I kept moving forward, already feeling my cheeks flaming back up to red-hot.
Oh, shit.
I hope he didn’t say anything about me watching Rhys watching porn.
Shit, that would be awful, and that would for sure cause me to lose my job.
My job that I didn’t even do anything at.
Hell, all I was doing at this point was making him dinner, checking on him periodically throughout the day, and then spending my time on his couch.
Sometimes we would go out to eat, while others he would lay down on the couch with me and watch Netflix all day long. Periodically, he’d lay down on the ground and do sit-ups, or sometimes he did push-ups. Hell, just last week he’d gotten a pull-up bar and hung it up in the door frame that led from the hallway to the living room. Now, he did pull-ups, too.
I literally didn’t think I’d be able to do it much longer—keep my attraction to him a secret.
It was becoming like an itch underneath my skin, and I was on the verge of jumping him like a horny fangirl—though it wasn’t due to his fame or super athletic star status that I wanted him. I was just plain in love with Rhys Rivera.
I pushed through the empty living room, then led him to my bedroom.
I could feel him close at my heels, practically feel his heat radiating off of my back with how near he was.
I led him into my room, then pointed to the bed where the transmitter had fallen.
“I’m just going to warn you now, this bitch weighs like nine hundred pounds, and I can’t lift it for nothin’,” I informed him as I turned to look at his face.
His lips twitched. “You’re tiny, honey. I don’t see you capable of lifting a toddler bed.”
I flipped him off, then walked around the bed and out of his way.
“Which side?” he asked, making sure to maintain eye contact with me so that I could see what he was saying.
I smiled. “Left side. Near the wall.”
The bed was made out of metal, and now I could see why it’d already been in the room when we’d moved into the place. It was physically impossible to move it anywhere.
Seriously, I doubted it’d been cleaned behind since it was placed in that very spot.
There was no telling what was behind it.
Rhys bent down and reached for the base of the bed, then gave it an experimental tug.
He frowned, surprised, I was sure, by the weight of it.
“Solid fucking bed,” he muttered, turning to me once again.
I nodded in agreement. “It was here when I moved in.”
He grunted something, but he’d turned back around, so all I could see was his body jerk slightly with whatever he’d said or grunted.
I bit my lip as I watched his shirtless form move.
He was sweaty, and the tattoos on his back looked like they were shimmering.
Every single tattoo he had was black or shades of gray. There was not a single piece of color on his body.
And still, the tattoos were vibrant and beautiful. Though, that might have to do with the man that the ink was on, and not the tattoos themselves.
He grunted, and suddenly the bed slid about four inches away from the wall.
“Holy shit!” I cried, likely a little too loudly. “I tried to do that when we first moved in because I lost a phone charger back there and couldn’t budge it.”
“This one?” he asked, grinning up at me while tossing something black over his shoulder.
I looked at the charger. “Yeah, that one.”
“You got a flashlight?” he asked, eyes meeting mine.
I walked to my nightstand, opened it up, and immediately slammed it shut again.
Then I bit my lip and opened it back up once more.
After retrieving the flashlight, I closed it with a soft click and then turned it on before handing it to him.
“Thanks,” he looked at me and said, then started to laugh.
“What?” I asked.
He laid down on his belly, then shoved the nightstand over with his shoulder before reaching far behind the bed.
Then he came out with…
“What the fuck is that?” I questioned when I saw what he was holding.
He set the chains down on the ground by my feet and came back with even more.
This time handcuffs, followed by a long pole like thing with a leather handle and…feathers?
The ‘toys’ just kept coming before finally he came out with a pink dildo.
The pink dildo caused my cheeks to redden in embarrassment.
There was one other thing I’d lost behind there…
“All right,” he said as he came back out with my transmitter, a smile on his beautiful face. “There’s nothing else back there. Here you go.”
I immediately took it and situated it, and then sighed when hearing once again returned to my world.
One had no idea just how depriving it was until it they experienced it.
It was like a sudden storm overtaking the sky. One second, everything was normal, and the next everything you once knew about the world was utterly different.
Or like going to a different country where everything was unfamiliar. You could navigate, but could you function as well if you were in your own world?
No.
And without actually being deaf, one would never know just how hard it was.
“Well, whoever had your room before is definitely a kinky son of a bitch. Now I can see why they left the bed, though. Something all metal like this would be a Dom’s playground,” he said.
“You know what a Dom is?” I questioned, blinking my eyes innocently.
He grunted and stood up, offering me the flashlight.
Since I was still fiddling with my transmitter, I gestured to the drawer I’d had it in. “Just put it in there.”
He bent over and opened the drawer and paused.
That’s when my eyes closed as I realized what I’d done.
That was the ‘drawer.’
