King's Pleasure (8 page)

“Mmm.” Her head fell back even farther and her mouth formed a complete circle.

“You want to come for me, Baby Girl?”
she remembered as she masturbated.
Stroke.

“Yes!”

Stroke.

“What? I can’t hear you, Baby Girl.”

“Yes! Yes!”

Stroke
.
Stroke.

“Give Daddy all this good candy.”

Stroke.

“Oh—oh.” Leigh’s imploded as a silent scream dangled from her open mouth. Seconds later, every limb on her body started quivering. Her hands dropped away from her firm thighs in order for her to brace her weight against the tiled shower stall. It took another minute for her to realize that the water had turned ice-cold.

Shutting off the shower spray, Leigh quickly splashed on some baby oil and grabbed a towel. When she walked into her bedroom, she was stunned by the fact that there was a trail of rose petals. “What in the…?” She finished wrapping the towel around herself, and then followed the trail.

In the short time that she was in the shower, her living room had been transformed with what looked like hundreds of flickering candles. In the center of the room, on bended knee was DeShawn Carter in a three-piece suit.

“Hello, Leigh.” He puffed out his chest and swallowed nervously.

She walked up to him, shaking her head. “DeShawn, what are you doing here?”

“I came to do what I should’ve done a long time ago.” He reached into his jacket pocket and took out a Harry Winston jewelry box.

She gasped as her knees buckled.

DeShawn’s smile grew more confident at her reaction. “Leigh, this past week has been hell for me. I don’t like it when we fight…and I know that we usually fight because I’ve done something stupid. But, sweetheart, you have to know that you mean the world to me. I know beyond a shadow of a doubt that you are the woman that I want to share the rest of my life with. And I think, deep down, you feel the same way.”

Leigh’s heart started skipping beats as tears pooled in her eyes.

“So, I’m asking you, Leigh Imani Matthews, will you marry me?”

Two weeks later…

“Y
ou’re getting married?” Jeremy deadpanned as he stared across the dinner table at The Palm. It was his brother’s favorite get-together in West Hollywood, mainly because the restaurant served the best steaks. But now that Xavier had cheerily dropped this bomb on them, Jeremy lost his appetite.

“Congratulations,” Eamon said, and then reached over and pounded Xavier hard on the back. “Glad to see you taking the plunge.”

“Plunge,” Quentin scoffed. “How appropriate.”

Xavier gave his cousin and best friend a warning look. “Don’t start.”

“What’d I do?” He tried to give his famous puppy-dog expression, but there was just too much anger stiffening his jaw. “I’m simply pointing out what an appropriate term ‘taking the plunge’ is for this momentous occasion. I don’t see you trying to leap frog down Eamon’s throat—or is that since you both have lost the good sense God gave you, you’re trying to double-team the sane people at the table now?”

Jeremy tossed his hands up. “Please don’t drag me into this.”

“Hell, I’m not quite sure that I know what
this
is,” Xavier said, as his facial expression twisted.

“That makes two of us,” Eamon added, looking equally confused.

“There. I just proved my point,” Q insisted. “You two are on the same crazy wavelength or something. You’ve always been competitive with each other. Admit it. Eamon married a woman that tried to put us in the poorhouse, and now you want to marry the chick who tried to put us all behind bars. Crazy. And you guys are always trying to tell me that I need a shrink.”

“You
do
need a shrink,” the King brothers said in unison.

“Then all of y’all can go to hell.”

Xavier tried to squash the conflict. “All right. Calm down and take a deep breath.”

Q ignored him. “Let me ask you, if Eamon jumped off a building, would you do it, too?”

Jeremy sighed. He knew better than to jump into this melee. Quentin and Xavier were best friends, but when they got into it, they could be at it for hours. For a moment, he turned his attention away from the table and thought he caught a glimpse of a face he recognized.
Baby Girl?

He leaned over the table to try and get another look.

“Yo, dude,” Quentin stopped arguing long enough to bring it to Jeremy’s attention that he was damn near leaning into his lap.

“Oh. I’m sorry. I thought I saw someone I recognized.”

Q blinked. “Are you seeing people who aren’t there?” He leaned in closer. “Do they talk to you, too?”

“What?” Jeremy’s expression twisted as he stared at his cousin.

As if realizing his mistake, Quentin straightened, and then tried to brush aside the conversation. “N-nothing. Forget it.”

Jeremy ignored his cousin’s comment, and took one more sweeping glance around the restaurant.
She wasn’t there
. He leaned back in his chair and tried to brush off his disappointment. That had been the second time today that he thought he’d seen his Baby Girl—and about the hundredth time in the last two weeks.

Plus, he didn’t want to mention the times that he’d practiced in the mirror what he would say if in fact their paths did cross again. The first part was something like, “Hey, thanks for the police record.” Never mind that Cathy and George Atwater had since dropped the charges without explanation, but it didn’t change the fact that Los Angeles County now and forever had him photographed and fingerprinted.

