I Choose You (The Billionaire Brothers Series) (31 page)

Just then, the doorbell rang. Jahleel turned his face up to the ceiling and shouted. Just shouted. A long string of expletives followed. Then he turned and went to answer the door with his pants still undone and his white boxers peeking out.

He was seriously pissed off. Angrier than I’d ever seen him. Yet, I felt nothing. At that moment in time, I couldn’t find myself caring I’d hurt him. This was a screw-the-world moment for me.

I. Just. Didn’t. Care.

As I slid off the table and scooped up my underwear, I heard Jahleel explode again. “Ha! He’s like the fuckin’ Candy Man. Just say the assfuck’s name and poof, he appears!”

Panties still clutched in my hand, I ran from the kitchen to the front room and standing at the door was Trevillo, hands stuffed in his front pockets, face expressionless. He was Rocker Trev tonight, in black boots, black jeans, black T-shirt, and even a studded black belt.

All over again, I started hurting. Just to see him there. On my doorstep. The ice thawed from around my heart and it started beating again. I started
hurting
again.

Trevillo studied Jahleel’s ruffled attire — pants undone, cock semi-hard beneath the boxers. Then to me — dress twisted, panties in hand, lips no doubt swollen from kissing. Slowly, his eyes came up to mine, and I couldn’t read what was going on with him because he was still expressionless.

My heart plummeted, and I felt like crying. I wanted to apologize and beg for his forgiveness because I knew, even though he wasn’t showing it, he was hurt. Funny how I didn’t feel the compulsion to meaningfully apologize and beg for Jahleel’s forgiveness, even though he expressed his pain and had been good to me since I knew him.

And to think I had the nerve to feel guilt
,
even though I’d caught Trevillo in a more comprising position with Sarah, and he hadn’t apologized
or
cared
or
begged for forgiveness, yet
I
was feeling like the villain.

Starting to grow infuriated for having the wrong feelings in the wrong places for the wrong people, I turned to Jahleel to beg for
his
forgiveness, because he was the one who deserved it. “JK, I — ”

“Fuck off, Krissy,” he spat, as he zipped up his jeans. Leaning down to stare into my eyes, he seethed, “Fuck. Right. Off. You’re a heartless, emotionless, selfish, manipulative and empty bitc — ”

“Nuh uh,” I heard Trevillo warn in a calm voice. “Don’t talk to her like that.”

On a bitter laugh, Jahleel turned to Trevillo. “Seriously? Dude, I just had my cock buried
deep
inside her.”

Trevillo’s jaw tightened, but he held his composure well. “You may say whatever you want to me. But to her?
No
.” He shook his head from side to side to emphasize the ‘no’.

Jahleel scoffed and waved a hand between Trevillo and I as he said in general, “Good luck with … whatever the fuck
this
is.”

He shouldered past Trevillo through the door, and seconds later, I heard his motorbike roaring off.

The handsome blue-eyed man stood there all calm and inexpressive, staring at me, and I grew guiltier by the minute. I hid the hand holding my underwear behind my back so the shame wouldn’t be so evident. However guilty or shameful, I wasn’t going to give in to conscience and apologize for my actions, because the last time I saw this man, his cock was in another woman’s mouth.

Deceivingly soft, he ordered, “Pack your stuff.”

That’s it? That’s all he was going to say?

“What?”

“Pack your stuff,” he repeated as he took a step inside the house.

“What do you mean ‘pack your stuff’?”

Taking another step inside, he replied in an extremely quiet voice, “It means exactly what you think it means, Krissan. You are going upstairs to pack all the things you
need
, because when you leave this house tonight, you’re not coming back.”

I snorted. “I’m not going
anywhere
with you. You can’t just pop up on my doorstep some four days after I watched you empty yourself down another woman’s throat, and think you can order me around, telling me what to do. That agreement to be yours was broken. You broke it. Not by cheating on me, but by
not
showing you give a fuck with so much as a text message apology attached to a lame excuse. Nothing. You did
nothing
!”

Still stoic, he told me, “Be mad. You have every right. Cut my balls off. You have every right. Curse me out. You have every right. Seek revenge.
You have every right
. Don’t forgive me. I don’t deserve it. But leaving me? That’s not allowed. You don’t get to leave me. When you agreed to be Trev’s, you agreed to be Trev’s forever. Through shit storms and fuck-ups, you
stay
. There’s no leaving.”

Tears suddenly pooled in my eyes, threatening to spill. “You didn’t come after me. You didn’t! Why? Why would you just leave me to choke on the pain? Why?”

Trevillo sighed, and it was the first sign of emotion he showed since he arrived. “Aside from the fact I was out of the country within that same hour Monday, how … how could I have talked myself out of that, Krissan? Tell me? How could I have explained it to you? Should I have been a dickless asshole and blamed it all on Sarah when I know I could’ve controlled myself better than I did?

“I’ve never had a
girlfriend
before. I’ve never been in a situation like this before. So I didn’t know the first goddamn thing to say to you if I called you. I tried, many times, but hung up before the phone even rang. What the fuck do I say to something like that? I still don’t know how to handle this shit. I just knew the minute I got off that jet, I wasn’t going to let you leave me.”

He drew a hand from his pocket and rubbed his forehead. “Now, since you know how to handle situations like these, try talking yourself out of what happened with you and your brother. Try explaining that shit to me. I’m all ears. Teach me. You start, and I’ll follow your lead.”

