Page 16

Sixteen

I totally believe in annoyed at first sight.

— Aella to Cakes

AELLA

Okay, so admittedly, I probably should’ve stayed away from Chevy Clayborne.

If only because I now had the same flu that he had.

I left early from work, well and truly dragging.

I just hoped that Chevy was there so we could be miserable together.

When I got into the lot—for once being able to use my parking spot because I wasn’t worried about my car not starting—I saw that there was a plethora of cars parked around and near my spot, but mine was actually open.

I pulled right into it, shut the car off, and practically forced myself out of the car.

By the time that I hit the landing to my apartment, I thought that I might pass out due to the exertion of climbing the stairs.

That pause that I did outside of my apartment door allowed me to hear the words coming from inside my apartment.

“So not only did you steal my daughter away from me, but you also stole my inheritance?” Someone laughed disdainfully. “I don’t care what I have to do to you, Trini Cowan. But I’ll spend the rest of my life making sure that yours is miserable.”

One, why was my mother in my apartment?

Two, why was there a strange man with her?

Because I was now deathly afraid of what I’d find in my apartment, I pulled out my phone and did the craziest thing I’d ever done.

I called Chevy instead of the police.

He answered on the fourth ring.

“Hey,” he said, sounding out of breath.

“There’s someone in my apartment,” I breathed, shaking slightly.

There was a moment of silence, and then the door to my place opened and Chevy was standing there, shirtless, hair mussed, and eyes puffy and red.

Any other time, I would’ve checked out his amazing upper body—so many muscles—but not this time.

I was scared and about to pass out because I was losing steam fast.

He frowned when he saw me and reached for me.

The way his hand curved around my body had butterflies taking flight in my belly.

“Your mom showed,” he said.

I touched my skin to his and immediately regretted it.

My skin hurt to the touch, and he was so hot he was blazing.

“You’re running a fever,” I muttered as I scooted toward him pathetically.

“So are you.” He paused. “Did I get you sick?”

I shrugged and came into the room farther, altogether uncaring about who was also in my apartment.

“Your mother showed while I was dying in your bed,” he explained as he closed the door behind me. “Did you take any ibuprofen yet?”

“Popped some at work,” I admitted. “Who let her in?”

“A man,” he replied as he moved so that I could see the room.

My apartment wasn’t super huge, but it wasn’t small, either.

It might be a piece of shit, but it was on the larger side of a piece of shit.

I did have a tiny kitchen table, and it looked tinier when some large man with a beard and a scowl the size of Texas had my mom by the shirt collar across the top of it.

She also had a chair attached to her, which only made the scene all the more funny.

But the scowl disappeared from the man, and I nearly gasped aloud.

From the time that I could comprehend what compliments were, I’d been getting them about my brown eyes.

They were quite unique, according to friends.

My mom always liked to say that my eyes looked like I’d shit in a bottle of whiskey and left it out in the sun to percolate.

Everyone else said that my brown eyes seemed to be alive with fire.

And the man staring at me right now, his hand still securely wrapped around my mother’s collar, had the same eyes.

I felt my world shift as I stared.

This man…

“Holy shit,” I breathed.

The man let my mom go, and she toppled off the side of the table.

The chair, a sturdy thing that I’d gotten off an old lady going into a nursing home, didn’t break.

It did make her arms shift awkwardly, though, and I heard something snap.

Hopefully her wrist, because I really liked those chairs.

“Whoa,” Chevy said as he tried to catch me.

But let’s be honest, he was just as sick as I was, and we were both going down.

It was a man I hadn’t seen in the shadows that had both of us before I could blink.

I’m not sure how it happened but all of a sudden I found myself on the couch in my living room, staring at the man that was looking at me with so much concern that I didn’t know how to process it.

The silent man that’d been in the shadows stared at us, but outwardly didn’t show any signs of worry.

“Thanks.” Chevy ran a hand over his face. “Would’ve gone down.”

“What…” I cleared my throat. “What’s going on?”

I looked between the two men, then over to Chevy.

By the time I was done, my head was once again spinning.

Plus, I was shivering and cold.

The man that had my eyes saw this and caught the blanket off my recliner, then gently draped it over my shoulders.

I clutched at the ends and stared.

“My arm!” Trini cried out.

The silent man walked away, and I heard what sounded like him upending the chair and situating her onto it.

Too bad.

I wouldn’t have minded her staying where she was.

“I remember one time in particular when I was sixteen, I’d fallen outside on the steps and broken my left arm. When I’d come inside, I’d told my mom, who happened to be there for once, and she’d told me to walk to the hospital,” I murmured.

