Spice

by Seressia Glass

  He stared out the window, not seeing the city outside. “More than anything else, I know she has a huge heart. I know her capacity to care, and receiving her compassion was the sweetest experience of my life.”

  “Sounds like you love her.”

  “I do.” Without thought, he moved to the closet, grabbed his suitcase, and began stuffing his things into it.

  “Going somewhere?” Simon asked, his smile all too smug.

  “Don’t you dare try to take credit for this.”

  “For what?”

  “I’m going to go get my woman.”

  He caught the first flight back that he could get. Part of him wanted to immediately head to Nadia’s place, to pound on her door and demand that she see him. The slightly more rational part of him said he should at least take a shower before trying to convince her to take another chance with him.

  The aroma of something baking filled his hallway. The scent immediately reminded him of Nadia, of sugar and spice and how she made everything nice. Need pulled at him. Somehow he’d find a way to convince her that he was more than an addiction, that what they had could be better than good.

  Stepping over his threshold he stopped short, blinking in disbelief. The smell of freshly baked sticky buns hit him square in the face. Someone was baking sticky buns in his kitchen? No, not someone.

  “Nadia?”

  She stepped into view, uncertainty bright in her eyes and a tentative smile on her lips. “Hi.”

  “You’re here. In my house.”

  The smile faltered. “I wanted to talk to you. And I wanted to make you some sticky buns since you hadn’t had any in a while.” She wiped her hands on the towel she’d thrown over one shoulder. “I’m beginning to think this wasn’t one of my better ideas, so I’ll just head out as soon as I— Oof!”

  He clutched her to him, burying his face into the crook of her neck, breathing in the scent of honey and vanilla and cinnamon that always seemed to cling to her. “Nadia. Nadia, baby, I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”

  She clung to him just as fiercely, hot tears splashing on his neck. “I’m sorry too, Kaname.”

  It took several tries before he could loosen his grip. “I can’t believe you’re here. I wasn’t scheduled to come back until tomorrow.”

  She scrubbed at her eyes. “You were on a trip?”

  “I went to visit my parents, and I told them all about you. I also went to Los Angeles, to finish up my consulting work and sketch out the book series I told you about. I’ve also heard from a university that wants to expand their online coursework, and they want me to manage the program. I’d be able to work out of my home office. I told them I’d have to discuss it with my family. Then I had a nice heart-to-heart with the department head at Herscher.”

  “You’re leaving?” she asked, dismay clear in her voice. “But your work at Herscher—”

  “Isn’t as important as you are,” he said, cutting her off. “I’ll survive without tenure if it comes to that, but I don’t think it will. They need me more than I need them, and I let them know that you’re going with me to every faculty-plus-one event they make me attend and I don’t give a damn who has a problem with it.”

  “But Kaname . . .”

  “I don’t want to live without you, Nadia,” he insisted, desperate to make her understand. “That night was a mistake from start to finish, because I handled it wrong. You tried to tell me, and I refused to listen. Honestly, I thought everyone would see you the way I see you—see the beautiful, successful woman that I fell in love with.”

  Nadia heard the words. He said them so easily, she couldn’t believe it. Didn’t dare believe it.

  “I’m prepared to fight for you, Nadia Spiceland,” he declared. “To do whatever it takes to convince you that I love you and want to be with you. To prove that what we have is not addiction, not obsession, but something precious and real and right.”

  Hope threatened to beat its way out of her chest, but she couldn’t let it. Not yet. Not until he knew everything. She took his hand, pressed a kiss to his knuckles. “Kaname, I need to talk to you about what happened with me and Gary. Before anything else, you need to know what happened to me.”

  “You don’t have to tell me anything you don’t want to.”

  “I may not want to tell you, but I need to. I don’t want anything else between us, okay?”

  “Okay.”

  She guided him over the couch with its beautiful view of the bay. “I told you I wasn’t a good person, before. I’m trying to be now, though. Some days are just harder than others.” She looked away. “But you deserve to know everything that happened, everything I can remember. I don’t want whatever you feel for me to be built on half-truths. It wouldn’t be fair to you.”

  “All right, Nadia.” He took her hand again. “You tell me what you want, how you want. I’m listening.”

  “I was young and stupid and naïve,” she began. “I also connived and schemed and manipulated. No one could tell me anything, not even Gary, my manager. He was the one who got me hooked.”

  “Your manager got you addicted to drugs?”

  She nodded. “The drugs Gary gave me only made it easier to be that person because the pills numbed everything else, even my judgment. They also made me more . . . susceptible to him. I did things for him, because of him that I never want to think about again. I was under his spell, a spell he deliberately wove. I thought I loved him. Instead it was an obsession, another addiction, because he was older and worldly and exciting and I needed the feeling I got from being with him. I trusted him, and because of that I gave him control of everything. He abused that trust. He abused me.”

  “God, Nadia.” His hand tightened on hers.

  “It was mostly mental, not physical. Not that it made a difference,” she continued. “I never told anyone, not even my therapist. Siobhan didn’t learn the truth until about two years ago. I dealt with it by taking more drugs to numb the pain of it, hoping to fill the hole that I didn’t realize being with him had created inside me. Then one day I looked into the mirror, didn’t like what I saw—didn’t recognize who I saw—and I said enough.”

  “Good for you.”

