“Well damn,” Graham said, going to the sink to wash his hands.
Behind him, she eyed his tall, muscled physique in the V-neck sweater and denims he wore. Graham’s body was pure steel, honed by exercise and good eating. He moved with strength. Power.
She swallowed hard as she licked the corners of her mouth. Sexy motherfucker.
He looked back over his shoulder at her.
She forced a smile as she raised her eyes from the sight of his tight buttocks.
He had the nerve to look bashful as he turned to lean back against the edge of the counter as he crossed his muscled arms over his chest. “I’m here, Jaime. The question is why?” he asked.
I love you, but I can’t say it because I may be carrying another man’s child. Or it could be a little boy with your eyes and smile.
“I thought we should do something we really haven’t done these last few months since we—”
Fucked.
“Reconnected,” she said instead.
Graham looked brooding. “Our past?” he asked.
“Our past,” she confirmed.
“Seventeen years,” he said, eyeing her with intensity. “There’s a lot to unpack.”
She nodded. “Then the sooner we start the better,” she said as she leaned forward against the island that separated them. She envisioned crawling across it to fling herself at him and had to shake her head a little to free the tempting thought. Lord, he’s so sexy. But he’s also smart. And creative. And deep. And forgiving.
Graham gave her a smile that exposed his charming dimples. “Then let’s get at it,” he said.
On the floor or my bed?
Wait, not sex. He means talking.
“Let me fix our plates,” she said. “You go to the dining room.”
“Dining room?” Graham balked. “Very formal.”
Ding-dong.
Jaime frowned at the intrusion as Graham walked into the adjoining room. “Who is that?” she asked herself.
“Don’t tell me you invited old boy, too,” Graham said.
“Definitely not,” she assured him as she made her way to the foyer again to check the door viewer to see her parents there. “What the fuck?”
She turned and pressed her back to the door. Graham and her parents. What ironic karma pit of hell is this?
He came to the edge of the kitchen to lean against the counter. “What’s wrong?” he asked.
“My parents are doing a drop-in,” she said with a weak smile that trembled more than her suddenly nervous stomach.
“What you wanna do?” he asked.
“Disappear,” she admitted.
He chuckled. “I know the last time I encountered your mother it was not ideal,” he said.
“You think?” she asked, remembering a decade ago when he walked out of the bedroom naked and holding his dick while she and her mother were in the living room of her rental townhome.
“But I might be the father of their grandchild,” he reminded her. “Maybe it’s time to get to try to go beyond it, Jaime. Face the past and all that.”
Ding-dong.
“Right,” she said, pushing off the door. “At least you’re dressed this time.”
“Maybe she forgot,” Graham said as he turned to walk back into the kitchen.
“I doubt that,” Jaime stressed as she turned.
His chuckles reached her as she opened the door.
“Surprise!” Virginia said, giving her daughter’s cheek a brief kiss before she breezed past Jaime to enter the apartment in a blur of pearls, tweed, and fur.
Jaime eyed her burly father. “Dad,” she said, air-kissing his cheek as he hugged her with one arm.
“How are you, Jaime?” he asked.
Pissed at you.
She saw her mother’s eyes on her and forced a stiff smile. “Fine,” she said, her tone short. “What are you two doing in New York?”
“Your father had dinner with friends not far from here and I insisted on attending with him,” Virginia said with a wink at Jaime that was awkward and obvious. “Funny thing, they never showed up. Had a flat tire or something your Dad said.”
Was his wife finally putting a leash on her husband in her own little way? Good.
“How’s golfing, Dad?” Jaime asked.
Franklin Pine looked flustered. “I’ve given it up,” he said.
Oh shit!
“Yes, I told your father that we needed to spend more time together. Right, dear?” Virginia said.
“Right, dear,” he droned.
Another wink from her mother behind her father’s back.
Oh, Virginia was on his ass and he didn’t even know it.
Graham stepped into the living room.
Virginia’s shocked inhale of breath was deep and low and long. And funny. But Jaime dared not laugh.
“What’s wrong, dear?” Franklin asked.
“Mother. Dad. This is Graham Walker—”
“Why is it every time I drop by my daughter’s home unexpectedly, I run into you?” Virginia asked, losing her normal composure. “At least you’re dressed this time.”
Franklin’s jowls quivered as his eyes widened in understanding as he glared at Graham. When Jaime had needed their help financially in the days after she left Eric, his mother had filled him in on the incident at the townhouse and he ordered her to stay away from the then-unknown man if she wanted his assistance.
“Hello, Mr. Pine. Nice to see you again, Mrs. Pine,” Graham said, extending his hand to first her father and then her mother. Neither accepted it. “I apologize for what happened that day. Please forgive me.”
“Manners,” she pointed out as Graham left his hand extended.
Franklin’s back stiffened in indignation as he gritted his teeth and took the hand offered to him. “You understand our confusion with seeing you here after all these years, while my daughter is pregnant, and not long ago she was engaged to another man,” Franklin said.
“I understand that,” he said, smiling at him before now offering his hand to her mother again.
Graham is fucking with them.
