Drug Lord: A Bad Boy Baby Romance (9 page)

“
P
ackage for you
, sir.”

I nodded in thanks before grabbing an envelope from my doorman. Most mail wasn’t sent directly to me.

I opened the envelope and then dropped it like it was on fire.

It was a DHL package that contained something I didn’t want at all.

Naelle’s engagement ring had fallen out of the envelope. It sat there, twinkling innocently on the ground, as if there weren’t a steel knife plunged into my heart at the sight of it here and now.

I sank to my knees. I stared at it. I couldn’t pick it up.

I couldn’t even breathe.

I’d done a lot of terrible things in my life. I had killed without a second thought. I sold drugs to people and made them addicted for life.

But hurting Naelle was easily the worst thing I had ever done.

And it was coming back to haunt me.

I noticed the edge of a piece of paper peeking out from the envelope’s open flap. The envelope wasn’t empty. There was a letter inside.

I didn’t want to read it, but I had to.

I reached for the letter first. I unfolded it.

The words cut me more deeply than a razor blade.

I thought that this was mine, but it’s not.

I dropped it as if it had scorched me.

We were done.

I clutched the center of my chest, but the pain didn’t stop.

I knew in that moment that I wasn’t going to passively accept her ring back. It belonged on her finger. She belonged to me, whether she believed it or not. I’d have to soothe her fears and fix whatever her father had told her about me, but I was willing to go the distance for her.

She was worth it.

I
made some tea
. The microwave in this tiny cabin looked like it was from 1980, but it still worked.

When I came back to the house, my dad had already arranged to send me to the safest place he could think of: a cabin owned by a buddy of his in the woods in the north part of Wisconsin, what Cheeseheads referred to as Up North.

So here I was, in a small cabin in Door County. I was apparently in a town so small that it was called Fish Creek. I could get groceries, I thought, but when I’d gotten here, the cabin was fully stocked with everything that I would need, as if I needed to be fortified for the zombie apocalypse. The longer that I stayed here, the lower chance I had of having to interact with the outside world.

The only thing I wanted to do was lick my wounds. I’d fallen in love too fast, and now I was paying the price of my stupidity.

Yesterday, I’d pan-fried some of the fish that I found in the fridge. I’d woken up with food poisoning and thrown up in my bathroom, so I had to make tea to settle my stomach.

I wanted ginger ale, though. My mother always insisted on keeping some on hand, except whoever had stocked the cabin hadn’t brought any.

I had a little rental car that I’d driven up from Milwaukee. I was so far north that I was basically in Canada, my cabin was very close to Lake Michigan, and eerily quiet, a little too much like a horror movie for a city girl to be really comfortable.

Up here, I was safely alone, but there wasn’t much to do. I spent a lot of time on Facebook, but doing Castleville quests was already getting really old.

I sighed. Maybe I should go into “town.” They would probably have ginger ale there.

I rinsed out my mouth with some Crest mouthwash before getting dressed. I tied my hair into a sloppy bun, because I just didn’t care. My mother would have a fit if she saw me out of the house with my hair like this, but whatever. There wasn’t really anybody here whose opinion I cared about.

I drove for longer than I wanted to in order to get to the nearest store, a big Woodman’s store.

When I got inside, everything was in disarray. I got the impression that the store stocked just about everything, if you could find it. Sort of like a room which magically produced everything you wanted but made what you wanted the hardest thing to find.

I hunted high and low for ginger ale, but it wasn’t in the soda aisle. I walked through the liquor aisle, and I found it there, even though it was completely nonalcoholic.

I lugged a case of ginger ale — they didn’t have anything smaller — to the register, where the cashier, a girl who was supermodel-tall and gorgeous was chewing gum. She had long, straight blonde hair and high cheekbones. She looked like she belonged on the cover of a magazine. I wondered what she was doing here, in the middle of nowhere.

I shrugged. I wasn’t the only one who had problems. Fish Creek was an easy place to hide, so small that strangers were notable. I got the impression that everybody knew everybody else up here.

I was an odd girl out, with my dark eyes, Brazilian blowout, and brown skin. Everyone here looked like a Viking.

