A Touch of Persuasion

by Janice Maynard

  Gracie piped up, eyes dancing. “I’ll help, too. It’s about time we had some girly stuff going on up on this mountain.”

  Everyone laughed.

  Victor held out a hand, cradling a champagne flute as two young women passed around matching glasses to the crowd. Cammie’s was filled with orange juice.

  When everyone was served, Victor cleared his throat to quiet the rambunctious assemblage. “To Kieran…and his bride-to-be and daughter. May you always be as happy as you are today.”

  Glasses were raised and emptied. Kieran leaned down to kiss Cammie and then Olivia. “To my girls,” he said softly. “I love you both.”

  Hours later, when the clock was about to strike midnight, Kieran and Olivia stood beside their daughter’s bed. Olivia held his hand, her head on his shoulder. “You missed so much,” she said. “I’ll never be able to give that back to you.”

  He was quiet for long moments, his chest barely moving as he breathed. “We all walk our own road, Olivia. Yours and mine diverged at the worst possible time, but we won’t ever have to worry about that again. Side by side. Day by day. We’re marking a new path that will be ours alone.”

  “And you do want more children?”

  He turned to face her. “Give me a dozen,” he said, teeth flashing white in the semidarkness. “We’ve got room to grow on this mountain. God willing, there will be plenty of cousins, too.”

  She went up on tiptoe and kissed him. “I knew the first day I saw you that you were the man I wanted to marry.”

  He scooped her into his arms, carrying her to the adjoining bedroom where half a dozen candles were lit. As he laid her on the bed, coming down beside her, he grimaced. “If I had handled things better back then, we wouldn’t have wasted so much time.”

  She caressed his face, cupping his cheeks, rubbing her thumbs across his bottom lip. “I tried to convince myself that what we had was a fling, a college romance. But deep in my heart, I’ve always known you were the one. Which made it pretty difficult to go out with other guys.”

  “I don’t want to hear about the other guys,” he muttered. “Not now, anyway.” He slid a hand along her thigh from her ankle to the place that readied itself for him with damp heat.

  She stopped him, trapping his fingers by placing hers on top. “There were none,” she said simply. “Only you.”

  Silence throbbed. His eyes widened, and something that was a combination of astonishment, relief, joy and humble gratitude flashed in their depths. “You’re mine, Olivia. I’m yours.”

  As Kieran positioned himself for a thrust that would take him home, he heard a faint voice…words that faded as the one who spoke them moved into another realm. I love you, my son. Be happy....

  Unexpected tears stung the backs of his eyes as he filled Olivia’s tight passage with a surge of longing and the length of his passion.

  He was home…and he was happy.

  * * * * *

  A Lover’s Touch

  Brenda Jackson

  Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  One

  Kendra Redding inhaled a deep, fortifying breath as she took off jogging down the sandy beach. She kept her gaze focused in front of her as she ran along the shoreline. Already the awakening sun was peeking through the sky. It would be a beautiful June day; a hot one, but beautiful nonetheless.

  She loved this time of the morning, when most of the residents of the small beach community where she lived were still sleeping. This was her quiet time. She would be busy soon enough when she opened her optometry office in a few hours. But now, the only sound she heard, other than the seagulls flying overhead, was the steady wash of surf over sand.

  As she continued her run, Kendra thought about her father. She regretted he had lived only a few months after she’d joined him at the office last year, before a heart attack had claimed his life. Her mother had died when Kendra was four, and she and her father had been extremely close.

  As Kendra’s sneakered feet continued to pound into the sand, she suddenly felt a tingling sensation in her midsection and the tips of her breasts became sensitive against her midriff top. She slowed the pace of her jog while scanning the deserted stretch of beach, seeking out anything that would confirm her suspicion…or rather, her body’s pronouncement. But she saw no one.

  Thinking she must have imagined things, she took a deep breath and increased the pace of her jog. Moments later, she came to a complete halt. Taking another deep breath, she glanced around. This time, she knew her body was not playing games with her. The tingling sensation that had been in her midsection earlier was now a deep throb that had moved lower, settling right smack between her legs, and her breasts were more sensitive than before.

  Squinting, she could barely make out the jogger who loomed on the horizon, and although he was still some distance away, she could tell the human form was that of a man. He was jogging at a brisk pace, seemingly as one with the elements surrounding him.

  She inhaled sharply when her body reacted once again. There was only one man who had the ability to bring her body to such an aroused state, even from a distance and even after a seven-year absence. He was the man she had fallen in love with at sixteen; the man she had given her virginity to at seventeen; the man her body had craved ever since. And although she didn’t want to, she could feel his touch as though it had been just yesterday when his strong hands had stroked her body into a feverish pitch and introduced her to passion of the most profound kind.

  Swallowing deeply, she forced the memories away and accepted that her body’s reaction to the person jogging toward her could mean only one thing.

  Slate Landis was back in town.

