Mattie greeted her with a wide grin that exposed her top front teeth. “Justine, honey, it shore is wonderful ’bout Tonya. I tell you, I am glad it’s over. I didn’t worry none, though, ’cause I prayed, but you never can tell. My Moe said, sometime brothers and sisters can’t even match.” She looked down at the sauce she stirred. “Mothers ain’t a shore bet neither. We have to thank God.”
So she knew and had had the grace not to mention it. She put her arms around the little woman and hugged her. “Thank you, Mattie, for being a real friend.”
“Oh, shucks, child. It ain’t nothing you wouldna done for me.”
He entered the dining room and walked back to the kitchen where she and Mattie stood arm in arm, but she didn’t turn around. From now on, it would be he who orchestrated whatever happened between them.
To her amazement, he said, “Justine, there’s a string quartet concert down at the National Gallery tomorrow night. Would you like to go?”
She faced him. “I’d love it. Thanks for asking me.”
He wasn’t himself. Duncan Banks didn’t flounder, but the man before her had the appearance of one at a precipice, forced to jump, but uncertain as to the right direction.
Mattie must have sensed their uneasiness with each other, for she tried to smooth over their awkwardness. “Mr. B, I stretched myself like you said I oughta and made you a scallop mousse with shrimp sauce. My Moe bought me the book.” She dipped the spoon in the fragrant sauce. “Here, taste that. If it don’t make you hop, skip, and jump, my name ain’t Mattie Swindell. All y’all don’t eat, I’m taking home to my Moe.”
Justine watched Duncan dutifully taste the sauce, run his tongue over his top lip, and smile in a way that she hadn’t seen him do in two weeks. “Mattie, I doubt there’s anything else you could have done that would have made me feel this good.” He looked at Justine. “This is right up there with Justine’s quenelles.”
Mattie’s eyes held a mischievous twinkle. “So, you made him quenelles. Looks like you know a few things, too.”
At dinner, the three of them talked about French food, Cajun food, Soul food, anything but what bore on their minds. Several times, Justine glanced at Duncan and found him staring quizzically at her, as though she were a riddle that he couldn’t decide whether or how to solve. They finished Mattie’s excellent meal, and Duncan said he’d do the dishes. Justine knew he’d given her a chance to avoid the inevitable, and she went to her room.
Banks’s call was the last that she would have expected, for Banks had told her bluntly that she had secrets, but that she should trust Duncan. Was her friend calling to scold?
“Justine, you did what you had to do, and Mama and I are proud of you,” Banks said without preliminaries. “I discovered your big secret the week after we met, and Mama figured it out when you came for her birthday, but we didn’t know your reasons, so we kept it all to ourselves. Just wanted you to know we’re on your side.”
“Thanks, Banks. What I have to tell goes to Duncan’s ears first, provided he gives me the chance, but I can tell you that I’m a good person, and I never planned on getting involved with him. I tried to prevent it, but nature had other ideas.”
“Enough said. I love my brother, and I want you for my sister-in-law, girlfriend, so get busy and fix it up with him. Bye for now.”
Justine looked at the phone as the dial tone hummed. Well, that was something with which to begin.
The next afternoon, Sunday, she went alone to see Tonya and couldn’t believe the change in her. “Juju. Juju kiss Tonya. Juju read Hiwattie.”
She grabbed the child into her arms and smothered her face with kisses. Duncan walked in and found them hugging each other.
“How’s Daddy’s girl?”
“Daddy kiss Tonya,” she said, leaning away from Justine and opening her arms to him. He took her into his arms and closed his eyes, and she watched in awe as tears streaked his face. Things weren’t right with them, but she put her arms around the two of them, and when she opened her eyes, she looked into fiery masculine orbs that brimmed with passion, and her heart began to gallop in her chest. Maybe she could hope.
“Would you rather go to dinner than a concert?” he asked as they left the hospital. “I…we need to talk, Justine.”
“I know. I’d rather get a bag of hamburgers or some Chinese food and go home. If we’re going to talk, really talk, we’d better be alone.”
“All right. Hamburgers and fries.”
He built a log fire in the living room fireplace, got a bottle of wine and some glasses, and settled with her before the fire—the room’s only light. After their silent meal before flames that undulated among each other and cast their shadows across the bodies of the troubled lovers, Duncan cleared away the evidence of their dinner. He sat on the floor at her feet with his arms wrapped around his knees and looked up at her.
“What the devil!” he said, when the phone rang.
“Banks.”
After about five minutes, he came back. “That was Warren. He wanted to tell me who you are. I let him know that I didn’t care to discuss you with him. What was it about?”
Thank God, she could tell the truth. “He knows my background, and he tried to blackmail me into sleeping with him. In exchange, he wouldn’t tell you about me. As you may see, I refused.”
“Well, you can forget about him. I put the fellow in his place.”
He sat at her feet, as he had before the phone rang, but sitting above him on the sofa, unable to look directly into his face when she spoke, magnified her discomfort. “Would you…sit up here with me, please. I need to see your face.”
