A Price to Pay Read online

  “Pitiful.” Steven couldn’t help but appreciate Carter’s tenacity. He got what he wanted and that was what he had instilled in all his children from the beginning. The best education, training, and guidance had created four exceptional people. Well, at least three. Haley was something else entirely.

  Carter felt no pity for Anthony. He was the one who convinced Avery to keep Connor away from him and guilted her into feeling obligated to him because he had been there for her when she ended her engagement to Carter. Avery was loyal and wanted to do what was right. Anthony was counting on that and Carter would crush him for it.

  Steven chose not to press it any further. If there was one subject he couldn’t change Carter’s mind about, it was Avery. “Call me tonight after you’ve read it.”

  “It might be late,” Carter said, grabbing the baby bag and turning to leave.

  “I don’t care,” Steven answered. “And son . . .”

  Carter turned back to his father, trying to move away from Connor’s tiny hands that were blocking his eyes.

  “Be careful with Julia. Women like her have one thing in mind: getting a ring on their finger. If she catches on that she’s just a means to an end, you’ll have trouble.”

  “She won’t catch on.” Carter really did like Julia. He just didn’t love her. “I got it under control.”

  And Carter truly believed he did. In the last six months, he’d been as meticulous in his social life as he was in his professional life. Avery was just an inch away from him. He could taste her.

  “Which one is it?” Thirty-year-old Michael Chase asked his seven-year-old son, Daniel, who was twisting and turning on his lap.

  Daniel pointed to the computer, but didn’t say anything. He was getting bored and Michael knew he should probably let up. It was good enough that, at seven, both Daniel and his twin brother, Evan, were acing educational software games aimed for eight-to-twelve-year-olds. But they were Chases, and doing better than expected was the least that was expected.

  He’d had this conversation with his sons many times. Fate had them born into a family that lived under a microscope. The Chase family, in all their power, money, success and philanthropy, had become more than just a rich family. Their reign over the upper crust of black society, and powerful role in white society, made them unlike any other family of their kind, and the expectations would only rise with every generation. Carter was the Harvard lawyer. Michael was the Columbia finance whiz. Leigh was the Duke doctor and Haley . . . Haley was the spoiled socialite. Every rich family had to have one.

  As the third generation of this dynasty, Evan and Daniel, now joined by Connor, would be expected to be at the top of their private schools, get into the Ivy Leagues, and project the appearance of perfection in career success, family, and commitment to the community. It was a lot of pressure, but it came with advantages too numerous to even mention; including a hefty trust fund.

  “You’re a Chase, Daniel. We don’t give up. If you pick the right one, you’ll get a card and can move to the next level.”

  Daniel sighed, lowering his head back to where it rested against his dad’s chest.

  “Jellyfish!” yelled Evan as he jumped around on the other side of Michael’s desk.

  “You can’t even see it.” Daniel sat up, seeming energized by the challenge of his brother.

  “I already finished it.” Evan jumped on the black leather settee nestled in the middle of Michael’s home office, one of ten rooms in the six-thousand-square-foot, Tuscan-inspired house nestled in the ultra-lux Hollywood Hills.

  “I told you about yelling the answers,” Michael warned the son that was becoming more and more like him every day.

  Daniel and Evan were fraternal, but looked almost identical. Both were a smooth, chocolate brown like their mother with dark, fierce eyes like their father. Daniel was reserved and thoughtful like his Uncle Carter. Evan was always on and eager, like Michael. Michael only hoped they would grow up best friends as he and Carter had. They certainly fought as much.

  “They’re all jellyfish, stupid.” Daniel leaned forward. “It’s a Bubbler Jellyfish.”

  Michael smiled. “You mean Blubber, right?”

  “That’s what I said.”

  “It isn’t,” Evan said without even looking up.

  “Michael!”

