The CEO And The Wedding Planner: An Instalove Possessive Age Gap Romance (A Man Who Knows What He Wants Book 201)

by Flora Ferrari

  “You don’t think it’s too fast?” I ask, giving her hand a squeeze.

  “Well, do you?” she says.

  “No. No freaking way.”

  She beams. “Then you’ve got your answer, sister.”

  Sister.

  I’ve never had a sibling before.

  Later, Mason and I sit in his rooftop garden, the scents of the plants dominating the air around us as the setting sun casts hazy rays through the heavy-leafed trees. I lean back in his enveloping arms, savoring the feeling of security, my man so close that it seems as if nothing in the world could ever bother me again.

  “Are you sure you’re okay?” he asks breathily, his voice still carrying that carnal possessive note it always does after we make love.

  I told him earlier that it’s the anniversary of my parents’ death tomorrow.

  “Yes,” I whisper.

  I feel tension run through him, and I know he knows I lied, or at least just shielded the truth.

  “No,” I say a second later.

  Truth, always.

  As a street kid, that’s going to take some getting used to.

  But it’s worth it.

  For him.

  For us.

  “I never knew them, so I guess it’s silly that I even care. They were junkies and everybody I ever met was keen to remind me of that fact. My parents were dirty junkies who had a little legend about them because they died of an overdose two days apart. I don’t know, some people think my mother committed suicide because she loved my dad so much and couldn’t go on without him. Others think junkies are incapable of love. I was already in social services, just ten days old.”

  He reaches up and wipes tears from my cheeks with hands that still carry the smell of our passion, which somehow comforts me, like were animals smothering each other with our scents, proclaiming to the world that this is it, we’ve found our one.

  I grab his hand and kiss his fingers, one by one.

  “You can still care about that,” he whispers. “Natalie never really knew our Mom and Dad. She was too young to remember much, I mean. And yet she still talks about them all the time. It’s natural, to want to belong.”

  “I do feel like I belong,” I whisper. “I feel like I belong to you.”

  “That’s because you do,” he whispers with fierce passion flaring fire-like in his voice. “And I belong to you. Because I—”

  You what? Why have you stopped?

  Then I hear my cellphone ringing, realizing it’s interrupting the moment.

  I think about ignoring it, but then I glance over at the table and see it’s Gertrude. She rarely calls me after hours unless we’ve planned to do something and immediately I feel a horrible pounding in my chest.

  “Something’s wrong,” I whisper, hands shaking as I pick up the phone.

  “You don’t know that,” Mason mutters, but uncertainty quivers beneath his words.

  I answer the phone.

  Silence for a few moments.

  And then his voice, a voice I will never forget, the voice that screamed after me and into the street, panting in terror.

  “I’ll get you, whore. I’ll never stop searching for you. You’re mine. Nobody disrespects Hardhat and gets away with it.”

  “So here we are,” he says. “You’re a slippery one, I’ll give you that. And can you believe, my sweet Melody, that your old surrogate grandma didn’t put a password on her phone? That’s not very security conscious, is it?”

  “Where is she?” I whisper.

  “She’s here waiting for you,” he says, and I can hear that he’s grinning proudly.

  “How do I know that?” I say, somehow not breaking down in tears.

  Everything feels like it’s spinning a million miles per second.

  But I have to keep it together.

  I have to hold on.

  “Fine, have your way. Here, Grandma, it’s for you.”

  Some rustling, a pause, and then Gertrude’s voice comes whispering across the line.

  “Don’t do what he wants, dearie,” she wheezes. “Live … live your life.”

  “Where the hell is she?” I yell, when the phone rustles again. “You bastard. You evil bastard. This has nothing to do with her.”

  “I agree,” he says. “This is between us. So be a good little whore and come and get her, and she’ll go free. I’ll text you the address. It goes without saying that if you don’t come alone, I’ll put a bullet in old grannie’s head. Don’t fuck with me, Melody. I’ve got nothing to lose here. I’m tired of being called Scarface behind my back. Tik-tok, Melody, you haven’t got long.”

