The Lonely Hearts 06 The Grunt 2 Read online

  - Matthew 7:7 (NIV)

  With Al Green playing on the surround sound system piped out on the patio to add a little ambience to the already romantic evening, Mr. Benson slipped a hand behind the woman’s back and gripped her waist, pulling her closer to him as they sat on the sectional enjoying the gentle breeze and each other’s company. A smile crept across his lips as he nuzzled his nose into her hair and breathed down her neck.

  Thank God for Friday night. He had been waiting all week for this moment.

  Mae was the most beautiful woman he had ever laid eyes on, and he knew that he was damn lucky to actually have her in his life. It was just happenstance that he met her at a reception for the Black Lawyers Association in Raleigh a year ago. He knew then, when he saw her standing at the bar alone, ordering a dirty martini as she flipped her natural hair over her shoulders and killing that navy blue St. John’s dress, she was going to be trouble for him. He had been right. After introducing himself, she bought him a drink, and the rest was history. They had slept together that same night in his hotel room. The next morning after room service, he had done the unthinkable for a playboy like him and asked her on a second date. She accepted, and he hadn’t slept with another woman since then. On top of that, she was single like him, divorced twice just like him and wealthy, just like him. He couldn’t have found a better match if he had tried. Now, every Friday was reserved just for them – no kids, no grandkids, and no drama. She drove down from Raleigh, or he drove up from Atlantic Beach. It didn’t matter as long as they saw each other. Hadn’t missed a Friday in 52 weeks, and they both were firmly against marriage. Third time wasn’t necessarily a charm, and they were now set in their ways. Why mess up a good thing?

  “Damn, you smell good,” he growled, wanting to take her upstairs to the bedroom right then and make sweet love to her. She was wearing that dress tonight and keeping his attention. He liked a woman with a little meat on her bones and she made the meat on her bones look delectable. Size 14-16, with hips and ass like Pam Grier, a face like Phylicia Rashad, and a mind like Thurgood Marshall. She was superwoman.

  Mae smiled. He was always so frisky after a few glasses of cognac. For him to be such a big muscular man, he couldn’t hold his liquor at all. Putting down her drink on the table, she turned to him and wrapped her arms around his neck. Face-to-face, she looked him in his big brown eyes, filled with needy seduction, and kissed him slowly.

  His wide-set full mouth tasted like cognac and chocolate and was as soft and lush as any bed of pedals she had laid in. Mmm, she wanted to lay into his mouth tonight, curl up with his spear-like tongue and let him feast on her body for dinner. Melting into his wide chest, she inhaled the fragrance of his cologne and the warmth coming from under his white Armani button down.

  “Come closer,” he said, pulling her up onto his lap. Making her straddle him in her red silk dress, he set his legs wide and angled his growing erection to play with the center of her damp panties.

  “You are something else with yourself, you know that?” she said, feeling his large hands roam down her back with tender restraint.

  “I’m normally a very civilized man, baby girl,” he joked. “But you bring the animal out of me. I’ve been thinking about you all day. Now that I have you here, I’m going to do everything that I’ve been fantasizing about.” With his index finger, he pulled at the spaghetti strap of her dress until it was down on her shoulder, and then gently ran that same finger around the low-cut front of her dress.

  “What are you doing?” she asked in a raspy voice.

  He looked up at her with a devilish grin, eyes twinkling. “I’m hungry for you,” he said, easing one of her breasts out of her dress. His thumb stroked her nipple, creating a flame in her loins.

  She moved her hair back, arched her back and allowed him to taste her, slow and sweet. His lips attached to her skin and suckled at her brown nipple while his large hands gripped her buttocks.

  Mae bit her lip, breathing erratically as he flicked her nipple with his tongue over and over again until it start to make her sex pulse out of control. “We should take this upstairs,” she said, hand on his baldhead, guiding him.

  “Why not make love right here?” he suggested, kissing a trail from her breast to her neck.

  She closed her eyes and swallowed her throat dry now from breathing hard. “Because I’m 47 not 27.” she whimpered. It was funny though, even as she said that, she knew that he made her feel young again.