They’d been kind enough, though the little kids stared a lot more than I was used to in DC.

I put my case of ginger ale on the countertop.

“Just ginger ale?” the cashier asked.

I nodded.

“I threw up this morning.”

“Do you want any medicine? Do you still feel sick?”

I shook my head.

“Nope. I don’t feel sick at all. It was weird…just a little food poisoning, I guess.”

She looked at me for a moment, as if trying to decide something.

“No offense, but maybe you want to pick up one of our pregnancy tests? They’re in the pharmacy section.”

I felt the floor move under my feet.

“Pregnancy test?”

“Why not? No harm, right?”

I stared at this stranger who was suggesting something unimaginable.

Freaking out, I started counting in my head.

“Could you grab one for me?”

She took a quick look around the store. Nobody was there besides us.

“Sure thing.”

She walked quickly with the instinct of a bloodhound. I felt like I’d been a blind woman rummaging through Woodman’s, but she knew exactly what she was doing. Maybe she was native to Fish Creek, not a runaway like me.

Twenty seconds later, she had an EPT box in her hands.

“Here you go. If you take it and get a positive result, there are some clinics within driving distance…you can find an OBGYN.”

I looked at her and couldn’t process what she was saying. I knew that she was speaking English, but I was flipping out.

“Thank you.”

“You betcha.”

I gave her my credit card and she rang me up. I hadn’t used my credit card since I’d come up here, because I simply hadn’t needed to buy anything.

I didn’t even know which answer I wanted. If I had a baby…if I really…I was a mess.

“All done!”

She pushed the case of ginger ale at me with the EPT box on top. She slid the receipt across the counter, and then I signed it.

“Do you need a bag?”

I shook my head. I tucked the EPT box into my purse.

W
hen I went home
, I immediately went to the bathroom. I didn’t know if it was performance anxiety or just plain anxiety, but I just couldn’t do it. I put the stick on the counter and chugged two ginger ales, which tasted like ambrosia or unicorn tears…or maybe both.

A few minutes later, I was ready to take the test.

I put it back on the counter while I waited for the result, my mind a confused whirl. I didn’t know what I was even hoping for.

When the time was up, I looked at it.

The result was positive. I was having a baby.

I couldn’t process this, any of it. I knew that if I were responsible, I’d be making an appointment with a doctor to confirm my pregnancy and get…prenatal vitamins and some instructions or something. Was there some kind of parenting handbook?

I couldn’t do it alone. I needed to tell my parents…and maybe Emilio.

But I had an emotional overload for the day. I couldn’t do anything but wash my hands, put on my pajamas, and go to sleep.

Somehow, even though it should have been impossible with how many things I had on my mind, I fell asleep.

* * *

I
was having
the dream that I had every night when I closed my eyes. In it, Emilio was with me.

“Come back,” he told me.

“I can’t,” I told him. “I have to think of the baby.”

Dream Emilio reacted differently every other time.

He exploded out of his chair and came close to me before putting his warm hand on my stomach.

“You’re pregnant?”

“With your child, but we aren’t together anymore.”

Like a magic trick, he was holding my engagement ring in his hand. What a nice dream.

“We can be. Your child can have both parents if you just try to work with me.”

“Do you think we can?” I asked Dream Emilio. “I mean, my father literally hunts you for a living. How could this ever work?”

“You know that I take what I want.”

“Yes.”

“I want you, Naelle. Come with me. I promise that we’ll find a way to be together.”

I put my hand over his hand, which was still resting on the gentle curve of my stomach where our baby was growing.

I regretted the way that I had sent back the ring. At the time, I’d been so horrified that I was in love with a notorious drug lord that I couldn’t imagine raising a child with him.

But my time here in the cabin had changed my mind. I knew that he would be a good father. He might not be a good man. He was a murderer, who ran an organization full of criminals.

But he treated me like a princess, and I knew from the way that he treated his family that his blood meant everything to him. He would love our child just as much as he loved the rest of his family.

And I knew that he loved me.

“We can make it work,” I said, surrendering.

Dream Emilio kissed me just as hard as he had when we were leaving Quito. His hard, heavy body came on top of mine, pressing me into the bed.

