A Kiss of Color: The Complete 3 Book Collection
Read A Kiss of Color: The Complete 3 Book Collection Online
Authors: Cristina Grenier
Tags: #A BWWM Interracial Romance
Chapter Five: All That Matters
Chapter Three: What Will Never Be
Chapter Four: Irreconcilable Differences
Chapter Seven: The Last Stage of Grief
Chapter Three: The Beginning of the End
Chapter Four: Unexpected Arrival
Chapter Seven: Refusing Goodbye
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A Kiss of Color
Book 1
All That Matters
Eight Years Prior
She was miserable.
Starving, cold, tired…and her cheek still burned from where her mother had struck her just hours before. When she remembered the way she’d left, tears rose to Helena’s eyes. All she wanted – all she had
ever
wanted – was her mother’s love. Instead, for as long as she could remember, the woman had ridiculed and abused her.
Of course, she’d fought Helena’s father for custody. When her parents had divorced, she’d been just seven years old, and all Helena had known was that she wanted the fighting to stop. Her parents had screamed at each other more often then they’d been cordial, and their encounters usually ended in her mother threatening to kill her father. Janette Freeman, was fond of wielding kitchen knives with malicious intentions she never followed through on – but the idea that she would resort to such actions to intimidate had been bad enough.
Helena recalled little else beyond the fighting. As a small child, she’d tried to shut it out as much as she possibly could. What she did remember was that her father had fought for her. He’d threatened to steal Helena away if her mother kept her, but ultimately, something had changed his mind. After an ugly divorce, he had eventually just walked away, his visitation rights next to nothing.
Helena had grown into adolescence under her mother’s very volatile thumb. She’d started cooking meals for Janette when she was only nine years old at her mother’s insistence. She’d attested that Helena needed to start pulling her weight, but the real reason soon became apparent when, more often than not, the little girl returned home from school to find her mother enveloped in a haze of drugs and alcohol.
Janette had threatened her. Had beat her and demeaned her until it was all she could do just to leave her room, she was so frightened. Of course, all that had changed once Helena had gotten her first job. She’d sworn that she would start saving to leave her mother’s house as soon as she was able and at the age of fourteen, she started working at a fast food restaurant a few blocks from her house.
Of course, the horror didn’t end. It was interspersed with periods of saccharine sweetness – when, for a while, the young woman had thought that her mother loved her…that she had
finally
learned to care. The truth of the matter was that Janette had wanted her daughter’s paychecks. Nothing else. The moment she’d wheedled one or two hundred dollars from Helena, her behavior returned to normal. That was: name calling, screaming, and a slew of physical blows that drove Helena from the house – and to the hospital – more than her fair share of times.
Yet, somehow, she kept coming back. She hoped that, one day, her mother would realize the error of her ways. That she would realize that she only had one opportunity with her only daughter, and that she would become close with the woman who had called her a mistake – an ungrateful leech.
Of course, there had been no powerful transformation. Instead, things had just gotten worse and worse, finally culminating in Helena’s refusal to give her mother any more money to fuel her addiction. The result had been Janette kicking her from the house – hurling boxes of her daughter’s things from the window and screaming obscenities that would have soured even the most seasoned soldier.
And now, here she was.
Helena stood on the threshold of her father’s downtown apartment. She could count on one hand the number of times she had seen the man over the past eight years. Her mother had attested her hate for her ex-husband enough that mentioning his name in her household was tantamount to a curse. Helena had been so wrapped up in trying to win her mother’s love that she’d all but forgotten about the father who’d fought tooth and nail for her before all but disappearing from her life.
But now, she had nowhere else to turn.
She rubbed eyes swollen from crying as clear as she could, feeling somewhat out of place in the upscale apartment complex that hosted her father’s address. She hadn’t been to his house since her parents had split, but she got the vague sense that he’d done well for himself. Janette was under the impression that her ex-husband thought that he was better than where he’d come from. Both she and he had grown up in a poorer part of town – they had come from families that could hardly string two pennies together.
Helena was young, but she knew that wasn’t the lift she wanted to herself. Scraping coins from the bottom of the jar just so that her family could eat. Living in a neighborhood where she felt unsafe walking to and from school every day. For her entire life, she’d been surrounded by such blatant lack of ambition that here, now, she found herself ill at-ease with the thought that people could achieve so much more than she had.
