The Foreigner's Caress

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“Probably,” he agreed, his hand kneading the small of her back softly. “Madison, I want you…badly,” Steve laughed.

“Me, too.”

“This is so difficult!” Steve exclaimed. “Look, I don’t get what’s going on here, but I just feel like it’s too important to mess it up by rushing things.”

“And sometimes sex does just that,” Madison agreed.

As much as they wanted to take their desire to a higher level, the intimacy between them was compelling enough without an act of sexual intercourse. They paused to allow logic to take up a space in the midst of their excitement and found the consolation to be just as sweet as the first place prize when they spent the night fully clothed, snuggled against one another on Madison’s brushed-cotton, oversized sofa. They talked until they feel asleep, and when they awoke in each other’s arms, the satisfaction that washed over them made them both realize that they could not have felt more complete than they did by just being in one another’s presence.

That languid bubble of tranquility was unexpectedly burst the following morning, however, when the New York Post’s gossip column featured a picture of them leaving the club the night before, arm in arm, with a caption beneath it that read, “Has Madison Daniels finally snagged herself a well-appointed Prince Charming?”

The columnist went on to report that this was the second known sighting of Madison and Stevenson Elliott, son of English billionaire Gregory Elliott.

“Do you believe this crap?” Madison spewed angrily.

“Perhaps you want to tell me over breakfast why the press is so fascinated with you?” Steve asked gently after he’d read the article that Madison had dropped on his lap.

Madison slid down onto the sofa beside him. “Look, me and the media have had a little love/hate thing going on for the past couple of years—they love to stay in my business, and I despise the wombs they came out of. Those people are animals and for some reason, they seem to find my little boring life of major interest, go figure.”

“Somehow I doubt there is anything boring about your life,” Steve said.

“Yeah, well, be that as it may, it just kills me that when a man dates and is linked to noteworthy women, he’s this year’s eligible bachelor. When it’s the other way around, the woman’s called every kind of gold-digging whore in the book.”

“I agree. There’s definitely a double standard, and I don’t care what side of the globe you’re on. But, in all fairness, the media only report on what people want to know, so don’t blame them because we live in a society that is nosy and filthy-minded. And speaking of filthy…”

Steve tugged at the top of the tank top Madison wore. She smacked his hand.

“Seriously, Steve. I don’t know if it’s such a good idea that you and I be seen in public again. I mean, if this crap gets back to England, your parents might be a little, well, put off.”

“Put off about what? That I’ve met a beautiful woman and am having the time of my life getting to know her?” Steve asked as he traced Madison’s collarbone with two fingers.

“How about the fact that you’re spending time with a woman who the press likes to spy on and paint to be some sort of strumpet who’s out to trick him out of his family’s fortune?”

“In that case, come here, my little strumpet,” Steve said, pulling Madison across his body. “Let me teach you a lesson about stealing, you naughty girl.”

Steve closed his mouth over hers, cutting off any further protests she could make.

Chapter 7

“This is a nice hotel, but you’ve got a really crappy view,” Madison said as she peered out of the fourteenth-floor window of Steve’s hotel room.

He’d invited her to have dinner in with him that evening in acquiescence to her desire to keep their business out of the papers. A quiet evening indoors and out of the public eye was extremely appealing to both of them.

Steve moved to her side and looked through the glass himself. His room faced a parking garage and an office building. Looking to the left, he was afforded a partial view of the Times Square area, the lights from Broadway already brilliantly lighting up the street.

“Good thing it wasn’t the view of New York City that I stayed in town for,” he mused, having turned his attention away from the window and refocused it on the breathtaking woman standing beside him.

Madison smiled up at him, still amazed to find herself tingling under his gaze. It had been two weeks since they’d met and she was getting to believe that no matter how much time passed, she would still be as flattered by his considerate and charming nature as she was now.

“Are you ready for dinner?” he asked.

“Uh-uh,” Madison answered as she moved closer to him.

She had an irresistible urge to kiss him and dinner would just have to wait until she satisfied that compulsion. She tilted her head, her lips angled a couple of inches away from his. When their mouths met, she felt her body tremble quietly. Her mouth opened to his probing tongue, and warmth spread through her entire body. Tentatively, yet expertly, he explored her mouth, breathing her in until she filled all of his senses. The thickness of his lips as she nibbled and tasted them caused her breath to catch in her throat while the heat of his tongue as it danced with hers sent an electric current straight down to the center of her taut abdomen.

