by Linda Verji
Danny simply laughed.
“In any case I plan to ask her. I just haven’t found the right opening,” Nathan explained. “It’s not something she likes to talk about and there’s no way I can start the conversation without telling her how I got my information.”
“Then tell her,” Danny said.
“Don’t listen to the kid.” Zeke advised Nathan, “Look, if you’re gonna blub at least wait until you have something to offer her. Like movement on her case, Charlie’s password, why Alim is following her…something like a peace offering.”
That actually made sense.
“It’s not gonna wooooooork,” Danny sang.
Zeke hit Danny’s arm with his cue-stick. “Shut up.”
“That fucking hurt,” Danny complained as he rubbed the injured arm.
Zeke arched his eyebrows. “What did mother say about sparing the rod again?”
“I hate when you listen to Mother.” Danny made a grab for Zeke’s cue-stick but Zeke moved it to his left hand thwarting him. Throwing Zeke a narrow-eyed this-isn’t-over glare, Danny said to Nathan. “You know there’s a way you could shorten your prison sentence. Just be honest with Kira about what you did, apologize and then tell her you love her. She’ll be angry but eventually she’ll forgive you.”
Nathan immediately snapped into standing position and his gaze zeroed in on Danny as his brain cells latched onto what they considered as the most important part of Danny’s whole speech. “I don’t love her.”
“C’mon. I saw the way you look at her.” Danny waggled his eyebrows. “You even threatened to kill me when I flirted with her.”
“We always threaten to kill you,” Zeke dismissed.
“True. But I felt the vibe this time.” Danny hissed and shook his shoulders in a mock tremble.
“Your imagination is working overtime.” Nathan derided even as his mind reeled, tossing and testing Danny’s assertions. It spun excuses of why he was not in love with Shakira. It was too soon. Just the other day he’d been too suspicious of her. He wasn’t the kind of man to fall in love. “I do not love Shakira.”
There was less conviction than he would’ve liked in his voice. True to form, Danny caught it.
“I’m sorry, is this the part of your strategy where we all pretend to be stupid? Cause I missed that memo,” Danny mocked. “Any blind idiot…even this one…” His leg shot forward as he kicked Zeke. “…can see that you have some serious feelings for this girl.”
Nathan was struck speechless. He turned to Zeke expecting him to refute Danny’s assertion.
Zeke’s response was a shrug and a “What the kid said.” before he lunged for Danny.
Nathan was in deep.
The silence in the room was stifling - terrifying even - but Shakira would be damned if she’d be the one to break it. If Edya wanted to rack up the tension to inferno levels with silence then she was up to it. Beyond Shakira’s ‘come in’ when the woman had unceremoniously presented herself at the door a few minutes ago, there’d been no words exchanged.
Shakira stared at Edya.
The older woman stared back at her.
And the silence persisted.
Edya seemed undisturbed by it. Dressed as she was in a pastel purple skirt suit with a string of pearls wrapped twice around her neck and her black hair perfectly coiffed in an austere chignon, she was the epitome of blue blood. She sat daintily on the white loveseat, a blue booklet clutched in her bejeweled hands and her gaze unwaveringly fixed on Shakira. Shakira would’ve matched her position if the edge of the bed had a back-rest. She settled for crossing one leg over the other and then linking her fingers on her knees.
Shakira almost cackled with glee when Edya finally gave in and broke the silence. Her amusement however waned when Edya’s first words were, “So, Shanita-”
“Shakira,” she corrected.
“Shanice,” Edya persisted. “Who’s your father?”
The question caught Shakira off-guard because she was not expecting it. “Excuse me?”
“I know your mother’s some kind of prostitute,” Edya said pleasantly. “But who’s your father? Is he a convict or did they shoot him in a drive-by.”
This time Shakira’s “Excuse me?” was even more high-pitched. Who the hell did this woman think she was? Shakira had no idea who or where her father was but that didn’t mean she was going to kowtow to the older woman’s disrespect.
