I narrow my eyes at her. “I don’t want to hear that you think he’s fucking hot.”
She raises a brow. “You obviously thought Sayler was hot enough to get hard for. Shut that shit up.”
I growl, aggravation setting in. “I hate this.”
“Well, get over it. He’s my friend. He has been since then. He hung out with me that night as we hit up a few parties in the area. We’ve talked about you before. We’ve talked about Presley. He lived with me for a while between college ending for the summer and him moving back in with his parents before he moved here for school—to be with Presley. He was screwing my roommate for crying out loud, not me. The worst thing we’ve done is see each other during brief periods of nakedness, like him shucking said condom from screwing my roommate or him taking a piss when I was getting in the shower.”
I stare at her. “You expect me to believe he saw you naked and never tried to hook up with you when both of you were single? And then last night you and him kissed. Whether Presley was in on it or not I’m not buying it.”
She rolls her eyes. “Maddox, shut up. It was like kissing my brother, if you must know. I hate even giving you that kind of ammo, because your jealousy over Konnor is quite entertaining considering he’s married with a baby on the way. The only thing that saved me from getting little incestual vibes is Presley. We’ve never had that kind of a relationship. He got the sister vibe from me long before I picked up on it, hence him screwing my roommate. My head was always on you. Unlike some people, a hot guy was just a hot guy to me. I didn’t sleep with them just because I thought they were hot.”
I jerk her on top of me as I flip on my back. “You going to keep reminding me I slept with other girls when we weren’t together so I’ll feel even guiltier that you didn’t?”
A wicked gleam sparkles in those espresso eyes. She leans forward, pulling her long hair to one side, and peppering kisses on my mouth. “Maybe. You fuck so much better when you’re groveling.”
I frame her face with my hands and pull her in, snagging up her lips for myself, letting myself grow hard between her legs. She moans into me when my tongue slips through her mouth, already rubbing her wet center up and down my length as fast as she can, rocking the bed. My chest expands, my hormones pumping me up from how good she feels on top of me. It always blew my mind how in tune she was with her own body, even just coming into her teens.
She sits upright. Her hips work hard to make that clit of hers feel good, but just when she’s about to come, I wrap my arm around her waist and lift her off me, quickly burying my dick in her heat. “Asshole,” she says, her hips starting up again. “I love your strength.”
My legs pull into a bend and my heels dig in. There is no space between us. She’s grinding that hot little body on mine, leaving me soaked as she rocks on my cock. “Shit.”
She works harder, remembering exactly how to make me and her come at the same time. Dick to pussy wall over and over. Soft skin against my pelvis. One hand settles on her waist and the other squeezes hard around her breast. “You like me doing this to you?” she asks.
“Yes. No one fucks me like you do.” My toes curl and my head scrapes back against the pillow, trying to focus on any action but what she’s doing. The headboard lightly hits against the wall from how hard she’s going.
The friction from her skin scrubbing against mine is making it so much hotter, and suddenly, the front of her body is tight as her spine rounds and she slows down. Everything tightens around me; gets wetter. “Maddox,” she whispers.
I grab the back of her neck and pull her down, making her look at me. Her eyes have always been my downfall. “What you want, baby?”
“Come with me; in me.” The second it’s out of her mouth the first spurt shoots off inside of her. The kind of power she has over my mind and body is scary. I grip her head and pull her in for a kiss, feeling through my orgasm as I worship her mouth, my hands memorizing every inch of skin. I’ll never get enough of her. She’s the only girl for me. Six years of my life proved I’ll never move on. Our eyes open at the same time. “I love you, Maddox. I need nothing else in life but you.”
Emotion consumes me. “I can’t live without you, Gabby. I’ve tried. I need to know it’s forever this time.”
She places her hand on the side of my face and kisses me. “Until we take our last breath.”
She gets off me and out of bed. “I want to take you out,” I tell her. “We can get lunch and then go get phones and anything else you need.”
