“Yes, you fucking do,” he snarls.
I cross my arms over my chest. “I’m not saying I thought this was going to be forever. But over the last couple of months, I’d let myself imagine the possibility …” I say while I throw my charger, laptop, phone, and books into my shoulder bag.
“Okay.” He shrugs. “What’s changed since you fell asleep on my cock six hours ago?”
Of course. It’s always about sex with him. I shake my head and slip my feet into my shoes. I can’t even look at him.
Queen.
I love you.
Respect you.
All lies.
“You ordered a background check on me?”
His face pales. My stomach falls.
“Because I’m ‘hot enough to fuck, but not good enough to bring home’?” my lip curls in a sneer
“Who told you that?” he asks and my heart sinks.
“Well, at least you’re not denying it.” Fatigue makes my sadness heavy and suffocating.
“I didn’t mean—”
“I can’t believe you talked about me like that,” I say, my traitorous voice breaking. The warmth of his hand resting on my shoulder suddenly feels like a branding heat.
I step away. “Don’t you fucking touch me,” I snarl.
“Confidence, what the fuck?” he demands.
My stomach cramps and I hug my arms around my middle.
My heart is sick.
I’m sick.
How in the world could I have fallen for this shit again?
I tattooed this motherfucker’s name on my body.
I square my shoulders, drop my hands and straighten up so I can look him square in the eye. “I heard you last night. I followed you when you left because I thought maybe you needed me,” I tell him and watch his face fall.
He groans and for the first time since I’ve known him, I see fear in his eyes. My own fear feeds on it. The ache in my stomach sharpens. Things are about to get worse and I’m scared by how viscerally I feel the loss already. I’ve fallen so thoroughly and irredeemably in love with him. Just in time for him to break my fucking heart.
“No,” he says sternly. “You’ve got all of that wrong. I ordered it before we were together in Italy. Weeks later when it showed up, I couldn’t remember why I thought I needed it. I never opened it.”
“You didn’t?” I ask and I feel a flicker of hope that maybe I misunderstood.
“No,” he sighs. “I decided I could overlook everything that was wrong about us. Your lack of money, your lack of a name. I already knew about the scandal surrounding your career,” he says.
I pale. But I set my jaw and narrow my eyes at him.
“You’ve overlooked them?” I ask, almost daring him to repeat himself.
“Yes. I decided it didn’t matter,” he says like he’s being a benevolent ruler. Like he’s looking down his nose at me.
My hackles shoot straight up. “I didn’t ask you to overlook anything,” I hiss.
He comes to stand in front of me and reaches for me. “No,” I say quietly.
“Let me explain.” His voice is thick and gruff. Angry.
Fuck him.
I won’t look at him. I can’t.
The heaviness in my body is only outmatched by the ton of pain in my heart.
I turn to face him.
“I may not have a name. Maybe I didn’t know where Positano is or what some random Latin words mean … or whatever.” I narrow my eyes at him and stab the air with my finger. “But, I’ll tell you what. My mother worked her way up to manager at a small plant in Tennessee at a time when it was really hard for women to do that. While she lived with a husband who treated her like a punching bag and a son she was afraid of. And she put up with that shit for me. She worked a second job to help pay tuition to put me,” I say, pointing at my chest, “through college. And law school. Because she looked at me and saw what you and the rest of your stuck-up friends fail to see. All of my potential.”
I wave my hands in the air around my head, my fingers pointing down to my body. His expression is one of pure shock.
“I was raised to treat everyone with respect,” I continue. “I was raised to be proud of my integrity, my loyalty and my kindness. My name means something because I’ve made it mean something.”
“Confidence,” he growls.
“You don’t have the right to say my name,” I snap and his eyes widen. “I’m not going to let you or anyone else look down on me because I don’t have money and my last name isn’t on a stadium or museums or a hospital somewhere.”
“Fucking hell, Confidence,” he grinds out.
I ignore him.
“You’ve had everything handed to you. And yet, here we are.” I fling my arms wide in a sweeping flourish that covers the whole room. “In the same place. At the very same time. Who’s slumming?” I sneer. “And who’s leveled up?” I give him a hard, challenging look. “Who should be looking down on who?”
“I don’t look down on—”
“The one who’s here because she worked, scraped, and beat back the crabs trying to pull her back into the barrel?” I take a step closer to him. “Or the person who’s here because he was lucky enough to be pushed out of a gold lined pussy?” I give him a disdainful head-to-toe assessment.
His eyes narrow, his jaw flexes and he rears back. “What did you just say to me?” he hisses.
“Did you let the pretty dresses, law degree and good table manners fool you?” I ask. “I grew up with a trucker hat turned to the back, jeans tucked into my muddy hiking boots, a hunting rifle slung across my back and a bowie knife tucked into my waist. I’ve been thrown to the wolves and I have killed every. Single. One. Of them.” I am aflame with indignation.
“You need to calm down,” he says and has the nerve to reach for me.
“No,” I huff and grit my teeth. “We’re done. You are never going to insult me again. You don’t deserve me.”