Madison had kissed many men in her lifetime, but could honestly say that she had never been kissed so thoroughly and completely as Steve kissed her. She’d experienced passion and lust, she’d thrown herself with reckless abandoned into physical encounters and, while finding physical satisfaction, she realized now that the intimacy of a simple kiss with Steve far outweighed any of that. She lost herself inside his mouth, sank into his arms and discovered it was a restorative and peaceful place to be.

When their lips finally parted, Steve continued to hold her in his arms, her body resting against his as they stood in front of a window with a partial view of Manhattan. The serenity that settled over them made them both realize that what had begun as a chance meeting and an instant attraction had quickly morphed into something more profound than either had ever experienced before.

“I want to make love to you, Madison,” Steve said, breaking the silence that had enveloped them.

“I hear a but in your voice,” she responded.

Madison’s heart raced because she’d already expected this moment, anticipated it, even. She felt the same way, a desire to share on a physical level what was developing on an emotional level. However, for the first time, she’d met someone and sexual curiosity was not the most pressing thing for her.

“But I’m not sure if we should. I mean, I want to. Don’t get me wrong, I really, really want to,” Steve laughed.

“Really?” Madison joked.

“Really, really,” Steve reiterated. “I just…I’ve got to be honest with you.”

“About what? Please don’t tell me you’ve got a wife and three kids back in England, ’ cause that’s the last thing I need to hear in my life at this point,” she said half-jokingly.

“Of course not. I’m single and unattached…no girlfriend, wife. Nothing like that. Actually, I haven’t even been on a date in the past couple of months. It’s just that, well, Madison, I’ve never felt like this before. I mean, these past two weeks have been incredible. Being here with you, it just totally caught me off guard, and I feel like I don’t know whether I’m coming or going.”

“I know what you mean.”

“Do you?”

“Of course. Steve, you’re definitely not out here on your own. I wasn’t expecting this and after the last crazy couple of years I had, I certainly wasn’t looking to hook up with anyone. But this is so different. With you I feel like I can just be myself and be however crazy, goofy or silly I feel like being. I don’t have to be what my parents expect, I don’t have to live up to what the media think about me and I don’t have to give a damn about what my friends or anyone else asks of me. This has been so nice, but…” Madison’s voice trailed off.

“But you think it has to end,” Steve finished for her.

“Doesn’t it? I mean, you have a life in England. I’m here trying to get my life together. You have obligations to keep. I mean, we just met. We’re practically strangers.”

Madison moved away from Steve, needing to distance herself from feelings that had come on too strong too soon. She stopped in front of the television, where some ridiculous commercial about a goat and a soft drink was playing.

“You don’t feel like a stranger to me,” Steve said as he watched her from his vantage point by the window.

The sincerity in his voice forced Madison to turn to face him. His face was an open book, free for her to read in his warm-brown eyes and sensual lips an emotion that was greater than lust and infatuation.

“You feel like home to me,” he added softly.

Steve walked across the room to Madison, taking both of her hands in his. She allowed him to guide her to the top of the double bed, her body at his command as he lay down and pulled her with him. He leaned his back against the pillows, his arms around her, and she laid her head on his chest, listening to the sound of his breathing. Wrapped in a cocoon isolated from the outside world, they felt free to be real with each other.

“I don’t know how to explain what I am feeling right now and I don’t even really understand it, but it’s like I was looking for something or needing something and all of a sudden I don’t feel that need anymore,” Steve said softly.

“It’s scary how connected I feel to you already, Steve,” Madison admitted. “I think I’ve been looking for something, too, without even knowing it.”

They fell silent, alone with their thoughts yet sharing an emotion that was bigger than both of them. A long while later Steve spoke, his meditation having taken him to a place deep inside in his soul.

“When I was a little boy, maybe four or five, I remember sitting on my grandmother’s rocker on the veranda of her house. Grandma’s house was old like most of the houses in the countryside of Jamaica where we lived. You know, outhouses and open-air cooking.”

“Hmm,” Madison said.

