No, I’m not about to let her go that easy. I claimed her, and she’s going to be mine. My princess.
5
Nicky
My feet are burning and filthy. I can feel the grit from the road cutting into my skin as I walk, brushing them off against my ankles every few minutes. I even put my heels back on for a while and walk until my feet hurt, then go barefoot again.
Greenville is very quiet, only a single car passes me as I walk. It stops and a man offers me a ride, but he looks like he might be a cannibal-murderer, so I decline and keep going.
I’m still ringing like a bell from the orgasm the mechanic gave me. I didn’t even realize just how badly I needed it until I was melting against his tongue. No man has ever done what he did to me and I finally realize what’s been missing in my life.
To be honest, I can’t even believe what just happened. It’s just not something I would ever do. In fact, it’s the opposite of everything I’ve been about in my life up until now. The way he spoke to me flipped a switch deep down inside me, and I responded back in a way I never would have thought possible.
After what seems like the world’s longest journey, I find myself walking up the private driveway to the lake house. When I push the front door open, I find my adopted mom looking worried sick, and Bradley looking like he’d rather be doing anything else.
“You see?” he says casually to Ruth. “She’s not dead.”
I’ve grown so accustomed to his douchebaggery that I’m not even fazed. He’s a handsome guy, there’s no denying that, but when I look at him, I don’t feel the fire inside me that I do when I look at the rough, greasy, working man who just had his way with me. Not even close. In fact, as I watch him light his thick cigar and take a drag, I want to vomit.
“Where have you been, Nicky!?” my adopted mom snaps, rising from the table. She’s had a few drinks of wine – at least a few. It’s obvious.
“The car broke down.”
“The GT?” Bradley asks quickly. “You’re kidding. What did you do to it?”
“I didn’t do anything,” I reply. “It just started smoking, so I pulled over.”
“Smoking?” Ruth gasps.
“Yeah, something about the coolant or radiator or something,” I sigh. I’ve been missing for hours, I look like a wreck, my feet are practically bleeding, and what are we talking about? Bradley’s car.
“Thank God,” he relaxes. “That wasn’t smoke, dear. It was steam.”
“Smoke, steam,” I say dismissively. “Same thing.”
“No, not really,” he replies. “There’s a big difference.”
Of course I know there’s a difference, but I also don’t feel like arguing. There’s no point. Bradley doesn’t care about anything I have to say; he doesn’t care about me. He’s just the man that Ruth picked out for me to marry so he can rescue us from the financial hell she got us into.
I was adopted; I never knew my real parents. Ruth and Frederic took me in. When he was still alive, he was the head of a large company that owned food stores and clothing shops all across the country. He was a self-made man, and quite kind, from what I remember of him. But he died when I was seven. For some reason, he left my adopted mom in charge, and that’s when it all went downhill.
Ruth has a penchant for pricey shit. If it didn’t come from Madison Ave or Rodeo Drive, she’s not interested. Cross-country flights on the private jet became a regular thing for her, and she’d return with armfuls of furs, designer heels and purses – so many that she actually had an entire second home built on our old property to store her wardrobe.
“My walk-in closet,” she’d smiled when it was completed. I wanted to barf.
On top of that, she loved spas, massages (from cute masseurs), trips to Venice, the Amalfi Coast, Paris and London, and “working on her tan” in the Caribbean. Running the company, something she was never cut out for anyway, took a back seat to all her pleasure time, and it wasn’t long before the empire was collapsing and we were running on empty. We lived on the good grace of my adopted dad’s name for a long time while my mom ran up debt like it was going out of style. Even as a teenager, I understood that the lifestyle was simply unsustainable. When the debt collectors finally came calling, that’s when she found Bradley.
And now, it’s my job to marry him. He’s thirty-seven; Ruth’s only forty-four and still looks good for her age. I’m pretty sure she went for him first, but when he wasn’t interested, she threw me in front of him. He took to me right away (the fact that I’m only nineteen being a big part of it), but I have a feeling that he only wants me because of my last name. There are still people out there in the business community who would do business with him simply because of his ties to my family.
I want to tell them both to fuck off and that there’s no way in hell I’m marrying this guy, but Ruth will cut me off immediately and I don’t have any backup plan. With no money actually in my name, I’d be homeless, penniless. Ruth knows that, and it’s the only reason I’m still standing here.
“So where’s the Bentley?” Bradley asks, taking another draw from his Cuban. He looks like an aspiring mob boss, and I’m pretty sure that’s the look he’s going for.
“At…a shop,” I reply. I almost want to tell him that I left it at the garage of a sexy, arrogant mechanic who just went down on me and gave me a mind-blowing orgasm, but after my long trek here from his place, I’m not in the mood for a fight.
“He says we can pick it up in a couple of days.”
“Small towns,” Bradley rolls his eyes. “If this was the city, I’d have it fixed by tomorrow.”