At First Kiss

Just as she had gotten out of the last of her snow-damp clothing, she heard the bedroom door open and close. She looked up and saw that Troy had walked in with his hands behind his back.

He had a devilish grin on his face and she knew that meant payback.

“Now, Troy. You wouldn’t do anything to an unarmed woman, would you?” She took a step back, trying to make her way to the bathroom so that she could lock herself in while whatever snowball he was carrying melted.

He laughed and shook his head. “I’m afraid I can’t do that, Jasmine. Now, are you going to take your punishment like a woman?”

She fell back onto the bed in a splayed position, hamming it up for all she was worth.

“That’s a good girl.” He walked over to the bed and she saw that he hadn’t had snow behind his back. He had an ice bucket. He placed it on the nightstand and started to undress.

His body never ceased to amaze her. He epitomized masculinity. Every ripple and ridge of his frame made her want to run her fingers over his skin. His caramel-colored complexion made her want to lick his…everything.

But more than anything, she wanted to know what he planned to do with that ice.

GWYNETH BOLTON

was born and raised in Paterson, New Jersey. She currently lives in central New York with her husband, Cedric. When she was twelve years old, she became an avid reader of romance by sneaking books from her mother’s stash of Harlequin and Silhouette novels. In the ’90s she was introduced to African-American and multicultural romance novels and her life hasn’t been the same since. She has a B.A. and an M.A. in English/Creative Writing and a Ph.D. in English/Composition and Rhetoric. She teaches college-level classes in writing and women’s studies. She has won several awards for her romance novels, including ten Emma Awards and a Romance in Color Reviewers’ Choice Award for new author of the year.

When Gwyneth is not teaching or working on her own romance novels, she is curled up with a cup of herbal tea, a warm quilt and a good book. She can be reached via email at [e-mail]. And readers can visit her website at www.gwynethbolton.com.

At First Kiss

Gwyneth Bolton

www.millsandboon.co.uk

To the readers, who make real to me every day the old African proverb that states simply, I am because you are.

Dear Reader,

Sometimes people meet the love of their life and know right away that they have just met the person who is the other part of their soul. Sometimes people meet and become good friends before they become lovers.

And then there are other times…

Troy Singleton and Jazz Stewart didn’t fall in love at first sight. They didn’t even become good friends right away. Frenemy would be a better description for these two. They tolerate one another because their best friends are married, but that is as far as it goes. And then there’s the fact he’s a player and she’s a serial dater. They are too much alike to ever be attracted to one another. And they can’t be around one another without getting on each other’s nerves. So they don’t ever have to worry about hooking up or anything like that….

Or maybe, they are so much alike that they are really perfect for one another and it will take an act of God or something just as strong to get them to realize it.

I hope you enjoy Troy and Jazz’s journey toward love as much as I enjoyed writing it!

Much love and peace,

Gwyneth

Acknowledgments

I want to acknowledge my family, because without their support I wouldn’t know what love is or even be able to write about it. Special thanks to my husband, Cedric Bolton, my mom, Donna Pough, my sisters Jennifer, Cassandra, Michelle and Tashina, my nieces Ashlee and Zaria and my nephew, Michael.

Many women have shown me what true sisterhood and friendship is through the years. To my friends who have been there for me through the years and encouraged all of my early attempts at writing and listened to my dreams, thank you. I’d like to especially thank Cheryl Johnson, Elaine Richardson, Jennifer Thorington Springer, Latisha Folkes-Nwoye, Lily Marella Payne, Angelique Justin and Yolanda Hood. Smooches and triple-hold hugs to you all! I’d also like to thank my sista-authors, whose stories inspire and motivate me and whose friendship I count on. And I’d especially like to thank A. C. Arthur, Victoria Wells, Iris Bolling, Deatri King-Bey, Shelia Goss and Ann Christopher. Keep on writing those amazing stories and please keep being the wonderful women you are! Finally, I’d like to thank my sands, because they have been showing me true Delta love and sisterhood since we crossed in the spring of 1990. Thank you Kimmie, Shakira, Antoinette, Edith, Monica, Audrey, Sherita and Karen. I love you! Oo-oop!

