by Pam Godwin
Her friends found interest in their fingernails, drinks, and the grout in the tile flooring.
“Any woman can get dresses and pearls and makeup, but only the special ones get his belt.” Camila leaned over Yessica’s chair. “I’ll say this one time, and this goes for all of you.” She waved a hand, indicating the collective whole of prostitutes. “Do not touch him, invade his personal space, or proposition him. Do not do anything that disrespects me. If I get a whiff of it—and trust me, ladies, I’ll know—I’ll have your asses removed from this estate. I have no problem with the services you provide around here, but going forward, Matias is no longer a client. Are we clear?”
Paralyzed silence.
Camila sighed. “I asked a question.”
“Yes.” Yessica ground her teeth. “We’re clear.”
“Cool.” She gave them a cordial smile. “Chau pues!”
She turned and headed toward him, her steps lighter, easier. As she closed the distance, however, jealousy tried to work its way into her resolve. She pushed it back with the reminder that she’d fucked countless men, causing Matias the same amount of pain.
When she reached his table, she moved toward the empty chair, but he gripped her arm and pulled her onto his lap.
“Do I want to know what that was about?” He brushed his lips against her ear and nibbled.
Tate angled toward Nico, distracted by whatever was displayed on Nico’s phone.
“No more gifts for Yessica.” She twisted to look at Matias.
“I don’t shop for her.” His eyes glimmered. “I receive all kinds of shit when I travel to the States. Presents from my business partners. I give her the girly stuff to divide among the whores.”
Relief settled through her. “Well, maybe just give that stuff to a homeless person or something.”
“I can do that.” He nuzzled her neck. “What else?”
“They won’t be propositioning you anymore. Hope your ego can handle that.”
“I’ll live.” He nipped the skin beneath her ear.
She shivered with pleasure. “What did you announce this morning?”
“I briefed my lieutenants on your status and had them run the update down their chains of command. Everyone who stays here now knows you’re my equal.”
“Your equal?” Her heart slammed against her rib cage.
“My life,” he said matter-of-factly.
A wave of heat gathered between her legs. As significant as his statement was, it also carried an undertone of need. Every interaction he shared with her was sexual in its delivery. He knew how to arouse her with his growly timbre, a look in his eyes, a caress of his breath against her skin. He didn’t even have to touch her to satisfy her. It was his demanding hunger—that of a confident, dominant man—that she responded to, lifting her face to the rumble of his voice, offering herself to his desires.
She held her mouth against his, touching, not touching. Teasing. “I have two requests.”
“I’m listening,” he breathed against her lips.
“I want…” She touched her throat. “I want my collar back. Or better yet, I want something permanent and comfortable and ours.”
His body went hard a millisecond before he gripped her neck and captured her mouth with his. The kiss was potently seductive, possessive, and consuming, stealing her air and awakening every cell in her body.
Too soon, he pulled back, breathing heavily. “The other request?”
“I want to see the closet.”
MATIAS LED CAMILA INTO THE CLOSET of their private suite and angled her in front of the retinal scanner. His breaths quickened as the lock disengaged. What waited behind that door, the pieces he’d been holding back from her, were the knots of guilt he’d carried for years.
“I’m nervous about this.” He stepped behind her and wrapped his arms around her chest, kissing her shoulder and savoring the feminine scent of her, bathed in the clean bite of citrus and lavender. “I’m not one of the good guys. I’ve done things for which there might be no forgiveness.”
“I disagree. You’ve eliminated bad guys far worse than yourself for over a decade.” She touched his inked forearm and turned her neck to press her lips against his bicep.
“Hold on to that thought for the next few minutes.” He let go and nudged her through the doorway.
She looked up at the ceiling as motion lights flicked on then turned in a circle, scanning the shelves of the small second closet. “Boxes? Plain, non-threatening cardboard. Definitely not what I expected.”
He went to the top shelf on the right and pulled down his two favorite boxes.
