Redemption's Touch (Kimani Romance)

by Ann Christopher

  If she had half an ounce of sense, she’d stay far away from him.

  Hell, if he had a quarter ounce of sense, he’d vacate this terrace now, but sense was apparently thin on the ground tonight, and he didn’t want to leave her.

  But what was he doing? Where did he think this was going?

  Nowhere, that’s where.

  So he got up even though his limbs felt heavy and resistant, ignored the bright hope shining in her eyes, put his empty dessert bowl on the ledge next to his empty wine goblet and started on his way.

  “I need to go,” he said. “Have a good night.”

  Her face fell. “Can’t you stay for a minute?”

  “No.”

  “Don’t you even want to know my name?”

  He hesitated.

  Know her name? Didn’t she get it? He wanted to know her name, her favorite color, her date of birth and how she liked her eggs at breakfast. He wanted to unravel all the secrets of her body. Most of all, he wanted to know what she’d seen in him that made her approach him when so many people in his life had written him off.

  Yeah, he wanted, and the subtle glow of longing in her face, which was partially hidden behind several windblown curls, damn sure wasn’t helping.

  “Your name?” he asked stupidly.

  “It’s Arianna. Smith.”

  This time, finally, he had to laugh. “Arianna? I should have known. You don’t look like a Sue, and with brothers named Antonios and Alessandro—”

  “It’s Greek for ‘most holy.’”

  “Yeah. I should’ve known that, too.”

  “Why?”

  The smile slipped away from him, but the words wouldn’t shut the hell up. “Because you look like an angel.”

  She stilled. When she spoke again, her voice was filled with a new huskiness that wound him up tight. “Is someone waiting for you?”

  “No.”

  “Then why can’t we spend a little time together?”

  Good question. At the moment, he couldn’t remember. Something about his agenda and there being no room for a woman in his life, but neither consideration seemed any more immediate than the atmospheric conditions on the planet Mercury. Nothing but this was important—nothing but her.

  “It’s just—”

  “Am I bothering you?”

  Yeah, she was, but not in the way she feared. She made him hot and bothered. Intrigued and bothered. She had him on a hook and he didn’t particularly want to get free.

  “No.” He hated admitting it, but he couldn’t keep the truth locked up because it burrowed right under the gate like a gopher hopped up on speed. “But I need to know—why me?”

  That got her. She dropped her gaze and shook her head. “You’ll laugh.”

  “No, I won’t.”

  “It doesn’t make sense.”

  “Tell me anyway.”

  He waited, studying the top of her head, watching the sleek black hair flutter in the breeze. They’d gotten closer somehow, probably because he couldn’t resist the slow drift of his body toward hers, and he could smell the light flowers of her perfume and, underneath that, the warmth of her clean skin.

  Seconds passed. Then she met his gaze again, and understanding shone so bright in her eyes it nearly made his heart stop.

  “Because. When I saw you looking at me earlier, I thought, ‘He needs me. He doesn’t want to, but he does.’”

  Jesus. That wasn’t what he’d expected.

  “So I came to find you.”

  There was nothing he could say to that, no denial he could manage with a straight face. Because he did need her. Their ten minutes in the moonlight had brought more sunshine to his life than he’d known in years. He didn’t like it—she was right about that, his brilliant little Yale Law graduate—but that didn’t mean he could ignore it. He’d been in the dark for too long. He needed the sun for as long as he could have it.

  Reaching out, he smoothed the hair back from her face so he could keep those eyes in view. They crinkled at the edges, and he felt something deep inside ease up as a little more light crept into his life, a little more hope.

  “What’s your name?” she asked.

  For the first time in years, the wrong name came to his lips: his real name, Joshua. He didn’t know why, but it seemed inappropriate to tell her anything else. But of course, Joshua had died long ago, and a little moonlight and romance weren’t going to resurrect him.

  “Dawson.”

  “Dawson,” she echoed, trying it out for size, and her voice saying it was better than a John Coltrane sax solo. “Can you stay a little longer, Dawson?”

  “Yeah.” No hesitation this time. “I can do that.”

  Chapter 2

  The delicious moment stretched between them, but Arianna had already discovered that almost everything about this man struck her as delicious. His grumpy wariness, his wounded brown eyes behind frameless glasses. His head full of thick, short, perfectly groomed black dreadlocks, and his pouty lips that were downturned in a perpetual suspicious sulk. The slashing heaviness of his black brows and the glowing walnut of his skin. His commanding height, the breadth of his shoulders and the severity of his suit, all of which made him as dangerously sexy as a siren calling a sailor to his doom from her rocky perch.

  He reminded her of a trained grizzly who’d accidentally caught his paw in a trap and now no longer trusted humans. There was, she suspected, a teddy bear imprisoned somewhere inside, but she’d have to slay a thousand dragons to get to him. But, man, she wanted to get to him. Because Dawson made her hot enough to melt her way into the center of a glacier.

  Too bad that wasn’t the worst of it. He touched her, and that was trickier than mere sexual desire. Later—much later—she’d have to give that some thought. For now, she just wanted him to stick around for a while.

