Fated: An Alpha Male Romance (12 page)

“Never,” he replied. “Mrs. Miller and I have an understanding. It can be the same with you and Alexandra. She’s just being fickle right now and I think that her sister has gotten into her head. But, to answer your question, the slant of her odd behavior suggests a distraction.”

The dent in my brow let him know that I wasn’t following.

“A man, Roderick.”

My laugh came out almost like a cackle. “No offense, sir, but that’s impossible.”

“My Alexandra is weak-willed,” he added. “The world is different from when Janice and I were courting. These days, men will openly covet another man’s property. I can easily see Alexandra falling victim to some lowlife’s chicanery.”

I started thinking about that smug doctor from the Christmas Eve fundraiser. Ethan Stewart. I’d despised the way he’d disappeared with Alexandra without my permission. Her working on my diabetes fundraiser meant that they’d probably increased contact, and he’d seemed more than interested in talking about business that night.

“But you’re also implying that if she did in fact fall victim to a man’s subtle trickery, she might be spending evenings with this man,” I replied. “So, she could possibly be sleeping with him.”

His brows came together. “I wouldn’t go that far. I doubt that my little girl would throw away her virginity on some clown.”

I cleared my throat. His little girl certainly hadn’t thrown her virginity away to a clown as I’d been the lucky catcher. Well, it wasn’t so much as luck as a night with Alexandra was as standard as it came. I would kiss her, maybe fondle her breasts, and then enter her. There were a few times that she’d tried to do “other” things, no doubt at the behest of her, for lack of a better word, slut of a sister, but those things weren’t for our bed. The things that she wanted to do were things that happened between a man and his mistress, not his future wife. Wives were placed on a pedestal and seeing her mouth hovering near my penis had almost gotten her tossed clear from it.

“Do it,” I agreed. “I would like to know what has been going on with her. Also, if it’s possible, I would like for them to get more information on this Dr. Ethan Stewart that she works with to ensure that I’ve got background information on everyone involved in activities directly related to my campaign.”

He smiled, nodded, and then made the call.

Ethan

I was fucked.

I know naturally in these situations your first reaction is to look at me and go, “Well, duh, of course you love her,” but men aren’t as quick with these things as we’d liked to be. It also had to be some form of Guinness world record how fast I’d gone from fantasizing about Alexandra, to the inability to function without seeing her every day.

Those one or two visits up to her office turned into an amount that I’m not quite ready to admit to. If I wasn’t upstairs in her office, she was downstairs in mine even if I just had a couple minutes of downtime. I started doing some other shit too, like pulling her onto my lap and burying my face in her neck or hair. I even started doing that damn Eskimo-kiss nose-rubbing thing that I vowed I would never do even if I found someone that I could be serious with. The other day, I added a smiley face at the end of one of my texts. Sometimes I reach for her hand before she has a chance to grab it just to walk her out to her car. Then, there’s the way I feel when I’m holding her and she plays in my hair. Or even better, the way she kisses me all over when I’m twenty-thousand leagues-deep inside of her.

Like I said…fucked.

I didn’t know how I was supposed to get through dinner with Kellen and Tayler without them seeing it all over my face. I’d barely agreed to meet up with them even though it was a rare occasion to have them both in town at the same time. I’d had to choose between seeing them and spending the afternoon with Alexandra, Gia, Kai and Evelyn watching Eli cut the ribbon to mark the opening of his second fitness center in Baton Rouge. It had been a long time dream of his to own several gyms across the United States, and all I ever saw was support from Gia.

Most people thought that Gia and Alexandra were different because of their very different external appearances and mannerisms, but they had more similarities than I think even they realized. The most important one, in my opinion, was the amount of support that they showed to the men in their lives. Even though Alexandra had been steering it in the wrong direction for the past couple of years, she was still able to recognize someone willing to put her interests front and center where they belonged.

Just like “cute” and a few other words, “overwhelmed” was not something that was often found in my vocabulary, but it was the only way to describe how I felt when Alexandra told me that she was all mine. I’d never thought in a million years that a woman like her would ever give up so much just to take a chance on me. It wasn’t as though I saw her being with me as a step down, but it wasn’t what everyone else wanted. It wasn’t what everyone else had planned for her. Yet, for her to finally come into her own…I would have still enjoyed watching her make decisions based on what she thought was best for her.

