Mick Sinatra 2: Love, Lies, and Jericho (11 page)

The children
laughed.
 
It was hardly funny, but that was
the kind of relationship he had with them.
 
Very surface.
 
Not unlike, Roz
thought, all of those yes-men that worked for Mick.

“I have a
question,” Adrian said.

“Shoot,”
Mick said.

“How will
this marriage affect our standing?”

Mick stared
at him.
 
“Your standing?”

“Our
financial standing,” Adrian clarified, and Gloria and Teddy both rolled their
eyes.

“Oh, come
on, Adrian!” Gloria said.

“Really
dude?” Teddy asked.
 
“That’s your
question?”

“What?” Joey
didn’t see where Adrian had said anything wrong.
 
“That’s a legitimate question.”

“They know
it is,” Adrian responded.

“No, we
don’t know it is,” Teddy responded.

“Joey and I
have our concerns, yes, we do,” Adrian said.
 
“Dad doesn’t treat us the way he treats you and Gloria and that’s just a
fact.”

Mick’s cell
phone, seated in front of him, buzzed again.
 
Roz looked as he turned it over and skimmed the text.
 
Apparently some major business deal was going
down or he would have shut it off.
 
Mick
was a lot of things, but he tried to at least be attentive when he was around
his children.
 
He was trying.

But Adrian
didn’t notice the fact that he was reading a text.
 
His comments were more directed at Teddy and
Gloria.
 
“And if you don’t think I’m
telling it straight,” he continued, “just think about all the help he gives the
two of you, and then think about what he does for Joey and me, which is next to
nothing.”

“Joey’s
working for him now,” Gloria said.
 
“How
is that nothing?”

Mick looked
at Gloria.
 
Although he knew she still
had issues with him, she was at least trying to move on the way Teddy had
done.
 
Which was more than he could say
for Adrian.

“I said next
to nothing,” Adrian clarified.
 
“And it
is next to nothing compared to what he’s done for you.
 
You have a modeling career now thanks to Dad.
 
Teddy’s business is flourishing thanks to
Dad.
 
But we know why.
 
He loves your mothers.
 
That’s why he treats y’all right.”

He loves their mothers
? Roz thought.
 
That was news to her!
 
She didn’t think Mick gave a flip nickel
about any of his baby mamas.
 
And strangely
enough, Mick wasn’t disputing that characterization.

“Dad takes
care of you and Joey the same as the rest of us,” Gloria said.
 
“We’re all trust fund babies.
 
Teddy’s the only one who won’t touch a dime
of it.”

“Because he
has his own thing going,” Adrian said.
 
“He’s making his own money.
 
But
that’s thanks to Dad too.
 
But Dad
doesn’t give me any extra help.”

Gloria
frowned.
 
“Why does he have to give you
extra help?
 
What does that mean
anyway?
 
Why can’t you help yourself?
 
You’re a big boy now.”

“With
boy
being the operative word,” Teddy
said.

But Adrian
didn’t back down.
 
“I still say he should
do more for us.
 
That’s a fact.”

Roz could
see tacit agreement in the eyes of all of Mick’s children as they all looked at
their father, but not one of them verbalized that agreement.
 
And then the waitress arrived, took their
dinner orders, and left, and all was right with the world again.
 
Until Adrian brought it back up.

He looked at
his father.
 
“So I ask you again: how
will this marriage affect us?”

“It won’t
affect you financially at all,” Roz decided to say.
 
“I’ll be more than happy to sign a prenuptial
agreement.”

“You aren’t
signing shit,” Mick said firmly.

“But if he’s
worried about the money,” Roz said.

“Then that’s
his problem,” Mick responded.
 
“A man who
worries about another man’s money,” he added, staring at Adrian, “is not a
man.”

“Mick!” Roz
said, surprised by his harshness.
 
But
Mick did not take it back.

“Yeah?
 
That’s how you feel about me?
 
About your oldest son?
 
Then you can kiss my ass!”

Mick
immediately lurched across the table, grabbed Adrian by his shirt, and slung
him all the way over the table.
 
He and
terrified Adrian were face to face.
 
“Kiss mine instead,” Mick said.

Roz saw
restaurant staff about to head their way, to ask if everything was okay, but
she held up a hand for them not to come.
 
They didn’t come.

“Go on,”
Mick said to Adrian.
 
“Kiss mine,
motherfucker.
 
What are you waiting on?”

“I was just
talking, Dad.
 
I didn’t mean anything by
it!
 
I was just running my mouth.”

Mick figured
as much.
 
He released his son and Adrian
sat back down.
 
Sufficiently embarrassed.

Mick looked
at his children.
 
He might have dropped
the ball when they were younger and was on a guilt trip now, but that didn’t
give them a license to disrespect him.
 
“I’m not taking your bullshit,” he said to all four of them. “You
understand me?”

They didn’t
respond, but it was obvious to anybody that they fully understood.

Mick sped
onto Roz’s driveway in his Lamborghini and got out and headed for her front
door.
 
