Affair of Pleasure

“You want some of this?” A shirtless man stumbled from his shuffling dance around the fire to offer Nichelle a blunt.

She shook her head in refusal. “Thank you, though.”

He passed it on to someone else with a happy smile.

“This is what you invited Dad to?”

Madalie groaned and rolled her eyes. “Dad was young once, Nicki. He doesn’t have a stick up his butt about stuff like this.”

True enough. Their father was firmly of the carpe diem school of life. Grab it now since tomorrow is promised to no one.

“Still, it just seems wrong. If I were into this—” she gestured to the blunt being passed around the fire “—I don’t know if I could smoke with him sitting right there.”

“You’re so uptight. Wolfe is definitely your more fun half.” Madalie glanced over Nichelle’s shoulder, and her eyes lit up. “Daddy! Willa!” She jumped to her feet and waved frantically at the two figures making their way through the growing crowd. They waved back.

Their father—serious in his Miami Dolphins cap and Wayfarer sunglasses—walked next to Willa, who kicked her way through the sand on bare feet, hands shoved in the pockets of her incredibly short shorts. Their father also wore shorts.

Nichelle greeted their father with a hug. “Hi, Dad.” The last time she’d seen him, he was sitting at an outdoor café with a woman young enough to be one of his daughters. Nichelle had driven past the café, barely believing her eyes. But from that brief glimpse, he’d seemed happy.

“I thought you’d be too busy at the office to come out this evening,” he said to Nichelle, then kissed Madalie’s forehead.

“Woman cannot live by massive paychecks alone,” Nichelle said with a teasing smile.

He chuckled and sat next to her in the sand. “My baby is growing up.”

Willa, the image of their long-dead mother with her stripper’s body and angel face, smirked at Nichelle. “Yeah, I thought you’d be too tied up in the office with Wolfe to come out and play with us mere mortals.”

Madalie snickered. “I wish it was bondage with that hot man instead of work that kept her in the office all day and night. It would at least be more interesting.”

“And way more fun.” Willa hiccupped with laughter.

“Screw you.” Nichelle flipped off both her sisters. She was so tired of them harping on the imagined relationship between her and Wolfe. When it came from anyone else, she didn’t care. But there was something about the way her sisters teased that always rubbed her raw.

Their father made a token sound of peacekeeping. “Girls...”

“Okay, Daddy.” The three chorused voices set off a round of laughter on the beach.

Fire crackled and sparked in the circle of stones, its light appearing brighter as the sun dimmed and dusk’s softening colors spread across the horizon and over the ocean.

Nichelle leaned into her father’s shoulder to watch the fire. This, she thought with a sigh, feels perfect. After a long day of conferences, meetings and negotiations, it felt good to simply be. No stress or expectations.

On the other side of their father, Madalie was asking Willa where she got her shorts. Nichelle hugged her knees to her chest and tilted her head up to the stars.

Chapter 2

“Pass me the rice and peas, Cheryl.” Glendon Diallo reached out to his daughter for the white serving platter piled high with the fragrant dish.

The entire Diallo family, along with Nichelle and the rest of the Wrights, sat at the large oval table in the Diallos’ dining room. Nineteen people, voices all raised in conversation and laughter. Hyacinth Diallo insisted on having a family gathering every four months that all the Diallos, no matter where they were in the world, had to attend. As next door neighbors and friends for nearly the entire twenty-four years they had shared the same Key Biscayne neighborhood, the Diallos had regularly invited the Wrights to participate in many of their gatherings, subconsciously melding the families over the years.

That melding had become even more deliberate after Nichelle’s mother died. At the time, Nichelle had thought Cin Diallo just felt sorry for them, but now, with the wisdom of adulthood, she realized that was what friends did for each other. Although she helped raise her two sisters after her mother had been killed in a car accident, because of the Diallos, she’d never been alone.

“I hear you and Wolfe are going off to Paris next week,” Alice Diallo, one of the youngest at just a few weeks past her twentieth birthday, said with a sigh. “That’s going to be so romantic.” She drew out the last word with a sly smile.

“We’re going there for work,” Wolfe reminded her as he reached for a platter of ripe plantains. He forked some onto his plate and tilted his head to listen to what his father, seated to his immediate right, was saying.