  They all looked up as twenty-nine-year-old Kimberly Chase stormed into the office. Despite wearing a T-shirt and jeans, no makeup, and her long hair in a loose ponytail, what always struck one first about Kimberly was that she was distractingly beautiful. Both men and women stared at her everywhere she went. The society papers gave her the title of “most attractive Chase.”

  “Mommy!” Evan jumped off the settee toward his mother. “I finished first. Daniel still takes forever.”

  “Did not!” Daniel yelled out in his defense.

  “Go play,” Kimberly ordered curtly. She was trying her best to hold her temper until the boys were out of the way.

  Both boys looked at their father, which only made Kimberly angrier. Michael had always been the disciplinarian in the family, but in less than six months she had ceased to have enough authority over her own children to be listened to alone.

  “We’re learning,” Michael said. “Play time will come later.”

  “Okay,” Kimberly said, holding up a cell phone. “I just want to know who Shana is.”

  Michael reached for his pocket and felt that his cell was still there. He lifted Daniel off his lap. “Okay, you boys can go play.”

  Without hesitation, they ran out of the office. There was no glance toward their mother. Michael was all the authority they seemed to need anywhere. He was turning her own children against her and Kimberly wanted to kill him for it.

  “Why is this bitch calling me?” Kimberly closed the door behind her.

  “I don’t know what you’re . . .”

  “Aren’t you tired of that?” Kimberly asked.

  “Tired of what?”

  “Pretending like you don’t know that I know you fuck anything that moves!” She tossed the phone at him.

  Michael ducked to avoid the flying iPhone. When he looked back up, his dark eyes were intense. “I don’t have to explain myself to you.”

  And he hadn’t. Ever since Kimberly had done something that could destroy everything the Chase family had worked to create. That was six months ago. Since then, Michael never answered to Kimberly for anything, including his affairs.

  “Besides,” Michael said, “you don’t fuck me, so why do you care who does?”

  Kimberly was disgusted. “Don’t flatter yourself, asshole. I don’t care, but what I do care about is when one of those skanks calls me on my cell phone. How did this Shana bitch get my number?”

  Michael wanted to know the answer to that too. “I’ll handle it. Is there something else?”

  Kimberly thought about the question. Yes, there was. He could give her a divorce and let her take her children as far away from him and his crazy family as possible. That’s what she wanted, but Kimberly knew she wasn’t going to get it. Michael wasn’t going to give her a divorce unless she agreed to ask for nothing. And he would never let her take the kids. He told her she would never even see them again. She tried to leave with the boys six months ago, but he’d found her and gave her no choice but to come back to L.A. She couldn’t be separated from her kids.

  It used to break her heart that her husband had turned so cold to her. She used to worship Michael. He was her knight in shining armor. From an abusive, poor childhood to being a teenaged street hooker, meeting someone like Michael Chase just wasn’t supposed to happen to someone like her. But then again, there was that beauty. She was modeling in New York when she had caught his attention the way she did every man that crossed her path. She was attracted immediately. He looked like a young Sidney Poitier, but it wasn’t his good looks that got to her. It was his presence. There was a power about Michael that anyone would recognize. She’d had no idea who he was until a
fter their one-night stand.

  Her entire life, all the men Kimberly had known had treated her like a placemat. Michael was the first man who loved her and needed her. It didn’t matter that she would never be accepted by his mother and they would have to lie to everyone about her past. Although she wasn’t willing to get another abortion, she hadn’t asked him to marry her when she found out she was pregnant. He asked her. And for almost seven years, he loved her and gave her the world.

  Things began to change more than a year ago when Kimberly schemed to get rid of Janet Chase, the woman who made her life hell by reminding her every day she wasn’t good enough for the Chase name. By dredging up a skeleton from Janet’s past—an affair with another man after her engagement to Steven, which resulted in an abortion—she set off a chain of events that led to Janet’s overdose on prescription pills and alcohol, while almost exposing the family for what it was: truly dysfunctional.

