Ready for Love

“You know what? I have often wondered what it would take to shut you up.”

Maritza smirked and filled her expression with more brazenness than she felt at that moment.

“Funny, I’ve often wondered the same thing about you. Unfortunately, Penny would miss you if I followed through on any of my ideas.”

He chuckled again. It was masculine laughter at its finest. “Hmm… Good thing my idea will shut us both up for a while…then we both win.” His sexy face leaned in, further invading her space.

She gulped. And willed herself to pull away, but she leaned forward instead. It was as if some magnetic force was moving her head, twisting and contorting it to find the right angle for his lips to meet hers.

It couldn’t be of her own free will. Could it?

She did not want this. Did she?

His lips connected to hers and she sighed. It sounded like a contented kitten that had just lapped up the last bit of milk. More like a sigh and mewl mixed together, but nevertheless problematic….

His tongue traced her lips and more shocks went through her. Her heart seemed as if it wanted to pound its way right out of her chest and into his hands.

Stupid heart, she thought as she opened her lips and allowed her tongue entry into his mouth.

She wasn’t letting her heart out but there was no reason her tongue couldn’t come out and play.

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 the Romance in Color Reviewer’s 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]. Readers can visit her website at www.gwynethbolton.com.

Ready for Love

Gwyneth Bolton

www.millsandboon.co.uk

To all the readers who loved the Hightowers and have been asking for Terrill and Maritza’s story almost from the beginning… This one is for you!

Dear Reader,

Psssst. Psssst. Pssssst.

Come closer…

Okay… Terrill and Maritza have a secret. It is a secret that will shock all of their friends and family. And it will probably even shock you, dear reader!

I wish I could share their secret with you but I am taking great risk telling you this. Okay, I’ll say this much, I think of the old New Edition song, “My Secret” whenever I think of these two enemies turned lov—

Oops! I’ve said too much already. But let’s just say, when New Edition’s Ralph Tresvant sings “sparks begin to fly, lightening in the sky,” he could very well be talking about what happens every time Terrill and Maritza come within five feet of one another. And their secret has a lot to do with what happens when neither one of them can ignore all those sparks any longer.

You’ll have to read it to find out the rest. But I hope you will enjoy finding out Terrill and Maritza’s secret as much as I enjoyed revealing it!

Much love and peace,

Gwyneth

I want to offer a special thanks to my family: my husband, Cedric Bolton; my mom, Donna Pough; my sisters, Jennifer, Cassandra, Michelle and Tashina; my nieces Ashlee and Zaria and my nephew Michael.

And I’d like to offer an extra special thanks to all the readers and book clubs that have read my books and have let me know that they enjoyed them. I can’t tell you how much your support has meant to me. I appreciate you all so much because the readers make up the heart of this genre that I love so very much! Thanks for all you do to make sure that the legacy of Black romance novels continues.

Contents

First Interlude

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Second Interlude

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Third Interlude

Epilogue

First Interlude

If you stay ready, you won’t ever have to get

ready…

“Girl, you got some’s plainin’ to do!” Samantha Hightower did a halfway decent mimic of Ricky Ricardo. The dark chocolate beauty was a dead ringer for a pre–Weight Watchers Jennifer Hudson.

Maritza rolled her eyes at Joel Hightower’s wife as she toyed with the ten-carat pear-shaped engagement ring on her finger and tried to figure out where it all had gone so incredibly wrong.

Wrong man.

Wrong ring.

Wrong everything.

Wrong like the way she was thinking about Terrill Carter—the man who was undoubtedly the love of her life—instead of Andrew “Speed-Lo” MacGregor, the man she had agreed to marry…

“She doesn’t have to explain anything to me! Little mamacita was double dipping and trying to get her vanilla-chocolate swirl on! She wanted two men and then she got caught up in the mix. Shoulda asked an ol’ school playa like me how to play the game and not let the game play you. That’s the truth.” Carla, her best friend Penny Keys-Hightower’s mother, was stretched out on Maritza’s cream-butter leather sofa relaxing and popping off at the mouth—feet up and shoes on like she paid the mortgage or something.

Maritza could only shake her head because there was no point in trying to get into it with Carla. The petite firecracker looked spiffy in a peach maxi sundress and matching sandals. But her spiffy behind was going to hear it from Maritza if she left just one scuff mark on the butter leather.

The bright airiness of her downtown Los Angeles loft was cluttered with crowds of questioning people. The Hightower wives and their families, along with Maritza’s parents and brothers, made for a pretty intense interrogation team. Everyone wanted answers after Maritza’s fiasco of an engagement party hadn’t gone exactly as planned, and Terrill Carter showed up trying to get Maritza to admit she loved him.