“Grandma was standing over the cooking fire making cornmeal porridge in a big metal pot that was situated on a metal grate and held up on a pile of big rocks. She had on a floral house dress and these tattered brown sandals. I had been helping Grandpa tie the livestock out in the hills like we did every morning and was sitting down to catch my breath. I started telling her how Uncle Nevel had promised to take me fishing at Alligator Pond early the next morning. I bragged and bragged about how I was going to catch the biggest fish of all, bigger even than the one Uncle Nevel had caught the week before, and I was going to bring it back to her to cook it up for dinner.”

Steve paused, and stared out into space for a moment. Madison waited, stroking the back of his hand gently.

“When Grandma turned around, her face was wet. She was smiling at me, but tears were streaming down her face. I went over to her. I was only four but my head already reached Grandma’s chin. I remember asking her if she wanted to go fishing with us…if that’s why she was crying. That question made her laugh out loud. She had a soft tinkling laugh. She laughed and hugged me, rocking me against her body. I was so confused. But then she told me that no matter what happened, no matter how far away I went or how big I got, I would always be her best lickle pickney…her favorite little child.”

Madison looked up at Steve, saw the tear that had formed in the corner of his left eye. His face was pained and she wanted to ask why, but she also wanted to give him the space and time to tell his story the way he needed to.

“She sat down in the rocker and held me on her lap, telling me all the while that I was getting too big to sit all over her like that.”

Steve fingered one of the twists of hair that covered Madison’s head. “Grandma had worn dreadlocks, too, but hers were long and thick from years of growing. I started playing with her hair like I always did and she just held me, bouncing me up and down on her knee and staring down at me like she was trying to capture me in her mind.

“Two days later, my dad came back from a trip to England and a few days after that my parents and I left Jamaica. I didn’t know it at the time, but that would be the last time I saw my grandmother. We left our warm, sunny island where I spent long days chasing butterflies and swimming in the creek and we moved to England. Everybody I’d spent my childhood with—my grandmother, my grandfather, uncles, aunts and a dozen cousins—were left behind. I spoke to Grandma by phone a couple of times…on her birthday and Christmas, you know? I always asked her when she was coming to visit and she kept saying that she didn’t like to fly.”

“Why didn’t you guys ever go back to Jamaica?” Madison asked.

“I don’t know,” Steve said, chewing on the question as if its answer was the secret to the universe. “My parents always made up excuses when I asked. They were too busy with the business. It wasn’t the right time. And no one could come to visit us because we didn’t have space for them at first. Eventually, I guess when they thought I was old enough, they told me that our relatives were better off in Jamaica. They said that they could never fit in with our new, prosperous lives in England. I didn’t understand this philosophy of theirs until much later on in life. It seemed the wealthier we became, the less we associated with anyone who was Jamaican. My parents made sure I lost my accent quickly, and essentially, we cut all ties with that part of our heritage. We became English citizens and that was that.”

“That’s terrible,” Madison said, thinking of her own parents and their separatist ways.

“For a long time, I’ve wondered why I allowed them to do that to me. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not one of those people who you see on those daytime talk shows talking about their horrible upbringings and neglectful parents. I mean, I had a great childhood. I had privileges that most kids only dream about. I went to good schools and traveled to exotic places. But part of me always felt guilty when I thought about the family we’d left back in Jamaica. Life can be hard in the islands.”

“Steve, you were a child. How could you possibly have done anything to change the situation?”

“Not then, but as I got older…in my teen years. I should have done something. When Grandma died, we didn’t even go to the funeral.”

The broken expression on Steve’s face caused Madison to want to capture him completely in her arms and kiss his wounds away.

“How long ago did she pass away?” she asked softly.

“I was sixteen. I remember my parents were planning a holiday, and I suggested that we go to Jamaica. They scoffed at that idea. I’d started asking questions about Jamaica and the family back there and that’s when my father told me that there wasn’t much family left. He said it almost matter-of-factly. Maybe five or six months later, we received a phone call…I think it was from one of my father’s brothers. Grandma had passed in her sleep at the age of seventy-two. I thought we would go to the funeral, but we didn’t. My mother explained that my father was too busy to leave work at that time, which of course didn’t make much sense to me, but by then, I pretty much understood that they had no intentions of ever setting foot there again. So when my grandfather followed her a year later, I wasn’t surprised that we didn’t go to his funeral, either.”

