Yours to Keep: A Loveswept Contemporary Romance

by Bell, Serena

  She exchanged glances with Ethan, whose scowl said nothing on earth would make him happier than to see Branch held accountable. Except maybe exacting his own revenge.

  Abrams handed Ethan a glossy black folder full of forms and shook their hands again. “I do some pro bono work,” he offered.

  Ethan shook his head. “I’ve got the money, and if I pay for us, then you’ll be able to do pro bono for someone who really needs it.”

  “That’s the spirit,” Abrams said, which made Ana laugh.

  He walked them out, and they held hands as they descended the wide front steps of the house to the sidewalk level. As they did, a car pulled out across the street, an aging navy-blue Ford Focus. Familiar. The back of the car was papered with Red Sox window and bumper stickers.

  Crap. Ernie’s car.

  She’d better talk to Ricky sooner rather than later.

  That night Ana’s students played Around the World, a version she’d invented for them. One student stood up and went to the far-left front corner of the classroom, where she stood next to a classmate. Ana asked a question in English. Whichever student could most quickly utter an accurate, coherent, grammatically correct answer moved on to the next challenge. The questions were easy—“What’s your name?” “Where are you from?” “What time is it?”

  Ling was in the process of sweeping the room; she’d advanced from her seat, second from the front, to stand beside a new student, a Somalian teenager. “What was the weather today?” Ana asked them.

  The door of the cafeteria banged open and Ricky clomped across the floor toward her. Every head in the room turned to look at him. “What were you doing at the lawyer’s?” he demanded.

  “I’m sorry,” Ana said to her students, though none of them were looking at her. They were all watching Ricky. He was a sight, almost two hundred lean pounds of enraged Dominican male. His brows were low, his jaw set, his eyes aflame. Because he was her brother, she was only a little scared of him. She couldn’t imagine how the rest of the class must feel about this intrusion. She strode out from behind the podium and took her brother’s arm. She led him back toward the door. In a hushed voice, she said, “You can’t come in here like this.”

  “What were you doing there?” He’d lowered his voice a tiny bit, but he was still much louder than he needed to be, considering that her ear was less than a foot from his mouth.

  “Can we talk about this later?”

  For the first time, it seemed to completely sink into him where they were. He looked over his shoulder at her students. Their expressions varied from amused to cowed. Ling looked outraged, probably furious that he’d put her reign in jeopardy.

  “No,” growled Ricky. “Tell me what the fuck you were doing there.”

  At least he was quieter now. Behind her, the class began to murmur among themselves. That was something. Maybe they’d speak English and get some practice. Nothing like gossip to spur conversation.

  “I can’t do this now. I have to teach this class. Can we talk about it when my second class is done?”

  “I have to be at work early tonight.”

  “What the hell do you want me to do, Ricky?” Her temper was spinning away from her. If this went on much longer, she’d be shouting, too.

  He looked taken aback. Well, good. She’d gotten through to him.

  “Tomorrow morning.” He started toward the door.

  “Ricky.”

  He turned back to look at her.

  “You owe my students an apology.”

  “Lo siento,” he muttered.

  “En inglés. Más fuerte.”

  His eyes narrowed, but he apologized, more audibly, in English, to her class. Then he gave her a hard look and left.

  “It was cloudy today,” Ling’s opponent said quickly. The door hadn’t even clicked shut yet.

  “Cheating!” Ling cried.

  Ana was torn between concern that she’d lost control of the situation and pride that Ling had chosen to speak English in a moment of high emotion.

  “Do-over.” Ana said it as calmly as she could, but her heart pounded in her ears so loudly that she could barely breathe.

  Chapter 23

  Ana’s beginners filtered slowly out of the cafeteria, crossing paths with her incoming advanced students. One of the beginners approached her. It was Nati, the Salvadoran woman whose daughter had been deported. Nati had gone down easily in the game of Around the World—too easily. Her comprehension of English was excellent, her ability to make herself understood nearly as good. But her self-confidence was poor, and she disliked speaking in front of the class.

  “It’s none of my business,” Nati said now to Ana in Spanish. The roots of her hair above her drugstore dye job were white. Her lips were thin, compressed.

