A Kiss of Color: The Complete 3 Book Collection (3 page)

And so, for five years, she’d lived like she had never thought she could. Under the same roof with a loving parent. A man who had encouraged and supported her in everything she did. Her father had literally had to rebuild the way she thought of relationships between children and parents. He’d taught her that he would always be there for her, that whenever she fell or stumbled that he would be present to help her back onto her feet. He’d introduced her to the world of medicine – which had become her passion from day one.

Mind you, it had taken a while for Helena to get over the issues she had with seeing blood. When she’d first started observing in the operating room, it had been all she could do to calm her churning stomach. Now, in the fourth year of her undergraduate degree, she found that she could hold her gorge when she concentrated on how fascinating the human body was – how interesting it was to watch doctors perform miracles that saved lives on the cusp of being lost. She wanted to be able to perform such miracles.

She wanted to be like her father.

Isaiah Graves was known in the medical community for both his skill as a surgeon and his kind heart. Several times a year, he performed pro-bono work for families desperately in need, and was a member of several charitable organizations. As serious as he was about his job, he was even more serious about making sure his patients got the treatment they needed and went through it with few apprehensions.

He performed the surgeries that other doctors wouldn’t do – worked long hours and committed to the people who needed him without any regard for how far it would inflate his paycheck or his reputation. As a result, he became a kind of saintly figure – someone other doctors looked to for inspiration – and for Helena herself, he was her saving grace. A figure that she could truly be proud of.

His death had been devastating.

The cancer had taken her father swiftly, and brutally. Despite being the picture of health – low blood pressure, no genetic history of life-threatening disease, being generally active, and eating healthy – Isaiah had been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer just days before Helena’s twenty first birthday. While his daughter had been utterly devastated, Isaiah had accepted his one year sentence with surprising grace. He handled the news so calmly he might have already known he was sick – and Helena suspected several times that he had. As he wasted away, the young woman was faced with losing one of the only positive influences in her life. The man who had lifted her up when it seemed like she was totally in the dark.

How she had made it through his funeral, she still wasn’t certain. For a whole year after he’d died, she’d grieved so deeply that she hadn’t wanted to attend her classes at school – hadn’t wanted to further the dream he had instilled in her. Then, one morning, she’d woken up and realized how much time she’d wasted.

Her father wouldn’t want her to mope in the darkness of her room, lamenting over what she had lost. He would want her to fight for her dreams. How many hours had he spent with working on her application for Antioch? How proud of her had he been when she’d received a full scholarship? To throw away all of that would be a monumental waste.

And so, Helena threw herself into her studies. For her sophomore and junior years, she did nothing but study. Any and all semblance of any social life was completely forgotten in the wake of her renewed enthusiasm. To be completely and totally honest, she didn’t even contemplate the dalliances that her peers indulged in. Her roommate, Magda, a curvaceous blonde who caught the eye of every male on campus, liked to change men on a whim. How many times had she told her that she should take a break? Come out to a party? Live a little?

As much as Helena appreciated the effort, she was too absorbed in doing justice to her father’s legacy that she always finished her studies too late to make it to any kind of viable social activity. As she worked now, Magda was off at some sorority mixer. The elder girl had sent her several text messages in an attempt to get her out of the dorm, all to no avail.

That type of lifestyle had never really appealed to Helena anyway. After watching the wild parties her mother had hosted as a young girl – the chaos that overdrinking could cause – she had never adopted the habit. Not even as an impressionable freshman.

College was not the sin city for her that it was for her fellow students – and she’d faced relatively little temptation to the contrary.

One of those temptations, however, had faced her just the previous afternoon.

At the memory of the incident at the library, Helena had to stop in her reading. Placing a marker in her book, she closed it before leaning back in her chair.

Xavier Thompson.

Not a person on campus didn’t know his name. His family was rolling in dough and they liked to throw it around a fair amount. Helena had heard rumors that his father, Garret Thompson, had bought into the board of trustees the moment his son had been accepted to Antioch. Quite honestly, she had to wonder whether he’d bought his sons entry entirely. Xavier was supposedly some kind of HTML coding prodigy, but by virtue of being constantly engrossed in her studies, she’d never actually seen him.

Certainly, Magda liked to regale her with tales of the trust fund child’s good looks and his appearances at various parties around campus. Helena listened with half an ear, knowing that her friend tended to exaggerate stories to the nth degree.

However, it was apparent that when she’d spoken about Xavier Thompson, she hadn’t been bending the truth in any way, shape or form. Helena had known it was him the moment she laid eyes on him. She’d seen him enough from public events on television and the few ads he’d posed for nationwide. She just hadn’t expected him to be so devastatingly gorgeous in person.

Those deep blue eyes and that sharp facial structure…his strong chin and that dark stubble covering swarthy, recognizable features. He was pale, of course. Paler than your average white boy – something Magda had assured her came from the fact that he was an incomparable nerd. Apparently, he was constantly in the school’s computer lab – which led Helena to wonder why he didn’t work on his own fancy laptop. He had to have one. Just the previous year, a line of computers had been released from Apple with his family’s name on them.

What wasn’t nerdy about him, however, was the man’s incredible build. He overshadowed her lowly 5’4” frame by what had to be a foot, and had the build of a football player, despite not joining a single sports team. Where, she wondered, did such a build come from? He must have to work out near obsessively to have the barrel chest that he did. Upon seeing said chest, she wondered what it might be like to be pressed against it – to have him lift her effortlessly into his arms.

