The nervous knot in my stomach swirls into a cloud of rage. “What the fuck happened?”
She lowers her gaze, as if ashamed. “She was stealing my money. She only wanted to become my legal guardian so she could get her hands on more.”
“Holy shit, Lucky,” I say, looping my arm over her shoulder and pulling her close.
“She was writing checks out of my trust accounts and diverted my concert earnings into an account she’d set up in both our names. I didn’t even know.”
We start walking again, but I keep my arm around her. “She sort of laid into me on your bus that last morning on the road. She was pretty pissed I’d made the Freddie connection for you and she told me to back off.” I shake my head. “Her whole reaction was off, but I thought it was just because Freddie’d dumped her.”
“Wait…what?” she says, looking at me. She blinks a few times as understanding dawns in her eyes. “She derailed the A&M thing because Freddie dumped her?”
I nod. “According to Freddie.”
“She told me he lied and broke promises. I thought she meant professional promises.” Her face scrunches and she rubs her eyes. “I’m so fucking stupid.”
“You’re not stupid, Lucky. Shit happens. When you’re successful, people screw with you. You just learn and move on.”
“Yeah, well…” She shrugs. “Doesn’t really make any difference now, except I have nowhere to live and I need a new manager.”
“My manager’s pretty useless, but I have a few names that might work for you.”
She pulls away. “I told you, I don’t want your help.”
“Jesus Christ, Lucky,” I say, right on the edge of losing my shit all over her for being so stubborn. “Just let me do one fucking thing for you.”
She looks at me for a long second, and that’s when I see the truth in her eyes. She came to me, but she doesn’t trust me.
I want to be angry, but I think about her life: abandoned by her mother, jerked around from foster home to foster home. And now her manager, one of the few people in her life she’s ever let herself trust, turns out to be a skank. And here I am, the biggest dirtbag to ever walk the face of the earth, and I expect her to trust me? Yeah, right.
We get to the baggage claim and I lean against the luggage cart stand, pulling her with me. “I don’t blame you for not trusting me, but I’m not fucking with you. Just let me give you some names. I won’t even contact them. You can talk to them and see what you think. If you don’t like any of them, then fuck ’em. You can go out and find someone else.”
She bites her lower lip as she thinks about it. “Fine,” she finally says.
She looks at me a moment longer before stepping between my legs and sinking against my chest. I tip my face into her hair and breathe her in. I’m going to explode with whatever this feeling is, like someone dropped an entire box of Alka Seltzer into my bloodstream.
From the corner of my eye, I see a few people snapping shots. I don’t move. After weeks of waiting, I finally have her where I’ve wanted her since the moment I first saw her, and I’m not going to do anything to spook her.
When my duffel comes around, I push off the stand and yank it off the belt, keeping my other arm firmly around Lucky’s waist. We head to the curb and find a cab. My heart kicks when I give the driver the address of my apartment. After everything, Lucky’s here. She’s coming home with me. I made her a promise before I left. Anything she wants from me is hers. My body, my heart, my soul. There will be no holding back.
She owns me.
Lucky leans against me as we pull away from the airport. Her warm body against my side is doing things to my vitals that I can’t control.
I wrap my arm around her shoulders and when she settles deeper into my side, I tip my face into her hair. “What are we doing here, Lucky? Because if this is just a onetime thing, I need to know that up front.”
She lifts her head and smirks at me. “So I don’t break your tender heart?”
I hold her gaze so she knows this is no joke. “Exactly.”
For a long time, we stay locked in each other’s gazes, but her pull is too strong and I find myself leaning closer.
She closes the last inch between us and her warm, soft lips brush over mine.
My groan rolls up from the deepest part of me, pure base need. The next second, my fist is twisted into her hair and I’m crushing her to me, devouring her mouth with mine.
She doesn’t pull away and I feel the desperation in her kiss matching mine. I spend the next several minutes trying to find a way to crawl right inside Lucky and just live there. When we finally come up for air, I glance out the window and see we’ve reached my neighborhood. But when Lucky’s hand finds my jaw and pulls me back to her mouth, I forget everything else.