A Dangerous Way to Love (Dangerous Bonds Book 3) Read online

  I willed myself not to look at her ass, but how could I not? I wanted to go after her, spin her around, and steal a kiss from her lips while gripping all of her voluptuousness into my hands. Oh, how I longed for one last kiss from Raven. One last chance to make love to her. Or did I want this all from Alise?

  I had to find out more about this beautiful songbird. It was a must.

  Chapter Two

  Alise

  Heart Connections

  I slowly became alert as the sound of my phone went from a low hum to my ringtone blaring loudly. As soon as I opened my eyes, the piercing daylight shined through my thick blue curtains and stung them. I didn’t feel rested. I was tired as a two-dollar stripper.

  “Hello,” I groggily answered the phone to quiet the noise.

  With my vision blurred by my brain’s desire to go back to sleep, I frowned and waited for the person on the other end to announce themselves. Lord, they had better have something good to say. I didn’t get in until after two in the morning, and it took me a few hours to wind down after that.

  “Hey,” Jayne finally spoke up.

  “Oh, hey, Jayne. Why are you calling so early?” I asked. Once the blurriness in my eyes had cleared, 8:31 a.m. was sitting prevalently on my screen.

  “Are you still sleeping, sleepyhead?” Jayne asked, sounding as if she had been up for hours. But why… just why had she been up for hours?

  I rolled my eyes.

  “No, my voice is just raspy because I ate a box of rocks for breakfast,” I answered sarcastically. “Of course, I was sleep, Jayne. We just left the club a few hours ago. So, unless your house is on fire, you got hit by a train, or you want to go feed the hungry, why are you calling so early, sis?”

  “Bruiser must’ve come over and waxed you,” she averted the question and went to her usual love connection mode.

  “Ha, funny. I don’t want to laugh this morning. I want to sleep. Besides, why would Bruiser come over here?” I sat up in the bed as if saying his name required me to be erect so that I could think straight.

  “I don’t know. Maybe because the man couldn’t seem to keep his eyes off of you when you were at the club last night, and… even though you masked it damn good, you looked like you were about to drool when he walked you to the table. Oh, and he watched you through the window at the end of the night as you walked to your car. Y’all are like a regular Lifetime Movie. So romantic, girl.”

  “You’re tripping about me drooling, Jayne. And if he was watching me, he was only doing his job. He is security, you know?”

  “Yeah, he’s security on the nights that you’re there, but on other nights, not so much.”

  “What do you mean by that?”

  “He lets his employees work the club when you’re not there. He doesn’t even come out of the security room on those other nights,” Jayne said.

  “And just how do you know this?”

  “I have ways of knowing things.”

  “Even if that is true, you’re putting too much into it, Jayne. We’re not feeling each other like that.” I began twirling a loose coil of my hair, then caught myself and stopped. “Wait, this can’t be the reason you called me this morning. It is entirely too early in the morning to be talking about Bruiser. Why are you calling so early? Tell me that.”

  “I just wanted to talk to my bestie. You better be glad I let you sleep this long. I’ve been up since five this morning, and I started to come over there because, well, I just needed to talk.”

  I yawned and stretched my arms as I did. Why did I have to have a best friend that called so damn early in the morning? A few more minutes of sleep would have done my tired bones lovely.

  “Talk, sis. I’m up now.”

  “Well, I really thought you needed a wellness check with the way he was watching you last night.”

  “Not about Bruiser,” I said sternly.

  “I’m just saying, he could have followed you home and did very bad things to you. What kind of friend would I be if I didn’t check on you?”

  “That’s your dirty mind, Jayne. Only you. But you know what, since you seem to lust after him so much, why don’t you—”

  “Whatever, Alise. You always do this.”

  “Do what?”

  “Talk yourself out of being with someone who’s interested in you. I wish I had that problem, actually.”

  She had me stumped with the direction this conversation was going.

  “Where is all of this coming from, Jayne?”