My own mother hadn’t chosen me over the throng of men she’d paraded through our old apartment in Baton Rouge. Many times, I’d tried to ignore the sounds coming out of her bedroom when I was a kid, but they would still permeate the old wooden walls of the subpar, two-bedroom rat hole. If they weren’t sounds that a four-year old wasn’t supposed to hear, they were the sounds of her begging and pleading for these lowlifes to stay with her instead of going home to their wives.

Then, there was John Ezra.

John Ezra was a special kind of dick. He was a portly man despite his massive height — massive to a kid, at least. He had dark brown hair and dark, almost black eyes. I later learned that he’d lived in Texas, which was why his skin always seemed to carry an orange tint. There’d also been a certain level of malevolence to his expression — a permanent scowl that I don’t know how my mother could have ever found attractive.

John was the only man that I’d ever seen hit my mother. There were times that I’d caught a healing bruise on her cheekbone or a knuckle imprint on her legs, but John had whipped the butt of a pistol across my mother’s face right in front of me after we came home from my first day of kindergarten.

I never forgot the feeling of terror from seeing my mother fall to the floor as I’d stood there with my pet jellyfish — which was really a plastic bag in a soda bottle filled with blue colored water — between my trembling hands. She’d immediately sent me to my room while they continued a loud argument that had brought two uniformed officers to our door later that afternoon.

Later that night, as though he’d known I wouldn’t be able to safely fall asleep, John tugged open my bedroom door and stood glaring at me in the doorway. The light from the kitchen behind him had augmented his monstrous features.

I’d pulled my knees up to my chest and cowered under the thin sheets. Then, he’d walked over to my wall where there’d been a flaking strip of green wallpaper, peeled the strip just a little leaving a patch of an ugly neutral color peeking through, and trudged out. For weeks after that, he did the same thing — peel a little bit of the wallpaper until the end result was a gaping hole. While I never understood his tactic, it was an intimidation strategy that had worked so well that I’d unlearned how to sleep through the night without wetting my bed.

After a while, I confessed to my mother about what he was doing and how much I didn’t like him. She’d responded with a distorted, “It doesn’t mean anything,” then she’d remained with him, off and on, for the next five months. A bit after that, I was placed in my grandfather’s care.

Although I’d told Alexandra that my mother had
sent
me to New Orleans, after her arrest, I became a ward of the state and my grandfather had been the only family member around to willingly take me in.

Alexandra deciding to be with me over everything else was the first bit of gauze on that old wound. She’d gotten me to go from a man who didn’t really want anyone in his life, an “if it happens, it happens” kind of guy, to a man that couldn’t imagine a life without her.

Knuckles tapping against my window made me realize that I’d been sitting with the car idling for the past several minutes. I looked up to see Kellen cupping his hands around his eyes with his face pressed against the tint. I cut the engine and pushed open the door.

“Go ahead and leave your fingerprints on my window,” I warned. “You’re giving me all the forensics I need.”

He laughed and in that laugh alone, I knew that he’d met someone in Atlanta. He’d only been there a few weeks, but Kellen meeting someone was an extremely easy feat. We’d known each other since our undergraduate molecular biology days at Johns Hopkins, which meant that we often ended up in DC on one of our rare free weekends. Between me, him, and a few other mutual friends, the women were easy pickings.

On one specific night, a female modeling agent had made the mistake of telling him that he reminded her of some handsome actor from a Spanish telenovela. His ego grew so large that night that we could have probably flown back to Baltimore using his head as a hot-air balloon. But, it all ended up working out in the end as she’d offered him a contract, and he spent the next several years taking so many gigs that we both left medical school with zero debt. Unfortunately, good looks, money, and that easy-to-win-over heart of his was another bad combination on his part.

“You don’t want to frame me with the dirt I’ve got on you,” he teased. “Dirt that I’m pretty sure you forgot during several alcoholic blackouts.”

A car horn blared behind us, and we moved out of the way so that Tayler could pull into the spot next to mine. Her slim, curly dreadlocks were in another one of her famous buns piled on her head and adorned by a colorful headband. She was beautiful, extremely beautiful, but she never gave it a passing thought.

Tayler and I initially met in medical school when she’d stolen both mine and Kellen’s attention from our textbooks walking into the Eisenhower Library. She had an amazing reddish-brown complexion that reminded me of a California redwood, and which came from a mixture of her mother’s Ghanaian and her father’s Cuban heritage. Her eyes were the same color as mine, a killer combination when you added their oval shape and her dark lashes, and she’d sported locs for as long as we’ve known her although she never let them grow longer than the middle of her back. As she stepped out the car, I thought about how much I couldn’t wait for Alexandra to meet both her and Kellen.

