On the Rebound 2 Read online

  On The Rebound 2

  By

  Brenda Barrett

  Published by Jamaica Treasures at Smashwords:

  Copyright 2015 by Brenda Barrett

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  Chapter One

  Church.

  She was in church.

  Regina sat in the back of the picturesque neat building and looked around with a sense of disbelief. This is what Ashley had unknowingly driven her to, going to church just so that she could see her.

  And not any old church either--this church was the epitome of conservativeness. It gave her the creeps. It reminded her of those long ago days when she stayed with her grandparents after her parents divorced. But even then her grandparent’s church could not compare to this medieval looking edifice. Everything was minimalist and white, from the gleaming church floors to the material they had covering the podium. The only splash of color was a floral bouquet with some daffodils; their bright yellow blooms were some of the biggest that she had ever seen.

  She admired them for a while and then continued to look around in disbelief. The people coordinated with the Spartan decor. From what she could tell from her position in the back row, the women wore long dresses covering their knees...and hats! Good lord, who still wore those kind of broad-brimmed hats in the twenty-first century…and blouses buttoned up to their neck?

  And if that was not bad enough, everybody had unprocessed hair except for a braid or two. No one had on makeup or jewelry that she could see.

  Even Ashley, Miss Fashion Plate, sitting at the front of the church, was looking plain and unadorned, not even a ring on her finger.

  At least she can bring off the plain look, Regina thought, admiring her for a while. Ashley did not need makeup or any of that stuff to look pretty. Her hair was natural now and the bun she had under the ridiculously frilly blue hat looked curly and thick.

  Ashley looked softer somehow, younger if that were possible, and innocent...no not innocent, pious...that was the word. She hadn't seen Ashley in person for five years, ever since Ashley's divorce from Brandon Blake.

  Regina had kept tabs on her though; even when she had gone to live in the UK and was working as a sports journalist she had hired an investigator to track Ashley.

  His reports had been monotonous; Ashley did nothing really remarkable that first year after her divorce. The second year she had started going back to church in earnest and started this mad path she was on to recreate herself into this holy creature. The third year she visited her mother in the States for three months and they seemed to be getting along. The fourth year, Ashley met a guy, Ruel Dennison.

  A pastor.

  Of all the professions in the world? Regina had been flabbergasted. Ashley really seemed to have a type. She liked straitlaced conservative Christian men. Brandon had been the epitome of straitlaced conservatism and she had thought that Ashley would not have stood a chance with him.

  She was wrong then and she was wrong now because this pastor, Ruel Dennison, had married Ashley eleven months ago.

  He was even more conservative than Brandon, if her reports from King, the investigator, were right. The pastor was forty years old, a widower with one child, a girl around sixteen, who still lived with her grandmother.

  The pastor had met Ashley at one of those things that churches have—a convention. It was an event where church folks came together and stroked each other’s egos, or that was how Regina imagined it, having never been to one.

  As far as she knew Ashley had not told him about her and their past together and she was banking on the shock factor to get Ashley out of here and away from Ruel Dennison, minister of the gospel. Surely he wouldn't want a wife who had a past like Ashley's. That was her ace card. Ashley made it so easy with her choice of men.

  It gave Regina power and she was not afraid to use this ammunition to once more break up Ashley's happily-ever-after with whatever sucker she had managed to lure into her web.

  Regina truly believed that Ashley had gotten in over her head. Surely she can’t be enjoying this imprisonment in a small hick town in the back of beyond.

  It was possible that the pastor had worked some sort of voodoo on her or given her some sort of magic pill for her to be staying in this place. Surely it was not normal or natural to be this buttoned-up and suppressed. It boggled Regina’s mind that Ashley, who had just turned thirty-five, could enjoy this kind of hemmed-in lifestyle.

  Regina had to rescue Ashley. She had to do something. Her two months’ vacation before she joined a local television station as head of their sports department would have to be spent up here in Hicksville trying to get Ashley to see sense once again. And this time she was sure that Ashley would listen.

  She looked around the church. It had two pews, it could comfortably seat sixty persons and the front benches were relatively full. She had come at the right time, it seemed. Somebody was reading a scripture passage and the rest of the audience was following from their Bibles...no, not audience, congregation.

  They called the gathering of a people in a church congregation. She was going to have to brush up on her church vocabulary.

  She hunkered down in her seat even further. She stuck out like a sore thumb. She had recently pierced her eyebrow and the tattoo of the bird that she had gotten just last month in a drunken dare with one of her friends was in livid relief against her neck. Not to mention that she was in a ruby red sleeveless pantsuit. Her arms were showing! Bring on the church police. She looked around. Did they have church police?

  She tried not to chuckle at her silliness as someone announced prayer. The congregation in unison pulled out kneeling pads from the pockets in the church benches and knelt.

  She followed—why not? She hadn't knelt in years and though her new Versace pants were perilously close to the ground, she still knelt. She didn’t want to stick out even further. Fortunately, the place was tiled in what looked like white marble.