He got up, sat beside her, and took her hand. “If you can’t tell me everything right now, everything I ought to know, this is where I get off.”
Fair enough, she thought, and oddly, she had no fear; she’d take whatever came. “My name is Justine Taylor Montgomery. I’m thirty years old. I have a Ph.D in psychology, and I am a widow. I was married to Kenneth Montgomery until he died in a motel fire with his white mistress of more years than I’d been married to him. Seven hours after I left the scene of that fire, Tonya was born one month prematurely.”
He said not one word, as she continued to speak, leaving out nothing that had happened to her from that fatal day until she answered his ad for a nanny.
“I did not intend to become involved with you or any man. Never. My father and Kenneth had been lessons enough. The first person to love me after my mother’s death was Tonya. I thought Kenneth loved me—until I met you; until I watched you with Tonya, I knew I’d had no idea what love was. And until you held me in your arms and made love to me, I knew I had never before loved any man. I fought getting involved with you, because the burden of my guilt was so awesome—at times, almost unbearable. The day before we learned that Tonya needed a bone marrow transplant, I paid an unexpected call on my father.”
He spoke for the first time. “Is he the Virginia Assemblyman?”
“Yes.” She told him the remainder of the story, including her father’s offer to test for the transplant.”
“That’s my story, Duncan. Unvarnished. I can’t excuse myself for the deception, but considering how things turned out, I don’t know if I should apologize.”
He slid down on the sofa until his head rested on its back. “It’s a lot to digest. If you’d told me you were her mother, I certainly wouldn’t have hired you. Yet, I can’t say I’m sorry I did. I always knew that nothing about you fit the role. With your nurturing, she developed so rapidly, a mushroom swelling to maturity in the summer rain. Don’t jump to any conclusions. You’ve given me a lot to think about, and I’d better get started on it.” He got up, extended his hand, and helped her to her feet. “I’ll say goodnight. Wednesday morning, we have to bring Tonya home.” He left her standing there and, as though with feet of lead, climbed the stairs. She stared after him as he walked off, leaving an empty hole in her soul.
Wednesday arrived too quickly for Justine. She di
dn’t see how she could live with Duncan in a platonic relationship when she loved him so deeply, yet she didn’t know how she could live separately from her child. They brought their daughter home, put her in her playpen, and sat on the floor beside it while the child reacquainted herself with her toys. He’d given no hint as to what he felt about her or thought of her deception.
Unable to tolerate it any longer, she left him in Tonya’s room laughing and playing with the child. Half an hour later, when he knocked on her door, she opened it and spoke first. “I have to leave here, Duncan.”
His eyebrows lifted and a frown darkened his features. “You what?”
She walked to the window and stood with her back to him. “I can’t stay here. I know I’ll never have a peaceful moment without my child, and I have no legal claim to her, but I can’t live in this house with you as your mistress any more than I can sleep across the hall from you night after night and not go insane wanting you. At least, you’ll let me see her once in a while…won’t you?”
“You can’t leave, Justine. Tonya needs you.”
Icy fingers circled her heart, but she straightened her back and turned to face him. “I know she needs me, but…” She bit her tongue and said it. “What about you?”
When he didn’t answer, she turned her back to him and stared unseeing at the endless darkness. The heat of his fingers on her shoulders renewed her hope and sent jolts of passion hurtling through her, awakening in her desire that for weeks had been unappeased.
“Please don’t touch me, Duncan. If you’re not going to hold me, don’t play with me.”
His fingers dug into her shoulders until she turned and faced him. “I have no right to judge you harshly. Few people could have had your experience and weathered the turbulence as you have done. You’re a brave woman. You expected that when I learned who you were, I’d walk away from you. Yet you didn’t hesitate to give your child life a second time, knowing that doing so would expose you. Justine, it hasn’t occurred to me to ask you to leave here. Don’t you have any idea what you mean to me? You’ve held me in your arms, in your body, and you still don’t know?”
She shook her head. “With my experience, I no longer take anything for granted.”
He lifted her chin with his index finger and looked into her eyes. “What do you see?”
She thought her heart would fly out of her body. “I…I see half a dimple.” She traced it with her fingers. “The most beautiful eyes in this world, an—”
“You don’t see that I love you?”
“Duncan. Duncan!”
Her words, the quivering of her lips, and the hard tips of her breasts against her shirt sent wild fire roaring through him, exacerbating his pent-up hunger for her, intensifying his pain of wanting her non-stop since he’d held her sobbing in his arms on Saturday. He struggled to check the desire that threatened to tie him in knots, to render him as ineffectual as a sinking ship.
“Justine, I’m yours to take.”
He could sense her hesitance, her uncertainty. But he knew that he had only to touch her in familiar places. He let his left hand drift down her shirt and over her right breast, the more sensitive of the two, and watched her lips part and her tongue dart out to lathe them.
“It’s been like this from the moment we first looked at each other, Justine, and you know it. Tell me you can walk away. Tell me you don’t belong here with me. In my arms. In my bed. Tell me I don’t belong inside you. You told me you loved me, and I believed you, because I already knew it. Tell me it’s no longer true.”