“Are you still afraid of what your parents will say if you make contact with your family now?”

Steve looked down at Madison.

“You think I’m a coward, don’t you?” he asked, a nervous chuckle pushing through his lips.

“No, I don’t think that at all,” Madison said, stroking the side of his face thoughtfully. “I think you are a loyal and considerate man, who worries too much about doing the right thing and doing what his parents want him to do. I know this is not the same thing, but one truth I have learned recently is that while everything we do will have consequences, we’re the only ones we have to seek approval from.”

“Perhaps you’re right,” Steve said.

He buried his chin in the top of Madison’s head and closed his eyes.

“Sometimes it’s hard to follow your own voice,” he said, his voice now thick with drowsiness.

In the past few days his dreams and conscious thoughts had been filled with a mixture of Madison and images of Jamaica and his grandmother. It was as if his meeting Madison had caused remembrances that he had buried long ago to resurface. Strange as it seemed, he pondered if Madison had come in to his life at this time for the sole purpose of helping him to remember.

“She would have liked you,” he said.

“Maybe one day I can get to see where you lived with her,” Madison said.

“Maybe,” Steve echoed, his eyes closed and his arms wrapped tightly around Madison, as if he never intended to let her go.

It was just that rapidly and with ease that his soul connected with hers and the comfort that he felt as he lay tangled in her embrace was strangely familiar to him. They’d come from different soil and circumstances, but shared upbringings that were symmetrical in ways that made them understand one another. Minutes seemed like days, days like months, until the length of time that had passed since the moment of their meeting could not be comprehended as being short or limited. All either one of them knew was that they would be forever changed by their meeting.

Chapter 8

“This is not a love thing,” Madison said as she wound the leash of Brandy, a ninety-five-pound golden retriever, tightly around her hand.

Her shoes slapped against the pavement as Chip, the fifty-pound sleek black Doberman, pulled her toward a cluster of trees that had attracted his attention. The two dogs and a lady made quite a trio. This was one of the various odd jobs that Madison worked in order to supplement the monthly allowance her father provided. She enjoyed walking dogs the most because it was a job that obligated her to remain out of doors for stretches at a time instead of being cooped up in an office or building. The dogs both lived in buildings in her neighborhood and she’d been their official exercise and relief chief for the past three months. While both dogs busied themselves sniffing at the shrubbery that lined the small park, Madison adjusted the Bluetooth earpiece against the side of her head.

“Sounds like it to me,” her sister Kennedy said into her ear.

Madison and Kennedy had been close growing up, but had gone through an estrangement over the past few years that Madison knew had more to do with her own reckless behavior than with anything Kennedy had or had not done. She celebrated the fact that in recent months they had begun talking more regularly and sharing more of their lives with each other just like back in the old days. Having her sister in her life as a confidante was one of the highlights of her newly structured existence, because as headstrong as Madison had always been, she still appreciated the value of having her big sister’s wisdom to call on from time to time.

“Just because you’re all lovey-dovey with that husband of yours doesn’t mean that you should try to paint the rest of the world with that same brush,” Madison replied.

“Methinks the lady doth protest too much,” Kennedy said, donning a poor imitation of a British accent.

“Very funny, Kennedy. Where are you anyway?”

“Right now I am at the folks’ house. I just came back from Dad’s office. We had lunch and then I looked over some papers for him. He’s thinking about buying in to this retirement community idea that one of his club members is developing.”

“Oh, and where’s Malik?”

“Malik is at home in D.C. He’s driving down to meet me on Friday. We’re going to spend the weekend here. You know Saturday is Aunt Marva’s fiftieth birthday party. I heard you’re not planning to come.”

“No, I don’t feel like traveling all the way down there. Besides, I’ve got a ton of things to do. Make sure you give her my regards.”

“Uh-huh…you’ve got a ton of things to do all right. I bet you they all revolve around that man,” Kennedy teased.

“Not even,” Madison said, not sounding very convincing to even her own ears.

“Oh, Maddie, what’s the big deal? What would be so wrong with admitting that you’ve fallen in love with this guy? Mom told me that he’s gorgeous and very nice.”

“Your mother has a big mouth. She’s only seen him one time…she barely exchanged two words with him. How would she know? Anyway, that’s not even the point.”