  The church was so quiet you could hear the trees rustling near the building as they swayed in the wind. This is probably what is meant by reverence, she thought. It was nice, soothing. She could get used to this part of the church thing.

  No noise. Just silence. And then the lady who was supposed to pray started, shattering the silence with her heavy, almost manly voice.

  "Good Lord, we are sinners; deliver us from our sins…"

  And then she went on and on, like she was preaching, and the rest of the once-docile congregation started shouting amen intermittently. It was crazy.

  Regina cracked one eye open and then the other. Was this the sermon? Why did she have to shout?

  "You are a visitor," a pleasant-faced lady whispered and knelt beside her in the middle of the marathon prayer.

  "Yes," Regina whispered back. "Is it so obvious?"

  The lady quirked her brow at Regina and then smiled. "Yes."

  She closed her eyes and bowed her head like everybody else and Regina looked at her curiously. Middle aged, obviously as conservative as the rest of the people here. Her hair was peppered with gray and she was in one of those broad-brimmed hats. She was plump and pleasant; she had actually smiled with her—a far cry from the reception that she thought that she
would get from these country folks stuck in the seventeen hundreds.

  Regina was under no illusion that she looked anything near conventional; she even got funny looks from non-Christian people, even though she had her Mohawk style dyed in a more conventional orange-red color these days. Her eyebrow, nose and tongue piercings were a bit much for the more traditional public, as her mother would take pains to point out to her time and time again.

  When the prayer was over they got up. The lady looked at Regina. "I am Lynette Skinner. You can call me Lyn."

  "Hey." Regina nodded. "I am Regina Tharwick. You can call me Regina."

  Lyn grinned. "You are from Kingston or some foreign place, huh? I can tell from your accent."

  "Yes." Regina didn't elaborate; she liked to think that she didn't speak with any accent but she definitely didn't sound like anyone from Primrose Hill. She figured that Lyn Skinner was being kind.

  Lyn moved in closer to her. "I am just returning to church after being banned. I am not really qualified for the front benches. So I guess I will stay around here with you. They treat me like a stranger anyway…the bunch of hypocrites."

  "What did you do?" Regina asked curiously. She felt warmed by the fact that Lyn was not only not judging her but was speaking to her as if they were friends.

  Lynette frowned and then looked around. There was no one else up to three benches before them and only the windows to the right. There was nobody to overhear them if she whispered.

  "I was disfellowshipped." Lynette leaned in closer to Regina.

  "What's that?" Regina was looking at Lynette, fascinated now. "Is that like being expelled from school?"

  "Something like that, but more like a suspension." Lynette crossed her hands primly over her lap. "I am still not a full member again yet. They have me on probation. As if..." Lynette snorted.

  "What did you do?" Regina's interest was piqued now. She didn't know that churches suspended people for wrongdoing, but it made sense. They were an institution just like school. And if they had a dress code and stuff, it stood to reason that there would be punishment.

  "My employees, the Kincaids... Them." Lynette pointed her thumb in the direction of a couple who were sitting near the front. They looked to be in their late forties or early fifties. It was hard to tell from the distance. The man had his hand around his wife in easy familiarity. The lady was in a heavy embroidered dress with long sleeves. It looked expensive but completely out of place in the hot June weather and in this neighborhood, where everybody else seemed to dress simply.

  She also had a matching embroidered hat that was so wide at the rim that Regina couldn't see her face.

  "What did you do?" She focused her attention back to Lynette.

  "Nothing to be disfellowshipped about," Lynette whispered. "They have a farm, a big farm, and I just took a bag of oranges without their permission. Granted, it was a big bag and I had all intentions of selling it but still... They were not around for me to ask. The wife was in the States on business and the husband was out for the day, God knows where.

  They have a half-mad son, him," she indicated a young man who was crouched around the keyboard near the platform area.

  He was thin, very thin, and very light-skinned, almost albino like. He wasn't albino though. He looked up as if sensing Regina's gaze and his eyes connected with hers briefly before he looked down again. There was a young girl preparing to sing and he played the first notes from the song.

  "He doesn't look mad," Regina whispered, finding that she was enjoying herself immensely since Lyn showed up.

  "Well, he's not really mad. His brain is messed up from smoking marijuana or something like that." Lyn snorted. "Let's just say that he comes and goes. You know..."

  "Lucid and crazy at the same time." Regina nodded. "Got it."

  "Well, he caught me with the oranges and created such a ruckus, next thing I know they were calling me a thief, almost turned me into the police, and then the wife suggested that they should handle it at the church level. If you saw the way she was haughty about saying it, too…

  "They carried me to the church board and condemned me like I was some horrible thief who deserved to be hanged. God sees and knows that I am no thief.

  "I worked for them for twenty years and I never took a thing. Taking a bag of oranges when they have hundreds if not thousands of oranges dropping off the tree--is that a sin?"

