Scandalous Heroes Box Set (161 page)

At eleven at night, it didn’t make sense for this dude to be sporting sunglasses, but he rocked them along with his Mr. T starter kit worth of gold chains around his neck. His dark skin had to be the only thing remotely appealing about the man. His mouth full of gold-covered teeth didn’t interest her. She smiled just to be polite.

“You look good in that outfit.” He snaked his tongue over his lips.

Eminence’s stomach churned at the sight. Before she responded to his compliment, she noticed a woman standing next to the man.

“Maybe you should compliment your date.” Eminence nodded toward the woman who carried a scowl on her face that looked like she had been born with the expression. To give him an example of what she wanted him to do, Eminence scanned the woman’s outfit. After observing the woman’s sky-high, architecturally impossible hair, to her transparent blouse with an unfortunate sight behind it, to her too-tight pleather skirt, the date’s shoes had the most attraction. “Cute shoes. Louboutin?”

“What does it matter to you?” She sucked her teeth. “Just turn your happy ass around and stop hitting on my man.”

Eminence wanted to tell the woman that no one wanted her rat-faced troll, but she, instead, kept quiet and returned her attention to the line in front of her. A woman of her age and standing should not be fighting while waiting in line at a brand, new club, especially when she had the lure of securing a better job...if she really wanted to go for it. Eminence still hadn’t decided. 

Going out to this club opening would help her settle on a couple of things: did she really want to be in a relationship with Les Hill, and could she face a person she hadn’t seen or talked to in years?

Part of that query had come to her suddenly in the form of her former boyfriend, Keys Tanksley. She hadn’t expected to see him in the store earlier that week. She couldn’t deny that she didn’t love the sight, evident from her self-loving act at home.

She still remembered how her body reacted as soon as she saw him defending her from that jerk. Her nipples had hardened right away. She felt her clit throbbing. As soon as she touched his hand when he handed her back her license, an electric jolt shot up her arm and exploded in her head. No denying it. Keys still held that magic that could always get to her.

She shouldn’t be thinking about him. She had a possible promotion to think about. She had a quasi-boyfriend on the side. She had a possible confrontation with a woman she had considered to be her best friend years ago.

What or who she really needed to support her decided to keep himself at home. Les had politely declined Eminence’s third offer to come out to the club. “Don’t you want to curl up with a good book instead?” he’d asked her.

A good book. Les hadn’t even offered up himself as a lure for her to stay at home. Then again, she would have been home alone. Les didn’t think it would be wise in their brief relationship to exchange home keys.

Eminence didn’t have a problem with that decision. She liked her privacy. It would have been nice to be able to spend the night at his place or have him stay at her home once in a while. If that happened, it might lead to breaking another one of his rules: no sex.

She should have found his desire to keep their relationship to a PG rating endearing. Les would kiss her, but he wouldn’t even touch her breasts over her clothes.

“Heavy petting leads to more.” Les had sounded like a school teacher rather than a man in his early thirties.

The fact that her sweet, cherubic-faced partner treated her so gentlemanly should have comforted her. As soon as Eminence hit puberty, guys had been hitting on her constantly. The idiot in the line tonight proved her point.

She needed to be grounded right now. Taking her cell phone out of her tiny purse, she hit one key to dial Les.

After she heard a lot of clicking and fumbling through the phone, Eminence heard a very sleepy, “Hello?”

She glanced at her watch.
Who
,
except for old people,
goes to bed before ten?

“Hey, honey,” Eminence said, smiling so that her happiness, real or not, translated both through the phone and to the two creeps behind her.

“Les, please.” He sniffed.

Eminence gritted her teeth. Aside from his insistence that she never use terms of endearments when talking to him, she knew what would quickly follow his standard sniffling.

Immediately Les made a low grunting noise that emanated from the base of his throat and continued the pig-like sound for a solid thirty seconds. Of course he’d never made the noise the first couple of weeks while they dated. 

“Just calling to let you know I’m still standing in line.” She shifted her weight from left to right before taking a couple of steps forward.

