Redemption's Touch (Kimani Romance)

by Ann Christopher

  “She died when you were in college, right?”

  The new tightness in his throat settled into a lump and started to grow. “Yeah.”

  “Diabetes, or—”

  “Complications, yeah.”

  The natural urge was for him to glare her into silence—he didn’t make a habit of chitchatting about Mama’s death and the subsequent beginning of the roughest time of his life—but Arianna wasn’t asking out of idle curiosity. He’d be willing to bet she cared about him even if she’d rather die than admit it. Since his most fervent wish was for them to reestablish and grow their relationship into something, even if he wasn’t quite sure what the something would look like, there was no time like the present to start opening up.

  A little.

  But only if she met him halfway.

  So he sat on a carved bench facing the long hall’s windows and gave it a shot. “Have you got a minute?”

  “I don’t—” She eyeballed the bench with open suspicion, probably remembering the first time they’d occupied a seating device together. Then she looked up and down the hallway, possibly calculating the nearest exits and relative proximity of others in the house, and made up her mind. She sat, much to his unreasonable joy. “Sure.”

  Scrubbing his hand across his jaw, he gave her the abridged version. “Mama died. Bishop fell apart and got depressed. I fell apart and started drinking and partying.”

  She nodded with complete understanding. “Your mother was the heart of the family. Mothers usually are.”

  “She was the only thing keeping me and Bishop from ripping each other’s heads off, that’s for sure.” The memories were never far away, and they came back now in a swirling rush. Mama making his Spider-Man costume for Halloween; Mama letting him lick the pound cake batter off the beaters; Mama spanking his butt when he talked back, which was never with her but often with Bishop. “But with her gone, I don’t think we knew how to deal with each other. His depression got worse and my drinking got worse. And then one Christmas, it all blew up.”

  “He told you he wasn’t your father.”

  “You got it,” he said, wrapping the bitterness around him like a down comforter on winter’s coldest night. Because what else was he supposed to do? Show the world how hurt he was? How that one hurtful moment had ruined who he was and turned him into someone he’d never wanted to be? Hell, no. If he didn’t have his pride, what was left?

  That was his position, and he’d stuck to it for all these long and lonely years.

  Until Arianna looked at him with those shining eyes and asked, “It hurt, didn’t it?”

  To his utter shame, a trembling began in his chin, and it stopped only when he twisted his lips and bit the inside of his cheek hard enough to draw blood. That sharp pain cleared his mind and gave him the control he needed. “Yeah. It hurt. I hadn’t known I was adopted. It was…hard to find out like that.”

  “I guess so.”

  “The funny thing was, I was always Mama’s, even though she didn’t give birth to me. But I was never Bishop’s. He never wanted me.”

  Arianna didn’t buy it. He could tell by the open skepticism in her narrowed eyes that she didn’t want to think ill of her beloved Saint Bishop.

  “Is it possible he loved you but didn’t know how to show—”

  “No,” he said flatly.

  Sitting right in the crosshairs of her pure brown gaze, he had no choice other than to tell the truth, even though it was always so much easier to nurse his hurt. “I’m sure he tried,” he admitted, the best he could do.

  “It wasn’t enough?”

  “Let’s just say that Bishop and I never fit together like a hand in a glove.”

  This time she conceded the point, her eyes clouding over on his behalf. “I’m sorry.” To his surprise, she reached out a hand and sank it into the hair at his nape, giving him a caress that was probably supposed to comfort but also served to remind him of the magic that happened when they touched each other. “I’m sorry.”

  “Jesus.” He couldn’t keep his breath from spiking or a shudder from rippling through him. “You’re pretty good with those mixed messages, Ari, you know that?”

  Brilliant, jackass. Way to kill the mood.

  Right on cue, she stiffened and started to move away. Catching that soft hand before she could escape, he leaned in, desperate to kiss her. Screw it. He might as well lay it all on the line.

  “Come to my room with me, Arianna.”

  “No.”

  Damn it. He always had to push too hard, didn’t he? Always had to ask too much. Like now. “Let me touch you.”

  “I can’t.”

  “You want to.”