That’d been the day that I’d decided that emancipated would be more agreeable than whatever the fuck I was doing with her.

“She did that?” the man with my eyes asked.

“Hush,” Chevy said. “Could you maybe go shut her into the bathroom so we can talk?”

Hush did what he was asked, and then the other man sat on the coffee table in front of me and completely changed my world.

“We’re still waiting on DNA results.” The man cleared his throat. “But I’m pretty sure you’re my daughter.”

I blinked. “Why are you sure?”

He grinned. “Other than the obvious right now?” He tapped the space beside his eyes. “Timelines fit. Things my ex-wife said as she was walking out the door. Things that your mom’s said and done.”

I slumped further into the couch, wondering if my eyes were deceiving me.

Maybe it was the flu, and I was hallucinating.

This was absolutely nuts.

But the evidence—his eyes—were right in front of me, making me understand on a cellular level that what he was saying was true.

The chair dragging into the bathroom pulled me out of the study of his eyes, and I said, “Any other time, I would have a million questions to ask you, but I feel like I’m about to pass out, and I really want a shower so I can warm up…and I don’t even know your name.”

“Paden Nobleman,” he responded. “And when you’re ready, you can come see me anytime. Chevy knows how to find me.”

He held out his hand, and I took it.

He helped me to my feet and said, “Can you get to the shower all right?”

I thought about it for a second and then said, “Not with my mother in there.”

There was a small pause and then he said, “I’ll get her out.”

“I need to get a truck here, first,” Hush said. “Can’t get her onto one of our bikes.”

“You can borrow my car,” I said. “The keys are somewhere.”

“On the floor by the door,” Chevy murmured quietly, sounding just as run down as I felt.

By the time I’d gotten to the bathroom, my mother had once again been moved out of the small area.

She glared at me as we passed each other, and I shut the door on her tirade.

“…going to make you pay for…”

I stared, unseeing, at the tiles under my feet.

What exactly was this life?

Four days.

It took me four days to feel like a human again.

It was on the fifth day of our confinement—Chevy had stayed with me, suffering in silence the entire time—that we both woke up and felt semi-human.

I took a shower and walked out of the stall in time to see him reaching out into the hallway of my apartment.

When his arm came back inside, it was with a huge bag of food.

My stomach rumbled at the sight of the grease soaking through the white paper bag.

He turned and saw me standing there, and his mouth tipped up at the corner. “That’s my shirt. I was wondering where it’d gone.”

At some point, someone had come over and washed our clothes.

I’m not sure who, I’m not sure when, but I’d had a nice, neat stack of clothes to choose from the moment I stepped out of the shower.

Which reminded me…

I called Silver as I walked toward Chevy, putting it on speaker like normal.

His eyes took me in, and I felt my face flame.

No longer being sick as a dog meant that I now paid attention to the way the man’s muscles rippled as he set the bags down.

Or the way those sexy eyes took in my every move.

“Hey, sissy,” Silver said. “Are you alive?”

“Barely,” I admitted as I took a seat on the chair that my mother had been strapped to a few days ago and placed my phone in the middle of the table. “I just got a shower, and for the first time in days I feel like I can move without too much effort.”

“Did you see that I did your laundry?” she asked.

I paused. “That was you?”

“It was,” she snickered. “Both you and that sexy ass man of yours were down for the count. But there was a man sitting on your couch that let me in. He has your eyes, sis.”

There was a long pause as I glanced at Chevy, who winked at me when he caught me staring.

My heartrate once again skyrocketed.

“About that…”

I told her everything I knew, and ended with, “Isn’t our mom lovely?”

“Why doesn’t that surprise me?” she asked. “Did you say a diamond ring?”

“Yes,” I said. “Why?”

“Because I remember her having that. One time, I watched her shove it under her mattress, and I stole it. I still have it.”

My brows rose. “Can I have it back?”

“Yes,” she said. “I always thought that it was important to her, so I kept it.”

Relieved, I said, “I’m just about to sit down and eat, but I’ll call you back once I get more information out of everyone.”

“All right,” she sighed. “I always knew she was a bad person, but why do I get the feeling that our mother is the absolute worst?”

I snorted. “Because she is.”

Silver hung up after a few expletives, leaving me staring at Chevy as he handed out what looked to be burgers.

“I only got you plain with everything on the side because I didn’t know what you liked on it, except for hating mustard,” he said as he put the massive burger in front of me.

My mouth watered.

The doorbell rang again, and Chevy got up to check the door.

“That’ll be Cakes,” he said. “I figured you wanted your answers sooner rather than later.”