  But he’d already backed up a step or two and dropped his hand, and she could feel a moat opening up between them.

  Couldn’t have that.

  So she laughed, both because he was funny in his sulkiness and because it seemed to disarm him so badly, and asked something she’d been wondering.

  “You don’t smile much, do you?”

  This, naturally, produced a full-fledged frown. “I smile.”

  “Not very much. Bad teeth?”

  That got him. Snorting with a grudging laugh that revealed the flash of perfect, strong white teeth, he looked across the lawn toward the house and shoved his hands deep into his pockets. Wow. That was worth the wait. One little smile stripped all that suspicion away and left him dimpled and charming.

  She stared at him, her breath spiking. More. She wanted more of that.

  Unfortunately, he seemed to catch himself. Maybe he allocated himself only three smiles per day, or maybe it was that each smile could only last for two seconds. Whatever. The smile faded away, leaving him with his default expression: serious.

  “See?” he said. “A smile.”

  “Did it hurt?”

  The laughter came a little quicker this time, a little easier. As though his body were flexing out-of-shape muscles and getting stronger with each repetition. Even so, he didn’t let it last long.

  “You should be happy now. Two smiles in a row.”

  “Two incredible smiles,” she agreed. “Gone too soon.”

  It would’ve been nice to keep this in the area of meaningless flirtation, but this seemed important, as though basic understanding of this one point was essential to really getting him. And, more than anything, she wanted to really get him.

  They stared at each other, another of those tension-filled moments that sent goose pimples racing over flesh that suddenly felt over-sensitized and alert. He was somehow closer again, and she’d leaned toward him, her hands planted on the ledge for support. His faint clean scent, something dizzying that reminded her of sunshine, water and the raw earthiness of a pine forest after a summer shower, made her want to wrap her arms and legs around him and press her face to his neck.

>   “What do you want, Arianna?”

  That was easy. “I want to know why you’re so serious and what I could do to get you to have an easy conversation with me. I want to know what you do for fun when you’re not trying to conquer the world.”

  His brows came together in unmistakable surprise.

  “That’s right, isn’t it? You’re out to conquer the world. But why? I want you to tell me. And I want to make you laugh again, because you have a great laugh.”

  His comeback took a minute. “That’s quite a list. Anything else?”

  “That’s it for now.”

  “Most people start with asking about pets and hobbies, Arianna.”

  She shrugged. “Why waste time? I like to cut to the chase. But if you have a pet you want to tell me about…”

  “No pets.”

  “And no hobbies, either. Right?”

  This shrewd assessment seemed to disturb him, because his face darkened. Still, he tried to joke it away. “It takes a lot of time to conquer the world.”

  “No doubt.”

  “You come on like a ton of bricks. You ever think about being subtle?”

  Ton of bricks? She’d been called worse. Aunt Arnetta Warner, for one, went into daily spasms of horror about Arianna’s directness, among other things. The poor woman had spent the first week or so of summer trying to remake Arianna into her vision of Southern gentility, but it was far too late for that. Arianna had already grown into her own woman. This last year had proven that, if nothing else.

  “I could be subtle, yeah,” she agreed. “But if I’d been subtle tonight, you’d be gone and I’d be here by myself, eating two bowls of mousse and looking around for another one. That would’ve been sad, wouldn’t it? Because we like each other.”

  He hesitated. She could feel him considering various denials and evasions, trying them on for size and seeing which ones might fly. In the end, he just admitted it, and that grudging admission felt like the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.

  “Yeah.” His voice was huskier now, his gaze a little more intent. His absolute and unwavering attention surrounded her, edging everything else away from her vision until only he was left. “We like each other.”

  Those four words shouldn’t have made her this unreasonably happy, but they did. Everything within her smiled, but her mouth couldn’t manage the gesture, not with him staring at her like that.

  Tone it back, girl, she told herself sternly. You’re not ready for a relationship, and this is only flirting anyway.

  Only it wasn’t. Definitely not on her part, and she’d bet that this…thing between them, whatever it was, was new to him, too.

  The air between them held all sorts of promise, like a cloudy summer sky in those last few seconds before the first drops of rain fell. She opened her mouth, waiting for her chatterbox instincts to kick in again so they could resume their mostly one-sided conversation, but words ran and hid.

  And still he stared at her, inches away, his hands in his pockets.

  “Cat got your tongue?” he murmured.

  Her lips worked, trapped somewhere between a slow smile and an answer to his question. “I’m not sure. This has never happened to me before.”

  “What?”

  They both knew he wasn’t asking about her sudden silence.

  “Any of this,” she said.

  It was true. This last year, she’d been so celibate she probably qualified for re-virginization. Back in the day, she’d had the usual amount of collegiate sexual experience, some of which involved alcohol. That being the case, she knew that alcohol could lower her inhibitions, which were well below sea level at this point. But she’d only had half a glass of champagne about two hours ago, so she couldn’t blame being drunk for the unreasonable chemistry she felt right now.

  Nor could she blame a generalized horniness for this attraction, because she and her battery-operated boyfriend got along quite well, thank you very much.

