Redeemed: A Billionaire Second Chance Romance (Lost Love Book 1)

by Marcella Swann

I remember one of the guys, from behind me, trying to grab at my arms, and I saw another one closing in on Cynthia at the same moment, reaching for her. I acted almost without thinking, twisting my arm free of the guy’s grip, which he wasn’t expecting, and kicking out behind me while looking to see where the next guy might be coming from. For about ten minutes, give or take, everything was chaos. I punched, kicked, looked around. At least one of the guys had a knife, and I remember being shocked--for a second--to see Cynthia manage to get it from him with some kind of maneuver where she twisted his wrist. Another guy had a taser, and I barely managed to duck his attempt to get me with it.

  “Shit! Shit! This is taking too long,” one of the guys told the others.

  “Let’s get out of here,” one of the others said.

  “No hell you’re not,” Cynthia told them, and I realized what she planned to do; keep at least a couple of them here so that we could call the cops.

  We did manage, between the two of us, to disable three of the six. But the other three got away, going over the wall surrounding my townhouse and running before we could get the ones we’d trapped secure enough to not risk them running, too. By then, Jack had figured something was up and had come into the front yard of my house, phone in hand.

  “I’ve got dispatch, they’re sending someone,” Jack said. He introduced himself to me as he checked in on Cynthia.

  “I’m fine,” she said.

  “I should have insisted on being in place,” Jack muttered.

  “You were doing what you were told to do,” Cynthia countered.

  “The whole point of having a bodyguard is so you don’t have to wrestle with attackers on your own,” Jack said, looking at me doubtfully.

  “She wasn’t exactly alone, you know,” I told the man.

  “No--no, I know,” Jack said. “It just should never have been an issue in the first place.”

  “Yeah, I can agree with that,” I said. I could still feel the adrenaline pumping through my body. I took a deep breath and tried to take stock of my own body. Somewhere in the scuffle I’d gotten bruised along my ribs, probably on my face just under my eye, judging by the ache I could just feel there. Cynthia had a smear of blood on her hand, and she still had one of the knives in the other. I didn’t know if it was her blood or one of the guys’ blood.

  The cops came about fifteen minutes later and I had to think of what to tell them. Dad’s instructions to me had always been to never speak to the police, at all, unless the family lawyer was present. But our family lawyer wasn’t really involved in the situation at hand. In fact, Dad and I both were pretty sure that Frank might have some involvement in getting him framed. But there was a lawyer present at the scene after all; Cynthia.

  “We’ve never seen these men before in our lives,” Cynthia told the officers. I was surprised at how calm she was as she answered their questions. With adrenaline still coursing through me, I definitely expected her to be shaken.

  “Mr. Peterson, do you think they were after you, specifically? Can you give us any kind of lead on why they might have attacked you and Ms. Evers?” The three guys we’d managed to detain were in the cars, and the four police who had arrived, two pairs, had Cynthia and me separated to get our reports. I wasn’t sure how much to tell them.

  “I have some people after me,” I said. “I’m pretty sure these guys were hired, but I can’t say who would have hired them. It’s definitely not random.”

  “No, it doesn’t seem like it,” the officer questioning me agreed. “Why do you have people after you?” I looked at Cynthia.

  “There have been some legal issues with my father, as I’m sure you’ve probably seen in the papers,” I said. “This, I think, is linked with that. We were leaving to go speak with the DA about the issue.” I hoped that would give them enough information to feel like they could investigate without revealing what we knew about the people working against my father and me.

  It took, what felt like ages, but finally the cops left, and Jack took up his position in his car, waiting for Cynthia. “We should probably go talk to the DA now,” Cynthia said.

  “I think we both need a drink first,” I countered. “And right now I’m not sure that the charges they’re trying to get against me are the biggest concern.”

  “They’re still important,” Cynthia said.

  “Yeah, these guys they sent were sloppy,” I agreed, after a moment’s thought. “I’ve seen better professionals.”

  “I’m sure you have,” Cynthia said tartly.

  “Come inside. We’ll have a drink and figure out what to do.”

