A Fiancé for the Holidays - Chapter 1
“Do you plan to drink that coffee or are you just going to stir it all day?”
Dr. Zaire Paige looked up to find her mother, Dr. Orisha Paige, standing in the doorway of the staff break room, giving her only daughter a pitiful glance.
“Baby, if you’re this distracted, maybe you should go back home and try to work things out.”
Zaire dragged a slow breath into her lungs, trying to figure out how to act normal when her world was falling apart.
“Mama, East New York is my home. San Francisco is just where I live.”
Her mother raised an eyebrow. “Zaire, you can’t run from this forever.”
“There’s nothing to run from,” Zaire shot back, even though she knew it wasn’t the truth.
She was totally running.
Sure, it was usual for her to come home every Christmas Eve and spend the next week working at her mom’s clinic and planning for the community Kwanzaa celebration. But she’d left San Francisco more than a week early for one reason alone: to get away from Ainsley Clay’s marriage proposal.
“You have to talk to him, Zaire. You owe him that much.”
Zaire looked at the swirling light brown concoction in her hand and gave up on ever drinking it.
“I thought you said there were only two things I was required to do in life: stay Black and die. Are we now adding working things out with Ainsley to that list?”
“Don’t get cute ’bout the mouth,” her mother warned, giving Zaire her signature “I’m not playing with you” look. “I know you love him. Life’s too precious for you to walk away from something you want.”
Her mother’s soft tone tugged at her heart. She recognized the familiar sadness Orisha always displayed when she was missing Zaire’s dad.
“I’d give just about anything for another moment with my Walter here in our beloved clinic. I’d give anything twice for him to have been able to work side by side with his pride and joy in his clinic. This place was everything to him and he wanted you to be part of this legacy.”
Sadness and uncertainty twisted in her gut as she thought about the plans she and her father had made for their family to run this place. She’d wanted it too. Her plan had been to complete her residency and fellowship in San Francisco, and then return home to work with her mom and dad at their neighborhood clinic. But when he’d died, grief hollowed her out and she couldn’t bring herself to come home permanently.
She’d done everything to dull the pain of her loss, and part of that had been leaving behind her commitment to their underserved community in East New York and pouring her energy and dedication into Ainsley’s legacy.
Ainsley Clay was a fifth-generation doctor from a famous medical family. Famous enough to have a hospital wing named after them. His great-great grandfather had served as a medic to Black soldiers in the Union Army during the Civil War. When the war was over, he’d migrated west at the start of Reconstruction and built a modest clinic for the small Black community in their city. He married a direct descendent of the philanthropist and abolitionist, Mary Ellen Pleasant. The two of them went on to turn that modest clinic into a hospital for Blacks who weren’t allowed to be treated at white hospitals.
Their medical legacy didn’t end there. Each generation of Clays that followed had made significant contributions in medicine, making them a household name in San Francisco’s medical community. With such an august legacy, it was easy for Zaire to feel inferior when she came from humbler means.
When her father died, she’d intentionally allowed the grandeur of the Clay family to consume her to avoid the pain of thinking about her father and his work. The clinic in Brooklyn had given his life meaning, making it impossible for Zaire to separate his work from the man. And thinking about the man just hurt too much.
She’d been fine with the excuse of submerging herself and her career in the Clay history until Ainsley proposed.
With both of them having hectic schedules, the only time they could find to celebrate Christmas was the fifteenth. They’d had a romantic dinner alone. When Ainsley had gotten down on one knee and said, “You and I are going to build the best and brightest branch of the Clay legacy.”
His words, so sure as he presented her with a ring, forced her to pull her head out of the sand she’d willingly buried it in. There was no excitement and joy, only fear and worry as her mind raced with questions.
What about the Paige lineage? Doesn’t it matter? Don’t I matter?