“You called me at—” More shuffling. “—ten after nine to tell me what I already knew? You know I have to go to work at ten tomorrow morning, right?”

Eminence counted down from ten in her head before she continued. “I needed to hear a kind voice right now. Just needed a little support.”

A long sigh sounded through the phone. “You know you have my support. I just don’t understand why you need to attend this club opening. You’re no longer twenty-one. You have a great job now. You don’t need to change anything.”

Why did it seem like Les and Eminence’s mother had talked? Eminence cleared her throat. The dig at her age didn’t bother her as much as his conclusion that she needed to stay in her same rut without challenging herself.

Les continued talking without acknowledging her. “No need to rock the boat. You should be happy to have what you’ve got.”

Eminence felt her eyebrows draw together. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

Les chuckled. “It’s not like you graduated at the top of your class.”

“Cum Laude is not bad.” Considering she worked three jobs at the time she graduated made her proud to be a Cum Laude graduate.

“And you make a good living now. Don’t be reckless. Just go home. We can see each other at church on Sunday.”

So much for support. “Oh, look. The line is moving. Go back to sleep, bab—uh, Les. I’ll talk to you in the morning.”

“Lunch. I get a break at lunch and I can talk to you then.”

This time she sighed. “Okay. Talk to you later.”

“Stay special.” Les disconnected the call before Eminence could come back with her own sweet response.

Despite Les’s decidedly unromantic nature, he did give her some of the best conversation and companionship she’d had in years. Who wouldn’t want an intelligent man with a stable job?

Deep down, Eminence knew she needed more. During their lunchtime conversation tomorrow, she would have to break off this relationship bound for nowhere. She couldn’t take being with a man who couldn’t see her full potential.

Eminence shook her head and decided to focus on her next step: walking into Reign. Standing in line, she distinctly remembered her very first club outing.

Seventeen years old, she and her good friend at the time, Jordie, had masterminded a plan that got Eminence out of the house and into a too tight, too short dress in order to gain entrance to a hot new club at the Virginia Beach Oceanfront. Staring down at herself now, she did have to blink a few times to be sure she wasn’t still in high school again.

Tonight she wore another tight, short skirt. She smoothed her hand down the leather and silk garment. To maintain her grown and sexy body, she worked out like a fiend, a habit Keys had taught her. Too bad she couldn’t teach him how to grow up and be responsible. He did know how to make her body sing, even back in high school.

Keys Tanksley. Funny how locations, sounds, and sights can stir up memories, good or bad.

Eminence wrapped her arms around her body, trying to ward off the chill she received from the sudden summer wind that whipped around her bare legs. The sensation brought her back to that special night so many years ago.

After a night of club hopping, Eminence couldn’t make the drive back to Jordie’s house. When Jordie had made the suggestion to go to their friend Keys’s house, Eminence had to agree. Plus spending time with Keys had always been a good thing…back then.

Eminence had to push Jordie’s rust bucket of a ride to Keys’s street so that they would not wake the neighbors. Of course the car could have been heard even a mile away. Eminence chuckled to herself remembering the metal-on-asphalt sound Jodie’s car muffler made as it dragged the ground.

Once at Keys’s house, she knocked on his window and waited for her friend to answer. Thankfully he hadn’t been out of town for a school game or even out with his friends, surprising considering how incredibly hot he looked.

Keys opened his window and let Eminence and Jordie in his room. When they got inside, he’d given them his bed. Keys had made himself a bed in his closet of all places. How such an imposing figure, even then in high school, could have folded himself up into that cramped closet, Eminence could never figure that out, not then and not now.

That night, Eminence crept into his closet while Jordie slept. If the small area could barely fit one hulking body, she had no right trying to introduce her body…but she did.

With the overhead light on in the cramped space, she stared at Keys, at how muscular his frame was for a high school boy. Keys spoiled her for other men after him. She wanted a strong man whose physical power matched her mental strength. Years later she got Les.

