Ready for Love

by Gwyneth Bolton

  “Girl, Terrill is good for keeping secrets, just ask Brat, oops…I mean Penny. He kept her secret for years and that was some old craziness right there if I ever saw it. I would have dimed her out years ago if I knew and I’m her mother.” Carla chomped on the popcorn.

  “That’s right, he lied for Penny to Jason about cheating on Jason. Penny wanted Jason to believe she had cheated with Terrill and that the baby she miscarried was Terrill’s and not Jason’s.” Samantha Hightower plopped down on the sofa and grabbed some popcorn.

  “Umm…hello…I’m right here and I certainly don’t appreciate y’all recounting my business like it’s some soap opera.” Penny rolled her eyes at her in-laws and glared at her mother.

  “Your business? What about all of y’all in my house giving me the third degree and trying to get all into what happened between Terrill and me?” Maritza shook her head at the lot of them and almost laughed at the Hightower women and Carla until she remembered her own family was there listening to the tale as well.

  Her mother, father and brothers were seated in the other chairs and love seat in the room. She glanced at each one and each one was giving her their unique personalized versions of the I’m-so-disappointed-in-you-Maritza stare.

  Just what she needed…

  Not!

  “Do you love him, niña bonita?” Her father was never one to beat around the bush.

  “I knew I should have jumped in and helped Jason and the other Hightowers pull Andrew’s thug posse off of Terrill. Terrill is a good guy. I knew it had to be something more behind this.” Louis had a gleam of mischief in his eyes as he stood up, paced the room and shook his head.

  Maritza sucked her teeth because she knew her most irritating brother was trying to find a way to irritate her even more. He was just never going to get over the fact that she had been born and knocked him out of his baby of the family position.

  “Papi asked you a question, sis.” Manuel Jr. sat with his arms folded in front of him right next to their parents. He was the typical oldest child. Manuel Jr. had a butter-pecan complexion and he and Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson could probably pass for twins.

  “And after you answer Papi’s question you can let me know why you never told me that scumbag Herbert Jackson was back in town and if he had anything to do with messing things up between you and Terrill.” Victor was giving her his intense cop stare as if he were trying to read her mind or figure out the past and what she refused to tell him.

  Maritza let out a loud scream before glaring at her brother. Everyone in the loft stopped their side conversations and chattering and all eyes were on her again.

  Just want she needed…

  Not!

  Her jaw clenched and she took a deep breath. She glared at Victor one more time so that he understood that if he mentioned one more thing or tried to question her again about what had gone down between her and Herbert Jackson, he would no longer have a sister. Victor had promised to stop questioning her about it, but he always found a way to bring it back up. This time she was holding him to his promise. The last thing she needed was for her other brothers and her father to hear what that scumbag did to her. And none of the Hightowers could know because she never ever wanted Terrill to find out!

  Terrill…

  She felt a sharp pain through her chest that felt worse than anything she had ever experienced.

  A tear trailed down her face and she wiped it away.

  What had she done to her Terrill?

  Her love…

  She turned to her father. “I love him, Papi. But it’s too late for us now. I messed up and I just have to live with it.” She turned to Victor. “I don’t want to talk about Herbert Jackson. Ever! I’ve told you this over and over, Victor. Please, Victor, you are my brother and I love you. I just want to leave it in the past.”

  Victor’s face went through a range of emotions and he shook his head. “I’m sorry, sis. I can’t leave it alone anymore. I never could. You know that. I need to know what that scumbag did to you and if he has anything to do with this. And if I can’t find out from you then I will find out from Terrill.” Victor started walking toward the door.

  Maritza looked after him in shock with her mouth open. Her mouth fell open even more when Louis and Manuel got up and followed Victor. But when her father got up and followed her brothers, a helpless squeak came out.

  They can’t! She wanted to scream. Terrill can’t find out!

  She thought about running after them and begging them not to go and almost did when she felt her mother’s hand on her shoulder.

