“Nesta will give you the grand tour. I’ve got something on the stove.”
He watched her walk down the hall and was reminded of the beautiful full-figured women of his youth.
Nesta laughed. “Did you just check out my mother’s booty?” She laughed again. “Never mind, don’t answer that. No need to start lying to me now.”
He looked around quickly before kissing her forehead. “Does your mother work outside?” Ian whispered. He was somewhat surprised he hadn’t thought to ask before.
“She’s a psychologist. She works for the Chicago school district.” Nesta was used to being asked what her parents did for a living whenever she brought somebody home, but the question coming from Ian was unexpected and somewhat disappointing. She’d thought a person who had live-in help would understand.
“So that means we will have some time alone this week?”
She smiled. He was just checking schedules. “Oh yeah, if not we would have go out and get a room. I’m spoiled now.” There was nothing predictable about him, and she liked that.
Ian didn’t expect to see Kingsley enter the hallway. He’d just assumed that Nesta’s father wasn’t home.
“My brother,” Kinglsey said as he walked toward him. He stopped a few steps from Ian and looked at both of them.
Ian felt a chill run down his spine. He knew exactly what had happened, but he opened himself to hear Kingsley’s thoughts.
I smell her all over you and vice versa.
We should talk.
Damn sure should.
I’m an honorable man, Kingsley.
I know you are—that’s why you’re still standing.
Both men laughed, and Nesta stopped her monologue about the painting they were facing. To Ian, it looked like something toddler Nesta had probably finger-painted. It was hung in an expensive frame.
“What was funny about that?” she asked.
“I just think everything my little girl says is cute.”
“Yeah, right.” She looked at both of them again, waiting for a better explanation. Ian smiled.
Nesta continued, “Anyway, this room is my daddy’s office, also known as the study.”
“Your mother is serving dinner on the deck tonight. Make a big deal about it,” he said as he walked toward the kitchen.
“I will.”
“We will,” Ian added.
He really liked Kingsley’s study. He could see the man in the room. The furniture was big and comfortable and instead of walls, three sides of the room were floor-to-ceiling packed bookshelves.
“Who’s the reader?” Ian asked.
“All of us. We each have a wall.”
He found her wall without asking. From the eclectic titles he knew he hadn’t been wrong about her. On the bottom shelves, he found the usual children’s picture book titles with a heavy emphasize on Dr. Suess. He smiled, thinking of her sitting on Kingsley’s lap hearing about Hop on Pop or Horton.
She saw him looking at her picture books. “I know them all by heart still.”
“What’s your favorite?”
“Congratulations! Today is your day. You're off to Great Places! You're off and away!” She said in a playful voice.
The gleam in her eye made him want to lock the door and endanger his life by taking her on her father’s desk. “I beg your pardon?” he said.
“You have brains in your head. You have feet in your shoes. You can steer yourself any direction you choose.”
“That’s probably true, but what the hell are you talking about?”
“You're on your own. And you know what you know. And YOU are the guy who'll decide where to go.”
“Nesta, are you having a stroke?”
She laughed from somewhere deep in her stomach. It was a silly five-years-old’s laugh. “I was older when this one came out.” She bent down and pulled a book from the shelf. “I got it as a graduation gift from middle school.”
He took the book from her hand and read the copyright date. He shuddered when he read the numbers 1990. “You’re so young.”
She took it from him and placed it on the desk. She stepped into his arms. “Am I too young, Ian?”
He inhaled her scent. “Not for anything I have in mind,” He felt a change in the air pressure, and he knew somebody had entered the room. He attempted to back away, but she stopped him.
“It’s okay, Ian, this is my home too,” she whispered.
He hoped it wasn’t Kingsley standing in the doorway. Kingsley would have heard her.
“Honey, take Ian to his room. He might want to freshen up.”
Nesta held Ian in place as she peeked around him to answer, “Okay, Mama.” She took Ian’s hand and led him from the room. She let his hand go as soon as they were in the hallway again. “That was my mother’s way of telling us to get out of here with our stuff. I guess either she’s told him or my father has figured it out. I’m guessing he’s not happy.”
“You think?” Ian said, his voice dripping with obvious sarcasm.
Chapter Eighteen
Ian had never been so self-conscious in his life. Nesta showed him to his room, closed the door and pulled him to the bed. She tried to push him down, but he wouldn’t let her. Finally she gave up and sat on his lap.
“We can’t do this, Nesta.”
She’d learned that his neck was especially sensitive. She leaned in and fluttered her long eye lashes against the sensitive area under his ear. “Do what? I just want to sit on the bed and talk.”