  Two

  Slate saw the feminine figure slowly jogging toward him and recognized her immediately. It was about time their paths crossed, and what better place than the sandy shores of Fernandina Beach, Florida, where they had first declared their love seven years ago?

  He’d tried to keep his return to town quiet since arriving two nights ago. He had been busy unpacking and getting updates on everything and everyone from Marcie Wilkins, an old friend of his deceased grandmother’s. He had known that there was a good chance he would run into Kendra this morning. In fact, he’d been counting on it. He had discovered over the years that there were some things in life that a man could not get out of his system, and the woman he had once loved to distraction was one of them.

  His mind suddenly went back to the first day he had ever laid eyes on her. He had been twenty, a junior in college, and she had been sixteen. That summer he had come to live with Ms. Marcie, an old family friend, the first year after his parents’ death in an auto accident. After getting a job as a lifeguard, he had gone to the optometrist’s office in town to undergo the required eye exam. Kendra had been working there, assisting her father, and from the first moment he saw her, he had been drawn to her like a moth to a flame.

  Sighing deeply, he tried to compose himself when he finally came to a stop directly in front of her. “Kendra.” He greeted her in a low, husky voice that he almost didn’t recognize as his own.

  “Slate,” she said breathlessly, whether from the run or from startled surprise he wasn’t sure. She met his intense gaze with one of her own. “You said you’d never come back. Why are you here?”

  Her question made his thoughts shift to that ill-fated day seven years ago when he had left town. At the time, she had been
a youthful-looking eighteen-year-old. Now she was a gorgeous woman of twenty-five and was everything male fantasies were made of.

  His gaze did a slow burn down the length of her body. Her skimpy top and shorts made him very much aware of her bare thighs, long legs, curvy hips and generous cleavage. His eyes then moved upward and zeroed in on her nut-brown face, which was more beautiful than ever. He knew her lips tasted just as good as they looked—full, ripe and with a flavor that was distinctively hers.

  Heat pooled low in his belly, and his blood grew hot and heavy in his veins when he remembered the number of times his tongue had stroked those lips.

  “Slate?”

  He realized he hadn’t answered her question, and a part of him suddenly became obsessed with having the woman he’d walked away from back in his life. Feeling he had nothing to lose and everything to gain, he decided to show her rather than tell her why he had returned.

  Three

  Kendra didn’t know what had happened. One moment she was staring at Slate, and the next moment she was wrapped firmly in his arms with his mouth devouring hers.

  Her body stiffened, then relaxed as any thought of resisting him was destroyed the second his tongue entered her mouth, capturing hers and evoking memories she’d tried to suppress over the years.

  His mouth was hot and sweet to the taste. Even the light musky scent of his sweat was intoxicating. Waves of desire uncoiled inside of her as he stroked her tongue, making every emotion she had skate around in her brain. He’d always had this sort of effect on her, even when she’d been too young to understand what sexual chemistry was about.

  The sudden feel of his tongue on hers made all-consuming heat ignite between her legs, and she heard herself moaning deep in the back of her throat. He wrapped his fingers in her hair to hold her mouth in place, as if she could possibly think of going anywhere. Although logic ruled that indulging in this kind of kiss with him was crazy, she intended to get her fill now and criticize her foolishness later.

  When the distant sound of the horn from a shrimp boat invaded, he slowly lifted his mouth from hers. It was then that she noticed that at some point she had grabbed hold of his shoulders to keep from falling when her knees had weakened.

  She slowly lowered her arms to her side and felt him untangle his fingers from her hair. She realized that any attempt to pretend she hadn’t been affected by his kiss would be futile, because she had been, and had a feeling he knew it. The one thing they had never been able to hide from each other was desire. When it came to arousing her, he had the process down pat.

  “Kendra,” he murmured, in a low, sexy drawl, recapturing her attention.

  She drew in a steady breath as heat poured through her. He was well over six feet tall, had a nice build and was the color of semisweet chocolate. At twenty-nine, he had aged handsomely and was still the kind of man who women, both young and old, noticed at first glance.

  A deep frown came to her face when she remembered how easily he had walked away seven years ago and not looked back, and the pain she had suffered. “Why, Slate? Why did you come back after all this time?”

  He reached out and stroked his thumb across her bottom lip, a lip still tingling from their kiss. She hoped he didn’t detect the hot, fiery desire that was running rampant inside of her; however, judging by the dark, hot look in his eyes, he did.

  “I’d hope after that kiss the reason I’m back would be obvious, Kendra,” he said huskily in a deep voice that shook her to the core. “I came back for you.”

  Four

  Slate focused his attention on Kendra and watched how her body stiffened with his words. Marcie Wilkins had been right. Gaining Kendra’s forgiveness for leaving the way he had seven years ago would not be easy.

  “Aren’t you going to say anything, Kendra?”

  She finally met his gaze, and when she did, he winced from the pain he saw in her features.