Her first sight of him had triggered something in her – a protective mechanism that made her want to run far, far away. It wasn’t because the man frightened her. Oh, no. Quite the contrary. When she was supposed to be studying, he made her want to do far less productive things. Things that involved very little clothing, privacy, and an ecstasy she had never personally experienced.

Pursing her lips, Helena rose from her desk, deciding to take a brief break to collapse on her bed, closing her eyes. When push came to shove, she’d be the first person to admit how much she’d given up to be at the top of her class. Her chest swelled with pride when she thought of how proud her father would be of her when she finally gained her undergraduate degree, but there were times when she found herself more than a little bit lonely.

She had few friends, and her romantic encounters were almost nonexistent. Helena’s first and only romantic encounter had been harried, clumsy and awkward. She remembered feeling distinctly out of her element – scrutinized to the point of ridiculousness by her partner, who had been amazed by his luck getting her into bed. The mental image made her cringe and she hugged a pillow to her chest, frowning deeply.

What would it be like, she wondered, to be with a man who could really
handle
her? In her late teens, she’d read enough romance novels to fill an entire house and, like any other girl her age, her mind had been filled with her perfect prince charming. Gone were the fears that she’d someday end up with some deadbeat from the wrong side of town, who would objectify her and expect her to pop out his children and cook his meals for him for the rest of her life. While Helena was fully aware that most of the books were absolute nonsense – and that the perfect romance was one of society’s most prevalent pipe-dreams, what did stick with her was the physical connection that the characters had.

To be so close to someone – to have a man touch you like you were treasured. Like he wanted nothing else more in the entire cosmos than to hear his name on your lips. Those were her dreams. Of course, upon occasion, more carnal thoughts worked their way into her system – thoughts like the ones inspired by the immense, well-dressed form of Xavier Thompson. A man like that could really toss a woman around – dominate her, tear down her walls and rebuild her. Just the thought of that full mouth of his roaming the more tender parts of her made Helena moan softly.

When she caught herself, the young woman flushed. She was supposed to be studying and here she was, laid out on her bed fantasizing about a man who was a complete and utter stranger to her. Xavier Thompson was way out of her league. Despite how far she’d come, she was just a girl from the wrong side of the tracks trying to make something of herself. By the grace of God and her father, she’d escaped her abusive mother and now stood to build a new future for herself.

A future that certainly didn’t include a playboy trust fund baby.

***

Damn it, she was going to be late.

Most students had finished their classes for the day, and so the main walk leading up to the science building was practically deserted. She hurried along the path, her arms aching from the books she held – only to have someone step out in front of her. This time, the young woman managed to narrowly avoid another collision. However, when she saw who had stepped out in front of her, all her books tumbled from her already straining arms just the same.

Her mother.

For a full minute, Helena just stared at the woman before her. Over the years that she’d lived with her father, she’d seen Janette a fair amount. A month after she’d moved into Isaiah’s house, the woman had come knocking on their door, asking her to come back. She’d apologized for the hurtful things she said to Helena and the way she’d driven her from her house and begged her daughter to return.

Helena, ever susceptible to her mother’s wiles, had almost gone with her. Before he would even let her begin to pack her things, however, her father had intervened. He had driven his ex-wife from his household, incredulous that she would come after Helena in the wake of what she’d done. When he’d told her he was taking her to court over custody of their daughter, Janette’s pleading manner had all but disappeared. She’d begun to scream at Isaiah, telling him that Helena was hers and that she needed her to survive.

What she really needed, the young woman had quickly realized, was her money. Living on welfare and Section eight, her mother routinely exhausted her monthly stipend on drugs and alcohol, leaving Helena to feed and care for both of them with the salary from her minimum wage job. It was a cross that no sixteen year old should have to bear, and her father had helped her to see it. For the first time, he’d given her the strength to refuse her mother.

And it wasn’t going to happen today.

Her heart immediately beginning to pound, Helena gazed over her mother’s haggard form. Her stained white t-shirt barely covered her thin torso. Janette’s daughter could see her ribs poking through the thin material. Her jeans had numerous holes in them – none of which were for the sake of fashion. She wore tattered flip flops on her feet and her ebony skin, once smooth and lustrous, was covered with needle marks and scars. The smile she wore was full of rotten teeth, and at the sight of them, Helena cringed.

She’d gotten worse.

There had been a time when Janette still thought about taking care of herself. She had spent more of her money on her hair, nails and clothes she couldn’t afford instead of her more healthy addictions. However, it seemed as though those days were long past.

No matter how many times Helena faced her mother, it never got any easier. Since she’d started college, their meetings had been few and far between. The young woman spent most of her time on campus and security was such that very few visitors got in unannounced.

It was clear that, somehow, Janette had accomplished the feat.

Clearing her throat, Helena tried to force a greeting past her lips. Even as she did, her eyes darted around, looking for anyone who might see them together. The young woman didn’t have much of a reputation on campus, but many knew who her father was. For the sake of his good name and her own studies, she tried to pretend that she didn’t have a mother most of the time – and it worked.

Or, at least, it had.

“Hi, Momma.” Her voice was surprisingly steady, even if inwardly she shook like a leaf.

“Baby.” Janette Freeman’s voice was hoarse, dry and parched. “I’m so glad to see you. I’ve been trying to contact you. Did you get my calls?”

Of course she had. And Helena had ignored each and every one of them. It was easier for her to refuse her mother what she asked if she never spoke to her.