The Kiss Thief(102)

“I’m thinking about how happy you make me,” I said, frankly.

We stopped two feet from Angelo.

He turned around and smiled at me, happiness shining from his blue, ocean eyes.

“We made it,” I whispered. “Apart.”

“You look beautiful, Francesca Rossi.” Angelo pulled me by the collar for a slow, suffocating hug, whispering in my ear. “But not as beautiful as my future wife.”





Six Years After



I watched my wife from what used to be her bedroom window many, many years ago, my hand caressing the wooden box where Emmeline—it was her room now—kept all her seashells. Francesca and I had agreed early into parenthood that we didn’t want to continue her family tradition of the notes. Too much pressure and confusion.

My eyes followed my wife as she said goodbye to her favorite vegetable garden that she had tended to for over a decade with Josh and Emmeline hugging each of her hips and little Christian in her arms. Sterling was there, too, rubbing my wife’s shoulder with a smile.

Later on tonight, we were going to board a plane that would take us to DC. I was going to start serving my country the way I’d dreamed about since I was an orphan—as the president of the United States.

We had dreams to chase, a country to serve, and a lifetime to love each other more fiercely and strongly than we did the last year. But as I looked down at her, I knew, without a shadow of a doubt, that my decision to steal her under the starless Chicago sky ten years ago was the best choice I’d made.

I loved my country ferociously.

I loved my wife more.





THE END





Enjoyed Wolfe Keaton from The Kiss Thief? Make sure you meet Baron ‘Vicious’ Spencer, the original anti-hero.





MY GRANDMAMA ONCE TOLD ME that love and hate are the same feelings experienced under different circumstances. The passion is the same. The pain is the same. That weird thing that bubbles in your chest? Same. I didn’t believe her until I met Baron Spencer and he became my nightmare.

Then my nightmare became my reality.

I thought I’d escaped him. I was even stupid enough to think he’d forgotten I ever existed.

But when he came back, he hit harder than I ever thought possible.

And just like a domino—I fell.



Ten Years Ago



I’d only been inside the mansion once before, when my family first came to Todos Santos. That was two months ago. That day, I stood rooted in place on the same ironwood flooring that never creaked.

That first time, Mama had elbowed my ribs. “You know this is the toughest floor in the world?”

She failed to mention it belonged to the man with the toughest heart in the world.

I couldn’t for the life of me understand why people with so much money would spend it on such a depressing house. Ten bedrooms. Thirteen bathrooms. An indoor gym and a dramatic staircase. The best amenities money could buy…and except for the tennis court and sixty-five-foot pool, they were all in black.

Black choked out every pleasant feeling you might possibly have as soon as you walked through the big iron-studded doors. The interior designer must’ve been a medieval vampire, judging from the cold, lifeless colors and the giant iron chandeliers hanging from the ceilings. Even the floor was so dark that it looked like I was hovering over an abyss, a fraction of a second from falling into nothingness.

A ten-bedroom house, three people living in it—two of them barely ever there—and the Spencers had decided to house my family in the servants’ apartment near the garage. It was bigger than our clapboard rental in Richmond, Virginia, but until that moment, it had still rubbed me the wrong way.

Not anymore.

Everything about the Spencer mansion was designed to intimidate. Rich and wealthy, yet poor in so many ways. These are not happy people, I thought.

I stared at my shoes—the tattered white Vans I doodled colorful flowers on to hide the fact that they were knock-offs—and swallowed, feeling insignificant even before he had belittled me. Before I even knew him.

“I wonder where he is?” Mama whispered.

As we stood in the hallway, I shivered at the echo that bounced off the bare walls. She wanted to ask if we could get paid two days early because we needed to buy medicine for my younger sister, Rosie.

“I hear something coming from that room.” She pointed to a door on the opposite side of the vaulted foyer. “You go knock. I’ll go back to the kitchen to wait.”

“Me? Why me?”

“Because,” she said, pinning me with a stare that stabbed at my conscience, “Rosie’s sick, and his parents are out of town. You’re his age. He’ll listen to you.”

I did as I was told—not for Mama, for Rosie—without understanding the consequences. The next few minutes cost me my whole senior year and were the reason why I was ripped from my family at the age of eighteen.

Vicious thought I knew his secret.

I didn’t.

He thought I’d found out what he was arguing about in that room that day.

I had no clue.

All I remember was trudging toward the threshold of another dark door, my fist hovering inches from it before I heard the deep rasp of an old man.

“You know the drill, Baron.”