Lost for You Read online

  I strip my top off, then reach behind my back to unclasp my bra. Before I can slide it down my arms, Brax’s hands cover mine and we pull it the rest of the way together. Leaning forward, he lightly caresses my lips, his touch so light like he’s scared I’m going to break. He gently rests his forehead against mine, breathing me in. “I thought I’d lost you. That I’d never get to hold you, kiss you, love you again,” he whispers.

  “I knew you’d find me. I knew you’d save me,” I reply, my voice full of emotion.

  He moves his hands to his jeans, undoing them and removing the rest of his clothes until he’s standing naked in front of me. I slide off the vanity, copying him until I join him in his nakedness. He holds out his hand for mine, leading me into the steaming hot shower where he wraps me in his arms and just holds me, the soothing water streaming over us, washing the horrors of the night away from us.

  We stay there for what seems like a lifetime, clinging to each other. With a lone tear escaping down my cheek, a sob escapes my heaving chest as all of the emotions and the intensity of the night’s events suddenly hit me. “Hush, baby. I’ve got you now. Nobody is going to hurt you ever again,” I hear Brax murmur against my head, his quaking voice telling me he’s as overwhelmed as I am. “Never again.”

  When we’re finally out of the shower, and changed into some clean clothes, Shay and Devon are long gone.

  I was still very shaken up when Shay took me back to the car. I was full of fear, desperate to know what was going on back inside the cabin. Brax’s eyes were so cold, so void of emotion. I was never scared of him, but I was scared of what the thought of losing me had done to him and what it may lead him to do to that man.

  “Shay, you need to go stop him,” I had pleaded.

  He looked at me, sadness filling his eyes. “Darlin’, Brax knows what he’s doing. He will be fine, and will be back with you as soon as he can. I promise you that.”

  About an hour after we got home, the police were knocking on our door. We invited the two detectives into the living room; they just wanted to follow up, and make sure for themselves that I was unharmed. They didn’t say anything about what happened to Gibbons, but I’m trying not to think about that. I won’t be able to move on from this if I focus on what happened.

  Now that I’m lying in bed, cocooned in Brax’s arms, I feel safer than I’ve ever been and relieved that this horrific ordeal is over. All of the worry, the stress, the job of protecting me...it is all behind us. I can’t wait to see Brax relax, the burden of worry gone from his face.

  I feel him stir behind me. “Good morning, sweetheart,” he rasps. I’ve always loved his voice first thing in the morning.

  I roll over in his arms until we’re lying face to face. “I love you, Brax,” I say quietly.

  He gives me a sly smile, his eyes dancing with amusement. “I’m glad about that, because I’m never going to let you go.”

  “I never want you to,” I reply before kissing him like my life depends on it. All of the fear and doubt are poured into this one kiss. He chuckles as he lets me take his mouth. My tongue strokes against his as my free hand snakes up between us, grabbing his hair to hold him close to me.

  Tearing myself away from him, we sit there, nose to nose, just breathing each other in. I watch him as he closes his eyes, then takes a deep breath before slowly reopening them, staring straight into mine. He tightens his arms around me, pulling me in as close as he can.

  I see something different in his eyes; the stress he’s held for the past year is gone. He looks open, relieved, full of love.

  “Marry me,” he whispers against my lips.

  My whole body stills. Of all the things he could have said in this moment, that was way down the list of possibilities. My eyes well up at the enormity of what he’s just said.

  “I thought you’d never ask,” I say, bringing my hand down his cheek and trailing my tongue along his bottom lip.

  He laughs again, the smile never leaving his face. “Is that a yes?”

  I clear my throat, my tears of happiness choking me up. “Yes,” I say softly.

  “Yes.” Kiss. “Yes.” Kiss. “Ye-”

  Unable to hold back any longer, he rolls me on my back and attacks my mouth with renewed veracity. We are a tangle of hands and legs, unable to get enough of each other. He places kisses down my neck to my heavy breasts, worshipping each of them with his tongue before taking them in his mouth. I arch my back against him, needing more of his touch.

  “I can’t wait any longer, babe. I need to be inside you, I need to show you,” he spits out before kissing me again.