Contents

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Epilogue

Chapter 1

It doesn't matter if you win or lose, it's how you play the game…

Ten years earlier

So the Kappa Alpha Psi pretty boy is late. Go figure…I should have expected that from a Nupe!

Jasmine “Jazz” Stewart alternated between walking up and down the inside of the airport, checking and rechecking each luggage pickup location, and braving the cold Detroit weather outside. It had been over an hour since she had landed, and her ride was nowhere to be found. She was going to be late for her best friend’s wedding rehearsal, all because some cane-swinging Kappa pretty boy—whom she had never met, but she had seen pictures of and had to admit he was too handsome for words—had no concept of time.

Her best friend, roommate and sorority sister was marrying the no-show’s best friend and fraternity brother. She and Alicia were both members of Delta Sigma Theta and had pledged the Pi Iota city-wide chapter when they were sophomores in college. They were now seniors at Mount Holyoke College. From what she’d heard, Alicia’s fiancé, Darren, her cousin Kendrick and the tardy Troy had all pledged Kappa at Howard several years ago, Xi chapter.

Jazz knew that her friend Alicia probably had some hopes of her and Troy hitting it off and Jazz finally becoming serious about one guy instead of dating them and dropping them, as she was prone to do. But if Troy was always this late, he wouldn’t stand a chance with her. She liked her conquests to be prompt.

She glanced at the Coach watch she’d gotten a good bargain on back home at Filene’s Basement in Boston. An hour and twenty-five minutes late! She had never met Mr. Troy Singleton, but from what she’d heard, he thought he was some kind of God’s gift to women. He was probably used to making women wait for him. After making the mad dash to catch her flight from Boston, suffering through the two-hour turbulence-filled flight and trekking through the unreasonably long Detroit airport to get to the luggage claim spot in a timely manner so that she wouldn’t keep her ride waiting, she knew for sure she wouldn’t be one of the many women to fall for his charms.

She walked outside again just as a humongous gas-guzzling bright red SUV pulled up. When she saw the tall, muscular frame stepping out and walking leisurely toward the entrance to the airport, she just watched him go. The jeans and thick leather jacket he wore gave him a rugged and almost dangerous appearance. If it weren’t for the air of suaveness that seemed to radiate off of him like whatever the male equivalent to a siren’s call would be, he would read bad-boy-all-the-way.

She decided she hated him on sight, every six-feet-plus muscle-bound caramel-hued bit of him.

She took her luggage and rolled it over to the SUV and patiently waited for him to come back outside when he saw she wasn’t in the airport waiting like a dutiful twit with nothing better to do. The brittle Detroit air almost made her want to go inside and find him, but she braved it.

Oh, the things one would endure to prove a point…

Twenty minutes later he came out talking on his cell phone. She leaned against his car with her arms crossed in front of her. He stared at her for a moment and walked over. His expression was a mixture of perplexed and inquisitive with a slight bit of interest.

“Jasmine?” His mouth tilted slightly in a soft, sexy half smile that would probably knock the average girl off her feet.

Jazz wasn’t anybody’s average…

“It’s Jazz. Can you open the trunk and let me put my suitcase in? We’re running late. Or should I say, you’re incredibly late and we’re going to miss the rehearsal.”

He reared his head back as if offended before narrowing his eyes. “How did you know this was my car?”

The sexy little smile was gone and she kind of missed it.

Oh. Well.

“I watched you get out of it. Can you open the trunk? And can we get in? It’s cold out here.” She realized that she really was starting to freeze her very ample behind off.

The cream dress slacks she wore with a cute little sweater and lightweight leather jacket, both of which were more for style than warmth, were no match for Detroit’s weather. It might have been close to spring in the rest of the world, but Detroit hadn’t gotten the memo yet.