I shake my head in frustration and then stand up. He moves fast and grabs me by the forearms. He presses his forehead to mine, our noses touch, our breath mingles between us and his eyes burn into mine with possessiveness and determination.
“You’re right. I don’t.” He pins me in place with his eyes “I know it. You know it. And yet, here we are. In the same place at the same fucking time,” he says, throwing my words back at me. “You take everything I give you. Even when it hurts because you know I’m going to make you come so hard you can’t breathe. You sleep next to me with your fingers linked with mine because you love me. We are not even close to done,” he grits out and I try to pull myself loose.
Right now, I’m caught between wanting to sob in his arms and wanting to kick him in the balls.
“Let go of me,” I growl.
“Never. You will not walk away from me because of some bullshit like this.”
“It’s not bullshit. I have spent the entire weekend with your crazy ass family and their friends,” I shout back at him and shake myself loose. This time, he lets me go. “Are these really the people you want to surround yourself with? You talked about your family doing good. What good does it do to get dressed up for a six-course meal just because it’s Friday? I mean, it’s like fucking Versailles. Your city is drowning and you’re dressed up because it’s Friday.”
I hurl my words like bullets and when his face turns red with anger, I know I hit my target. He grabs my wrists and pulls me back.
“You overheard me and Dare last night, but you still let me fuck you. Were planning to leave me when we woke up?” he asks angrily.
I flush because the way he says it makes it sound … treacherous. But I shake that off because it’s not remotely true.
“I didn’t know what I was going to do, Hayes. I was confused!” I shout at him.
“Did you know you were going to leave this morning?” he asks me coldly.
“Yes,” I answer. He flinches.
My family is no prize and has its fair share of shit. But
I don’t want to live like this. I didn’t escape the frying pan just to jump into the fire.
“I mean, maybe if that craziness with Eliza had felt like a fluke, or the dinner guests hadn’t made me feel like something a dog dragged in from outside. Or knowing that your brother thinks I’m already measuring for drapes and counting your money. But I don’t want to live in chaos with people who hate each other—and who hate me. I mean, she slapped the housekeeper!” My arms fling out in front of me. His hands take the opportunity and grab hold of me. I don’t fight him. I
“I’m not them,” he grinds out.
“But you are. You can’t help it. They treated me the way you did the night we met,” I say with a stony glare.
He flinches.
Good.
“You have to forgive me for that. It can’t be the reason you walk away,” he says.
“It’s not the only reason. Everything that’s happened this weekend. I don’t want to fight in the place where I’m supposed to be safe. I want a calm, quiet home. Those are my reasons.” I want to cry because all I want is for him to hold me.
“There’s a much better reason for you to stay,” he insists.
“Like what?” I ask impatiently.
“You love me. I belong to you,” he whispers, and I close my eyes on a pathetic whimper. He strokes his nose alongside mine. A tear rolls down my cheek.
“You belong to me,” he says before he crashes his lips on top of mine. He snags my lower lip between his teeth and sucks it, bites it. My fingers slide into his hair, and his tongue slips into my mouth. I let him taste me while I drink as much as I can handle before my body throbs for more. And then I gather tufts of his hair into my hands and yank—hard.
“Fuuuuck!” he roars and breaks our kiss.
I scramble around the bed.
“I belong to myself,” I snarl. “And yes, I kneeled in front of you and took what you gave me. But, I will never kneel for you again.”
He looks angry, but I still see that fear and I hate it. “You better not walk out of that door,” he says.
“Or what?” I hiss.
We face each other. His bed is like a battlefield between us. I press my knuckles into the mattress and lean toward him so I can look him in the eye one more time. There’s real distress in his that shakes my resolve. Damn him for making me love him so much.
“I am not afraid of you. How could I be? When you were so afraid of me that you needed a background check—" I say.
His face is pained. “I’m sorry—”
“You should be,” I snap. “But not for me. I’ve survived worse than a man who’s too blind to see that I’m the best thing that will ever happen to him.”
My heart tugs at the nearly gray pallor on his face when I turn to pick up my things. With each piece of clothing I throw into my bag, my resolve grows. I face him again. He’s watching me, his face thunderous and his body perfectly still.
“I’m leaving,” I tell him.
He shrugs. “You’ll be back. And I’ll be waiting.”
“Right,” I scoff dismissively and zip up my suitcase.
“You’re mine. My queen. What do you have without your king?” he asks coldly.
“All the power,” I say with an equally icy tone and smile.
Then, I walk away from him.
Part II
Chapter Fifteen
The Return
Hayes
I careen through the winding and nonsensically narrow street of the Rivers Estate. The rows of manicured shrubs are nothing more than blurs of dark green as I run yet another stop sign.
On a street without a single intersection.
In a subdivision with only one house.
It’s just one example of the lack of planning and the sense of entitlement that’s created the mess I’ve been cleaning up since I took control from Uncle Thomas.
It’s been eighty-seven days of inconsistencies, complaints, and so much fucking disappointment, that I’m starting to forget what it feels like to be satisfied.