His smell was intoxicating. It was the mix of masculine musk and dark spice that drove me wild.

And just like that, I realized that I wasn’t dreaming.

I pushed him away. He just rolled to my other side on the bed, his eyes on my face.

“You’re real!”

“Yes, very real.” He put his arm around my waist, drawing me close and wrapping himself around me. “Very real.”

“Being away from you was hell.” He buried his face in my shoulder.

My hand moved of its own volition to stroke his soft hair.

“I missed you.” I was already so honest with him when I had thought that he was a figment of my imagination that it didn’t feel like too much. In for a penny, in for a pound.

“I felt like my heart was empty,” he told me. “But I meant what I said. Come back to Ecuador with me and we’ll find a way for us to be together.”

I desperately wanted what he was offering. With him in my bed, it was difficult to remember why we shouldn’t be together. I was still half-convinced that this was a very strange dream.

“I’ll come with you,” I told him.

His tongue was suddenly in my mouth, my hands over my head, my wrists in his hands.

“I promise that I will try to make you happy every day of my life,” he said. “And there’s a piece of jewelry that you need to wear from now until you die.”

Somehow he was sliding the ring onto my ring finger. I knew that it had been in his hand earlier, but how had he kept hold of it while we were kissing?

I had no clue, but I knew that I would keep the ring this time around.

I’d hurt myself twice as much as I’d hurt him when I sent the ring back.

Going with him to Ecuador was definitely the right thing to do.

Our love would last forever, no matter what we had to do to keep it alive.

“
W
e’re going back now
.”

“Now?” I blinked at him. “But I haven’t packed. I’m in my pajamas.”

“I don’t care.” He looked me over. “You’re fine.”

“I’m a total mess. You have to let me clean up.”

“No. I’m not going to waste a single moment of our time. We’re going back to Ecuador now.”

He pulled me off of the bed, blanket and all.

“It’s cold outside,” he explained. “I have to keep you and the baby safe.”

“Are you going to carry me all the way to Ecuador?” His grip on my body was extremely firm.

“No. My driver will take us to the nearest airport. We’re flying home.”

Outside, there was a black SUV. He put me into the middle seat before climbing in after me and grabbing my hand.

Before, when we held hands, it was a sign of intimacy.

Now it felt like a mark of possession, especially when his thumb stroked my ring.

The drive was quiet. When we got out, we were at an extremely tiny airport with a single runway.

“I didn’t even know that they had an airport here.”

“There are small airports everywhere.”

We got out of the car and walked into the hangar.

It was a sharp contrast with the urban private hangars that we’d been in before. There were small covered planes.

“What are those?”

He wrinkled his nose. “Crop dusters.”

It made sense that the airport mostly dealt with crop dusters, especially since we were in America’s dairyland.

We went up the steps into the jet. But something was different. The seats were gone.

“Where are your seats?”

“I stowed them. We’re sitting on the couch.”

“Couch?” Did he have a secret lounge somewhere?

When we walked to the back of the jet, I saw what he meant. There was a small sideways couch that had two seat belts there.

“Buckle up.”

He let go of my hand for the first time since we’d left the cabin.

I buckled myself up. He slung an arm around my shoulders. It was as if he thought that I would disappear if he wasn’t touching me.

“You can let go,” I teased. “You have me on your jet. It’s not like I’m going to go running off.”

“I’m not taking any chances.” He leaned down and nuzzled my neck. “I’d rather keep you right here with me.”

I kissed the top of his head. He smelled insanely great. I made a mental note to ask what kind of shampoo he used. It made me want to jump on top of him.

“Ready,” he called loudly.

The steps were pulled up. I felt embarrassed to have the crew see our intimacy on the back couch, but they must’ve had orders to basically ignore us, because the pilots just started taxiing down the single runway and getting us into the air.

“Can we get all the way to Ecuador in this jet?”

His arm tightened around me.

“We’re going to stop for fuel in Miami.”

“Okay,” I said, and then I yawned. I rested my cheek on his head, which was still resting on my shoulder.

And I slept more deeply than I had since we were separated.