to live up to his boast that he would remain a bachelor until he died and then they’d have to pry his player card out of his cold, dead hands, he needed to get as far away from Jasmine Stewart as possible.
He could never allow himself to get too close to her.
Ever.
He just reminded himself how mean and evil and crazy she was. That would work, and his player status would be safe…
Chapter 2
“All the world’s a stage and all the men and women merely players…”
—Shakespeare
Ten years later
“W ha de France yuh telling muh? Yuh mus be mad, nuh?” Stunned and increasingly livid didn’t even begin to cover the feeling of dread creeping through Jazz’s body. She knew she was just on the edge of losing it completely because her Bajan was coming out. Even though she had been on her mother’s island home of Barbados for a couple of days now, it wasn’t just being around her Barbadian kin that had made her code switch and flip on her dialect. It was the stress of losing the one person she loved more than anything in the world that had her about to snap on the puny lawyer.
The past few days had been one shock after another, starting with her mother’s death.
Jazz hadn’t even known that the cancer had come back. She’d been traveling a lot for work, a lot of traveling for a local television personality, anyway. And travel to and from Boston in the winter meant a lot of time spent in various airports because of delayed and canceled flights.
Airport chairs didn’t invite longtime sitting, let alone comfortable sleeping. Add to that losing the only person who had faithfully had your back and a lawyer spouting nonsense about terms of inheritance in the will tied to outrageous sums of money and marriage of all things, and it was easy to see why Jazz’s patience had finally run its course.
The stiff but kind of cute young lawyer seemed to sense that Jazz was on the brink of some kind of breaking point, because he moved back in his seat a little.
“Your mother has left you $500,000 with the condition that you marry in at least six months and remain married for at least two years.” He nervously fidgeted with his gray tie, which perfectly matched his gray suit and did nothing to compensate for the blandness of his starched white shirt. “If you fail to do so, the money will go to your father, Clifton Williamson.”
Jazz never knew her mother even had a will, let alone $500,000 to leave her. And all her life Carlyne Stewart had told her daughter never to trust no-good sorry men and to make sure she could take care of herself and never have to depend on a man.
Yet her mother had actually made it a condition of her inheritance that Jazz had to marry someone? It made no sense. None of it made sense.
Just like it didn’t make sense that she was going to have to bury her mother in a couple of days. That nonsensical element was the real tipping point threatening Jazz’s sanity.
Her mother was gone.
Why should anything else make sense in the world when Mom’s gone?
Jazz inhaled and exhaled. She braced her back against the wooden chair for some kind of support. She closed her eyes and held them closed as she mentally counted to twenty.
When she opened them, the lawyer was still there. The will was still on the table. Her mother was still gone. And the possibility that her deadbeat—never paid one dime of child support that she knew of—father, whom she wouldn’t even be able to pick out of a police lineup, would be getting a whole lot of her mother’s money was taunting her brain and giving her an acute migraine.
No way would Clifton Williamson see one thin dime of her mother’s hard-earned money.
No way would she get married in six months, either.
She glared at the lawyer again.
The lawyer moved even further back. “As I said, you have six months in which to get married. You’re mother’s will is very specific about what she wants for you. And she left you this letter to read at your leisure. She said it would explain her reasons for wanting this for you.”
Reasons? Reasons? She didn’t need to read the letter to get her mother’s reasons. It was obvious that her mother had lost her mind in her last days. Why else would the woman who’d told her on a daily basis that she needed to be able to take care of herself and do for herself because men aren’t worth a damn now be demanding that she get married?
Insanity was the only reasonable answer.
She reached over to take the letter off the desk and the lawyer moved back. If she weren’t so irritated it would have been funny. She was tempted to really lose it and throw a serious fit that would give him a real excuse to take all the precautions he was taking. But she didn’t have it in her.
She had funeral arrangements to finalize, and her mourning wouldn’t let her expend any more energy on the scared little lawyer. The only other thing she could think about was how she would make sure Clifton Williamson never spent one dime of her mother’s money and how she was apparently going to have to find a husband in six months…
The island breeze and the sound of Lalah Hathaway’s beautiful voice riffing and scatting like Ella Fitzgerald reincarnated made Troy feel like his impromptu trip to the Barbados Jazz festival was more than worth the wrath he was going to incur from his father/boss when he got back to Detroit. Besides the great footage the two-man camera crew was getting for his top-rated show, Detroit Live, he was also proving a point to his meddlesome father.
And the women…oh, the women.
Barbados in January—with its white-sand beaches, azure-blue waters, lush green foliage and breathtaking tropical flowers—all the beautiful women—both the local fare and the many who traveled from other countries to enjoy the festival—had made his trip all the more worthwhile. The bevy of beauties, the music and the atmosphere made him feel like he was in player’s paradise.
“So are you really going to keep in contact with me when we get back home? Detroit is a long way from New Jersey. You’re probably just on the prowl for an island fling like my girlfriends said.” A high-pitched, nasal voice piped into his chill space sounding like a deep and ugly scratch on a vintage album.
Troy pulled his attention away from Lalah’s melodious voice and the fine women all around him to focus on the petite cutie sitting next to him. He’d met her the night before when they were listening to Roy Ayers perform. She had been with a group of other women and stood out as the hottest one in that bunch.
But she was starting to become just a tad too clingy for Troy’s tastes. And he didn’t have the energy to expend making her feel secure when he’d just met her. Plus there were so many women in attendance, women more adept at the game and who knew how players play.
“Sure… We can definitely connect when we get back to the States. I travel a lot getting footage for the job. Anything that has something to do with the entertainment industry is of interest to my viewers. So, I’ll definitely look you up if I’m near…” Troy struggled to remember both her name and where she was from. He hoped that his pauses hadn’t clued her in.
He gave her a smile, one of his most suave
