Chapter 1
W hat began as a perfect morning for Nick Alexander went sideways quickly, and in hindsight, what hurt the most was that it was his own damned fault.
At sunrise, he was making love to his girlfriend, Amiya, their bodies joined in a sweet grinding on his Chinese sleigh bed in his Atlanta home.
It had started as breakfast in bed—bagels and coffee Nick fetched from a café in his Buckhead neighborhood—but had evolved with unexpected speed into them grasping for each other with a desperate hunger that had surprised him.
They had been together all night and had made love for hours before finally falling asleep, and still, they couldn’t get enough of each other.
Straddling him, Amiya rocked in a seductive rhythm, her curly ebony hair hanging down her face in a veil, her lithe figure gyrating, sunlight glistening on her smooth, dark brown skin.
His hands roamed alternately between her waist and her hips.
Eyes closed, matching her rhythm with his thrusts, he thought with sudden clarity that there was nowhere he would have rather been, and in his forty years on Earth, he had been almost everywhere.
“Do you love me, baby?” she asked, flicking her hair away with her slender fingers.
“Yeah,” he said, short of breath. “Yeah, yeah. All day long.”
“You want us to have some babies?”
“Yeah, for sure.” He grunted. “All right, yeah . . .”
“You want me to marry you?”
“Yeah . . . wait.” His eyes flew open. “What?”
“Gotcha.” She smiled down at him, bent lower, kissed him.
He ran his fingers down her smooth back and clutched her against him.
Soon after, an orgasm buckled through them, leaping between them like an electrical current.
They collapsed together on the mattress, limbs entangled, chests pressed together, hearts beating so closely Nick couldn’t tell which throbbing belonged to him or her.
April sunshine slanted through the partially opened Venetian blinds and painted stripes on the walls.
Nick could hear birds singing and the sighing of the spring breeze.
Although his six-bedroom home was in the throbbing heart of Buckhead, the morning was so peaceful they might have been on vacation at a bed-and-breakfast cottage deep in the countryside.
“You shouldn’t play like that, you know,” he said.
“Play like what?” Amiya lifted her head off his bare chest and gazed at him. Her brown eyes, flecked with amber, glimmered with amusement.
“The marriage thing. You know how important that is to me. How I want the whole package.”
“Sweetheart, I’m not a toy in a box delivered by FedEx,” Amiya said. “One of multiple items in your Amazon shipment.”
“You know what I mean.”
“Let’s not ruin the moment.” She punctuated her request with a soft kiss. “One day at a time, Nick.”
Nick had proposed to her a month ago at Bacchanalia, a French restaurant where they’d had their first date sixteen months ago.
Flustered, Amiya had declined the three-carat diamond engagement ring with the response that she had to “think about it.” Nick pocketed the ring and resumed dinner as if he’d never asked.
He hadn’t expected Amiya to immediately say “yes.” He’d wanted to gauge her reaction, to get a handle on how close she might be to taking his hand. Checking the temperature of the relationship was how he thought of it. He was getting hot, but needed to crank things up a few more degrees.
He wanted to marry her, obviously. Thirty-three years old, she was gorgeous and smart.
She held a PhD in psychology and put those brains to use as an associate professor at Clark Atlanta University, and a part-time counselor.
She came from a family of means—both of her parents were highly specialized physicians—but she moved easily in social circles across the spectrum.
They had shared interests, too. One rainy weekend, they stayed in and binge-watched episodes of Stranger Things on Netflix. Most important of all, his mother adored her.
She checked all the boxes on his list. That wouldn’t have been an issue if she hadn’t realized that he had a list and had measured her against it, that he was assessing her suitability to complement the other things he had accomplished in his life: the whole package, he liked to call it.
He had money in abundance, thanks to his booming nutritional supplements company. He had the swanky Buckhead home, a trio of luxury vehicles, and the admiration of the community.
But he didn’t have Amiya.
She kissed him again, a soul-stirring kiss that started to arouse him all over again. When he reached for her, she slipped out of bed.
“I’ve got to go make the donuts, baby,” she said. “So do you.”
“I’m the boss. I get to the office whenever I damn well please.”
“Nice, but I don’t have it like that. I have students waiting on me and a department head breathing down my neck if I don’t show.”
“You could say goodbye to all of that if we got married. You wouldn’t have to work.”
She smiled. “We’ll resume this discussion another time.”
While she showered and dressed, he sat up in bed, sipping coffee and watching CNN on the sixty-inch flat-screen TV hanging on the wall. Watching the news depressed him and felt like a waste of time, and he had other, more productive activities he could pursue.
He slipped on his running gear. He saw Amiya off to work, with her promising to come by that evening, and as she pulled out of his driveway in her Honda Accord coupe, he hit the road adjacent to his home.
He had an athletic club membership, but there was nothing like running outdoors, breathing in the fresh, flower-scented air, and challenging himself with the shifting terrain of the streets in his own neighborhood.
He had jogged for half a mile when he became aware that a vehicle was following him. He looked over his shoulder.
“Oh, shit,” he said.
A gleaming black Cadillac Escalade trailed him, perhaps thirty feet behind. The windows were tinted smoke-black, but Nick didn’t have to look inside to find out the identity of the primary occupant.
He briefly considered running, discarded the thought as foolish. Running would have only made things worse.
Running might have gotten him killed.
The driver tapped the horn.
Nick stopped in his tracks. The SUV pulled alongside him. The rear passenger door swung open.
“Nick,” a familiar voice said, deep as a black hole. “Get in, my brother. We’ve got important business to discuss.”