Big dick self, she thought, letting her eyes drop down briefly to take in his imprint against his jeans.
“You’re a hard lady to find,” Tyson said, coming over to stand by her bedside.
Jessa briefly noted that he hadn’t even looked down at her baby in the crib. “Um, yeah ... well, I can be reached when I want to, and obviously you can find me when you want to.”
He reached down and stroked the back of her hand.
Jessa got chills as she forced herself not to free her hand from his touch.
“You been on my mind since that night in New York,” Tyson said, looking down at her. “I thought I left enough of an impression for you to call me.”
Jessa leaned back against the pillows and slyly cut her eyes up at him. “So what are you doing now, putting in your bid for the first one to get the post-pregnancy pussy?” she asked.
Tyson shook his head and laughed, his white teeth flashing against his bronzed skin. “Still sassy as hell I see.”
Lord, this man is fine.
Jessa said nothing as she continued to look up at him even as her heart beat so loud that she wondered if she would be able to hear Delaney if she cried.
“I heard on the news you had the baby and I figured this was my chance to reconnect with you and let you know I’m still interested.”
“Right now?” she joked, with a horrified expression.
Tyson held up both of his massive hands with his eyes wide. “Nooooo. No. No. No.”
Jessa laughed huskily.
He joined her in her laughter. “That’s what I like about you. You’re fun and sexy and you know how to make a man feel good. You know?”
In truth, Jessa had thought a lot about Tyson and the night they shared over the months that passed, but she knew being around him was a threat to her promise to stay celibate—and her even bigger promise not to have sex while pregnant with another man’s child.
Jessa wasn’t looking for strictly a lover, and with all the chemistry they shared—and now that she was no longer pregnant—maybe they could see if more could develop. Maybe God was sending her the man to fulfill all her wishes.
“You look beautiful,” he told her, his voice deep and low.
“Listen, once I get settled down with motherhood and get my body back together in bikini shape, maybe we can go on a couple of dates and see what happens,” she told him.
Being alone when she went into labor and all through the birth made her realize just how much she hated being alone.
“Does that mean I can have your number now?” Tyson asked teasingly.
Jessa shrugged. “We’ll see,” she said, flirting.
Delaney began to stir in her crib and Jessa climbed out of bed to check to make sure she didn’t need a diaper change. She found her daughter’s eyes open wide. They were big and bright. Jessa bent down close to her and nuzzled her cheek. “Who loves the baby? Hmm? Mama loves the baby?” she cooed softly. “Mama loves Delaney?”
She leaned up just in time to see a soft smile spread on her daughter’s face. Jessa giggled, feeling the innocent joy like that of a child again. Something she hadn’t even felt as a child after her mother left.
“Look, she’s smil—”
Jessa words faded as she looked up and saw Tyson in the opposite corner quietly talking on his cell phone. She looked back down at Delaney, who was lying quietly and sucking the side of her hand.
“Oh my God, I love you so much, Delaney,” Jessa sighed, feeling her love for her child burst in her chest. It was better than the other love she even thought she had for her own mother, Eric, or even Marc.
Deciding to fight the urge to hold Delaney and spoil her, Jessa climbed back in bed and pulled the crib close to its side.
“Okay, reschedule the meeting for the morning and make my apologies,” Tyson said in a no-nonsense business tone, before ending his call and sliding his iPhone into the inside pocket of his blazer.
Jessa let her eyes take in his swagger as he came back up to the bed on the side opposite from where she had the crib. He had just reached down to stroke soft circles onto the back of her hand when the door opened and Henry strolled in.
Jessa’s face lit into a big smile. “Hi, Henry,” she said, genuinely pleased to see her friend. He was on her list of approved guests and so no call ahead was necessary. She looked down at Delaney. “Look, it’s Uncle Henry.”
Henry eyed Tyson for a few seconds before he nodded in greeting and made his way straight to the crib. “Mornin’, morning’, Delaney,” he said in his big booming voice.