  Positioning himself between my open legs, he pushes himself into me, forcing a loud groan to escape me. The feeling of fullness, of being physically complete with Brax inside me, truly overwhelms me. Knowing that he wants me forever, he wants to marry me, spurs me on. I match his thrusts, our lovemaking overtaken with the raw passion that’s always been there. As I feel myself tighten around him, he moves his mouth to my ear. “Come with me, Mrs. James” and that is my undoing. We fall apart together, climaxing loudly as we come back down to earth.

  Lying in bed beside each other, Brax rubs his hand up and down my naked side as I breathe out a sigh of contentment. “I’m home,” I say.

  He props himself up, looking down at me. “You’ve always been home, Elle.”

  “No, I haven’t. I lost everyone I loved four years ago. I thought that was the end of my life. That I’d never feel settled again. That I’d never have my anchor. But now I feel home again. I have you. Forever. You’re all I need, all I’ll ever want. I’m truly home now.

  “You’re my home too, baby,” he says, his eyes full of adoration. “You are where I’m supposed to be.”

  We spend the day at home. After last night’s drama, I need to have Elle by my side today. I can’t stop touching her. It’s like my subconscious realizes how close I came to losing her and is making up for it in abundance.

  The moment she said yes to marrying me, it made all the shit we’d been through worth it. She’s agreed to be mine forever, and I could not be happier. Nothing can top that, nothing can even come close. Although, proposing in the middle of sex isn’t the most romantic of proposals, so I’ve come up with a plan to do it properly.

  We’re lounging around on the couch when my phone starts ringing from the kitchen. I grab it, look at the caller ID, and wonder why the hell Sylvia would be calling me. We may have cleared the air, but I wouldn’t say we’re at the ‘call each other to say hi’ stage, that’s for fucking sure.

  “Hello,” I answer gruffly.

  “Brax! Oh my goodness, please tell me Elle’s okay? Do you need anything? Have they asked for a ransom?” she shrieks down the phone.

  “Calm down, Sylvia. She’s fine, we rescued her late last night. What I wanna know is how the hell do you know about it because I sure as shit didn’t ring you?” I ask suspiciously.

  “Don’t be mad, but Victor called me. He thought I should know.” I’m suddenly frozen on the spot. How the fuck does Victor know my birth mother?

  “Sylvia, why would my boss be calling you about Elle being kidnapped?” I ask, angry at yet another secret being kept from me.

  “It’s not something we should discuss over the phone, Brax,” she says, brushing it off.

  I’m seething now. “Sylvia, unless you want there to be more problems between us, you’ll start talking. Right now!”

  “Brax, I think we should do this face to face. There’s a lot of stuff from the past we still haven’t talked about yet,” she replies shakily.

  “What aren’t you telling me?” I say through gritted teeth. I feel Elle wrap her hands around my waist, and I look down to see her frowning.

  “I changed my name when I left home. My family had a sketchy reputation, to say the least, and I didn’t want to be tarred by their dirty brush. So I started using my mother’s maiden name, Robinson.”

  “That’s the name on my birth certificate,” I spit o
ut. She’s not telling me anything I don’t already know.

  “Yes, but my family name is Bertorelli.”

  And all of a sudden everything makes sense. It’s like the final puzzle piece of my life has finally clicked into place.

  “Victor…” I breathe out.

  “Is my brother, yes. Your uncle. He’s been watching out for you for a while now,” she continues to explain.

  “Why the fuck didn’t he tell me? He knew I tried to find you after Roger died!” I shout. Elle is rubbing my back now, trying to calm my rigid body.

  “I asked him not to tell you. He told me that he recruited you, and to be honest, I hated him for it. I didn’t want you involved in his kind of business,” I hear her sigh.

  I try to take a deep breath, but this betrayal of sorts is too much to deal with. “Here’s Elle,” I say as I hand the phone over to her and walk away into the bedroom. I need to clear my head. This must be how Elle felt when I told her everything about the job and the company.

  It’s a cluster fuck of epic proportions.