  “It’s time for everything to come out in the open, baby girl. You can’t keep holding on to secrets and carrying shame for things that you shouldn’t be ashamed of.” Sharon Morales wrapped her arms around Maritza.

  Maritza leaned into her mother. She only needed to hear the soothing sound of her mother’s voice to know that her mother already knew about what Herbert did to her. She’d always thought that Victor knew and just wanted to have her confirm it. He couldn’t keep anything from their mother.

  He always was a mama’s boy! Maritza had to laugh to keep from crying at that point.

  And if Mom knows then for damn sure Papi knows. Because Mom and Papi don’t keep anything from each other, especially when it comes to us kids. That thought sent a cold chill through her.

  She let out a soft sigh. Hell, maybe it was time to just let everyone know. She wasn’t ashamed of it.

  Was she?

  But somehow she had become a victim of the secret just as sure as she had been a victim back then.

  “Umm…did they just leave for Terrill’s mansion? Brat, I thought we were staying with Terrill at his big mansion. No offense.” Carla shrugged. “But I don’t want to stay here in this loft if I can be staying in a mansion. I mean it’s cute and all…but…they’re not taking our places at the mansion, are they?”

  Maritza shook her head and laughed. Yep, she was definitely laughing to keep from crying. And it probably sounded more like hysteria than laughter. But that was all she could do at the moment.

  Celia Hightower came over and placed her arms around Maritza, too. Both Celia and her mother led her over to the sofa and sat down with her, each patting her back and trying to calm her down.

  “This chick done lost her mind! I told ya men will drive a chick crazy every time! Why you think I’m so crazy?” Carla grabbed some more popcorn. “Well, if we gotta stay here in this small loft, then at least you can make it entertaining and finish telling us the story. How long was you doing the bump and grind with Terrill? And were you getting your swerve on with this Herbert person and the white rapper dude and Terrill all at the same time? Gu-rl! I knew you was a wild one. I peeped that about you early on!”

  “Mommy, stop harassing Maritza.” Penny hissed between clinched teeth.

  “You guys were broken up by the time you announced your engagement on Valentine’s Day. That’s why when I saw you kissing—” Aisha Hightower, the newlywed wife of Patrick Hightower, shut her own mouth before Maritza could glare at her. She should have known that Aisha wouldn’t be able to keep what she’d seen a secret.

  “That’s what I’m talking about, get to the good stuff!” Carla said.

  “Girl, you might as well finish spilling. You know once your brothers get over to Terrill’s he’s gonna tell them his side if he isn’t already telling Lawrence and the rest of them…” Minerva’s expression read as if she really was trying to be helpful instead of just being nosy.

  Maritza knew better, but Minerva was right. She might as well tell the rest. “Okay, I managed to get Terrill to agree to having a secret affair. And we pretty much had all of y’all fooled that we hated each other…”

  “Child, please, you two weren’t fooling a soul. We all saw the attraction between you and thought you needed to get a room years ago. We just didn’t know you were already getting a room.” Celia Hightower shook her head and laughed.

  “I know that’s right, Cel
ia, you tell her. She wasn’t fooling nobody! And she sure wasn’t fooling me.” Carla added her two cents.

  “Me neither. I could tell from the moment I first saw you and Terrill together that he was the one. I even told your father he was the one. That’s why I was so shocked when you announced you were going to marry this Speed-Lo person.” Sharon Morales wasn’t one to be outdone by the other two older women in the room when it came to the who-knows-Maritza-best contest.

  Maritza laughed and it sounded a little less hysterical this time. “Okay. So we had been lovers for a little over a year…”

  “I can’t believe you and Maritza have been kicking it since Big Mama passed away. That is one hell of a secret…” Jason just shook his head as he looked at Terrill.