“But Paris is Paris,” Alice said. “When I went there after high school, I totally fell in love with the city and with this gorgeous boy I met there.”

“You’re always falling in love, Alice. I bet you don’t even remember that boy’s name.”

“Names aren’t important,” Alice said dismissively. “It’s about the feeling.”

Good-natured laughter bubbled around the table. She was only twenty but had been in love more times than anyone else at the table. At least according to her. Every man she dated was susceptible to her declarations of love. Once, she’d even fallen in love with a woman. The family refused to talk about it, even though she kept bringing it up and wanting the family to recognize that she was now “queer.” Just like all the others, that love affair had blown over after a few weeks.

“It’s the city of romance.” Alice pointed her fork at Nichelle. “You can’t tell me you haven’t thought about it.”

Nichelle shook her head. “I’ve been to Paris before, remember? I spent a few days there while I was backpacking through Europe. It’s a pretty city, but I didn’t see any romance in it, just a lot of people using any excuse to make out in public.”

“You’re so cynical!” Alice made a dramatic motion with her fork, sending a piece of asparagus flying.

“Hey! Stop wasting food,” Willa called out from the other end of the table where the flying vegetable landed.

“I’m practical,” Nichelle said to Alice. “There’s a difference. When I fell in love, it wasn’t in Paris, but I think those feelings are just as legitimate, right?” she teased the young girl.

Wolfe caught her with a stare worthy of his namesake. “You’ve been in love?”

Nichelle winced, wanting to kick herself for saying anything about that failed affair. “Yes. Remember the Harvard professor I dated a few years ago?”

“That bourgie douche-bag?”

“Elia!”

Nearly the entire table exploded to scold the fifteen-year-old and youngest Diallo child.

“Don’t act.” She stared them all down. “You know none of you liked him. Especially not you, Wolfe.”

Wolfe bit into a plantain, and Nichelle noticed that the fruit left a sheen of oil on his lower lip. He licked at it, but the glimmer remained, making his mouth look plump and bitable.

“He wasn’t very interesting,” Wolfe said in his driest tone.

“See?” Elia laughed. “And Wolfe usually likes everybody.”

“You don’t have to say everything you think, darling,” her mother gently scolded.

Elia pouted and stabbed her fork into a piece of curry chicken on her plate. But she looked up at her big brother and grinned. Wolfe winked back at her, then smiled innocently at Nichelle when she took note of their exchange.

Mid-meal, the doorbell rang. Since they had dismissed the staff for the day, Glendon Diallo, Wolfe’s father, got up to answer the door. He returned a few minutes later with Nala, Nichelle’s best friend.

She grinned and hefted a bottle of wine above her head as if she’d just captured it in the wild. “Greetings, family!”

Nala looked as if she’d just stepped from the pages of a Goth magazine in a sheer black shirt flashing her sequined black bra, a black leather skirt and heavy knee-high boots, also black. She wore her hair long and straightened, the inky mass hanging over her shoulders and halfway down her back.

She made her way around the table to greet everyone with a kiss on the cheek, hug or handshake. When she made it to Nichelle’s side, she dragged a seat up to squeeze between Nichelle and Madalie.

“Why didn’t you just use your key?” Nichelle bumped Nala with her shoulder. Nala had been in the Diallos’ lives as long as she’d been in Nichelle’s, whole-heartedly welcomed into both families since she didn’t have a family of her own. Her keys to both houses were symbols of that welcome.

“I didn’t want to be rude,” Nala said.

Glendon Diallo sucked his teeth. “How long have you known us?”

Nala laughed. “Good point.”

Wolfe’s mother slid a plate and utensils in front of her. “We’re glad you could make it,” she said, squeezing Nala’s shoulder.

She thanked Hyacinth with a smile.

“I didn’t think you’d be back from Brunei so soon,” Nichelle said.

Nala grinned. “Hey, it’s free food night. You think I’d miss that?”

Nala and Nichelle met when they were both twelve years old and modeling for the same Miami-based clothing line. It wasn’t long before Nala found that she preferred being on the other side of the camera, and Nichelle realized she didn’t like any part of the business.

