Redemption's Touch (Kimani Romance)

by Ann Christopher

  And the very last thing she needed, anyway, was to emotionally entangle herself any further with Dawson, the poster child for the kind of unreachable bad boy that any thinking woman should stay far away from. Seriously. Signing up to be a suicide bomber was a safer prospect than any further involvement of any kind with…him. Whatever his name was.

  She went outside to the—big surprise—Reynolds Warner Memorial Garden and sat on a bench next to a pretty little stone fountain. Settling against the back, she tilted her face up to the sun’s warmth, closed her eyes and tried to find enough peace to get her through the waiting.

  It almost worked. After a few minutes, she felt some of the tension begin to ease from her kettledrum-tight shoulders, but that was when it happened.

  “Is this seat taken?”

  Him.

  She stiffened into concrete again. For one foolish second, she thought of ignoring him, but that would just be ridiculous, and it wasn’t like they were in second grade. No matter what else happened, she could act like the dignified woman she was and deal with him with grace and maturity.

  The bastard.

  Cracking her eyes open, she looked up. He towered over her, with a stack of two white Styrofoam clamshells in one hand and a couple cans of soda, one diet and one not, in the other. He looked flushed and possibly nervous but said nothing further and waited patiently for her decision.

  A distant voice tried to talk sense to her. A smarter version of herself, it stood on a faraway mountaintop and flapped its arms, and then in growing desperation tried flags, Morse code and smoke signals.

  Leave him alone, dummy! You know he’s not for you! This won’t end well!

  All of that was perfectly sensible and probably prescient.

  Arianna was smart. She’d graduated from Yale Law. She should listen.

  On the other hand, that guardian angel’s voice was faint, and he was right there in all his moody, dark-eyed glory. They both needed a temporary distraction, and he’d brought food. As long as there was no greenhouse within walking distance, nothing could happen, right?

  So, yeah, he could stay. But that didn’t mean she had to be nice to him.

  The decision made, she frowned at him with all the indifference she could manage, which was somewhere between zero and one-half gram.

  “That depends. Are you planning to start any more fights today?”

  “No.”

  “Do you have any more names I need to know about?”

  Something in his face softened. If a person could smile without moving his lips, then he was doing it. “No.”

  “Is that food for me?”

  “Yeah. Least I can do for knocking you down earlier.”

  At this reminder of his latest transgression against her, she narrowed her gaze. “Don’t think I’ve forgotten. Or forgiven.”

  He nodded. “I don’t blame you. Do you want me to leave?”

  No. “Yes.” She paused, giving him time to flush and shift uncomfortably. “But it’s safer to keep an eye on you since you’re like a well-dressed tornado, wreaking havoc wherever you go.”

  “A well-dressed tornado?” He tilted his head, considering this and accepting it with a shrug. “I’ve been called worse.”

  “You deserved it—whatever it was,” she said flatly.

  This assessment didn’t abash him in the least. “You’re right. Can I sit down? Now that the food’s cold?”

  She flashed him a final warning look and moved her purse aside for him. “As long as you understand I’m going to talk to you. That’s what people do when they eat together; they have a conversation. Can you handle that?”

  “Yeah. I figure your nonstop chattering is a good distraction right now.”

  Hold up. She talked a fair amount, yeah, but she did not chatter—

  He sat down, and her gathering outrage stalled in her throat.

  Oh, no.

  The bench had seemed like an adequate seating device for two to three people, but that was before he came along, crowding her and throwing off waves of heat scented with the earthy deliciousness of his cologne. Had he always been this big? Really? How did he make it through life trying to negotiate those shoulders around corners and through doorways?

  “I don’t chatter,” she said sourly, for the record, acutely aware of his muscled arms and thighs and the brush of his silk sleeve against her bare arm.

  “Sure you do.” He passed her a container of food. “Here.”

  On cue, her belly rumbled with unexpected hunger. Opening the clamshell with a swell of hope, she looked inside and discovered…a salad.

  He, meanwhile, was about to dig into a loaded burger with great gusto.

  “I want that,” she said when the burger was one inch from his gaping mouth.

  “You’re lucky to get anything. Eat it. Women eat salad.”

  That kind of nonsense didn’t need to be dignified, so she clasped her hands together in front of her heart and let her lower lip tremble. “Please,” she whispered, “I’ll do anything.”

  That did it. The huskiness of her tone made his eyes glaze for a second, and she could almost see the memories of last night scroll through his brain. To his credit, he snapped out of it quickly and handed over the burger with a wry smile and good grace.

  “Impressive,” he conceded.

  “I know.” She took a giant bite of the burger, which was cold but gooey.

  “Does that routine always work for you?”

  Laughing, she handed him a fry, just to make peace. “Usually.”

  That fry disappeared with a single chew and a gulp, leaving him free to focus all his considerable energy on her. “So you’re a Warner, eh?”

  “Not exactly.”

  “Close enough. Why didn’t you mention it last night?”

  Was he blaming her for that? She stared at him, longing with every molecule of her being to dump her burger upside down in his lap. “There’s a lot we didn’t get to last night.”

