Lover Man Read online

  When she slipped the strap of the binoculars around her neck that night, she wasn’t expecting much. Crystal led a pretty mundane life. And besides, although their homes faced each other, the only rooms Shelly had been able to infiltrate were the bedroom—and that was only during the day, when Crystal opened the blinds—and the office, whose blinds Crystal never closed.

  Shelly had watched her sitting at her computer reading e-mails and talking on the phone, but little else.

  She laughed at the irony of it all.

  If one of her neighbors were watching her the way she was watching Claude and Crystal, they’d catch her in some compromising positions, and not always with another person.

  Last night had more than made up for the weeks of boredom.

  It hadn’t been her intention to spy on them. Shelly had been working into the wee hours on her manuscript. She’d finally decided to call it a night; switching off the desk lamp, she stood and, like always, peeked through her shutters to give the streets a once-over before she retired to her bedroom.

  Her eyes happened to fall on Claude’s house, and in the darkness of Crystal’s office, she saw movement.

  She looked at the clock on her desk. It was almost four in the morning.

  Shelly reached for her binoculars, and lo and behold, who did she see bent across that expensive wooden desk, taking it from behind (and Shelly had assumed anally) like an inmate … none other than Karma Jackson!

  She knew there was something about that girl that didn’t quite sit well with her.

  And who was doling out the punishment?

  Survey says:

  Claude Justine!

  “God,” Shelly cried out to her office walls, “I wish I’d gotten that on videotape!”

  37

  Karma was silent for the entire ride back to New York. Geneva didn’t have much to say either; she was nursing a wicked hangover.

  Karma gave them all a tight hug and bid them goodbye, and then watched while the rented Charger slowly pulled away from the curb and disappeared down the quiet Brooklyn street.

  Up in her apartment she made a beeline toward her bathroom, stripping out of her clothes as she went.

  Turning the shower on full blast, she stood beneath the pounding water and cried. She felt dirty and cheap.

  How could she have done something so horrible? Fucking a man in his house with his woman just feet away?

  And how he’d taken her! Like she was some West Side Highway whore!

  Karma reached for the loofah and began roughly scrubbing her skin.

  But she’d allowed it. She’d welcomed it! She was a willing participant!

  She could have said no, could have screamed and woken up everybody in the house, exposing him for what and who he was!

  And what was that exactly?

  Karma searched for the proper response.

  A dog?

  And so what did that make her?

  “His bitch,” she whispered into the spray of water.

  “Geneva, what ’s up with your girl?” Noah asked as he came to a red light.

  Geneva moaned, “What?”

  “Karma. What’s up with her?”

  Yes, she realized that Karma had behaved a bit strangely, but what did Noah expect? He, Zahn and Crystal were all new to her.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I’m just surprised that she came back to New York after what happened between her and that man she had.”

  Geneva was perplexed. Geneva had shared the fact that Karma used to be Mildred and that a man had taken her for her life savings, promised to marry her and then left her waiting at the altar. Well, at City Hall.

  She’d also told him that after Karma’s transformation, the two had met up again in Barbados and the louse didn’t even recognize her.

  Karma had gone on to seduce him, making him fall in love with her the same way she’d fallen in love with him, and then left him at the altar.

  That’s as much as Geneva knew.

  “Why wouldn’t she?”

  Noah turned all the way around and gave Geneva a penetrating stare. “’Cause she took him for damn near a half a million dollars!”

  Geneva waved her hand at him. “You don’t know what you’re talking about. You must still be drunk.”

  “I know what the hell I’m talking about because I’m the one who helped her do it!”

  Geneva stared blankly at him, and then she started to laugh.

  Zahn shot a wary look at Geneva but said nothing.

  Car horns blasted behind them and Noah threw them the finger before screeching off.

  “Chevy called me and told me that she needed me to act as the father of this Karma girl.” His words came out in rapid bursts. “To tell this man of hers that I played the currency market and how I could double his money in no time, and just like that the guy transfers two hundred thousand to my account and I in turn transferred it to Karma’s account.”

  Geneva’s laughter began to fade. She realized that Noah was dead serious.

  “I guess she didn’t remember that it was me Chevy called, ’cause she didn’t say anything and I certainly wasn’t going to mention it.”

  Karma had never shared any of that with Geneva, and now she sat there dumbfounded.

  “You mean she never told you?” Noah asked.

  Geneva shook her head.

  “Wow.” Noah sighed as he pulled the car up in front of Geneva’s house. “Well, you ain’t hear it from me.”

  38

  Shelly waited until the sedan that Claude had climbed into was well out of sight before she opened her front door and stepped outside.

  Crystal was still standing on the lawn, a forlorn look on her face as she stared down the road.

  “Hey!” Shelly called brightly. “How ya’ll doing?” she said, making sure she stayed on her side of the street.

  After her visit to the house and Claude’s phone call, she’d received a warning letter from Claude’s attorney, reminding her of the stipulations of their divorce. She had to remain five hundred feet away from Claude and/or his home.

  “Hey, hey.” She waved frantically. She wanted Crystal to come over to her side of the street.

