Manacled in Monaco Read Free Page B

braked a tad short of them. Wary emerald eyes darted back and forth between the two adults.
    “I asked you to stay above deck.”
    “My son doesn’t take orders from you,” she spat out the words.
    “Captain Terry says you’re to head to the deck. Your guests are here.”
    Crap, he’d forgotten the primary purpose of this trip. “Ask Captain Terry to hang for a bit. I’ll be up in a second.”
    “No, you tell him yourself. I’m staying with Mom.” Tony marched into the room.
    “Anthony, it’s okay. Please go above deck and relay Mr. Paxton’s message.”
    He waited until the boy’s long limbs vanished around a corner. “Joint custody, Sarita; I’ll settle for nothing else.”

Chapter Two
     
    For what seemed like an eternity, Sarita traced Rolan’s retreating broad back. Her knees buckled when his pronouncement penetrated her stunned brain.
    Joint custody.
    Over her dead body.
    Every instinct told her to take Tony and disappear, run to the farthest corner of the world.
    She heard the familiar sound of her son skidding to a stop, his sneakers squeaking on the uncarpeted floor.
    “Mom?”
    A miniature of his father, Tony braced the doorframe. Each day he grew more and more like Rolan, in looks and in personality. She raked his features, taking in the wobbling lower lip, reading the unvoiced question in his dilated pupils. He knew. He’d overheard.
    “He’s my dad, isn’t he?”
    “Yes.”
    “I have a dad,” he said and clenched fingers into tight fists. He gave her the exact same lip-curled-at-one-corner cutting glance Rolan shot her not moments ago.
    “You lied to me.”
    The words sliced her heart apart and she dug fingers under her rib cage, the pain a physical one, stabbing at her diaphragm. Sarita didn’t even know when her son slipped out of the room, too caught up in misery to do anything but wallow in self-pity.
    For years it had been just the two of them united against the cruel small-town mindset that favored the country club members, those tennis playing blondes with their perfect Kellogg’s families and husbands who tried to cop a feel at each high-falutin’ shindig she waitressed.
    She’d had to drop out of high school a scant month before the year ended and long after the NFL drafted Rolan. No one knew about her pregnancy; not even her more drunk than sober mother suspected until the now-famous DUI pileup on the town’s main drag.
    Scandalized by her mother’s affair with the bank’s president, the town ostracized Sarita. And the grieving widow vented her rage on Sarita with a vengeance. In less than a month, the bank repossessed the ramshackle cottage by the train station, her mother’s 99 Chevy, all the appliances, and the furniture. She didn’t have enough money to pay for her mother’s funeral.
    “Sarita, get a move on, Rolan’s chafing at the bit. There are twelve high flyers on deck.” Austen, the bosun and chief steward, dwarfed the doorway. A veteran Navy SEAL, the man’s Popeye biceps rippled as he reached the top cabinet. “I’m tending bar, so you’ll have to do the serving. Any more of this brandy? They’re guzzling it like agua. Captain said to assume formal attire. Hey lovey, you going to wear that little black number?”
    “It’s all I have,” she muttered, wincing, and wished the black cocktail sheath weren’t so revealing. “I’ll be right behind you. There’re a couple more bottles of brandy in the main dining room, cabinet under the TV.”
    Scattering the minced parsley around the salmon rosettes, she washed her hands and rushed to her cabin, donning the spandex sheath. On impulse, she added a slash of scarlet lipstick and yearned for the requisite high heels to go with it. Back in the kitchen, she sliced black olives, garnished the antique pewter tray with them, nabbed a handful of decorative paper napkins, and stalked out of the confining room, shoulders squared.
    Fortifying her courage, she flashed through the changes ten years had wrought.