Page 70 of Distracted

“I did it for my family.”

“Will you tell me what happened?” I asked.

Ellery lowered her cheek back to my chest, and for a few moments, she didn’t say anything. She simply allowed her fingertips to draw random patterns absentmindedly along the skin on my chest. I was happy to let her do that. I’d wait as long as she needed me to wait for her to be ready to share.

My patience paid off, because she eventually said, “It was my dream to become an author.”

Her words were unexpected, and yet, I clung to each and every one of them. I had a feeling that they were the last part of her that she remembered before her life changed.

Wanting to encourage her and let her know I was listening, I gave her a small squeeze before I began tracing my fingertips over the skin on her hip.

Sure enough, she started speaking again. “I wanted to write fantasy stories. I fell in love with the world building part of the process, and it was sometime during my freshman year in college when the best idea for a story came to me. I spent the whole semester taking notes and writing down lines or scenes I didn’t want to forget. My plan was to finish that semester and spend the summer writing that book. Unfortunately, I spent the summer having to plan a wedding.”

“How did that happen?” I asked.

“My father, Vernon, was a commercial real estate land developer and the owner of Cross Development Group,” she began again. “On the last day of my freshman semester at school, I came home feeling excited about my plans to write all summer, and he was in a meeting with Preston Crespo. At the time, I hadn’t ever met him before, but that wasn’t uncommon. My father had a lot of associates that I didn’t know. Preston was different, though.”

Ellery paused a moment. I waited patiently, knowing this was probably where things were going to take a turn.

Finally, she went on. “Preston was an investor, and the reason he was meeting with my father was because my dad had put a lot of our family’s assets on the line with a new project he had been working. One of the other investors backed out, and without that investor, the project was dead in the water. Unfortunately, while the other investors all had their interests protected, my father didn’t. If it didn’t go through, we were going to lose everything. Our home, our possessions, and years of memories. My sister was still in high school.”

Lifting her cheek from my chest again, Ellery brought her eyes to mine. “Ainsley was just fifteen. I did what I did for my whole family, but I did it mostly for her. She was just a kid.”

“You said you were nineteen,” I reminded her.

“Yeah.”

I cocked an eyebrow. “Technically, you were an adult, but you were still just a kid yourself.”

Ellery didn’t dispute my claim. Instead, she nodded her agreement and dropped her head down against my chest once more.

After letting out a deep sigh, she explained, “Anyway, I didn’t know what the meeting was about initially, and after being introduced to Preston, my sister and I left my dad’s home office to catch up with each other in the kitchen. But before I knew it, I was standing in that office again. Long story short, Preston had told my father that he’d put up the money needed for the project, but that he wanted me involved in it. He hadn’t discussed specifically how he wanted me involved until they called me back into the room. I guess where my father believed that Preston would want me working in some sort of internship role or something like that, Preston had other plans. He wanted me to marry his twenty-seven-year-old son, Patrick, that summer.”

My fingers stopped moving on her hip and pressed in deep. I closed my eyes and had to take a moment to calm my anger. She was just nineteen, and the man she’d been forced to marry was approaching thirty. If I ever got my hands on this guy, I wasn’t sure there was anything that wouldn’t stop me from beating the ever-loving shit out of him.

In an effort not to lose complete control, I asked, “Your father agreed to this? Were your parents really okay with you marrying this man’s son?”

“No. No, they weren’t, but when I learned the truth about why Preston had the gall to demand something so outrageous, I knew I had to do something. There was no other option, and my father told me as much. That’s why I agreed to it. And that summer, I lost all of my dreams of becoming an author. I managed to get Preston to agree to allow me to finish school, but even having my degree, I couldn’t manage to do what I wanted to do in my life. I was beyond depressed about my life, and the only thing that made me feel better was reading the stories I had wished I could have lived. I read about women who found real love, and even if I believed I’d never have that in my life, those romance novels gave me hope. I don’t know. I guess I believed that maybe one day my prince charming would come and rescue me.” Ellery stopped speaking, but only to lift her head again. When she brought her gaze to mine, it was filled with unshed tears as she rasped, “I never truly believed after eight years of hell that I’d ever find you.”

“Ellery, as much as I love knowing that you feel happy being here with me, it’s important for me to make sure you know that if I had known what you went through, I would have done things differently,” I told her.

Sadness washed over her. “Why? Why would you ever want to change something that was so unbelievably perfect?”

I didn’t know how it was possible for this woman to have endured all that she did for so many years, feeling the weight of the world on her shoulders, and still come out the other side in one piece and not completely broken.

She deserved the whole world, and I vowed that from this point forward, she would only know what it felt like to be treated like a real woman.

“I’m going to give you everything you didn’t have with him, princess. I’m going to give you that and so much more,” I promised.

“That’s just it, Kane.”

“What?”

The most beautiful smile I’d ever seen washed over her face, and all of the negative tension and energy I felt in the room had vanished. Then, she said, “You already have.”

I closed my eyes and let out a sigh.

She was wrong. I hadn’t even gotten started.

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