Dressed comfortably for the cold
weather, he wore a pair of brown dress slacks, a white turtleneck sweater, and
a brown bomber jacket.
 
His thick brown
hair was pushed back, and his face was clean-shaven, but with his lazy eye and
menacing looks, not to mention the NASCAR-style car he drove, even he knew he
still had a long way to go to project the conservative image he was going for.

Always
security-conscious when it came to Roz, he turned the knob of her front door
before ringing her bell, just to make sure she had locked it.
 
He smiled.
 
She had.
 
And then he rang the
bell.

After dinner
with the kids last night, they went their separate ways.
 
Not because they wanted to, but because he
had a major meeting that would undoubtedly run late into the night, and Roz
still had packing to do.
 
So he went his
way and she went hers.
 
Mick only prayed
it didn’t portend things to come in their relationship.

The door
opened and Roz, smiling grandly, welcomed him in.
 
But Mick found himself staring at her as he
walked in.
 
She was the epitome of
elegance to him, even though she was dressed youthfully in skinny jeans,
stiletto boots, and a waist-length black leather jacket with zippers
everywhere.
 
But it was all in the way
she carried herself.
 
She never wore fake
boobs or had to sashay her hips from side to side just to draw a man’s
attention to her ass.
 
She never did
tricks with eyeshadows and eyebrow pencils to draw a man’s attention to her
face.
 
She was the draw.
 
The entirety of her.
 
From something as simple as the dimples on
her cheeks, to something as complex as her seriousness, Mick often found
himself excited to see her again.
 
His
heart even slammed against his chest in anticipation, when she first opened
that door.

“That’s what
I love about you,” Roz said as he moved across her threshold and closed the
door.
 
“You always do your best to be on
time.”

“Only to see
your mug again,” Mick said as he pulled her into his arms.
 
He noticed that her hair was parted on the
right side of her head this time and hung along her shoulders in thick waves of
bounciness.
 
Sexy as hell.
 
“You look adorable,” he said, as his hungry
mouth moved toward hers.
 
“Just
lovely.”
 
And then he kissed her.

Roz adored
the way Mick kissed her.
 
It was always
hard and deep and long.
 
It was the kind
of kiss that never failed to make her horny even though she opened that door
without a hint of sex on her mind.
 
But
just seeing him again, and tasting him again, did the trick.
 
She threw her arms around him, and basked in
his love.

What Mick
loved about Roz was the way she always allowed him to take the lead.
 
She was a strong woman, one of the strongest
women he’d ever known, but she knew when to ease up before she stepped into his
territory.
 
She knew when to let a man be
a man without feeling as if her very womanhood was being threatened.
 
But she had reassured him that she wasn’t interested
in overstepping her bounds.
 
“Getting
into a pissing contest without a penis,” she once told him, “is stupid.”
 
He laughed when she said it, and loved her
for saying it.

Roz thought
that they would kiss a little while and then hit the road.
 
They did, after all, have a long trip ahead
of them.
 
Tennessee wasn’t exactly around
the corner.
 
But just as she thought he
was easing up on kissing, she realized one of his hands was unbuttoning and
unzipping her jeans, and his other hand had opened her jacket, lifted her
sweater and bra, and was fondling her breasts.
 
Instead of easing up on his kissing, he moved his lips down further, to
those breasts.

He moved her
back against the table in the foyer and began to suck and kiss and lick
her.
 
And when he looked up at her, and
she saw that his lazy eye was almost closed with lust, and his regular eye was
hooded too, she knew it was all over.
 
They weren’t going anywhere until he fucked the shit out of her.
 
No doubt in her mind.
 
He never had that look without putting
something on her she wasn’t going to soon forget.

He lived up
to the hype that morning.
 
He sucked her
nipples and fondled her breasts until they were aching with pleasure.
 
And then he slid down her pants and panties,
and moved down, between her legs.
 
He
began eating her with that urgent control she loved.
 
She couldn’t lean back far, because they were
still in the foyer, so she lifted her arms behind her head and held onto the
coat rack behind the table she sat upon.
 
And she gladly, proudly, let him have his way with her.

Mick loved
her surrender.
 
He could feel it on his
tongue when her clit began to pulsate as he licked it.
 
He could feel it deep inside of her when he
began to eat her.
 
Her body had arched up
high; so high that he could stand up and eat her.
 
And he did.
 
He ate with the purpose of drying her up.
 
But every time he did, her vaginal juices
spilled again, and he happily had another meal to finish.

He was also
unzipping his pants and pulling out his dick.
 
With other women he had to stroke it to get it ready.
 
With Roz, all he had to do was look into her eyes,
or just feel the texture of her pussy on his tongue, and it was ready.
 
With no soft contours on any square inch of
it.
 
It was ready to fuck.

And they
did.
 
In the foyer of Roz’s new rental
house.
 
Mick slid it inside of her, she
arched even higher at the friction of his entry, and they were in their
groove.
 
Her home was especially quiet,
as all had been shut down, and all that could be heard were the slapping sounds
of his cock hammering into her pussy, and the sloshing sounds of their
intermingled juices.
 
