitress said. “You’d think we were the worse servers in Boston the way he ride our backs. But speaking of riding, if those three hunks want to meet you at a hotel, tell them you’ll throw me in for free.”
Jenay laughed. “I don’t share,” she said jokingly, and left the kitchen.
But when she rounded the bar and looked toward her station, her smile quickly turned into dread, and her fast pace slowed considerably. And then she stopped. One of the three gorgeous hunks sitting in her section, as her colleague called them, was the one man she had been unable to stop thinking about; the one man she was certain she would never see again. But just like that, less than two months later, he was once again visiting her world.