Page 32 of Quiet as Kept

“Cool.”

I turned the doorknob on the room that looked out on the beach. The other room looked out on the side lawn.

Once I got them settled, I went back downstairs. My dad was on the screened in porch with the girls. We used it as a playroom.

Destin sat on Gannon’s lap, while Dakota leaned against him, occasionally standing to move a checker piece on the table near them. Somebody had changed them out of their wet swimsuits and back into their regular clothes.

“You can go out there on the deck. The swim lesson is over.” He teased me with a sly grin on his face.

“How’d it go?”

“I watched him give lessons to my granddaughters, then I watched him give lessons to Xarielle. Seems to me like he treated my granddaughters like they were the more advanced students.”

“What?”

He answered my question with a question. “Did you pay for a specific amount of lessons? How are you paying this guy?”

“I wasn’t sure how many lessons it would take, so I’m paying him per lesson.”

“He’s going as slowly as he possibly can with Xarielle. I’m no swim expert, but when you have a two and a three year old doing more than you have a grown woman doing, the math ain’t mathing.

“I watched my grandbabies hold on to the edge and kick their legs for five minutes, while he stayed on the deck and called out directives to them. Funny thing is, he wasn’t out of the water one time when Xarielle was in it. When she was holding on to the side of the pool kicking her legs, he was right beside her with his hands on her waist. He has more confidence in babies than he has in a grown woman? This,” he looked down at my girls, “n-i-g-g-a is getting free feels. Fire him!”

Right before we sat down to eat the meal that Vivienne prepared for us, Aunt Reese arrived by rideshare. Either Nehemiah or Yahirah had already alerted her that Vivienne had her face in the place because she didn’t seem taken aback to see Vivienne at all. She was totally cool about it. She was also distracted with loving on the girls and catching up with Xarielle and her new life on Jackson Island.

After dinner, all of the ladies minus Vivienne went out to the deck. She and Gannon opted to bathe the girls and read them a bedtime story. The four of them headed upstairs. That left Nehemiah, Ayden, and me to clean the kitchen.

I was about to start the dishwasher when my phone chimed with an alert that a vehicle was on my property.

“Who could that be?” I mused. My eyebrows furrowed, and my face frowned.

“I thought everybody was here already,” Ayden commented.

“Maybe it’s another long lost relative. What if it’s Priscilla? What if she found out about Gannon and Vivienne?” Nehemiah was a clown.

I laughed, but not that heartily, because what if it was Priscilla?

I walked to the front double doors, opened them, and waited. Seconds later, a familiar frame exited the black Porche sitting in the middle of my driveway. My heart gave a thump before it started to gallop in my chest.

The fuck?

I watched in both astonishment and horror as Jayla Wilson hurried from the car toward me.

“Kept. Kept,” she called out softly in her molasses thick, Southern Georgia accent.

“What the fuck?” I muttered to myself, taking in the strapless, lacy, mini dress that actually looked like lingerie.

It hugged curves that were . . . new? Jayla had always been stacked. She was perfectly thick in all the right places when I met her. She had the quintessential coke-bottle shaped figure. But as she hustled toward me on high heeled sandals, everything about her body looked enhanced, larger.

“Kept.” She tipped up the brick stairs and almost fell into me. Her arms snaked around my waist, and her face landed in my chest.

“Jay?”

“Yes, baby.”

Baby?I wasn’t her baby. Dude, the Middle Eastern real-estate investor who lived in London, was her baby. He was the one she ditched her actual babies to be with.

“What’s up, Jayla?” I eased her off me as nicely as I could.