“Wait a minute, you saw me get out and go inside to look for you and it didn’t occur to you to try and stop me? I wasted damn near twenty minutes in there looking for you.” He just stood in front of her not opening the trunk with expectation written all over his face.

He was starting to work her nerves, and the Bajan always came out in her whenever someone worked her nerves. Even though she’d left the island when she was a toddler, she was her mother’s child. And Carlyne Stewart had never lost her Barbadian dialect.

She narrowed her eyes and gave her teeth a slow, lyrical suck. “C’dear…wha ’bout muh time, nuh? I wait and walk and wait and walk back and forth roun’ dis godforsaken airport for I ain’ no how long for yuh ta reach. We nowhere near even, yuh, but I ain’ got time to waste belaboring the topic…” She gave him a disgusted look. “Trunk? Door?”

He pressed the automatic lock, walked over to the driver’s side, got in and started up the car. She lifted her suitcase as she cursed him out in her mind and then got in the SUV.

“Woulda killed yuh to be a gentleman after havin’ muh here waiting all this time, huh?” It irritated her to no end that this fool had triggered her anger so quickly and had her channeling her mother’s tongue. She took a deep breath and counted to ten.

He turned up his music to some loud hip-hop and started driving, effectively ignoring her.

That was all right with Jazz. He might have been the finest guy she had ever laid eyes on, but he was also an arrogant-late-no-manners-having jerk.

Jasmine. Man what an evil—!

Troy shook his head as he made haste driving them to the small chapel where Alicia and Darren were having their wedding rehearsal. The sooner he got Ms. Jasmine Stewart out of his ride the better.

And what is with the Miss Cleo routine?

She hadn’t sounded like she was from the islands at first, but then all of a sudden she went full-blown come-back-to-Jamaica on him. He didn’t have the time or the patience for this crap. Not after just finding out that his parents were going to end their almost thirty-year marriage because they had supposedly “grown apart.”

He chanced a glance at Jasmine. She was as pretty as her picture, even though her hair was different. Instead of the wild and free natural style from the picture, it looked like her auburn hair had been straightened somehow and it was in one of those fancy pinned-up styles with rings of curls placed strategically. She must’ve gotten it done like that for the wedding.

Yeah, she was gorgeous. Too bad she was such a ball buster.

And to think, he had even planned to let her be the woman he kicked it with this weekend. Everyone knew that weddings were the perfect venues for hit-it-and-quit-it hookups. He’d seen Jasmine’s picture when Alicia asked him to pick up her up from the airport and he hadn’t been able to get her out of his mind. He had all kinds of lines ready to woo her.

Yeah, he’d been a little late picking her up… So what? He’d gotten there. And after getting the news he’d just received, news that totally messed with his mind in ways he wasn’t ready to address, she was lucky he even showed up at all.

And she played him by watching him go in the airport looking for her like a fool. Well, her loss, there would be plenty of women at the wedding looking for Mr. Right. He might not be Mr. Right, but he was for damn sure Mr. Right Now, and he wasn’t going to let Jasmine ruin his plans.

Jasmine.

He never remembered women’s names. But he couldn’t seem to forget hers, or anything about her, from her pretty cinnamon face to her fierce auburn natural. And her body…

Voluptuous came to mind… Her body was definitely a throwback to the Marilyn Monroe days, when real women had curves.

He turned, looked at her and frowned.

“Keep your eyes on the road, Stud. Get us there in one piece, it’s bad enough we’re going to be late.”

“Stud?” He couldn’t help the smile that came over his face. Maybe this weekend wasn’t a total loss after all…

“Yeah, if you won’t call me Jazz, as I prefer, I’ll just call you Stud, you know because you think you’re such hot stuff, but you’re really not all that. It’s like a play on words… Instead of ‘dud,’ I’ll call you ‘stud.’”

He gritted his teeth. If she wasn’t so fine and if he had a little less respect for women he would call her a long list of names. But instead he called her the one thing he knew she would hate.

“Cute, Jasmine. You made that up all by yourself?” He chuckled in a sarcastic manner and he could feel her bristling beside him.