  “I want to.”

  He could see that. Desire radiated off her flushed skin, and her breath was choppy and short. Her lips were parted, her black pupils dilated. A textbook case of frustrated lust if ever he’d seen it, and he ought to know since he had a terminal case of it himself.

  “Then why?” He ran his nose across her cheek, one inch from her sweet skin, breathing her in as much as he could. Nothing seemed more important than being close to her again, now. Sex was only part of it, and that was the scary thing, because sex had always been the be-all and end-all as far as he and women were concerned. “Tell me why.”

  “Because.”

  “Why?” He tried to keep the sharp edge out of his voice, but that was impossible in the grips of this kind of need.

  “You’ve already hurt me once.” She floundered, working hard to force the words out. “And this thing between us, it’s—”

  “What?”

  “It’s big.” She slid down the bench and away from him. “What’ll you do to me next time, if I let you?”

  There wouldn’t be a next time. Not if he had anything to say about it. But she didn’t know that, and he’d given her no reason to take another gamble on him. “I get that you’re afraid. I don’t blame you. But this thing with us, this attraction, it’s there. It’s not going to go away if we ignore it. You know that. We’re living on the same property, for God’s sake.

  “Not for long.”

  “For now, though.”

  His persistence seemed to tick her off, and a sudden gleam of anger flashed in her eyes. “Why are you doing this? You can’t be hard up for women to have sex with. Are you?”

  He didn’t deny it. What would be the point? There were women he could have, yeah. The problem was, he’d had a hard time remembering any of their faces in the last couple of days.

  “I don’t want other women,” he told her. “I want you.”

  For one heart-stopping second, he thought she was wavering. She stared at him, and he felt her hope and excitement, could almost smell them in the air. But then she shook her head in a firm no.

  “Maybe you do,” she said. “But I don’t think you’re finished wallowing in your bitterness, and I’m not ready for a relationship anyway. I don’t think we’d do each other any good right now.”

  “I disagree.”

  “Maybe we do want each other.” She took a stab at a brave, oh-what-does-it-matter grin as she stood, but the corners of her mouth refused to curl, and the grim determination in her eyes made smiling impossible anyway. “But we’ll get over it.”

  He stood, too. “Arianna—”

  She moved off and he put his hand on her arm to stop her.

  And Andrew appeared around the corner.

  All three of them froze with a kind of pregnant horror.

  Yeaaah…awkward.

  The brother’s sharp eyes saw everything, in that annoying way they always did. Their flushed faces, the touch between them, the burning intensity. Arianna, recovering first and trying for that whole nothing’s-going-on-here thing, stepped out of Dawson’s grasp, but Dawson’s defiant tendencies kicked into warp speed. He widened his stance and squared his shoulders. Yeah, he wanted Arianna, and he didn’t care who knew it. Maybe King Andrew here wasn’t too thrilled, but screw him. Who the hell was he? Self-appoin
ted head of the family? Well, screw that, too.

  “Everything okay here?” Andrew’s voice had that false silky-calm quality that wouldn’t fool a kindergartner. “Arianna?”

  She flashed a bright smile, apparently determined to avert any pending violence. “Great.” Patting Andrew on one cheek, she gave him a reassuring kiss on the other. Andrew’s jaw flexed with clear annoyance at being handled, but that didn’t break Arianna’s stride any. “I was just leaving. So I’ll see you both later.”

  She swept off down the hall, leaving a yawning wake of silent suspicion behind her. Dawson watched her go, deflating with each step she took. Andrew, meanwhile, swung all his narrow-eyed intensity around to Dawson.

  “I think we need to have a talk,” he said.

  Yeah. They did, and Dawson knew it in the rational part of his brain. He and his beloved half brother here needed to clear the air on a whole host of topics, from Arianna to the unfortunate breakdown in their relationship all those years ago. Except that Dawson didn’t feel like letting Andrew set the timetable, and he especially didn’t feel like talking now, when he may have made a little headway with Arianna but now, thanks to this unwanted interruption, wouldn’t.

  “Later,” he said, brushing past Andrew.

