Just One Kiss

Just One Kiss

Chapter 1

Present Day

The year she had been sixteen had been the turning point in her life. She sometimes wondered if all that had happened to her now, would've still happened had it not been for that night. That night when the two of them had had just enough drinks to make them both presently tipsy so that while sitting in his lap( as was her habit back then) laughing and talking she'd felt him 'rise' and that was all the encouragement to impulsively turn and kiss him. She often wondered whether had he not kissed her back and had not things begin to get a little too heated; had he not subsequently rejected her and turned his affections on the girl that had only just arrived in town, subsequently married her would she still be the much sort after designer and potter she was today? Would she have left town at sixteen and not go back since?

Tatiana Romelli known to the world as Tanya sighed, only God could answer those bothersome questions because she couldn't and even if she could she wasn't sure she would want to. They unsettled her too much. But damn, if those stupid questions didn't make her miss him more-if that was humanly possible since she missed him every day of the pass ten years since she'd ran from home. Rahul Watinagi...he had been her playmate when she was six, her first crush when she was twelve, someone who was always on her side at thirteen when her mother proved difficult with her insistence that it was time that her extremely tom-boyish daughter change her ways and start acting like a girl but above all else he had been her friend, her best friend and due to her impulsiveness she had lost that. Maybe not completely lost that friendship but things had certainly changed and to this day even after all these years she wasn't sure if it had been for the better.

Sure she was famous, had money to burn, and her clothes and art work sold like freshly baked bread -faster than it took to take them out of the oven. Sure she enjoyed her work and the places it took her and the people she'd meet because of such a career like hers that never quite felt like work because she enjoyed it so much. Yet there was something missing. All she'd ever wanted was for him to love her like she loved him. All she wanted was for him to love her the way she knew her mother and his father loved each other but that probably would never be since he had spurned her and married someone else and have a child with that person. Sure his wife was dead now and he was hers to take if she wanted him- or so his father claimed. She wanted him but he didn't want her and besides which it didn't feel right somehow.

All these years as she globe- trotted to places that most people only dreamed of going, she had hoped, prayed and tried her hardest to forget him and move on-she smiled mirthlessly- she had succeeded in a sense because she had moved on- made something of herself, went on dates, made new friends and she could proudly say that she had new best-friends whose names were Gabby and Ferdinand but there was just one problem with this wonderfully happy life she had built she had left her heart- the part of her that was reserved for her lifemate- to use the word widely used by one of her favourite authors, Christine Feehan, in Danville, Maryland with the one person who didn't want it.

Now she sighed, if only she could forget him just so the pain that had plagued her since she was sixteen could dissipate but that, like the thought about him loving her the way she wanted him to, didn't seem like it would ever happen since he was the form her muse took on its hourly visits.

The need to create took her and she stopped her musings long enough to reach for her sketchpad and pencil and began to draw and when she saw what or rather who was beginning to take shape another sigh fell from her lips but never the less she finished it and stared at what she had done. She had drawn them both locked in an embrace under a huge great willow away from preying eyes.

This would not be given to her aunt to sell for her; this would join the ones gone before it into her fire place. Still feeling like creating something she went into her studio and turned on her wheel.  As she began to work her thoughts went back her earlier musings and frowned it was times like these she wished she was six again. That was the time when things in her life had been simple but then again it was at the age of six that she'd first met Rahul Watinagi and this all really began. As her hands began to turn the clay into art in her mind was back in her mother's yard on that fateful day....