The rehearsal dinner had been interesting, to say the least. Alicia must have been really trying to do the matchmaking thing because she even sat Jazz by Troy at dinner and they were paired together as bridesmaid and groomsman. If it weren’t for the buffer that Troy’s sister and brother-in-law provided, things wouldn’t have gone well.

“So, Troy picked you up from the airport? How did that go?” Sonya asked. “I’m not supposed to be saying anything… But Alicia was kind of hoping that the two of you would hit it off.”

“Nice way not to say anything, babe,” Kendrick said with a shake of his head.

Jazz let out an exaggerated laugh. “Alicia can just forget about that…” She looked at Troy and shook her head. “It’ll never happen. Never.”

Troy offered a sarcastic chuckle. “Yeah, I like my women a little less high-maintenance and a lot less crazy.”

Crazy? High-maintenance?

She could feel the heat rising in her neck and covering her cheeks. She did not need a repeat of her episode with Troy earlier. It was a nice upscale restaurant, and if she started cussing him out in her Bajan dialect, it probably wouldn’t look good. So she smiled at him instead, a smile that probably appeared just shy of crazed.

He offered that lazy half smile, half smirk of his that she quickly came to realize worked her last good nerve and made her want to smack him. She wasn’t used to these kinds of things. Guys usually didn’t faze her at all. She could take them or leave them, and nine times out of ten she was leaving them. And none had never ever gotten under her skin so intensely and so quickly.

“Excuse me.” She stood up and walked away from the table. She needed to go to the restroom to compose herself before she did or said something she would regret later.

After some breathing exercises and telling herself repeatedly that he was not all that, Jazz exited the restroom a newly composed woman. Until she saw Troy standing there…

“Look, before you blow up and start acting all psycho again, I just thought I’d check on you and apologize. I have no idea what I’m apologizing for, but whatever has your panties in a bunch that you perceive I am at fault for, I’m sorry.”

Is my eye twitching? My eye is twitching. This— She closed her eyes, took a deep breath and willed him to be gone when she opened them.

She opened her eyes. The left one twitched. No such luck.

“Go away, Stud. No need to apologize. Clearly you can’t help being just what you are, a jerk.”

“I’m not going away. We need to find a way to call a truce or something. Like it or not, our best friends are about to get married and that means we are going to be seeing a lot of each other through the years. Unless of course you and Alicia grow apart after college… One can only hope…” He let his words trail off and gave her a cocky grin. “I’m kidding. I’m kidding. Lighten up, will you?”

“Alicia and I will always be close. And as for you and me running into each other in the future…Just do your best to stay out of my way and I’ll do my best to stay out of yours.” She moved to walk around the arrogant man and he caught her arm.

She turned around and gave the offending hand a hard glare. He still wouldn’t let go. He stepped closer until there was no semblance of personal space whatsoever.

She inhaled.

Mmm. Drakkar Noir. Nice.

“What’s your problem, Jasmine? Why won’t you just—” He cut himself off, and before she knew it his lips were on hers and he had engulfed her mouth, mind and all of her senses in his all-consuming grasp.

His arms locked behind her and he held her so still and so close that the only thing she could move was her mouth. And apparently her mouth wanted to move. Her tongue snaked its way into his mouth and swirled around like it had found a new playground or something.

Her heart felt like it was going to beat its way out of her chest and her toes tingled. What the hell kind of kiss made your toes tingle? she wondered, as she pressed closer to him, enjoying the warmth of his body heat.

We are on fire.

She sucked his tongue into her mouth and decided to forget about her out-of-control heartbeat. He tasted too damn good.

Fire and Desire like Rick James and Teena Marie. I’m talking square biz. I’m talking lo—

She pulled her tongue, her body and her mind back at the same time and she used the hands that were trailing his massive and muscular chest to push him away. The disconnection between them was so gut-wrenching and so swift she almost fell.

It’s you! You? Oh. Hell. No. Not today. Not ever!

