Rutland is complex. Eliot Marie Lays is a woman haunted by tragedies. Their one and only meeting is emotionally and sexually explosive. It starts a chain of events neither anticipated nor can control. The meeting is literally devastating for Eliot and life altering for Vincent. It’s also the catalyst that leads him to Antoinette, Eliot's beloved friend.

While he has a special bond with Eliot, it is Antoinette who captures his heart, his soul, and ultimately his trust. But she is hiding a secret from Vincent -- a secret that is directly related to that night. Once revealed, will he find it in his heart to forgive her or will he choose the path of no return that Eliot has embraced?

But how do you convince someone, who has been hurt in the past, that the flame he’s carrying for you now is meant to give warmth and not to burn? Will he succeed at convincing her that when dreams come true nothing will be left of yesterday’s pain?

REVIEW

He never could make clear in his mind his mother’s relationship to Eliot, or to his half-brother. But a part of him understood his father’s obsession with her. She brought out a man’s basic instinct to take care of her and to protect her.

Vincent liked the demure type, especially if she was a lady in public with the instincts of a world-class slut in the bedroom. God save him from the little kitten who craved vanilla sex. He wouldn’t know what to do with her. The only thing nice he wanted in his bed were sheets. It was hard to find a woman with both qualities, not that he was particularly interested in finding one to keep. He was young, rich, and handsome. Except for his damn obsessive-compulsive disorder, he was enjoying his life and intended to maintain it as it currently was: unattached.

He thought about his father’s little paramour. As had always been the case, his father had scored in an area he had only dreamed of.

Yeah! That Eliot, he thought. Now she was the perfect chameleon. The not-so-sweet rendezvous they shared in his mind would make the most hardened dominant male blush. In his mind, Vincent had taken Eliot in every position he could conceive, so now his fantasies of fucking her had become repeats.

Vincent first saw her on television, walking off the plane with his father. The images of her and his father bombarded him for weeks, and the image of her tiny frame was burned in the part of his mind reserved for all things in his life he wanted to forget, but could not. Rather than allowing his mind to feel sympathy for her, he created a sordid x-rated movie starring Eliot, the woman he constantly referred to as his father’s whore.

Although Vincent was able to escape the media and remain pretty much obscure, his mother had not. She was the third piece to the puzzle that made the tabloids swim in profit heaven.

The media had managed to find the most China doll shots of Eliot. She always had a sad, waiflike, clingy, needy look. It was as if she were yelling, “Help me!” While his mother had always been athletic and feisty and strong, Eliot was the opposite. Her photos were of a contradictory woman: sexy as hell with an uncanny mixture of fearfulness and hurt. She was childlike in that you knew she had been hurt somewhere along the way because of those sad, doelike eyes.

Vincent figured those qualities had appealed to his father because at Jonathan’s age, it made him feel needed, vibrant, and young again. The interest in them soon faded in Europe, but American gossips would not let it die. The Biography Channel profiled his father, concentrating more on the five-week period Jonathan and Eliot were together instead of his business brilliance and the life his parents had enjoyed. Sitcoms had story lines patterned around the young girl"old man theme.

That was the main reason he decided to stay in London and call it home. Whenever the buzz surrounding them began to fade, something new would come along"her illness and temporary commitment to EsCare Mental Hospital, the baby, his father’s death, and finally his mother’s death. Now the media was clamoring for information on his half-brother Damien, something he found unacceptable. Damien was the one true innocent in the sordid media drama that their life had became.

Why, the speculation was, had Harriet Rutland left half of her estate valued at twenty million dollars to her late husband’s illegitimate son? The conjecture also included polite innuendo that “that girl” had somehow managed to ingratiate herself into Harriet Rutland’s life and walk away with even more of the Rutland’s riches.

Vincent really hated the stories now circulating about his brother and the newfound interest in Damien. Because of the strong sense of family loyalty Vincent had been raised with, he wanted to squash those stories and protect Damien. He wanted Damien to grow up like him, untouched by the media instead of a freak show like the Kennedy clan or the Onassis girl.

When his mother died and he came back to the States, he had mulled over getting in touch with Eliot and Damien. But at the time, he decided against it. He thought it best under the circumstances that they continue as they always had, through attorneys and accountants.

His mother provided handsomely for Damien, although it had not been necessary. Damien was extremely wealthy from the trust fund their father had created for him. Vincent’s mother’s will stipulated both he and Eliot equally share in decisions affecting the money she left in trust for Damien. Vincent knew Harriet’s goal was to force a bonding relationship between Vincent and his half-brother. But Vincent wasn’t interested in bonding with Damien. He wanted to protect him, but Vincent wasn’t the big-brother type. It would be a cold day in hell before he would watch some little kid play baseball or hockey or whatever little kids did now. Besides, how could he save his brother when he was having a hell of a time trying to save himself? It was easier for Vincent, and in his mind, safer for Damien, if he just stayed away.