  “In English, please,” Ana said. Her heart rate had returned to normal, but queasiness lingered, a tightness in her chest. She was not in the mood for any conversation that started with “It’s none of my business.”

  “It no my—problem,” Nati began again, heavily accented but perfectly clear.

  Ana crossed her arms.

  “The lawyer,” said Nati. “If you see him about papers, he no help. He charge you money, lot of money. He no help. Nobody help. This country, it no want us.”

  Ana felt a wave of pain. For everyone like her, everyone who had found a way to belong, there was someone like Nati’s daughter who had been barred. Ten, twenty, a hundred, thousands, millions more people who, even if they had the courage to ask for a lawyer’s help, would face years of exile before they could apply for a visa that might take twelve to fifteen years to materialize. She was a drop in the ocean, the luckiest of all lucky circumstances. A swerve here, a deviation there, five years older, a mistake made, and she’d be Nati’s daughter.

  “The lawyer just want to take your money. He no help.” There were tears in Nati’s eyes. “He make everything worse.”

  Ana took a deep breath. “I’ll be careful, Nati. I promise.”

  “Please, Ana. Please be careful.”

  Ana shook her head. “This lawyer is the very best. And I will be very careful. You don’t need to worry about me.”

  “I will, though,” Nati said in Spanish. “I will worry about you all the time. And I will pray for you. I won’t stop praying until you are a citizen.”

  Since her mother’s death, no one had promised to pray for her. She didn’t exactly believe in God—and, if she did, he wouldn’t be much like her mother’s version—but she was still touched that Nati would put in a good word for her. She reached for Nati’s hand, clasped it in hers. “Thank you.”

  “We need you here,” Nati said.

  She surprised herself by attacking Ethan in the bedroom, grabbing handfuls of his hair and tearing at his clothes, her breath coming in gasps and moans. She kissed him everywhere she could reach, ear, throat, jaw—licking, sucking, biting at his mouth, sliding into the V made by his open top button. She fumbled with his shirt buttons, and he helped her, because she was clumsy in her desperation.

  She pulled him down, demanding, “Kiss me,” grabbing his hands and urging them onto her breasts, biting his lips and tongue, obeying a violent fever in herself that had come from nowhere as they’d stepped into the bedroom. She pulled her knees up, and her hips lifted to him, pressing against his hot, substantial hardness. He rolled away, dived for the night-table drawer, as clumsy unwrapping and unrolling the condom as she’d been a moment before with his clothes, and then he was in her, and she was demanding again, “Harder. You aren’t hurting me. I promise. I won’t let you hurt me.”

  She was so wet she could feel it on her inner thighs and hear it as he thrust into her again and again, and then—

  Her mood shifted suddenly as desperation gave way to tenderness, the satisfaction of possessing him and being able to wrap herself, her whole, greedy self, around him. She relaxed under him and smiled, then reached up and put both her arms around his neck and they began moving against each other slowly
, slowly. He drew out the strokes and watched her face, his eyes locked on hers. She didn’t think he’d ever watched her like that, as if he were reading her, as if he were memorizing her, as if he were trying to understand from the most minute details of her expression exactly what was going on in her head.

  Or her heart, really. Her heart full, suddenly, of something heavy, molten, something whose heat matched the heat where his body met hers. Matched the heat of the gaze he was holding with her, igniting the heat there, firing the shared gaze and the points of contact on their bodies like a glassblower’s furnace, until she lost track of where she ended and he began. She dissolved, lost her edges, and she tried to grab him and pull him down, but he resisted. “I want to watch your face,” he said, and she felt the words like a line of stray wildfire exploding into a new conflagration.

  Time slowed down, then, and they made love that way for a long while, the heat building and rising and spiraling. A look of concentration came over his face, ratcheting her desire suddenly upward, and she felt a flush rise from her chest to her face, saw it echoed on his face, the matching surprise in his eyes, and they went over together, bodies clenching and rising and meeting, holding, suspended, starstruck. She longed, wildly, as she temporarily lost track of her surroundings, except for the green of his eyes and the sense of being connected, to know that he felt it, too, the link and the understanding that they were melodic and harmonic counterpoint. He had to feel it, too.