  Andrew, naturally, was incapable of leaving well enough alone. He grabbed Dawson’s arm in a hard grip that pissed Dawson off all the more. “What’s going on with you and Arianna?”

  Dawson jerked free and took another step. “None of your bus—”

  “Everyone in this family is my business.” Andrew sidestepped and blocked him again. “And I don’t want her hurt.”

  That was code for what Dawson already knew in his heart to be true, not that he wanted to hear it from the young emperor here. “You mean I’m not good enough for her,” he roared, infuriated. “You mean you don’t want your poor relation of an ex-con half brother putting his filthy hands on a Warner princess.”

  Andrew, who’d never turned away from a fight, puffed out his chest and roared right back. “I mean she’s vulnerable right now, and you’ve got some serious anger-management issues. You’re mad at the world—”

  “I’m mad at the Warners, yeah.”

  “—and I don’t want to see her heart broken again. And if you cared anything about her at all, you’d know that already.”

  Wow.

  There was the kick in the teeth he’d needed, the one that knocked all the angry bitterness right out of him. For now, anyway. Because he did know. Arianna wasn’t for him on a good day, and his emotional reserves were so low right now that he was nothing but a walking disaster. He knew it. Too bad knowing it didn’t make him want her any less. Ashamed suddenly, he ducked his head and turned away, hoping Andrew wouldn’t see the turmoil that had to be simmering on his face.

  He saw.

  “Jesus,” Andrew muttered, now looking at him as though he’d sprouted horns, a tail and purple feathers. “You’re in love with her.”

  Whoa. The L word made Dawson’s jaw drop, threatening to hit the floor with a clang. Talk about your ridiculous ideas. He wanted to snort with laughter, except that his mouth had gone bone-dry and he couldn’t get his lungs to contract.

  After way too long a pause, he managed a plausible denial.

  “I don’t believe in love.”

  “Neither did I,” Andrew said. “You see where I’m at now.”

  Yeah, Dawson saw: Andrew had a wife and three boys and was apparently so happy with his domestic situation that seeing him and Viveca together was the rough equivalent of mainlining a five-pound bag of sugar.

  Love. Please.

  Ridiculous.

  Except that Dawson’s chest constricted another notch or two, threatening to lay him out flat on the cold black-and-white marble floor.

  “You can’t—” Dawson had to swallow back a huge-ass lump in his throat; where’d that come from? “—you can’t fall in love with someone you just met.”

  Andrew stared at him. “I hate to tell you, my brother, but you can fall in love at first sight, and I’m speaking from personal experience.”

  “Bullshit,” Dawson said, but there was no bite to the word, a fact that didn’t seem to be lost on Andrew, who gave him a grim and, if he wasn’t mistaken, pitying look. Dawson couldn’t take it and folded like a house of cards staring down a hurricane. “Later for this.” He tried to walk off again and got nowhere. Again.

  Andrew called after him. “You’ve got to work on forgiveness, man. You can’t hate the whole world and be the kind of man Arianna needs and deserves. You need to pull yourself together.”

  There was way too much truth in those three sentences—hell, in this whole conversation—and it scared him to death. And being scared only fed his anger, because God knew he’d spent far too much of his adult life being afraid of one thing or another.

  “It’s easy to talk about forgiveness when you’ve got everything life has to offer, isn’t it, my brother?”

  King Andrew was much too secure to let taunts from lesser relations make a dent in his armor. Shrugging it off, he spoke with calm conviction. “I didn’t have everything until Viveca came along and I wanted to do better. So I could be with her.”

  Some of Dawson’s anger deflated. There was no rebuttal for that, nor could he think of any way to deflect the growing list of things he and his half brother here had in common. “Well. Three cheers for you and Viveca.”

  Andrew’s face twisted. “You don’t make this easy, you know?”

  “Things haven’t been easy for me, so why should I take it easy on you?”

  Andrew flushed; the light streaming in from the hallway’s floor-to-ceiling windows highlighted his new color the way a spotlight highlights an actor on stage. To Dawson’s surprise and intense discomfort, the brother pressed his lips together and looked…guilty. Almost ashamed.