  She looked like she was going to argue on that point, so I grabbed her hand, the non-bloody one, and pulled her with me into the townhouse. “They’re not going to spring charges on me right now,” I pointed out. “They’re going to be doing damage control on that botched...whatever it was.”

  “I guess that’s a good point,” Cynthia admitted.

  “I didn’t know you got to be such a badass,” I said, bringing her into the kitchen with me for a drink. I opened a beer for her and one for myself, thinking about the way she’d held her own against the guys who’d been attacking us, and then the way she’d handled the cops.

  “I had to learn how to look out for myself a bit,” Cynthia told me, taking a sip of her beer. “You kind of make yourself a target in this line of law.”

  “If anyone had told me back in high school that you were going to become this--this badass, take-no-shit defense attorney that makes tons of money and knows how to hold her own against kidnappers…” I shook my head. “I would have told my dad to go to hell when he made me break up with you.”

  Cynthia met my gaze levelly for what felt like a full minute.

  “You could have told him to go to hell anyway,” she pointed out. “The fact that you wouldn’t fight for me, for us, was one of the things that encouraged me to learn how to fight for myself.”

  “So something good came out of it, at least,” I countered with a smile.

  “I could have done without being kicked to the curb like last week’s broken toy,” Cynthia said, tartly.

  “You don’t know what it was like,” I told her tartly. “I was still a kid.”

  “So was I,” Cynthia said. “And I would have fought for you.”

  “I did fight for you!” I glared at her. “Just because you didn’t see it doesn’t mean it didn’t happen.”

  “What?” Cynthia chuckled bitterly. “Did you tell your Dad that you wouldn’t take his money for college? Did you threaten to move out and never join the family business?”

  I felt myself getting angry at her.“Look, it’s in the past,” I said. “I don’t even know why I brought it up.”

  “You don’t? I would have assumed it’s because you’ve apparently been obsessed with me ever since,” Cynthia pointed out.

  “Obsessed with you?” I raised an eyebrow at that.

  “Why else have you been, by your own admission, following my career?” She crossed her arms over her chest.

  “If I’m obsessed with you, you’re no less obsessed with me,” I countered.

  “Until you walked into my office the other day, I hadn’t thought about you in years,” Cynthia said.

  I laughed. “If you had really gotten over me, then you wouldn’t have cared that it was me. I would have been just another client to you.” I moved a bit closer to her, almost unable to help myself.

  “There’s a difference between not wanting to have anything to do with someone and monitoring their career,” Cynthia pointed out. I grinned.

  “Why do you care, though?”

  Cynthia rolled her eyes. “Because you were my first real boyfriend. I lost my virginity to you, and then, almost right after, you dumped me because your dad told you to,” she said. “So no, I was not happy to see you in my office and I’m not happy to be working to keep your Dad out of jail.”

  “Do you think I was happy to need to come to you for this?” I was moving close
r to her, too aware of the way the color in her cheeks made her eyes brighter, and that the deep breaths she was taking, as she got more irritated, made her breasts strain at the front of her blouse.

  “Why didn’t you go to someone else then?” Cynthia glared at me, and I smiled slowly.

  “I told you. Because you’re the best in the city,” I said. “I don’t think any other lawyer I could have gone to would have been able to hold their own against those assholes, anyway.” Cynthia rolled her eyes.

  “This is serious, Shawn,” she said.

  “You’re right,” I agreed. “It’s serious. For all either of us knows, those fuckers were going to kill us if they could.” Cynthia’s eyes widened and I realized that it hadn’t occurred to her to think of what could have come of that attack. She might have figured it would be abduction, or something similar. But what point would there be in abducting us if not to, at least, beat us into agreeing to drop my Dad’s defense? It’d be easier to just kill us anyway, and it would put any other lawyers who Dad might go to on notice.

  “Holy shit, you’re right,” Cynthia said, for the first time sounding genuinely afraid.

  “So we have to take care of this,” I told her. Cynthia considered that for a moment.

