Enticed Read Online Free PDF Page A

continuing to cook in the kitchen, and only looking up when he arrived at the kitchen entrance at the end of the main hall.
    “Hello dear. Breakfast will be ready in a moment,” she said, smiling. Mark found his charge losing momentum. There was something incredibly disarming about Tammy’s composure. She had smiled as if they were back in the city and he was coming home during a normal day of work. Except this wasn’t how it had been. He noticed she was cooking his favorite breakfast, hash browns, eggs, toast, and bacon, and this shocked him on two levels: first, Tammy almost never cooked, and never exclusively for him and second, he hadn’t even known that she was aware of his favorite meal. And this was something else that made Tammy dangerous: she always picked up on the little truths revealed in the minutiae of information, sensing weak spots and advantages and exploiting them at exactly the right time. This time, it didn’t matter.
    “Tammy. Get out of her RIGHT NOW,” Mark said, with somewhat less rage than he’d originally intended.
    “Alright honey,” she said, smiling sweetly. She took her apron off, kissed on the cheek, patted him on his crotch, and left. It was eleven a.m., and Mark felt strongly that he needed a glass of bourbon to process what had just happened.
    It took Mark three hours and two glasses of bourbon to finally figure out what had happened. Tammy had come in , finding the key underneath the stone in front. When he’d arrived, she’d been sure not to react to him. This had thrown him off, first. Then, we he told her to leave she’d offered no resistance, never allowing his anger to gain purchase. Last, she’d patted him on the crotch. An act of possession, but also an action that - if he were honest about it - had aroused him slightly. Of course, out of curiosity, he’d sampled the food, eventually eating it all as the alcohol made him hungrier. It’d been delicious. He burst out laughing when he realized that, when he’d gone to look for the bourbon, it was sitting conveniently on the kitchen counter next to a lipstick stained glass with a few drops of it left. Which would make perfect sense…except that Tammy hated bourbon. Had she planned the whole thing, or did she merely work off of instinct? One thing was clear, and that was that he was right to marry her in the sense that she was a magnificent woman. He had gained great joy, over the years, from seeing Tammy - an African American woman - use people and society’s underestimations of her against them. Realizing two of the defining relationships in his life were with black women, he wondered if there was some relationship between them. Sure, physically Alana and Tammy were similar, and years of watching Alana during swimsuit summers with tank tops and knee length dresses had left an impression on Mark. On the other hand, it seemed their similarities ended there. Alana was less contrived and more natural, a facet of her personality Mark was pleased had survived the years. Tammy was cunning and ruthless, burning bright with ambition and confident in what she wanted - at least at any given moment. She was a genius in a certain sense, and dangerous. Worse, it seemed that, for one reason or another, she wasn’t done with Mark.
    Mark checked his phone. It was a little after three. Still not too late to grab lunch with Alana. He wondered if he was upset with her. He’d cancelled without any explanation on the day after they’d been intimate together. There was no way around it. He needed to give her some sort of explanation. Mark didn’t want to lie to Alana, but neither did he want tell her what was happening. He picked up his phone and called her.

 
    Chapter Four
     
    Alana was out on the front porch drinking homemade lemonade and looking out into the wild when Mark’s call came. She’d left her phone in the guest room on the bed, not wanting to wait for a call she was afraid would never come. After she’d calmed down,