Untamed Love. Lindsay Evans
and her smile became more natural. The sight of it loosened a tightness he hadn’t known was in his chest. She grinned up at him, a small ray of sunshine glowing beneath the heavy gray skies.
“Oh, good.” Her smile widened.
He was so screwed.
Mella shouldn’t have touched him. But she thought if she put their flesh together, casually, as she’d done with any other man in the past, it would be nothing. That she would get past the foolish notion that touching Victor would be significant. But it had been much worse than she thought.
On the porch of the mansion, she looped her arm through his and felt shivers run through her body, tiny seismic events jolting through her and making her deeply regret the impulsive move. His skin on hers was exactly the shock to the system she had been expecting. And more. He smelled like something she wanted to put on her body. A favorite blanket, an old T-shirt, Christmas socks that felt perfect while she lay by the fire. Even now, after he’d driven off to his office or wherever he needed to be at one o’ clock on a Thursday afternoon, her entire side tingled from where she’d been pressed against him. The core of her felt like it had been flung about on a roller coaster. Stupid. She had been utterly stupid.
Mella sat in her car with the windows up, steam fogging up the interior as her thoughts ran completely away from her.
This is pointless, she thought. I need to get out of here.
With a shuddering sigh, she started the engine and roared her little car down the long driveway. The tires hissed through the rain, windshield wipers thudding back and forth across the glass.
There was work to do at the café, but she didn’t feel like dealing with any of it. Not with the awareness of Victor Raphael riding so close to the surface of her skin. Mella just drove. She didn’t realize where she was going until she pulled into Mary McLeod Bethune Park. The small Coconut Grove park lay between two roads, one open to vehicular traffic and the other closed to everyone but the long line of motorcycles doing the charity ride for pelican protection and conservation.
Her aunt Jessamyn, who didn’t give a damn about pelicans but used any excuse she could to travel with other bikers, was on the ride. Around one thirty, she and the other riders were supposed to take a break at the park to eat and stretch their legs before continuing north to Deerfield Beach. If Mella had thought about it, she would have ridden her own motorcycle to link up with her aunt, but the anticipation of meeting with Victor Raphael that morning had made basic thought processes impossible.
It was still raining, and her hair was already wet. The rain jacket she pulled from her car kept the rest of her mostly dry, though. Her boots squelched in the grass as she crossed the manicured green to the other side of the park and to the line of motorcycles. She took out her phone and called her aunt.
“Are you still at the park?”
Her aunt immediately answered in her gravelly voice. “Yeah. By the statue of the old girl. One of the shaded picnic benches.” In the background, Mella could hear other voices and the occasional grumble of a motorcycle.
Mella waded through the crowd of bikers, fifty at least, and easily found her aunt in the roundabout, her bike parked near the eight-foot bronze statue of Mary McLeod Bethune. Her aunt straddled her big purple Harley while she chatted up another biker, a man with a handlebar mustache and most of his muscled chest bare under an open leather vest.
Even in a crowd like this, her aunt stood out. Almost unnaturally beautiful, she’d gotten even more striking in her middle age. She had long ago traded her sleek pantsuits and blazers for jeans, biker boots and the occasional tuxedo when she was in the mood. Today, she wore her mostly salted hair in two big French braids with the ends curled like snails at her shoulders. The freckles on her sand-colored cheeks glistened under the steadily falling raindrops.
As Mella came closer, her aunt’s companion gave her a fist bump, then wandered off. Aunt Jess waved at Mella. “I didn’t expect to see you here, honey.”
“I didn’t expect me, either.” Mella made a face, irritated with herself now that she was officially running to her aunt as if someone had stolen her lunch money.
“What’s wrong, Michaela?” Her aunt’s forehead wrinkled in concern.
But even though she’d run halfway across the city to see the woman who had raised her, she wasn’t ready to talk about it yet. It being whatever the hell Victor was doing to her.
“I’m not sure,” Mella finally said. “Maybe I’m just feeling restless.” She rubbed a hand over her face.
But Aunt Jess wasn’t buying her helpless act. “You’re a terrible liar, Michaela. But I’ll wait.” She got off her bike and pulled a minicooler from her saddlebag, then pointed Mella toward an empty picnic bench under a nearby banyan tree offering some protection from the light rain.
Aunt Jess unpacked two sandwiches, two bottles of water and a bag of potato chips from the cooler. “Eat. It’s lunchtime, and I doubt you’ve made the time to get something.”
“I was going to stop by Gillespie’s on the way back to the café.” But she took a sandwich anyway, one of her favorites her aunt made with turkey, rye bread and raw kale. The wasabi mayo burned sweetly as she chewed her first bite. “This is good.”
“Don’t talk with your mouth full,” her aunt chided, but she was smiling. She opened the other sandwich and nudged the bag of kettle chips closer to Mella’s hand.
When she was very young, Aunt Jessamyn had been one of Mella’s favorite adults to be around. Her aunt liked the same movies Mella did, cooked the best food and liked to do different things from the rest of her family, including her own parents. Although Aunt Jessamyn had a kid of her own, Shaun, she often acted like a child herself, laughed loud and long in public, impulsively took Mella and Shaun on trips to Disney World and learned to ride motorcycles just because. She loved doing things for the experience of them, and that was one of the things Mella had always enjoyed about her favorite aunt and her mother’s only sister.
The three aunts on her father’s side were boring. It just seemed natural that after Mella’s parents died when she was eight, Aunt Jessamyn was the one to take her in. She’d loved her parents and missed them every day, but she was glad she had Aunt Jess.
“How’s the ride going?” Mella asked after chewing a mouthful of chips.
“Decent enough. It would be good if this rain let up, but it’s not too bad. Watching out for the fool drivers cutting up in this weather is a decent distraction from thinking about Shaun.”
Mella nodded. She’d noticed the date, nearly four years to the day Shaun had been sent away to begin his ten years behind bars for vehicular manslaughter. Her aunt was hurting. Mella reached across the table and squeezed her hand.
“You saw him this week?” she asked.
Her aunt nodded. “Yesterday. He’s in such bad shape.” She pressed her lips together, her face a mask of pain. “I’m not sure he’ll last in that place if he doesn’t get paroled. Every time we talk, he tells me he’s sorry for what he did and wishes he could take it all back.”
“I know,” Mella said. “We all wish that.”
But they didn’t live in a world where wishes came true and felons got released just because their mothers were sad.
When Shaun was only twenty and in college, he’d been dumb enough to get behind the wheel after a few too many drinks. The crazy thing was he’d done it so many times before that he hadn’t even thought twice about doing it again. Or at least that’s what he’d told Mella when she visited him in prison.
That night, he’d had too many drinks and didn’t notice the stop sign until he’d plowed through it in his SUV and T-boned a little white sedan. The man in the car hadn’t survived. And although her aunt, through