  Crystal gave her an odd look and then said, “You wanna come over and have a cup of coffee with me?”

  “Why don’t you come over here,” Shelly yelled back. “I have a new cappuccino machine I need to break in.”

  Again, Crystal shot her an odd look. “Um, it would be best if you came over here, the kids are still in bed. I can’t leave them alone in the house.”

  “Oh, they’ll be okay.” Shelly knew as soon as the words came out of her mouth that they sounded wrong.

  Wasn’t she a mother? How could she suggest a woman leave two young children in a house alone, even for a minute. Anything could happen.

  Shelly hurried to correct her faux pas. “You’re … you’re right,” she said, bobbing her head up and down like some idiot. “I-I have a conference call coming through in a few minutes anyway,” she lied. “Maybe we can go to the park later on?”

  Crystal’s face brightened. “I would like that.”

  Claude felt like he’d been doing push-ups for two days straight, that’s how pumped up he felt.

  Power was an amazing thing, he mused as the black sedan sped down Route 22.

  He’d done some wild shit; he’d taken his share of chances, but had never come close to screwing another woman right under the nose of one of his main women.

  He’d had a hard-on for the rest of the weekend. He could tell by the look on Crystal’s face that she was more than happy to see him leave.

  Claude had pounced on her every chance he got. And with every stroke, he relived those stolen moments. Even as he reminisced his dick began to stiffen. Sure, he’d taken a wife on vacation and flown a girlfriend down to the same island at the same time, but he’d always kept the women in separate resorts, and neither one was ever the wiser.

  That had made him feel po
werful, but now those experiences seemed like a neophyte’s compared to what he’d done over the weekend.

  The rush had been mind-boggling. He couldn’t stop thinking about it. He was like a dope fiend, and even though one part of his brain was telling him to forget, to store the memory away in the dark part of his psyche, the other part of his mind, the part that thrived on living dangerously, was already plotting and scheming as to just how he could manage to pull it off one more time.

  39

  Joshua Lieberman had been standing over Karma’s desk for a full one hundred and twenty seconds before she even sensed he was there.

  “Oh, sorry, sir, did you call me?”

  Joshua nodded his head. He had called her a number of times from the doorway of his office, and then after she didn’t respond he moved closer and closer until he was at her desk, hovering over her.

  He actually hadn’t really minded standing there; the low-cut blouse she wore treated him to an eyeful of her sexy cleavage, which is why he was flushed in the face when she finally looked up at him.

  Joshua cleared his throat and quickly averted his eyes. “Yes, I need you to, um …” He trailed off. He’d suddenly forgotten what it was he wanted to say to her.

  Damn her breasts!

  “Never mind,” he mumbled. Embarrassed, he turned and walked away.

  Karma shrugged her shoulders listlessly. She didn’t know what his problem was. She had her own problems.

  The message Geneva left on her voice mail two days earlier was haunting her like a bad dream.

  “Karma, I know what you did. We need to talk,” she said tersely.

  Karma had been nauseous ever since. She was sure Geneva knew about her and Claude and wanted to confront her.

  But how did she know?

  Karma ran everything round and round in her head and couldn’t figure out how it was Geneva knew. She shook her head in dismay. She’d really fucked things up, hadn’t she?

  And on top of that, she hadn’t heard from Claude. She hated herself for wanting to hear from him. She hated that she checked her cell phone every ten minutes, not to mention her e-mail. And she almost jumped out of her chair when her private line at work rang.

  But it was never him.

  She told herself that that was a good thing, that she should simply pick herself up, brush herself off, forget about Claude and the awful thing they’d done the other night, and move on with her life.

  But in her heart she knew that she wouldn’t.

  40

  “Mind your business, Geneva,” Deeka warned from his hotel suite in Copenhagen. “Stay out of it.”

  She’d shared everything that Noah had told her, and the fact that she was furious.

  “’Neva, you’re being ridiculous. Just because you’re friends doesn’t mean she has to tell you everything—”

  “Says you.” Geneva was being stubborn. “Me, Noah and Crystal tell each other everything!”

  “If that’s true,” Deeka sighed, “and God, I hope it’s not—”

  “What?”

  “I’m saying that some things that happen between a man and his wife should stay between a man and his wife.”

  Geneva rolled her eyes.

  “But back to what I was saying, you, Crystal and Noah practically go back to the womb. You’ve known Karma what, all of two years?”

  Geneva grunted.

  “And I realize that you failed to include Chevy on your list of complete confidants. Even I know Chevy doesn’t tell you guys all of her business.”

  “Well,” Geneva snapped, “Chevy has always been sneaky and—”

  “Okay, Geneva, I know I’m not going to win here, so let’s just drop it. I called to see how you and Charlie are doing. I really don’t have any interest in the As the World Turns drama of your friends.”

  Geneva started to shoot back “Then you don’t have any interest in me!”

  But thought better of it.

  “Okay, Deeka,” she said sweetly. “I miss you, baby …”

  “So I see you had company over the weekend?” Shelly probed as nonchalantly as she could. “That must have been nice.”