  “It was the best day and the worst day. I got up the nerve to tell him it was over, that he was fired from my business, my life, my bed. He didn’t take it very well. He said I wasn’t going to be free of him that easily, then he drove us into a tree.”

  She heard his sharp intake of breath, felt the tightening of his fingers on hers. She couldn’t look at him though. She didn’t want to see his pity or his disgust. Or his regret that he’d given her words he wished he could take back.

  Finally, he spoke. “Why did you never tell anyone the truth? You could have saved yourself a lot of heartache over the speculation.”

  “What would have been the point?” She shrugged, then sighed. “He was dead, I wasn’t. On top of that, being in the hospital all that time started my detox. I knew it wasn’t my fault, but it felt like it. It didn’t matter what everybody else thought of me then because it couldn’t have been worse than what I thought of myself.”

  She sat back, drained. “I got a second chance I felt I didn’t deserve. Eventually life moved on, I got clean, and left LA to make sure I stayed that way. Another scandal happened as they usually do and people forgot about me. I was able to heal inside and out, and I finally got to the point where I was ready to try again, try being intimate again, and you were kind enough to offer to help.”

  She smiled at him, then sobered. “I thought if I could keep my emotions out of it, just keep it sexual and focused on the book, I would be able to handle it and not lose myself. I didn’t count on you being different, so unlike any man I’d met before. I didn’t count on feeling so safe and cared for so quickly. I wanted to tell you what had really happened with Gary so that you’d understand how important what we
had was to me. You kept telling me how you saw me, how you thought of me, and I wanted so badly to be that person for you, because of you. A person who wasn’t used, who wasn’t treated like an object to exploit.”

  “Until the party.” A tremble rolled through his voice as self-disgust crested his features. “Until I did everything you were afraid of.”

  “I know you didn’t intend it to come off that way, but that’s how I felt. Any other day, sex in a supply closet would have been hot. I would have gotten off on thumbing our noses at your uppity colleagues who wished they were having sex like that on the regular. But that day?”

  She shook her head slowly as tears pricked her eyes. “I was worried about being a deterrent to you. I was worried about how your coworkers would react when they learned about me. And I worried about why you wanted me to go with you to the party. I felt like an ornament instead of your date, a pretty trinket on display doing whatever you wanted. Some women are okay doing that, but I’m not one of them. I felt like my bad choices were coming back to haunt me. I couldn’t let that happen, Kaname. I had to do something about it.”

  “You had to dump me. I didn’t understand it then, but I do now.”

  “Do you?” she asked, hope making her voice crack.

  “Not completely, but I’m trying. I’ve been talking to your parents and to Siobhan.” He flashed a rueful smile. “Actually I endured a verbal beat down from Nicholas and had to grovel to Siobhan. She gave me some materials from Narcotics Anonymous to read up on, and I think your dads might actually tolerate me now.”

  He wrapped both hands around hers, kissing her knuckles. “I’m learning, Nadia, but I need a teacher. There’s only one person I want to fill the position.”

  She swallowed the lump in her throat, wanting to say yes, needing to say yes to this man, this wonderful man who was trying because he wanted her, really wanted her, warts and all. “I know I’ve got issues, but I want to try, Kaname. I want to try with you, if you’ll let me.”

  “Shh.” He loosened his hold on her hand to brush her tears away. “I don’t want you to try with me, Nadia,” he whispered. “I just want you to be, with me. Say yes, and we’ll make it through together.”

  “Are you sure you want to do this, Kaname?” she asked. “Not out of guilt or some misplaced sense of feeling like you owe me.”

  He looked down at her, his midnight eyes soft, tender. “I want to do this. Would you like to know why?”

  “I-I think so.”

  “Because I love you, Nadia Spiceland. Not some ideal you that lives in my head, not the Los Angeles you who starred on television. I love the you that you were, the you that you are, and the you that you will be. I love the survivor, the fighter, the beautiful woman with the ugly cries. I want to walk with you through this, and when you’re ready, I want us to finish our walk through the Garden. No matter what, I want us to be together. I’m not expecting it to be easy, but nothing worth having ever is. As long as I know there’s a chance that you’ll fall in love with me, I’ll be a happy man.”

  “Then be happy,” Nadia said. “But I’d like to add one condition.”

  “Name it.”

  “I want your ramen recipe.”

  He smiled at her. “A lot of love goes into making the family ramen. Do you think you can handle that?”

  “I think I’m willing to prove that I have what it takes, including love,” she answered, grinning widely. “Especially love for a certain sexy professor. It is the spice of life, you know.”

  “Then it’s good that I happen to have a thing for spice.”

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  The Perfumed Garden of Sensual Delights is an Arabic treatise on sex written by Sheik Nafzawi in the early part of the sixteenth century. It is a combination of tales and instructions on how to get the most from that most intimate of actions. French soldiers translated the short guide in the early part of the nineteenth century, then Sir Richard Burton created a highly embellished version for his Kama Shastra Society in 1886.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Seressia Glass is an award-winning author of more than twenty contemporary and paranormal romance and urban fantasy stories. She returns to contemporary romance with the sexy Sugar and Spice series. She lives north of Atlanta with her guitar-wielding husband and two attack poodles. When not writing, she spends her free time people-watching, belly dancing, watching anime, and feeding her jewelry addiction. Visit her website at seressia.com.