  No.

  That left only one conclusion, reluctant as she was to come to it: this was all about Dawson, his effect on her and hers on him.

  “What now?” His eyes were heavy lidded, his voice the lowest whisper.

  God. She couldn’t even speak.

  Her face was hot, her breasts heavy. Between her legs, she felt the slick wetness of her body’s response to him, the insistent clench of inner muscles.

  It was inevitable, then. This. Them. Tonight. Now.

  “You could kiss me,” she said.

  He hesitated, studying her face and deciding. She would have told him not to fight it, but her voice had left the building.

  For the first time in what seemed like hours, he looked away from her face, to her bare shoulder, which was pressed up near her jaw line. Taking all the time in the world, he pulled his hand out of his pocket and slid his long, neat fingers up her arm, to the point that held his absolute attention.

  Then he circled with his thumb, leaned in and pressed a kiss to her shoulder. A long, wet, scorching kiss.

  “Oh, God.” Her heavy head fell back and she stared up at the black sky, seeing both those stars and the ones he’d made flash across her vision. The air could no longer get to her heaving lungs, and she had one millisecond to wonder what was happening here, what they’d unleashed, but then it was too late for thinking and he was nipping at her neck and easing his body between her legs. “God.”

  His other hand came out of his pocket, and everything happened at once. His hungry, searching mouth ran back and forth over that sweet tendon—there, God, right there—and continued on its way up her exposed throat, across her cheek, to his final destination: her lips.

  He waited there, hovering just long enough to make her want to scream with frustration. Her arms went around his shoulders, anchoring him closer between her thighs, and his hands slipped over the silk of her dress, to her butt, dragging her up against a heart-stopping erection that he ground against her. Then they went to her breasts, stroking and kneading.

  He kissed her, silencing her cries. His skilled mouth claimed her, sucking and biting his way deep inside, his tongue plunging and retreating. Relentless. He tasted like chocolate, wine and heaven, and she wanted to gorge until she passed out with it, and then she wanted to gorge again.

  Without warning, he broke the kiss and leaned his forehead against hers, panting. They stayed like that for several breathless beats, shocked with the power of their connection, and then he pulled back just enough to study her with eyes that were glazed and glittering with desire behind those glasses.

  “Yes or no, Arianna?”

  “Y—”

  His body shuddered with what was probably a restrained combination of relief and lust—it looked like he almost smiled—but then his hands on her breasts loosened a little, robbing her of the pleasure she needed, and his thumbs stopped circling her nipples.

  “Think about it,” he warned.

  He was right, of course. She should think about this, come to the sensible decision and stop before things got out of hand. Her life was unsettled, and she’d just come off the worst year she’d ever known. She wasn’t ready for a relationship, and this man was a complete stranger who, for all she knew, could be on a day pass from the local mental institution.

  So she should say no. That was the smart thing. No. Do it.

  She opened her mouth.

  “Yes,” she said, and her whole heart was in that one word. “Yes.”

  Chapter 3

  “Come to my hotel,” he said, his voice dark now, thick with passion.

  Hotel? Did he think she could wait that long without bursting into flames of spontaneous combustion? The cottage was much closer, but there was no way the two of them could slip past hundreds of people, especially her sharp-eyed aunt Arnetta and Bishop, her extra pair of eyes, unnoticed.

  She looked wildly around, saying a quick but fervent prayer of thanks that their little spot on the faraway terrace was dark and secluded enough to hide what they were doing.r />
  “No,” she said. “Greenhouse. Hurry.”

  “Greenhouse?”

  He seemed bewildered for half a second but then looked around, saw the greenhouse behind them and came up to speed. His face grim with determination, he snatched her off the ledge just as she was, arms and legs wrapped around him in a stranglehold, and swung her around with what felt like the strength of three or four men. Holding her in a death grip, as though she might try to sneak away while his attention was diverted—yeah, right, as if—he strode the rest of the way down the path and banged through the greenhouse door and into the humid warmth inside.

  It was dark, with only the sketchy moonlight filtering through the panes of glass to light their way. Luckily, she’d been there several times since she’d arrived and knew exactly where they could go.

  “There’s a bench,” she said, pointing. “By the fountain.”

  He was already halfway there, led by the steady trickling of water. Multitasking with those clever fingers as he went, he ran his hands up her bare thighs, to her butt, and went to work on her lacy black bikinis. Then he lowered her onto her back on the padded bench with all the care in the world, as though he’d be graded on gentleness later, and sat beside her, stripping the panties down her legs and off past her heels. When that was done, he worked his way between her thighs, exposing her, resting one of her legs up on the back of the bench and the other across his lap.

  He sat for a minute, studying her in the darkness, his eyes the only gleam of light in this thrilling inner world, as he shrugged his way out of his jacket. She tracked his every move, her lungs straining with the effort to breathe and her skin all but quivering for his touch.

  She wished she could see him better. She wished he was inside her, now. Most of all, she wished this night would go on forever because she knew, already felt it in the marrow of her bones, that this one time would never be enough.

  “Dawson,” she said, opening her arms to him, “come here.”