They were on a
roll.

“So tight,”
Mick was braying as he fucked her.
 
“Oh,
my baby.
 
I can feel every sweet piece of
you.”

Roz leaned
up and wrapped her arms around his neck.
 
“I can feel you too,” she said happily as she kissed him.

“One word?”
he asked her.

She was
about to say thick, because he was, but that word didn’t capture it for
her.
 
“Full,” she finally said.

Mick
smiled.
 
“Anything for my baby,” he said,
wrapped his arms around her, and fucked her even harder.

Mick
squeezed his eyes shut as he fucked her.
 
He never thought, not in a million years, that one woman could give him
everything he needed.
 
Until he hooked up
with Roz.
 
Now he not only allowed
himself to fall in love with this woman, but he asked her to marry him.
 
It was an incredible thing.
 
It was miraculous to him in many ways.
 
And as he opened his super-hooded eyes and
looked into her super-hooded eyes, he fucked her harder still.
 
Because she was his.
 
Because this beautiful African queen belonged
exclusively, unambiguously to him.
 
If he
was a sentimental man he would have cried.
 
He wasn’t, so he didn’t.
 
But he
felt the sentiment deep within his heart.
 
Inwardly, he was balling.

And as she
began to have her orgasm, and leaned her beautiful neck back from the intensity
of her contractions, he rubbed his hand along that thin, gorgeous brown neck,
and then across her breasts, squeezing and fondling them again.

And when he
began to cum, when every vein in his body began to surface from the stress of
his bountiful release, he still couldn’t believe his good luck.
 
Not some throwaway like him.
 
But it was true.
 
He was fucking Rosalind Graham, the woman he
loved where no other woman ever came close, and she was soon to be his
wife.
 
To be Mrs. Sinatra.
 
He was a very fortunate man.
 
He was the luckiest man that had ever lived,
and nobody was ever going to tell him differently.

“Belt
Buckle, Tennessee,” Mick said with a smile as he drove past the welcome sign of
the small, sleepy town.
 
“What’s the
population?”

“Probably a
couple thousand now,” Roz said as she looked at a place that used to be so
familiar to her once upon a time.
 
It
still was, but it was so foreign to her too.

“More or
less than when you were growing up here?”

“Less.
 
Something like a thousand people less.
 
Folks got out and never came back.”

Mick looked
at Roz. “Sure you want to come back now?”

Roz
nodded.
 
“I’m sure.
 
If you can go back to Jericho, surely I can
pay a visit to Belt.”

“Don’t
forget the buckle,” Mick said, and Roz laughed.

“Believe it
or not,” Roz said, “there’s a Bell Buckle, Tennessee too.”

“Really?
 
What’s with all the buckle references?”

“I’m sure
there’s a reason,” Roz said, “and I’m sure I don’t know what it is.”

“Never
looked it up?”

“Never cared
enough to look it up,” she responded, and Mick laughed.
 
He was already enjoying this trip.

But it got
kind of real for Roz when they drove down the main street of the town, called
Mendenthal Boulevard, and parked in front of a diner.
 
Her big brother’s diner.
 
The very diner she had planned to leave New
York and come to work for when her acting career stalled.
 
But then Mick entered her life in a
larger-than-life way and changed everything.
 
And, in her opinion, changed it for the better.

“Tyson’s
Surf and Turf,” Mick said as he looked over his steering wheel at the name on
the top of the storefront building.
 
“Your brother’s place, I take it.”

“You take it
right,” Roz said.
 

It wasn’t
lost on Mick that her mood had changed.
 
Not in any depressed way that he could detect, but she certainly was a
little more subdued.
 
“What’s the
matter?” he asked her.
 
“Coming home
jitters?”

Roz
nodded.
 
“I guess so.
 
It’s been a while.”

“What’s a
while?”

“I haven’t
been back since I left for college.”

Mick, for
some reason, was surprised to hear that.
 
“That’s a while,” he agreed.

“There was
no need to come back.
 
My dad and brother
constantly visited me in New York, or Connecticut when I was in college, and my
mom would drop by too when she had business to take care of.
 
On most holidays Tyson usually went to
Memphis to hang out on Beale Street, Dad was usually on the road, and Mom
didn’t want to be bothered.
 
Holidays
were her time to get some rest, she always told me.
 
Even when I was a kid she told me that.
 
What was I coming back for?”

Mick didn’t
realize how fractured Roz’s family life was until now.
 
She rarely spoke about it, just as he rarely
spoke about his own upbringing.
 
He
reached out, took her hand, and held it.
 
“We don’t have to do this if you don’t want to, sweetie.”

Roz
appreciated his concern.
 
“No, I want
to.
 
I have to.
 
I want my family to meet the man I love, and
understand that you’re going to be a part of our family too.
 
This is important to me.
 
Just give me a minute, and then we’ll go in.”

“Take all
the time you need,” Mick said, and meant it.
 
He wasn’t exactly buzzed about meeting her family either.
 
People didn’t generally care for him on first
sight.
 
He didn’t see why her kinfolks
would be any different.