Back then, Keys had this ridiculous scraggly beard without a mustache. He looked like an Amish guy, not that anyone had the nerve to tell him that. Although Keys could joke around with the best of them, piss him off and he had been known to break a finger or two.

Since Eminence used to play the piano back then, and she and Keys used to be joined at the hip, friends got used to calling them the Piano Twins. Friends called Keys White Keys because of his race. Eminence, of course, had been called Black Keys. That night, they had made beautiful music.

Eminence remembered so clearly how Keys stared at her like he wanted her so much. Instead he’d said, “Let’s wait.”

Eminence hadn’t waited until she got permission to leave the house and go out to a club with her friend by using a fake I.D. She hadn’t waited until adulthood to make her lifelong plans of being a success in her career. She would be damn if she would wait to finally get her friend, the one other girls in her school had said couldn’t be caught. Of course, she would push out the fact that with each of the brave items she’d done, Jordie had pushed her to do them.

As Eminence and Jordie headed to Keys’s house, Jordie had mentioned that she slept hard and wouldn’t hear a thing if Eminence wanted to do something with Keys. Her friend’s not-so-subtle wink cemented what Eminence had suspected. Jordie had suggested Eminence take that next step with Keys.

Eminence had thought about it a lot, something she’d shared with Jordie. She had never been the girl to make a big move without overanalyzing it first. This time, with her brave friend by her side, Eminence would dare to be daring.

“Let’s not wait and say we did.” She’d kissed him.

He’d broken from the kiss long enough to say, “Jordie.” He nodded toward his bedroom.

“Sleeping like a rock.” She pulled her top over her head.

“In a closet?”

Eminence had known exactly what he meant. Even then, it touched her that he would offer to wait so that the moment that would have been her first time having sex would be special. She knew what would have made it memorable. “I’m with you. That’s what’s important.”

Even standing in line now thinking about that experience, caused Eminence to cross her legs to tamp down the slow throbbing in her clit. She would give her left arm to get a mind-numbing kiss like that again. Les had given her quick smooches and kisses on her forehead and cheek.

Keys had handled her body like an expert, like she’d whispered in his ear before he touched her that she liked his fingertips gliding over her skin, or that she loved to be kissed on the back of her neck, her back, between her breasts, and the backs of her knees, or that staring into his hypnotic eyes the entire time he’d made love to her melted her.

Then the other night when she’d seen him again, he’d barely said two words to her. What she did hear, Keys’s voice sounded like he gargled with rocks. His voice had been deep back in high school. Now he sounded even grittier...and angrier. From his quick departure, Keys hadn’t forgotten their past either.

“Damn.” Eminence fanned her face down as she took a step in the line at the club.

She wished she could purge the memory of that man, of that moment, from her mind.

No, that was a lie. Since their breakup, that fateful day when a lover and a friend had betrayed her, she thought about Keys every day. Truly the one that got away in a very real sense. He couldn’t be blamed. Eminence had run away and made it virtually impossible for him to track her down. The image that drove her away still burned in her brain.

That day had been on the top of Eminence’s list of surprises until she received an invitation to the grand opening of Reign. After so many years, how did Jordie find her? Why had Jordie bothered to invite the one person who she knew wanted nothing to do with her?

As soon as Eminence received the gold-and-black invitation, she wanted to rip it up, burn it and send the charred pieces back to Jordie with a note that simply said, “You’ve burned your bridges.” Eminence had grown up, and she needed to react differently.

As an adult, she needed to confront her demons. Plus it would be interesting to hear the reason Jordie had invited her to a club opening. Eminence heard Les’s voice in her head that she shouldn’t be in line at a club opening. Too late. Eminence had to see this thing through and gained something her mother had never gotten, closure. 

This trip wouldn’t be personal. As a mature woman, she had to be gracious. If Jordie got too familiar, Eminence would have to remind her that just because she accepted her invitation didn’t mean she wanted to come back into Jordie’s life.

Eminence retrieved the crumpled invitation from her purse and fanned her face, now overheated from thinking about Keys, the betrayal, and how this night would go.