  “You came back for me? Do you think you can jog back into my life after seven years and say that?” she asked heatedly. “It’s been seven years, Slate. Seven years without a call or a letter. Did you not think I had gotten on with my life?”

  He sighed as he continued to meet her gaze. “No, Kendra, I didn’t think that.”

  “Well, what did you think?” she snapped.

  Now was not the time to tell her that he had thought, hoped and prayed that, after finally coming to terms with that fateful day that had nearly destroyed him, the two of them could have a future together. He had walked away from her and everyone else because he believed that he was to blame for Susan Conrad’s drowning. He’d felt there was something he could have done differently to save the six-year-old who had wandered too far out into the ocean.

  Although he and Kendra had been on the beach that day, he hadn’t been on duty as a lifeguard when he’d heard Susan’s mother’s screams. Knowing he was more experienced and could swim a lot faster than the lifeguard who was on duty, he had taken off, charging into the ocean, swimming faster than he’d ever swam before in his life in an attempt to save the little girl. But the undercurrent had been too strong, and by the time he’d reached her it had been too late.

  Although everyone had told him he’d done all that he could—including nearly losing his own life in the process—he had never been able to forget the look on that little girl’s face as she clung to the hope that he would save her. And the one thing that he had not been able to let go of was the guilt that he had let her down.

  It had taken years of soul-searching, counseling and therapy to put the past behind him and to finally let go. But over the past year he’d come to realize that although he had been able to purge the guilt of Susan from his soul, purging Kendra from his heart was not possible.

  So he’d made a decision to return to win her back. He knew the odds of doing so were against him. But he had a week to show her just what his heart already knew. She was his life, and there was no way he could continue to survive without her in it.

  He finally decided to answer her question as he met her gaze. “What I think is that we need to talk. We owe each other that much.”

  Five

  Once again the sound of Slate’s voice evoked heat through Kendra. She forced her gaze away from his, and it came to rest on the waistline of his jogging shorts. She quickly snatched her gaze back to his face. He was the only man she knew who could get that aroused from a kiss. But, then, it had always been that way between them. It was like a domino effect. His arousal would automatically trigger hers, and hers in turn would automatically trigger his.

  “We don’t owe each other anything, and there’s nothing for us to talk about,” she finally said. “You made it clear when you left that you never intended to come back.”

  Slate nodded. “Yes, I know that’s what I said, and I meant it at the time. But I had to come back to ask your forgiveness over the way I left.”

  Kendra sighed. She had always understood his need to leave the beach; his need to be alone for a while to come to terms with Susan Conrad’s death. But at no time had she thought he would completely shut her out and turn his back on their love.

  But he had.

  “I can forgive you for leaving, Slate. I understood what you were going through. But I’m not sure that I can forgive you for giving me not so much as a phone call to let me know you were okay. You didn’t even contact Ms. Marcie, and the two of you were close.”

  “I was going through some rough times, Kendra,” he said softly.

  “What a shame,” she said coolly. “So was I, Slate.” She inhaled deeply, wanting that episode of her life to go back to the past where it belonged. “How long will you be in town?” she asked, needing to know how long she had to avoid him.

  Slate paused for a few seconds before answering her question. “I’ll be here a week.”

  Kendra nodded. Then he would return to New York. She’d overheard Ms. Marcie tell Mrs. Butternut at church a few months ago that he lived in Harlem and owned a very successful interne
t sales company that he operated from his home, designing websites and databases for major corporations.

  “Are you staying at the Wilkinses’ Beach Resort while you’re in town?”

  “No, for privacy I’m staying in the Wilkinses’ beach house,” Slate answered.

  Kendra met his gaze. “The beach house?”

  “Yes. You remember where it is, don’t you?”

  She swallowed deeply, not wanting to acknowledge all the memories the beach house generated. The Wilkinses’ Beach Resort and her home were right down the road from each other, and the smaller beach house sat snugly in between the two, hidden behind the sand dunes. The proximity of the Wilkinses’ Beach Resort—where Slate had lived during the summers he’d worked as a lifeguard—and her home was the reason they had become so intimate so quickly. Secret late-night meetings at the beach house had been the norm for them.

  “Of course I remember,” Kendra breathed. “That’s where we first made love.”

  Six

  “I still think we need to talk.”

  Slate’s words recaptured Kendra’s attention, and she took a calming breath. Being as detached as she could, she said, “I don’t know if that’s possible since I’m pretty busy most of the time. I’ve taken over the running of the shop now that Dad’s gone.”

  Slate nodded. “I heard about your father, Kendra, and I’m sorry. He was a good man. I really liked him.”

  “Yes, he was, and he really liked you, too,” she responded softly. That had been true. Her father had never said an unkind word about Slate, even when he knew how badly Slate had hurt her.

  “I think it’s wonderful that you’re carrying things on the way you know he would have wanted. I’m sure he was proud of you.”