The baby smiled again.
Jessa looked on as he went to the bathroom to wash his hand and then rubbed them to warm them before he scooped her right up into his arms with ease. “I guess having all those brothers and sisters paid off,” Jessa teased, enjoying the way Henry walked back and forth around the room holding the baby.
“Jessa.”
She tore her eyes away from them to look at Tyson. “Yes?”
“Maybe I should come back,” he said.
Jessa shook her head. “No, Henry is like family. You’re fine.”
Henry looked over at Tyson. “That’s me. Henry the family friend,” he said, his voice slightly odd.
Jessa eyed him, but he was busy eyeing Tyson.
Then she turned her head to eye Tyson, but he was just as busy eyeing Henry back.
She eyed Henry. Then Tyson. Then Henry again.
Jessa bit her bottom lip.
Jessa knew men. Well. And standing before her were two men eyeing and shaping each other up like primal animals who sniffed out their first piece of tail and was ready to spar for it.
She eyed Henry again. But he had finally turned away to talk in quiet tones to the baby.
Henry isn’t interested in me. My radar is off. Maybe he’s just being overprotective like a big brother or uncle. Not every man wants me. Well ... most, but not all.
Right?
Tyson smiled as he handed her a piece of paper and a pen.
Jessa hesitated briefly as she looked up at him with soft eyes and an even softer smile before she finally took it and scribbled her cell phone and landline numbers on it.
Tyson smiled broadly like a wolf about to jump on its prey. He bent down and pressed his lips to her cheeks and then again on the corner of her mouth. “You’ll be hearing from me soon,” he whispered against her lips.
Jessa gasped a little and nodded, stepping back to watch him turn and walk out the room without even acknowledging Henry. She smiled and lightly pressed her fingers to her lips.
Chapter 14
Six weeks later
Jessa parked her new cherry red Land Rover in the parking lot of her mother’s long-term residential care facility. Darla had finished her inpatient drug and alcohol rehab a month ago and chose to move directly into a sober living environment. The halfway house of sorts served as a bridge between rehab and returning back to her normal life. It was meant to strengthen her resolve, not to relapse.
The high-end facility was costing Jessa a pretty penny, but it was worth it to her.
She climbed from the SUV and opened the rear door. “Hey, Delaney,” Jessa said, as she removed her carrier/car seat from the strapped down base. Flinging her Burberry baby bag over her shoulder, Jessa used her hip to bump the vehicle’s door closed.
Covering the carrier lightly with a blanket to shield the April winds, Jessa made her way into the renovated mansion that housed ten currently sober-living clients.
Jessa frowned at the empty check-in desk. She waited for a solid two to three minutes before simply turning and heading up the stairs to her mother’s room at the end of the hall. She knocked and opened the door.
Jessa gasped in shock as a man pulled his dick out of her mother from behind. Darla’s skirt was up around her waist and her lace panties on the floor around her feet.
“Sorry. Excuse me. Sorry,” he apologized profusely as he tried his best to shove his erection inside his jeans. Tried and
failed.
Jessa grabbed the short man by the back of his balding head and guided him out the bedroom to securely close the door behind him while he still apologized profusely. “I hope by the time I turn, your ass is still not tooted in the air, Mama,” Jessa snapped, bending down to remove the blanket from the carrier.
Delaney was fast asleep.
“I have needs like any other woman, Jessa,” Darla cooed.
Jessa sniffed. The smell of their sex hung in the air. Oh. Hell. No. She looked over her shoulder. Her mother was in her adjoining bathroom with the water running. Jessa opened the bedroom door and the window. Wide.
“He was actually about to get me all finished before you interrupted,” Darla called from the bathroom.
“I came to see my mother, but that was way too much for my eyes,” Jessa drawled, grabbing one of her mother’s perfume bottles to lightly spritz the air.
She paused and pressed the bottle to her nose. The scent made her feel nostalgic. This was the perfume her mother wore when she was child. She looked at the bottle: Chanel No. 5. Of course.