“Of course you two would be standing in the middle of a parking spot on a busy Saturday evening,” she joked, wrapping me up in a hug. “How are you guys doing?”

“Starving,” Kellen answered.

She eyed him. “What’s her name?”

“What’s whose name?”

“The woman that you’ve fallen in love with in Atlanta.”

He grinned sheepishly and glanced away. Whoever this woman was, she had him by the balls.

“Let’s get inside,” he said, turning towards the restaurant. Tayler and I exchanged glances, laughed, and followed him.

I’d brought
Alexandra
up in the middle of our conversation three times already; my friends were keeping count. I also need to mention that we were still working on appetizers so it wasn’t as though I’d only brought her up three times during the course of our entire dinner.

“We’ll stop picking on you if you just tell us about her,” Tayler said, scrunching her nose in distaste as Kellen popped calamari into his mouth.

“There’s nothing to say,” I lied, a smile winning out against my battle to keep a serious expression.

“Oh my god, she even has you doing the shy smile?” She pinched my cheek and I pulled away, but the smile didn’t die.

“At least tell us her actual name,” she added, sticking her fork into the shrimp remoulade that we shared. “Have we met this Alle? Have you ever talked about her before?”

“You guys haven’t met her,” I answered. “And I might have talked about her once or twice.”

Kellen chewed on another piece of his fried squid. “Alexandra Miller.”

My head popped up. “How did you know that?”

“I met her.” He turned to Tayler. “Once, when I stopped by his office, we were getting ready to leave to play ball at the park nearby, but then he told me that he had to make sure to say good night to a woman named Alexandra.”

“How the hell do you remember that?” I asked. “I’m pretty sure that was nearly a year ago.”

“Because the woman is beautiful.”

“And you remember her because of that?”

“That and the fact that I came back later to try to get her number.”

I eyed him. “And what happened?”

“Nothing, nothing,” he asserted. “She told me that she had a boyfriend. Some guy in politics. So, I backed off.”

There was the caveat. I wasn’t sure if I wanted to tell my friends, my
good
friends, that the boyfriend wasn’t entirely out of the picture. Well,
yet
.

“So, what happened with him?” Tayler asked, leaning back as the server appeared with our orders. She’d ordered Atlantic lobster-tails with butter on the side while Kellen and I had opted for the Angus porterhouse steaks.

I answered with a succinct, “Well…” and then shrugged as I cut into my piece of meat. Kellen’s mouth fell open and Tayler folded her arms. The expression on her face reminded me of the time she’d scolded Kellen and I like children for roughhousing in one of the fountains on campus after board exams before jumping in herself. It was a look that I was pretty sure she’d gotten from her mother dozens of times as a child.

She opened her mouth to begin her lecture, but then looked to the ceiling before slowly letting her arms fall. “Ethan, how do you feel about her?” she asked.

Only a woman knew how to ask a question that could make a man feel uncomfortable and eager to talk at the same time. It was one of the upsides of having a close female friend — you could tell her stuff that your guy friends would laugh off or make fun of you about.

When I didn’t answer, Kellen’s mouth gaped even wider. “
Fuck…
you can’t be
not
saying what I think you’re not saying, E.”

“What am I missing?” Tayler asked. “What are you not saying…hold on. Wait, you can’t be
not
saying that you love her?”

I stuffed my face with a forkful of sautéed mushrooms.

“Oh my God!” Her face lit up. “You’re
in
love with her!”

They both then started laughing and cheering so loudly that I looked around for the member of the restaurant’s staff that would come and kick us out.

Tayler leaned over and wrapped an arm around me, and I playfully shrugged her off even though that smile had returned again. I couldn’t believe that this was me, grinning like a fool over some woman, but I didn’t want it to be any different. This was the first time in my life that I’d ever associated that four-letter word with someone outside of my friends. I’d never even said it to my mother, nor her to me.

Tayler waved down a server. “Can you bring us a round of Long Islands please? We just found out that we have something to celebrate.”

The woman’s eyes lit up. “Oh really? What’s that?”

“Our best friend is finally in love,” Kellen replied. “And it only took him four centuries.”

The woman giggled and walked off with our drink order. I remained quiet to give them a chance to calm down, and to prepare myself for the barrage of questions that were sure to follow.