She didn’t dare speak those words aloud for fear of the answer she would receive. Instead, she just said no and ran. She didn’t stop running until she found a flight heading out to New York that very night. After six hours of languishing in her seat, she desperately tried to figure out why she’d turned Ainsley’s proposal down. All she could come up with was the Clays were too famous, too rich, too important…just too everything for her and her family’s modest accomplishments to mean anything. She’d tried to ignore it for too long: she didn’t fit in with the Clays.
You’re not here to get caught up in your insecurities, Zaire. Focus on the work.
“Well,” her mother huffed, “as much as I’d like to stand here wasting time, there’s a five-year-old asthmatic who doesn’t want to keep the nebulizer mask on her face in room two. Time to go work your magic, Dr. Paige Junior.”
Zaire felt pride bloom inside her chest every time her mother used her pet name. She nodded, poured her untouched coffee out in a nearby sink and headed toward examination room two, grabbing the patient’s chart from the rack on the door.
“So, I hear we have a five-year-old who doesn’t want to take her medicine,” she said as she stepped into the room.
“Chronologically she’s a thirty-five-year-old, but she’s acting like a five-year-old right now.”
Zaire’s head snapped up from the chart, certain she had to be dreaming. She knew that voice like she knew her own name, but it was all wrong here.
“Ainsley, what are you doing here?”
“What am I doing here?” His tone was sharp and fiery, lacking its usual warmth. “The question should be why are you surprised I’m here.”
He was right—she was surprised to see him after turning down his proposal in San Francisco. She was also surprised by the anger and annoyance she saw burning in his deep brown eyes.
Ainsley was a Clay through and through. Clays didn’t do public displays of uncontrolled emotions. They were calm, consummate professionals at all times. In all their years together, she’d never seen Ainsley so worked up. Granted, he wasn’t exactly in a frenzy. But his shoulders were raised, hands on his hips, and his eyes narrowed into slits as they darted back and forth, taking in the full picture of her. For a Clay, this was almost rage.
“Ainsley, I come home every year to celebrate Christmas and Kwanzaa with my mother. You know that. You’ve never seen the need to follow me here before. Why are you sneaking into my mom’s clinic under the guise of being a patient?”
“How else was I supposed to get you to talk to me? You haven’t answered any of my calls or texts. I had to call your mother just to make sure you were alive. What the hell is going on, Zaire? I ask you to marry me and you disappear off the face of the earth?”
That was exactly what she’d attempted to do. Disappearing was the only reasonable thing when everything you wanted slipped through your fingers and you didn’t have the heart to face it head-on because it hurt too much to do so.
Deep down, as much as she loved them, being part of the Clay family made her feel so small. She’d fought this truth for so long, but a ring and a proposal brought it front and center in a way she couldn’t deny any longer. They were just too different.
Like many of the people she’d gone to college and medical school with, Ainsley was ridiculously wealthy. She, on the other hand, had been a scholarship kid who’d barely had enough money left over from her school expenses to buy instant noodles. His family lived in a four-story, seven-bed, seven-bath residence on Scott Street near the beach in San Francisco. Her parents struggled to keep up with the mortgage payments on a one-family, two-bedroom house just over the Brooklyn-Queens border off Conduit Avenue.
Being with him had been great. Becoming his wife, however, would only serve to remind her of the cruel things their med-school classmates had said behind her back: she didn’t belong in the same circles as the wealthy and powerful, not coming from a place like East New York. This meant that instead of seeing his proposal as a happy occurrence, she saw it as the complete erasure of everything she was, and worse, the proof that what others in the Clay world had always said about her was true. She was an imposter and she didn’t belong.
“I’m sorry for not answering your calls,” she relented, trying to get her head together in Ainsley’s presence. He was a commanding force whenever he stepped into a room. Self-assured, knowledgeable and in control of the situation, confident that he belonged. That was something she couldn’t always hold fast to walking in his world. “You deserve better than that and I’m sorry.”