  And how the hell was Dawson supposed to deal with that?

  “I’m sorry,” Andrew told him.

  “Save it.”

  Andrew, Mr. Arrogance himself, a man who’d probably never apologized for anything in his life, kept right on talking. “I should have tried harder to make peace with you. I should have tried harder to get Bishop to work things out with you. I should have tried harder to get you a better lawyer. We could have paid for it even after you refused—”

  “I didn’t want your charity then, and I don’t want your pity now.”

  That, finally, shut Andrew up. Which was good, because Dawson didn’t do emotional scenes, and he wasn’t big on forgiveness just yet, even when a better man would’ve graciously granted it. His heart was too hard.

  They faced off, and Andrew just had to push it.

  “I’m sorry.” Andrew’s absolute determination to do the right thing and heal old wounds was so clear it might have been a tattoo etched across his forehead. “I’m sorry you lost years of your life for a crime you didn’t commit. I’m sorry for every slight this family has given you. I’m—”

  Dawson snorted. “Wow. Isn’t your apology just the winning lotto ticket? Lucky me.”

  Andrew’s expression hardened, which was what Dawson wanted. Even though he knew that made him a rotten SOB who’d just shot the peace dove with an AK-47, it was what his hard heart demanded. He had to hurt these people the way they’d hurt him.

  Grimly satisfied, he enjoyed the utter rightness of his world, at least until Andrew asked him the one question for which he’d never had an answer.

  “I wonder, Joshua, do you ever get tired of being your own worst enemy?”

  That stopped him dead, like a zap from a Taser.

  He was his own worst enemy; he knew it. He’d spent countless excruciating sessions with his shrink down in Atlanta addressing this very issue. His pride kicked in, he got his panties in a bunch and he lashed out—always hurting himself way more than he hurt anyone else.

  Case in point: When he was arrested those many years ago, the family stepped up to the plate. He hated to remember that now, but t
hey did. Tried to contact him. Offered to hire a lawyer for him. And he, being young, hotheaded and, worst of all, stupid, had told them to go screw themselves. He’d nursed his anger at Bishop and the young king here and placed his faith in the justice system.

  Yeah. That was a brilliant move.

  What’d happened? Well, his pride had remained intact, that’s what. Until his lame-ass court-appointed lawyer fell down on the job and bungled his way to a conviction.

  Another case in point: right now. Andrew was his brother. Well…half, but still a brother. Dawson had claimed he wanted his rightful place in the family, and he’d always longed to fit in, to belong. Now here was a golden opportunity to usher in a new era in Warner family relations, and what was Dawson doing? Was he being mature and putting everything he’d learned during therapy into practice?

  Hell, no.

  He was doing the same old tired, knee-jerk, cut-off-his-nose-to-spite-his-face routine he’d always done.

  What a smart boy he was. Genius, in fact. Did he think this kind of winning behavior was going to shape him into a man who deserved a woman like Arianna?

  Swallow the pride, Dawson. Turn over a new leaf.

  Andrew was still glaring, still waiting.

  And Dawson, suddenly, was tired of hating. So he gave an honest and heartfelt answer. “Yeah.” He paused, clearing his craggy throat. “I’m pretty tired of being my own worst enemy. I’m, ah…I’m working on that. And I’m, ah…I appreciate…” Shit. You’d think he’d never spoken English before. He cleared his throat again. “I really appreciate…I mean…thanks,” he finished lamely. “For the apology.”

  Andrew, looking gruff, gave a sharp nod and stuck out his hand.

  Dawson took it.

  They shook. He moved or maybe Andrew moved, and then without warning, they’d pulled each other in for a backslapping hug. It was familiar and strange at the same time, exactly what he’d needed even though he’d never known it. Some of the aching hurt that made its permanent home in his chest eased up, and he felt hot tears sting his eyes.

  Blinking them back, he stepped away and dropped his head so Andrew wouldn’t see. All his childhood, he’d looked up to Andrew, who’d always been the best and brightest, the most athletic and gifted, and tried to be as strong as him, as cool. That hadn’t changed apparently, and he didn’t want the brother to see him cry now.