  Something dark glinted in his eyes, a wicked warning that reminded her of all the things they’d done together in the dark and all the things he still wanted to do with her.

  “There’s a lot we did get to, Ari.”

  She ignored the yearning huskiness in his voice. “For example,” she continued as though that sound she’d just heard was nothing more meaningful than a passing fly’s buzz, “you didn’t mention your family ties or your multiple names or your irrational desire to spill Warner blood.”

  Tension pulsed in his jaw. “First, I don’t want to spill blood—”

  “Much,” she said darkly.

  “—and second, it’s not irrational.”

  Did he actually believe that? “You just want what’s coming to you. Is that it?”

  “Exactly.”

  “Did you ever think that maybe you want the wrong thing?”

  His lips flattened down to a slash of annoyance and disbelief. “And what should I want instead of my birthright, pray tell?”

  “Peace.”

  That got him. She knew it would. Floundering and silenced, he stared at her until he couldn’t stare anymore. And then he looked away.

  Fueled by her newfound righteous serenity—they both knew she was right, even if he wasn’t willing to admit it—she worked on her burger.

  He, meanwhile, stabbed at his salad with vindictive enthusiasm and worked on his argument. “Spoken like a pretty little princess,” he said finally, “who grew up in a penthouse where her mommy and her daddy worshipped and spoiled her and she never knew anything but peace.”

  She had to smile because he was so funny. Unwittingly funny, but still funny. Did he seriously think this gruff finger-pointing routine would make her scuttle into a corner and hide? “The thing about peace is—if you don’t have it, you can make it.”

  That shut him up. Again.

  Immensely satisfied, she took another bite or two of her burger.

  He regarded her with utmost derision, as though she believed it was possible t
o live on sunshine, love and puppies. “Is life that easy for you? Just make peace?”

  Maybe he didn’t believe it, but she did. “It’s that easy.”

  “Where did you come from?”

  Arianna stilled.

  Because he didn’t say it like he wondered how she’d managed to escape and when the men would arrive with the nets to take her back to the facility. He said it with a hint of wonder and a flare of unwilling interest in his eyes. He said it as though she’d arrived in the nick of time, and he was damn glad she had.

  And, God, she just couldn’t think when he looked at her like that.

  “Eat.” She pointed to his salad, desperate to direct his interest somewhere else.

  To her surprise, he did.

  They ate in a companionable silence that was broken only when he held out the diet soda. “Don’t even try it,” she told him. Rolling his eyes, he kept the diet for himself and gave her the leaded version.

  The sun shone, robins sang and splashed in the fountain, people came and went from nearby benches. And in that perverse way men had of doing things, especially after the bickering they’d just done, he calmed her down and brought her that peace she’d needed. Merely by sitting beside her with his quiet, solid energy.

  Yeah. That was a problem.

  And then a bigger problem reared its big, fat, ugly head.

  He threw their trash away and then casually reached over to brush her breeze-blown hair away from her cheek, stroking her skin with those amazing fingers. It was the kind of instant-relaxation touch that melted her innards, and she couldn’t bottle up her tiny sigh of pleasure.

  Naturally he took advantage of her pathetic weakness and kept stroking. And she, fool that she was, kept letting him. For a minute. Then she found the strength to pull her face away and shoot him a sidelong frown.

  “You really should stop touching me.”

  He hesitated, but she wasn’t dumb enough to think the matter had been settled. Those fingers came right back, twining in her curls and then tucking them behind her ear. “It’s hard for me not to touch you after last night. I feel like I have blanket permission to touch you. We can’t put the genie back in the bottle.”

  God, how did he do it? Those hands were freaking amazing. If he kept up like this, she’d have a shouting orgasm in another minute, right here in public, and then fall, comatose, into a nap right on this hard bench.

  Pissed off by his power over her, she jerked away. “You had permission last night. Today you’re back to nowhere with me.”

  He didn’t like this pronouncement, not if the immediate brow lowering was any indication. “You promised you’d remember,” he said, as though there was a snowball’s chance in a Sahara summer that she’d forget.

  “And you promised you’d meet me at the pasta bar, but you walked out, and that made me feel like a hooker on a corner downtown.”

  Whoa. She hadn’t meant to be quite that honest.

  “Don’t do that to yourself,” he said vehemently. “What happened with us had to happen. There was no stopping it.” His eyes went all sad on her, and with all the earnestness of a convicted murderer arguing his case for getting into heaven to St. Peter, he said, “I’m sorry I left, Arianna. I’m sorry.”

  She turned her head, determined to remain unmoved even though her vulnerable heart was beginning to ache.

  And then he played dirty.

  “One day real soon, Ari,” he said, in the gentlest voice imaginable, “we’ll have to talk about this some more. We need to come to an understanding.”

  That anger surged again, hotter this time because it was directed inward. How could she blame him for trying to get laid again? He was a man; it was what they did—that, and make empty promises. She was the stupid one here, not him.

  But it was easier to turn that fury outward than it was to own it.

  “Understand this,” she said. “Keep your hands off me.”

  Before he could say anything, his cell phone rang.

