Paradise Found: Cain (Paradise #2)(79)
“I’ve made my wish.”
My squinted eyes questioned him, but the slow curl of his sexy lips let me know that he was flirting with me. The apple was precut in half, sideways as he called it, and I opened it. Inside the apple, a star shone even brighter as surrounding it was my engagement ring.
“I want you to be my wife. In private. In public. No more pretending. No more secrets. No more hiding. This is my wish.”
I didn’t move. I continued to hold each half of the apple in my hands, staring down at that gorgeous solitaire that had been on my finger for only a short time then dangled from my neck for a month. His father had taken it.
“How did you get it back?” I whispered.
“It’s mine. I always find what’s mine.” His eyes gleamed teasing me. “You didn’t answer my question.”
I smiled sheepishly, playfully responding. “I don’t recall hearing one asked.”
“Sofie, I think this is like the fourth time I’ve asked. Be my wife. Stay my wife. Just let the world know you’re mine by wearing that rock. I found you and I don’t intend to lose you again.”
I laughed despite his sincerity.
“I don’t want to fight,” he added.
“We weren’t…” His fingers covered my mouth.
“We weren’t, you’re right, but you said some things that sucker punched. The most important thing from what you said is I love you. That’s all that matters to me. I love you. I want you to love me.”
“I do,” I blurted.
“Well, I wish I remembered you saying those two words the first time, but I intend to hear them again. A real wedding. A real wedding brunch. An actual honeymoon.”
My arms slipped around his neck and my mouth crashed to his. Books scattered off the bed as we shifted to wrap around one another. I fumbled with the apple behind him until I released it in our rolling together. He jerked back from me and I produced my hand to show the diamond was where it belonged: on my ring finger. Both our wishes were coming true.
Although Abel had agreed to fight, Ava still argued that she had a way out for us, but she refused to explain her plan. I didn’t have faith in her. There was something about her that seemed vaguely familiar in her take-charge attitude and her severe looks, but I couldn’t place the connection. Abel seemed to trust her implicitly, especially since she had taken him on as her protégé. I, on the other hand, didn’t have to believe a word she said, and I didn’t.
Additionally, Sofie was pretty adamant that she did not want me to fight my brother. I thought about what she said. How I had done so much for my siblings, and I tried to justify that Abel could do this one thing for me, but Sofie wasn’t buying into my argument. She was persuasive in her own right against my fighting for her. The simple threat of her holding out on me wasn’t taken seriously by me, as I quietly reminded her what she’d miss if she did keep her body from me. But something told me there was an undertone to her teasing that was rather serious. She wasn’t going to let this fight occur.
I was stalling from the fight in my own right. I refused the mega million-dollar campaign, the overexposed promotion plan, and the extra-large arena proposed for, what I considered, another fiasco fight of the century. I didn’t wish to meet Abel in the cage again. He wouldn’t win against me. My rage wouldn’t be contained a second time, even though he was my brother. Sofie was on the line. The strength it took the first time to control the need to punch and kick was unparalleled to anything I’d done before. No workout, no training session, no fight prepared me for the composure I’d need to not beat the ever-loving-f*ck out of my own brother. Instead, I was fighting my father every step of the way.
That’s when he showed up at Eden2. There was no greater omen than his sudden presence in my gym.
“So this is what you’ve been working on?” he scoffed, slowly twisting in a circle to assess my warehouse converted to a gym space. His eyes weren’t appraising. His expression smug. His jaw clenched in concentration.
“You’re wasting your money and talent in the middle of nowhere,” he stated, narrowing his eyes at me. Those cold eyes that matched mine, and yet, recently didn’t. I hoped to God above, I didn’t have the evil in me that Atom Callahan had in him.
His facial expression slowly changed. A twitch came to the corner of his mouth, and slowly his lips curved into a crooked smile. He shook his head as if I’d said something and he was agreeing. My blood grew cold within me. He was up to something. If I knew nothing else of my father, it was that he never smiled unless he had a plan, and typically that plan involved something so asinine, so convoluted, you could only predict that it was unpredictable. When he asked the strangest of requests, come to Carrie’s with him, I should have known better, but I didn’t refuse. Foolish hope sprang, that if we could go someplace neutral, we could talk like reasonable adults.
I followed him willingly to his car, where a driver awaited him. Entering the vehicle, it occurred to me that my gym had been unreasonably quiet. Malik and Ray were normally hovering about, but I hadn’t seen either of them for hours. We travelled off the dusty gravel drive onto the main industrial street in this warehouse district, and then turned onto the highway heading east, away from town. Instantly, I recognized we were headed in the opposite direction of Carrie’s. My heart slowed, as I begrudgingly realized I’d made a grave mistake. There was something very wrong about this silent drive.