  “I’ve never seen a 20-something woman look as good as you,” he said, hand moving further up her dress. “Besides, it’s not like anyone will see.”

  It was tempting for Mae, but she quickly pushed the idea out of her mind. She was a sitting judge, had been an amazing assistant DA, and a damn good trial lawyer, there was no place in her life for this kind of adventure. All it would take is one extremely powerful lens in front of one extremely ambitious photographer to put all of her work in jeopardy.

  “I spent $4,000,000 on this house for absolute privacy. Out here on this patio, it’s just me, you and the Atlantic Ocean. No one is going to see. Trust me,” he said, sucking on her ear. Mr. Benson’s lengthy erection trailed the inside of his pants leg, pressing against her, changing her mind.

  What was life without adventure? Mae thought to herself suddenly.

  She planted her hands on his large forearms and looked in his eyes. “Complete privacy?” she asked in a high-pitched tone, feeling him slowly undulate under her.

  “No one but you…and me,” he whispered, knowing he was close to sealing the deal. A smile quirked at the side of his lips. “You can enjoy the breeze. I can lay you down right here on this sofa, strip you down naked, kiss you from your head to your toes…” His husky voice strained as the need grew stronger. “Trust me. You’ll love it. I’ll make damn sure of it.”

  Mae was at her wits end. Just the image of them in a naked embrace in front of the bay made her shiver. In all her years, she had never made love on a patio before, and it hadn’t been on her bucket list until now. Her lip twisted up in thought and just as her mouth opened to say yes, his phone rang.

  The sound of the phone was like an alarm clock sounding after an hour of sleep. Jolting the both of them, Mae’s suddenly curiosity wilted.

  Mr. Benson threw his head back, defeated by the untimely and unwelcomed interruption. He knew that no one called him on Friday nights unless it was an emergency. So it more than likely was.

  Pulling away from his embrace, she exhaled. “You better get that,” Mae said, coming back to her senses. The forces of the universe had decided. Bedroom it was.

  Mr. Benson looked at her and shook his head. “I was so close, wasn’t I?” The phone rang again.

  Mae grinned. “You have no idea.”

  “When I get off this phone, we’re going to continue this discussion,” he said seriously.

  Gently lifting her and setting her beside him on the sofa, he stood up, adjusting his rock-hard erection and disappeared behind the glass pane doors that led into the house, leaving Mae to set her gaze panoramic view of the chartreuse marsh grass and blue-gray water of the coastline and fantasize about what might have happened.

  Mr. Benson picked up the phone in the den and instantly recognized the number. He answered it quickly and went into his downstairs study. Closing the door, he huffed. “Boy, I left a message for you two days ago,” he said, frustrated. He sat down in the corner in an armchair hanging under a picture of the Omega Psi Phi Fraternity Incorporated founders.

  Jermaine was immediately apologetic. “Sorry, Pops.” He stepped out into his garage and went to the corner where unopened marked boxes were. “I just got your message. I haven’t been home in a couple of days.”

  Mr. Benson knew that his frustration stemmed from his current situation, so he silently excused the boy. Glancing at the door, he wiped his mouth. He had been so close. “You know, I know when you were growing up, things weren’t easy between me and your mother. Then after that with L
inda but still I thought I taught you better than this? A married woman?”

  Jermaine took his knife and opened up the top brown box. The sound of it drowned out his father’s voice. “I knew Amy was married, but I didn’t know that she had a kid. She completely forgot to mention that,” he said in his defense. He avoided discussing his upbringing altogether. It was a moot point anyway. “If she had said that, I would have never offered for her to come here.” He opened the box and looked inside.

  “How did you think you were going to hide a married woman on a military base in the first place?” Mr. Benson was not impressed, but that was nothing new. Jermaine had gone through more women than he could count over the years.

  “I wasn’t going to hide her anywhere. She was just going to stay here until she figured out her next move. We weren’t shacking up like it sounds. She said that she was leaving her husband. Evidently, he was some grunt who always stayed gone and she had had enough.”

  “How did you even meet this woman?” Mr. Benson asked.