  “We do,” she agreed, and took another deep breath. I was only inches away from her somehow, without even really knowing how I’d ended up there. And I realized that the excitement of everything that happened in the past hour or so had a pretty predictable effect on me. My cock was starting to harden just by looking at Cynthia.

  “We’re both stressed out,” I pointed out.

  “Where are you going with this?” Cynthia frowned and looked at me suspiciously.

  “I know a good way to relieve stress,” I replied, smiling again.

  “You--you really want to have sex right now?” Cynthia looked like she wasn’t sure whether she wanted to laugh or glare at me some more.

  “You have to admit, the couple of times we got to do it before, we were pretty damn good at it,” I said. “And I seem to recall that you were pretty stress-free afterwards.”

  Cynthia’s eyes widened and she stared at me, opening and then closing her mouth. “Oh! Did I make the clever defense lawyer speechless?” I leaned in closer, until I could almost feel her breath on my skin.

  “Shut up,” Cynthia said, and I chuckled.

  “Some part of you has to be curious,” I pointed out. “I know I am. Was it only that good because neither of us had anything to compare it to?” On impulse, I reached out and grabbed Cynthia’s waist.

  “I don’t want to compare you to anyone else,” Cynthia said.

  “Then compare me to me,” I suggested. I leaned in the final inch or so and kissed her on the lips. For just a second, Cynthia didn’t react at all--she didn’t kiss me back, she didn’t pull away, she just stood there with my lips against hers.

  But a moment later, almost begrudgingly, I felt her shift against my body, her lips pressing back against mine. It was like nothing had changed between us, ever, and yet like everything had changed, all at the same time. I wasn’t the seventeen-year-old boy I’d been when Dad made me break up with her, and she wasn’t the fifteen-year-old girl. We’d both learned a thing or two since then, and when Cynthia nipped sharply at my bottom lip before opening her mouth to let me in, I had to wonder where she’d learned that little trick.

  But then, all at once, I didn’t have the ability to wonder about anything other than how quickly I could get her clothes off. I let my hands wander all over her body, feeling the way her hips flared out from her waist, the way her tits fit perfectly in the palms of my hands. They hadn’t been this big when we’d been dating as teenagers, I was almost certain. But I was pretty sure they would be just as perky as they had been back then if I got her bra off.

  Cynthia’s hands began to move too, shifting down along my body from my shoulders, to my chest, and stopping just short of the bulge at the front of my pants. Her fingers tightened and I groaned against her mouth, dipping down to her neck. Her skin was so soft--and she smelled so good, exactly how I remembered but different. I was getting harder by the moment, and I had to get her clothes off.

  I found the hem of her blouse and managed to pull it up, along her ribs and then past her chest, and in an instant it was off of her and on my kitchen floor. My shirt was right there with it a couple of moments later. I went for her bra next; all I could think of was how much I needed to see her naked, every inch of her. I was as horny as I’d ever been when we were teenagers together, as desperate as I’d been back then--it was amazing how it all just kind of came back like that.

  I managed to pull back just enough and remembered to do the right thing. “If you want me to stop…”

  “I don’t,” Cynthia said, before I could even finish the sentence. We were both down to nothing but our underwear, and I took advantage of the moment to appreciate the sight of her, leaned against the counter, her tits shaking slightly from the force of her breathing. She looked gorgeous--but I knew she would. She looked like the girl I knew, the girl I had been with for my first time, but grown up in all the best ways. I moved in to kiss her again and tried to think; even the living room was too far to go. I wanted her right then, and I wasn’t about to let something like position become an issue.

  I picked her up and lifted her onto the countertop, kissing her as I made sure she was just where I needed her to be. I felt like I might actually explode if we didn’t get to the main event, but I knew, all too well, that once I got Cynthia going, it was a marathon, not a sprint. Besides, I definitely wanted to show off everything I’d learned since we’d been kids.

  Chapter Seven

  I had never been as turned on in my life as I was then, perched on Shawn’s kitchen counter, his mouth trailing from my lips to my breasts and back up again. I had already soaked my panties, and it felt like every time his lips wrapped around one of my nipples, my inner walls tightened with so much force that it sent a shockwave through my body, heating me up even more. He was a natural when we’d first gone for it together, and whoever he’d been with since then had only improved his skills.