The second part of his rehearsed conversation had something to do with asking for her name. One thing that might surprise a lot of women about him was that, despite his long list of naked activities with the opposite sex, he knew the name of every woman he’d ever slept with.

The irony was that the one woman whose name he didn’t know was the one that he most wanted to see again.
Don’t let it be said that God didn’t have a sense of humor.

Xavier pushed back from his steak and stared his cousin down. “Look, Q. I know that this may be hard for you, but just because I’m getting married it doesn’t mean that anything is going to change between us. We’re always going to be best buds.”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah. You say that now, but wait until after the wedding vows. People always change after the ‘I do’s.”

“You didn’t change.”

Quentin frowned. “You can hardly call my six-month trip down that crazy rabbit hole a marriage. I was crazy—she was definitely crazy—and the whole thing lasted a hundred and seventy-nine days longer than it should have.”

“Well it’s different when you do it for love instead of money.”

Quentin set down his empty glass, leaned back and gave Xavier a small round of applause. “Wow. That must have set some type of record. What did that take—three minutes before you brought that little tidbit up again? Yes, I married to recoup my inheritance. Good thing too because that temporary lapse of judgment cost me the only woman I’ll probably ever love. But I seem to recall that my first investment with that blood money provided capital for a few ungrateful cousins sitting around this table.”

Jeremy held up a hand. “I’m grateful.”

“Well, apparently not this jackass,” he thundered at Xavier.

“Whoa. Whoa,” Xavier said, getting testy himself. “Let’s take this down a notch before your mouth writes a check your ass can’t cash up in here.” He stared pointedly at Q. “Now, I know that you’re still working out whatever the hell you’re working out, but your issue is with
Sterling
—not us. And, frankly, I think it’s past time you handled that situation. Call him, write him or send him a damn smoke signal—but do something if we’re going to continue being boys.”

Xavier turned his attention to his baby brother. “I know that this may be coming as a total surprise to you but—”

“Not to me.” Quentin laughed as he signaled their waiter to bring him another whiskey sour. “I saw this coming the first time you cock-blocked me at Cheryl’s job interview.”

“What?” Xavier twisted up his face. “I did no such thing.”

“Oh, now you have amnesia?” Q challenged. “A’ight. Go ahead on. I remember what happened that day. What about you, Jeremy?”

“Sorry, bro, but I’m gonna have to go with cuz on this one. There was an awful lot of cock-blocking going on.” He tossed up his hands. “Not that I blame you. I still have an image of Cheryl in those panted-on jeans emblazoned in my mind, as well.”

“Hey, yo!” Xavier slammed his fist down on the white-linen table. “Cut it out. That’s my future wife you’re talking about. So get those painted-on jeans out of your heads.”

Eamon cracked up. “Damn, bro. You’re going to pop a blood vessel. Maybe you need to calm down and take a deep breath.”

Xavier tried, but the devout bachelors at the table had officially ruined the mood. “Look, I don’t ask much from either one of you, but I do know that I’ve been a faithful friend
and
brother. So it pisses me off that when I come here to share one of the most important decisions of my life, that I’ve found someone who truly makes me happy, you two selfish bastards can only think about how it affects you.”

Jeremy and Quentin glanced at each other and then dropped their heads.

“Technically,” Jeremy piped up, “I never said that I wasn’t happy for you. Look, man, if you love her and you’re happy, then hell yeah I’m happy for you. Of course, I’m not an asshole. You’re my brother, and I’ll always want what’s best for you.” He looked over at Eamon. “You too, for that matter.”

Eamon and Xavier flashed him identical smiles. “Thanks, bro.”

“Don’t mention it.” Jeremy reached for his beer. “Soooo I say that we officially need to make a toast to celebrate the occasion.”

“Hear, hear,” Eamon and Xavier chimed and then tapped their bottlenecks together. The three Kings then turned their attention to their cousin.

“You know, I fall under that technicality, as well. I’m just…” Q drew in a deep breath. “I have a problem with change. If this knucklehead here…” he said, tilting his head toward Jeremy, “…bails on me, I’m going to have to wrangle up some new cousins from some place.”

Xavier set his bottle down and stood up from the table. “Come here.” He opened up his arms.

“What?”

“C’mon,” he coaxed. “Let’s hug this out.”

Quentin’s bottom lip quivered as he stood up from his chair. “That’s all a brother wanted, a hug.” He opened his arms as well and the cousins came together.

“Aww…” Jeremy tossed his napkin down and then stood up from the table and threw his arms around both of them.

Quentin peeked over Xavier’s shoulder at Eamon.

“You’ve got to be kidding me,” Eamon said.

“You don’t feel the love?” Q asked.

