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Rivals in Paradise
Gwyneth Bolton
Cicely Stevens needs the vacation of a lifetime. After being cheated on by her boyfriend and passed over for a promotion, she's off to the Caribbean for a weekend of hot island fun. And there's no sexier bad boy than her old college rival Chase Yearwood, who's on the same plane en route to his lush estate…and whose kiss Cicely never forgot. When he takes her in his arms again, he's more irresistible than ever. But will she lose her heart before this fling is flung?They call him the "Wolf" because of his legendary skills in the boardroom–and the bedroom. Now is Chase's chance to even the score with the woman who once beat him at his own game. But can rivals in business become passionate partners in love? Under a romantic tropical moon, he'll seduce her with a passion that will have her begging for more!
“Fine. We have a no-strings affair. No questions. No promises. No problems. And you can reserve the right to change your mind if you feel the need. But—”
He cut her off with a kiss so potent it left her breathless. His tongue was almost acrobatic in its mission. It twirled and flipped and spun in her mouth as if it were the star attraction in the greatest show on earth.
She couldn’t be outdone so early in the game, so she moved her tongue slowly in and out of his mouth, interrupting his pace, slowing it down but keeping the heat of the kiss. She arched her back and moved her hips, swiveling them and rocking them against the hard press of his masculinity.
He let her slide down off the wall. His eyes were hooded in desire as he gazed at her. He lifted the hem of her sundress, his hand inching up her thigh in a slow seductive manner until he reached the part of her inner thigh closest to her core.
“Just relax and enjoy the ride,” he whispered.
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 five Emma Awards and a Romance in Color Reviewers’ 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 gwynethbolton@prodigy.net. And readers can visit her website at www.gwynethbolton.com.
Rivals in Paradise
Gwyneth Bolton
www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
This novel is dedicated to all my sistah-authors, for writing the amazing books that keep the genre of Black Romance alive. Nikki Giovanni told us that black love is black wealth and I know it’s true every time I read your books. Keep on writing and making this a genre that I am so proud to be a part of….
Dear Reader,
There is something about the rivals-to-lovers story that never gets old for me. Most of my favorite television couples have some element of rivals to lovers in their stories.
Who can forget A Different World, when Dwayne Wayne and Whitley Gilbert traded barbs in the early days of the show when he thought he was head over heels in love with Denise Huxtable? We all know how that turned out—with the famous wedding-crasher show and Dwayne begging… “Whitley, I love you! Please, baby, please!”
And then there is my all-time favorite couple, Maxine Shaw and Kyle Barker from Living Single. They took the “I hate you! I love you!” push and pull of rivals to lovers to passionate new heights.
These couples made crossing that thin line between love and hate oh so much fun! And if you enjoy journeys to love that are just a little vexed but also a whole lot of fun, then you are going to enjoy Cicely “Cee Cee” Stevens and Chase “The Wolf” Yearwood’s trip down love’s rocky road immensely.
From the minute Cicely stepped on the scene in If Only You Knew, I knew she’d have a wonderful story to tell one day. This younger sister was spicy and sassy and I knew I had to find just the right hero for her. It took me a minute, but I found him. You’re going to love Chase. He’s smooth, funny, 100 percent alpha male, every bit of fine and he loves Cicely to distraction (even if it takes him a minute to realize it). I hope you enjoy Cicely and Chase’s story. Be sure to look for my April 2011 release, At First Kiss!
Much love and peace,
Gwyneth
Acknowledgments
I want to acknowledge my family, because without their support I wouldn’t know what love is or be able to write about it. Special thanks to my husband, Cedric Bolton, my mom, Donna Pough, my sisters, Jennifer, Cassandra, Michelle and Tashina, my nieces Ashlee and Zaria and my nephew Michael.
To all the readers, thanks so much for all your emails and notes. Hearing from all you smart and savvy readers always makes my day!
Thanks to all the book clubs who have read my novels, especially SistahFriend, Sexy Ebony BBW African American Book Club, Sistas’ Thoughts from Coast to Coast and the Prominent Women of Color Book Club.
I also want to thank the ladies of the Live, Love, Laugh and Books Yahoo Group. The readers, writers and aspiring writers in this group, along with my fellow host authors—Shelia Goss, Michelle Monkou and Celeste Norfleet—are one amazing group of people.