A flock of baby geese step into the road just two hundred and fifty feet ahead of my speeding car. I slam hard on my breaks to stop in time. My high- performance Maserati protests with groans, shrieks, and sputters. I struggle to hold my steering wheel straight to stop the threatening spin out that’s pulling my tires to the right. The acrid stench of burned rubber and the uncertainty of whether I had ten geese crushed beneath my car congeal like cooled grease in my stomach.
I peer out of my window and breathe a sigh of relief when the gaggle waddles past, completely oblivious to the havoc they nearly wrecked and how close their lives came to ending.
“Where’s your sense of survival, you idiotic animals?” I chide them as I pull past them and hook a right up the dark, concrete tiled driveway. The rows of pink flowering bushes on either side were planted by my mother the year before she died.
I’m surprised Eliza didn’t pull them up. She tore out the rose garden my mother planted within months of marrying my father. I pull up the drive and park under the huge carport that should have been knocked down years ago. I throw my car into park and give myself a minute to collect my thoughts before I walk into the house.
Built at the turn of the twentieth century by my great-great-grandfather, Jeb Rivers, it’s one of Houston’s oldest homes. As my uncle likes to remind anyone who will listen, at nearly twenty thousand square feet that sits on two and half acres of land, it’s also one of the biggest and most expensive homes in the city.
Houston’s nearly one-hundred-mile sprawl means that even as we get close to edging Chicago out of the number three spot on the list of America’s largest cities, there’s a seemingly endless supply of land that keeps home prices down. That forty-million-dollar price tag would buy a six thousand square foot penthouse apartment in New York City, max.
It’s why Houston’s wealthy can indulge in more cars, food, theatre and retail therapy than their wealthy counterparts in other cities. And indulge, we do. I stare out at the expanse of lawn that’s bisected by a ground level fountain with a pool full of koi fish. The estate boasts a citrus grove, rose gardens, a tennis court, Olympic-sized infinity pool, and is surrounded by hundred-year-old trees. But after Confidence’s visit, when I look at it, all I see is a tomb where our family’s skeletons live. If I had my way, I would tear it all down.
A sharp rap on the passenger’s side window of my car startles me out of my daydream. My uncle, the Crypt Keeper himself, is peering in at me. His thick silver eyebrows are drawn down over his thunderous dark eyes.
He doesn’t look like an old man. He looks like an old villain. One that threatens to eat children when they make too much noise. His wide, thin-lipped mouth is moving, but my blissfully soundproof car keeps the assault from reaching my ears. I savor the quiet in my car long enough to take three deep breaths before I step out of the car into a jarringly different atmosphere.
“You’re late. The team has been gathered for more than twenty minutes,” he says. He’s got the kind of voice that’s powerful without being loud. But, the power of that is lost on me. I know that he’s nothing more than an empty vessel for delusion and resentment.
“Well, since the meeting couldn’t start without me, I’d say that I’m right on time,” I tell him. “And if you had held this meeting in the office instead of here, it would have started twenty minutes ago,” I tell him. We step in the gargantuan foyer and start up the stairs to the room that’s always used for Kingdom business. Swish’s old office.
“You forget that you’re talking to your uncle, Hayes. I will have your respect,” he says from behind me.
I stop and turn to find him standing on the bottom step, hands folded behind his back, an expectant look on his face.
I walk back down so I’m one step above him.
“You forget that you’re talking to the head of your family,” I remind him. “If you want my respect, you better set about trying to earn it.” I turn and start back up the stairs. “
The mess you’ve made of things has left us vulnerable on too many fronts and has lost you any built in credibility I gave you because you’re my uncle. You’ve done a piss poor job,” I say over my shoulder.
A lawsuit filed by a group of tenants whose homes were damaged in the flood last month is just the latest in a pile of shit that’s been landing on my desk for the last three months. I’ve spent nearly all of my time as chairman of the board putting out fires. It’s meant to be a figurehead position, but with an incompetent and corrupt executive team, I’ve been forced to take a more hands on approach. None of them like it, but I don’t care.
“The lawsuit is what we called you here to discuss,” he says, still behind me as I push open the doors to the room that’s decorated like a nineteenth century country club. Whatever traces of Swish there were in here are gone. I want to hurry and get out of here.
“Gentlemen, please have a seat,” I say to the three men who stand when I walk in.
I sit down at the head of the table. “Tell me what’s going on with this.” I look at Rich Jones, the current head of operations.
He slides a folder over to me and opens the one in front of him.
“There are twenty-five thousand units that are included in the class; they represent an annual revenue of about three hundred million dollars to the Real Estate Investment Trust. Our investors expect those dividends and profit shares.”
“What’s this got to do with the flooded-out apartments?”
“Well …” he tugs at his collar and looks around the table at the other two 80-year-old incompetents who had helped him and my uncle destroy Kingdom one bit at a time.
They all stare down at their laps.
Cowards.
“There are two main issues in their complaint. The first is that some of them were evicted without notice. The units took on water, but we disagreed with their complaints that there would be any significant problems with people living there once they dried out,” he says.
“What was your disagreement based on?” I ask.
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