Nala was an orphan, a trust-fund baby whose parents had been killed in a freak shooting in Miami when she was just a toddler. She was raised by lawyers entrusted with her twelve-billion-dollar fortune until she turned twenty-one. Despite all the things she’d been through and the financial fortune that could have turned her into an unbearable person, Nala was a wonderful friend, and Nichelle felt lucky to know her. They were as different as night and day—and just as necessary to each other’s lives.

“So tell me, what did I miss?” Nala asked.

“She and Wolfe are running off to Paris together,” Kingsley, the oldest, said dryly. Nichelle frowned his way, but he only arched a teasing eyebrow then winked.

Nala giggled and looked at Nichelle. “Finally, huh?”

* * *

The dinner was wonderfully long. They spent hours lingering at the table over conversation and laughter and trading stories. As the evening stretched toward midnight, the dining room emptied and people made their way to the large family room or to the terrace overlooking the pool to share cigars and more risqué conversation.

Nichelle snuggled into the hammock at the back of the house, nearly half a bottle of merlot swimming pleasantly through her system. Nala lay on the matching hammock a few feet away, snoring softly.

Light footsteps approached from inside the house. Nichelle turned from her smiling contemplation of her friend to see Wolfe standing in the doorway. The scent of cigar smoke clung to him.

“Hey.”

He stood in the light, dress shirt unbuttoned to show the strong line of his throat, and draped perfectly over his wide chest and shoulders. He looked ready to head out on a date.

“You leaving?” she asked softly.

He looked surprised. “Why do you say that?”

She only laughed, saying nothing.

“Yes, I am.” His mouth curved in a sinful grin. “A new friend called.”

“The one who came by the office?”

“No, another one.”

She shot him a disbelieving look, then shrugged. “Just make sure you wrap it up.”

“Always.” He didn’t deny he was heading off on a booty call.

Nichelle shrugged off an unexpected twinge of unease. “Wait.” She sat up in the swaying hammock. “Are your parents asleep yet?”

He frowned. “No.”

“Then why are you leaving? I’m sure they want to sit and talk with you some more.” Although Wolfe loved his parents, he was often at work, or at play, seeing them maybe once a month tops, and sometimes not for very long. “You should stay,” she murmured. “The new booty can wait until tomorrow at least.”

She could see his eyebrow tip toward the ceiling, a considering look on his face. He was surprised by her request, she could tell.

“I’ll see,” he finally said, hands in his pockets.

Nichelle knew what that meant. “Okay.” She lay back down. “Have fun tonight, wherever you end up.”

He paused in the doorway again, shoulders broad against the light flooding from the sitting room behind him. “Good night.”

“Don’t let the strange girl bite,” she sang out to him softly.

When he left, she heard Nala stirring nearby. Her friend sat up and swung a leg on either side of the hammock.

“Is he really going to leave his parents’ house on family dinner night so he can go bang some random chick?” The disbelief was plain in Nala’s voice.

“It seems so,” Nichelle said. “He is a man, after all. I think it’s biologically impossible for him to turn down booty.” But even as she said the words, she winced. That wasn’t quite true. Wolfe was actually a lot more discriminating than that.

As if reading her mind, Nala snorted with laughter. “If he caught every piece of ass that got thrown his way, he’d never get any damn work done. Hell, he’d never eat.”

“At least not food, anyway.” Nichelle smiled and curled up in the hammock. It rocked from the movement of her body.

“Doesn’t that piss you off?” Nala asked.

“What?”

“The fact that he’s off screwing around when he could be here with you...and his parents?”

“No. Should it?”

Nala sighed. Even in the dark, Nichelle could practically see her rolling her eyes. The assumption that she and Wolfe were, or at least should be, together wasn’t limited to people in the office. Nala and just about everyone Nichelle loved rarely missed an opportunity to tease her about him, insinuating that there was a lot more going on between them than she and Wolfe were letting on. But she’d never had any romantic or sexual feelings for him. Yes, he was the most interesting of his eight brothers. But that was all. There was nothing more to her admiration than that. He was gorgeous, but there were gorgeous men all over the place, especially in Miami.

“Go back to sleep, Nala.”

Her friend cackled and flopped back down into the hammock. “And you should wake up, Nichelle. That man won’t wait around forever.”