Finally, I want to send an extra-special dose of love and appreciation to the Shelfari Black Romance Reading Group. I have so much fun talking about black romance novels with you all. I’m sure my local bookstore thanks you, too, because we are all so willing to enable each other’s book-buying addictions!
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 1
“Ohmygodohmygodohmygod. Oh. My. God! Harder. Harder. Harder!”
Cicely “Cee Cee” Stevens walked toward the master bedroom of her condo with her eyes and mouth wide open. There was no way she could possibly be hearing what she thought she was hearing.
Not in her house.
Not in her bedroom.
No damn way was this happening to her after the day she’d just had at work!
But the squeaking of the bedsprings and the bang, clunk, bang, clunk, bang of the headboard didn’t lie. Isaac was cheating on her….
That lowlife had another woman in her bedroom. In her bed! And he had better be thankful that she didn’t own a firearm. The old adage that God protected babies and fools was obviously true, because if she’d had a gun…heaven help the fool!
At one time not all that long ago, Cicely’s job had been all-important to her. She had known that she was damn good at it. As an executive in the corporate finance department of the huge media firm Mainstay, she was well-known all across Miami for her business acumen and savvy. She’d had a style and flair for business that made money appear with such ease folks had hardly realized that money was moving.
Now, however, her new passive-aggressive, anal-retentive division leader, Leonard Stone, barely gave her breathing room, and the workplace had become a hostile environment.
Her new division leader had graduated from FAMU, as she had, and she’d tried on numerous occasions to build a better working relationship with the insufferable man. But he wouldn’t budge, and she was starting to think that she might need to start pounding the pavement, looking for another position.
She’d had hopes of moving up the corporate ladder. She’d hoped to try her hand at corporate development so that she could work in mergers and acquisitions and really make deals, not just get the money to make the deals happen. She’d thought she was a shoo-in to get the division leader position in the corporate development department when it opened up. But she had no such luck.
The promotion should have been hers. It would have gotten her away from the division leader from hell and in charge of her own department. Instead, she’d just found out, it was going to some interloper who was more than likely a friend of Leonard “The Evil One”—as she had grown fond of calling him—Stone.
Home sweet home was usually her space of refuge, a place to wind down and relax. But now she had come home after a particularly hard day at work to find her nice, quiet, nerdy, handpicked-because-he-would-never-hurt-her boyfriend Isaac in the bed with another woman.
Can a sista catch a break? Seriously?
He was supposed to be waiting for her so that they could celebrate the promotion she’d thought was hers when she came back from celebrating with her girls. Thirty-year-old Cicely had just given the cheater a key to her place after a year and a half of being a couple. It seemed like the logical next step, since her biological clock was ticking loudly. It was starting to sound like a hurricane warning tone on full blast. And he had seemed like the perfect candidate for a future husband. Nice. Safe. Sweet. A little bookish…okay, maybe totally nerdish…but sweet…definitely sweet…
And he wasn’t supposed to hurt her like this!
She took a deep breath as she reached the door. His cheating just proved her original beliefs, the ones she’d had almost all her life… No man is safe when it comes to matters of the heart.
The only person who can protect your heart is you.
It’s better not to fall in love.
She’d decided a long time ago that she would never get caught slipping and falling in love. But she did have deep feelings for Isaac, the kind of camaraderie they could have built a nice, strong, sturdy lifetime on…
She was certain that if she was really in love with Isaac, the lying, cheating, humping-another-woman-in-her-bed jerk, she wouldn’t be able to open the door and calmly do what needed to be done.
That’s why love was a problem. If she loved him she might have thought twice about kicking his faithless behind to the curb!
She opened the door and saw exactly what she thought she would see. Isaac was screwing some floozy.
She slammed the door behind her and cleared her throat.
The startled lovebirds broke apart, each grabbing for the cover.
Cicely frowned because she had purchased those 500-count ecru Egyptian cotton sheets just a few weeks ago and now she would have to burn them or at least throw them in the trash. Because there was no way in hell she would ever sleep on them again. She glanced around at her recently remodeled—so it wouldn’t look so girlish and make the cheating boyfriend she had just given a key to uncomfortable—bedroom. Everything from the chocolate duvet to the ecru sheets would have to go.