“We’ll start with these.” He passed her one and carried the other into the bedroom.
They placed the closed boxes on the bed, and he stepped back, hands in the pockets of his jeans.
“Open them.” His pulse accelerated, and a damp mist formed on his brow.
She flashed him a concerned look and opened the first box. Gasping, she removed picture frames filled with her and him, her and her sister, Lucia, and even photos of the old stray dog, Rambo. The citrus grove was the backdrop in most of the images.
“How did you get these?” Her hands trembled as she flipped through bundles of loose pictures.
He’d grabbed what he could that awful night, leaving behind the photos that included her parents. “There’s more.”
Eyes glistening, she darted to the second box and pulled out a slingshot fork from an orange tree, her favorite raggedy doll as a child, and his denim jacket—the one she’d stolen from him when she was fourteen and refused to return.
His heart hammered in his chest. There were a dozen more boxes of memorabilia in the closet. He’d gone through them so many times over the past eleven years he knew the contents by rote. He used to think he’d found comfort in them on his loneliest nights, but looking back now, he realized those memories had only made him lonelier.
“Matias…” She wiped the back of her hand across her cheek, erasing a fallen tear. “I thought all this stuff—” A sob rose up, but she choked it back. “I thought it was lost in the fire.”
His eyes felt gritty and hot, but he didn’t look away.
She pulled the jacket to her nose and inhaled deeply. “It still smells like you.” Her gaze turned inward, and little lines formed on her brow. “Did you go back there after I disappeared? Did you see my parents before they died?”
Yes, yes, and fuck those motherfuckers to hell.
With a heavy breath, he sat on the bed and patted the spot beside him.
She set the jacket down and joined him, her shiny eyes searching his face. “You’re scaring me.”
Perhaps he would always scare her, but she wasn’t a runner. She would fight him, maybe even kill him someday, but she would never leave him. He found a strange sort of comfort in that.
“Six weeks after your disappearance, I killed my brother, Jhon.”
She gripped his hand and kept her teary gaze on his.
“A few weeks after that,” he said with a tight throat, “your sister disappeared.”
“Lucia?” Her voice whipped through the room.
“I had some guys watching the grove. I was in full-time-guns-out search mode, pulling every resource I had, trying to find you, hoping you’d show up there. When Lucia didn’t return home from work one night…” He insides clenched with guilt. He should’ve been watching her sister, protecting her. “I knew.”
“What did you know?” A lethal chill spiked her tone. “Where is she?”
“She’s gone. I’m sorry, Camila.” Pain stabbed through him. “She was abducted. Killed.”
Her hands flew to her mouth, her eyes wide and wet.
“I prayed to hell I was wrong.” He pulled her against his chest and stroked her hair. “Weeks went by, and your parents never reported her missing.”
“She would’ve been…nineteen.” She gripped his t-shirt. “She was an adult—”
“She was a missing person, Camila. Missing, and
no one was fucking looking for her.”
“No.” A keening noise sounded in her throat. “I can’t hear this…”
“You have to hear it.” God knew, he needed to put this to rest. They both did. “Jhon was dead. Nico was the new face of the cartel. But Andres and your parents knew who I was, knew I was a Restrepo and the real capo. So I paid them a visit.”
Her tears soaked his shirt, her cries silent beneath the rush of her breaths.
He held her tighter, running a hand through her hair as his chest squeezed painfully. “Your parents denied any involvement in her disappearance. Said she ran away, she was trouble, and more bullshit on top of bullshit. Goddammit, I was so fucking pissed. And desperate. I had their houses bugged and their phones tapped. A few days later, I got my answer.”
Her breaths cut off, her shoulders hitched around her ears. Her entire body froze as if waiting to hear what he knew she’d already figured out.
“When Hector and Jhon died, they left behind an army of loyal men in my cartel. Men loyal to them, not to me and certainly not to Nico. This insurgency tried to overtake the cartel, and it took me months to root them all out.”