  When Elle comes into the room a few minutes later, I’m sitting on the edge of the bed, my head in my hands as I try to come to grips with this new information. My boss is my uncle. I’m related by blood to one of the most prolific crime families in the South. Fuck! If it wasn’t enough to be related to Evans, now I have a criminal history on both sides.

  “Babe, are you okay? Aunt Sylvie explained everything to me,” she says as she sits beside me on the bed.

  “Not really,” I say into my hands. “It fits, though. Everything Victor’s done for me, always looking out for me, and now you. It all makes sense.”

  I feel her lean into my side, resting her cheek on my arm. “It’ll be okay, Brax. What are you going to do now?”

  Lifting my head up, I look over at my beautiful girl. She’s always looking for the positives in any situation. “What I have to. They’ve left me no choice now. Do you have my phone?” I ask, standing up.

  She hands my phone to me but still looks worried. She’s got nothing to worry about now. Brimstone has been charged and is going to be put away for a long time, and Gibbons has been dealt with. I can’t tell her that, though.

  There is no doubt in my mind what happened once Devon and I left that run down shack. The two gun shots that boomed out into that night air behind us as we ran away were the final nail in Gibbons’ coffin. You never cross Michael Evans, especially when it comes to blood. And for all his faults, Evans holds his family, especially his two sons, above everything else. I need to find out what happened, but that call will have to wait. There is another family member I need to speak to first.

  I bring up his number and push send, my hand shaking as I bring the phone up to my ear.

  “Brax,” he says when the call connects.

  “Vic, or should that be Uncle Vic?” I say deadpan.

  “She told you,” he says with a sigh of relief. The man has the audacity to be relieved?

  “You should’ve told me years ago, instead of letting me search for her and continually come up empty handed. You knew all along who and where she was.” I can’t hide the venom in my voice now.

  “Yes, I did, but she asked me not to tell you. She just wanted to know that you were safe and happy.”

  “I was never happy. Not until I met Elle. You know that.”

  “And she knows that too,” he adds.

  I’ve made my decision. Now, to tell him. It’s something I’ve considered, given recent developments, but this final piece of information has cemented my future. “Well, you know what this means.”

  “What, Brax?”

  “I can’t work for you anymore. I can’t have anything to do with your business, legal or otherwise,” I say spitefully.

  “I had assumed that would be the case, given that you’re not living down here anymore. What about Shay?” he asks, apparently not surprised with my decision.

  “That’s his call. I’m not gonna tell him what to do.” And it’s true. He may be my best friend, and someone I regard as a brother, but I’m not going to hold it against him if he chooses to continue working for Victor.

  “Okay. Well, I’ll settle everything at this end. Do you want me to sell the house?” he asks. Roger and Leah’s house; the house I’ve lived in for most of my life. The house Victor helped me save when the bank was about to foreclose.

  “No, I’ll deal with it. And Vic?”

  “Yes?”

  “Gibbons is dead. Evans shot him,” I reply stoically.

  He scoffs down the phone. “I know. Have you not seen the news this morning?”

  “No.”

  “Well, it might pay to read the newspaper. It seems that your father is at it again, hogging the limelight and seeking hero status. I’ll be in touch, Brax.” The line goes dead.

  And that is that.

  I’m now unemployed, and to be honest, I’ve never been more relieved in my life.

  “Sweetheart, have you collected the paper today?” I ask Elle as I walk back into the bedroom. She’s lying down on our bed, reading one of her romance novels that I love teasing her about.

  “Yeah, it’s on the coffee table with the mail,” she says, looking up at me with those soft green eyes of hers. God I love this girl, and I’m the lucky bastard that gets to keep her.

  I rush to the living room, grabbing the paper off the top of the pile, and open it up. The headline screams at me, “Michael Evans Shoots Kidnap Suspect After Freeing Victim.”

  Well, fuck!

  Devon and I are having breakfast at the campus café when I see a man in a table beside us open his newspaper. I almost choke when I see Michael Evans’ face staring back at me with the headline, “Michael Evans Shoots Kidnap Suspect After Freeing Victim.”

  “Hey D, grab a paper for me, will you?” I ask as he stuffs a breakfast muffin into his mouth.