  “The way he looks at you like you belong to him. Both of y’all do it. You need to stop playing with his emotions and just add another ebony and ivory couple to the group. If I get me a white guy, we’re going to all be considered the swirling ebonies and ivories.”

  “Huh? What in the actual hell are you talking about?” I laughed. “I don’t mess with Bruiser’s emotions. We barely speak to each other.”

  Jayne had teased me about Bruiser before, but I never considered seriously getting with him. I may have imagined how his lips tasted, and I’d bet money the taste was like Irish crème and liquor mixed with honey. Once or twice, I may have thought about how it would feel to run my hands along the contours of his muscular back while I was lying in my bed, and he was on top of me. But—

  “Well, we already have Channing and Kemara, Jeb and Tameka, and now it will be you and Bruiser,” Jayne’s fantasies brought me out of mine.

  “Let’s just say I entertain your foolish idea that it’s too early in the morning to be entertaining. Who are you going to bring into this ebony and ivory couples group?” I asked.

  “See, don’t worry about that part. I’m doing the best I can when it comes to finding someone to be with. It’s been hard to trust anyone, you know?” Her playful tone turned sullen, and finally, it clicked.

  Ned.

  “What did Ned do?”

  “Huh?”

  “Don’t try to play dumb. Whenever you sound the way you just did, it’s Ned. You call talking about my love life when really you want to talk about whatever it is that Ned has done, so Jayne, tell me what he did this time?”

  “Just give Bruiser a chance. You deserve to have someone that looks at you the way he does. The last guy you were dealing with was an ass.”

  “Like Ned,” I brought her back to who was about to be the hot topic of the morning. That much, I was sure of.

  “Yeah, like Ned’s disloyal ass. Don’t ignore the chemistry you and Bruiser have because men like Ned are out there waiting. I did my homework on Bruiser, and he doesn’t have a secret woman out there anywhere, and I doubt that he’s a loser like Lamont, who just wanted some of your iTunes money without showing the support.”

  I paused to look at my phone. I indeed had it in my hand, and Jayne had indeed called me before 10:00 a.m. to talk smack about men who I wasn’t involved with. The furthest thing from my mind was hooking up with Bruiser or Lamont.

  “Okay, Jayne, I’m going to ask you one more time. Tell me what happened. Did Ned do you bad?”

  When her ex did her bad, she called me up to talk about my past loves, potential loves, and my love life in general, anything except her men problems. That’s precisely what she was doing at the moment.

  “Who said someone did me bad?” she asked defensively. The reflectiveness in her tone let me know I was on the right track.

  “Was it Ned?” I asked.

  I crossed my fingers and held them in the air, hoping she hadn’t given him another chance to hurt her. He was a guy she met when she was right out of college, and he was most definitely a chronic abuser of her heart. Every time she got him out of her system, he stepped back into her life and gave her just enough rope to reel her in so that she would be hooked on him again. Then, like the snake he was, he would wiggle away back to another woman’s garden.

  Jayne’s long, exasperated sigh, meant to ward off her tears, let me know one thing.

  It was Ned.

  I gave her enough time to collect herself before I p
rodded.

  “Was it him?”

  “Girl….” Jayne took a deep breath in and let it out in a loud huff. “I let him come over last night and… well, we slept together.”

  “And I’m assuming, when you say ‘slept together,’ not much sleeping went on.”

  “Unfortunately not. You know, I have a soft spot for him.”

  “I know,” I said motherly.

  “Just like last time, he got up right after we made love and told me he had to get home. I know it was because his wife called repeatedly while we were fucking.”

  “Were you fucking or making love?” I asked her. “Because to best understand what is going on, you have to understand what it is that you are doing.”

  “I made love to him.”

  “And do you think it was the same for him?”

  “He fucked me, Alise! Okay?” A long pause on the line ensued. “Then, he thanked me for a good time and left.”

  “How did that make you feel?”