“Don’t act so offended.” There was no change to Edya’s almost pleasant expression or in the inflection of her voice. It was as if the woman didn’t realize how insulting her words were. “We both know where you come from. It’s a reasonable assumption.”
Reasonable assumption? Shakira wanted nothing more than to slap the reasonable assumption from the woman’s thin lips. She dug her nails into her palm to keep herself from standing up and doing just that. Her voice was tight with restrained anger as she answered, “My parents are none of your business.”
“They are when you’re trying to trap my son.”
The words falling from Edya’s lips were so outrageous, so infuriating, that Shakira couldn’t think of one thing to say that wouldn’t irreparably damage her relationship with the woman – if even there was one. Taking a deep breath to calm herself, Shakira mimicked, “Trap your son?”
“It’s the only explanation for why he brought you here,” Edya returned with a shrug. “You’re not his type.”
Shakira didn’t know if she was being insulted for being poor, too skinny, black, tall, non-Jewish, something else…or a combination of all the above. “How would you know his type? You haven’t even seen him in over a decade?”
“You’d be surprised the things I know about Nathan.” The woman’s blue eyes flickered with something resembling tenderness. However, the thought that Edya could have a tender bone in her body was so absurd that Shakira instantly shoved it into her ‘this witch’ closet. Her opinion of Nathan’s mother was only reinforced further when the older woman said, “You’re pretty enough I suppose.” She capped the backhanded compliment with a tilt of her head, a slow perusal of Shakira and a “But I don’t get it. Did you tell him you’re pregnant?”
“I am not pregnant,” Shakira ground the words through her teeth.
“Of course you’re not.” Edya’s lips turned up at the corners into what could’ve been a smile but since the rest of her face didn’t move, Shakira wasn’t sure. “But that not what I asked. Your kind can pretend to be pregnant just to get a man. Did you tell him you’re pregnant?”
Her kind? This. Had. Gone. Far. Enough.
Shakira exploded off the bed. “My relationship with your son is our business. Now if you’ll excuse me I’d like to unpack.”
Edya didn’t respond to Shakira’s sudden bout of temper or her standing up. Instead the older woman’s eyes narrowed and her gaze intensified. To make her point, Shakira turned to face the bed and consequently the black suitcase. Her fingers shook as she tagged at the zip but she shut that down with a firm mental reproach. Nathan’s mother was a vampire for weakness and if Shakira showed it she would gleefully suck it up.
Ignoring Edya, Shakira withdrew hers and Nathan’s clothes from the suitcase before walking over to the closet and grabbing a few wooden hangars. Edya tracked her movements closely but did not say anything – neither did she leave.
Shakira was in the process of hanging up Nathan’s suit for the wedding when Edya spoke again. “You don’t look like the type to kill.”
The comment was so strange that despite Shakira’s intentions to ignore the other woman, her attention snapped towards her.
Not waiting for a response, Edya added, “Clearly you’re a gold-digger like your mother but you’re not a killer. Who do you think killed Charles?”
Shakira’s pulse came to a screeching halt, her words went on holiday and her blood froze into one large icicle of shock. Turning completely to face Edya, the suit still in her hand, she stuttered, “H..h…how do you know about Charlie?”
“My dear, I’m Edya Landa-Hollis,” the older woman proclaimed grandly. “I know what you ate for dinner last night.”
“Charlie is none of your business.”
“You’re right. Your dead boyfriend’s none of my business. And he shouldn’t be Nathan’s either.” Edya sighed as she sat straighter on the loveseat. “Let’s cut to the chase.”
“Please.” Shakira covered her shock with sarcasm. “Let’s.”
“I don’t want my son involved in your…issues.” Edya placed the blue rectangular booklet on the side table beside the couch. “I’m willing…” She opened the booklet, picked a pen and scribbled on one of the pages. “…to compensate you for that to happen.”
Shakira struggled to wrap her mind around what was going on here.
“Don’t play naïve with me” Edya continued with the same irritating nonchalance. “The last man you were with ended up dead and they still haven’t found out who did it. Maybe it was an ex-boyfriend of yours. Maybe it was your father. Maybe it was the people your boyfriend was fixing matches with…I don’t really know – or care.”