  Hurtled back to the crisis with the force of a catapult, they exchanged a look of mutual wide-eyed panic—Oh, God. Bishop—and then he fished the phone out of his pocket and raised it to his ear.

  “Yeah?” He listened, his gaze glued to hers, and she prayed until he hung up, his expression unreadable.

  “Tell me,” she said.

  Dawson’s face contracted, stopping her heart, but then he let out a sharp bark of laughter. “He…came through with flying colors. It looks…good.”

  She was afraid to let herself believe it. “Really?”

  He nodded.

  Relief hit her hard. Joyous, overwhelming, breathtaking relief. It bubbled up her throat and she opened her mouth, thinking she’d laugh with Dawson.

  That was when, to her complete horror, she burst into tears.

  Hold up…was she crying?

  Oh, man.

  Paralysis struck him down. Normally, he had zero patience with emotional women, and he put them in the same category as malaria and buffalo stampedes: things to avoid at all costs.

  But that was women.

  This was Arianna, the woman who had, throughout this crisis, shown the coolheaded calm of General Eisenhower on D-day. Arianna was a rock, and he’d bet his next ten years of freedom that she rarely cried.

  What the hell did he do now?

  He couldn’t ignore it, even though her ducked head told him she was embarrassed and wanted to hide. Not when the sight of those sparkling tears made him want to howl with sympathetic grief.

  Yeah. Clearly he’d lost his freaking mind. “Don’t cry,” he told her.

  Actually, he didn’t tell her so much as he ordered her.

  “I’m not.” Turning away, she swiped at her eyes and sniffled.

  “Don’t bullshit me.” His voice sounded gruffer by the second, probably because his rising desperation was making him crazy. If Arianna was upset, he felt the driving urge to fix it. Whatever it took to put the light back in those eyes. “What’s wrong? The old man’s going to be okay—”

  “I know.”

  “So what’s this about?”

  “I’m relieved.”

  She offered up a watery smile, but he saw it for the deflection it was.

  “Yeah? And?”

  The questions put a dent in her defenses. Her bottom lip quivered for a minute, but then her mouth firmed. “This whole thing. It…reminded me of my father.”

  He smoothed back her hair—she didn’t stop him—and asked gently, “What happened to him?”

  That gaze turned back to him, the bleakest of Arctic winters. “He had a brain aneurism a few years ago. Died on the table.”

  Oh, man. He hated to think of her suffering on that terrible day.

  “I’m sorry.”

  Nodding, she put the past firmly behind her and resumed her agenda with the levelheaded practicality he’d begun to see as her trademark.

  “I didn’t have any more time with my father. But you’ve got a second chance with yours. What’re you going to do with it?”

  No interview in his life had ever felt this tense, or this important.

  “I need to figure that out, don’t I?”

  “You’re not going to waste it, though,” she said.

  There was no question in there, but she waited anyway, giving him the chance to come correct and do the right thing. And he’d discovered, all through this long morning, that where Arianna was concerned, he wanted to…he wanted to…he wanted to come correct, yeah, but that wasn’t all.

  He wanted to…be better…at everything.

  Better man. Better son. Better human being.

  Otherwise, how could he—

  What? How could he what?

  His mind’s eye squinted, peering in the distance, but he couldn’t see that far. All he knew was that he wanted something from her, and it was only partially about sex. The rest was unknown, but he was still determined to get it.

  “No,” he told her. “I’m not going to waste it.”

>   “Good.”

  A gleam of satisfaction appeared in her eyes, but she didn’t gift him with the whole smile this time. Reserving judgment, probably. Smart girl, but man, he wanted that smile, especially after the tears. He wanted all her smiles, but there was time for that later.

  She held her hand out to him. “Let’s go see your father.”

  Emotion tiptoed up on him all of a sudden, catching him by surprise, and he stalled, not sure what to do with all the blessings in a life he’d considered cursed.

  His father wasn’t dead or dying; they both had a second chance. The sky was blue, and he was a free man. And Arianna, the woman who was light-years above him in every imaginable way, and who’d told him not ten minutes ago not to touch her, was voluntarily offering him her soft little hand.

  If there was something better than this in the universe, he didn’t think his heart was strong enough to behold it.

  He tightened his lips and wished his nostrils would stop flaring, but of course her sharp eyes saw it all and softened with understanding.

  That put him over the edge. He didn’t give himself a chance to think.

  Taking her hand, he reeled her closer across the bench. Some of his sudden intensity must have shown in his face, because she stiffened and turned her head, straining to get away. His pride should have kicked in about then, but his need was greater. Breathing her in, that wonderful scent of warm, healthy Arianna, he let his nose lead him to her cheek, where he hovered and imagined some of the connection they’d shared last night was still there.

  “Please,” he whispered, just brushing her ear with his lips. “This one time.”

  Her body eased, just enough, and he knew that was all the permission he’d get. So he kissed her on the cheek, a lingering kiss that channeled his gratitude, desire and all the other bewildering things he was beginning to feel about this woman.

  It was the best kiss of his life.

  Back up in the recovery area, the scene was exactly as Dawson had expected, but still an unpleasant shock—like knowing you’ll get buzzed if you mess around with a plug, but sticking your finger in anyway.