The One Who Holds Me
(2026)(A book in the May-December Black Romance series)
A novel by Garnell Wallace
Soula
His name was Mecca Malone, and he was a lethal combination of American, Jamaican, and African, with deep roots in Côte d'Ivoire, West Africa. He came to me on a balmy summer night in Jamaica with French and Patois on his tongue, mingled with sweetness and secrets. Some secrets I was willing to keep, like how much we desired each other, despite my being thirteen years older.
It was supposed to be only a few nights. He was supposed to be a little something for myself while on vacation, a beautiful secret I would leave behind once I left the island for my simple life back in Key West, Florida. While I was enticed with my Stella-wannabe island fling, cautionary reminders of how the real-life version of the book had turned out also taunted me. My fears were placated by the fact that Mecca had money, and he wasn’t just some island boy looking for a good time.
The only thing he needed from me was my body, and she wasn’t helping the situation by behaving like a cougar in heat, demanding this six-five, muscled, chocolate dream, able to make me feel like a woman again. I couldn’t help but surrender to the magic in his eyes, and that deep, radio voice that assured me that, despite his age, he knew how to take care of me. Mecca was a man of his word, at least in the bedroom, which was the only place it mattered.
I was foolish to think I could be that close to Mecca in Miami, a city his family owned, and he wouldn’t want to own me, too. I was older, but Mecca was a man used to getting what he wanted, and he wanted me. As circumstances and desire snared us closer to each other, and secrets started creeping out of harrowingly dark places, I eventually saw that Mecca’s age was low on the list of things that should make me stay away from him.
Mecca
Jamaica was the place where I hid from my family, and everything being a Malone entailed. Our family, one of Miami’s most prominent, had a legacy of secrets as layered as the city itself. My family had afforded me a life where I could do and be anything, except myself. Jamaica was where I went for business, and to let the demons caged in my soul run free on white sand and amongst tropical trees that didn’t tell tales.
I never thought I’d find a kindred spirit in a woman who arrested my attention first with her body, and then with her heart. Despite our age difference, I had more of what was important to me in common with Soula than anyone else. I wanted to make her mine- forever, but, how did I convince a woman, shattered by one man she’d loved, that it was okay to take a chance on another, especially a man bearing secrets that could wreck her world once again?
Genre: Romance
Used availability for Garnell Wallace's The One Who Holds Me