HAN: Her Ruthless Mistake: 50 Loving States, Delaware (Ruthless Triad Book 4)

by Theodora Taylor

  Phantom dipped his head to level with me. “She didn’t die. She ran. She took one look at what Han had done, and she cut out like she didn’t even have a kid. Then she called Victor’s dad and told him where he could find his family—but only in exchange for not killing her—just her. She didn’t negotiate fuck all for her son. She’s still alive out there somewhere. She just didn’t want anything to do with her kid after everything was done, and it wasn’t like Victor’s dad didn’t tell Han what went down too. He knew—he lived with what really happened. And that’s the real reason he thought women weren’t worth shit….at least until he met you.”

  The horror of Phantom’s story froze me in place as memories of Han’s words on the Fourth of July echoed in my head. “Most people are cowards. You cannot trust them to stay when danger is involved. It does not matter if they once claimed to love you.”

  I’d thought he’d just been trying to make me feel even more stupid for ever dating Brad—which I totally did. But now, those words hit different.

  Cynicism hadn’t made Han tell me that, I realized, but lived experience.

  “I…I didn’t know,” I said to Phantom.

  “Yeah, well, that’s because he doesn’t talk about it,” Phantom answered with a shake of his ogre head. “Not to me. Not to Victor. Not to anybody.”

  Phantom expelled a guilty breath. “And he’d be pissed if he knew I was talking to you about it now. But Han never heard from her again. She might as well have been dead, which is I guess why he told people that—because to him she was. And I guess you could say that fucked him up….”

  Phantom went quiet for a moment, like he was trying to find the right words, then came back with, “He’s that guy, you know. Gets all the chicks easy AF. But he never trusts them. Never lets them in. He let you in, though. He let you stay with him, and when you did everything in your power to save him instead of saving yourself, I don’t think he knew what to do with that. So bam, Mrs. Han, as opposed to doing something not crazy, like you know, just saying thank you or buying you jewelry or some shit like that.”

  I looked to the side, my head swimming with all this new information. “So you’re saying Han forced me to marry him because I surprised him by having common decency.”

  Phantom stuffed his hands in his pockets, and he appeared embarrassed as he answered, “What you did ain’t common. If it was, Han wouldn’t be so fucked up over you.”

  I stood there, not knowing what to say or how to respond to any of this. This was a wipeout of a different kind—a gigantic wave of information out of nowhere in a placid sea.

  “Listen, this ain’t my bag, so I’m going to shove off. But talk to him again or don’t—it’s up to you. I just thought you should know that,” Phantom said.

  With that, he finally departed, leaving me wiped out on the rocks. Not sure how to recover.

  29

  JAZZ

  Hawaii was exactly as we left it, like a postcard that somehow never changed no matter how many tourists passed through it.

  I still couldn’t figure out how to forgive Han, but I was glad to be home. And my heart softened a little as I hung up my Patagonia coat in the second bedroom’s closet.

  There was no talk of me joining him in his room like before. But the next day, when I came back from my first Dawn Patrol in months, I found a dress bag with a post-it note attached hanging off one of the kitchen island’s chairs. The post-it read, “For our birthday date.”

  So that was how I found myself in the back of an Infiniti QX80 with Han the night of my birthday, getting ferried around by Yaron, his creepily silent driver, like old times. Except now, there was no backseat hand-holding or glances caught by the other.

  Instead, I sat as far away from him as I could, feeling petty…and guilty.

  No matter how many articles I’d read about how it wasn’t up to me to be the therapist in a relationship on the plane ride back to Hawaii, I couldn’t shake what Phantom had told me.

  And try as I did not to that night, I ended up glancing over at him…

  Only to find him doing the same thing—before we both quickly looked away.

  Maybe if he said something, if he explained himself, I could…I didn’t know…find it in my heart to forgive him. Or something. Just so long as we got annulment papers drawn up as soon as I paid him back.

  But he didn’t say anything, and Hawaii rush hour traffic was still Hawaii rush hour traffic. So we ended up stewing in the miserable silence for nearly an hour.

  Yaron let us out at the Honolulu Harbor, so apparently, we were eating at one of the restaurants on the waterfront.

  For the first time since the day he forced me to marry him, Han took my hand and guided me…

  Wait, not toward the bright restaurant lights. But in the opposite direction, toward the dark warehouses.

  I refused to break my vow of forever silence to ask him where we were going, but I wondered, and I totally forgot to snatch back my hand as we walked until we arrived at a tall warehouse, much like the one we’d escaped in Delaware.

  “Your present is right through here,” Han explained, opening a side door for me.

  Though it had looked dark from the outside, inside I found an old friend standing underneath a single hanging light. “Chen! Hey…” I started to say to the former driver I still considered a friend.

  But I trailed off when I saw the three men tied to chairs—the three men who’d obviously taken a severe beating. Their faces were so bruised and swollen, I didn’t recognize them at first. However, when I did, my heart dropped to the warehouse’s concrete floor.

  It was my sister’s dirty cop in-laws, the Lacerdas!