She looks at me, picking my white undershirt up off the floor and pulling it on, then steps into the swimsuit bottoms she was wearing last night. “Phones? As in plural?”
I lean over and grab my boxer briefs off the floor to put them on. “Yes, we are both phoneless.”
She puts her hands on her hips as I shove my long legs into my underwear, and then stand to jerk them in place. “How many phones are you going to break over me?”
I smirk, remembering the time some little fifteen-year-old twerp from her school thought it was romantic to ask her out on her Facebook timeline, and not the go out on a date with me asking out, but the will you be my girlfriend so we can hang out at our parents’ house together. What a douche. We were ‘friends’ so it came across my feed. All her little friends kept commenting on it, spreading it around to more people, all while I couldn’t say shit to the little prick that she was my girlfriend because parents frown upon their thirteen-year-old daughters being fucked just right by seventeen-year-old boys. I was already pissed off I couldn’t ask her to prom when I saw it, because she wasn’t allowed to ‘date’ yet. Breaking the phone so I’d quit seeing it every damn time I pulled up Facebook seemed like the best option at the time. Deleting the app probably would have been the most reasonable option. I’m never reasonable where Gabby is concerned, though.
I grab the front of my shirt she’s wearing and pull her closer. “As many as necessary until the world knows you’re mine and stops trying to piss me off. It works. It got you to delete that damn post back then and it proved a point last night. It was time to switch to a nationwide company anyway. I’ve been here since May. Having a local carrier and living in another state is worthless. When I’m here I’m on Wi-Fi because my data sucks.”
“Still doesn’t mean you have to waste resources. I’ve had one of those pay as you go phones since I graduated and gave my dad back all his crap he bought. When it ran out I usually waited a couple of months before buying more minutes.”
Gabby goes radio silent for months at a time.
Konnor’s comment in the multipurpose center makes sense now. “You sure as hell are not getting one of those. You can get on my plan where I pay the bill so I know that prick that created such an amazing creature can’t take it and I can track your ass any damn time I want to.”
She grins at me. “Oh, we’re moving up to joint phone service providers and location tracking now? Must be gettin’ serious.” Her eyes dance with mischief. “You gonna read my texts too?”
I fight the smile and fail. “Damn right I am. It’s been serious since the night you first rode shotgun in my truck and then gave me your virginity in the backseat on a late-night backroad.”
She kisses me. “That it has, baby. I’m going to shower if you want to go out.” She turns to walk off.
I grab her hand. “Wait, I’ll come too. It’ll save time.” Her face gives off a hint of pink when she looks at me. “What?”
“Do you remember the first time you took me to your parents’ camp on the river for the weekend so we could be together out in the open? You took me out on the jet ski and we rode all the way to the coastline out in the gulf to see the casinos. We were going to ride to Ship Island but it started pouring down rain, so we went back. Took us about fifteen to twenty minutes to get back, the hard rain stinging as it hit our skin, and by the time we pulled up to your dock we were freezing. You turned on the outdoor shower to warm us up under the hot water instead of tracking water in th
e house where it would have been colder under the air conditioner. I was wearing a white tee shirt over my bikini. One thing led to another and before long we were naked with only three wooden panels to hide us from anyone that decided to pull up in the carport under the house.”
My breathing is ragged and my heart is beating fast. Images of her leaned back against the wood, soaking wet, her thigh in my hand and lifted to my waist while I thrust in and out of her plays in my mind like a home movie. “The first time we had sex without a condom.”
She smiles, her cheeks flushed. “And?”
Her hands were wrapped around my waist and her head was tipped back. She was breathing heavy. Her blonde hair was sticking to her neck and cheeks, but even with water pouring between us she made sure to kiss me the whole time. That was our thing. Always kissing like we were starving for each other. But then she looked up at me from beneath her long, wet, full, dark-blonde lashes, her dark eyes so clear, and it was that moment I knew she was the girl I was going to marry. My eyes gloss over. I blink fast to clear it. “That was the day I first told you I love you.”