She allowed herself one last long sniff before setting it back on her dresser where everything was neatly arranged. The room was neat and orderly, just like her mother had always kept their homes when she lived with her.
Stopping herself from sitting on the bed, and picking up any “drippings,” Jessa set Delaney’s carrier on the small sofa in the corner as she watched her mother stroll out of the bathroom. She smiled.
Darla had lost nearly twenty pounds, and the casual but stylish clothes Jessa brought for her fit her newly svelte frame. Gone was the craziness she saw in the early days of her recovery; she fought the addiction, and the psych medicines were able to work.
In that moment, as it did now and in the weeks since Delaney’s birth, Jessa thought about the fact that her child had crazy running in the family on both sides. She could only pray God watched over her daughter and did not let her be afflicted by mental disease.
“Oooh, let me see my grandbaby,” Darla said as soon as she sat down on the sofa. “I can’t believe you finally brought her here for me to see.”
Jessa swallowed down her fears as she removed the baby from the carrier and handed her over to her mother.
Darla looked surprised. “You’re actually letting me hold her? Wow, I was just testing you,” she said slyly.
Jessa said nothing as she handed her mother a thin baby blanket from her Burberry baby bag.
Sober and mentally clear, Darla was smart, quick-witted, flirtatious, and funny. Jessa genuinely liked her, and it felt good to have family.
“Oooh, she looks just like us,” Darla said, removing Delaney’s shoes to kiss the bottom of her feet.
Delaney smiled.
“And you’re doing so good with her.” Darla looked up at Jessa. “I’m proud of you.”
Jessa turned to keep her mother from seeing how much her praise pleased her. She was nervous about going all in with loving her mother. Her fear of love and being hurt remained.
Her cell phone rang from the side pocket of the baby bag. Jessa kept her eyes on her mother and her daughter as she moved across the room to retrieve it. “Hello.”
“Hey. You busy?”
Jessa immediately felt her insides warm at the sound of Tyson’s deep voice. “No, not really,” she said, her eyes widening as her mother held the baby precariously.
She moved back over to sit next to her mother, taking Delaney and pretending to check her diaper. “Are we still on for dinner tonight?” she asked.
“I can change her diaper. You not fooling anyone. I invented slick, baby girl,” Darla said dryly, moving across the room to light a cigarette.
“Who’s that?” Tyson asked.
“No one,” Jessa said, as Delaney belched and threw up a bit onto Jessa’s lightweight linen jacket.
Darla snorted in derision.
“You sound busy. I’ll pick you up around seven,” he said.
Jessa ended the call. “Mama, hand me a bib please,” she requested, holding her hand out.
She looked up when after a few moments her hand remained empty. Darla was sitting on the bed swinging her crossed leg and smoking her cigarette. “You sure I have sense enough to hand you a bib?” she snapped.
Jessa placed Delaney on her shoulder and walked across the room to grab the cigarette from her mother’s hand. “You have sense enough than to smoke around a baby.”
Jessa tossed it out the window before she grabbed the bib herself. “What’s wrong with you?” she snapped as she cleaned the baby’s chin.
“How long you think you gone keep me hidden here?” Darla snapped back.
Jessa looked down at her mother. “This isn’t prison, Mama. You can leave when you want.”
Darla nodded. “And go where. Back to hiding in Harlem?”
Jessa walked back across the room and put Delaney in her carrier. “Um, I didn’t know a damn thing about you being in Harlem all these years and you know that.”
Darla moved to sit on the window bench and open the window higher before she lit another cigarette, exhaling the fumes outside. “What I do know is my daughter is ashamed of me. Won’t answer questions from the press about just where I am and how I’m doing after our big reunion. Rather hire a live-in nanny than ask me to help her. You’re scared to have the baby around me, like I’m gonna literally eat her for lunch or throw her out the window.”
Jessa shifted her eyes from her mother, afraid she would see just how true her words were.