The luxury of a gated apartment community where people didn’t roam the streets and drugs weren’t hawked on corners was both strange and exciting. But before she could even contemplate things, she had to face a man who was now a complete stranger to her.
Taking a deep breath, Helena raised her hand, hesitating only slightly before knocking on the door.
Long minutes passed without an answer and her stomach began to churn with unease. It was late, she knew, and the man was probably asleep. She would have to go slinking back to her mother, begging for forgiveness for crimes she didn’t commit, and return to a life laden with heartache.
All at once, the light above her clicked on, there came the sound of a bolt being unlocked. Helena’s heart skipped a beat as the door swung open, revealing a tall, broad figure, and a face that was all at once familiar and strange.
When Isaiah Graves’ eyes fixed on the face of his only daughter, they widened in shock. For a moment, the two stared at one another, silence hovering between them. In those few seconds, Helena felt a rush of emotion so powerful that it almost choked her. Her heart filled and her face tightened as she felt tears she had just dashed away return with full force.
She tried to form words – but what could she say? How could she tell him of the years of suffering she had endured at the hand of a woman who would never validate her existence? Who would never love her?
She opened her mouth to try to speak, but sobs stifled her words. She closed her eyes, her entire form trembling with grief. “Dad….Dad…” She could do nothing but cry. As much as she’d promised herself she would show him only her strong side, it was all she could do not to fall apart. “
Daddy.”
“Helena.” He took her in from head to toe. Helena knew he would see her ill-fitting, ragged clothes, her unkempt hair and her tear-streaked face as things that couldn’t fit into his upper class lifestyle; That the man standing there in his clean, comfortable pajamas in his cavernous home would reject her and everything she was, just because she belonged to a woman who detested him for so long. With a low whimper, she stepped back, preparing to flee – only to have her shoulders taken in a warm, firm grip. The young woman raised her gaze once more, and her heart broke when she found that she wasn’t the only one crying. “
Helena
. Come in here.” Her father drew her into his warm embrace, and it was the sweetest thing she had ever known.
“You’ve come home.”
***
Present Day
Xavier was bored.
It was often the case when he had to sit through long HTML programming classes. He’d enrolled in Antioch University for their coveted IT graduate program, only to find that most of what they taught, he already knew. Sitting in class, he’d discovered, was a complete waste of time. He’d found that even skipping through most of his required coursework to start advanced material wasn’t even enough to stimulate his mind.
He supposed it was really no skin off his back. His parents had agreed to his choice of university because Antioch was a big name – an easily recognizable name. It wasn’t Ivy League, but then, Xavier had always been against Ivy League schools. Both of his parents had attended them, and, at one point, had been insistent on his following in their footsteps.
Unfortunately, all the money in the world wouldn’t convince their son that he needed to be a doctor or a lawyer. Xavier didn’t care so much about money as he did about following his passions – something that made him a bit of an anathema in a family that fairly dripped old money. His older sister was practically running a firm upstate, his youngest sister was a cello prodigy at Julliard, and he…he liked to tinker with machines and build programs that he knew would change the world.
It was a shame that no one else but him seemed to believe in his ambitions – least of all his parents who refused the mere idea of funding the IT start-up that was his dream. It was strange that they refused to give him a fifty thousand dollar investment for his business but would pay a hundred thousand dollars to send him to school. More outlandish, perhaps, was the idea that they wouldn’t let him accept merit or academic scholarships.
They wanted
everyone
to know that they were paying for the most expensive school, and the most private apartment. Nothing but the best for a Thompson. The mere thought made him roll his eyes.
“Is there a problem, Mr. Thompson?”
Great. The last thing he needed right now was his uptight coding instructor taking offense to something that had nothing to do with her. Straightening in his seat, Xavier cleared his throat before casting the sour-looking woman his most brilliant smile. “Nothing at all, Professor. My apologies.”
While the gesture usually worked on freshman newly arrived on campus and most of his underclassmen, Professor Lachey appeared far from pleased. Merely scowling at him, she continued with her lecture as the other students in the classroom furiously scribbled down notes. She was, of course, going over a concept that Xavier had grasped when he was eleven years old, so soon, he was spacing out again.