  As with every other scandal, and there were too many Chase scandals to count, Steven and Janet’s money and influence kept it a secret from the world. But Michael, who lived for his father’s approval even more than his wife’s love, hadn’t been the same since. She had gone behind his back and almost destroyed his parents’ marriage and his family’s image.

  But he still loved her and he did not leave her. He worked hard to forgive her, and even though the rest of the family had turned cold to her, Michael stayed. But his relationship with his father had taken a serious blow and Michael made it clear to Kimberly that she couldn’t tip the boat again. He’d lose everything.

  So when her old pimp, David Harris, came to California to blackmail her, Kimberly tried to handle it without telling Michael anything. But it wasn’t money David wanted. He wanted revenge against Michael, who’d had him framed and put in a Mexican jail to keep Michael’s parents, or anyone else, from finding out about his connection to Kimberly. David promised Kimberly he’d leave if she slept with him. She thought it was over when she complied, but it was only beginning.

  Kimberly found out that David had taped their sexual encounter and was planning to post it on the Internet for the world to see. They struggled for the tape and David ended up dead. When she realized that someone else, hiding in the closet, had witnessed the accident and stolen the tape, Kimberly had no choice but to tell Michael, who had no choice but to tell his father and explain everything.

  Kimberly’s life had been miserable ever since. While he was eager to help her hide David’s murder, when Michael found out she’d slept with David, he lost it. That, on top of the fact that his father now blamed him for almost destroying the entire family, was the end of their marriage. Michael made sport of humiliating her, isolating her from the rest of the world. He controlled every aspect of her life. She couldn’t take a step outside the house or spend a penny without his knowing of it. He demeaned and degraded her when it suited him and still had the nerve to want sex.

  Sex, she refused, but everything else she put up with. She didn’t have much of a choice. Steven and Janet backed Michael’s threat that she would never get the children. Kimberly wasn’t just afraid for her own life. She was afraid of never seeing her boys, the only good things in her life.

  “Yes,” Kimberly finally answered. “I’m going out to eat with Avery.”

  “No you’re not.” Michael pressed the Exit button to release the CD-ROM.

  “The boys want to see Connor.”

  He rolled his eyes. “Can you do anything but lie?”

  “Can you be anything but a hypocrite? Your whole life is a lie.”

  Michael shot up from the desk and smiled when it caused Kimberly to jump. “I have you to blame for that.”

  It was Kimberly’s turn to smile. “Which I take pleasure in every day.”

  Michael slowly came around the desk, enraged by the sight of her. Not because he hated her, but because he couldn’t hate her enough to get rid of her. “The boys will see Connor at her birthday party next week.”

  “I’m going.” Kimberly turned to leave, but Michael was at her side in a second, pulling her away from the door.

  “I said no.” Michael glared menacingly. “You walk out that door and you don’t come back. Do you understand? You say good-bye to my sons and I’ll let you leave with the clothes on your back. I’ll even give you a few bucks.”

  After over six months of this, Kimberly had stopped falling to her knees in tears. She knew something, and that knowledge was giving her more and more confidence every day. “Is that so?”

  “You heard me, bitch!”

  “Yeah, I heard you now and when you said it last week and the week before. I still left, and you let me in when I came back. You even came looking for me when I didn’t come back soon enough.”

  Michael let her jerk her arm free. “Don’t push your luck.”

  “If I had any luck,” Kimberly said, “you’d drop dead!”

  When she opened the door to his office, Michael slammed it back. He leaned against her from behind, pressing her body against the door. He could hear her let out a gasp and it turned him on. Touching her always turned him on and he hated her for still having that power over him.

  “Baby.” He nestled his head into her neck, rubbing against her. “You have as long a leash as I want you to. You’ll stay as long as I want you to and when I’m done with you, you’ll leave; penniless and childless!”