“Sorry to interrupt. But since this is my bedroom in my condo and all…I’d appreciate it if you both get your nasty asses out. Now!” Cicely put one hand on her hip and pointed toward the door with the other.
Isaac grabbed his glasses off of the mahogany-and-nickel nightstand and the sheet dropped. The woman pulled more of the sheet over herself, and Cicely wondered when they were going to get their nasty behinds off of her platform bed.
Yuck. Just. Yuck. Would she have to get a new bed, too?
She rolled her eyes as Isaac struggled with the woman for the sheet and tried to explain himself at the same time.
“Baby, I can explain…. She means nothing to me…. It was just a one-night thing…. She’s been throwing herself at me for months…. I’m just a man…. Baby, please…” Isaac’s words started to jumble together as he leapt from the bed and pulled on his trousers.
Once the other woman resigned herself to getting out of the bed, she at least had the good taste to get dressed quickly and quietly. Cicely did notice that the woman cut Isaac more than a few nasty looks while he was rambling out his apologies and explanations.
The woman was pretty if you liked tall, slim model types with perfect chocolate skin, big doe eyes and cute, pixie-style haircuts. Once clothed, she wore a rather nice purple pantsuit and killer matching shoes. Cicely had to give it to Isaac; at least he picked a really attractive woman to cheat with.
The woman walked over to the bedroom door where Cicely was firmly posted. With her arms folded across her chest, Cicely gave the woman the once-over and, with one scathing look, dared her to say anything out of line.
The woman took a deep breath and bit her lip.
Cicely arched an eyebrow.
“Look. I don’t want any trouble. He misrepresented his situation to me. And for what it’s worth, I apologize for my part in this. I’d just like to leave now. I didn’t mean you any harm, Cicely.” She turned to Isaac and spat out, “You’re a jerk!”
Shocked that the woman knew her name, Cicely gave her a more thorough once-over. She realized she knew the woman. She was the lobby receptionist in the office building that both she and Isaac worked in.
The accounting firm that Isaac worked for was on the ninth floor of the building, and the company Cicely worked for was on the fifteenth floor. Cicely couldn’t help rolling her eyes then.
If Isaac and she had initially hooked up by meeting in the elevator of that building, then why not Isaac and the lobby girl? With so many other companies and employees located in the high-rise office building, who really knew how many other women this geek-nerd-jerk of a man had been with or was still sleeping with?
As if he could tell where she was going, Isaac began pleading his case again. “This was the first time. I have never… I would never, ever do something like this to you. You gotta believe me, baby. I love you…. I just started to get cold feet, that’s all…. Things were starting to get real serious between us, with us exchanging keys and all…it’s a big step…”
Both Cicely and the lobby woman sucked their teeth at the same time.
Cicely stared at the woman again.
Pam!
Her name was Pam. Cicely now remembered that she had always thought that Pam’s smiles and greetings were a bit false whenever the woman would say hello as she signed into the building in the morning.
Now she knew why.
Cicely stepped aside and let Pam leave. Hearing the front door close, Cicely turned her attention back to the cheater.
Isaac’s usual toasted-cinnamon complexion was looking almost ruby-red. He ran his hand across his close-cropped hair several times. He always did that when he was thinking. Now Cicely thought it might be a sign that he was trying to think of a lie.
“I love you, Cicely. You gotta know that…” Isaac started. “I thought you were going out with your sister and girlfriends for happy hour?”
The mention of her canceled girls’ night out celebration focused her attention on yet another reason why this had to be the worst night ever. After finding out that she had been passed over for the promotion, she’d called her two best friends and her sister to cancel their impromptu celebration. She’d felt like curling up on the sofa with some Chunky Monkey ice cream, her favorite torn sweatpants and FAMU T-shirt, a blanket and her boyfriend, feeling sorry for herself.
Is that really too much to ask for? Seriously?
Instead, she came home to her boyfriend in her bed with another woman.
Isaac reached out and touched her shoulder, trying to pull her closer to him.
“Uh-uh. No. Don’t you ever touch me again! And I want you out of my condo. Give me your key and get the hell out. Take anything of yours here because you will never be coming back!” She turned and walked out of the master bedroom.
She couldn’t stay in the condo tonight. Finding him in her bed with another woman had left her feeling almost violated. He had tarnished the sacred space of her home. She had to get out of there. At least for a little while….
He followed her with his pants half-zipped. Ironic.
