Enigma of the Heart
Trisha “Taffy” Thibodeaux is shocked as she comes face to face with her one-night stand. The one-night stand that left her aching after a night filled with passion. But Jean-Michel Batiste is now the contractor on the house she is renovating for her deceased parents. His sexy bedroom eyes, and a cream-your-panties French accent takes her breath away.
They relive that erotically filled night together, and Taffy begins to feel something that she doesn’t believe is possible. Jean-Michel is determined to make her believe it can, awakening her body with sensual exploration and intense passion.
But even as she tries to deny what she feels for Jean-Michel, her life is endangered by someone she least expects. Danger creeps into her life and tries to overtake her. But so does love. Taffy has to put her past behind her in order to accept all that Jean-Michel has to offer, and believe that her heart can love completely and with abandon.
Genre: Contemporary
Length: 49,121 words
ENIGMA OF THE HEART
Wynette Davis
EROTIC ROMANCE
Siren Publishing, Inc.
www.SirenPublishing.com
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A SIREN PUBLISHING BOOK
IMPRINT: Erotic Romance
ENIGMA OF THE HEART
Copyright © 2015 by Wynette Davis
E-book ISBN: 978-1-63259-456-3
First E-book Publication: June 2015
Cover design by Harris Channing
All art and logo copyright © 2015 by Siren Publishing, Inc.
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED: This literary work may not be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, including electronic or photographic reproduction, in whole or in part, without express written permission.
All characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any resemblance to actual persons living or dead is strictly coincidental.
PUBLISHER
Siren Publishing, Inc.
www.SirenPublishing.com
Letter to Readers
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DEDICATION
While the small town of Mandeville, South Carolina that is mentioned in this book is fictional, I dedicate this book to all the small southern towns that inspire love, passion, and romance in us all.
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
About the Author
ENIGMA OF THE HEART
WYNETTE DAVIS
Copyright © 2015
Chapter 1
Her vagina hurt. It wasn’t the best way to wake up. But realization hit her, and her vagina did hurt. Not a painful, something strange had happened to it hurt, but that dull ache that came from a lot of sex. A lot of very good sex. But as she lay in bed motionless, the realization that it couldn’t be from sex slowly seeped into her brain, because she couldn’t remember having sex. If she had, she would like to remember something that made her vagina ache. It only seemed fair.
Taffy slowly opened her eyes. At first, she was unfamiliar with her surroundings. It was definitely not her apartment. The subdued sunlight fought to enter the darkness of the room, but she could see an old dresser, an armoire standing at the foot of the bed, and the hardwood flooring in the room. It was shocking at first, until she began to remember bits and pieces about where she was. She wasn’t in Los Angeles. She had moved to Mandeville, South Carolina. She vaguely remembered her best friend, Nina, picking her up at the hotel she was staying in. She could kind of remember the club they had gone to in Charleston, and dancing with… That was it. Her mind closed down in a haze of post alcohol-induced stupor.
She was in South Carolina. Charleston. She’d moved to Mandeville to be exact. So, at least she remembered that part. Locality was important. Then she remembered dancing with some man. No, she hadn’t danced with him. She remembered grinding on him. Yes, it was slowly coming back to her. She and Nina had gone out to celebrate her belated twenty-ninth birthday. Nina had introduced her to a few of her childhood friends. Dancing. She remembered dancing with some man, again. Her eyes widened, as she remembered kissing the man in some dark corner of the club. A very attractive man with dark, hazel eyes, and kissable lips. And she had kissed him. A lot. It was then that she heard the soft snoring of the person lying beside her.
“Shit,” she said softly.
She looked under the sheet she held in front of her. Yep. She was as naked as a jaybird. She lifted the covers off of her apparent partner. Yep. Nice sculpted ass, muscular build. And the slight ache between her thighs confirmed the fact that she had definitely fucked him. Well.
Her head ached. And her pussy ached. And she couldn’t remember who mister-man was, or what he looked like since his head was turned away from her, except for the fact that he had a very nice ass, and that he was a white man. Now, she was really worried. She had never dated outside of her race before. Not that she hadn’t wanted to. It just never happened.