“And you never took it back.”
That damn tear falls anyway. I grab her and pull her against me, hugging her tight. “I’m sorry I gave up,” I tell her, kissing her. “I should have been there the day you turned eighteen. I never stopped loving you.”
She kisses me back, her tears mixing with mine, our emotions pouring out heavily. “I’m sorry I never called. I thought I was protecting you. Everything I’ve ever done was to protect you. My heart was aching and I missed you. I didn’t know how to be happy without you. Promise me you won’t leave me.”
I look down at her, wiping her face. “Why would I leave you? I just got you back.”
“I have to tell you something.”
Her heart is pounding against my chest. “What? Is there a dick somewhere you forgot to tell me about?”
She starts crying harder. “Just promise me we’ll get through this, Maddox.”
What the hell? My nerves are trying to coil. “What is it, Gabby? Just tell me, damn.”
“We have a son.”
“What?” My hands drop from her body and I step back. A wave of nausea rolls in my stomach. I’m breathing so hard I feel like I’m going to pass out.
She runs to her bags in the corner of the room she’s yet to unpack, digs something out, and then brings it back to me, handing over a photo face down. “I got pregnant the day you left, when we met up before you left out to say goodbye. We had sex in the back of your truck just like the first time, remember? Only you didn’t pull out. We have a son. His name is Madden Leroy, after you. I had him when I was fifteen.”
I flip the photo over and sink to my bed, my eyes falling on a baby that looks fucking familiar, only the photo isn’t as aged as the ones in my mom’s photo album. “Jesus Christ,” I whisper, already covering my face to hide my tears. My body is shaking. A bad feeling is sitting at the pit of my stomach. She didn’t hand me a photo of a kid. She handed me a photo of a baby. “Where is he?”
“Maddox,” she whispers, crying harder with every word. “I swear I tried. I begged. I screamed. I did it to protect you. You have to believe me.”
I can barely breathe. “Where the fuck is our son, Gabby?”
“Don’t scream at me!”
I feel like I’m losing my goddamn mind. My whole body is laced in panic. Anxiety is weaved tight through every muscle. “Where?”
“I don’t know! He took him from me the day he was born! I tried to hold onto him. I tried to tell him no. I begged him to let me keep him. Told him I’d never try to contact you again if he’d just let me keep our son. Nothing worked. It was a private adoption. He wouldn’t let me meet the family. He told me nothing about them so I couldn’t look. I wasn’t even supposed to hold him after I gave birth. That was the deal for him to let me carry him to term instead of the abortion he wanted me to have in the beginning, but I couldn’t help myself. I wanted him. He was mine. I felt him move while I was pregnant. I pushed him out of me. He was the only thing I had left of you. When I wouldn’t hand him over, he told me he was going to use him against you to file charges if I didn’t let him go. He knew I would do anything to protect you. We weren’t wrong. We loved each other. They took him out of my room and wouldn’t let him come back. A nursery tech is the one that snuck me the picture of him. I did it to keep you out of jail.”
Tears are pouring down my face. “I would have gladly gone to jail if it came down to giving up our son. You should have fucking called.” I run my hand through my hair, pulling at it. I’m so mad I could explode. My chest is aching. I feel like I’m dying. “Is that even fucking legal? How does he not have to have me terminate my rights to give him away?”
She’s crying harder than I’ve ever seen her cry. Gabby doesn’t just cry. She’s not a whiny bitch. “I don’t know. I was fourteen and fifteen years old. He had all the power. I had to homeschool the entire time I was pregnant. A doctor made house calls during my pregnancy unless it was something I absolutely had to go in for. I wasn’t allowed to sit in the lobby. I had to hide the entire pregnancy like I was ashamed of him and couldn’t go back to school until the evidence was gone. He made me sign everything I had to sign. He has his own attorney. All I know is that he said the biological father abandoned me. The day I graduated high school I cut my ties with him as much as I could. I don’t use his money. I don’t live with him. I gave up college. A career. Anything he bought me, or liked about me, like my hair.”