  Terrill held the newly refreshed ice pack up against his eye and leaned his head back. He’d gone through several ice packs as he told his tale and he expected to go through even more before the night was over. He had barely scratched the surface of his years-long, on-again off-again affair with Maritza.

  He sat up and stared at his best friend, glad that they had finally worked past the misunderstandings and were friends again. If he could have the woman of his dreams, too, everything would be perfect in his world.

  But Maritza was actually going to marry another man! How in the hell had things gone so incredibly wrong? Better yet, how could he fix them and make them right again?

  The doorbell rang and soon his butler was leading four more men to the entertainment room in his mansion. The Morales brothers were there along with Maritza’s father.

  After a round of everyone shaking hands and giving each other pounds, Maritza’s brother Manuel spoke up. “We heard from Maritza that you had just cause to want to break up the engagement party today.”

  “Well, maybe ‘just cause’ is putting it too strongly, but let’s just say we understand better now why you did what you did.” Louis folded his arms across his chest and leaned against the wall. “Seriously, I don’t know what my sister is thinking sometimes.”

  “If we had understood better back at the restaurant, then maybe you wouldn’t be nursing that black eye right now.” Victor shook his head. “You know I wanted to have your back in there, man. I know you’ve looked out for my sister when you could. And now I know why. Right now though, I just want to find out what, if anything, Herbert Jackson has to do with any of this.”

  “Victor, maybe now is not the time…” Maritza’s father started.

  Terrill stilled. He had always suspected that something bad had gone down between Maritza and Herbert. And now he could see that all of the Morales men knew or suspected something as well and they were all just looking for one good excuse to go and hunt Herbert down like the dog he was.

  Terrill cleared his thought. “I was just filling everyone in on what went down with me and Maritza and why I had to—why I have to stop her from marrying another man…” He let out a hiss of breath.

  “It’s not her fault. We both made mistakes. I shouldn’t have gone along with her desire to keep our relationship a secret for so long. If I hadn’t done that, then the majority of the things that went wrong between us might never have happened.”

  Terrill couldn’t let Maritza take all the blame. He knew how much her family’s opinion meant to her and he would never knowingly do anything to put that in jeopardy.

  “Yes, both of y’all can take the blame for that foolishness. But I blame you the most, Terrill.” Patrick Hightower, the man of few words, decided to chime in and offer his fifty cents.

  “How you gonna blame him? They’re both adults. It takes two people to start a relationship and two people to mess one up.” Jason defended Terrill and it made Terrill feel good to know that he had his best friend back and Jason would even defend him against one of his older brothers if it came down to it.

  “He shouldn’t have even let her set the ground rules like that. He should have manned up and told her that he wasn’t keeping the relationship a secret and she would just have to deal with it.” Patrick shrugged.

  “I agree, big brother, he should have laid down the law. That’s what I did,” Lawrence Hightower added.

  “Me too. I just told Aisha straight up the first time I met her that she was going to be my love.” Patrick was clearly starting to feel himself.

  Louis Morales let out a gut busting laugh. “Excuse me, but have any of you met my little sister? She grew up the only girl with three older brothers and this man for a father.” He pointed at Manuel Sr. for emphasis. “And she gave as good as she got and none of us could ever get away with telling her what to do. She’s so hardheaded and stubborn—”

  “And laying down the law wouldn’t have worked because she would have told him exactly what he could do with that law.” Manuel Jr. cut Louis off, laughing the entire time. “And my little sister has a mouth like our mother. Trust me, he didn’t want to take that route. Maybe he shouldn’t have let things go on so long without getting her to admit how she felt about him and making her go public with the relationship. But he wasn’t going to make Maritza Morales do anything she didn’t want to do.” The look Manuel gave Terrill then made it clear that he better not ever try to make Maritza do anything, either.

  Terrill’s eye started throbbing even more. He suddenly wanted everyone out of his home so that he could lick his wounds in peace.