Her chest began to heave again, and her fingers dug into his arm. Having lived at the estate for a few weeks, she knew enough about cartel politics and understood how easily an uprising could occur in the wake of a fallen leader.
“These men who wanted to take over…” She gazed up at him, eyes tinged pink. “They went after you by going back to the place you grew up? To threaten your loved ones?”
“Yes. Except the only one I loved was already gone.” His insides tightened. “Camila, your parents…”
“They negotiated, didn’t they?” Tears skipped down her cheeks.
“They didn’t want to lose the grove or their lives, so they gave up Lucia in exchange for protection.”
“Why?” She reared back, teeth gnashing, and voice angry. “If my parents knew you were the capo, they would’ve come to you. And who the hell did they need protection from?”
“They needed protection from me.”
She sucked in a sharp breath. “I don’t understand.”
He angled toward her, shifting as close as possible with his thigh pressed against hers and his hands cupping her neck. “I was hunting through my ranks, torturing and killing those who were involved in your abduction. That’s how I learned that Andres and your parents…” He paused, closed his eyes briefly, then looked at her. “They gave you up to Jhon to save their own lives.” When her face crumbled, he rushed on. “When I killed Jhon, they knew I would come for them.”
The brokenhearted look on her face and hitching sound of her cries sent a sharp bolt of agony through him. He pulled her onto his lap and held her for an endless moment as her shock morphed into full-body trembling. He rocked her and shushed her, his own eyes burning with so much goddamn remorse he couldn’t catch his breath.
Eventually, she settled into soft sniffles, and he moved the boxes to the floor to lay with her on the bed. Side by side, faces inches apart, she stared into his eyes as hers became clearer, more lucid.
“How did you kill them?” She balled her hand in the bedding between their chests, but sympathy flooded her expression.
He pulled in a dry breath. She knew her mother had been the only mother he’d known. While her parents had never really accepted him, never thought he was good enough for her, it still killed something inside him when he pulled the trigger.
His rage, though… That had made it easier. It was such a deadly emotion, rising up from a dark place and taking over without logic or attention to consequence. His anger had been pure passion—raw, vindictive, and his only friend that night.
“Bullets. One shot each. Quick. Andres included.” His voice was scratchy, hoarse. “Then I gathered your personal things. Set the fire. Covered my tracks.”
“Where’s Lucia?” Her voice was so small and hesitant he knew she didn’t want the answer.
“She wasn’t in that fire, but she’s still gone, mi vida.” He’d give anything to return her sister to her.
She lifted up on an elbow. “Where is her body? Do you have that proof?”
“No, but I have an investigation that proves her death. Every trail I followed, every name of every person involved is in one of those boxes in the closet.”
“Show me.” She jumped off the bed and straightened her white dress over her legs as she headed to the closet with way too much hope in her steps.
He couldn’t bring back Lucia, but he could help Camila through the healing process as she grieved her sister all over again.
Two hours later, he sat with her on the bed amid papers, maps, printed photos of locations and slave traders—the entire portfolio of his two-year investigation. An investigation that ended with Lucia inside a transport that crashed in Peru. No one survived in the cargo full of trafficked slaves.
Camila stared at a newspaper clipping, her eyes glazed as if not really seeing it. “She’s gone.”
Her cheeks were sunken in, face pallid, and the paper trembled in her hand. She needed to eat, rest, take a fucking step back from this, and let her heart breathe.
He gathered the papers and started boxing everything up. “Tate asked about Lucia years ago then again this morning. He doesn’t believe me and wants to retrace my steps, see if he can find something I missed.”
“Really? Why?”
“I think he’s just being a competitive asshole. Honestly, I don’t understand his motivation, but he can take a stab at it if he wants. There’s nothing to find that I don’t already know.”
She smiled sadly. “Guess he has a lot of free time now that he doesn’t have to babysit me.”