  The line goes dead.

  And my world plummets.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Mason

  “He said I had to come alone,” Melody says, glancing at the building where this fucking monster Hardhat is keeping an innocent older lady who’s the only motherly figure Melody has ever had.

  I stare at the building, squeezing the steering wheel as the gulls whine in the air around us, the sun almost completely set now, turning the rocking waves the color of muddy melting ice.

  “It’s not enough that he’s done this to you,” I snarl. “But of course he has to do it here. I guess he thinks it makes him clever. I guess he thinks it makes him big and powerful and will give him some goddamn credibility on the streets as if there’s such a thing as that on the fucking streets.”

  “Here? The docks?” Melody whispers, eyes glued to the small office outhouse-type building at the far end.

  I’ve parked down the way, just behind some shipping containers, and we can just about make out the worn, rundown looking building.

  “It’s Spark’s first office,” I say. “The only real estate I could afford back then when everybody thought I was just another kid with another stupid dream. He thinks we’re powerless, Melody. Well, fuck that. I’m going in there and I’m getting that innocent lady out. I’ll return her to you. You just need to stay here.”

  “What?” she gasps. “No, Mason. I can’t stay here. And I can’t let you go in there. I shouldn’t have even let you come this far. If he sees you—”

  “He’s going to kill you,” I snarl, the words producing a Big Bang of fight-or-flight hell inside of me.

  And everything, all the clattering stars exploding and imploding inside my body, settle on fight.

  Fight for my woman.

  I’m going to fight for our future.

  And that future doesn’t involve a day when I let a lowlife scumbag hurt an innocent wedding planner.

  “And he’s going to do it either way,” I go on, watching waves of anxiety flicker across her face. “Listen to me, Melody. This bastard doesn’t let anything go. He can’t allow you to scar him and then—and then what? Give you a slap on the wrist? No, if you go in there, you’re dead. If we send in the police or my security detail, Gertrude is dead. But if I go in alone, if I make him feel powerful long enough—”

  “Long enough for what?” she snaps.

  “For me to get close,” I snarl, venom shooting through my veins.

  She buries her face in her hands.

  “Oh God,” she moans. “Oh my God.”

  “Do you trust me?” I say, touching her face and subtly moving her chin so that she’s looking at me.

  “Yes,” she says without missing a beat. “Of course I do. We’re going to have children together, Mason. I trust you with my life.”

  “Then trust me with this,” I say. “I swear to you, I will always protect us. I’ll always protect our family. And from what you’ve told me, Gertrude is becoming like family to you. So let me do this.”

  Tears bead in her eyes but then she hardens her face, making a conscious effort not to cry.

  She paws at her eyes and stiffens her lips.

  “Please save her,” she whispers.

  I push open the door, grinning grimly when I hear the familiar squeak, the same damn squeak the landlord said he was going to get fixed and never did.
The place is abandoned now and has clearly been home to squatters and junkies, the carpet picked apart and littered with bottles and paper wrappers and other detritus of the street.

  It’s easy to find Hardhat.

  I just walk into the room that used to be the main office.

  It’s no longer home to a few small desks and a filing cabinet. Not that we ever filed anything. Now, it’s just a wide-open room, a few chairs huddled around a burnt-out fire of charred newspapers.

  Gertrude sits in the center of the room on a plastic lawn chair, her hands bound and her feet tied to each leg. Duct tape over her mouth stops her from speaking. My chest lightens when I see that she’s unharmed and that she still has a fierce glint in her eye, the one Melody has described to me more than once.

  Last night, she told me, “She might be getting older, Mason, but she’s like a lioness. I once saw her chew a client out for trying to squirm out of paying. It was a real Jekyll and Hyde moment. But in a good way. She’s incredible.”

  Now, she’s just the same, even as she sits there powerless.

  I read the message in her blazing gaze easily, Is Melody okay?