Panting and trying to keep her heart rate from spiraling out of control, she glared at him. “What the hell do you think you’re doing?”

She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand with as much disgust as someone who had literally been kissed senseless could muster. “Don’t ever do that again! I do not like you. And you need to just stay away from me.” She straightened her shoulders and half walked, half ran away.

Troy Singleton had taken her through a range of emotions in the space of a few hours. More emotions than any guy had ever taken her through before, and that placed him in a category all by his lonesome…

And that was just where he needed to stay, all by himself and the hell away from her. She couldn’t afford to let him get too close, ever. He could never catch her slipping or she would fall…fast.

Troy stood in the middle of the hallway and watched as Jasmine did her breakneck dash to get away from him. The expression that a feather could knock him down came to mind. Even though he could hear a small whisper in the far nether regions of his mind whispering, it’s her, her, he didn’t want to go after her, that was for damn sure. In fact, as soon as his knees were no longer weak and his toes uncurled and stopped tingling, he was probably going to run in the opposite direction and get the hell out of that restaurant.

If he was going to live up to his boast that he would remain a bachelor until he died and then they’d have to pry his player card out of his cold, dead hands, he needed to get as far away from Jasmine Stewart as possible.

He could never allow himself to get too close to her.

Ever.

He just reminded himself how mean and evil and crazy she was. That would work, and his player status would be safe…

Chapter 2

“All the world’s a stage and all the men and women merely players…”

—Shakespeare

Ten years later

“W ha de France yuh telling muh? Yuh mus be mad, nuh?” Stunned and increasingly livid didn’t even begin to cover the feeling of dread creeping through Jazz’s body. She knew she was just on the edge of losing it completely because her Bajan was coming out. Even though she had been on her mother’s island home of Barbados for a couple of days now, it wasn’t just being around her Barbadian kin that had made her code switch and flip on her dialect. It was the stress of losing the one person she loved more than anything in the world that had her about to snap on the puny lawyer.

The past few days had been one shock after another, starting with her mother’s death.

Jazz hadn’t even known that the cancer had come back. She’d been traveling a lot for work, a lot of traveling for a local television personality, anyway. And travel to and from Boston in the winter meant a lot of time spent in various airports because of delayed and canceled flights.

Airport chairs didn’t invite longtime sitting, let alone comfortable sleeping. Add to that losing the only person who had faithfully had your back and a lawyer spouting nonsense about terms of inheritance in the will tied to outrageous sums of money and marriage of all things, and it was easy to see why Jazz’s patience had finally run its course.

The stiff but kind of cute young lawyer seemed to sense that Jazz was on the brink of some kind of breaking point, because he moved back in his seat a little.

“Your mother has left you $500,000 with the condition that you marry in at least six months and remain married for at least two years.” He nervously fidgeted with his gray tie, which perfectly matched his gray suit and did nothing to compensate for the blandness of his starched white shirt. “If you fail to do so, the money will go to your father, Clifton Williamson.”

Jazz never knew her mother even had a will, let alone $500,000 to leave her. And all her life Carlyne Stewart had told her daughter never to trust no-good sorry men and to make sure she could take care of herself and never have to depend on a man.

Yet her mother had actually made it a condition of her inheritance that Jazz had to marry someone? It made no sense. None of it made sense.

Just like it didn’t make sense that she was going to have to bury her mother in a couple of days. That nonsensical element was the real tipping point threatening Jazz’s sanity.

Her mother was gone.

Why should anything else make sense in the world when Mom’s gone?

Jazz inhaled and exhaled. She braced her back against the wooden chair for some kind of support. She closed her eyes and held them closed as she mentally counted to twenty.

When she opened them, the lawyer was still there. The will was still on the table. Her mother was still gone. And the possibility that her deadbeat—never paid one dime of child support that she knew of—father, whom she wouldn’t even be able to pick out of a police lineup, would be getting a whole lot of her mother’s money was taunting her brain and giving her an acute migraine.

No way would Clifton Williamson see one thin dime of her mother’s hard-earned money.