The one that every woman had with her special supplies—such as lube, condoms, and her vibrators.
Jesus. Christ.
My cheeks flamed even hotter than before, and I wished the ground would swallow me whole.
He didn’t say a word, though, as he gently placed the flashlight in right next to my dildo—the same one that matched the one on the floor that he’d likely mistakenly blamed on the previous tenants—and closed it tight.
Moments later, he was standing at the end of my bed and pushing it into the wall once again. This time where there was no gap at all.
I swallowed just as he rounded it and laid down.
I bit my lip as I watched him watch me.
“I’m a healthy woman!” I cried.
His lip twitched. “Yeah?”
I nodded. “Yeah.”
He lifted his arms up over his head and made himself comfortable in my bed, his eyes trailing around my room only to stop on my door.
Then he frowned.
He opened his mouth, and then closed it again.
I followed his gaze, staring out onto the porch…and realized what else I’d revealed.
“You can see into my room,” he said.
I shrugged. “Maybe. I hadn’t really noticed.”
He gave me a look that clearly said he didn’t believe me and then switched over to what I now deemed as ‘my side’ of the bed.
It was the side that allowed me the easiest access to his TV—and his porn.
Son of a biscuit eater.
This day could literally not get any worse.
I turned away from him to hide my embarrassment. He knew that I could see him.
Then he sobered.
“Henley?”
I looked over to find him staring at me fiddling with my transmitter.
“Yeah?”
“Can I talk to you for a minute?”
My stomach plummeted at h
earing those words.
“Yeah…” I paused. “Sure.”
I was expecting to hear about the porn that he was watching—that I was watching, too—but that wasn’t what I got. Not even close.
“Good.” He took a deep breath. “I know that I offered you eight months, but…”
“Oh, God. You’re firing me, aren’t you? I knew you didn’t really need me anywhere near as long as you said you did.” My shoulders slumped.
“Yes.”
My stomach dropped.
He’d said words that I hadn’t expected to hear from him—at least not this soon.
Sure, I probably should’ve expected it. I was, after all, not doing a damn thing to help him.
“Kind of.”
I frowned. “How do you kind of get fired?”
“Well…” He paused. “I don’t want you to work for me anymore…but I do want you to marry me.”
Chapter 16
Sneeze on your knuckles before a fight in order to inflict poison damage.
-Helpful Tip
Rhys
I hadn’t actually intended on telling her this today. I’d intended on doing it once her the rest of my convalescent time was up—but, she’d presented me with this opportunity, and I had to take it.
“You want me to what?” she asked curiously.
“I want you to marry me,” I repeated.
“Why?”
She honestly sounded so flabbergasted by the fact that I was asking her, of all people in the world that there were to pick from, that I started to bristle.
“Why not?” I asked.
“Well…because we barely know each other, first off. And I’m a plain Jane. You could have anybody in this world. Any woman would jump at the chance to have you. Hell, a lot of women have already tried.”
“Exactly.” I paused. “In all this time, you were the only woman who spent any significant amount of time with me without trying to throw yourself at me…and honestly, I was concerned that you didn’t even find me attractive.”
The snort that left her was quite unladylike.
“I’d have to be dead not to find you attractive,” she pointed out. “You’re the whole package, Rhys.”
I found myself grinning. “Yeah?”
She flipped me off.
I sobered.
“I have a…problem.”
“What kind of problem?” she asked hesitantly.
“The kind where, if I don’t marry by the time I’m thirty, my inheritance goes bye-bye and goes to the next highest bidder.”
“And who is the next highest bidder?”
I scowled. “My uncle Pablo. The head honcho of the Italian mob.”
She opened her mouth to say something, then closed it, unsure what to say.
“Your uncle is the leader of the mob.”
I nodded.
“You’re joking, right?”
I shook my head.
“I think you’re trying to fool me. This is all some sick joke, isn’t it?”
I shook my head again, smiling sadly. “You’re telling me you’ve never heard of Rhys Rivera, the missing mobster’s nephew?”
She looked clueless when she answered with a shake of her head.
“Google me. I’ll wait.”
She frowned but reached for her phone that was in her back pocket.
Then she started clicking away.
The more her thumb moved, the more the blood drained away from her face.
“You ran away from the mob so you could be a baseball player?” She breathed. “Don’t they kill people for doing that?”
I nodded.
Then understanding dawned.
“Your motorcycle accident.”
I nodded again, still not saying a word.
“I…you can’t expect that of me.”
“I’ll make it worth your while,” I immediately offered. “I’ll pay off all your debt, your school loans, and your medical bills. And the money that I get, half of it will be yours.”
Her mouth opened, then closed as astonishment washed over her features. “You know about my medical bills?”
I nodded.
Her medical bills were substantial…or at least her mother’s were.
