Page 100 of Wrecked By You

She gazed at me for a few seconds, her eyes brimming with love. Shifting her body, she straddled me, tracing my scar with her lips for the second time. God, I could get used to this. With every kiss, she healed a broken piece of me. I gripped her hips, rocking my erection into her.Christ. I’d missed the feel of her heat, the curve of her hips against my palms. The sweet scent of her. Driven insane with lust, I pushed up her skirt.

“Ah, fuck. No.” I tipped her off my lap. “I might be a selfish asshole, but I’m not that selfish. You’ve heard my story. Now I want to hear yours.”

“Sex first?” She blinked at me, all coquettish and sultry. Christ, she’d be the death of me, and this time, I’d embrace it—crave it, even.

I groaned as she reached for my cock, capturing her wrist at the last moment. If I let her touch me, we’d spend the next several hours in bed, and before we knew it, Chloe would be home.

“No.” I set her hand in her lap. “Talk to me.”

She snapped off a loose cotton thread from her T-shirt and rolled it between her fingers, a sigh making its way up her throat. “My real name is Eloise Fernandez. My maiden name was Harper. My mother’s name is Eleanor, so I took ‘Ella’ from that and I took ‘Reyes’ from my maternal grandmother. I needed to disappear, but I yearned to hold on to my roots in some small way. Mateo never met my parents, nor was he interested in learning anything about them, so choosing that name felt safe enough.”

I frowned. “How come your parents never met him?”

She breathed out heavily. “They didn’t approve. When I met him, Mateo was thirty-two, and I was seventeen. They forbade me from having anything to do with him. So, of course, I rebelled.” She shrugged. “Teenagers, hormones, and being told I couldn’t do something was motivation to do the very thing my parents actively discouraged. I chose Mateo and lost my parents.

“What happened is all on me. As soon as I turned eighteen, I moved in with Mateo, and shortly after, we married. Mom and Dad reached out to me several times, begging me to come home, so I changed my phone number and gave the guards strict instructions that they were not to let my parents past the gates.”

She blinked a few times in succession and averted her gaze. “Last I heard, they got divorced, I think because of the stress of what happened with me. My mom remarried and moved to France. My dad lives in New York.”

She took a breath, and I waited until she’d collected herself, then encouraged her to continue. I’d purged my demons. Now it was her turn to purge hers. And then, maybe, we could both move on.

“At first, life with Mateo was… idyllic. I was eighteen, living like a queen in an enormous house with servants at my beck and call, a car on standby, all the designer clothes and jewelry I wanted. We vacationed on yachts and stayed in fancy hotels, and I thought I was the luckiest girl in the world. Not once did it occur to me to question how Mateo earned his money. I just enjoyed the spoils of other people’s misery.”

Emotions rippled across her face, and she tucked her chin into her chest. I ached to comfort her, but I refrained. There’d be plenty of time for me to soothe her pain and ease her guilt. Eighteen. Fuck, when I thought back to the kinds of things my brothers and I had gotten up to at that age, how we’d looked at life through a perfect lens, I wasn’t in the least bit surprised that a far more mature Fernandez had duped the Ella she’d been back then.

“Just over six months before I left, there was a raid on the compound. Mateo had moved in on a rival gang’s territory, and a lot of men were killed. Their plan was to kidnap me and Chloe until Mateo surrendered and returned what they saw as rightfully theirs.” She closed her eyes, possibly reliving the terror of that moment. “Mateo returned just in time. He tried to brush it off as a business deal gone wrong, but by then, I was older and wiser. I began to poke around a little, ask questions, and it didn’t take me long to work out how he made his millions.”

“Drugs.”

She nodded. “Drugs, and all the shit that goes along with being in that business. Right then I vowed to leave. Chloe wouldn’t be safe as long as he dealt drugs, and she was my only concern, the only thing I cared about. It wasn’t easy. I didn’t have money of my own, and Mateo kept us so well guarded—for our protection, he said. But it was more than that. He thought of me and Chloe as possessions. It took me those six months to claw together enough funds to make a run for it. At first, I went to New Mexico, and Mateo almost caught us, so I ran again. And that’s how I ended up in Los Angeles.” She hitched a shoulder. “That’s it. The whole sordid affair.”

I pulled her to me then, comforting her in the only way I knew, with my hands and my lips and my words of love and adoration for everything she’d endured. In the end, it had brought her to me, but I wished we could have met without her having to suffer along the way.

“Are you going to reach out to your parents now that you’re free of him?”

She ran her teeth over her bottom lip. “I’ve been thinking about it more and more over the last few weeks, but I don’t know where to start. I’m scared they’ll reject me.”

“They’re your parents. They love you unconditionally, whether or not they agree with your choices.”

“Yeah.” She sighed. “It’s just so hard to make that first move. I don’t even know their contact details.” She sighed again. “I’m so desperate to see them again and have them meet Chloe, but my fear of rejection is holding me back.”

An idea unfurled in my mind. It came with risks, and I wasn’t sure whether I’d fuck things up rather than fix them, but I had to try.

“Oh God,” she suddenly expelled, struggling to sit up from where I’d pressed her into the couch. “The award. Fuck.” She checked her watch. “It was three days ago. What happened?”

I gave her a crooked smile. “We won.”

She squealed, leaping on me and covering me in kisses. Then she sat up, all the joy draining from her face. “You didn’t go to the ceremony.”

I angled my head to the side. “Taking care of you and Chloe was far more important than picking up some award. I sent Ryker and Stan instead.”

Her jaw slackened. “Oh, Johannes. You’ve worked for that for so long. It was what you wanted. You should have been there to soak up all the glory.”

I shook my head. “No. I thought I wanted it, but what I want more than any award or recognition or success is… you.”

Her pupils flared, then dilated. “You have me, now and forever… on one condition.”

Narrowing my eyes, I jutted up my chin. “Go on.”

---