  “How about we just let the man finish telling the story and then maybe we can figure out a way to help him fix things.” Joel Hightower was usually all jokes, so Terrill was kind of shocked to hear him trying to be the voice of reason. “’Cause God knows he is going to need all the help we can give him to fix this gigantic mess,” Joel added and started laughing.

  Terrill tossed the thawed ice pack to the side and wasn’t surprised when moments later his butler was there with another ice pack. He placed the ice pack on his eye and groaned.

  He figured he might as well finish telling them the story. Joel was right. He was going to need the help of everyone in the room to figure out how to get his woman back. And he wanted his woman back for damn sure.

  “So where was I? Yeah, basically I let Maritza set the ground rules for our relationship. But at least that way I was able to be with her and experience the best two years of my life…”

  Chapter 5

  Maritza rolled over into the arms of her lover and snuggled for a bit before tickling him. They didn’t have long before they had to arrive separately at a cookout at the Hightowers’. They were supposed to be in separate hotel rooms, but somehow Terrill had talked his way into her bed. She couldn’t believe that she had been lucky enough to have this man as her lover for over a year.

  Penny had gotten married to Jason and the East Coast branch of New Images by Keys and Morales was doing just as well as their Los Angeles branch.

  Maritza’s business and personal lives couldn’t have been better and that’s why she couldn’t help but wonder when the other shoe was going to drop.

  Terrill’s hand stroked its way up and down her back and finally curved onto her behind. She wiggled it and snuggled closer to him.

  “What if Penny decided to visit one of our rooms and found that you aren’t in yours. Our secret would be out.”

  He nipped her bottom lip and then licked it, snaking his tongue out slowly as if he were trying to savor her.

  “If she tried to find a room for me, she wouldn’t find anything because I canceled my room. I saw no reason to pay for a room when I have a perfectly fine room right here, one that has my fine sexy woman in it, I might add.”

  “Your fine sexy woman that no one is supposed to know about.” She tried to feign indignance but that was really hard to do when wrapped in your fine man’s arms and feeling his oh-so-big and oh-so-satisfying erection pressing against your skin.

  And then he kissed her, long and deep. His tongue tunneled through her mouth as if on a mission to warn the rest of her body what was coming next.

  She stopped his intoxicating kiss a
nd trailed her own kisses all over his muscular body. She gave teasing and taunting pecks along his strong, square jawline and around his throat. She came down his rippled chest and let her tongue out to play, tasting the pure masculine strength of him and taking it in like an energy drink. She licked her way downward until she found herself at the base of his proud, erect penis and licked and sucked some more.

  She was torn between licking him to completion and tasting his potent, hot seed or straddling him and riding him so that she could feel him inside of her.

  Feeling him won out and she stopped long enough to grab a condom from the nightstand and place it in her mouth. She seductively put the condom on with her mouth, continuing his blow-job as she did.

  “Aww, babe, you’re going to kill me one day. But what a way to go.” Terrill let out a groan as she straddled him and slid down on his protected penis.

  He felt so good and huge inside of her. In this position she swore she could feel him invading just about every crevice.

  Every nook…

  And she rode.

  She rocked her hips back and forth and side to side and up and down and all around. She closed her eyes and let a rhythm as old as time guide. Each time she bounced up she came back down to the best feeling in the world. She knew she would never get enough of this man and she never wanted this to end.

  Why couldn’t she have it forever? Why had she made such a mess of her life that a man like Terrill would probably never take her as his wife?

  She realized that was what she really wanted and a tear fell from her eye. Terrill sat up and wiped the tear away. He then placed his hands on her behind and held her tight and close as he kissed her again. He kissed her with so much intensity she thought she might disappear into his kiss. He held her and kissed her as he continued small pulsating thrusts. His penis moved inside her, hitting spots it must have memorized.

  Another tear trailed down her face and this time she didn’t know if it was from wanting what she couldn’t have or the pleasure that Terrill was inflicting. All she knew was that she came with blinding passion that almost made her pass out.