His shoulders dropped and the anger left his eyes. “At least we can agree on that.” He huffed, rubbing his hand down his face. He seemed exhausted all of a sudden and Zaire wasn’t sure if it was traveling across country or dealing with emotional upheaval that had him this way. In either case, it made her heart ache, especially because she bore some blame for it.
“Zaire, I’m sorry for ambushing you like this. But I need answers. I don’t get why me proposing upset you so much that you’d turn me down and leave.”
Of course he didn’t. From his view, life was perfect.
“Ainsley, I don’t really want to get into this now. I’m at work.”
He stepped closer to her, eating up the distance between them in an instant. She could smell the woodsy scent of his cologne. She knew the exact brand and loved snuggling close to him just to inhale it whenever she could. That was then, though. Now she needed to stand still and pretend she wasn’t affected by the arousing aroma or the hard-bodied man taking up all her space.
“Don’t pull the work card now, Zaire. I’m not going anywhere until you give me an explanation as to why you turned down my proposal and then ran away like a thief in the night.”
Annoyed, she crossed her arms and tried to ignore the way his nearness made her pulse jump.
“Maybe I just don’t love you anymore. Maybe I woke up and realized what we had isn’t what I want. Did you ever consider that, Ainsley?”
She expected to see hurt in his eyes, anger even. But what she got was a wicked grin that made his eyes spark with mischief.
“I did. All the way over here I kept thinking I should probably leave it be and move on. But now that I’m here…” He lifted his hand, letting a single finger slide along the line of her jaw until his palm was gripping the back of her neck in that firm possessive way she loved. “But now that I’m here and I see the want in your eyes, I’m more convinced than ever that your love for me isn’t the issue. You not only love me, you want me.”
He pulled her closer until his lips were less than an inch away from hers. “And now that I know you want me, there’s no way in hell I’m letting you go. Whatever this is, we’re going to figure it out. Because as long as you look at me with so much need in your eyes, I’m not going anywhere.”
He pressed his lips to hers, keeping his hand cupped around her neck to make certain she couldn’t go anywhere. He didn’t have to worry about that. Although her rational brain told her she should put as much distance as possible between them, once his lips met hers, once the fire his touch always stoked began to spark, there was no way she would willingly walk away from this.
Ainsley was a man who’d been trained to exude calm and control in all situations. But when it came to passion and lovemaking, that focused energy turned into something hot and all-consuming. If you were fortunate enough to experience it, it was hard to give up.
As always, his kisses scorched her lips. He pulled her into his embrace, locking her body against the hard wall of his chest. She raised her hands, smoothing them against his pecs.
She could hear herself moaning as need coursed through her blood, making her flesh ache for a much more intimate touch than a small examination room would allow. She should have better sense than to let this go on. But the truth was, the only thing she was focusing on at the moment was how good being in his arms felt as she ground her hips against his, seeking enough friction to ease the ache in her clothed sex.
He pulled his mouth from hers. When she whined, chasing his mouth for more, he stood to his full height, giving her a wicked smile as he did so.
“As long as that happens whenever we’re together, I’m not letting go.” He stepped away from her, walking toward the door and tossing her a cocky wink over his shoulder. “Are you staying with your mother or at the place you keep on Sutter Avenue?”
“I’m staying on Sutter.”
He gave her a curt nod. “Good, I’ll pick you up tonight at seven. Don’t think of running again, Zaire. I’ll just find you and we’ll start this nonsense all over again. Tonight, we fix whatever this issue is that made you take off. Because you’re mine and I’m yours, and I’m not willing to let us go.”
He left the room, closing the door with a silent click. And just like that, her upper hand disappeared into thin air. Ainsley Clay was back with a vengeance, and if she didn’t figure out how to get rid of him quickly, he’d have her packed and on a plane back to San Francisco before she could put up any resistance.
“All right, Ainsley,” she quipped. “You won that round. But this is far from over. I’ve got a trick for you.”