“I should have been watching you! I should have protected you. Don’t you see?” He dragged one of his tattooed hands down his face, and I saw the pain there, the fear. “I could have lost you.”
“That wouldn’t have been your fault, Cade.” I didn’t know why I was consoling him, but I had to. He looked broken, tired, and just as depressed as me.
He pulled at his thick dark hair. “It would have been my fault, dollface. I was so consumed with you that I let my guard down. I let shit slip through the cracks. I wasn’t going to let that happen again. This country has made changes since then.”
I glanced at the television. We all saw the news. “You created a lot of havoc.”
“They should be happy I didn’t create more. And I had to leave you for a while to make sure that in that time, you were safe. I visited every family in the world that’s important. I’ve had conversations with them all. I’ve hacked every one of their bank accounts just to show them exactly what I’m capable of, to show them your value to me. They all know now.”
“Know what?” I asked with a hand on my hip.
“You’re mine. And if they even breathe an ounce of foul air in your direction, I will burn their country to the ground.”
“Why didn’t you just tell me you were doing that, Cade? Why make me believe you’d left? Why cut me off?” He needed a better excuse than wanting to protect me.
“Tell you?” He shrugged. “Until I was sure I could solidify your safety, Izzy, I couldn’t have you clouding my judgment. I love you too much. You were better off without me around and I needed my full attention on the priority, keeping you safe.”
I was furious he couldn’t have just shared his plan with me, so I shrugged and went for the jugular. “Maybe I still am better off. I don’t want a man who’s in and out of my life. It’s not like we ever established you would be. We were just having fun—”
“Is ‘fun’ me claiming you around the world?”
I poked his shoulder. “You can un-claim me.”
“Is it fun that you have half my savings in your bank account?”
My stomach dropped. I wasn’t sure if he’d been moving numbers around on accounts because he could or what. I didn’t think that was half of anything. “Half?” I squeaked. There were more than eight zeros behind my normal balance.
“Sure, baby. I’ll make more if you want, though.” He leaned in to lick my neck, and I shivered. I couldn’t deny him. My heart was beating too fast, my world suddenly stood still with him at the center of it, and the inkling of hope was bleeding out to become a huge puddle I couldn’t overlook.
“So what? I’m supposed to just forgive you?” I didn’t know how I would say no to him though and the way my hands had crept up to smooth his shirt, to feel his warmth under me, to feel the love of my life there when I thought I lost him. It wasn’t something I would let go of. I might have been emotional before, tried to hide who and what I was, but I couldn’t hide from this.
“Of course. I can tie you up if you want to fight about it. It’ll be more fun for me that way anyway, but we’re doing this, dollface.”
“I think I want to kill you,” I admitted. For the whiplash he’d given me at the very least. “The pain you’ve caused me . . . It’s either I die or you do.”
He laughed. The beautiful, cruel man who I loved cackled at my turmoil. “Baby, look how mad you got at me this month. But didn’t you feel alive?”
I hated that I did, that Cade made me feel every damn thing. He dragged his finger across my rib cage where he knew my tattoo was and then rubbed back and forth. “You need to change this Addict tattoo of yours and put under it, ‘Of life and Of Cade.’ I deserve it.”
“You don’t deserve anything,” I grumbled.
“Fine. Should I grovel more?” He smirked like he had a fucking sense of humor all of a sudden.
“More?”
“Well, you have half my savings, a new penthouse, roses every day that you throw away, and the title of an Untouchable. I didn’t stop caring for you even if I was gone, dollface. Even if I let you go, I was still going to feed you every day—”
I rolled my eyes but did have to tell him, “The office team thanks you for the subs, by the way.”
He chuckled. “But do you thank me?”
“No,” I sneered, trying not to laugh with him. “You’re a dick.”
“I know. You wrote it on my computer screens at work.”
“Yeah, well, maybe you should get that tattooed on you to match the one I got after what you called me.”
He glanced up as if he was considering it. “Would that count as part of my groveling?”
“Oh my God.” I shoved him to try to hide how having any of my words tattooed on him would turn me on.
He didn’t move at all. He leaned in and whispered, “I see that blush on your cheeks, pretty girl. Means me getting tattoos for you makes you wet, huh?”
“There’s something wrong with us. I shouldn’t even want to be near you right now.”
“We’re fucking volatile. And spontaneous and chaotic. It doesn’t make us bad or wrong, dollface.”
“It makes us hard to deal with, Cade.”
“Life without chaos would be boring, Izzy. Life without glitches and your bursts of anger and me seeing you go off . . . it’s unbearable.”
“Everyone’s working out the glitches for a smooth life!”
“Are you?” He cocked his head. “Or do you come to work every day looking for them, wanting to conquer them, wanting to wrangle them, and then you enjoy when they get out of control again and challenge you?”
“We’re not stable.”
“Of course we aren’t.” He shrugged and dragged a finger across my neck. “You want your stability with Gerald?”
“I don’t know.” I crossed my arms, just to piss him off. “Maybe he could give me that.”
“Yeah.” Then he bent at the knee and kneeled before me. “He’d wipe out your emotion, your beauty, your you.”
“What I feel isn’t always pretty, Cade. It had me wasted for a long time.”
He nodded as he said, softly and almost like he was mourning the thought, “Would you be happy if you could feel them?”
I took in a breath, and it was shaky, so damn shaky that I knew he saw my chest quivering. The fact that I didn’t hide it from him spoke volumes. “I’d try to be, and everyone would be happy for me.”
“When you fight those feelings the way you do, your body explodes into doing dumb shit, because a fireball isn’t meant to be contained. Let the real you breathe so everyone else can witness it.”
“I can’t lose you and experience that pain, Cade. Not again,” I whispered.
“You won’t,” he promised. “You never did. I was always watching. I may have thought I let you go but I couldn’t. I won’t. Never, Ms. Hardy. You’re my future wife.”
I laughed with tears in my eyes. “Not until you propose.”
He hummed low, and then he slid his hands under my shirt to slip my shorts and panties off. “I can’t do that for a while. I need to grovel some more first.”
And then his mouth was on me. I sobbed out with need for him.
“Just so we’re clear,” I moaned, “I want a lot of groveling. Right now, I still hate you.”
He chuckled into my pussy. “And I still love the way you hate me, dollface.”
32
Epilogue
Cade
Three months later
I knew she needed time, and so did I when I left.
If I could have changed the world’s damn clocks, I would have. I contemplated fucking with the daylight savings and time zones. Like it would have mattered.
Instead, I did what I could for us, or for her.
She deserved the world, and I’d thought it would be better for her if I wasn’t in it.
I claim to be good at the dark web, not knowing a woman’s mind.
I’d spend the rest of my life making it up to her. I knew afterward I should never have left.
There were still days I wondered if she was better off without me, if somehow I still put her in danger by being tied to her. Yet, I did know better than to leave again. Izzy Hardy would always be my weakness, the girl I couldn’t look away from or leave behind, even if I tried.
I had tried. Yet, in the month I was gone, I’d also checked on her every day. I’d hacked her text messages, listened to her voice mails repeatedly, watched the security cameras to see her face over and over again.
I knew what people meant when they said a person could die of a broken heart. Without her, I would have died, and I think she felt the same.
Every morning, I saw the way she looked at me—with a smile so wide on her face that I hoped the world would never be without it, I heard the way she moaned out that she loved me or hated me, dependent on the day.
Izzy was living.
Living her life to the fullest.
So, I intended to lock her down and make sure she would be mine, living exactly that way for the rest of her life, by buying a ruby the same color as the roses she now wanted every day.