18. Chapter 18
Chapter eighteen
Gabe
“ W hy would he be here?” Abbie whispers and then turns to me. “Oh God. This is a nightmare.” She sinks down low in her seat. “I cannot believe this is happening.” She looks at me. “Drive. There’s a side door.”
“What are you doing, Abbie?” I demand, Reid’s warning about a reconciliation grinding through me. “Get up.”
“No. Drive.”
“Abbie—”
“I’m protecting you. Don’t you dare turn this into anything else!” Her voice cracks with anger. “I wouldn’t be hiding if it were just about me. He will come after you.”
I rotate and press my hand on the seat looking down at her. “Are you sure that’s all this is? You protecting me?”
“Yes. Of course, it is. Don’t do this, Gabe. We just had this conversation.”
“And we’re having it again based on the fact that you’re hiding in a car in an effort to not be seen with me.”
She rolls to her side to face me. “I swear to you, Gabe. I hate that man.” Her voice radiates on the word hate. “He’s evil. You —Me—I like this, whatever this is. I don’t want him to have the chance to destroy it. I don’t want you to become his target.”
I study her face, search her eyes, and not only do I believe her, I too like “this,” whatever this is between us, and way too much to allow it to be destroyed, because hiding destroys it and us. “There’s only one way to beat a fear,” I say. “Face it. We’re facing him, here, now. Right now. Together.” I turn away and open the door.
“Gabe!” she shouts, grabbing my arm, but I’m not about that right now.
I easily untangle myself from her grip and exit the car. I’m barely standing and she’s out of the car as well, but she doesn’t head toward her ex to stop my confrontation with him as I suspect she might. She rounds the trunk to meet me at the rear of the BMW.
“Please don’t do this,” she pleads, stopping in front of me, her hands planting on my chest, which I find encouraging. Now that we’re out here in the open, with her ex in our sights, and us in his, she’s not denying our relationship. “Let’s get back in the car and drive to another entrance,” she offers, her voice low, desperate, her red hair blowing across her face.
My gaze lifts over her shoulder to find that her ex, billionaire bastard that he is, has, in fact, spotted us and he’s striding in our direction, and even in jeans and a polo, he walks like he has a stick up his ass. “He’ll be here in about thirty seconds,” I say, stroking her red curls from her eyes, and then cupping her face and tilting it to mine. “We’re not avoiding him. He doesn’t get to control you or me.”
“Wait to do this. We’re new. This is fresh. What if—”
“I stop wanting you? I won’t. What if you stop wanting me? I’m not going to let that happen. I will wine, dine, fuck, and please you in every way possible to make sure it doesn’t. He doesn’t get to control you or us,” I repeat and then I claim her the way I want to claim her, and without hesitation. I lean in and slant my mouth over hers, my tongue stroking once, long and deep before our lips part and she whispers, “You don’t need to wine and dine me when you kiss me like that.”
“Is that right?”
“Yes. Very right.” She’s breathless and leans into me as if she wants me to absorb her, as if she wants to forget what’s behind her, but she can’t. It’s too late.
I stroke the dampness from her lips, and warn her softly, “He’s here.”
“Abigail.”
She stiffens with the sound of her ex’s voice, but she doesn’t jerk away from me. She doesn’t turn to him. Her eyes meet mine and there is torment in hers as if she wants to say something to me but time has run out. She slowly turns to face the asshole billionaire that once was her husband. My hands settle on her shoulders, telling her and him, that I’m here. I’m with her. She’s not alone.
“Kenneth,” she says. “What are you doing here?”
He’s thirty-eight, a year older than me, but he looks younger, plastic, tall, but not as tall as my six-foot-three height. “Your mother called emergency services when the flood started. I was worried. I thought you might need help, but your mother kicked me out.”
“Perhaps because you fucked around on her daughter and now want to take the property away from her rescue,” I say dryly. “Which really does make this flood convenient for you, now doesn’t it?”
His gaze lifts to meet mine, ice in his gray eyes, but they aren’t as cold as I feel. “Gabe Maxwell,” he says dryly.
That he knows me doesn’t surprise me. He likely has Abbie being followed but we both have a connection to Jean Claude and my father as well. “That’s my name,” I say flatly. “Tell my father I said fuck you. You won’t get this property, and if I find out you had anything to do with this today, I’ll bend you over in court and fuck you without Vaseline.” I wrap my arm around Abbie’s shoulders. “Abbie and I are going in to help the animals.” I turn us and set us in motion.
“You don’t know what you’re getting into, Maxwell,” Kenneth calls out. “Stop walking. Turn around and talk to me without her. You need to hear what I have to say.”
I ignore him. I keep walking. “Gabe,” Abbie whispers. “He’s going to come after you. Stop walking. I need to go talk to him.”
“He told me about KM,” Kenneth calls out.
I stop walking, anger ripping through me with the taunt that is about my past, the taunt that confirms my father’s involvement. The taunt that ties to a past I left behind long ago and says he’s prepared for me. He expected me today. “Go inside, Abbie,” I order tightly, my anger a low burn in my veins. “I’ll be right there.”
“No,” she replies stubbornly. “No, I won’t go in without you. Who or what is KM?”
“I know all about her,” Kenneth adds, saying more than I want Abbie to hear.
My jaw sets hard and I give Abbie my back, hoping she stays there as I close the small space between me and her bastard of an ex. I don’t address KM. “You do know my father, right?” I ask.
“You know I do,” Kenneth says, his gray eyes glinting with satisfaction.
“Of course you do, because he told you how to get my attention, but I know him. He didn’t tell you everything and that’s in your best interest and his.”
“Your father and I are closer than you might think,” he bluffs, and it is a bluff. My father wouldn’t give anyone else anything to hurt me. He’d do it himself.
“Close, are you?”
“Very.”
“Then you know what a brutal fucking asshole he is,” I say. “I learned well from him. I know how to play dirty. I know how to play rough. More so than he ever did on any level. And I’m younger and hungrier than him, and what I want I get, especially Abbie.”
“Abbie?” He snorts an arrogant laugh. “You don’t even know her name.”
“I know her name. I know how she tastes. I know how she feels. I know what she needs and that includes this property. Whatever your agenda, I’ll find out and I’ll make sure it burns in hell right along with you. And I won’t stop there.”
He smirks. “Is that supposed to intimidate me?”
“Ask my father what it means to become my enemy, or just wait and find out. It won’t take long. Leave her the fuck alone.” I turn and all but run into Abbie, but I don’t miss a beat.
I drag her to me and this time when I set us in motion I don’t stop walking. She’s stiff in my arms, anger crackling off of her. A gate opens and several people walk out of it. Abbie catches the gate and we enter, turning right down a narrow concrete pathway and that’s when she stops walking and whirls on me. “ You know how I taste ? You know how I feel ? What was that?”
I pull her to me, molding her close. “A cock fight that I won.”
“I don’t want to be used like that. Do you understand?”
“He needed to know that you have my protection.”
“I didn’t ask to be protected.”
“You need my protection.”
“You didn’t think so before.”
“I never said that.”
Her eyes narrow on me. “Because he threatened you and me. Right?”
“Yes.”
“I didn’t hear a threat.”
“I did,” I say.
“I need to understand what you heard that I didn’t. Who is KM, Gabe?”
KM.
Kendall Murphy.
The woman that might just make Abbie hate me and I’m not ready for her to hate me.