Love by the Rules (Harbor Point Book 3)

by Heather Young-Nichols

  Cash remained quiet the entire time, like he was waiting for me to break the ice. But I didn’t want the ice broken right then. I wanted to stay right in my own head, where it was safe. At least until it was time to go.

  “You ready for this?” he finally asked.

  “Not at all.” I sighed, then decided to voice my fears the way Dr. Peters had said I needed to. “I don’t know what’s going to happen in there, Cash, but please know that whatever my parents say—”

  “You don’t have to worry about what I’ll think or any of that shit. I love you, Gemma. The rest doesn’t matter. And they are terrible fucking people, so whatever they say is meaningless.”

  “I love you, too,” I said as I pushed up to my toes so I could kiss him good and hard.

  Cash looked too dashing for words in his dress shirt and pants. I hadn’t seen him in much besides jeans, T-shirts, shorts, and running clothes. But cleaned-up Cash had me wanting to skip court even more yet I couldn’t let the guys down.

  As we filed into the courtroom, we were among only a handful of people in the room. When we got to the front bench, Gio stepped aside to allow Sal in, then guided me in behind him and sat beside me.

  I was wedged between my two protectors, who were each holding one of my hands. Actually, three protectors because Cash rubbed my shoulder from behind.

  I didn’t know the guys had planned to ensconce me between them. Obviously, I’d assumed the guys would want to sit with their girls.

  When I glanced back at Cash and the girls, I saw that those three arranged themselves like we had with Bianca behind Gio, Bailey behind Sal, and Cash behind me.

  They were our moral support, but it was the three of us against this world.

  A couple of lawyers came in to take their seats at the tables and everything moved from there.

  It was all a blur to me because my pulse was beating so loudly in my ears that I couldn’t hear what was being said. Likely, I wouldn’t have understood it anyway. It was like watching a silent movie.

  I saw everything but heard nothing as I tried not to become so lightheaded that I passed out.

  But I still saw our parents.

  They all looked at us as they came in to take their seats and continued glancing back throughout the proceedings. The three of us sat stiff, unmoving, but I could still see them from the side. I wasn’t the only one to notice because I felt Cash’s fingers on the back of my neck, letting me know he was still there and that was very reassuring.

  The next thing I knew, Gio pulled on my arm to get me to stand and our parents filed out.

  It was over and I hadn’t heard a word anyone had said.

  “What happened?” I asked anyone willing to answer. I couldn’t believe I’d missed everything.

  “You didn’t hear any of it?” Cash asked from behind me.

  I shook my head. I’d totally checked out.

  Yet every time my mother glanced at us over her shoulder, I knew. I could feel it as if it was a physical touch reaching out to me. It reminded me of the way she used to speak to me when talking about the very intimate ways to please a guy, something no girl should ever hear from her mother’s mouth.

  But we stood there, the three of us together, with our support system right behind us. This was something I never could have imagined.

  They hadn’t taken everything from us.

  “Basically, they have new lawyers who are saying their last ones didn’t act in their best interest, which is the only reason they agreed to the deal,” Sal explained to me.

  “Besides the fact that they used us as sex slaves. I don’t suppose they mentioned that?” I spat back immediately, wishing I hadn’t. But screw it. We all knew what we’d done.

  “They left that part out,” Gio said softly.

  From behind Gio, I watched as Garret, our Trinity lawyer, approached. I didn’t like the look on his face at all. It was the kind of face that said we weren’t going to like whatever it was he had to say.

  “Let’s talk out in the hallway,” he said, then led the way.

  Gio, Sal, and I stood in a semi-circle around Garret while Bailey, Bianca, and Cash hovered nearby. They didn’t go too far away from us, but they weren’t part of this either and I was pretty sure not one of us wanted them to hear everything. They had enough of our shit in their brains.

  “I talked to your parents’ lawyer and apparently they have a request.”

  “Who gives a fuck what they want?” Gio crossed his arms over his chest, making him all the more intimidating.

  “I’m obligated to present this to you, Gio. You can reject it after that.”

  “We reject it now.”

  “I have no choice,” Garrett continued. “Apparently, they didn’t expect the three of you to show up. But since you did, they’d like to meet with you tomorrow.”

  “Fuck no.” This time it was Sal who responded.

  I continued to stand quietly taking in the scene.

  “In return,” Garrett continued like Sal hadn’t interrupted him.

  I began to feel bad for the guy, having to deal with my brothers all the time. Sal was like my brother. Although Garrett would be used to them, it couldn’t be easy.

  “In return,” he continued, “they agree to never contact you again, which we will have notarized and everything. If they did contact you, you could sue them. They’re going to have to see this appeal through because it’s already started, but it would end after that.”

  “Why would they want to see us?” I finally asked.

  “Gemma,” Garrett said. “I think they have plans to convince you they didn’t do anything wrong. That’s just my feeling. Their lawyer didn’t say anything specific.”

  “Can we reject this now?” Gio sighed.

  Garrett nodded.

  “No,” I said. “I think we should do it.”

  “Not a chance, Gemma.” Gio’s voice was firm.

