from the spot on the Avenue of the Americas. One of these days, he was actually going to strangle Carmen.
Maxwell tossed and turned in his sleep the entire night. Visions of Reese nestled in his arms tormented him with longing. How in the world would he be able to get through the next few weeks when his feelings for her were spiraling out of control?
He wished that he had it in him to let go. But after Victoria, he’d promised himself he’d never allow his heart to guide him again. Victoria Davenport was the first woman he’d begun to open himself up to, and even now, two years later, the pain of her betrayal could still flare raw and ragged.
When he’d first met Victoria at an engineering conference in Washington, D.C., he was instantly captivated. She was the fascinating combination of beauty and brains. What enchanted him the most was that she was the first woman who didn’t trip all over herself trying to get his attention.
Finally, unable to stand her pointed rebuff a moment longer, he’d maneuvered his way around the throngs of people in the dining hall and introduced himself.
“Can I refresh your drink, Ms….?” Maxwell asked, easing up next to her.
Victoria turned cool, green eyes on him. “Don’t tell me you came from clear across the room just to get me a drink?” she taunted, her smile a sweet invitation. “I truly thought chivalry was dead,” she added, her soft Southern drawl like music to his ears.
He leaned against the bar. His eyes rolled up and down her slender frame. “Let me guess. You’ve been watching me just as hard as I’ve been watching you.”
Her finely arched brows rose in feigned surprise. “What would make you think that?” She tried to sound indignant, but failed.
“How else would you know that I was way on the other side of the room?”
Victoria tossed back her head and laughed outright, her strawberry blond tresses skimming her bare shoulders. “Just for that, I’m going to tell you my name, you’re going to tell me yours, and we’re going to get to know each other. There’s nothing I like better than a man who speaks his mind.”
Maxwell joined in her laughter, enchanted by its musical quality. And they did get to know each other. They had tons of things in common both being computer engineers, she for the government and he in private practice.
For the next eighteen months, Maxwell made his home between D.C., where Victoria lived, and New York. During those months, Maxwell quickly learned that Victoria was the type of woman who lived on the edge, challenging everything and everyone. Her looks gave her entrée into the black world as easily as the white, and she played whatever role suited her at the moment.
“I was fortunate to be born with a choice,” Victoria said to him one night after making love.
“We all have choices,” Maxwell said, folding his hands beneath his head and staring up at the stuccoed ceiling.
She smiled, the kind of sly smile that compels you to want to know more.
“When I’m with you, I can let down my hair and go back to my roots. When I’m outside of ‘our little circle’ of friends and associates, I cross the line to my other world.”
For several moments, Maxwell simply stared at her, too flabbergasted to speak.
“Don’t look so shocked, darling. How many times in your life have you wished—prayed—that you could cross over into the Japanese world and be accepted, and at your whim return to the black world and not miss a beat? The only difference between you and me, is that I can.”
The truth of her statement slammed him in the gut. For all of his thirty years, he had been on the fence of life, so to speak, trying to discover where he fit. Listening to her now, brought to bear his reality.
On all of the forms and applications he’d ever had to fill out, he always checked “other.” Other what? he’d always wanted to know. Yet he’d learned to live with it, at least on the surface.
What he couldn’t accept was Victoria’s cavalier attitude about her ethnicity. With effort, he managed to put her indiscretion aside. He convinced himself that he was falling in love with her, that what she did when she wasn’t with him didn’t affect him. That was the beginning.
It was several months after that revelation that they’d had a terrible argument. Maxwell was miserable without her. He’d decided to drive down to D.C. for the weekend and surprise her. That was the end.
He knew she always worked late on Friday, so he’d planned to beat her to the apartment and have dinner waiting—his way of making things up to her and telling her how sorry he was.
When he arrived at the apartment they shared, he thought he was alone until he heard noises coming from the back. Surprised, Maxwell put down his packages and headed for the back bedroom.
“Vicki, I didn’t expect you…” He pushed open the bedroom door, and for a split second he couldn’t focus. Victoria in all of her peaches-and-cream splendor was astride her boss, her head tossed back as the throes of climax gripped them both. Neither of them heard him enter or leave. They never spoke to or saw each other again.
The question that always nagged at him was: what role was she playing that afternoon with her white lover? And why had she chosen Max? What role had he played in the eighteen months of their relationship? He was soon to find out, when the Washington Post ran the story about Victoria Davenport and the innovative new computer program she’d developed that gave PC users unlimited access to the Internet—and enhanced processing speed—the very same program he’d been working on for months. When the press got wind of their relationship, they made his life pure hell for months.
His breakup with Victoria reconfirmed his mistrust, rekindled his belief that no one was as they appeared, and the shell around him had grown tight once again.
Until Reese.
Chapter 5
Reese was bone tired when her aunt Celeste phoned her at 7:00 a.m. Her night had been haunted by those faceless phantoms that had plagued her life for the past fifteen years.
Had she had these dreams—these nightmares—before that time? she wondered, letting the cool water sluice across her body. If she had, she couldn’t remember. Just as she could remember nothing prior to that fateful day when her life was irrevocably changed.
Shadows, images, screeching tires and screams were all that she could recall. But something had led to it. Something or someone that she could not remember. And all of the hypnosis, therapy, and drugs had not brought her memory back. The first fifteen years of her life were nothing more than a black abyss.
Wrapping the thick, standard white hotel towel around her dripping milk-chocolate body, she thought about how guilty she had felt for so many years. Guilty that she’d survived, and could not remember anything about her mother or father, who had perished.
And whenever her guilt began to ebb, aunt Celeste would find a way to resurrect it, making her feel that she’d betrayed her family because she could not remember them, as she had moments ago.
Reese had assumed the early-morning phone call was her hotel wake-up call. Her heart thundered with trepidation when she heard her aunt’s voice reach out to her across the wires.
“Aunt Celeste, how are you?”
“I’m fine,” she answered in a tight voice. “But how would you know that, you don’t remember to call.”
Reese squeezed her eyes shut and took a long, calming breath.
“Aunt Celeste, I called you before I left Chicago. I gave you the number of the hotel here in New York.”
“That was nearly two weeks ago,” she accused. “I’m your only living relative. I’d think you’d treat me with more regard.”
“Aunt Celeste, please,” she whispered, feeling again like the lost, confused child