But even as she came to realize the fact that the gorgeous man lying beside her was white, she also had to remind herself that she was biracial. Her father was white. She had the nickname of Taffy for a reason. Her light coffee complexion, and curly dark blond hair were in stark contrast to her full lips and facial features. Society pushed her to identify with one race, so she chose black. Mainly because many of her white relatives had disavowed her black mother and her. But th
en again, so had her black relatives. But between the two, it had basically been a coin toss.
She slowly and as quietly as possible got out of the bed, thanking God that she hadn’t decided to stop her birth control even though she hadn’t been sexually active in over a year. Scratch that, she thought. The days since the last incident were back to zero.
She started to gather her clothes from the floor. They were scattered around the room, as if she had been in a hurry to get rid of them. She couldn’t find her bra. Tiptoeing over to the other side of the bed, she found it on the end table next to him. It was then that she saw who her bedmate had been. And she had to commend herself on picking someone so fucking gorgeous.
His dark hair was somewhat long or at least to his collarbone. He had full lips, and that scruffy beard that only lent to his sexiness. But she didn’t want to study his appearance. She wanted to retrieve her bra and get the hell out of wherever the hell she was.
She quickly got dressed, as she began her search to find the front door. She pulled her top over her head, as she descended stairs that led to who the fuck knew where?
She found the front door, thankful there was no alarm system to alert Mr. Wonder-Dick upstairs that she was leaving. Once outside, she called for a taxi, waiting around the corner for it to arrive. “What the fuck?” she said to herself, leaning against a low wall.
She wasn’t in college. She wasn’t some woman that liked to have indiscriminate sex. She wasn’t the type to have a hook-up. It had been one of the reasons why it had been so long since she had been with anyone. She wasn’t the type to want a lone dick when needed. She’d always wanted a relationship. She wanted the whole nine yards. A house in the suburbs, two point three kids, PTA meetings, soccer games, and maybe one of those really tacky mini-vans with wood on the side. Love. She wanted love. She was not the clubbing-on-the-weekends-and-ending-up-with-a-strange-man-in-her-bed-every-night kind of woman. But here she was.
She had to leave. She had a strange feeling that if he woke, she would be subjected to some kind of barbarian claim he had on her. The soreness between her legs had to be for a reason. From the size of him, he looked to be the type of man that sported the largest dick in stock. She must have been past the point of her normal drunkenness if she had been willing to take a Kong dick. Or it could have been that she’d thrown caution to the wind, and had fucked him like her life had depended on it. It was a possibility.
She took her cell from her purse and called Nina. Nina’s groggy voice actually answered, which at that time in the morning was as surprising as the man she’d found herself in bed with. “What?” Nina’s sleep-induced voice asked.
“Nina, wake up,” she said, trying to speak around the giant frog in her throat.
“Why?”
“Nina, I fucked up.”
“Fucked up how? Like fucked up come get me out with bail money? Or fucked up in you’re married?”
“Fucked up like I woke up in bed with some strange man and my pussy hurts.”
“Ooh, hoo! Girl, you didn’t fuck up. You got fucked!”
Taffy glanced up to see the taxi pull up in front of her. She hurriedly got inside and gave the driver the address of the hotel she was staying at. “Yeah, that, too. What the hell did I do last night?”
“Why in the hell are you asking me? I’m just as hungover as you are. That was a hell of a birthday, huh?” Nina said, laughing before falling into a fit of coughs.
“I don’t know who he is,” Taffy said. “I can barely remember anything about last night.”
“Ooh, girl, we had some fun,” Nina said. “You, especially. The last time I saw you, you were… No. No, that was me. I remember you grinding on someone. I can’t remember a face, though. Sorry.”
“I’m a slut.” The driver looked back at her with a smile. “Eyes on the road!” she said to him. “From my aching vagina, his name is Mr. I’ve-Got-A-Big-Dick. But maybe we can just call him Dicky for short?”
“Just come to my place and we’ll talk things out,” Nina said to her. “I can’t continue this conversation without caffeine.”
Taffy told the taxi driver the new address, continuing her conversation with Nina. “I don’t do this, Nina. I don’t sleep with men I don’t know. I don’t end up so drunk that I can’t remember shit. Why didn’t you stop me?”
“I tried,” Nina said defensively. “You told me that you were a grown-ass woman, which I agreed with, and to leave you the fuck alone. That’s exactly what you said. You said to leave you the fuck alone, and so I did. And so, there you go. You had Mr. Big Dick.”