Damn, he thought, how did she know that would work? He pulled away and looked disapprovingly at her.
The need for conversation was not what he saw in her expression. He listened to her thoughts and learned that she had a perverse desire to “do it” in her childhood home. It would be a first for her.
He was finding this side of her very appealing, exciting. At the same time, he had no doubt that if they so much as stretched out together, Kingsley would kill him before Fox got a chance to arrive and put him in the nothing room.
“I’m very fond of you, Nesta, but you are not going to get me killed my first night in your parents’ home.”
Her expression was playful. “I’m not trying to get you killed, Ian. I’m trying to get you laid.” Her voice had never sounded sexier.
The words went straight to his cock. “And I do appreciate that you share that goal with me.”
She felt him beginning to harden and smiled. She wiggled.
“Wait until everybody goes to sleep,” he finally said, hoping, and yet not, that she would stop her wiggling on his lap.
“Promise?”
“I promise I’ll try my best to make it happy, but I won’t upset your parents.”
She giggled. “You said ‘make it happy’—did you mean happen?”
In his sexiest voice, he said, “I meant both.”
With that statement, what had been a game for her became serious, and she was sorry she’d started it. She took him to her childhood room. It was the room of a privileged teenager, mostly unchanged since her return from college.
“Did you spend a lot of time in here?”
She couldn’t read his face to know what prompted the question.
Her thoughts returned to the first time she’d brought a college friend home. “Well, now I understand your high siddity ways,” Kayla had teased. Nesta had laughed because she knew she should, but she’d been so removed from urban speak that later she’d had to ask her mother to learn that “siddity” meant ‘to put on airs.’
“Not really,” she told him. “I was always social, which wasn’t easy in a single-child household in this neighborhood. I hung out in the kitchen with my parents most of the time. And there were always people visiting. My mother grew up in a big family, and she needs people around too.”
He sat on her bed and tried to picture her listening to her music and talking to her friends on what he imagined was a pink princess telephone, but then he questioned if the time frame was right for
that style.
“I guess we’d better get back downstairs,” she said.
“You go ahead—I want to wash my face and change my shirt.”
She looked at the immaculate shirt he was wearing, but didn’t feel it was important enough to mention. “Okay.”
Ian wanted to wash away as much of her scent as possible. He wasn’t a father, but it wasn’t hard to imagine Kingsley’s feeling. A few minutes later as he started down the stairs, he sensed there was someone else in the house—the air pressure had changed. He knew Fox’s presence signature better than anyone’s, and it wasn’t him. Beyond Fox, he wasn’t concerned until he entered the foyer and saw a young man hugging his Nesta. Mine. He had to stop and calm himself; he knew immediately it had to be the ex-boyfriend, Andre.
He prayed the man did nothing in the next few seconds to make Ian kill him where he stood.
It wasn’t often that Ian had reason to evaluate another man’s appearance. He was even less inclined to question his ranking in such an evaluation, but Ian admitted to himself that Andre looked like he belonged with Nesta.
He was a little over six feet tall, slim and muscular in an even way that hinted at athletic, but not an athlete.
His skin tone was a light medium brown with red undertones. At a glance Ian recognized Andre’s African ancestors. He had the physical characteristics of the Khoikhoi, a group that had light, nearly copper-toned skin, high cheekbones and the slanted eyes that some African Americans called tight eyes, but the rest of the country called Asiatic.
Ian wondered how his early family had ended up in America, since the Khoikhoi wasn’t one of the usual tribes associated with slavery. He figured the slight contours of his nose and the between texture of his hair were his European ancestors’ contribution to the finished man. It all worked well on the young man, so well, in fact, that Ian could see his shallow confidence in his smile and the way he moved.
When he saw the man possessively embrace Nesta’s shoulder, Ian wanted so much to strangle the life from him that his hand twitched.
He took a step toward them. His right foot locked in the air and his left to the floor. He didn’t have to think about it—he knew it was Fox.
Meet me in the study were the words he heard in his head.
When he tried to move again, his feet led him to the study as if he had no choice. When both feet were on the floor of the room, the door closed. He looked up and he was in the dining room. The dining room in his house in Sacramento. The Pale Fox was seated at his dining room table.
“Join me, Ian.”
“Do I have a choice?”
“There’s always a choice.”
“Sit or death?”
Fox laughed. “You’re always so dramatic. Sit down, Hunter, this won’t be long.”
I’m dramatic?
“Yes, I believe you are. That’s what I like about you. Time hasn’t caused you to stop feeling.”
“Why are we here?”
“I need to ask you what you were planning to do to that kid?”