  I nod shortly, proud that a woman as strong as Gertrude has taken such a liking to my woman.

  The rest of the room is a cesspit for scumbags. I count seven goons standing at the other end of the room, two of them smoking, one holding a lead pipe.

  All of them are covered in tattoos and one is even taller than me, and wider, though his muscles have that puffy doughy look people get from too many steroids.

  I search the room for guns.

  Nothing.

  Except for the one that Hardhat casually tosses from hand to hand as he emerges from the shadows and stands in the light of the naked, flickering bulb.

  He’s wearing a combat jacket, cargo pants, and boots, clearly thinking himself some sort of militiaman or soldier and not just a two-bit crook.

  “You, my friend, are not Melody,” he says, flashing a grin that displays golden canine teeth.

  He wears the evidence of Melody’s ferocity like a badge of dishonor, a jagged pink scar from just under his eye down to his lip.

  “Getting a good look?” he snaps, causing the men behind him to bristle. “You know how stupid it is you coming in here, pretty boy? You can’t code your way out of this one. What, you gonna offer to make us an exploding toaster next?”

  His goons laugh like the obedient little fucks they are, stepping forward so that they’re closer to their master.

  “Well?” Hardhat moans. “Are you really shitting your britches so bad you can’t even talk? How much are you offering us?”

  “Offering you?” I say, unable to repress a smirk.

  “Yes, yes,” he says, gesturing with his pistol, half-aimed at me and half-aimed at the floor. “You came in here to offer us some cash to spare the old cunt and the cunt’s adopted daughter, right? So how much? And don’t forget, I know your net worth. That’s public information.”

  He scratches at the razor-wire tattoo on his bald head with the barrel of his gun.

  “What is it, fellas? Two billion?”

  “Three,” a man says, stubbing his cigarette out on a tattooed forearm as if that’s supposed to intimidate me.

  My heart is hammering.

  My nerves are sore and alive.

  But that’s just a human response, a mammalian reflex, and not my instincts.

  Because my instincts are fucking ready.

  To defend my woman.

  And everything that matters to her.

  Hardhat blows out air through his teeth.

  “Three,” he says. “Now that is impressive. And it all started here. I’ll tell you what there, slugger. You give me a cool billion and we’ll be on our way.”

  “Sure,” I say.

  He narrows his eyes, his shit-eating grin wavering.

  “Sure?” he says.

  And I see it in his eyes, the suspicious hunger, the look that says he knows this is ridiculous and I’d never agree to that, but he’s interested despite himself.

  Because he’s a lowlife and he tried to make my woman into his sex slave.

  All he cares about is money, money, and his fucked-up code that really is just an excuse to inflict more pain.

  “Absolutely,” I say. “I’ll have to move some things around, but that’ll be fine. There’s just one condition.”

  “Let the grannie go, yeah, we get it.”

  “No, not that,” I say, and with each syllable I stalk just a little bit closer, projecting an aura like I’m just talking like I’m not coiling all my energy and strength like a spring ready to erupt.

  “What, then?” he says, even if part of him knows this is all bullshit.

  “All you have to do, Clive,” I say, watching him flinch at the use of his name like I knew he would, “is get on your hands and knees and beg like the pathetic fucking worm you are.”

  “You mother—”

  I leap forward as he raises the gun, moving far quicker than he thought I would.

  Or could.

  He yells when I grab his wrist and, with a violent wrench, twist it upward, the gun falling from his hand and clattering metallically on the floor.

  He swings at me with a wild punch and I take it, I can’t move out of the way quickly enough.

  But I roll with the motion and then spin around, my elbow finding his jaw.

  Something goes snap and he reels backward, roaring.

  I kick the gun and it slides across the floor, and then I leap at the nearest man and drive my fist up into his nose. I feel something crush and then wobble like jelly as if I’ve dislodged his naval cavity, and then he falls to the floor in a shower of blood and screams.