  They were in the park watching the children play.

  “Yeah,” Crystal said as she crossed her legs. “I left you a message, I wanted you to join us.”

  “Yes, yes, I got that. But I was out and about all day.”

  “Really?” Crystal made a face. “Your Mercedes was in the drive—”

  “So tell me,” Shelly quickly interrupted, “who all came to visit?”

  “Oh, Geneva, who you already know, and my friend Noah and his mate Zahn and their—”

  “Did Karma come too?” Shelly shot eagerly.

  Crystal gave her an odd look. “Yes, as a matter of fact she did,” she responded slowly.

  Shelly seemed to be waiting for something else.

  “We sat around drinking wine and talking shit, you know, the usual.”

  Shelly was rapidly nodding her head, and Crystal got the impression that she wanted to hurry up to the good part. But Crystal didn’t know what the good part was.

  “Um, then Claude came home.”

  Shelly’s body jerked and she straightened her back.

  “He was sick so he really didn’t get to spend any time with them until the following morning.”

  Sick? He looked perfectly healthy when he was using his dick as a battering ram on Karma.

  Shelly was flabbergasted. Crystal really had no clue.

  “What?”

  “Nothing, girl, nothing.”

  Crystal’s face went blank and then suddenly lit up. She wagged her index finger at Shelly. “Are you fishing for material for your next book?”

  Shelly figured it was best to play along and grinned sheepishly. “Yeah.”

  “I knew it!”

  41

  Claude pulled the phone from his ear and stared at it for a moment before pressing it back and asking, “I lost how much?”

  His broker, Sal, a sharp Latino from the Dominican Republic, cleared his throat before repeating himself: “Forty-two million dollars.”

  Claude’s heart dropped down into his stomach. He’d taken hits before, but never anything like this.

  “Claude, the market, you know how it goes.”

  Claude did know, but forty-two million dollars?

  “You’re my watchdog, Sal, why weren’t you watching?”

  Sal was glad he was in his office in New York City, so that Claude couldn’t see him flipping him the bird.

  Sal wasn’t really the watchdog. Claude had always done his own watching, his own watching and his own picking—he just called Sal to make the transactions.

  All Sal could think of to say was, “Everybody got hit, Claude, some harder than others. You’ll bounce back and—”

  It took a moment before Sal realized he was consoling dead air.

  By the time Claude’s sedan pulled into the private community of Privada, located in North Scottsdale, Arizona, twilight had already fallen over the city. In this luxury community, Claude owned a spacious, one-level Spanish-style home. This house was a favorite of his; the open-plan living and glass walls brought the outside in.

  Claude let himself into the house and the bull mastiff, Jake, bounded from the kitchen and met him at the door.

  “Hey, boy, hey,” Claude said as he roughly scratched the large canine behind his ears. “Where’s mama, where’s mama, huh?”

  Jake bounded down the glass-walled corridor toward the master bedroom.

  Pryor was early to bed and early to rise. The only one of his wives who would never bear him children—a childhood disease had rendered her barren.

  Long and luscious Pryor, so dark, her nickname was Chocolate.

  Pryor spent her late teens and early twenties walking the catwalks of Paris and gracing the glossy pages of fashion magazines before she decided to become an artist. The two had met at an exhibition of hers. Claude dropped a cool twenty thousand dollars on one of
her landscapes, and Pryor agreed to go out on a date with him.

  Three months later he slipped a two-carat ring on her finger, and three months after that they became man and wife.

  Because of her inability to have children, Pryor was overly grateful to have Claude. She still found it unbelievable that this man of such means couldn’t care less about her producing an heir; all that mattered, he reiterated each and every time they were together, was the love they had for each other.

  Claude walked into the kitchen, opened the refrigerator and retrieved a bottle of sparkling water. Twisting off the cap, he tilted his head and drank deeply.

  He would spend tomorrow going over his investments. He had to admit he’d not been as diligent as usual. His extracurricular activities were starting to impinge on his money and that wasn’t a good thing.

  Setting the empty bottle down onto the blue-and-silver-flecked granite countertop, he started toward the bedroom.

  When Jake saw him coming he rose and began panting happily as he wagged his bobbed tail.

  Claude made a quick sweeping motion with his hand and Jake obediently trotted off to another part of the house.

  Claude pushed the door open and stepped into the darkness of the room. He gently pulled the door closed behind him.

  Soft music swirled around the room. Pryor liked to go to sleep to music. But above the music he heared giggling and moans.

  His hand went immediately to the light switch and what he saw was Pryor, her long chocolate legs thrown over the white shoulders of a person whose head was planted deep between her thighs.

  “What the fuck!” Claude’s voice shattered the night, and Jake’s barking followed.

  “Oh God, Claude!” Pryor screamed.

  “What the fuck!” Claude yelled again, his hands balled into tight fists!

  The head between Pryor’s legs quickly dislodged itself and turned and looked up at Claude.

  Claude knew the face.

  “Megan?”

  It was Pryor’s personal trainer.

  “Now, Claude, let me explain.” Pryor’s words shot rapidly from her mouth.