So, he avoided thinking about Damien. His attorneys kept him informed of his little brother, but he had never met him. He’d only seen pictures. And there were plenty of those, he discovered, when he retuned to California to handle his mother’s affairs and close up the house after she had died. There were dozens of photos of Damien throughout the house in comparison with the few he saw of himself and his father. There was only one photograph of Eliot, however. It was in a silver frame, and it sat on his mother’s bedside table. It was of Eliot and Damien together.

The photograph was haunting because of Eliot’s pose. Vincent found it disturbing. The lost look in her eyes made Vincent uncomfortable when he first saw it. Her pose was the opposite of his little brother’s. Damien had a huge grin on his face, mugging for the camera, but Eliot’s was subtle, almost forced. The expression on her face reminded him of the typical lost tourist in London. He could spot the “lost tourist look” a mile away. They always had the same expression on their face, not sure of where they were, looking around frantically hoping to find the right person to show them where to go.

It was then that he had really become obsessively envious of his father. The jolt of pure jealousy attacked his very core. She looked so tempting and fragile and hot! If such a thing was possible: a hot chick with sad, baby-doll eyes. Her caramel skin was exotically stimulating to him. Her hair was cut short so nothing distracted from the perfect face she possessed.

He loved women"all colors and shapes and sizes"but he especially loved black women. The way the sun’s rays danced off their skin. The variety of skin tones to choose from was like visiting Baskin-Robbins and sampling the 31 Flavors. He got off on that image alone. They seemed to also have a way of melting at just the right moment which made him feel like God’s gift to them. They would gladly put you on a pedestal and just as quickly kick your ass off when you fucked up. He liked a woman who could fight. And they did it best. He knew he was stereotyping a whole race of women, but he didn’t care. He loved all women"they all had their good points, he just had a preference. He kept that particular photograph of Eliot and Damien, packing the others away. He told himself that he wanted it because of the charming image of Damien, but that was a lie.

He kept it because of her.

EXCERPT

"You didn't tell me about the fringe benefits of this job, Leo," Kenneth spoke into his cell phone.

"What do you mean?" Leo Baron asked.

"The women are gorgeous." Kenneth adjusted his cell phone against his ear as he leaned back in his chair. He swiveled around and gazed up at the ceiling of the small office that he now occupied as a temporary professor in the Department of African-American Studies. He reflected on the events of that morning and pictured in his mind's eye the image of the woman that he knew had changed his life. There was only one problem"to find her…and keep her.

"Yeah, you would view the campus scenery as a smorgasbord." Leo laughed. He was all too aware of Kenneth's taste in women"smooth caramel color skin, short hair that did not distract from an oval-shaped face, big brown eyes, full rosy lips, a perfect little body with breasts that fit perfectly in the palm of his hands, and an ass that begged to be set free from the confines of tight clothing.

Leo had known Kenneth for years. Kenneth's mother abandoned her well-to-do living conditions in the suburbs"which included Kenneth's father"and moved into the "poor black part" of town with her jazz singer boyfriend, Elias. Eventually Elias and Kenneth's mom married and after a while Elias was able to open a jazz club in the district. But in the beginning, when Kenneth was seven years old, it was very hard for them.

The best they could afford was a run-down two bedroom apartment in the infamous DeQuincy Gardens Development of New Orleans. It was a rough place reminiscent and on the scale of Chicago's Cabrini Green or Indianapolis's Brick City or the Phoenix. He was the only white boy in the projects and he would get his ass kicked on a daily basis. That is, until Leo took pity on him, stepped up to the plate, and decided to protect Kenneth.

"I saw this girl this morning." Kenneth's voice was wishful, practically a whisper, with an edge of anticipation.

"Did you just refer to her as a girl"you know, jail-bait?"

"Sorry. She was definitely a woman, a beautiful, gorgeous, long-legged beauty. This lady was perfection. I'm in love."

"You're in lust, man."

"I'm in love. I'm going to marry her."

"You don't know her."

"I'll find her, make her scream, and then I'm going to marry her." Kenneth laughed, adding, "She's so hot that even if she doesn't make me scream, I'm still going to marry her."

"You are still my crazy little white boy. Man, there are over ten thousand students on that campus. You'll probably never see her again."

"I believe in God. I'll see her again," Kenneth said adamantly.

"She probably didn't even notice you."

"Listen to this, Leo, I was walking towards her and I was checking her out. She was eyeballing me, from head to toe. I got hard as hell, man. When I went past her I leaned in, touched her shoulder, said hello."

"No, you didn't! Don't tell me you sniffed her."

"Hell yeah I did. Man, I can still smell her. She reminded me of a field of wildflowers. My lungs exploded."

"What have I told you about using my shit? That's my shit, copping a quick feel and whispering hello. Girls go for that shit if you do it right. But I've told you time and again that the move is a black man Casanova Thang. A white man can't do that shit to a sister."

"This one did. I'm telling you, she stopped dead in her tracks. I mean she stood perfectly still."

"She was probably pissed and considering kicking your scrawny little ass."

"No baby. She turned and looked at me and her lips slowly parted."

"Shit man."

"Now all I have to do is find her and tell her that she's going to be my baby's momma," Kenneth joked. He added a smack to emphasize his statement.