Jeremy glanced back with a cocky smile. “C’mon, man. We’re all family.”

Exhaling a long sigh as he glanced around the crowded restaurant to see that his crazy
family
was indeed the center of attention, Eamon reluctantly got out of his chair and wrapped his arms around all of them. After all, the sooner he did, the quicker the little bonding episode would end.

“Ahem,” a throat cleared.

One by one, the men dropped their arms and went about pumping out their chests to reestablish their image of masculinity.

When Jeremy turned to see who had interrupted their family moment, his face exploded into a huge grin. “Well, I’ll be damned. Look who’s here. Roy, my man. How the hell are you?” He now threw his arms around his boyhood friend.

“I’m good. I’m good.” He nodded at Eamon and Xavier. “I see you guys are still thick as thieves.”

“You know it,” Jeremy said, standing back so that he could take another look at Roy. “I just can’t believe it. It’s been years.”

“Well, it’s not like we haven’t invested a healthy sum in long-distance phone calls. What are you doing here?” he asked Jeremy.

“The same reason everyone else is here. I came to get something to eat.” He laughed.

“C’mon. You know what I mean. Wait.” He looked around and then grabbed a chair from the next table and crammed it next to Jeremy’s.

“Join us. Have a seat.”

“For a few minutes. I’m having a business dinner, but I don’t see them just yet.”

“Cool, cool. You can just hang out with us until they get here,” Jeremy said, excited.

His brothers and Quentin had sat down by then.

“Oh, so does this mean that you’re being traded to the L.A. Razors, Roy?”

“It looks that way, but don’t tell anyone just yet. We haven’t made the official announcement.”

“Cool. Oh, I don’t believe that you’ve met my cousin here, Quentin Hinton.”

“Hinton?” Roy repeated. “As in your rich cousin you used to brag about?”

Quentin smirked. “Guilty as charged.”

Jeremy laughed. “I did brag about that.”

“Yeah, like that changed the fact that you were eating fried bologna sandwiches and drinking purple Kool-Aid like the rest of our broke butts.”

Jeremy nodded. The King family didn’t have much growing up in their small house in Atlanta, but they had plenty of love. “But you were like the king of the neighborhood because your pop built a tree house in your backyard.”

“Yeah, perfect for kids that ran away from home with a boxful of puppies.”

The table erupted with laughter.

Quentin’s brows crashed together as he tried to keep up with the conversation. “Do what?”

“Oh, you didn’t tell your cuz about that?”

Jeremy propped his elbow up on the table while his entire body trembled with laughter.

“It was a long time ago,” Eamon started to fill Q in on the story.

“Yeah,” Xavier agreed, shaking his head. “I tell you one thing, it certainly wasn’t funny at the time.”

“What wasn’t funny?” Q grew anxious, waiting on the story.

“You want to tell it?” Xavier prompted Jeremy.

Jeremy struggled to wipe the grin off his face. “Aah… I think I was six years old and I found this box of puppies that someone had abandoned in the woods.”

“So genius here decided to bring all of them home,” Eamon cut in.

Xavier bobbed his head. “Only our dad said that we couldn’t afford to keep them and that we would have to take them to the pound.”

“Only I didn’t like the idea of them going to the pound, so I ran away with the whole box of puppies and was gone for, like, two days.” Jeremy continued shaking his head.

“It sent the whole family into an uproar. We were all over the news and everything.”

Q frowned, thinking back. “Yeah, I think I do remember something like that happening. My mom was really upset and was convinced that Atlanta had another serial killer, snatching up little boys.”

Roy jumped into the story. “Only, Jeremy and his puppies were hiding out in my tree house.”

“Yeah, and you squealed me out,” Jeremy reminded him.

“No, I didn’t,” Roy said, defensively. “My mother got a little curious about all the peanut-butter-and jelly sandwiches I kept making and sneaking off with and taking to the backyard. You know I would never drop dime on a friend—let alone a blood brother.”

“Y’all are blood brothers?” Q asked.

The men held up their hands and showed tiny identical scars across the center of their wrists.

“Blood brothers for life,” they said together and then looked at each other.

“Oh, there goes my agent.” He stood up.

Jeremy was disappointed to cut their reunion short. “Well, we’re going to have to get together and play catch up.”

“Most definitely.” They smacked palms and then gave each other a one-shoulder hug. “Oh, as a matter of fact, you should come to my engagement party.”

Jeremy’s eyes rounded. “Do what?
You’re
engaged?”

“And the epidemic continues,” Quentin mumbled, and then received a quick jab from Xavier’s sharp elbow. “Oow.”

“What woman did you knock over the head and convince to put up with your Milk-Bone-addicted ways?” Jeremy asked.

“Aah, man. You ain’t never lied. I had to bust out the ring or lose the best thing that ever happened to me.”