Nichelle snorted, a bad habit she’d picked up from her best friend years ago. “The only one waiting around here is you. For a hookup that’s never going to happen.”

Only silence greeted her declaration. Apparently, Nala had taken her snarky advice and fallen back asleep. Annoyed, Nichelle stared up at the ceiling of the verandah, the hammock swaying with her weight, her mind drifting. To Wolfe.

Chapter 3

Paris was beautiful, just like Alice had said. The taxi from the airport dropped them off on a breezy and warm day bright with midsummer sunshine and the smell of baking bread from a nearby boulangerie. On the steps of the hotel, Nichelle drew in a deep lungful of scented air and basked in the skin-prickling heat of the sun. Wolfe had to nudge her up the marble steps and through the gold-trimmed doors, where the doorman watched her with an indulgent smile.

“This is nice,” she said.

He laughed. “Yes, it is.”

Despite her unexpected infatuation with the city, she was more than ready when it came time to unpack and meet Wolfe in his adjoining room for a prewar conference. His narrow windows opened out on to a busy street and a view of the Eiffel Tower. Sunlight poured in like a dream.

Still wearing her travel clothes, she sat across from Wolfe in one of a delicate-looking pair of chairs near the coffee table. Nearly every piece of furniture in the room was lined with gold and perched on spindly legs better suited to effete royalty than a pair of robust Americans. But Wolfe took everything in stride, making himself comfortable in the slight burgundy-and-gold chair that only emphasized his powerful masculinity.

“Let’s go over this thing one more time,” he said.

She wordlessly handed him the tablet with her proposal and the slight changes she’d made during the taxi ride from the airport. As they talked, Nichelle’s gaze slid to the open window. Although she wouldn’t admit it just yet, she’d love to go and play outside. Alice’s glowing talk about the magic of Paris had affected her more than she realized. Even the sound of traffic flowing in through the fifth-story window, a soothing mix of cars, bicycle bells and voices speaking softly in French, was its own seduction.

She and Wolfe weren’t slated to be in Paris long, and the client they were chasing was just as likely to tell them no as he was to say yes. And it was really just peanuts compared to the Quraishi account, the one she’d given Wolfe the proposal for in Miami.

Jamal al Din Quraishi was the Moroccan head of a multibillion-dollar research and development company that also dabbled in oil. Having him as a client would be a real coup. Nichelle had it from her sources that she wasn’t the only one angling for his business. The competition would be high, and gunning for the Quraishi account was going to be a challenge. Luckily, she loved a challenge.

Nichelle stopped in midsentence when she heard her phone chiming from the other room. “One sec.”

In her room, she grabbed her cell and frowned at what she read on the screen. “Favreau doesn’t want to talk business until after three this afternoon,” she said when she got back to his room. She paused to look at the clock. “Four hours from now.”

Wolfe tossed his cell on the replica Louis XVI settee across from him with an impatient scowl. “But he did invite us to come to his restaurant for drinks and enjoy his hospitality.” Apparently, he’d just gotten the same message.

“I’m not here to socialize with people I’d normally avoid at home.” The bright sunlight teased Nichelle through the window, something beautiful and tempting she couldn’t have just yet. “I came to close a deal.”

Wolfe shrugged. “Well he’s happily stringing us along. At this point I’m not even sure if he has any intentions of doing business with us.”

“That little weasel better sit down and listen to reason. I am not in the mood.” She threw another longing glance toward the open window with its gleam of sunlight.

Wolfe caught her eye and smiled. “You keep looking out that window like you have someplace to be. You want to test out the city of romance theory for yourself?”

Nichelle looked away, not able to hide her smile. It was sometimes disconcerting how transparent she was to him. “Not quite. But if Favreau is going to jerk us around for four hours, we might as well go do something interesting that involves sunshine.”

The last time she had been in Paris was for a long trip in college. She and three friends had only stayed in the city for four days before hopping on a train to Naples. The entire four days had been wet and cool, even though it was summer, the clouds and rain retreating for only a few hours at a time before enveloping the city once more in gloom. She’d been over Paris before they even left. But now, with the sunlight creating its particular enchantment, she could see glimmers of what everyone else talked about when they chattered on about Paris and its ambiance.