When Henley was younger, her mother—her stepmother that was, for all intents and purposes, the only mother she’d ever known—had paid astronomically for Henley to have her surgery, and in doing so had put herself so far into debt that it wasn’t even funny.
That was why Henley lived as simply as she did. She was paying everything that she could toward those medical bills—but she’d never be able to pay them off in her lifetime. Not even her children’s lifetime.
And I wanted to fix that.
I wanted to make everything easier…but I needed her to do it by my side.
“But why? Why me?” she repeated.
“Why not you?” I countered.
“I’m…ugly.”
I laughed, which caused her to bristle.
I immediately started to explain my laughter. “You’re so far from ugly that it’s comical. You’re beautiful. But that’s not what draws me to you. What draws me to you is your inability to see the bad in people, and your willingness to spend countless hours with a walking dead man who has no positive outlook on life.”
She looked down at her hands with sudden interest. “I’m weird.”
“You’re everything.”
“What if I say yes? What then?”
“Then we get married. We buy a house—and if you want, I’ll be more than willing to add a pool house for your mother and your sister. Whatever you want. You’ll be my wife in every way. We’ll have kids. You’ll watch them—or if it pleases you, you go to work. You live your life, and I live it with you.”
“You don’t…love me.”
“I adore you.”
I didn’t say I loved her—because I didn’t. But I could. Maybe. Possibly. If I tried to get past the blocks in my mind that my uncle had established.
I was telling the truth. I adored everything about her.
And found her insanely attractive.
But love was foreign to me, and probably always would be. But that didn’t matter. You didn’t have to love someone to make a marriage work.
She looked so hopeful that it was hard to look into her eyes.
“What if we don’t work out?”
I stood up and cupped her cheek with my hand.
“What if we do?”
Her frown deepened.
“What if what you feel for me—this attractiveness you speak of—goes away?”
I traced the shell of her ear. “What if it grows stronger?”
She narrowed her eyes. “What if you meet someone else you love?”
“What if I never meet anyone else because you’re all I can see?”
She swiped away a few tears that had escaped angrily.
“What if you’re traded? I can’t leave.”
“What if we decide that I don’t want to play baseball anymore?”
Her eyes widened, and for once, she had no reply.
“What if I was born for you, and you were put onto this earth especially for me?”
She stared at me as tears continued to streak down her cheeks.
“What if one day we live happily ever after?”
Her mouth opened, and a soft sigh escaped.
“What happens if you don’t marry?” she whispered, sounding hopeful.
“Pablo gets the money via me being forced to marry his daughter, and his empire will once again be secure,” I answered honestly.
“You being forced to marry his daughter.” She paused. “You’re kidding, right? And why is all of this happening in the first place?”
And that was the million-dollar question.
“A long time ago, Pablo and my father worked together. Pablo was the front man and my father was the brains…then my
mother started to screw around on my father in the form of pornos. Pablo thought my father was too soft, and if he couldn’t handle his woman, then he couldn’t handle the business,” I answered.
“And…”
“And my father was the one to have the last laugh. When he sensed Pablo turning on him, he hid money—a lot of it—most of the money that they had and put it in a trust fund for me once I married.”
“And if you don’t marry, that money goes to Pablo?”
I grunted. “No. Not technically.”
“Well, how about you enlighten me on how ‘technical’ it gets,” she ordered.
I liked that little bit of fierceness I could read in her body language as she crossed her arms over her chest.
“My father and his clauses on the trust fund are stupid. They’re not law-abiding, but the Italian mob doesn’t exactly deal with laws. The man my father used is known as a broker. He deals the money out in the way it was specified to dole it out, and nobody will ever question him. He’ll follow the instructions to the T.”
“And tell me these instructions.” She sighed, sounding like her head was hurting.
My head was hurting, too.
“It says that upon marriage, the money will be split between me and my legal wife—and we can never separate.”
Her eyes widened. “We’re going to be married forever? No exceptions?”
I nodded, waiting for her to explode.
“And what else? None of this is making any sense. Then why kill you? Why not just go kill that broker guy?”
Her knowledge of my world—or lack thereof—was refreshing.
“The broker guy is kind of what one would call ‘neutral’ territory. If someone breaks the rules and fucks with him, it will be like that person signing his own death warrant. This broker deals with all the mobs. Russian. Italian. Irish. Seriously, those are just the big games in town. There are likely a number of smaller organized crime syndicates that deal with him as well.”
She looked like she was losing her cool.
“If you don’t get married before you’re thirty, what happens?”
“Then all that money goes to my sister, and my sister will give it all to Pablo.”
“Just like that? Does she know what happened to your father?” she wondered.
I nodded. “But she has a family. A kid on the way. She can’t afford to fight him like I can.”
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