Provocative Territory

“So what’s the other thing?” Eli queried after silence dominated the office for several seconds. Amusement returned to his extraordinary stare as it shifted between Tigo and Linus. “Haven’t y’all already rehearsed how you’re gonna tell me?”

Santigo mussed the wavy crop of hair covering his head. “You won’t like it. No matter how we tell you.”

“You’d be a fool to put the kibosh on this, considering the Echols’s mess,” Linus blurted, staying true to his trademark outspoken persona.

“Then let’s hear it.” Eli smoothed the back of his hand across his goatee.

“We’ve been offered a remodeling expansion project. Given the scope of the thing...it’d draw on our offices across the country.”

Santigo nodded in agreement with Linus’s explanation. “It’s huge, El. Way bigger than the Echols deal and with the potential to keep us in the black for years.”

“More in the black than we already are,” Linus included, reading the look on Eli’s face.

“Sounds like an offer we shouldn’t refuse.” Elias reared back in his chair again. “So why don’t you think I’ll like it?”

“It’s not the offer we expect you to dislike, but who it comes from,” Tigo said, then cringed.

Linus stepped over to drop a folder on the desk. Elias leaned closer and brushed his fingers across the label marked with the name Jazzy B’s.

* * *

Clarissa David stared across the den at the decorative facial tissue dispenser but she didn’t trust herself to make the short trip to retrieve one. Instead, she used the backs of her hands to smear away the water that pooled in her large eyes and made a continuous stream down her cheeks.

She’d been sitting immobile for the last ten or twelve minutes. Intermittently, she’d been plagued by bouts of shaking her head in confusion as if some remark had just been made which prompted her disagreement.

No words had been spoken. Clarissa was alone in the room, dazed and in disbelief. Confusion was but one of the emotions filtering her mind at that point. She’d arrived in Media, Pennsylvania, two miles west of downtown Philadelphia in time to have her final conversation with her aunt Jazmina Beaumont. It was hardly a conversation. Clarissa twisted her mouth into what could have been a grimace. The purpose of the gesture, however, was to hold down the sobs crowding her throat. She’d gotten to her aunt’s bedside in time for the woman to tell Clarissa only a few things at best. While they were lovely and inspiring, they had barely grazed the surface of all the questions skipping around inside Clarissa’s head. Not to mention everything Clarissa herself had wanted to say to the woman who had helped raise her.

Clarissa sat perched on the very edge of an armchair cushion. She resembled a frightened animal ready to take to flight. She was clenching her hands so tightly that they had an ashen appearance. Frustrated by the sight of them, Clarissa hid her almond-brown face in her palms and shuddered.

Soft rubs to her shoulders caused her to jerk upright a few moments later. Clarissa tried and failed to produce a smile for her aunt’s oldest friend and business manager, Waymon Cole. Desperately, she reached up to tug on Waymon’s hand until he was seated on the arm of her chair.

Clarissa rested her head on the man’s thigh as she cried.

“It’ll be all right, sugar.” Waymon’s calm, easy tone was almost as assuring as the manner in which he stroked the wavy, dark hair that tapered at Clarissa’s nape into the chic boyish cut that she sported.

In spite of Waymon’s words, Clarissa cried harder into his pant leg.

“I just—just talk—talked to he-her.” Overwrought, Clarissa barely hiccupped the words. “I came out—out here to see her and—and to talk. I—Terry made a stop. I—I asked him to stop and...” The sobs grew heavier as she bawled. “If I hadn’t told him to—to stop, I could, I would have been here before...”

“Shh...stop this now.” Waymon brought the firmness back into his voice. “You stop that, you hear? It’s no time to sit around blaming yourself.” Waymon bent to kiss the top of Clarissa’s head. “Jaz wouldn’t want that and you know it. Especially not now when you’re about to have so much on your plate.”

“I don’t even—even know what she wanted.” Still in the throes of remorse, Clarissa’s words sounded somewhat garbled. “She didn’t have time to—tell it—tell me anything—I didn’t know. I don’t know what to do, Way. She didn’t have time...”

“Clarissa? Stop. You know that’s not true. One thing everybody knew about Jaz was that she never skimped on the chance to tell folks what she expected of them.”

Clarissa shook her head against Waymon’s thigh before looking up. “I don’t mean that.” She blinked tears from her red eyes. “She wanted me out here...had something she needed to talk about.”

“Something about the club?” Waymon’s long attractive face appeared haggard from all the crying he’d done that afternoon.

Clarissa rubbed the back of her hand across her nose. “I don’t know, she wouldn’t talk about it on the phone. She just said to get out here ASAP.” Clarissa buried her face in her hands and shuddered again.

Waymon was back to massaging Clarissa’s neck when Jazmina’s doctor walked into the den.

“Dr. Raines.” Clarissa was on her feet the moment she saw the man.

Steve Raines had been Jazmina Beaumont’s physician for years. Speculation ran high that the two had enjoyed more than a doctor-patient relationship. Of course, neither party had ever owned up to the rumor but, when such talk centered around the likes of Jazmina Beaumont, chances were highly in favor of its accuracy.

“How long was she sick?”

“Clarissa.” Steve Raines sighed but he had no intentions of providing a sugarcoated response. Jazmina’s niece was far more perceptive than Jaz had ever truly realized. “You’ve always been a smart one,” he said.

Clarissa unfortunately was in no mood to be complimented. “How long was she sick?” she repeated, her dusky gaze was like stone and fixed on the handsome fifty-something Jamaican.

“May I at least ask you to sit down?” Steve waved a hand toward a sofa that matched the armchair Clarissa had just vacated. He nodded when she obliged.

“Jaz never wanted you to worry,” Steve began once he was patting Clarissa’s hands where she held them clasped on her knees. “She didn’t want you feeling that you had to be here full time. She’s been having heart problems for years and we—” he pressed his lips together proving how difficult the moment was for him, as well “—we diagnosed her with heart disease. She had a triple bypass three years ago.”

Horrified, Clarissa covered her mouth with both hands. Her speechlessness didn’t last for long.

“You should have told me!” she lashed out, her eyes shifting in fury between the two men.

Steve was shaking his head. “I couldn’t, love. She absolutely forbid it.”

Clarissa turned her accusing glare toward Waymon.

“It’s true, sugar,” he confirmed with the same slow, sad shake of his head. “You know better than we do how protective she was over you.”

Clarissa let her head fall as though she had no strength to keep it up. She couldn’t refute the truth in Waymon’s words. How often had she listened to her aunt advise her, over the last five years especially, to not let the business become her life or even her passion. Remaining true to form, Clarissa had allowed business to become precisely that.

Feeling defeated, Clarissa left the sofa and went to overlook the rose garden Jaz had cherished. Behind her, she could hear Waymon speaking with Steve about the funeral preparations. She turned to rejoin them.

“No. You don’t need to sit in for this, baby,” Waymon said.

“It’s okay, I’m fine.” Clarissa’s sigh proved otherwise but she maintained. “I need something to stay occupied.”

“Occupied?” Waymon mixed laughter with the word. “I promise you’ll have more than enough of that. But this is something you should let others handle for you.”

“I need to stay busy, Waymon.”

“Not now you don’t.”

She knew the man well enough to know that was the end of it. Deep down—though she’d be hard-pressed to know exactly where—Clarissa knew he was right. Stifling her arguments, she returned to look unseeingly past the bay window.

* * *

Elias had been unnervingly silent since Linus dropped the Jazzy B’s folder on his desk.

“We’ve already taken the early meetings,” Tigo explained, averting his dark eyes to pull on his shirt cuffs. “We’ve pretty much done all that we can without your approval.”