I melted.

That was the sweetest thing ever.

Chevy opened the door and I gasped when I saw the huge cake that Cakes brought into the room with him.

“The reason he’s named Cakes,” Chevy said, seeing my surprise. “Is because the man can fuckin’ cook. He also makes the best goddamn cakes I’ve ever tasted.”

Cakes came into the room and said, “Since your other one I made went to waste, I brought this one.”

Tears blurred my eyes, and he saw them.

“I…” he hesitated.

“They’re good tears.” I wiped them away. “Would you like a burger? I’ll share some of mine.”

“No, baby,” he said. “Eat. I already ate. You can listen while I talk.”

So that was exactly what I did.

“Your mom and I met when I was eighteen and working at my father’s bakery,” he started. “At the time, I had no idea she was damn near pushing thirty. She looked all of eighteen, and I was hooked. We slept around for about six months before she took off, saying she didn’t like the monogamous life. Shortly after that is when I met Cally, and I was just so enraptured that I didn’t think about your mother ever again. Not until after things went really bad with Cally and me.”

I listened while my dad explained his entire life to me, ending with a piece of paper on the table.

“You are mine,” he said as he showed me the results of a DNA test. “I’m sorry that she didn’t tell you. Or me.”

I shook my head. “She lied about my father being Swedish and going back to Europe? My mother is…” I searched for the right words.

“A selfish bitch?” Chevy offered.

I snorted. “Actually, yes.”

I felt like I was having an out-of-body experience.

I mean, I had a dad.

A dad!

All my life, I’d wanted one, and now here I was, an adult, finding out that I did, in fact, have one.

And he was pretty nice.

At least, so far.

Chevy wouldn’t have let him into my house if he wasn’t.

Speaking of Chevy…

I turned to survey him and questioned, “Did you know?”

“I suspected,” he admitted.

“The whole reason we had your mother working at our clubhouse was so we could get information. I asked Webber to hire her.” He sighed. “My ex-wife, Cally, had made some pretty cryptic comments when we were in the process of divorcing that I had to look into Trini. Apollo started to dig into her and found that she was advertising herself as a licensed and bonded cleaning company, so we decided to get her to come out. See what we could find on her. Never expected you to walk right into my life, though.”

I smiled, though it was a little shaky.

This was a lot to process.

As if he sensed my thoughts, Chevy leaned back in his chair and said, “I think we should give her some time to process.”

Cakes—Paden—my dad—looked at me with a sad smile. “We have all the time in the world.”

Did we, though?

I felt like nothing good ever happened to me without being followed up by something really bad to overshadow it.

I might have a dad, but like I said, good is always followed by bad.

Always.

“If you’re up for it, you can come to the club party this weekend,” he said as he stood up, knocking on the table as he did. “Chevy can give you my number if you want it.”

Then he was gone, leaving me and Chevy alone to finish our food.

I picked at my fries when Chevy said, “Penny for your thoughts?”

I looked up, my gaze snagging on the cake that Cakes had brought in with him.

Cakes.

Paden.

“What do I call him?” I asked. “Cakes is kind of weird.”

Chevy chuckled. “Boys in the club call me Chaos, but it’s used so interchangeably with Chevy that I go by both.” He paused, studying me for a long second before saying, “Call him Paden. Call him Cakes. Call him Dad. Though, I think that last one will give him a little bit of euphoria to go with you actually acknowledging him.”

I turned back to him.

I wasn’t sure that I wanted to talk about my dad anymore.

I had a feeling that I needed to process that information, and the way I processed was to internalize everything and go through it in my mind, picking it apart piece by piece, until I had it worked out.

I’d almost had to because of what my mom had put me through.

Not that Silver wouldn’t have listened, but we were both well and truly fucked and rehashing it to each other only seemed to make it worse.

So, I changed the subject.

When he stood up and headed for the trash can with all of our trash—I’d eaten every single bit of my burger and fries—I stood up with him.

When he turned around, I practically face planted into his body.

His arms wrapped around me tight and I stayed like that for a long second, enjoying the perfectness of the moment, before asking my next question.

“Did you get my car fixed?” I asked into his chest.

“Yeah,” he said. “Stole it in the middle of the night. Took it to get a tune up. Had five mechanics at Webb’s Garage busting ass to get it done, too.”

I would’ve smiled had I had the energy.

“Thanks,” I said softly.

His hand traveled up the length of my spine, and despite my skin hurting every time he touched it—thanks, flu, for ruining this epic moment—I allowed the contact.

“I can’t believe after all this time I found out that I have a dad.” I shook my head. “This is insane.”