Her fiancé’s boys hadn’t liked Terrill’s impromptu interruption at all, and there had been a small scuffle that ended up with everyone being kicked out of the restaurant and possibly banned for life.

Yes, the people roaming around her loft wanted answers and they probably weren’t going to go anywhere until they got them. Maritza had no idea how she would appease them all, once they started throwing questions at her. On her best day she could take whatever people threw at her without blinking. She could work a room full of normal people and have them exactly where she wanted them. But she was unfortunately not having her best day. And the people in her loft would be hard to handle one on one if she didn’t want them all in her business, let alone as a pack of frenzied friends and family.

“Mommy, now you know you couldn’t have schooled nobody the way you got caught out there between my daddy and C-Money, so stop playing.” Penny rolled her eyes at her mother and sighed before turning to Maritza. Her bronze locks were hanging down her back and the black linen sleeveless pantsuit she was wearing had her looking like a sure stand-in for Janet Jackson in the “That’s the Way Love Goes” video.

“But for real, for real, girlfriend,” Penny offered in a need-to-know-all tone, “you are going to have to tell us what the deal is! How the hell did my boy, from way back in the day, end up crashing your engagement party like he was Dwayne Wayne and you were Whitley Gilbert in that classic episode of A Different World? Terrill was pouring his heart out on some ol’ ‘Maritza, please, baby, please,’ tip.”

Maritza ran an image-consulting firm called New Images by Keys and Morales with Penny. Both former video models and dancers, they had met on a rap video shoot years ago when they were both working their way through college and had developed a steadfast bond.

Since Maritza had grown up the only girl in a family of brothers and Penny had only ever had guy friends, developing a close friendship had been a challenge for the two of them. They had had to learn how to be good friends and trust the bonds of the sistah-girl-friendship. But they had worked at their friendship and it grew. Their business, New Images by Keys and Morales, was doing extremely well and was poised to do even better.

“They must have been having a secret affair. We all knew there was something there all along. But we just thought they liked each other and didn’t want to admit it.” Celia Hightower shook her head in disapproval and Maritza thought she couldn’t have felt worse until her own mother, Sharon Morales, joined in.

The similarities between her own mother and Celia Hightower had always made Maritza hold the Hightower matriarch in high esteem. They didn’t necessarily look alike, but both women had a regal air about them that seemed to say, “I shall not be moved.” They also had a calm way about them; even when they were telling you off, they could do it without getting a hair out of place or looking bad in any way.

She admired both women as mother and other-mother as well as older sorority sisters. Maritza, like her mother and Celia Hightower, was a member of Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority.

She’d pledged in college just before she started dancing in music videos. And it was the one thing she’d done during her college years to actually please her mother. She also did it because growing up she had always coveted her mother’s pink and green sorority paraphernalia.

“Maritza, I just don’t understand you at all. Why would you agree to marry one man when you clearly have unresolved issues with another?” The look of disappointment on Sharon Morales’s face and the tone of clear disapproval in her voice took Maritza down to her lowest point.

Sharon stood in a sleek black cocktail dress that showed off a perfect, size ten figure. Her creamy butter-pecan complexion held very few wrinkles. Her salt-and-pepper hair hung in naturally curled ringlets around her face and down her shoulders. Her hair was the only hint that she was the mother of four adult children, each in their thirties.

Maritza and her famous Black feminist academic mother had definitely had their issues in the past. Part of Maritza’s reason for even becoming a video model was an act of rebellion against her mother, the world-renowned feminist theorist and women’s and gender studies professor. She still got a kick out of getting a rise out of her mother.

But Maritza’s rebellion was something she controlled and navigated. The kind of parental disappointment and disapproval on Sharon’s face at that moment was new territory for Maritza and it didn’t feel good.

How the hell did I get here?

Why couldn’t I just admit that I loved Terrill?

Why couldn’t she just trust that things would work out between her and Terrill and just step out on faith?

Why did she have to find a way to ruin the good thing they had going?

“I didn’t know if I should have helped Andrew’s boys kick Terrill’s behind or help my man Terrill out.” Maritza’s older brother Victor had to add his layer to the guilt quilt their mother was weaving.

Her overprotective, LAPD detective brother was just getting started and she knew she had to nip it in the bud before all of her equally overprotective brothers and her massively overprotective father got in on the discussion.

“Niña bonita, you know your papi loves you with every breath in his body, but everyone is right, you have a lot of explaining to do. Now if Terrill didn’t have just cause to try and break up your engagement party, then fine. But if by some chance you have feelings for this man…and keep in mind, niña bonita, your papi knows you like the back of his hand…” Her father paused for emphasis and gave her the don’t-lie-to-me-because-I-already-know-the truth look. “Then you need to come clean once and for all. We won’t judge you.” Manuel Morales Sr. wore the look of distinguished emeritus professor like a second skin.

