by Glory Lennon

Created on: January 19, 2010   Last Updated: January 31, 2012

The moonlight coming in through the slight part in the curtained windows illuminated little in the spacious, elaborately decorated room but enough. Jameel’s exotic features, her almond shaped eyes, the thick fringe of lashes brushing silky soft cheeks, that adorable nose that so often crinkled with laughter, those deliciously dainty, ruby lips with its perpetual Mona Lisa smile even in slumber and her shiny black braid intertwined with colorful ribbons curling over her delicate shoulder to lay across her chest like a hibernating serpent were all clearly visible to him.

But that could have been because he knew her so well... too well perhaps. He stared at her with a melancholy smile on his face. Even relaxed in sleep she held him in a tortured prison. Jameel was a beauty beyond compare and as precious to him as her Arabic name implied but that didn’t mean anything. It didn’t excuse him nor his changing feelings toward her. They were wrong, very wrong and he knew not what to do about it.

"Mac, how I wish you were still here," he whispered into the dark, his eyes burning with unshed tears.

As if she had heard him she moved closer to him snuggling into the crook of his arm as she clutched at his shirt and flung her long slim leg over his jean clad ones imprisoning him further. He could feel his shirt where her head lay still damp from her tears. She sighed contentedly and mumbled his name before settling into sleep again.

Did she have any idea what she was doing to him?

Of course she didn’t. She didn’t know how she effected him. She didn’t know he had slowly but surely fallen completely in love with her despite his best efforts not to. She was a naive, trusting child....but then she was no longer a child, was she? They had celebrated her twenty third birthday a few months back right after her graduation from Cornell. There lay the problem.

Jameel still saw him as her guardian, her Uncle Payton, as she should. Although, in truth, she hadn’t called him that for many years now. So, she naturally felt no shyness with him, no desire to alter her affectionate and carefree ways and she surely had no compunction for making him crazy. She didn’t know she was doing it. She felt entirely safe and secure within his arms as she had since she was twelve years old. That was the dreadful year her father had died leaving his precious jewel in the care of his best friend.

Ten years had passed with their routine not altering one bit.

• 1
• 2
• 3
• ...
• 16
• Next Page >>