Ian sighed. “Fox, you have my loyalty, you and the bond have my body, but I’ll be damn if I let you have my thoughts too.” He waited for the punishment. With Fox they were always swift. As far as Ian knew, Fox didn’t believe in giving the “guilty” a chance to stew in it.
Fox laughed. “Touché, my friend. I liked that. Okay, time is running out. I’m just going to say this. Do whatever you want to the kid. Truth be told, I want to deal with him myself, but he’s not yours or mine to correct. If you act on your thoughts, unprovoked, mind you, I will have to punish you.”
“Point made.” As soon as the words passed, Ian was back in motion in Nesta’s house.
When he reached Nesta and the rest, they all had that deer-in-the-headlights look that Ian associated with a breech in time.
He made eye contact with Kingsley and nodded slightly. He knew the others would think they’d experienced déjà-vu, but Kingsley would know what happened.
“Here he is,” Dot stated.
“Was I missed?” he asked, looking Nesta in the eye. He could see she was trying to pull away from the young man, but he had a death grip on her shoulder. Ian scanned her thoughts. She was trying to avoid appearing uncomfortable because she didn’t want to alert her parents,
especially her father.
“This is one of Nesta’s friends from college,” Dot said. “Ian, meet Andre. Andre, this is Ian.”
Ian stuck out his hand, knowing the boy would have to remove his arm from Nesta to shake.
Andre reached out, and Nesta used the opportunity to slip away.
He thought she would take her rightful place beside him, but she stood next to her mother.
Dot beamed, but Ian suspected she didn’t have a clue what was happening.
The young man’s instincts were good. He looked at Ian and made an assessment. When Ian saw Andre mentally dismissing him, he smiled. He loved it when his opponents underestimated him.
“This is your client?” Andre asked.
Nesta smiled. “This is my friend. He’s visiting from California.”
Andre looked at him again. Again, he decided Ian was not a threat. “Where about in Callie?”
“I live in Sacramento.” Ian almost told him that most natives hated to hear the state referred to as Callie, but he wasn’t a native, and he didn’t feel the need to save him from an encounter with one.
“We were just about to have dinner on the deck. Would you care to join us, Andre?” Kingsley asked.
Both Dot and Nesta shot him a look.
“I appreciate the offer, but I have to be in the city in about—” He looked at his watch. “In about an hour. But I would like to borrow Nesta for a moment.”
“Come on, guys, you can help me take the dishes outside,” Dot said, pulling her husband as she left the area.
Ian glanced at Nesta before he followed them. Don’t worry, she said with her eyes. He wasn’t sure why he actually heard the words in his head.
“Is that the young man she was dating?” Kingsley asked his wife once they finished bringing out the dishes and were seated.
“That’s the sorry son-of-a. . .”
“Dot!” Kingsley interrupted.
Ian chuckled. He was liking Dot more and more.
“Maybe we should start without her,” Dot announced. “Honey, why don’t you say grace?”
Kingsley blessed the food, the cook and, much to Ian’s surprise, the guest at his table. Ian was trying very hard not to open himself to hear Kingsley’s thoughts. He knew that under normal circumstances they could be friends, and that was good enough for now.
Ian glanced at his watch. For a man who claimed to be in such a rush to get back to Chicago, Andre was cutting it close.
Dot had laid out a very nice spread. Ian wondered when she had time to cook. He was on his second helping of potato salad when Nesta came to the table. It had been at least ten minutes since he’d heard Andre’s car leaving.
Ian looked at her and saw tears in her eyes. He jumped up from his seat. “What did he do?”
Before Nesta could answer, Kingsley was at his side. Kingsley grabbed Ian’s hand as he reached for her. They all stopped, three sets of eyes focused on the spot where Kingsley’s hand clinched Ian’s arm.
“What are you doing, Daddy!”
Kingsley snatched away his hand. He held it out as if it were a foreign object and had attacked without his consent.
She’s been crying—I was reaching for her to comfort her.
I’m sorry. I reacted without thinking.
As did I.
“Will one of you say something?” Nesta said
Dot took a sip of wine. “All three of you sit down,” she said.
They all moved at once.
“What happened, Nesta?”
Nesta looked at Ian before answering. “It was nothing. Just a little disagreement. I didn’t mean to alarm anyone.”
“Are you protecting that boy? Did he put
his hands on you?”
She tried to smile. “No, of course not, he’s not crazy.”
“He let you go—I beg to differ,” Ian said.
Kingsley nodded. Dot took another sip. “You guys finish your meals. Couples argue.” She looked at her husband. “Do you think I never shed a tear over something you said or did?”
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