  “I felt like shit. I mean, it was on the tip of my tongue to ask him, ‘good time for who’ because he damn sure barely penetrated me.”

  “You would never do that to Ned.” It was true. She wouldn’t.

  Ned was a tall and muscular guy, six feet three, and built like an alpha machine. However, Jayne complained about his small penis size, saying it was the one thing she would change about him if she could. She had even coined the phrase teenie weenie Ned when she got over their initial breakup. But she let him back in her bed more times than once since then. She stopped calling him the nickname once they started back hooking up. Still, every time she brought his name up to me, I could only think of that name.

  “No, I wouldn’t tell him that. I just sat there speechless as I watched him find every article of clothing of his that we’d scattered through my apartment, and he meticulously dressed and went home to her. Alise, I swear, if I could cut my feelings for him out of my body, I would do just that. I don’t know what kind of hold he has over me. It sure isn’t that he’s pulling my soul out of my body through my vagina, so that theory is out.” She paused, sighing. “I just love him so much.”

  “I get it that you love him, but what you have to understand most is that he’s still the guy that left you and married another woman.”

  I hated to bring up the painful memory of a time when Jayne had been Ned’s main girlfriend up until the moment she read about his nuptials to another woman on Facebook. He was such a coward that he didn’t have the nerve to tell her face to face that he was getting married but not to her.

  Her voice fell an octave as she said, “You’re right. I spent two years engaged to this man, and he ran off with another woman and her child. Then, he comes back to me with tears in his eyes, begging me to talk to him. I can never turn him down. I open the door, let him in, one thing leads to another, and we end up tossing and turning in my sheets. Every time.”

  “He has a stronghold on you.”

  “I know.”

  “And you have to figure out how to get out of his hold.”

  “The only thing that jars me back to reality is his wife, Eliza. When his phone rings over and over during sex, I lose interest. I know, when it’s over, he’s going back home.”

  “You know what? I’m not even going to tell you that you shouldn’t have let him in, because you already know that. You just have to figure out how to say no to him. Maybe you’re the one that should be looking for a new man instead of trying to hook me up. They say the best way to get over one man is to get under another one.”

  “I knoooow,” she said, allowing the word to drag out dramatically. “It’s just something about him that keeps pulling me back to him.”

  “Well, we both know what it ain’t.”

  She laughed, and I joined her.

  “No, it’s not because he’s packing, Alise. He isn’t, but the way he makes me feel when he wraps his arms around me and kisses me like there’s no tomorrow. He makes me feel safe. You know, like I can depend on him to be there.”

  “Then, he snatches that hope away from you. It’s a sense of security he knows you want, but he’s not willing to give it to you. So, why keep falling for the same magic trick when you already know how it ends?”

  “I don’t know, Alise. It’s complicated.”

  “I know it is, but you have to figure it out. This is your heart and your life. You are responsible for your own happiness, not Ned, and not anybody else.”

  “I guess I just love him on a soul level. Not in the physical sense, but him, the person. I can’t get over the way I love him. I just can’t,” she said, and I felt that coming from the bottom of her soul. My best friend was helplessly in love with a dog.

  “Well, I used to love Lamont like he was cooked food,” I interjected. “I really did love him. But when I finally realized that it didn’t matter what I did, he wasn’t going to support my dreams, and that he wasn’t there for me like I was there for him, I had to make one of the hardest choices of my life and let him go. I chose me.”

  “And you’re so strong for that. If I could just bottle a little of that shit up, I would dump Ned out of my life and expose him for the lying cheat that he is. When he’s not around me, I feel strong and vibrant, but as soon as I see his face, I bitch up and fall right back in line with the game he’s running. He has some type of power over me that makes me crave the little bit that he gives me, even though I know after he gets what he wants, he’s going to go back home.”

  “To her. There, I said it for you. Don’t you ever forget to add that part. He’s going back home to her, Jayne, so you might as well start saying it out loud so much that you can hear the words in your sleep. Ned has a wife that he married while you were together, and he left your bed to go home to her last night.”