  She wanted him to love her, because she loved him. Knew it now beyond a shadow of a doubt.

  When they were lying in the contented aftermath, he asked, “Were you angry earlier? When we were kissing?”

  Surprised, she shifted in his arms, raised herself on one elbow to look down at him. “No, not angry, exactly, but—my brother’s friend Ernie saw us coming out of the lawyer’s office together.”

  Ethan made a “hmm” sound and lowered his lips to her hair. She lay now with one arm and one leg thrown over him, her hair fanned out across his chest.

  “Ricky barged right into the middle of my class to yell at me. I made him leave, but he told me we’re going to talk about it tomorrow morning.” Which she was dreading. He’d be cooler by then, surely, but it was still an awful thing to contemplate, Ricky’s rage and bluster.

  Ethan emerged from her hair, his jaw set. “He wouldn’t hurt you, would he?”

  “No.” She didn’t sound as confident as she’d meant to.

  “Do you want me there?”

  She shook her head vehemently. “My gut says that would make things worse. I haven’t told him yet that we might get married.”

  Something in his face tightened down, his eyes narrowing enough to tell her he wasn’t pleased about that. “Will you tell him tomorrow?”

  “Yeah. God, he’s going to hate the idea so much.”

  Now he looked away, hurt. Then he sighed and turned back, his brows lowered quizzically. “What do you think he’ll do?”

  “I’m not sure,” she admitted. She rested her head in the hollow of his shoulder. Underneath her palm, she could feel his skin rising into gooseflesh. “Cold?” she asked, and she reached down and pulled the blankets over them, snuggled in closer. “I think he’ll try to persuade me not to do it. He might threaten me.” Her voice sounded small even to her own ears.

  “With what?”

  “Kicking me out?” She wrapped her arms around the width of his chest and squeezed. “Or he might try to cut me off. From the family.” Her voice shook.

  He stroked his fingers slowly through her hair. “Could he really do that?”

  “I don’t think Cara would let him. But he could cut me off from him. And maybe that doesn’t sound so bad to you, given everything I’ve told you about him—”

  “No, I know. Brothers can be jerks, but you love them anyway. James is self-indulgent and self-involved, and I have no respect for the way he conducts himself with women, but the idea of doing something that might cut me off from him is still impossible to fathom.”

  She held him as tightly as she could, loving the spice-and-sea scent of his deodorant so close to her nose, loving the sheen of sweat on his skin, loving the way he understood, the way he got inside her, loving him. “He takes such good care of us. I don’t think it even occurs to him that his life would be completely different if he hadn’t been saddled with all of us.”

  She was crying now, quietly, her tears dripping onto his chest.

  “Maybe he won’t make you choose,” Ethan said quietly.

  Her hand came up, found his cheek. She rubbed her palm over the place on his jaw where today’s stubble had formed, then traced the backs of her fingers over his mouth.

  She smiled through her tears as he began making love to her again.

  Ricky appeared inside the door of the cafeteria the moment her second class let out. His face was gray-green and unshaved, his lids sagging with fatigue. He looked old, much older than she’d ever seen him look, old enough, finally, to be someone’s father, despite his baggy jeans and navy track jacket and do-rag. Her heart swelled with love for him, and she hurled herself at him, threw her arms around him. He stayed stiff, though. She tried to hug the anger and hurt out of him, but he wouldn’t relent, and after a moment or two she let go.

  He wouldn’t look at her.

  They sat across from each other at one of the carved-up old tables. This had once been Ana’s elementary-school cafeteria, where she’d eaten peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches with her friends, but it had never been Ricky’s. Ricky’s childhood was more than a thousand miles away, on an island she wouldn’t recognize as home.

  Ricky spread his big hands out over the scarred surface of the table, and she waited for him to speak first. When he didn’t, when he just looked down at the table, she said, “Ethan asked me to marry him.”

  Now he looked. Eyes blazing. “No.”

  It was her turn to avoid his gaze. But she held her ground. “I want to marry him.”