  “I met her in the gym while I was at Camp Lejeune. We worked out together a lot,” Jermaine said, forgetting to mention that they also had sex a lot too. Amy was great at sex. So great, until he paid for a $2,000 plane ticket to get more.

  Mr. Benson knew better than to think that his son was just being a Good Samaritan. “So you mean to tell me that you all were just friends and you were just helping her out? Is that your story?”

  “Something like that,” Jermaine said, looking through the contents of the box for the first time.

  Mr. Benson pushed back in the seat and huffed. “Come on, son. I wasn’t born yesterday.”

  Jermaine pinched the bridge of his nose. “Ok. I was screwing her.” He lowered his voice. “She was…skilled and interesting, and I was bored as hell when I first got here. I was going stir crazy.”

  “You better thank God in Heaven that she didn’t make it over there,” Mr. Benson said sternly. “This could have been a career killer for you.” He knew that his son was brilliant and a part of the new world, but in his old world, Jermaine was a young Black man who was running off with a married White woman. His chain of command would have crucified him.

  Jermaine leaned against the garage wall. “Look, Dad. I’m not alone right now,” he said, hearing heels tapping on the hardwood floor of his kitchen and echoing out to the garage.

  “Neither am I,” Mr. Benson said, smoothing a hand down his shirt. “So, it’s safe to say that your dick is inconveniencing both of us.”

  Jermaine rolled his eyes. “What do you want me to do?”

  For Mr. Benson, the answer was simple. “Stop screwing married women,” he said abruptly.

  “No, Dad. What do you want me to do about this case that you’re working on?” Jermaine said, holding up his finger as a Japanese woman stuck her head out of the door and smiled at him. “I’ll be just a second. I’m talking to my father,” he said, bidding her to go back inside.

  Mr. Benson rubbed his temples. This wasn’t the time for a long, drawn out conversation. There was no way he was going to keep Mae waiting much longer. “Do you have any communication from this woman still in email form or maybe even text or some of those sex pictures?”

  “Dad, the girl died in a plane crash. I didn’t keep any sex pics. It would have been too weird.” The idea of jerking off to a dead woman made him a little sick. “But I do have six big ass boxes in my garage. I’m looking through them right now.”

  Mr. Benson frowned. “Boxes?”

  “Yeah, when she left Camp Lejeune, she couldn’t bring all of her stuff on the plane. It would have cost a fortune. So she sent it ahead through FedEx that morning before she boarded the plane.” He scratched his neck. “I never opened them until right now. It wasn’t like we were that close. Plus, I didn’t want to pry.”

  “You didn’t want to pry?” Mr. Benson asked.

  Jermaine shrugged his shoulders. “Yeah, I mean. This was her stuff. I felt like I’d be invading the privacy of a dead woman by going through it, but also I didn’t want to throw it away. That felt disrespectful. So, I put it out in my garage in the corner with her name on it and just left it.”

  “I need you to send it back to me,” Mr. Benson said a little more urgently.

  “Okay. I’ll send them Monday,” Jerome said, glad to get the deceased woman’s belongings out of his hair and the conversation over with.

  “No, son. You’ll put whatever sweet little ass you have there with you in your car, load up those boxes and send them to me right now. It’s Saturday morning over there. You don’t have anywhere to be.”

  Jermaine didn’t push it. “Okay,” he huffed. That totally messed up his plans but there was no way that he was going to defy his father. “Anything else?”

  “No,” Mr. Benson said. “Normally, I’d want sworn testimony from the lover about what happened, but you are my son. This would taint your career. So, do yourself a favor. First, use a condom…always…even five minutes from now when you get off the phone and go back to whoever is cray enough to be waiting on you. Second, don’t ever sleep with a married woman for any reason. Third, don’t ever call me on a Friday night again unless you’re near death.”

  “Understood,” Jermaine said, throwing Amy’s diary back in the box. “I really didn’t know she had a kid.”

  “Yeah, well, you’ll find married women don’t exactly tell their lovers everything,” Mr. Benson said, standing up. “Good night.”

  “Night,” Jermaine said, hanging up the phone.

