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I’m twenty-two, need to be married before my birthday in December.” “Thirty-one,” I say with a chuckle, swirling the ice in my tumbler.
I’m not one to settle. If I can’t have the blaze I desire, I’d rather celebrate a life of ashes than fool myself into believing the warmth of an ember is enough. Not that this is ashes or embers or any type of flame. It’s not real. It’s a means to an end for us both. But there’s something about Wells,
something he stirs inside me. I’ve only felt it once before, a very long time ago, in a surreal five-minute fairy-tale moment. But while the premise of this possible sham marriage may be anything but authentic, Wells is astoundingly real. I’m fairly certain he would know exactly how to make stealing my innocence the most euphoric, earth-shattering moment of my life, complete with equal measures of commands and praise.
“Please, Mr. Wells, could you get off your fucking ass, wipe the cocky smirk off your face, and load my damn luggage?” Pulling back a smidgen, I study her triumphant features, thick eyelashes batting, so proud of herself. Jesus, she’s going to be fun.
That may be on point actually. He told me his work was dangerous, that he couldn’t even answer questions about it until I committed to him for my own safety. That should have been enough to make me run, but instead, I find myself eager to be a person he can trust. Eager to please the man who knows what he wants. And eager to be what and who he wants most. But I won’t be one of those girls. Never have been. I won’t let him simply call all the shots. If he
I suck in a breath of courage, my gaze glued to his. “Do you hurt people?” No hesitation. “Not good people.” And no apology. He believes in what he does, and my gut tells me there’s good reason for that.
The waves of pulsing electricity constantly crackling between us suggest it won’t take long, but closing that energized space too rapidly would be a mistake. It can’t happen until she’s prepared to fight. She’s the storm. I need her to clear the path for us.
This plan of mine to keep her at arm’s length until she’s breathless and begging, convinced she chose this, is crumbling. I need to fuck the brat out of her more than I need air.
Her eyes trail down to the unmistakable growing bulge in my pants before slowly returning to mine with a she-devil smile. “Maybe next time, you should bring a leash.” She tilts her head and bats those thick black lashes in a bashful ruse. “We can see who belongs on it more.”
We don’t contract kill. That’s a whole different racket. Our kills are only done when the completion of the mission requires it or if the client’s safety demands it.
Scared you can’t handle being married to me?” Her breath catches, but she doesn’t falter for a second. “Bring it. Whatever you throw at me, Wells, I’ll shove it right back at ya. And you’ll hate yourself for how much you love it.” Intuitively accurate.
She may have kissed me as though I had an antidote, but every encounter with her feels like being rolled in poison.
I don’t think I’m capable of love. Power hungry doesn’t leave much room for such frivolous emotion. But I’m indisputably a man obsessed. She gets under my skin, into my thoughts, heating me with a mere glance. That’s not what he asked though.
If I ignore my embarrassment for practically throwing myself at Wells, my broken heart from his rejection, and the reality that I am mixed up in something seriously fucked up, life is pretty fantastic right now.
“But I’m happy to be a passenger on your purpose until I find my own.” “You’re no one’s passenger, Ivy. You’re the destination.”
He’s lost his goddamn mind if he thinks his daughter, who has been raised with ethics and morals and strength, would ever willingly give herself to the person hired to hunt her down and turn her over for profit though. The truth of that thought slices through me.
Fantasies about the redheaded vixen have kept me from touching any other woman for more than a year. No one compares.
“Tell me you know there is nothing more important to me than you. No matter what else happens, I need you to know that.” The vulnerability in his face is almost haunting, as if his emotions are teeming inside him, like mine are. There’s no denying the truth in his declaration, which wrecks me further, in the best of ways.
I’m crashing into an invisible wall of realization that I’m not who I thought I was—nothing I believed was real. I’m not real. The curtain’s been pulled back to show it was all an illusion. But I’m not sure where that leaves me, other than sawed in half.
And that’s merely my childhood. What about this? The whispers of a future, the hopes spilled at our picnic, the dreams shared during pillow talk, the touches that tingled of home, prickling my depths with my greatest desires—visions of babies and holidays and exotic getaways. An unlikely family found in those three winsome yet obstinate guys. An epic love who would carry me through every rocky step. I knew a secret was looming. I prepared myself, thinking Wells had an enemy who was targeting
“Ivy, let’s say everything you remember is correct. Your masked stranger from your eighteenth birthday party was lurking around, protecting and falling in love with you for all these years because some secret cabal wants you to inherit your birth father’s role, but you have to undergo a trial to prove your competence. How does being committed to a psych ward while your husband and friends disappear from existence accomplish that?”
painting a blackened and charred version of the hollowness they left me. A more accurate depiction. The stone won’t burn. I like that. To leave smoke stains and walls enclosing ashes. A shell of what was. Of what isn’t. A fortress of all that was stolen. Erased, if you will. Ivy can be terribly difficult to eradicate after all. You might say I’m simply doing my part to accomplish what they began. But the thing about burning ivy—the poisonous kind—is that those plumes of smoke release
Lifetime. To being stolen and given away as a baby. To being raised in the warmth of a loving home that also served as a training ground for who I truly am. To falling in love with the man hired to hunt me for a cabal I’m the heir to run, in exchange for millions. To marrying that same man and discovering he is like a son to my father—a father who is a hostage to his malfunctioning body. To being gaslighted into believing none of it was real by the very people I love most in this
world, all in the name of testing my strengths. To being hunted and chased and shot at. To being rescued by the men I cherish, men I feared had betrayed me. One whom I’m madly in love with. Another whom I watched die after he confessed feelings for me. All four are chained to my soul like limbs I can’t walk without. It’s all still such a mindfuck.
