Mysterious by Fayrene Preston Page B

"What do you mean?"
    "She put me in a foster home, telling me it was the best thing for me." The laugh he gave was almost painful to her. It was so bitter and resentful. "But I wasn’t having any of that. I was angry because I felt I had been dumped, so I ran away and never went back. My home became the streets."
    "How horrible for you!"
    "Yes," he agreed simply. "It was. It was a constant fight... to eat... to live ... to find a warm place to sleep."
    She couldn’t stop her heart from hurting over the little boy who had grown up without any toys and, much worse, without any love. It explained a lot. "How sad," she murmured.
    His voice went from pensive to icy in an instant. "Life is a bitch, Jennifer, full of sad situations that you could spend the rest of your life crying about. Don’t waste your compassion on me. I’m one of the lucky ones. I made it."
    Stung by his sudden change of mood, Jennifer edged away from him and stared into the fire. "So what happened?" she asked quietly. "How did you get from being a street kid to a lawyer?"
    "I can answer that with one word: Sami."
    "Her again," she murmured dispiritedly.
    "Always and forever. She was wonderful. You wouldn’t believe how distrustful of people I was back then."
    You haven’t gotten over it yet, Jerome, she told him silently. Aloud she asked, "So what did she do?"
    "Well, she found me at a swap meet and took me home with her. I gave her some pretty rough times at first, circling her like the wounded animal I was back then. But it simply didn’t matter to her. She just clouded up and rained love all over me until I took root and grew. She gave me an apartment of my own, a place I could call home, made sure I had at least three meals a day, and at long last I began to flourish. She made me continue my education, and when I expressed a tentative interest in law, nothing would do but that I go on to law school, at her expense."
    "And what did you do for her?" Try as she might, she hadn’t been able to keep the sarcastic edge out of her voice.
    He didn’t seem to hear it. "Nothing. At least nothing compared to what she did for me."
    "You know what?"
    "What?"
    "I hate her."
    "Why?"
    She really had no idea why and took a long moment to figure it out. Finally she decided it must have something to do with jealousy. Which made no sense. So she shrugged.
    "You know what?" Jerome asked.
    "What?"
    "She’s going to love you."
    "Uh-uh! No way. I don’t want to meet her, and that’s final."
    "Knowing Sami, you won’t be given the choice. Once she’s ferreted out your existence, she won’t stop until she’s met you."
    "She sounds like a remarkable lady," Jennifer admitted grudgingly.
    "So are you," he whispered, and took her in his arms and kissed her.
    The kiss should have been tender, considering the intimacies they had just shared, but there was too much built-up need and want between them, and they melted together. His mouth took hers fiercely, demandingly. His hands ran under her sweater urgently, closing around her breasts roughly, gentling only after he had touched her completely, squeezing and molding, filling his hands until they couldn’t get any fuller.
    She strained against him, taking his need as her own and returning it tenfold. Jerome was someone she had desired from the very first night. And now that she was once more in his arms, she knew that she loved him. She had been through so much in the last few days. Still, if she knew one thing for certain, it was that she really did love him.
    His smiles and touches were as necessary to her as the air in her lungs. And it had suddenly become vitally important to her that he have the love he had been deprived of as a child. His love was something she could only pray would come eventually.
    She ran her hand inside his shirt, tearing away some of the buttons in her haste. She wanted to experience his flesh, search out his heat, touch his passion.
    Their desire was colored dark like the night, and burned wild