“Screw it,” Nichelle muttered. “Let’s just go out. Okay?”

Wolfe chuckled. “Okay. Just give me about fifteen minutes to change and make a quick phone call.”

“Good.” She headed to her room.

Like their offices, her hotel room was just like his. No surprises, although it seemed that she was already going to be spending more time in his room than in hers. They tended to take turns monopolizing one of the other’s spaces. His room actually had the better view.

Nichelle exchanged her tights and loose blouse for jeans and a thin cotton blouse with a string tied at the throat. She tucked a few things into a small purse and was ready to leave the room within ten minutes when the open laptop caught her eye, a new message on her email screen. Then her cell phone chirped with a message. It was from Favreau.

My apologies. I have meetings for the rest of the afternoon but have the next two hours free. Are you ready to impress me? My offices in 30 minutes.

Damn. Nichelle’s fingers tightened around the phone. But she took a breath. She knew the proposal for Favreau backward and forward but dammit, she had been excited about taking advantage of the Parisian sunshine. Phone in hand, she slipped through the door between her room and Wolfe’s.

“Favreau just sent an em—” She almost swallowed her tongue.

Wolfe was naked. He stood in the middle of the room covered in nothing but the light pouring through the windows. A pair of briefs dangled from his hand, as if he was giving some thought to pulling them on, but he didn’t move a muscle when she walked into the room. If anything, he stood even straighter to give her more to look at.

Oh my God... Nichelle’s mouth went dry, and her eyes widened.

His body was angled slightly away from her, a hip and shoulder in her direction, intriguing shadows swimming over his skin. And he was breathtaking. Literally, she could not catch her breath, staring at what she’d never seen before. A man who was beautiful to look at, true. But, having him tucked firmly in the realm of family, she’d never have thought to wonder at what lay beneath his designer suits and expensive jeans. But now she knew.

After the first hot and consuming glance, she dropped her eyes.

His feet were big. The bones strong but delicate-looking at the same time. Narrow ankles, muscled calves. But instead of keeping her eyes low like she should have, she looked up.

Wolfe had solid knees with scars on them from his childhood spent climbing, and sometimes falling out of, trees. There was a mole on his muscled thigh, the blemish like a drop of cocoa on the thickly cut flesh. She lingered over it, taking her time to visually devour the body she had missed for years.

His thighs were big enough for her to sink her fingers into. Spread wide, they allowed a clear view of his long and heavy sex. Nichelle swallowed and blinked as his body started to respond to her gaze, thickening even more before her eyes, rising toward the slats of muscle in his belly. She yanked her gaze up to his wide chest, pectoral muscles, tiny button nipples that she suddenly imagined flicking with her fingers then soothing the brief hurt with her tongue. His arms bulged with muscle. His shoulders were firm enough to easily take the weight of her legs, her thighs.

Nichelle gripped her phone and apologized stiffly past her throat that was dry as a desert. “Favreau wants us at his office in thirty minutes.” Then she very carefully turned and walked back to her room.

* * *

Wolfe stood with his briefs clenched in his hand long after Nichelle went back to her side of the door. His whole body was a fist. Tight, hard and aching. He’d been frozen while she looked at him, aware of her cool gaze on his body that suddenly felt too hot. He had hardened helplessly under her intense scrutiny, the blood rushing inexorably south.

He called himself ten types of fool for allowing her to see his physical reaction to her. But that was what he got for not taking advantage of what had been offered to him a few days before they’d left for Paris.

Anise, a woman he’d met while on a business lunch in the Gables, had texted him with a classic booty call invitation. He’d wanted it. He’d wanted her. But when, at the family dinner, Nichelle looked at him with disapproval, as if it would have been the worst sin for him to leave his parents’ house to sleep with some woman he’d only just met, he reigned himself in. He ended up spending the rest of the night and most of the next day with his parents.

Since then, he’d been too busy with work, getting ready for the Paris trip and working with Nichelle on the Quraishi proposal. He hadn’t made time to seek sexual relief from anywhere else, and by the time he’d gotten on the plane for Paris, his body was more than aware that it was suffering through an unintentional dry spell.