  Kimberly felt a shiver run down her spine. She wasn’t a fool. There was no fighting the Chase machine. She’d seen what happened to anyone who thought they could. When David died, she’d seen how her DNA, which was all over David’s hotel room, and her fingerprints, which had been in the system since she’d been arrested for prostitution at age fifteen, simply disappeared.

  But showing fear only fed his sadistic torture of her, so Kimberly’s elbow jutted back and hit him in the chest. “Unless you want me to throw up on you, you’ll get off me!”

  He leaned away, looking down at his watch. “Be back by five. I’m going out tonight.”

  Kimberly didn’t care. He would go out tonight and sleep with some whore. At least he wouldn’t bang on her bedroom door, demanding sex he wouldn’t get, and wake the boys in the process.

  Kimberly was shocked by what she saw when she opened the door. Her babies were standing there with a sullen look on their faces. They had heard them arguing . . . again. She took a step toward them, but they ran away in unison. Daniel would be silent for hours and Evan would cry. It was becoming the norm.

  She had to come up with some way out of this. She had to get away from Michael and take her babies with her. It was the only way to save them.

  Surveying another conquest, twenty-four-year-old Haley Chase looked down at the man she had just ridden to ecstasy, Garrett Collins. She had made him, a supposed cream-of-the-crop, cool stud, yell out her name . . . again. The best part was that he was mad she broke him down. That was Haley’s pleasure; breaking a man down. But as he reached up to kiss her, she leaned back and rolled off of him. She wasn’t a big fan of kissing. Besides, he was all sweaty.

  She reached for her phone on the nightstand in the bedroom of his condo, in the rapidly regentri-fying South Park, L.A. Flipping back her long, wavy, auburn hair, Haley knew his eyes were on her as she began texting her friends, making plans for tonight. As she lay back down, he stared at her glowing caramel-colored skin and firm, full breasts. His eyes veered down to her flat stomach and curving hips.

  Haley was a temptress, and lived the part to the fullest. She had a smoldering sex appeal and the danger in her eyes was like a magnet. She was wicked to the core, and every man that chased her knew it. Still, they all wanted to be the one who softened her, tamed her. They all wanted to be the exception, but none of them ever would.

  Then there were men like Garrett, who chased her for more than her body. He chased her for her last name.

  “You could at least pretend to enjoy yourself,” he said.

  Taking just another second to finish her text, she tur
ned to him and answered lightly, “I did.”

  It wasn’t a lie. She’d had an orgasm. Only one, but he wasn’t completely selfish. Garrett was handsome and very vain. He’d started balding his first year at Duke, so went the completely bald route and it suited him. He also wasn’t as skilled as she’d hoped, but good enough for a twenty-six-year-old. Haley usually preferred older, richer men. She’d met Garrett on the UCLA campus, where he was attending law school and she attended graduate school. She had no idea who he was, but Garrett, like most black people from upper-class circles, knew exactly who she was.

  “You sure don’t act like it, girl.” He sat up. “We’d make a great pair, Haley.”

  “What do you call what we just did?” She rolled over him to the other side of the bed and grabbed her panties. La Perla was too expensive to leave behind. “Please let’s not turn this into another our-kind-of-people conversation.”

  “Your father likes me a lot.”

  Haley laughed as she got up in search of her other clothes. “First of all, trust me when I tell you that is not sweetening the pot. I hate my dad and him liking someone would be a big turnoff. Second, my dad doesn’t like you because he doesn’t like anyone but my mother.”

  “He will like me.” Garrett placed his hands behind his head, leaning back as if he’d accomplished something.

  “Well, I hope you two have a wonderful life together. For me, once I graduate from that damn school in May, I’m out of here.”

  “Why do you hate school so much?” He opened the nightstand and pulled out a case of cigarettes.

  “Not while I’m here,” Haley warned. “I hate the smell of those things. And I hate school because my father is dangling my trust fund over my head to force me to go. Not to mention I have to run into assorted Jacksons every day.”