Virginia offered him no more than two of her fingers to grasp before she withdrew her hand. “We only stopped by since we in town,” she said, her haughtiness on high. “And we don’t want to interrupt.”
Jaime stepped in their path to the door. “Actually, you should meet Graham because he might be the father of your grandson,” she said, rushing the words with none of her concerns of yesteryears on how her parents would be disappointed in her.
“Might?” Franklin said, his round face masked with confusion.
Virginia nodded in understanding. “Is he the reason the engagement with Luc ended?” she asked.
“No, he’s not. That was my doing—or rather undoing, Mother,” Jaime said, eyeing her. “I need to be honest with you both because I can’t imagine anything worse than living a lie. Right?”
Virginia’s gaze on her was unwavering.
Jaime turned to her father. “Right, Dad?” she asked. “You never would want to live a lie and have everything someone thought of you destroyed by the truth. Isn’t that what justice is all about? Truth? Integrity? Being honest with who you are. Flaws and all. So that you can live in the light of truth and grow so that you don’t wilt in the darkness of your secrets and lies.”
Franklin eyed her strangely.
Virginia stepped in between them. “We’ll be going,” she said, leaning in close to kiss Jaime’s cheek. “Please don’t.”
Jaime nodded in agreement with what her mother implored.
Graham came to stand behind her and warmly pressed his hands to her shoulders. She welcomed the support, not knowing how he knew that at that moment she needed it.
Her father’s gaze on her was questioning as he kissed her cheek as well before turning to open the door and leave. “Jaime, we’ll talk soon,” he said over his shoulder.
Virginia left as well, pulling the door closed behind them.
&nb
sp; Jaime took a step to lock the door and then rest her head against the cool metal.
“What was that between you and your father?” Graham asked.
She smiled. He was always so observing. So aware. He missed nothing. Sought knowledge of everything, big and small. She turned and walked back over to pat his chest as she passed him on her way to the kitchen. “Hopefully, his awakening,” she said.
* * *
Graham took a sip of the punch as he eyed Jaime across the dining room table. He cleared his throat. “Think your parents will ever forgive me?” he asked as she set a steaming bowl of stew in front of him before ladling herself a bowl from the large tureen on the table between them.
“I think they have their own business to be focused on,” she said dryly.
He chuckled as he eyed her, loving the way pregnancy was rounding her face and plumping her lips. “I was childish back then. There were better ways to scare you off once I realized I was falling for one of my clients,” he said.
“Or you could have accepted your feelings for me,” she said.
He thought back to that time over a decade ago. “I wasn’t ready. I was young. Wild. I had been through a lot at that point. Was settled down more than I had ever been,” he said, thinking of the wealthy married woman, Smyth, who had kept him in a luxurious Upper East Side lifestyle that allowed him to attend college. Her caveat? The fidelity her husband wouldn’t provide. Having Jaime back in his life during those months after she first left her husband and moved into that townhouse had been hard to resist. Smyth ended things because of it.
“You scared me,” Graham confessed.
They joined eyes.
“Everything with you was different. Better. Sex. Conversation. Laughter,” Graham admitted. “I was too young and dumb to understand that it wasn’t a bad thing to care for a woman. To desire her. Want her. Need her. You. To need you, Jaime. What I felt for you scared the shit out of me and I did dumb shit to force you to end it because I didn’t have the strength to walk away from you. If you called, I was coming. In hindsight? I loved you. You were the first woman I ever loved, Jaime Pine. The only woman I have ever loved.”
She looked slightly stunned.
“That’s my truth,” he said raising his glass in a toast to her.
* * *
Jaime looked on as Graham knelt before the grand fireplace to light the log inside it as snow began to fall outside. As the fire grew, the blaze of yellow, red, and orange flames cast its light upon his profile, seeming to transform his caramel complexion into bronze.
“I owe you an apology, Graham,” she said from her spot in the corner of her oversized sectional sofa.
He looked back over his broad shoulder at her. “For?” he asked, closing the grate before he rose to his full six-foot-nine height.
“Letting what my friends thought of you make me deny to them how much you meant to me back then,” she said.
“The party at your friend’s house,” he said as a look shadowed across his face.
She remembered searching for him at Aria’s and Kingston’s party until a step out onto the porch proved he and his car were gone. She walked to her house nearby to discover he wasn’t there. Two days after not hearing from him she went to his penthouse apartment and walked straight into his kidnapping.
“I should have stood up for you,” she said with regret.
He crossed the leather area rug to sit on the other end of the couch, seeming to dwarf it. “Those six months we were together—really together—was dope, until that moment I overhead you tell them no one was talking marriage. It tore me up. It made me feel like shit. Like I still was just that dude you were using for sex—this time without paying for it.”
The crackle of the fire filled the silence that followed.
“Forgive me?” she finally asked.
He looked down with his brows wrinkled. His long lashes seemed to whisper against the top of his high cheekbones. “That plate is pretty full,” he mused, glancing up at her with a slight twinkle in his beautiful eyes.
“And I’m going to keep feeding it to you until you eat it,” she said, pointing her finger at him.
He stared off into the fire. “We’ll see,” he said, sounding unsure.
