Page 11 of Call You Mine

“What’s wrong with it?” she mutters defensively, even though I glimpse fear in her eyes as she looks out the window. “It’s only a temporary fix until I find a more permanent place to live. I can’t exactly go back home.”

“Why the hell not?”She had a mansion, for God’s sake—a whole fucking estate. Why would she stay here?

“You’re kidding right? I know I’ve been gone for a while, but even I know my brother’s planning to sell it if he hasn’t already.” Something about the sharp bite in her tone tells me she’s not entirely happy about that.

“What about your parents?” I ask, immediately regretting it when her scowl deepens. I should have known that was a sore subject since, like me, it wasn’t something she ever talked about.

“My mother is somewhere off the Amalfi Coast, living out the life she gave up when she married Warren and had Ace and I.” She shifts to unbuckle her seat belt. “As for dear old dad, I imagine he’s hiding somewhere trying to stay out of the prison cell with his name on it and avoid becoming someone’s bitch.”

Without thinking, I reach over her and grab hold of her seatbelt, crossing it back over her chest, and quickly locking it back in place. She gasps when my cold knuckles touch the exposed skin of her chest, her mouth dropping open and eyes bugging wide as she watches me intently, trying to figure out my next move.

Her eyes flick back and forth from mine, to my hand, and back up to my lips as my tongue sweeps across them. A darkness clouds her clear blue eyes, while she watches me, licking her lips in response to our closeness.

What the fuck am I doing?This wasn’t part of the plan. But things have never gone as planned with her.

“You’re not staying here,” I bark out, almost laughing. There’s no way in hell I’d leave her, or any girl for that matter, in this fucking shit hole. Her eyes widen as she watches me in disbelief. “You’re coming with me.” It’s not a question, nor a suggestion. It’s a fucking demand not leaving any space for arguing.

Yet of course the stubborn woman that she is, Wynter takes the bait, meeting me with a challenge in her eyes. “Damon,” she hisses, making the muscles in my jaw and cock tense. “You said it yourself. You’re not staying at your apartment anymore.”

Ignoring her, and frankly not interested in explaining the decision I’ll surely regret, I take the roundabout at the end of the street, burning rubber as I swerve in the opposite direction. She squeals, gripping onto the grab bar on the top of the car ceiling, gasping as I step on the gas.

A few cars blare their horns at us in anger, but I’ve simply got no fucks to give. My only goal is to get this woman as far away from here as possible, even if it means putting her in the path of danger—with me.

Fifteen minutes later, down winding streets, past the rows of white oak trees intricately placed along the sidewalks, and whitepicket fences fading by as we pass, we’re arriving at my house right smack dab in the middle of fucking suburbia.

A home I purchased six months ago with money I never expected to come to because, ladies and gentlemen, I was now a fucking billionaire.

Yup, you heard it right. Me, the fatherless punk, son of a crack-whore and troublesome delinquent, now had more money than I even knew what to do with.

It was right after I’d been mugged outside my apartment about a year ago, by a trio of gangster looking assholes who tried and failed to beat the shit out of me. I handed them their asses, putting to use the years I spent cage fighting back in Pleasant Hills as a teenager. That was until one fucker shot me and I realized I’d been outgunned. They left me there for dead, only I wasn’t.

I passed out from the pain only to awaken the following morning in an expansive, dimly lit bedroom I didn’t recognize. Three-hundred thread count sheets sat beneath me atop the king size bed that wasn’t mine. The rest of the room was pretty vacant, with only an armoire on one side and a large couch on the other. Upon it sat a shadowed figure, frighteningly still and staring directly at me.

For a split second, panic buzzed within me at the thought that my assailants had gotten their hands on me—after all, this wasn’t the first time I’d been captured, bonded and beaten—but it made no sense. Looking down at my shoulder that was throbbing in pain, my gunshot wound had been cleaned and bandaged.

Confused and frankly a bit irritated from not knowing where the fuck I was, my gaze shifted back to the man watching me from the couch. He stood and walked toward me, and when the sliver of light coming in from the window to our right lit uphis face when he came into view, I realized the stranger looked disturbingly like me.

To say the next twenty-four hours was a shit show is putting it lightly. I’d never seen the man before and despite everything he was telling me, I wasn’t sure he was real. I’d been shot, maybe even had a concussion from the beating I’d endured. Yet this man who’d not only saved me, but nursed me back to health, was claiming to be my uncle.

My father’s older brother. A father I knew nothing about nor cared to find. Nikolas Draconis, a multi-billionaire entrepreneur who had no next of kin, no heirs to continue the legacy he’d built on his own. Shortly after my mother died, Nico had discovered his younger brother had two children but could never track us down. Because of our mother’s death and the fact no one knew who or where our father was, Ruby and I were put into foster care. We’d arrived at the Grayson’s Foster home just days after our sixth birthday.

Since then, our records were sealed. Once we were transferred to Servite Academy, they practically disappeared. Until I applied for a business license two months before the incident and Nico received an alert from the private investigator he’d kept on retainer. Nico hadn’t heard from my father either since before Ruby and I were born.

It was all too surreal. Nothing about what he’d told me made any sense, but there he was, standing before me with the same green eyes and jet-black hair, only his was speckled with more white than black, and his face was ghostly thin.

Nico died three months later. Terminal cancer he’d been fighting for over three years. In the hours before his death, Ruby and I sat at his bedside, my sister only coming around to the idea of having a family on our father’s side when I’d told her how sick he really was. He confessed finding us was a Godsend. Fortwenty years he prayed to one day find us, and it wasn’t until it was too late he finally did.

Much to our dismay, Nico left Ruby and I his estate, his company, his entire fucking fortune worth nearly six billion dollars.

At first we refused it. We didn’t need anyone's money to survive. Sure, we led a shit life up to this point, but it was our own life. I’d been making my living now, and although it wasn’t something that would make a parent proud—maybe mine given the life they led—I was perfectly content with the way it turned out.

But we realized how fucking stupid we’d be if we looked this incredible blessing in the eye and just walked away. We owed it to Nico. He’d come into our life for three months and in those three months, he did more for us than anyone ever had. Nico became family, and that was something we were lacking in.

A few years ago, when I was trying to dig up dirt on Ace to prove to Scarlett he wasn’t who she thought he was, I wandered into a bar back in Providence, the town she was originally from. It was a piece of shit place, worse than where we’d originally grown up in Pleasant Hills. Something about the bar called out to me as I drove by.

It was a biker bar—thugs on motorcycles, lined up outside in the parking lot, a bonfire of sorts happening out back in front of an abandoned-looking church. But as I exited my car and headed into the front door ofPurgatory—aptly named—I saw a woman behind the bar who immediately caught my attention. Her bright green eyes were warm as she watched me approach her, her features so familiar. She looked like my sister, only her blonde hair a complete contrast to Ruby’s raven locks. Then it hit me. She was the spitting image of my dead mother.

One thing led to another and soon enough, I found the connection I wasn’t even searching for but desperately needed.Haley Lockwood had a sister, Hannah, whom she’d lost contact with just around the time Ruby and I were born. Hannah was older than Haley, so she says she vaguely remembers much about how it all happened, only that Hannah left her family after falling in love with some con man and getting pregnant.

---