Affair of Pleasure Read online

  Teague

  Nichelle tossed the letter in the recycle pile. She’d already told Teague, at least half a dozen times, that she wasn’t interested in leaving Kingston. Now his unwanted communications were just obnoxious, no matter their tone. She wasn’t going to respond to this latest one. What was it about certain men that wouldn’t let them take no for an answer?

  She sighed and glanced at her computer’s clock. It was nearly six. Wolfe had left the office an hour before for a late meeting, and most of the staff was already gone. Time for her to head out. Nichelle grabbed her purse from its drawer and reached for her cell phone. Her elbow knocked over the carefully sorted pile of mail.

  “Damn!” The letters slid halfway across her desk, some falling on the floor. It was definitely time to go home.

  She haphazardly scooped the mail in a pile, determined to deal with it another day. Purse over her shoulder, she quickly left for the parking garage. In her car, she turned on her favorite classic R&B station and eased out into rush hour traffic. Seconds later, her phone rang.

  Her sister’s face showed up on the small screen. “Hey, Madalie.”

  “What are you up to?”

  “Leaving work, which I’m sure you know.”

  Her sister giggled. “Yeah, I have you in the sights of my high-powered rifle now. I know exactly what you’re doing.” Madalie was currently indulging her obsession with spy novels and action movies. Everything was a gun or improbable martial arts metaphor.

  “I’m at the beach kickin’ it with some nice people. You should come.”

  Nichelle glanced from the slow traffic outside her window to her dashboard clock. “Do you have any idea what time it is?” It would take her at least forty minutes to get to the beach in that traffic.

  “Of course. I was the one who called you after work, remember?”

  Nichelle rolled her eyes. “Fine.” Madalie had been floating her way through life for a few years now, twenty-four years old and still not knowing what she wanted to do for a career. She had her own place, her own money from the dividends of the stocks her father invested in her name. But her lack of direction and resulting listlessness worried Nichelle.

  “Okay. I’ll meet you there as soon as I can. You’re at the usual place, right?”

  “Of course. You know I don’t handle change very well.”

  Half an hour later found Nichelle hiking across the sand with her high heels in hand. It was just past six thirty in the evening. The sky was hung with thick clouds while sunset burned its bright colors across the water. Her calf-length silk skirt and high-collared blouse weren’t exactly made for the beach. The outfit was perfect for her perpetually air-conditioned office, but out here, she was more than a little warm. It didn’t make sense for her to go home and change, though. For her sister, she’d endure a little discomfort.

  The beach was surprisingly packed. She trudged across the sand, joining a broken line of people making their way to the oceanfront. It was a miracle she’d found parking. There was some sort of party going on. Bass-thumping dub-step music played from speakers set up around a high stage. Men and women, along with some teenagers, danced on the beach. She easily found her sister at the water’s edge, her bright blue afro a beacon she followed to where Madalie sat at the edge of a bonfire, one of nearly a dozen or so people sitting in a circle, nodding along to the music and chatting.

  “Hey! This party is great, right?” Madalie stood up to pull her into a hug.

  “It’s something.” Nichelle glanced around her. “What’s going on? It’s a weekday. Shouldn’t these people be in school or at work?”

  “I think the work day is done.” Madalie laughed. “Maybe I should have dragged Wolfe along to make sure you had a good time.”

  Nichelle ignored that comment. Still laughing, Madalie introduced her to the group gathered around the fire. Most nodded at her in acknowledgment before going back to their mostly silent enjoyment of the music. The smell of marijuana floated from somewhere nearby.

  Scattered around on the sand were some blankets and a few folding chairs, abandoned while people danced to the throbbing music pouring out onto the beach. She considered grabbing one of the chairs, not in the mood to get sand and God knew what else on her black Balmain skirt. But at the knowing look from her sister, she dropped down into the sand. She only grumbled a little bit.

  “Why did you drag me out here?”

  “It’s fun,” Madalie said with a grin. “I invited Daddy and Willa, too. They’re looking for parking now.”

  “Ah.” After a moment’s hesitation, Nichelle dropped her shoes at her side and leaned back in the sand. An impromptu family get together. She bumped Madalie’s shoulder, and they shared a smile. “This is nice,” Nichelle said. She worked so much that she didn’t see her father or her two sisters as much as she’d like.

  Madalie prowled the art district at all times of the day and night instead of focusing on her life’s goals, while the youngest, Willa, was enrolled at the University of Miami, engrossed in her studies and enjoying being away from home. Nichelle barely knew what her father was up to. She didn’t know when they had started to live their separate lives. After her mother died twenty years ago, the rest of the family stayed cooped up in the big Key Biscayne house together, none of them strong enough to go out into the world. But somehow, over time, things changed. Nichelle stopped feeling as if she was the only one holding her family together. Her sisters stopped expecting her to play the mother role. Her father started dating again. She’d gotten her life back enough to go off to California for college and then work. And though she didn’t realize when exactly the transition happened, she jealously guarded the freedom she had now.

  “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.”