I grab my jeans from last night and pull them on, not bothering to fasten them. “Of all the things we’ve been through I can’t believe you would keep that from me. I would have gotten a job. I would have taken care of him. You even if your dad kicked you out. I would have done the jail time and then came and found you. You were my entire world, Gabby.”
“Maddox.” She steps toward me. “He was monitoring my calls and texts.”
“You should have found a way.” I move past her. “I need some fucking air.”
I grab the door and walk out, slamming it behind me, because I feel like I’m holding on by a thread.
Sixteen
Riggan
I stand behind Sayler at the island, my hands on her belly while she makes me a sandwich for work. “I can do that. You don’t have to,” I say against her hair.
“I know, but I like doing it.”
Presley walks out of the laundry room with a basket of towels when Maddox comes storming through the house in a pair of jeans, shirtless, his face redder than it was last night when he was seconds from blowing his top, only this time it’s soaking wet. “Maddox, are you okay?”
I follow Presley’s line of vision to his hand, catching a glimpse of a photo in his hand with a baby on it. He grabs his keys off the bar where they’re laying. “Fine. I’ve just got a bullet with someone’s name on it.”
Seconds later the door slams, and suddenly I remember I’m not the only one that carries. “Fuck.” I make a move toward the door. Gabby comes running in, her face identical to his. I point at Sayler. “Your ass better not set foot toward that door. None of you.”
I grab the door and run outside as Maddox cranks his truck, catching the truck door before it shuts. He throws his Raptor in reverse, trying to shove me out, but I jump in the cab and throw my back against his chest. He puts his foot on the gas, sending us backward. I glance in the rearview mirror and my heart stops at the sight of Gabby standing in the middle of the driveway, directly in the path of his tailgate. “Gabby!”
Gabby
I stand in the direct path of his truck, taking a deep breath as the tires spin and it starts quickly rolling backward. I’m counting on him to stop. He would never hurt me. But worst-case scenario, if he runs over me, better me than him. If he does, he wouldn’t be able to live with himself, which will keep him out of jail. Riggan shouts my name.
The truck slams on breaks and rocks an inch from my body from the sudden stop. I brief
ly close my eyes, a little thankful today wasn’t my time to go. The engine goes dead and Riggan hops down, the keys in his hand, taking a few steps back before he’s able to stop himself.
Maddox gets out and takes a step toward me, his chest heaving. “Gabrielle Katerina Thanos, I’m going to whoop your ass, you crazy bitch.” I smile. It’s a rare occurrence to hear my full name roll off his tongue. I haven’t heard it in a while. When I meet people now I tell them my last name is Holland—my mother’s maiden name—just to separate myself from my dad even more. It took me forever to teach him how to pronounce my last name right. He’s got a little too much backwoods country to roll his tongue that way.
I shrug, tears still slowly running from my eyes. “Figured I deserve it.”
His shoulders drop, and he just stands there for a second, staring at me in nothing but jeans on the driveway as he breathes, his face wet and his hair a mess. What a damn view. My heart gripped onto him and won’t let go. “No, you don’t.”
He finally starts walking toward me, stopping so close I could touch him with a sway. “It’s okay to hate me. For a long time, I hated me too.”
He blows out, puffing his cheeks out from so much air, trying to stop crying and failing. “I love you so goddamn much hating you is impossible. I just needed a breather. It’s a lot to take in, you know. Someone else is raising our kid when I would have gladly done it. I wasn’t bred to be a quitter. Maybe the timing was off, but I’ll never believe this is wrong. He was created because I loved you and you loved me and we couldn’t stand the thought of being apart.”
Finding Fate Page 11