  So you would think receiving my beaten and tortured in-laws as a birthday present would be the craziest thing that happened to me that week. But no….

  The non-too-gentle questioning Chen and a couple of other STs put the Lacerdas through revealed that they weren’t the ones who’d been threatening Mika all along.

  And did I swear up and down that I was never talking to Han again?

  Well, I broke my vow of silence on my birthday—first to ask Han to take me to Rashid’s after I began to suspect Mika might be in real danger—and realizing he was the only person I knew with enough tech-savvy to track her down right away. Anyway, what happened next was too crazy a story to tell here.

  But I ended up seeking Han how out a couple of days later when I got off the phone with Mika, who had somehow pulled off a happy ending with her Broken Billionaire boss.

  I found Han out on the lanai, finally making use of the pool he hadn’t touched the entire time we lived here together before the Delaware trip. But it looked like he’d learned to appreciate it now. For a few moments, I completely forgot why I came outside, I was so caught up in watching him cut through the water like a shark, his strokes relentless and precise as he clocked lap after lap.

  However, he abruptly stopped at the wall and stilled when he saw me standing by the side of the pool. Like a predator who’d spotted a doe.

  And something I’d been keeping tamped down for the last three months rose up like a thing unchained inside of me as he climbed out of the pool, water dripping off his re-tanned skin.

  How was he already so cut again? He must have been working out like a beast back in Delaware. Maybe that was what he did instead of….

  “Are you all right?” he asked, coming to a stop right in front of me.

  I nodded because I was fine. But it felt like a lie as I scanned his magnificent half-tattooed body.

  I averted my eyes and cleared my throat to tell him, “I just got off the phone with Mika. She’s safe and flying back here with Rashid and Albie next week. Thank you for helping me help her.”

  He grabbed the towel waiting for him on the nearby lounge chair but didn’t take his eyes off of me. “I’m glad you will get your sister back.”

  “Yeah, best birthday present ever,” I said with a light laugh.

  But Han didn’t laugh along. He
just stared at me with that hungry wolf look in his eyes. And just like that, after three months, the kaleidoscope of butterflies was back.

  “What you did? Making me marry you? That was crazy,” I found myself telling him out of the blue. “You get that, right?”

  “You’ve told me that several times on our wedding day,” he answered.

  But as he once told me. “That’s not an answer to my question. Do you understand that forcing me to marry you was crazy?”

  “I understand that it came off that way to you,” he said, running the towel over his ink-black hair. “I understand that I should probably feel ashamed of my actions.”

  “But you don’t?” I guessed out loud, resentment and anger once again rising inside of me.

  Han paused. Lowered the towel. And looked to both sides. “I can’t.”

  His eyes came back to me, pinning my gaze underneath his, and my heart trembled like a newbie trying to stay up on her first wave. “I’ve tried, and I can’t.”

  His dark, low voice was the sea, each word crashing into me, as he told me. “I can’t regret what I did.”

  Three months.

  Three months in Delaware, and we didn’t talk, we didn’t have sex, we didn’t even touch.

  But after just three days in Hawaii and three minutes of conversation…

  We fell into each other, kissing desperately.

  “Wait, wait, wait!” I said, ripping my lips away from his.

  He waited, his arms still wrapped around me, dripping water and lust.

  “I’m going to pay you back,” I reminded him—reminded myself. My chest heaved with the intention. “I’m almost there. Just a few more weeks. And when I do, you have to let me go. No questions asked.”

  He scanned my face with the most terrible look. But in the end, he gave me a sharp nod….before adding his own declaration:

  “Until then….” He stared down at me, his almost black eyes burning like moons that block the sun. “Until then, you’re mine. Nod.”

  I hesitated. But only for a second. For the first time since we met, it felt like an easy choice when I nodded, pushing my chin down, then up—

  He re-captured my lips in another kiss before I could complete the action.

  And no, he wasn’t a Fae King. I knew that.

  I knew that.

  But it felt exactly like a magical pact.

  30

  HAN

  Just a few more weeks…

  Just a few more weeks until Han would have no choice but to let her go. He took her again and again. Everywhere, as if they were reclaiming the apartment, now as man and wife.

  “You know when I first saw you, I thought you were this cold, totally removed Fae King,” she told him after one particularly intense session.

  After some humorous back and forth about what romantic Western literature and the definition of a Fae King was, he laughed and asked, “And what do you think of me now?”

  “That you’re a crazy hot Fae King,” she answered. “Like, in every sense of the word.”

  She was right about him being crazy. Chen was performing exceptionally well in his position as The Silent Triad snakehead for Hawaii. So that left him with more free time than expected. He could have returned to the East Coast, where he would be useful as they established their branch in Delaware. Instead, he spent all that extra free time on Jasmine. And though she still insisted on working, his world winnowed down to her.

  Workouts, eating, and business became the things he did only when she wasn’t an option. And for the weeks between Thanksgiving and Christmas, his world became absolute bliss.

  But then he got the call from Victor and Phantom.

  JAZZ

  I was in the middle of my usual first-time surfer safety tips spiel for a class outside the Tourmaline Resort when one of my students looked at his waterproof Apple Watch and said, “Sorry, Everybody, this class is over.”