  "That's so unchristian," Regina murmured, egging on Lynette, who looked like she was on the verge of frothing at the mouth.

  "Yes," Lynette harrumphed, "they should be the ones disfellowshipped for meanness to me. The man, Mr. Owen Kincaid," Lynette whispered, leaning even closer to Regina, "is an elder in this church. He sits on the church board and makes all of these decisions, and I know for sure that he is not holy. You should see the kind of things that are on his computer."

  Regina whispered. "Like what?"

  "Stuff. Really disturbing stuff," Lynette said, changing the subject quickly realizing that she had said too much. "The woman, Norma Kincaid, is the queen bee of the hills. She acts like she is the closest person to heaven but listen, she is not holy either. Something is off about her. I may not be able to pinpoint what it is but let me tell you, something is definitely fishy.

  Lynette smiled. "She appointed herself as choir director and she can't sing and nobody has the guts to tell her that her key is not on any musical register. The women around here, even the pastor's wife, hang on to every word she says as if she is God. She acts as if Norma is the first lady, not the other way around. That in itself is wrong, isn't it?"

  "Very wrong," Regina said solemnly.

  "They are the richest people around here though, and they do help out a lot of the families. I have to give that to them. You know Ashford Manor?"

  "Nope." Regina shook her head. She had just driven through miles of greenery and no civilization up to the hill where the church was perched. Everything had looked like one blur of rural greenery. She couldn't remember seeing any house.

  "They own Ashford Manor." Lynette snorted. "Who calls their house manor? Ridiculous if you ask me, and it is just a plain old house. Maybe because they own nearly all the land up here. They think that they are some kind of royalty. And to think a couple of years ago they were not even that wealthy."

  "Really?" Regina's interest was more than piqued now.

  "Don't ask me how they went from ordinary to much." Lynette huffed. "I am not one to gossip...but let me tell you, the Kincaids are not saints."

  "Not saints," Regina repeated.

  "Them...the Allens are not saints either," she stabbed her hand in the direction of an Indian lady in the front, who was fanning herself with what looked like an old-time hand fan that folded to look like a stick but opened up like an accordion.

  "She is a nurse at the community center, and the one that just prayed sits on the church board too," Lynette said harshly. "Nurse Honey Allen is not worthy to judge me either. I think people listen to her because she has all of that long, dark hair. I don't think she is even pretty."

  "Ooh, that was catty." Regina glanced at Lynette. "But I agree, she is not that pretty."

  "Him," Lynette pointed her nose to a gentleman who was sitting closer to them, three rows up. "He acts like he is the moral police: everything is wrong, nothing is acceptable, everybody should eat vegetarian and buy his vegetables. You should have seen how the old Pharisee thrummed his nose up at me in the meeting. He called me a thief."

  "Who is he?" Regina whispered. So her thoughts were not that far off; they really did have a church police!

  "Conroy Coke. He owns a popular aquaponics farm up here. He sells his fish but constantly talks about being vegetarian, the hypocrite. He sits on the board too. That guy over there is his son."

  She pointed over the aisle toward a young guy probably in his twenties, very good-looking in a smooth, slim-faced kind of way.

  "He is not nearly as bad as his Pharisee father. He actually asked for mercy for me but
it is so obvious that he lusts after the pastor’s wife that I couldn't help but think that he is just looking for company in his sinful ways."

  She folded her arms. "Then again, he recently returned to Primrose Hill under mysterious conditions. Maybe he had other sinful things going on in his life."

  "Mmm," Regina murmured. "Mysterious huh? Where was he?"

  "Kingston," Lynette said without hesitation. "He had a big accounting job with a company there. He just showed up here last year and they gave him a church post just like that. He is now the treasurer. And I have been in this church for years...years! Did they give me that post? Oh no! They gave it to him."

  "Really terrible." Regina bit her lip and suppressed the smile that was on the verge of breaking out on her face. Lyn Skinner was something else, and she couldn't remember ever enjoying church half as much as she was enjoying it now.

  "What's his name?" She was interested in this mysterious guy, who was now the church treasurer and had a crush on Ashley.

  An idea was forming in her head thanks to Lynette. The more Lynette kept pointing out the offenders of holiness, the more she thought how easy it would be to convince Ashley to leave this place. It would be one more thing to use in her arsenal.

  If Ashley could see that these people were not good for her, maybe she would want to come back to Kingston and forget this self-imposed Christianity nonsense.

  "Josiah Coke." Lynette glanced at her, breaking her chain of thought. "You know him?"

  "No." Regina shook her head. "Kingston is a pretty big place and I am just passing through here, really. Never seen him before."

  Lynette looked as if she didn't believe her. And why should she? Primrose Hill was not a place you just passed through. It being in the hills, there was nowhere else to go. It was off the beaten path.

  "It is quiet up here." Regina was forced to defend herself at Lynette's skeptical gaze. "Sometimes a person just needs to escape."