  The loud silence that overtook the line let me know that reality stung Jayne deeply. A faint whimper interrupted the silence, and my face tightened. I started to feel as if I would cry right along with her. Some men just didn’t care to understand the devastation they left behind after their midnight trysts.

  “You don’t have to be so harsh, Alise. I’m hurting over here. You think I feel good interfering with a marriage? But what about me? He was mine first! I still have my engagement ring. He was supposed to marry me, not her. Why does she get protected by the shield of a marriage certificate, when she knew that he was mine before she married him?”

  The hurt in Jayne’s voice shattered her usual hard exterior. She was irrevocably burned by Ned. If I had it my way, I would burn his ass back, literally. Even if she picked up the pieces and moved forward and never looked back, these types of blows in love forever changed a person’s DNA.

  “Sis, the way you feel about him and his marriage is valid. You had no idea he had another woman, and he betrayed you in the worst way imaginable. The only thing I’m saying to you is for you to stop being a willing participant in his betrayal. Every time you allow him back in, it’s like you’re saying what he did to you is okay. It’s not.”

  With that, Jayne broke down into a full-on bawling session, and I was right there for her. I knew what was coming after the tears were wiped away. She would proclaim that she wasn’t going to deal with him anymore, that it was over once and for all. I had heard the proclamations so many times that I could recite them on demand.

  You know what, Alise, I’m done. You’re right, I deserve better than this. This is the last time he’s going to come over here and treat me like shit. The next time Ned comes to my door, I’m going to cut his ass from his chest to his little penis and send him back to her in pieces.

  And so, she began, “You know what, Alise, I’m done… You’re right, I deserve better…”

  I waited for her to finish her usual declaration and readied myself to be on alert for the next time she needed me to build her back up, to help her get back to Jayne. With Ned’s manipulative ass, there would always be a next time.

  “On to another subject,” I began, confident that Jayn
e was feeling better. “Do you have everything you need for the wedding? It’s coming up soon.”

  “Yes, I picked up my shoes yesterday, and I’ve set all of my appointments for my hair, nails, and waxes. How about you?”

  “Still waiting on those dang-on gold shoes to come in, but after that, I’m good to go with hair, nails, everything,” I replied.

  “Good. Well, I’ll see you Saturday night at the club. I’m going to share the “Love Me Again” cover again today, too. That song is holding its spot on the charts. Hopefully, it will start climbing today,” Jayne said.

  I smiled because she was my biggest supporter. My friends, Tameka and Kemara, were second and third in line for my biggest fans.

  “Thanks, and Jayne?”

  “Yes.”

  “You are so very beautiful, my friend. Too beautiful to be a little dick man’s side piece,” I said bluntly, but she chuckled.

  “I know, and you are right.”

  “So, what are we going to do to make this right?”

  “I’m going to get my head in the game.”

  “That’s my girl.”

  “Okay, sis. I got this!”

  I hung up and sighed, praying my best friend would get a grip on her situation with Ned. She deserved a man worthy of her high-sprung fun energy, and Ned was nothing but an energy drainer, and he found a good energy source in Jayne. She needed to disconnect him from her life and find someone who could handle her outlandish spunk but also cherish the hell out of her flaws.

  “Oh, well, so much for a morning in bed,” I said, swiveling my feet around so that they were hanging off the side of the bed.

  Today, I was supposed to be working on my new CD, “A Dangerous Way to Love,” that was due out next month. I had a few more songs to add to it, and since sleep had slipped through my fingers with Jayne’s upsetting call, I decided to head into the studio.

  I got out of bed and walked to the bathroom to shower. This album was personal. It was about the ways men have handled my heart in the past. Some claimed to love me but left me feeling like a dagger was implanted right inside my chest. In truth, these men never knew how dangerously close they had come to me ending it all...for them.