  “Ethan? That his name?” More a growl than words.

  “Yeah. That’s his name.”

  “Are you pregnant?”

  Surprised, she looked him full in the face. “No,” she said belligerently. “You know I’m not.”

  “Then why would you marry him?”

  That caught her by surprise. Why was she marrying him? Things had started out so simple with Ethan, so primitive and elemental, his desire, her response, but now it was so complicated. Sex? Citizenship? Love? Last night, in the heat of their lovemaking, love had been the single thread connecting everything. Today, their motives were a spiderweb again.

  Ricky made a short sound of impatience. “He live in a big, fancy house? Got a lot of money?”

  She was on the brink of crying out that none of those things mattered to her, but he kept going, not giving her time to respond. “He’s paying for the fancy-pants lawyer, huh? Going to make you his lawfully wedded wife and a citizen? I wouldn’t have picked you to marry someone just to get legal.” His voice dripped with scorn.

  She knew he’d have been less angry with her if she’d admitted to being pregnant. What Cara had done was stupid. It had trapped them all here. But it hadn’t been a betrayal. Ana had chosen Ethan over her Dominican family, the life he could give her over the life that Ricky had done his best to build for them.

  “He’s a great guy.” Her voice sounded small, her words inadequate. “He’s a doctor.” As if that somehow stood in for what he meant to her, when his being a doctor signified as little to her as his big house or his money or the fact that he was paying for the lawyer.

  “Oooh, a doctor,” mocked Ricky. Only the hard set of his jaw gave away how angry he was. The rest of his body was so relaxed as to be insolent.

  “He’s a good man.” Her voice was stronger now.

  Ricky shifted in his seat. His eyes narrowed, mean. “He’s going to get bored with you.”

  She was caught off guard. “What?”

  “You’re his charity project. Those rich
doctors. Always looking for people to save. You get to be a doctor in the first place by having a savior complex. Thinks he’s God, thinks he can help everyone. You’re the latest.”

  She made a small, dismayed noise, her body jerking forward as if she were going to cut him off.

  He barreled past her voiceless objection. “It won’t last. He won’t stay interested in you. The spice wears off—and that’s what you are, spicy-spice girl, hot Latina girl, exotic dark-skinned private-stripper girl—”

  She felt as if she’d been slapped, or punched in the stomach. The breath went out of her, and she choked back acid.

  “—and then he’s done with you. He gets you a green card, he adds you to his list of good works, then he divorces you and marries one of those skinny rich bitches so he can have white babies.”

  “No!” she cried. “It’s not like that! He’s not like that.”

  “Everyone’s like that,” Ricky said tiredly. “Every white guy thinks he wants a piece of mocha ass, every black guy thinks he wants at those peachy-white tits, but you find out it’s not worth the trouble. Not half the trouble. You marry this guy, you’re going to end up like Mama. He’ll find some way to be done with you and move on. You wait and see.”

  She’d risen from her seat, and now she gave her chair a hard shove and backed away from him. “Screw you, Ricky! Screw you!” In English.

  He didn’t raise his voice or look at her. “I’m telling it like it is, hermanita. You’ll see. Before long.”

  “You’re wrong, Ricky. You’re so wrong.” She shoved the chair again, and it crashed to the floor. She turned and fled.

  “We’ll see,” he said behind her, quietly.

  She turned at the exit to look back at him. He’d put his head down on his hands. She watched for a moment, but he never moved, and she pushed through the double doors and out into the frigid November air, leaving him behind.

  Chapter 24

  She walked for a long time on the streets in her neighborhood. The kids were, for the most part, in school. Neighbors with jobs were at work or sleeping off their miserable third shifts, which left the streets in the possession of out-of-work men. It had always been somewhat this way in Hawthorne, but it had been worse in the past few months, with the recession. They were mostly older, gray creeping into their hair. They sat on their front stoops and their porches; they loitered on the sidewalks in pairs. They watched her appreciatively as she passed, hooted and whistled sometimes. The ones who knew her called out her name. The ones who knew Ricky well were more respectful; they nodded or tipped their caps as she passed.