His warm caramel skin and silver-trimmed hair, beard and mustache gave him an air of respectability. And it was sometimes hard to reconcile the fact that the man who was now known as the father of Afro-Latino Studies was once on America’s most wanted list as a leader of the Young Lords, a Puerto Rican power group in the late 1960s.

But that’s how her parents had met. Her papi had been a Young Lord and her mom had been a junior Black Panther. Both were staunch nationalist activists until her mother became a feminist and they both got involved with academics. Now, although they were still left-leaning activists, they were scholar-activists and most of their activism was in higher education or in the pages of their many nonfiction books.

“I don’t know about all that. I could have been home maxing and relaxing instead of coming all the way out to Cali for some bogus party. So I am judging.” Her brothers Manuel and Victor pushed their youngest brother, Louis, as soon as the words came out of his mouth.

Louis had big brown eyes, close-cropped black hair and a dimpled smile that belied his mischievous nature. A lot of people told her that her brother could be the fine actor Adam Rodriguez’s twin, but she couldn’t see it.

Louis shrugged and shook his head as he turned to push Maritza. “What? Papi’s niña bonita can never do any wrong? And once again I’m the only one willing to call her on her crap. I could have been scoring big time this weekend instead of coming here for an engagement party, when she doesn’t even know who she wants to marry. I knew she wasn’t ready to get married!”

Maritza rolled her eyes at Louis. If she had to rank her three older brothers from most to least liked, Louis, the brother who was only a year older than her and the one who should have been the closest to her, would be number three and least favorite. She loved them all, but Louis knew how to work her nerves, probably because he had the uncanny ability to see right through her, just like Terrill.

Her brothers took the best traits from their African-American mother and Afro-Latino, Puerto Rican father. They were each tall, like her mother’s basketball playing brothers, with strong, muscular builds. Their skin tones showcased varying shades of honey. Their jet-black hair had more wave than curl. Each had his own version of their father’s devilish dimpled smile.

Compared to her absolutely gorgeous older brothers, Maritza had always felt like an ugly duckling growing up. It hadn’t helped that she was also a tomboy until she started getting the curves that would one day make her a famous video vixen and the rest was history. She realized she might not be as fine as her brothers, but many men considered her looks and build eye candy.

She knew that her best attributes were her shape—for which she owed thanks to her mother—and her hair. But her long black curls could easily be attributed to both parents. Like that of many African-Americans, her mother’s heritage had a mix of some Caucasian and Native American. And, as a native Puerto Rican, her father claimed Black first but also had a mix of Spaniard and Indio in his lineage. Maritza liked to credit the hair to the Native peoples on both sides of her family tree and made jokes about having Indian in her family whenever people commented on her looks or hair. When it came down to identity though, she claimed her Black and Latina roots proudly.

She looked at her fine brothers and smiled as she thought about the various ways she and her brothers had found to rebel. Most people would think that having former nationalist parents who had protested the status quo and spent time in jail for their political beliefs would leave little room for kids to actually do anything that would shock their parents. But Maritza and her brothers each found ways.

Manuel Junior, the oldest, was a conservative talking head on the most conservative news channels on television. And for liberal, left-leaning progressives like Sharon and Manuel Sr., that was probably the ultimate act of rebellion. Victor was a cop and, for former nationalists who used to scream “off the pigs,” having a son decide to become a cop was probably just as bad as a fundamentalist preacher having a rock ’n’ roll artist as a child. Louis, at least, was leaving the corporate world that her parents believed was bleeding the country dry to become a professor. Too bad he was becoming a professor of practice in the business college of an Ivy League university and training more corporate sharks.

And then there was Maritza…Maritza Morales, the only daughter of famous Black feminist Sharon Morales, a former video vixen with a sexual past that would probably make her father have a stroke—even if he had grown up in the free love 1960s.

Yes, the Morales bunch proved that those other PKs—preachers’ kids—had nothing on professors’ kids when it came to acting out and breaking expectations.

“Niña bonita, you had better come clean. We need to know the truth about what happened and why.” Manuel Sr.’s voice was extra stern now and Maritza knew that it would only be a matter of time before he was no longer using his pet name for her and he started calling her by her full given name, Maritza Diane Morales. Once he went there she would have to work extra hard to make it back to her perfect little daddy’s girl place.

“We’re waiting,” Sharon added as she crossed her arms and tapped her foot.

Maritza sighed. There was no getting around this. She would have to tell them everything. She eyed the Hightower wives, Penny’s parents, Carla and Gerald, and her own parents and brothers. All of them had traveled to Los Angeles to meet her future husband and to celebrate her engagement.

