Sweet Sinful Nights(27)
The waitress returned with a fresh iced tea. “Here you go, sir. Sweetened, as you requested.”
Tanner grunted, then spoke to Brent. “That’s what we need the neighborhood association to see.” Tanner lowered his voice to a whisper. “And it wouldn’t hurt if you threw in a few thousand to have some of the Tribeca parks redone. There are a couple in need of a makeover, and that could make the residents happy.”
“Easy enough. I’ll be glad to do that. Anything else?”
“Yeah, how about you peel off a little extra for me? The ex is trying to take me to court about alimony payments.” Brent didn’t answer because he didn’t like the sound of the request, but Tanner quickly waved a hand and flashed his yellowed smile. “I’m just kidding. I won’t let the bitch have a dime of my money. And I’ll help you with all this. I want your club in my building.”
“Great. And I want Edge there too. So let me know if there’s anything else you need from me.”
“That’s all for now. But I’m sure there will be something else soon. That’s how it goes in New York. You gotta do whatever it takes.”
That seemed to be the new mantra in his life, whether with women or with business.
CHAPTER TEN
Shannon extended her arms high above her head, her palms flat together, her fingers pointing towards the sky. Perfect warrior pose. Just like her grandmother beside her.
At age seventy-three, Victoria Paige showed no sign of slowing down. She was fit, trim, muscular, and determined to keep up with anyone and everyone.
“Even the dog is getting jealous of my yoga skills,” Victoria said with a wink as she and Shannon shifted poses on the sun porch of her ranch home in one of the nicer areas in the Vegas suburbs, a house that her four grandkids had bought for her. Her Boxer mix raised his snout at the two women, then returned to lounging in the sun.
“As well he should be, Nana. Your downward dog is the best,” Shannon said as they both planted their hands on their mats. Shannon had taken up yoga in college when she tore her ACL, hoping it would help rehab her and send her back to the stage. No such luck. ACL injuries were pretty much impossible to come back from. But the practice had helped her to recover, and she’d kept it up since it was one more way to stay active. Her grandmother had taken to yoga quickly too, and now it was something they did together whenever Shannon visited her, which was at least once a week.
Her brothers were in the backyard. Michael, the handiest of the crew, was fixing a fencepost with their grandfather, while Ryan and Colin drank beers and tended to the grill. The homey scene was almost enough to make anyone forget why the six of them were so close.
“I hear from Colin that you’re doing business with your old flame,” Victoria said, as they finished their final stretch. There was no judgment in her tone. No haughty raise of the eyebrow. Victoria was never like that, not now, and not when she’d taken them in when they were teens. She’d done her best to finish the job her son had started, seeing the four of them through the end of their high school years after their mother went to prison for conspiracy to commit murder, sentenced in a swift and speedy trial mere months after the killing of their father.
Shannon’s stomach clenched, as it often did just thinking of the last moments of her father’s life. Thomas Paige was shot four times in the driveway of their own home, a run-down, ramshackle house in North Las Vegas, the worst section of the city, riddled with crime. He’d been found with fatal gunshot wounds and an emptied wallet, as if a robbery had simply gone wrong. A robbery was plausible enough in that neighborhood.
Shannon and her brothers didn’t come from means. They came from desperation. They were bred from broken dreams, from a mother who’d wanted to be a Vegas star but never had the talent, so instead eked out a meager living as a seamstress, and from a father stuck driving cabs in the nightshift. But his situation started to change, and he’d thought he’d finally caught his lucky break when he began driving limos. He started making more money, and after a couple of years at his new gig, the future looked bright.
But there was no lucky break the June night he was shot after eight hours of chauffeuring rich kids from the swank suburbs to their after-prom parties.
Social services sent the pack of unruly Paige-Prince kids to live with their paternal grandparents once their mom was arrested for murder. Shannon hadn’t even started high school then, and at the time she’d never fully comprehended how horrible her grandparents must have felt. Their son was dead, his life taken at the hands of his wife, the very same woman who’d carried these four messed-up, f*cked-up, troubled kids who had been dropped on their doorstep as teens—orphaned through death and then through prison bars.
As she grew older, Shannon came to understand the terrible balancing act that her father’s parents had had to pull off to raise them with love and kindness during those last few critical years. Shannon and her three brothers were grafted by murder into their grandparent’s home, united by the death of the flesh and blood that linked the two generations.
Some days, she missed her father fiercely. Today, she felt that empty longing envelop her in a split second as she stepped out of the pose, finishing their yoga session, and looked at a sun-faded photo of her father in his young twenties that hung above the end table on the sun porch. Sepia now in tone, the image showed his hands wrapped around Michael’s waist as he hoisted the toddler onto a slide. She could remember him taking her to the park, too, sometimes with his parents. He’d loved the outdoors, and loved to soak up the sun with his kids.