“He never looked at it that way.” He softened his expression. “If I hadn’t threatened his life four years ago, I’m pretty sure he would’ve gone after you for himself.”
“I always wondered what his deal was.” She shook her head. “I’m still trying to process the last four years.” She watched him put the box with the others on the floor, her eyes narrowing as he sat beside her on the bed. “What else are you keeping from me?”
“You have all my secrets now.” He rubbed a hand up and down her arm, reflecting on her comment about the last four years. “But there’s one question I never answered.”
“I don’t…” She blinked, and blinked again, lips parting. “What question? My brain is crap right now.”
“That last phone call you made to me four years ago…”
“To collect Van’s body?”
He nodded. “It changed my entire world, Camila. Following Van, finding you, approaching Tate, my plan to win you. During those four years, you were all I thought about. In my head, you were already mine, and I was yours. After that phone call, I remained one-hundred-percent faithful to you.”
“You didn’t…” She bit her lip as the corners of her mouth tipped up. “You didn’t have sex for four years?”
Neither had she. It’d been an unknown connection between them, both of them abstaining as if fate had already intervened, pulling them together.
“I didn’t touch or look at another woman,” he said. “Whatever Yessica told you—”
She gripped the back of his neck and kissed him, putting every ounce of her grief and love into the vibrating hum of her lips. When she touched her tongue to his, his brain ignited, and heat spread from his chest, loosening the coil of remorse in his gut.
He broke contact and pressed his forehead against hers, his breaths erratic as he caressed the line of her jaw, kissed the soft skin there. Never had he felt so loved, so wanted. And deep beneath their connection was something more, something darker, sexual and potent, and he knew. It wasn’t just his desire he sensed. It was hers.
“I’ll be right back.” He carried the boxes to the closet, making several trips, and returned to her with a smaller box, wrapped in black velvet.
Sitting cross-legged at the center of the bed, she reached for it, her eyes swol
len from crying and nose pink. Her fingers trembled with the latch as she stared at him with a glint of excitement peering through the shadows on her face.
“Go ahead.” He sat beside her, his breaths cut short. He’d waited for this moment for so long.
She lifted the lid, lips separating with a ragged exhale as she touched the platinum, double-link chain inside. “It’s beautiful. When did you get it?”
“Years ago.” He kissed her mouth. “I’ve never collared another woman. The leather collar was intended to be a statement to others and sturdy enough to be used when I restrain you.” He ran a thumb along her wet bottom lip. “And I will restrain you.”
She leaned into his touch, her eyes shutting for a moment then opening to stare at the collar in her hand. He removed it from the box and held it up so that she could read the inscription on the round platinum tag hanging from the O-ring.
Su vida.
“His life,” she whispered and blinded him with a teary smile.
Then she lowered her head in offering. With shaky fingers, he fastened the lobster clasp at her nape and felt his whole world click into place.
“Gracias. Te amo.” She wrapped her arms around his shoulders and pulled him to lie beside her, resting her cheek on his chest.
“I love you, too. Más que nada.”
She squeezed him tight, and her grip on him alone told him she was happy to be with him, that she trusted him. Didn’t matter how they arrived at this point, they were here, folded together, him holding her close to his side, and her closing fingers over the tag at her throat.
His heart sang beneath her cheek, his body vibrating with each breath they drew in sync. He internalized every twitch across her skin, the brush of her eyelashes against his shirt, the scent of her hair in his nose.
He tipped her face up and put his mouth on hers. She melted into him, snuggling in, and they stayed that way, wrapped up in each other for the rest of the day. When he had lunch brought in, they moved to the balcony where they ate arepas and curled up together on a wide lounge chair.
As the sun sank behind the vivid green landscape, they shared stories, painful stories, of their time away from one another. The men they’d killed, the nights they’d spent alone, and the searching, always searching for this. At some point they fell asleep, entwined together beneath the warm blanket of the black sky.