It was almost like she was reading from the book of Shakira. For a woman who’d been back in Nathan’s life all of one day she knew a lot – too much even. How had she found it out? Before Shakira could ask all the questions plaguing her, Edya tore out a leaflet from the booklet.
“What I care about is making sure my son doesn’t meet the same fate.” Waving the sheet of paper at Shakira, she said, “Here!”
Shakira made no move to take it. She didn’t even have to read the fine print on the paper to know what it was. “You have the wrong idea about me.”
“No.” Edya shook her head as she stood. “I’m sure I have a pretty good idea about you. You’re the type of girl who would have a one-night stand with a man then just move in for the sake of a roof over your head. We both know you have no feelings for my son. You just don’t want to go back to sleeping in your car. I’m offering you a way you can do that without getting Nathan hurt.”
“I don’t want your money.” Shakira was amazed she sounded so calm when her whole nervous system was racing towards anger. Her fingers curled into Nathan’s suit digging into the fabric. There were no lows to Edya’s insults. Just when you thought she’d hit you with her best shot, she’d hand you something even worse. A check!
“Maybe you even mean that - right now. But you’re a smart girl. Use your head.” Edya waved the check again. “Cash this and you could buy yourself another apartment if you want. Maybe even join your mother in Jamaica. I’m sure you’ll find someone else over there soon enough to replace Nathan. And in the process you get to save my son from getting hurt.”
She sounded so reasonable. Like she actually believed that the proposal she was making was something normal mothers did. Shakira had sudden clarity as she stood toe to toe with Edya. Though it was firmly hidden behind an expressionless façade there was some love in this woman. In her own warped way, Edya was trying to protect her son.
All the anger drained out of Shakira. Some part of her shook its head with pity for the woman while the other part wanted to yell at Edya and tell her that she loved Nathan just as much as Edya did. But she knew that the older woman wouldn’t believe her even if she did. So she simply repeated, “I don’t want your money.”
Edya folded up the check then set it on the coffee table. “Let my son go, Shakira.”
After a last lingering look, Edya left, closing the door silently behind her.
Maybe it was curiosity to see what she was worth, Shakira placed Nathan’s suit on the bed. She picked up the check and unfolded it. Her eyes nearly fell out of their sockets when she saw the number scribbled there.
CHAPTER 20
The pre-wedding dinner was an event in itself.
Edya didn’t believe in doing anything small and had invited practically the whole neighborhood – at least the stinking rich side of it. Even her fiancée got lost somewhere within the mêlée. Nathan only got about three minutes with the jovial Santa Clause replica of a man before he was dragged off by someone else.
“See why I’m glad I left?” he complained once he and Shakira were back in their room.
“It wasn’t so bad.” Shakira helped him out of his white Polo shirt. She kissed his naked chest before adding, “Besides you got to reconnect with some of your old friends.”
“Baby, there’s a reason they’re old friends. If I wanted to keep them I would have.” Nathan unzipped his pants and pushed them lower down his legs, watching Shakira all the while. She folded his shirt then tucked it into a polythene paper and then into their suitcase.
She’d been a trooper tonight. He’d thought she wouldn’t fit in with his mother’s friends but Shakira had an easy way about her that seemed to charm even the hyper-critical. A few people had of course asked who she was and if she was related to the Daltons of Napa Valley, but she’d skillfully evaded their questions.
Of course, it’d also helped that she was the most beautiful of the guests.
Her vivid blue gown brought out the seductive cocoa of her skin. It licked at her ankles strapped in silver sandals, skimmed the subtle curves of her lithe body and lingered over her pert breasts. A thin silver strap on one shoulder held the dress up and dipped in a diagonal line across her back to meet soft fabric at the base of her spine.
Other than the silver comb holding up her thick mane of hair high above her neck with a few loose tendrils curling around the sides of her face, she wore no jewelry. Yet she’d still managed to outshine every other woman at the party.
His woman had brought it.