  Shawn took his time, making me hotter and hotter, until I couldn’t stand it anymore. I felt sure that if the lights somehow all went out, I would glow in the dark like the hottest coal in a fire. I reached out, groping until I found the hot, hard ridge at the front of his boxers and began to rub them. I almost laughed as he groaned against my chest, thrusting against my hand. I wanted to tell him to just fuck me already, but I didn’t want to say it.

  Just as I started to think I had the upper hand, so to speak, Shawn slipped his hand between my legs and began to rub me too, and all my focus started to drip out of my mind. For what seemed like at least an hour, we stayed like that, touching and teasing each other, slowing down just when things got the hottest, until we were both panting and gasping for breath. I felt my thighs shaking, my whole body shivering as if I was freezing. I wasn’t, but I was so on edge that I couldn’t take it anymore. “Can we please just…”

  Shawn laughed. “God, I was hoping you’d say it,” he said. I somehow managed to squirm and shimmy out of my panties while staying on the edge of the counter, and watched as Shawn pushed his boxers down over his hips. Somewhere along the line between high school and present day, he’d gotten stronger. Still lean, but I could see the muscle rippling under his skin, bulkier than it had been back then. And I couldn’t help staring at his erection as it sprung almost audaciously erect as soon as Shawn’s boxers weren’t in the way anymore. Had it been that big when we were dating? I couldn’t remember. All I knew was that I wanted it, needed it, inside me.

  I reached out for him and pulled him to me, spreading my legs wider and wrapping them around his waist as Shawn wrapped his arms around me, pulling me towards him until I was only, technically, on the countertop. For a moment my heart skipped a beat at the possibility of him dropping me, but he held me against him so firmly, so easily, that I forg
ot any sense of fear the next instant, consumed with the need to feel his hot, hard cock filling me up. It teased me, barely brushing against my folds, tantalizingly close, and it was like agony to have to wait any longer.

  “Wait, fuck,” Shawn said, a bit breathless. “You’re on the pill, right?”

  “No,” I said. “Implant. It’s more effective.” Shawn smiled.

  “And you’re still clean?”

  I scowled at him, irritated. “Are you?”

  Shawn chuckled. “That’s fair,” he said. “We’re both clean then?”

  “Yes.” And then he shifted me until there was just enough of the counter under my ass to help support me. I felt his tip rubbing up against my inner folds, pressing against me, teasing me one last moment.

  He thrust up into me slowly, like he had the first time we were together, taking his time, filling me up. “God,” I said, half-moaning the word. It felt so good and completely right, the heat and his thickness sliding deeper and deeper inside of me until our hips were pressed as tightly against each other as they could possibly be. We both stayed still like that and I felt my muscles flex around him, my body taking over. It wanted the big finish, even more than my brain did. Then we both started moving at almost the same moment, me pushing my hips down and Shawn thrusting up into me, and it just fit; fit perfectly the way it had our first time together.

  But I couldn’t spare any brain power to remember things. I let my hands wander over his body, touching him, taking in the feeling of his skin, the muscles rippling underneath. I kissed him everywhere I could reach with my mouth, tasting the sweat that slicked his collarbones, the sweet-bitter taste of his lips and tongue with the beer we’d both been drinking lingering on them. Neither of us could keep it slow for very long, and before I knew it, we were both grabbing at each other, kissing and touching and groping each other while I slammed my hips down and Shawn thrust up into me hard enough to make the countertop shake slightly.

  I have no idea how long it lasted, but all at once, the tension that had been building up in my hips from the moment that Shawn had suggested we have sex, reached an unbearable height and then snapped. I moaned out so loudly, it was almost a shout as wave after wave of pleasure crackled through every nerve ending in my body, making every muscle tighten and release in uncontrollable spasms. I barely even registered the way that Shawn’s body tensed against me sometime during the middle of my climax as he hit his own orgasm, thrusting into me a few more times, before he slowed to stillness.