  He had no right to tell me what I was going to do and what I wasn’t. But he wasn’t going to agree to see our parents so neither would I because he wouldn’t be there with me.

  “Gio, listen.” I put my hands on his cheeks to pull his face down to me. “They think they beat us. What better way to show them how wrong they are than to show up with people who love us? We take them”—I swung my hand toward our entourage—“and that’s the biggest fuck you we could ever have. Those bastards didn’t think we’d ever find that and we’d always work for them. Let’s show them how wrong they are.” I took a deep breath and let go. “And them knowing that we each have someone in our lives will show them that we aren’t going to back down. They can rot in fucking hell because we each have something to fight for.”

  Gio and Sal were silent for what felt like forever before they both gave me little grins and nodded. It might have been what I’d said, it might have been how, but the guys knew I was right.

  If our parents knew that we had forged lives outside of them, they were more likely to try to hurt us but also less likely to actually think we would do anything for them. No one knew what it was like growing up in that house, with those parents. No one but the three of us. And now it was time for a little payback.

  We’d taken their precious company, which I was finally realizing was probably why Sal didn’t want to let it go, even if it caused him lots of hours and lots of headaches.

  Both Gio and I needed to step up to take some of that from him until we could sell. Now we had the opportunity to take the last thing they thought they’d accomplished.

  Owning us. They didn’t own us and it was high time they found that out.

  We planned to go out to dinner after court and stuck to that.

  It was a little early, but we needed each other right then. We could turn in early afterward because we also needed the people who could love us in the way our parents had tried to keep from happening.

  While at dinner, Bianca, Bailey, and Cash got a glimpse into our lives before we started to work.

  It was kind of n
ice to remember times that were somewhat happy.

  Our parents had always been distant. Sal’s too. We hadn’t spent a lot of time with them when we were young and most of the time I’d thought they’d had kids because it was expected.

  I missed my grandma and grandpa.

  They never would have let our parents ruin us.

  “You know it was a year after Grandma and Grandpa died that they started this,” I said because I wasn’t sure any of us had thought about it that way.

  “Were you close with them?” Bailey asked.

  “Not really,” Sal answered, which was true. “When they were around, it was great and they wouldn’t have let Trinity go in the direction it did. But they were building an empire, so we didn’t see them very often.”

  “So, they died and… ” Cash let his voice drift off.

  I nodded. “The Devils started with Sal and worked their way down.”

  Sal stopped eating until Bailey set her hand on his arm. He reached over to give that hand a squeeze.

  “Did you all know that Bianca kneed Gio’s dad in the balls?” Bailey said suddenly.

  I snorted and started choking on my water. “What?” I choked out.

  Bianca smiled while Gio laughed.

  “I was there,” he said. “It was fucking epic.”

  “When did this happen?” Sal asked.

  Glad to know I wasn’t the only one in the dark.

  “When we were in Chicago for Nick’s sister’s wedding. We saw him on the street,” Bianca admitted and you could tell she was pretty proud of herself.

  “Yeah.” Bailey laughed. “She kneed him in the balls and said ‘that was for me,’ then punched him in the face and said, ‘That’s for Gio.’ It was fucking perfect.”

  “That turned me on so much.” Gio laughed too.

  “Bianca,” I said seriously, raising my glass of water in her direction. “You are my fucking hero.”

  The entire table laughed, but it was true. I’d dreamed about doing that to my father most of my life. Now I wished someone would have gotten it on video.

  Once the bill was settled, we stepped out into the Chicago summer evening and that was where we also went our separate ways.

  It wasn’t weird that none of us rode together, even though we were all staying at the same hotel; we couldn’t all fit into one cab anyway. But I didn’t want to go right back to our room. So once we were in the cab, I asked the driver to take us to Navy Pier.

  Not because I wanted to do anything it had to offer. I wanted to be by the water. Cash didn’t question the decision.

  Once there, I didn’t lead him up toward the Ferris wheel. Instead, we went over to where the lake cruises launched. There were benches but I didn’t sit there. I went to the side and sat on the concrete. Cash followed. Our feet dangled above the water, not quite touching it.

  When I was fourteen, and I realized what their plan for me had been, this is where I’d come to hide. It was peaceful to let the sound of lapping waves against the concrete drown out everything else.

  Cash leaned against into me, wrapped an arm around my waist, and slid me over closer to him. This may have been the calm before the storm, but it was the calm that I needed right then and somehow Cash knew it too.

  I wasn’t sure how long we sat there, but the sun set further, casting us into darkness, and the air coming off the lake took a chilly turn. I was also tired, so I asked Cash to take me back to the hotel for the night.

  He’d like to see Chicago, he said, but after the day we’d had, and the day we were going to have tomorrow, he wanted to be able to hold me close.

  “You’re the strongest person I know,” Cash said as we were changing for the night.

  I shook my head at him. “I’m totally not.”

  “Yeah, you are. It’s part of what I love about you.” He took my hands in his and pulled me into him. “Even when I first met you. I gave you shit about not thanking me for holding the door and you gave me shit right back. I could have been a crazy person, but you stood up for yourself.” He kissed my lips softly. “You’re strong.”

  I swallowed hard. Maybe I hadn’t thought this plan all the way through.

