At First Kiss. Gwyneth Bolton

off.”

      “Nice way not to say anything, babe,” Kendrick said with a shake of his head.

      Jazz let out an exaggerated laugh. “Alicia can just forget about that…” She looked at Troy and shook her head. “It’ll never happen. Never.”

      Troy offered a sarcastic chuckle. “Yeah, I like my women a little less high-maintenance and a lot less crazy.”

      Crazy? High-maintenance?

      She could feel the heat rising in her neck and covering her cheeks. She did not need a repeat of her episode with Troy earlier. It was a nice upscale restaurant, and if she started cussing him out in her Bajan dialect, it probably wouldn’t look good. So she smiled at him instead, a smile that probably appeared just shy of crazed.

      He offered that lazy half smile, half smirk of his that she quickly came to realize worked her last good nerve and made her want to smack him. She wasn’t used to these kinds of things. Guys usually didn’t faze her at all. She could take them or leave them, and nine times out of ten she was leaving them. And none had never ever gotten under her skin so intensely and so quickly.

      “Excuse me.” She stood up and walked away from the table. She needed to go to the restroom to compose herself before she did or said something she would regret later.

      After some breathing exercises and telling herself repeatedly that he was not all that, Jazz exited the restroom a newly composed woman. Until she saw Troy standing there…

      “Look, before you blow up and start acting all psycho again, I just thought I’d check on you and apologize. I have no idea what I’m apologizing for, but whatever has your panties in a bunch that you perceive I am at fault for, I’m sorry.”

      Is my eye twitching? My eye is twitching. This— She closed her eyes, took a deep breath and willed him to be gone when she opened them.

      She opened her eyes. The left one twitched. No such luck.

      “Go away, Stud. No need to apologize. Clearly you can’t help being just what you are, a jerk.”

      “I’m not going away. We need to find a way to call a truce or something. Like it or not, our best friends are about to get married and that means we are going to be seeing a lot of each other through the years. Unless of course you and Alicia grow apart after college… One can only hope…” He let his words trail off and gave her a cocky grin. “I’m kidding. I’m kidding. Lighten up, will you?”

      “Alicia and I will always be close. And as for you and me running into each other in the future…Just do your best to stay out of my way and I’ll do my best to stay out of yours.” She moved to walk around the arrogant man and he caught her arm.

      She turned around and gave the offending hand a hard glare. He still wouldn’t let go. He stepped closer until there was no semblance of personal space whatsoever.

      She inhaled.

      Mmm. Drakkar Noir. Nice.

      “What’s your problem, Jasmine? Why won’t you just—” He cut himself off, and before she knew it his lips were on hers and he had engulfed her mouth, mind and all of her senses in his all-consuming grasp.

      His arms locked behind her and he held her so still and so close that the only thing she could move was her mouth. And apparently her mouth wanted to move. Her tongue snaked its way into his mouth and swirled around like it had found a new playground or something.

      Her heart felt like it was going to beat its way out of her chest and her toes tingled. What the hell kind of kiss made your toes tingle? she wondered, as she pressed closer to him, enjoying the warmth of his body heat.

      We are on fire.

      She sucked his tongue into her mouth and decided to forget about her out-of-control heartbeat. He tasted too damn good.

      Fire and Desire like Rick James and Teena Marie. I’m talking square biz. I’m talking lo—

      She pulled her tongue, her body and her mind back at the same time and she used the hands that were trailing his massive and muscular chest to push him away. The disconnection between them was so gut-wrenching and so swift she almost fell.

      It’s you! You? Oh. Hell. No. Not today. Not ever!

      Panting and trying to keep her heart rate from spiraling out of control, she glared at him. “What the hell do you think you’re doing?”

      She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand with as much disgust as someone who had literally been kissed senseless could muster. “Don’t ever do that again! I do not like you. And you need to just stay away from me.” She straightened her shoulders and half walked, half ran away.

      Troy Singleton had taken her through a range of emotions in the space of a few hours. More emotions than any guy had ever taken her through before, and that placed him in a category all by his lonesome…

      And that was just where he needed to stay, all by himself and the hell away from her. She couldn’t afford to let him get too close, ever. He could never catch her slipping or she would fall…fast.

      Troy stood in the middle of the hallway and watched as Jasmine did her breakneck dash to get away from him. The expression that a feather could knock him down came to mind. Even though he could hear a small whisper in the far nether regions of his mind whispering, it’s her, her, he didn’t want to go after her, that was for damn sure. In fact, as soon as his knees were no longer weak and his toes uncurled and stopped tingling, he was probably going to run in the opposite direction and get the hell out of that restaurant.

      If he was going to live up to his boast that he would remain a bachelor until he died and then they’d have to pry his player card out of his cold, dead hands, he needed to get as far away from Jasmine Stewart as possible.

      He could never allow himself to get too close to her.

      Ever.

      He just reminded himself how mean and evil and crazy she was. That would work, and his player status would be safe…

       Chapter 2

      “All the world’s a stage and all the men and women merely players…”

      —Shakespeare

      Ten years later

       “W ha de France yuh telling muh? Yuh mus be mad, nuh?” Stunned and increasingly livid didn’t even begin to cover the feeling of dread creeping through Jazz’s body. She knew she was just on the edge of losing it completely because her Bajan was coming out. Even though she had been on her mother’s island home of Barbados for a couple of days now, it wasn’t just being around her Barbadian kin that had made her code switch and flip on her dialect. It was the stress of losing the one person she loved more than anything in the world that had her about to snap on the puny lawyer.

      The past few days had been one shock after another, starting with her mother’s death.

      Jazz hadn’t even known that the cancer had come back. She’d been traveling a lot for work, a lot of traveling for a local television personality, anyway. And travel to and from Boston in the winter meant a lot of time spent in various airports because of delayed and canceled flights.

      Airport chairs didn’t invite longtime sitting, let alone comfortable sleeping. Add to that losing the only person who had faithfully had your back and a lawyer spouting nonsense about terms of inheritance in the will tied to outrageous sums of money and marriage of all things, and it was easy to see why Jazz’s patience had finally run its course.

      The stiff but kind of cute young lawyer seemed to sense that Jazz was on the brink of some kind of breaking point, because he moved back in his seat a little.

      “Your mother has left you $500,000 with the condition that you marry in at least six months and remain married for at least two years.” He nervously fidgeted with his gray tie, which perfectly matched his gray suit and did nothing to compensate for the blandness of his starched