Page 32 of The Ties That Bind

9

My bounty is as boundless as the sea,

My love as deep; the more I give to thee,

The more I have, for both are infinite.

ROMEO & JULIET

If you’d have toldme six months ago that I’d be standing under a wrought iron arch draped with tropical flowers on a beach in the Caribbean waiting for Arabella to walk down the aisle to become my wife, I would have said you needed to lay off the crack pipe because you’d clearly lost your goddamned mind. And yet, here I was, doing exactly that.

Our path hadn’t been an easy one—in fact, it’d been the most difficult thing I’d ever gone through—but here we were, coming out on the other end, each of us stronger for having endured what we did.

In looking back on their life-altering moments, people often claimed they wouldn’t change their experience for anything in the world. Me? You bet your fucking life I would have. I’d give just about anything I owned to have spent my life with Arabella, for our baby to have grown up being spoiled rotten by both her parents.

But that wasn’t the hand we’d been dealt so we were doing our best to embrace the one we had instead.

“What are the chances all this wedding hoopla finally convinces CeeCee to accept Aleksei’s proposal?” Ben asked, his eyes landing on the crazy Russian who stood off to the side, his eyes scanning the shore for uninvited guests.

I chuckled because I actually knew the answer to his question. “Arabella said she’s going to make him sweat a little bit more before she says yes.”

“Damn, that’s cruel,” he replied, shaking his head. “Poor sap.”

The other inexplicable thing about my life? I now counted Aleksei Vasilyev among my closest friends. In fact, as the head of my personal security detail, I trusted the man with my life. I still thought he was the craziest motherfucker I’d ever known, but it appeared his devotion to Arabella’s cousin was smoothing out some of his rougher edges. Not so much, of course, that people didn’t shit their pants when he showed up on their doorstep asking for a word, but enough that I no longer worried about him going berserker in the line of duty.

“What about you?” I asked, notching my chin toward the leggy brunette Ben had brought as his date for the week. “Maria seems nice.”

His eyes sought her out and unless I was mistaken, the hungry look in them said Ben thought she was way more than nice. And yet he tried to play down his interest.

Shrugging he said, “She’s fun. We laugh.”

“You do more than laugh,” I teased. “I’m pretty sure there’s some screaming and moaning happening as well.”

The compound we’d rented for the wedding comprised a large main house flanked by two smaller guest cottages at the edge of the 10-acre private island. No amount of foliage between Ben’s cottage and our place had been able to dampen the sounds coming from them the night before.

Ben’s lips stretched into a wide smile. “She’s a fucking animal, man,” he admitted. “Completely insatiable.”

“We noticed,” I smirked.

“Fuck you,” he gloated, a note of pride in his voice. “It’s not like no one’s heard you and Arabella going at it in the middle of the afternoon.”

I chuckled. “Yeah, we’ve got a lot of lost time to make up for.”

“Yeah,” he agreed, nodding his head. “I’m happy for you guys. I mean it. You deserve to be happy.”

“Thanks,” I answered noncommittally.

The reality was I’d done a lot of really heinous things in my life—things that if there were a god, I was certainly going to hell for—so I wasn’t sure I necessarily deserved to be happy, but I wasn’t about to question my good fortune. After all, I knew how fleeting it could be.

One minute you were holding the love of your life in your arms and the next she could be gone. One minute you thought you were going to be a father, and the next you were learning you’d never have a child to call your own. One minute you could be aiming a gun at the woman who broke your heart, and the next you could be waiting to give her your last name.

One minute you could be thinking your brother was the world’s biggest asshole—but he was still your goddamn brother—and the next you could be burying him in the family plot. In the end, I hadn’t been the one to pull the trigger, but if things had gone differently I would have been. That Jayce had been the victim of his own fucked up maneuvering gave me some measure of peace since it proved my plan to take him down had been the right one, but it didn’t mean I didn’t feel the loss of him all the same. The last few years had been hard—he’d been my nemesis more often than not—but that didn’t negate the fact that he’d been my brother. My goddamn twin. Some days I felt like I was missing a limb, the phantom pains of his loss.

As a trickle of sweat slid down my spine from the jungle humidity, I glanced down at my watch. We weren’t on a schedule or anything, but whenever Arabella was out of my sight for too long, I became worried. I knew I had to let go of that fear—Arabella was a strong, capable woman who didn’t need me to hover over her every second of every day—but until I could close my eyes and not picture her hanging from that hook in the ceiling with blood snaking down her arms, I’d always go a little nuts when it came to her safety.

Ben chuckled next to me. “Relax dude. Ain’t no one on this island, save the six of us.”

“Yeah, I know,” I muttered. “But what the fuck is taking her so long?”

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