  Everyone, including me, looked toward “Jason,” who was really Bui pretending to be a tourist just like them, hoping to surf for the first time

  “Why does he get to decide when class ends,” one of the students, a high-maintenance groom from Seattle, whined. “What’s going on?”

  “I’m not sure,” I answered, frowning at Bui myself. “Jason, what’s going on?”

  Jason was the undercover name Bui had given himself for our lessons. He loved trying on different accents and pretending to be from other places when assigned to one of my beginner classes. Later on, I’d remember all those endearing qualities and cry.

  But now he was all business as he informed me, “Family emergency.”

  I glanced at all my shocked students, people I’d have to refund, and asked, “Is that—”

  “Yeah, he said to tell you it’s an order.”

  Ugh!

  Many apologies and promises to reschedule later, we arrived at the penthouse.

  To my shock, all of the guys were here. Not just Chen and the Hawaii STs, but a few of the recruits from K Diamond’s crew, now wearing lightweight suits with their flip flops instead of shorts and tees.

  They all stood around, talking in rapid Cantonese, with Han in the middle looking like a Fae king.

  I didn’t know what was going on, but a weird urge tugged at my stomach—one that made me want to go to him and stand by his side as several of K Diamond’s former men took turns answering his clipped questions.

  His queen.

  Somewhere along the way, the impulse to act like his queen had taken root….even though I’d be leaving him before the end of the year.

  I decided not to focus on that and watched them closely to see if I could figure out what was going on despite them talking in Cantonese. Whatever it was had them really upset. They were all stony-faced, even K Diamond’s old crew, who Han had complained on several occasions liked to joke around too much.

  And after Han bit out an order that sent everyone but Bui toward the door, they all filed right past me. Even Chen didn’t throw me a shaka, and he’d been willing to talk to me about his Christmas plans to propose to Dexter while the Lacerdas groaned in the background a few weeks ago.

  Bui also got sent packing with a clipped, “Wait for further orders outside the door” from Han.

  “What’s going on?” I asked Han as soon as Bui departed too.

  The Fae King regarded me with a grave look that made me feel like I hadn’t gotten my first impression of him wrong at all. “Yaron has betrayed us….”

  HAN

  Jasmine’s mouth dropped open as Han told her the whole terrible story about what had happened to Dawn just a few days before Christmas and how Yaron was in league with K Diamond now.

  But she snapped it closed when he concluded with, “So you will stay here under guard until further notice. That’s an order.”

  She took this latest decree about as well as Han expected she would.

  “What? Are you kidding me?” she immediately exploded.

  “Yes, I am very serious,” he gritted out. “You are my wife. I will protect you.”

  “I’m your wife for like two more seconds,” she retorted. “And the holiday season is prime surfing lesson time with all the tourists. I’ve got so many classes booked, and canceling them all will tank my rating on the review sites.”

  Han tightened his jaw. “I will pay you double for any classes missed.”

  “I don’t want your help!” she yelled at him. “How many times do I have to tell you that? I’m so close to paying you back by myself by New Year, and now you pull this bullshit?”

  “It is not—”

  “Yeah, right, like I’m going to believe this sudden lockdown doesn’t have anything to do with you wanting to boss me around past New Year’s?”

  “They stole Victor’s wife!” Han roared, all of his frustration and worry exploding out of him. “They stole her right from under his nose! And you expect me to take the same risk with you?”

  “I’m not your wife, dude. I’m your possession,”
she yelled back at him. “And yes, I expect to at least have the chance to earn the right to be my own woman again. If you don’t let me work—”

  She broke off and shook her head, tears filling up her eyes. “Who am I kidding? You’re not going to listen to me. You never do.”

  Then, as if realizing that Han was a predator who wouldn’t change, Jasmine the doe rushed away. To her room, not his, slamming the door behind her.

  It was just a slammed door. The natural response of the petulant child she became whenever Han did things for her own good.

  Still, Han flinched. Three months of silence. Three weeks of bliss. But now they were right back where this marriage started.

  It doesn’t matter. He thought of how destroyed Victor had looked when Han had reported back that they couldn’t find Yaron, who had helped orchestrate the kidnapping of his wife.

  His brother’s face had collapsed as the realization had dawned. His worst nightmare had come true. His enemy had captured his pregnant wife, just as Han’s father had once captured Victor’s pregnant mother.

  So it didn’t matter if Jasmine went another three months without talking to him. She could refuse to utter a word to him until next August as long as it kept her safe.

  Yet…

  He couldn’t just go back to his room, even after telling himself that. Instead, he stalked back and forth outside her door. Like a wolf denied his meal.

  And eventually, he found his hand on the second bedroom’s knob.

  To his surprise, it turned without resistance. She hadn’t locked the door here as she had in Delaware.

  She’d left it open for him. And perhaps…

  Perhaps that was a sign.

  Taking a deep breath, Han ventured inside and found her lying on her bed, her whole body facing the open lanai doors. And the ocean beyond—the one he’d just denied her.