An engagement that really should have never happened…

If only she could have one of those Being Erica do-overs…

But what would she go back and change? Would she not accept Andrew’s proposal? Or would she find a way to stop Terrill from kissing her and turning her nice, orderly life upside down?

She shook her head because she knew which one she would have changed and there was no way in hell she wanted to live in a world where she didn’t know what a kiss from Terrill felt like.

It was time to come clean.

She cleared her throat. “See, what had happened was—”

“Oh Lord! Here she come starting with some ol’ what had happened! That means she ’bout to drop ol’ okey-doke crap. Anytime they start with see, what had happened, you know you ’bout to hear some ol’ convoluted mess.” Carla shook her head, all the while stretching and getting into a comfortable spot to hear what she was deeming a mess.

“Carla, hush up and let the girl tell her story. Go ahead, Maritza. And make it plain.” Celia Hightower gave both Carla and Maritza a stern look.

With that admonishment from the matriarch of the Hightower clan, she decided beating around the bush and hemming and hawing weren’t going to work and she needed to just tell the truth.

“Okay, it started back when Big Mama passed away…”

“Now that’s what I call a shiner! Da–mn! Man, you got knocked out!”

Terrill Carter held the ice pack over his swollen black eye and glared at his best friend, Jason Hightower, with the other eye. On any other day he would be able to take Jason’s ribbing, but not today.

It was nice to have company in his normally empty—except for when he had a work-related event or party going on—place. His Bel Air mansion was more a sign of status, and an affirmation that he had made it, than anything else. It certainly didn’t become a home until it was filled with his friends and since his closest friends, the Hightowers, lived in the city where he was born and raised, Paterson, New Jersey, the mansion didn’t feel like a home very often.

“Yeah, man! They almost jacked you all the way up! Just imagine how much worse it could have been if we hadn’t been there to pull dude’s crew off of you. What in the world possessed you to crash the engagement party anyway?” Joel Hightower had his usual expression—on the verge of laughter—on his face as he leaned against the door in the entryway to Terrill’s state-of-the-art kitchen.

“That’s not the most important question. As usual, you guys are slow on the uptake,” Lawrence offered wryly as he twirled a toothpick in his mouth and studied Terrill.

Terrill could feel the third degree coming and he didn’t like it one bit. Not with a swollen eye and the knowledge that he had only put a temporary stall on the love of his life’s wedding plans. He had only managed to break up the engagement party. There was still a chance that Maritza might be marrying another man in six months or so. How was he supposed to cope with that?

“The most important question is—” Lawrence leaned forward and arched his left eyebrow and gave Terrill his most intense cop stare “—when exactly did you and Maritza become an item? And how long have the two of you been seeing each other? Because no man comes up into an engagement party the way you did without having a really good reason.”

“Word,” Jason agreed.

“Right!” Joel exclaimed.

“Co-sign,” Patrick offered with a halfway bored shrug.

Things had not turned out the way he expected them to, that was for damn sure. He was supposed to waltz up in there and claim the woman he loved and leave with her. He and Maritza were supposed to be making love right now instead of him nursing a black eye and explaining anything and everything to the Hightower brothers.

The Hightower brothers were all tall, in shape and handsome with mahogany complexions and killer smiles. Terrill loved these men like they were his own brothers. But damn if they knew when to just leave a brother alone and let him sulk in silence.

“Come on man, you might as well come clean now. You and Maritza have been doing that I-hate-you-but-I-might-really-love-you dance for years. And we saw the way she looked at you when you bum-rushed the spot—” Jason started.

“True,” Joel added. “Love was all in her face. I never would have believed it unless I had seen it with my own eyes.”

“Word. And the way ol’ girl screamed when Speed-Lo’s bodyguard punched you and knocked you the hell out! Man, you can’t tell me she didn’t give a damn what happened to you,” Patrick added.

“So you might as well come clean, man. How long have you and Maritza been kicking it and what do we need to do to help you get your woman back?” Lawrence had a cynical smirk on his face.

Terrill winced and figured he could also add can’t-leave-well-enough-alone to the Hightower brothers’ list of annoying habits. But at least they had his back.

He remembered how the Hightowers used to joke with him all the time that light-skinned brothers were out of style and they’d always get more ladies than him unless light skin made a comeback. He would joke right back that he was the comeback. Still, the Hightowers were all actually married to the women of their dreams now and he was trying to stop the woman of his dreams from marrying someone else.

Maybe if he talked to them and gained some perspective he could figure out a way to get his woman back. He needed to make that happen because without her, he knew he would never be happy.

Terrill sighed. “Fine, since you guys refuse to leave well enough alone, maybe you can be of some use to me after all. Maritza and I have been kicking it on and off for a while. Since Big Mama died, as a matter of fact, right when Jason and Penny got back together…”