“Holy shit, Nina,” Taffy whined. “You know not to listen to my mouth when I drink tequila. I’ll see you in a bit. I’m on my way.”
“I’ll try to make some coffee, but no promises.” Nina hung up. Taffy saw the smile on the driver’s face. Now everyone would know why her vagina hurt.
None of it mattered. She’d turned twenty-nine, and by the lack of her memory about the night, it had been a fantastic birthday. The only downside had been the sex she’d had with a strange man. She couldn’t remember anything about him, or the apparent phenomenal sex that had her vagina aching. That, she wished she could remember. But she put it all behind her. That night. Her birthday. She had more important things to do. The reason she had come to Mandeville in the first place.
* * * *
A week later, Taffy and Nina were standing in front of a very large house. “Well, this is the biggest clusterfuck of wrong I’ve ever seen,” said Nina, with her hands planted on her round hips.
Taffy frowned at her, but looked back at the large house they were standing in front of. It was in bad shape. It was an intimidating home, but the fact remained that it was in really bad shape. But Taffy was determined to restore it to its previous beauty.
The home was a classic South Carolina style with front porches on the first and second stories. The exterior paint might have originally been a yellow or cream in color, but what remained of it was gray. Wide floor-to-ceiling windows were on the first floor, the kind that could be opened to let a breeze stream through the house, with wrought iron balconies lending to a romantic feel. It was how homes were made before the invention of air conditioning. She could see the same windows upstairs, and imagined them open throughout the house on a spring day, as the breeze blew through.
It had been her great-grandmother Jacinda’s home before she had given it to her grandson, Taffy’s father in her will. That hadn’t sat well with the rest of the Thibodeaux family. They had been sure that the home would go to Grammy’s daughter, Lou Pearl. Lou Pearl had tried to get the house through litigation. She had contested the will. The house would have gone to her if she had treated her mother with some kind of love and respect. But when you have your mother committed it was a sure thing that you would be cut out of the will.
Taffy’s mother had met her father when she was only sixteen. She would tell Taffy that she met him at sixteen, kissed him at seventeen, fell in love with him at eighteen, and married him at nineteen. But her father always told her that it was love at first sight. Her parents had died over two years before when their store was robbed at gunpoint. She never had any siblings. It had always been just the three of them. It hadn’t been what her parents had wanted. They wanted more children. They wanted their families, but neither was meant to be.
Her mother, Wilma Rischarde had done the unthinkable and had fallen in love with a Thibodeaux. A white man. And even though it had been the eighties, they were in South Carolina, and some things were still frowned upon. But it was worse than that, she had married him. The Rischardes had enough reason to hate the Thibodeauxs and vice versa. It was one of those feuds that had been going on for so long that neither one of the families actually knew why they hated each other to begin with. But they continued the feud out of loyalty, or maybe it was stupidity. But to marry one another had both sides disowning Wilma and Andre.
Her parents had left town to begin their lives together not caring abou
t what their families thought. There was only one person that gave them their blessing. Her father’s grandmother. Grammy. She’d given the newlyweds $50,000 to start their new lives with. And when she died a few years later, she willed her prized home to her grandson Andre.
He had been the only one that had visited her on a regular basis. Not her daughter, Lou Pearl. Not her son, Tremaine, or her youngest daughter, Eunice Mae. None of the family cared about her except for Andre. He loved his Grammy and she loved him. It made sense that he would be given her prized house. Because of that, the relationship with the family suffered.
Her mother had always wanted to have a better relationship with her family, also. It had eaten away at her heart to know that her daughter would never know her family, her grandmother, aunts, cousins, and such. It was another reason why Taffy was in Mandeville. She wanted to know the families that her parents had reluctantly given up.
“It’s not that bad,” she said to Nina.
Nina looked at her incredulously. “You’re lucky you’re pretty, cuz you’re as blind as a bat.”
They walked among the weeds in the small front yard, and around the perimeter of the house. She was sure they were drawing the attention of the neighbors. They were two black women in a predominantly white neighborhood in a small southern town in South Carolina. Of course they were drawing attention. They were trying to wait for the contractor to show up before they went inside, but Taffy was becoming impatient.
“Okay, fuck it,” Taffy said to Nina. “He can just find us inside.”
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