“Duncan, it’s…I—”
“I’m trusting you, sweetheart, and you have to trust me. Put your arms around me.”
The sweetness of it. The hell of it. She locked him in her arms, parted her lips, and sucked his tongue into her mouth.
He thought he’d burst if he couldn’t get inside her. “Baby, slow down.”
But she paid no attention to his pleading. Her hips rolled against him, and when she shifted from side to side, rubbing her breasts against his chest, he found her right breast inside her shirt, released it, fastened his mouth on it, and nourished himself on her sweet flesh.
“Duncan, I need you. I need you!”
He looked around him, stunned. Daylight. “Sweetheart, Mattie’s in the house.”
“Tell her to leave. Lock the door. I don’t care what.”
He picked her up, carried her to her bed, and stood looking down at her, her breath already coming in pants, eager for him. He closed the door, braced her desk chair beneath the doorknob, and rushed back to her. Standing beside the bed looking down at her, he wondered if he could get the control she needed. Her smile almost took his breath, and he quickly disrobed her, unbuttoned his own shirt, and reached for his belt buckle, but she was there before him. His trousers dropped to the floor, and he stepped out of them, but when he would have joined her in bed, she reached for him and caressed him. He threw back his head and gritted his teeth, but she didn’t stop.
The full power of his virility loomed before her and, unable to resist, she sat up, stroked him, and kissed him. “Justine, sweetheart, you’re playing with fire. I’m just a man, baby.”
She held out her arms to him and he fell into them. His lips brushed her ears and neck and traveled to her breast. He toyed there, knowing what she wanted and making her wait.
“Honey, kiss me. I need you to kiss me.”
His answer was a kiss on the inside of her arm, and a skimming of his fingers over her belly. When she could stand it no longer, she grasped his head and led him to her breast.
Heart-thumping, spine-tingling rockets shot through her, and she swung her leg across his hips, while he tortured her breasts with his honeyed mouth. Unable to contain her rising passion, she raised her body until she could feel his hard arousal and undulated against him. He gripped her hips to still her, and continued his assault on her nervous system. His tongue traced a line from her breast to her belly, reminding her of what he had done to her the last time, and the seat of her passion pulsated in anticipation of his lips. He made good on his promise, loving her, possessing her, branding her as his for all time until he brought a keening cry. He raised himself up and smiled into her face.
“May I, Justine?”
She opened to him and her pent-up passion exploded as he found his home within her. She had no secrets from him now and no reason to hold back. Free at last, she opened herself to him and let him know her, as she undulated and danced beneath him, gripping his hips and rocking to his beat.
“Slow down, sweetheart, and let it catch up with us.”
She hardly heard him, as frissons of heat shot through her. “Duncan, please!”
His lips stilled her murmurings. “Yes, sweetheart. I’m going to love you until you won’t think of leaving me. Do you hear? Give yourself to me. I want all of you.”
His deep thrust set her nerve endings afire. She didn’t want it to end. Didn’t want it to be the last time. But he turned her inside out, obliterated her inhibitions, and exposed her soul. The musky smell of him intoxicated her, his hands held her in his lover’s prison, and he was over her, beside her, and all around her as he drove within her.
“I said give yourself to me.”
“I am. I am.”
“No, you’re not. But you will.”
He bent to her breasts, put his fingers between them and teased her while he accelerated his powerful thrusts. She bucked beneath him and gave herself up to the powerful vortex into which he pitched her.
“Come with me, honey. Love me, Justine. You hear me? I want you to love me.”
Tremors shook her as wave after wave of ecstasy sucked her into his orbit and her body clutched him. “I do.”
“That’s it, love. I want all of you.”
“I love you. I love you,” she screamed as he stripped her of herself and made her one with him. He drove once more, folded her tightly to him, and unraveled in her arms.
He didn’t move away from her
, but continued to hold her after he separated himself from her body. Minutes passed before he said, “Justine, are you willing to give us a chance? You’ve already given me so much that I didn’t have before I knew you. What do you say? Will you marry me, Justine?”
“Will I—”
“Will you? You don’t want an affair, and I don’t either. I love you, and I can’t envisage life without you.”
“I…Yes. Yes. Oh, yes!”
He slipped on his trousers and stepped out of the room. There was one more thing that he had to settle. He kicked open the door and walked in with Tonya in his arms.
“Juju pay panno wi Tonya.”
Duncan put Tonya in her arms, sat on the side of the bed, and shook his finger at the child. “It’s time you learned how to say Mother. No more Juju. Say mother. Mother.”
“Muwa.”
He leaned over and kissed them both. “Muwa. That’ll do for now.”
FOOLS RUSH IN
An Arabesque novel published by Kimani Press/August 2009
First published by BET Publications, LLC in 1999
ISBN: 978-1-4268-3761-6
© 1999 by Gwendolyn Johnson-Acsadi
All rights reserved. The reproduction, transmission or utilization of this work in whole or in part in any form by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including xerography, photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, is forbidden without written permission. For permission please contact Kimani Press, Editorial Office, 233 Broadway, New York, NY 10279 U.S.A.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
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