Darla laughed huskily and low in her throat. “Remember, daughter, sometimes what is not said is more telling than what is,” she advised her before turning her head to exhale a long and full-bodied stream of silver smoke out the window.
Jessa waved her hand dismissively. “I just don’t want to argue with you, so I’m not saying anything.”
“I don’t want to lose another twenty-five years with you and so I pretended not to notice,” Darla countered.
Jessa looked up and hated the tears in her mother’s beautiful eyes. “I’m sorry if I made you feel some kind of way. I am doing the best I know how to deal with all these changes in my life,” she admitted.
Darla wiped her eyes with the sides of her hands.
“You have to understand that you leaving really fucked me up, Mama,” Jessa admitted for the first time out loud. “I didn’t know then what I know now. About the bipolar disorder and Grandma keeping us apart. So I was a kid who grew up thinking her Mama didn’t love her. Because of that I don’t give out my trust to anybody that easily ... and it’s going to take time for me to get over my natural instinct to protect myself from getting hurt.”
Darla looked out the window for a long time before she looked back at Jessa. “I just don’t want you to feel about me the way I feel about my mother. She was wrong for what she did and I hate her for it. You were all I had Jessa and she took that from me.”
But you could have turned down the money and kept me.
Darla shook her head. “You don’t know my mother. She would have done anything to keep me from you. She wouldn’t stop there,” she said, as if she had read Jessa’s mind.
Jessa felt her past trying to come forward and be acknowledged, but she pushed it back down. Trust me, Mama. I know all too well.
“Next Saturday, I’m gone pick you up and you’re gonna spend the day me and Delaney and, Mama, just wait until you see my house.”
Darla cried even harder as she put out her cigarette and held her hands out for the baby with a plea in her eyes.
Jessa lifted Delaney from the carrier and placed her in her mother’s arms.
Jessa glanced at her diamond watch before she turned this way and that in the full-length mirror of her dressing room. 6:45 P.M.
Tyson was always punctual and she knew she had exactly fifteen minutes or less to finish getting ready for that date. He might be early but never late.
She checked herself one last time. She had lost the ma
jority of her baby weight, but another ten pounds would get her back to a slimmer version of her hourglass shape. Thankfully, her Spanx snatched it all together and the silk wrap dress was pressed against her curves like an artist had poured the dress on her body like paint.
“Pow!” Jessa teased her reflection, finger-combing the deep waves of her jet-black hair and reapplying another layer of peach-colored lip gloss that made her lips completely suckable.
About two weeks after she left the hospital, Tyson had become a regular fixture in her life. Phone calls. Surprise visits. Gifts. Flowers. Intimate and romantic dinners. The works. The brother was coming on strong, a full-court press, and Jessa was enjoying every minute of his attention and their chemistry.
She even explained her presence in the church and her desire to remain celibate until she got married. He respected that—but let it be known that he was the man made for a sexy backslide on a promise to the Lord.
Jessa was remembering a heated kiss they shared against the fridge when the ringing of her cell phone interrupted the sexy memory. Grabbing it from the console, she answered the call, “Hello?”
“The doctor gave you the okay, so let that man slide that big ole dick on home, sugar,” Keegan teased.
“No, thank you, Keegan. We’re good.” Jessa slid her feet into stilettos.
“How long you think that big sexy man is going to walk around with the dry dick syndrome?” she balked. “At least suck it.”
Jessa frowned. “No, the hell I will not.”
“I’d suck it ... and swallow it.”
“I bet you would,” Jessa drawled.
“Trust me, darling, that ex-husband of mine was out in the streets because he just ain’t no damn good. It wasn’t for lack of good pussy.”
“The more we’re friends, the worse your mouth gets,” Jessa complained.
“Had to make sure you could take the real me before I turned her loose.”
Ding-dong.
“That’s Tyson. I wanna kiss Delaney before I have a mommy date night.”
Mistress, Inc. Page 19