  Chapter 21

  “Everything that is hidden will be brought into the light. Everything that is a secret will be made known.” Mark 4:22 (NLV)

  Although the military was vast and its personnel numbered nearly 2,000,000, it hadn’t taken much time for Gavin to pull up dirt on Leo Tabor. In a town as small as Jacksonville, Marines and Navy men not only worked together, they lived among each other, which meant there was a steady flow of gossip. This came in handy when conducting an unofficial investigation on one of their own. After a few calls to a couple of Navy men who owed him favors and a few more calls by his team on the West Coast to Annapolis, Gavin had found out everything he could about the man who would be “father.”

  None of the information that had come back on Leo was favorable, especially in a court of law. According to records, he was released on an Other Than Honorable discharge from the Navy about eight months ago. But that wasn’t the juicy part. According to another officer who used to work with Leo, he received the discharge for screwing his commanding officer’s wife. The relationship had gone on for about six months without being detected by anyone, but the two got sloppy and were caught by accident at a party given by the Admiral, screwing near the 16th hole on the golf course.

  Leo had tried to bribe his way out of being turned in by the MPs who found them and would have been let go on a warning, but then one of the guys recognized the woman.

  News of the affair traveled fast, and the Navy Command had to act fast to rid themselves of the shame. Lieutenant Commander Leo Tabor was removed from his post at Camp Lejeune’s Field Medical Training Battalion and thrown out on his ass by the Navy.

  No surprise that divorce papers followed shortly after. Evidently, the ex-wife had been the big bread winner. So proof of his infidelity had cost him his wife, his home and his piggy bank. With no other experience outside of the military in the medical field and no willingness to return as a failure to the upper East Coast blue blood family of doctors who raised him, he had settled down in Wilmington, NC and was living as a reject. Word on the street was that he spent his time at a high-end strip club, pimping out some dancer that he lived with and pretending to be some Veteran combat bad ass, when in fact, he had been a dentist by trade.

  So the question Gavin couldn’t answer was why did Leo want Cameron now after all of this time? Surely he had known about the boy since his birth, maybe even since his conception. However, he had never been in the boy’s life? Nothing abou
t his profile said that he cared about being a family man, especially since he didn’t see the young daughters he fathered with his ex-wife, who was a lawyer in Wilmington and a partner at a small, family-owned law firm.

  Gavin knew it had to be about money. Only Amy didn’t have any, and if she did, it would have gone to Brett upon her death. So what was the angle? His investigation had led him to ground zero.

  Stepping out of his new car in a pair of well-worn jeans, a gray t-shirt and a Cardinals baseball camp, Gavin passed the keys to the young valet and walked into the lit up front entrance of The Hellhound Strip Club. It was packed to capacity on a Saturday night. The hostess up front greeted him and asked him to take of his hat, but after slipping her a $100 bill, she let him pass.

  Music boomed in his ears. Strobe lights danced across the main stage. Drunken men in huddles laughed and drank, while watching the women dance. Women in short skirts and tied up tank tops carried drinks around on trays through the crowds while others danced nearly naked on the poles strategically placed around the building. It was definitely a mad house tonight, perfect for reconnaissance. Glad that he had gotten his PTSD under control before he took this job, he calmly strode through the hordes of people. This shit would have normally made him insane. But he had learned to deal when he had to. Tonight, he had to.

  With the photo of Leo memorized, he made his way to the bar in the back, the best vantage point to scan the room, and took a seat. As soon as he did, he caught the attention of Daisy. She had her eyes locked on the six-foot four giant with the superman smile. Quickly pouring six shots of vodka, she pushed them to the edge of the bar and took a wad of money from a young college boy who was so drunk; he looked like he was going to pass out at any moment. His friends, however, weren’t the least bit more sober.

  Screaming above the music, she made a motion with her hand under her neck. “I’m going to have to cut you off after this,” she said, irritated by having to tend to them for several hours. College guys were the worst when they were drunk and horny. She had been hit on like a hundred times by them, each time turning them down with a special little fuck-you face that she had adopted only after starting to work here.