He’d had to keep her close to his side the whole night just to keep the horn-dogs away. Not that he blamed them. Even now as he watched her bend to slip off her sandals, heat shot through his loins.
“You were wonderful tonight.” His voice dropped to a husky caress as he drew closer to her. When she straightened up to face him, he tagged her into his arms. “Thank you for doing this for me.”
“You don’t have to thank me…” Her soft smile sent his heart leaping to her like a dog wagging its tail. She wrapped her arms around his neck, pressing her curves against his body as she rose up on her toes, her breath brushing against his lips as she added, “…but if you insist, I know a way you can thank me.”
Nathan couldn’t help the automatic spurt of tenderness and something else…something he couldn’t quite put a finger on.
If this was a game, the scoreboards would probably say that he was the one who’d helped her by setting her up with a place to stay. But scoreboards didn’t – couldn’t - even begin to count the kind of support a man could get from a woman like Shakira. If it wasn’t for her he would’ve turned right at the gates today. He hadn’t realized how much he’d missed his brothers until they were actually together. At some level he’d even missed his mother.
His interaction with Edya tonight had been…civil. Which was a vast improvement because civil for the Hollis family was what hugging, kissing and tearful welcomes were to normal families. He and his mother hadn’t exchanged a harsh word all night. He’d even allowed her to re-introduce him to some of her friends.
If Shakira hadn’t been there, squeezing his arm or stroking his back whenever he felt the urge to lash out at Edya, the night wouldn’t have ended on as good a note. She seemed to be able to read his emotions even before he expressed them. He should’ve been discomfited that she knew him so well. Instead his heart swelled with emotion.
He wanted to know her just as well. He wanted to be able to read the emotions floating in her amber eyes before she said them. He wanted to shield her from hurt like she did with him and hold her if it slipped in anyway. He wanted to protect her. He wanted to make sure she never ended up in a situation like the one Eve had left her in. He wanted to love her.
You love her.
Danny’s words snuck their way into his subconscious. This time Nathan didn’t resist them. He knew he did. It didn’t
matter how long they’d known each other or how tumultuous their start had been. He loved Shakira. And he knew that even though Shakira hadn’t said the words, she did too.
Gathering her closer, Nathan dipped his head and let his lips meet hers. Her lips softened under his, instantly responsive. She was silky sweetness and unrestrained temptation. The feel of her, all warmth and curves, was nectar for his parched soul. Thirsty for her honeyed response, he angled his head and thrust his tongue between her lips. Shakira welcomed him letting her tongue brush his.
I love you. He put the words in the tenderness of his kiss. Her trust was implicit as she let him control the pace of their kiss, as was her desire. She pressed the pointed tips of her still covered breasts to his naked chest. It drew a groan from Nathan that had him lowering his hands from her waist to cup her ass.
She released in a sharp breath when he grasped her buttocks. He swallowed it as he kneaded the firm flesh in time to their kiss as he pressed his painful erection to her stomach. One of her arms eased away from his neck, lowering between their bodies to the waistband of his boxers. A sharp thrill cascaded down his spine when he felt thin naked air glance over his cock as Shakira pealed the fabric aside. It quickly turned into a slow harsh release of breath when she reached inside.
Dragging his mouth away from hers, he cussed. “Fuck!”
Shakira lowered her head, her eyes on the flesh she’d revealed. Nathan’s gaze stalked hers. His cock jutted out between the navy fabric, hard, pulsing and tearing up for her. She grasped it in her dainty fist, running her palm up and then down. “You’re so big.”
Her actions and words were enough to almost bring Nathan to his knees. He gripped the fabric of her dress, dragging it upwards over her knees and thighs until he had it bunched at her waist. Snow white fabric hid her from him but it was no match for Nathan’s ardor. With a quick teasing glance of his fingers over the triangular patch at the top of her mound, he delved lower and reached his target.
“Nathan.” He drew his name from her lips with a brush of his fingers on the nub at the top of her pussy. Her stroking of his cock slowed to a standstill as he pushed the gusset of her panties to the side and pressed his fingers to her soaking flesh.