  “Dude, grab it yourself!” he mumbles with mouth full of food.

  “I think you’ll want to see this one,” I say, raising an eyebrow.

  “Fuck. Okay, okay.” He gets up and grabs a paper from the counter and opens it. I watch in slow motion as his mouth drops open in shock. He walks back to our table, paper in front his face as he reads. He bumps into a few chairs on the way, apologizing but not able to rip his eyes away from the story.

  He takes his seat opposite me and drops the paper. His eyes are wide, his look full of disbelief.

  “Damn,” he says, shaking his head slowly. “The old man is still as slippery as always.”

  “Seems that way. Any idea what happened?” I ask. We were all too wiped last night to talk about anything. And to be honest, the intensity of what went down, of how Brax lost his shit at Gibbons, beating him within an inch of his life, and how Elle pulled him out of it, all hit us hard. When I saw Evans’ car pull in, and that he was driving, not one of his henchmen, I knew shit was about to get real.

  The look on Brax’s face when he got into the car and said “get the fuck out of here” said it all. I’ve kept my distance from them this morning. They need time and space to deal with the ordeal. I just hope that now that Gibbons has been taken out, and Brimstone is being charged, this whole threat has been neutralized. All the main suspects have been dealt with, even Evans’ in his own way. Although, I’m still uneasy about that creeper in the black Honda. He’s been conspicuously absent of late, and that doesn’t sit right with me for some reason.

  We passed three police cars on our way back last night, so there is no way Evans could have covered anything up in that time. But yet again, Evans is like Teflon; I’m starting to believe that nothing will ever stick to that man. The newspaper headline says it all, really. Evans stepped up for his sons, covered their asses, and admitted to killing Gibbons. But in true Evans’ style, he turned it around to make himself look good. But this is the closest he’s even come to redeeming himself for the sins of his past and present, especially the things he’d done to his own sons.

  “We need to check
in with the police, man. Probably make statements to explain what went down and shit. Tie up any loose ends so that we’re not pulled into this shit storm,” he says, his expression emotionless.

  “Good plan, bro. I’ll get the bill, then we’ll head over to Elle’s. I wanna check in with her and see how she is,” I add. “I think we all might need a debrief, too.”

  “Sweet,” he replies, folding the paper and putting it under his arm as he stands and walks towards the door. I swear to god that man looks like he’s just had the weight of the world lifted from his shoulders. And if anyone deserves it, Devon and Brax do.

  Brax has remained quite calm this morning, despite the newest revelations from his past. He’s surprised me. Sylvie was understandably upset about his reaction, and his anger, but was also relieved to hear that I was safe and relatively unscathed following the kidnapping.

  “Darlin’, I think you should come see this!” I hear Brax shout out to me. I hop off the bed and make my way to the lounge, finding him sitting on the couch with the morning newspaper spread open in front of him, a large photo of his father, Michael Evans, on the front.

  “What happened?” I stare at the photo of Brax’s father. The resemblance is so obvious now. Those ice blue eyes and their brooding stare are unmistakable.

  “Evans is being hailed a hero. This report says that he shot Gibbons in self-defense just moments before the cops arrived last night. Apparently, Gibbons was armed and had his weapon drawn,” he adds, looking up at her with a raised brow.

  He continues to read the article. “Apparently, Gary Gibbons was shot twice and died instantly. After being questioned, Evans gave a press conference this morning outlining exactly how he came to save billionaire heiress Elle Halliwell, and subdue her kidnapper long enough for her to run to safety,” he explains with a frown.

  “Babe, he did that? For you?” I sit down beside him, shell shocked. Just twelve hours ago, that man, the one who snatched me from the restaurant and held me captive for three hours, was alive. And now he’s dead. For what? What did he achieve by taking me? He told me he needed money, but as much as I tried he wouldn’t let me call anyone to get it for him. He was desperate, he told me as much. He was so unsure of himself, like he was second guessing his actions. He told me about his wife, how she’d left him because his gambling debts had cost them their house. How he worked with Harry Brimstone to monitor me, and how when Harry was arrested, he snapped. He told me everything in those two hours before Brax and Shay barged into the room and knocked him out cold.