Manwhore +1 (28 page)

I try to remember and I
can’t
, I just can’t remember if I said it.

But if I did . . . he wants to hear it again?

I could’ve just talked dirty, which would be
sooo
unlike me and something Saint would probably love to hear too.

I sigh, plump my pillow, and turn off my lamp, getting haunted and aroused by the simple thought of a knotted cherry stem.

T
onight is the night Saint meets my mother, and I don’t know who’s more excited, my mother or I.

Before I go to my mom’s, I stop by the pharmacy to stock her up on her medicines, then I buy her three bags of fresh, organic groceries and have neatly stored everything in her medicine cabinet and fridge. Then it’s off to help her with preparations for tonight’s dinner. I’ve made sure that the house is sparkly clean, the table set with our prettiest plates and topped with a pretty white rose centerpiece. Mom, apron and all, buzzes busily through the kitchen, stacking things in the hot drawer.

The excitement in our home is palpable.

Since my early teens, my mother has seen me focused exclusively on my career. I’d never really daydreamed about boys before. She’s as unprepared for me to bring a man home as I am—even though I’m sure she’s been hoping that I’d one day find “someone.”

Well.

I
have.

Holy crap, I have! And my mother wants to meet him, and most shocking of all,
he
wants to meet my mother too.

Exhaling in satisfaction, I give one last look at our home. It looks spotless and homey. Though, a little bit self-consciously, I realize my mother’s house is kind of a shrine to me and the accomplishments I’ve earned so far: framed newspaper articles I wrote for my high school paper. My first piece for
Edge
. Letters from some readers I’d touched that I had stored away.

“I was reading up on him just this morning . . .” Mom says as she comes out to give one satisfied look at the house. “He looks very powerful. Very beautiful.”

“He is. He’s both. Also smart. Motivated.”

I pat her hand and kiss her cheek, and she asks, “He’s really coming?”

“No, Momma. I just wanted to put us to work for fun.”

She smiles one of her tender mother smiles and this time, she’s the one who pats my hand. “It’s good that he’s coming, Rachel,” she assures.

My stomach squeezes at that, and I grin and nod.

I’m both nervous and excited for him to be here. “Remember you promised not to drill him with questions, okay, Mother?”

“Of course!” my mother says as she heads back to the kitchen.

Oh god. Please let them
like
each other.

Pulling back the gauze curtain, I peer out the window to see his Pagani Huayra slide to a screeching halt before our home.

Oh, Sin. Speeding.
Really?

I’m smiling, but I pretend that I’m not as I swing open the door and shake my head in disapproval while I watch him get out of the car. He’s wearing a black cashmere sweater and a pair of dark-wash jeans, a bottle of wine firm in his hand, and he’s making my heart race as he eats up the distance between us.

Sin is absolutely at home in the night, though it feels like every streetlight nearby is fawning on him, casting attractive shadows on his face and body.

He looks irresistible.

Dangerous.

Delicious.

“Hey,” I greet him as I step outside and impulsively press my lips to his rock-like jaw. “You get a kiss for coming.”

He draws me close to his body and speaks in my ear. “I have one for you too but it’s not fit for public.” His eyes shine devilishly as he watches me go red.

He follows me with one step, and then he’s inside. And he looks so very dark in my doorway. Darker than his hair, than the air he emanates. Bigger, somehow, as he takes another step inside, where my mother waits with a beaming smile.

“Malcolm, this is my mother—”

“Kelly,” she eagerly interrupts. She seems to want to give him a hug but she stops herself; Saint seems too larger-than-life for that.

He reaches out and gently squeezes her shoulder as he hands her the wine. I watch Mother make a desperate attempt to resist that captivating smile. And I notice his deep voice doesn’t help matters. “A pleasure to be in your home, Kelly. With your daughter.”

Gushing with gratitude over the bottle of wine, my mother heads over to set it in ice.

He touches my cheek for only a second, that one second enough to fluster me even more.

Damn him.

“You’re the first man Rachel ever brought home,” my mother tells him.

“This is the first time I’ve actually gone.”

He winks at me and my mother and I both kind of smile. We both mooned over him just seconds ago as he opened the wine in a way only a man who’s uncorked dozens of wine bottles can.

Now we’re all enjoying dinner, wine, and conversation.

“I always thought she’d have had more friends if she hadn’t had an imaginary friend. Monica,” my mother says.

“
Matilda
,” I correct my mother.

My poor mom, she’s so excited and so flustered she can’t even keep her facts straight.

“Matilda. Right. She’d blame everything on Matilda. Rachel doesn’t like screwing up in any way, you see,” she says. “She’s a bit of a perfectionist and it makes her mad at herself, so she used to blame Matilda when things didn’t go the way she wanted.”

I groan and roll my eyes. “This would be so
so
much easier to bear if Matilda were sitting here now.”

Saint leans over. “I wouldn’t have come here for Matilda. Only for you.”

His lips quirk when I redden.

“Rachel tells me you paint?” he asks my mother.

“I do. I like color on everything,” she says and proudly signals to her strawberry spinach salad. “Rachel used to paint too—that one’s hers.” She points at a small frame with my handprint on it.

“I did not paint that. I just set my hand there. Saint has one of those, Mother. A big one.”

“Oh, he does?” Her eyes widen in awe. “Those are sold, but in this case, it was a gift from End the Violence for her support.”

As we head into the main course, my mother tells Saint all about my involvement with End the Violence—nothing Saint doesn’t really know except perhaps that I’ve been doing it for a decade—while Saint listens attentively as he cleans his plate.

He listens to her tell him about the stories I used to tell as a kid . . .

Me and how End the Violence really made an impact on helping my mother and me cope . . .