  I jump at the gun again, slamming my elbow into one man’s back and then grabbing another man and lifting him clear off the floor by his shirt.

  I bring him down on my knee, violently, savagely, hitting him so hard he goes unconscious immediately.

  I grab the gun and tuck it into the back of my pants, turning to find Hardhat and the three of his men I haven’t yet injured standing there uncertainly.

  I glance at the one with the lead pipe.

  “Well?” I growl. “Aren’t you going to use that thing, tough guy?”

  He yells and throws it at me, which is probably the stupidest thing he could’ve done.

  I catch it mid-air and then leap forward, smashing him across the jaw and then taking out another’s legs. I drop it and grab the third, lifting him off his feet and pounding a head-butt in between his eyes, dropping him like a sack of potatoes.

  I stomp on Hardhat’s hand as he tries to pick up the pipe, twisting my shoe, making him wheeze and gasp.

  “All of you, out,” I snarl.

  They groan and writhe and gasp as they clutch their injured bodies.

  I grab the gun from my waistband and fire twice into the air, and that clears the bastards pretty damn quickly.

  I’m glad to see that they rush out of the back exit, meaning they won’t come into contact with Melody or see the car. Not that they would anyway, not where it’s parked, behind the natural camouflage of the shipping container where they’re unlikely to look.

  “What’s the plan now?” I snarl. “No women to abuse. No lives to threaten. What the fuck are you going to do now—”

  Behind me, I hear a gasp.

  I glance and see Melody stumbling into the room, her eyes wide as she takes in the scene.

  “Gertrude,” she gasps, leaping across the room and carefully removing the duct tape from her mouth. “Oh my God, Gertrude. I’m so, so sorry. I never should’ve put you in this position. I never should’ve even been around you long enough for this to—”

  “Hush,” she says, as Melody starts removing her bindings. “If I never met you, Melody, I’d count myself the unluckiest woman alive. You’re the daughter I never had. Do you really think a silly little man with a silly little head tattoo – which, frankly, does nothing to hide the fac
t that you’re bald, by the by – is going to change that?”

  Melody laughs and sobs at the same time.

  “How fucking cute,” Hardhat snarls.

  I kneel down and grab the back of his shirt, lifting him up like he weighs nothing and then giving him a stiff jab to the throat, making him choke and splutter and kick around pathetically.

  “Apologize,” I snap. “To both of them. Now. Or I’ll string you up and use you as a punching bag until the police gets here.”

  “Apologize?” he cackles. “Do you really think—”

  This time I smack him across the mouth with the gun, the metal causing his jaw to dislocate. Any pity I might feel is burned away when I think about the women and children this man has probably sold into sexual slavery and the fact that he was going to do it to my woman, stopping me from having my children.

  “The next one might kill you,” I growl, the beast within me in control now.

  “I’m s-sorry,” he gasps, his voice distorted with his messed-up jaw. “Jesus, I’m sorry. Just stop. Please. I’m sorry.”

  I look at Melody, waiting to see what she wants to do.

  Because she has power over this man, not the other way around, and she never has to be afraid again.

  “Let me get Gertrude out of here and I’ll call the police,” she says. “I’m done with this pathetic little man. And she’s right, Clive, that tattoo is the stupidest thing I’ve ever seen. Are you going to be okay watching him until the police arrive, Mason?”

  “Oh,” I say, and then reel back and hit him so hard in the stomach he doubles over and crumples into a ball on the floor. “I think I’ll be fine.”

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Melody

  As I ride the elevator up to Gertrude’s new penthouse apartment – with round the clock security – I clutch the newspaper in my hand, the headline still singing through me.

  Hero CEO Saves the Day: A New Dawn for Spark Industries?

  The photo on the front is of me and Mason, taken at an industry function a few days ago. I remember how nervous I felt as we strode into that ballroom together, my ball gown feeling faintly ridiculous as it trailed behind me and the flashing camera lights so intimidating I felt like I might run out at any moment.