  “Cash, tomorrow, they’re probably going to say some things—”

  “Do you think I care about anything they have to say?”

  “But there are things I haven’t told you. Disgusting things I—”

  “Gemma, I love you. I love you more than I’d ever thought it was possible to love someone. I’d rather yank my own balls off than cause you any pain and I really like my balls. Do you think there’s anything your parents could say that would change that?”

  I started to nod.

  “There isn’t, baby. There just isn’t.”

  Cash pulled me over to the bed to sit, but he knelt in front of me on the floor.

  “Gemma, once you first told me about all of this, trust me when I tell you there isn’t anything you’ve done that I didn’t imagine in those first days. Things no man should ever do to a woman. Things that made me punch a fucking hole in my bedroom wall.”

  “I didn’t see a hole when I was in there.”

  “I fixed it,” he said with a grin. “But all that made me want to do was break some asshole’s bones. It never for a second made me think less of you or consider that maybe you weren’t the one I wanted to be with. It’s also the reason I couldn’t make love to you until you were in love with me. And if that day had never come, if you had never fallen in love with me or told me that you loved me, I would have regretted it every day of my sad, pathetic life.”

  I giggled quietly. Only Cash could infuse any humor into a situation such as this.

  “I’m going to marry you one day, Gemma Diamati. I don’t know which day, that’ll be your call, but it’s going to happen. And none of the other stuff matters.”

  Tears welled in my eyes as a feeling of love completely overwhelmed me. My head fell to the side. I bit my lips together to keep myself from sobbing and making this whole thing get ugly.

  “You want to marry me?” My voice was barely even a whisper.

  “Well, yeah.”

  In less than a second, my lips hit his in a brutal fight for supremacy. He let me win.

  He let me yank his clothes off without touching mine until he was already completely naked. And then he let his mouth and tongue work me up until I couldn’t take another moment, for fear my body would revolt.

  Then he did it some more.

  There was nothing he was doing to me that I wouldn’t welcome. My parents didn’t own me. Cash didn’t own me, but he did own my heart.

  After taking all those feelings out on each other, we spent the rest of the night talking. We lay in bed discussing what seeing my parents again might be like. How talking to them might make me feel. Then we moved to the table for some room service when we needed a snack and talked about what would happen when we got back home.

  “Aiden will be pretty happy,” he said before taking a bite of a strawberry.

  “Why’s that?”

  “I can’t imagine I’ll be around my place much when we get back. He’ll finally have the house to himself a bit.”

  “Why won’t you be there? Are you moving?”

  “You’re not there,” he said, as if I should’ve already known.

  Sounded perfect. I figured he’d move in eventually, but we weren’t going to plan that. It would happen when it felt right for both of us.

  “Why did you give me shit about not thanking you for holding the door for me?” I asked as we sat at the table in the corner, empty plates in front of us.

  Cash laughed and shook his head.

  “It was the only way I knew I could get you to talk to me,” he said.

  “You didn’t think to just say hello?” I cocked my head to the side with a smile.

  “Uh… thought about it. But I don’t think you know what you looked like that day. You basically looked… detached. If I said hi to you, you would have said it ba
ck to be polite, then gone on your way. You would have forgotten ever seeing me.”

  I couldn’t argue with him, even if the thought of forgetting him made my heart tighten.

  Back then, I’d said hi to a hundred people a day but wouldn’t have been able to pick a single one of them out of a lineup if I had to. It was the nature of living in a tourist area.

  “I didn’t want you to forget seeing me,” he continued. “That way when I saw you again, like that day on the boardwalk, I would be a familiar face.”

  “I wouldn’t have forgotten you after that day on the boardwalk.” I smiled again at the memory. He was definitely hard to forget.

  “Because I had my shirt off, right?”

  I giggled to confirm that.

  “Exactly what I thought,” he said. “You were checking me out.”

  “Have you seen you? Everyone checks you out, Cash.”

  “But I don’t care about everyone.” He reached out and touched my cheek. “Plus, I’d be a hypocrite if it bothered me. I fucking stalked you around that bookstore. With my eyes, but still.”

  That night in bed, I took a deep breath and let everything out.

  I told Cash about every guy and every single thing I’d done. He didn’t want to hear it, but I needed to say it, so he listened. I needed him to know and not care, so I didn’t feel ashamed of myself.

  He said he understood and listened.

  His reactions were carefully controlled. Tightening of muscles in his neck and shoulders. The muted sound of his teeth being ground together as his hands curled into fists.

  He hated it but took it all on for me. He could’ve told me to stop and I would have honored that request. But he didn’t. He didn’t because I needed this.

  Twice he asked me to pause for a minute.

  I’d stop talking and he’d regain his composure so I could continue. I hated that this hurt him but not enough to stop.

  He told me it was fine, that he could handle it, but his anger at my parents and the men who’d taken advantage, especially the pervert who’d thought I was underage, got the best of him a few times.

  After I’d put it all into words, and listened to myself as I said it, I found that the things I’d done weren’t as bad as I’d built them up to be in my mind. The part of having no control, not being able to say no, and being forced into those things sucked horribly.