* * *
Out the window, he saw the snow began to fall in earnest but felt no rush to leave. Things were being said that needed to be said between them. He looked over to where she stood beside him staring out at the street being transformed to pure white. “Why couldn’t you trust me?” he asked, taking a sip of the hot chocolate she’d made for them.
“Really, Graham?” she said dryly into her cup.
“No, really,” he said, his eyes searching her profile. “Those six months—”
“Before the rooftop,” she said.
He remembered that day and had come back to it so many times over the years. “Yes,” he said.
She turned to face him as she leaned against the wall. “Walking away was tough. Well, agreeing to walk away. You were the one who wanted the break,” she reminded him.
“You were the one who wouldn’t let us have a future,” he countered.
“Running into women who shared your body—”
“Who you thought shared my body,” he inserted with a shake of his head. “You accused me of everybody. Any woman that blinked at me twice. Any woman that stared a little too long. Any woman that spoke. It was ridiculous, Jaime.”
She took a sip of her chocolate so deep that a dot of melted marshmallow was on her nose. “It was,” she confessed.
Graham chuckled.
“What?” she asked in confusion.
He lightly raised her head to bend down and kiss the froth from the top of her nose. “Marshmallow,” he said against her mouth.
He felt her shiver as they stared at one another. Deeply.
His eyes moved about her face, taking in everything, including the reflection of the falling snowflakes in the brown depths of her own. They landed on her mouth and she opened her lips a bit. Temptation overtook him as he dipped his head to kiss her. Softly at first. And then with his tongue probing hers. Stroking it before he suckled the tip.
His dick awakened as she kissed him back with a soft and easy moan from the back of her throat. As he placed his free hand to her back and pulled her closer, he felt the roundness of her belly. He ended the kiss with a step back. It wasn’t her pregnancy that deterred him. It was remembering that the child inside might not be his.
And it stung when he wanted nothing more than her son to be theirs.
* * *
“It’s getting late,” Jaime said as Graham handed her another rinsed plate to load into the dishwasher.
“You ready for me to go?” he asked.
Never.
“Nope,” she said instead. “You ready to go?”
“Not yet.”
Not ever? Maybe?
“Why were you in Ghana a while back?” she asked, as she watched him scrape the rest of the stew into a plastic bowl.
“Just traveling. No work,” Graham said.
She eyed his profile. “You can take the rest of the stew with you,” she offered.
He smiled, dimples and all. “I will take you up on that. I get tired of cooking for myself all the time,” he said as he snapped the lid on the container.
“I have a question, Graham.”
He looked over at her. “Fire away.”
It was tough because she wasn’t sure she wanted to hear the answer. “If we didn’t run into each other in Grenada were you ever going to call?” she asked as she removed a clean dish towel from the folded stack in the drawer by her.
He accepted it and dried his hands. “Honestly, I don’t know. Had I thought of you? Damn near every day. Did I wish things could be different between us? Always. But I was just so sure we would never be happy, no matter how much we tried because of our history—my history,” he said, pressing his hand to his chest as he turned to look down at her.
&nbs
p; “And my cheating on my husband with you,” Jaime added before busying herself closing and starting the appliance.
“Hey,” he called to her softly.
She looked up, hoping her disappointment didn’t show.
“My love for you was never in question. It still isn’t,” Graham told her with conviction. “It’s believing that sometimes even love isn’t enough. So I let you be, because I thought I would never measure up to what you felt you needed.”
She remembered the years she waited for him to reach out. “I needed you,” she admitted, closing her eyes, and forcing a smile as she felt weepy. “For all those years I thought: Wow. He came to me. He said he loved me. He said he wanted to try something real with me. He wanted more than sex. He wanted me. He convinced me he loved me. And then I never heard from you again. I thought you were across the country or remarried or had relapsed back into drugs. Or you no longer thought you loved me. I thought a thousand different things and all of them led me not to call you, but I never imagined you were right in Bedford, New York. Single. Doing fine. Living fine . . . without. . . me.”
Graham took a large step to pull her into his arms. “I wasn’t living fine,” he said. “I was surviving. Missing you. Wishing things could’ve been different then and still wishing it now,” he said as he rubbed circles onto her back. “Forgive me for not reaching out and at least explaining why we wouldn’t work?”
Jaime closed her eyes against his chest and felt weak from his closeness. Still. Six years after the rooftop and seventeen years after first seeing him dance, his very presence was electrifying.
She smiled as she shrugged one shoulder. “We’ll see,” she said, mimicking him.
“Ha, ha, ha,” he said as his chuckle echoed inside his chest and she pressed her face closer against it to enjoy the rumble.
* * *
Donny Hathaway’s soulful voice singing “Song for You” filled the room as they swayed together in front of the fireplace. With his head lightly resting atop hers, he held her body and eyed the sketch he gifted her on the mantel. Graham could almost forget her actions that were wedged between. Almost.
For a few moments, he closed his eyes as Donny sang of a deep, resounding, soulful love that may require some forgiveness. He allowed himself to forget her deception and just drink in being in the moment with this flawed woman he loved, who risked her entire happiness to be with him. Again.
Her Pleasure Page 20