Me and my dreams of having a career where I could both love what I do and earn a living at it . . .

Me and how I’ve wished to make her dream come true of working at what she loves . . .

“Her life has been full of other people’s stories,” she adds.

“Even mine,” he whispers with a sharp gleam in his eye aimed in my direction. He is not mad, just calm as he finishes his wine. Calm, and something else. He seems . . . illuminated. As if my mother’s stories have shed light on something that had been eluding him for a while.

I kind of think he looks even more comfortable than he did seconds ago, his attention unwavering as he crosses his utensils over his empty plate, leans back in his chair and cups his hands behind his head, laughing at my mother’s stories about young Rachel’s antics.

He looks . . . at home, here with my mother and me.

It does something to me. I suddenly feel very vulnerable.

I wonder about
his
mother as he talks with mine. As he talks with mine and occasionally ends her anecdotes with, “Did she really?” in amusement.

And my mom won’t shut up about me!

I feel extremely, intimately bared to Malcolm right now.

Malcolm already knows so much about me. What I like and fear and want. That I hope to do good things, but I sometimes do bad. He knows how I
taste
.

And now, having the man of my dreams know me through my mother’s stories, I feel completely exposed. As if I have no more secrets from him, while he, somehow, is a box of them that I might never fully open.

Gina’s right: maybe I do have a few walls up to protect myself. But I feel them all about to topple.

“Now, Rachel had very few friends when she was younger,” she says as she brings over my favorite dessert from the kitchen, a chocolate peppermint pie. “She was reserved and of course it was a concern of mine, as you can imagine. The only people Rachel allowed to know that she didn’t have a father were those we met through End the Violence. People like her, who’ve known loss. She just didn’t feel comfortable sharing that loss with anyone else, whom she thought wouldn’t understand.”

I try to laugh it off, but my laugh wavers. It’s only after Saint reaches for my hand under the table and squeezes it that I exhale.

Because he’s not judging me.

I’m into you
, I remember him saying. I steal a look at his profile. He senses it and turns, and when our gazes meet, I feel like he kisses me with his eyes.

This evening in my home feels so monumental all of a sudden. Like he too is giving me something he’s given no one else.

Now my mother is saying I read during the weekends throughout my teens.

“She wasn’t a party girl?”

He asked my mother this, but he’s teasing me. I can tell by the look—and smile—he sends my way.

A smile that no woman on earth could withstand with dry panties.

“Oh, no, though she enjoys having fun,” Mother assures. “Rachel was back from prom at twelve. Her date couldn’t interest her long enough to make her stay, a nice young man one of her friends suggested. She wasn’t really interested in anyone. I used to think she’d need a man so compelling, her stories couldn’t live up to him; he’d make her reality so much more compelling than anything else.”

I feel privately caressed when his gaze intensifies.

“So there was no one,” he says, sounding perfectly greedy.

I hold my breath.

“No one,” mother confirms.

But you,
I tell him with my eyes when he smiles at me.

It’s better than sex, the way he’s staring at me now, the clenching of his jaw as if some unnamable emotion has touched him.

“Sin, we really need to find someone able to tell me embarrassing stories about you, so I can get even,” I tease him with a husky, shy voice.

Under the table, he gives my hand another squeeze, his voice dropping an octave just for me. “Give it a Goog. We’ll be more than even.”

“She’d come up with stories about families,” Mom tells him. “Usually very sweet ones. I worried she was a bit too hopeful for the real world, but I’m sure it was the way she coped after we lost Michael.”

After a nod of understanding directed at my mother, Saint’s eyes seek me out again. Caress me again. But the caress doesn’t feel sexual. It feels like so much more. Male eyes, as deep as eternity, seem to simply say,
I understand.

“I’m sorry to hear that, for both of you,” he finally murmurs to my mother, and I notice that it takes him an effort to pull his gaze away from me.

The cold flecks that are so common in Malcolm Saint’s eyes . . .

There’s not a single cold fleck in them now.

He’s living, breathing and human and sitting like a calm storm at our dinner table, still so strong and alive and normal despite him being abnormally beautiful, abnormally powerful.

I see my mother blush a little when his full attention is on her. “I know you’ve lost your mother as well. I’m sorry.”

“I’m sorry too,” he says quietly.

“This is your home too, Malcolm. Anytime.”

When my mother walks us to the door shortly thereafter and Malcolm asks me if I’m coming back with him, I blush and nod. I’m not even going to pretend I don’t want to be with him right now.

He says goodbye to my mother, and then he speaks again, without hesitation or apology. “I’m not good at making promises. But I would like you to know I’ve never been serious about a girl until I met your daughter, and now that I know I’m the first man she’s brought home, I’m aiming to be the last.”

I’m red to the roots of my hair.

Oh.
My.

Did Saint just say this to my mother?

“No promise needed. Just be good to her,” she whispers, heartfelt to him. Then— “Please. Take dessert with you. I won’t eat it and you two can share it later. It’s Rachel’s favorite,” she adds, bringing over the pie, tightly covered in aluminum foil.

After I hug and thank her and she gives me this huge, huge smile that screams at me how much she likes him, how appeased she is about us having—possibly—a relationship, my heart feels content.

Saint walks me over to his car, opens the door, and when I settle in, he leans over to latch my seat belt. As his fingers graze me, my sexy parts start aching. How can Saint make something as simple as a homey dinner feel like foreplay?

I think he knows I’m burning.

Because the next second, he grabs the back of my head and kisses me.

The kiss is slow and so yummy that my thighs clench. I hazily wonder if I’ll ever grow used to his kisses. Strong and sure, he tongue-fucks my mouth. When he adds gentle sucking motions on my tongue, I tighten my hold on his shoulders.