I sucked in my bottom lip and worried it between my teeth as I tried to find the best angle to explain what happened with Jahleel. “Okay … Um, okay … I was mad. Yes, that’s it. I was mad!”

“I was weak,” he followed.

“I-I wanted to forget about you,” I told him.

“I thought about you the whole time,” he put in.

“I, uh … he was … I was upset and … ”

Yeah, this was hard.
There was nothing else I could find to explain the horridness of what went down with Jahleel and me.

“Pack your stuff.”

Looking up at in him disbelief, I tried to let him understand
what
happened. “Trev, I just had another man’s cock
inside
me.”

“It’s not enough to make me stop wanting you.”

“Are you seriou — ”

In the next second, he moved in and pinned me against the wall. “Listen to me, Krissan. They say you can’t choose who to love. I say that’s bullshit. They say love just happens by surprise. I say that, too, is bullshit. Because I
chose
you. I chose to make you mine, and now I’m choosing to love you. To love you and love you fucking hard and unswervingly. And I’m gonna make damn sure you love me back. I choose you, Krissan. You. And I swear I’ll damage anyone who tries to stop that.
You’re chosen.
Don’t you ever fucking forget that.”

Holding my chin with his thumb and forefinger, he tilted my head up so that my eyes aligned with his. “This thing between us, is until death. What happened here tonight, is never gonna happen again, because I’m taking you with me, and I’m never letting you out of my sight. I’ll give you a new position at TDR flexible enough so you are with me whenever I have to leave the country. Wherever I go, you go. We only get one chance to fuck up. I used up my chance Monday, and you used yours up tonight. We get no more chances. Now, things get real fucking serious.”

“But how — ”

“That’s it.” He scooped me up off the ground and into his arms, then marched out the door. “You’ve had more than one chance to pack your stuff.”

He made long, steady strides down the driveway to his car, opened the passenger side door, and buckled me in. As he made to close the door, I stuck my foot out. I couldn’t just leave the house with nothing at all. Plus, I was still holding my goddamn panties in my hand!

“Let me at least get my workbag? I’m still working on a project for you, Trev, remember? So I need my laptop and order sheets. It’s not an excuse to run, I swear. I just need my stuff for work.”

He watched me with a distrustful gleam, then said, “Tell me where the bag is,
I’ll
go get it.”

I sighed in resignation. “On the armchair in my bedroom. Oh, and bring — ”

Trevillo pushed my foot back into the car and slammed the door in my face. I folded my arms with a huff and sat back in the car seat.

Everything had just turned into one big clusterfuck. I didn’t even know how to go about fighting Trevillo’s hostile takeover of my life. But I also wasn’t arguing about leaving because I was unsure of how things were going to work out with me and Jahleel. How would we go back to who we were after what happened?

Then there was Trevillo who’d just shrugged his shoulders at me cheating on him. As if it was no big deal.

The night had taken a drastic turn and dove straight into a sea of confusion and incredulity. Two love confessions. One ruined a relationship, and one patched up another.

On the bright side —

I didn’t get to complete the thought, proving there was no ‘bright side’ to this night, because there was the sound of the car door behind me opening, and before I could even turn my head, a strong-scented cloth covered my nose and mouth. In the next second, I blanked out.

T
here was a hole in his head.

The image of Krissan’s legs wrapped around Jahleel’s waist, and the sound of her soft, breathy voice moaning as he thrust inside her burned a hole into Trevillo’s head. And he knew the hole was going to be there, unpatched, for a long, long time. Maybe even for life.

But, he was willing to deal with it.

He was willing to deal with the fact another man had screwed his woman, just as he had unremorsefully screwed other men’s women. It was his retribution. Karma was one nasty, cock-sucking, revenge-seeking bitch. And if she were ever fleshly, he’d fuck her, too. Then shoot her.

In the head.

Bitch.

Trevillo had driven straight to Krissan’s house the minute he stepped off his jet, returning from his grueling trip to the BVI. He couldn’t have gotten there fast enough. He missed her and needed to see her.

He loved her.

As he’d begun his walk up her driveway, his head down, hands in his pockets while he thought about what he’d say to her when he saw her, a crying woman bumped into him then quickly muttered her apologies and tried to go around him. He gripped her arm to stop her and question the reason for her tears, but when she looked up at him, he recognized her as the infamous Pop/Rock artiste Saskia Day. He remembered seeing her leave the house a couple of weeks ago.

With red, swollen eyes, she looked up at him and as recognition glittered across her face, she shook her head and warned him in her accented voice thick with emotion, “You might not wanna go in there … ” Then she left.

Striated with agitation, Trevillo went ahead anyway through the front door left ajar, and at the first sound of Krissan’s intimate urgency, the hole started to burn in his head …

One factor that helped him cope with this, was knowing what Krissan didn’t know he knew. He stood in the entryway of the kitchen long enough, watching them, to realize she used Jahleel as a substitute for him. Long enough to have heard her whisper, “
I love you, too, Trev.
”

That’s all he’d needed to hear.
His
name.

So instead of grabbing Jahleel to beat the sister-loving shit out of him, stuff Krissan in the fucking oven and turn the heat up so she’d burn to crisps,
then
set their house on fire … he’d simply turned around, went back out the door, quietly closed it, and rang the doorbell.

Krissan had saved their lives and didn’t even know it.

She’d been thinking about
him
. She did it for revenge.

Trevillo knew it was wrong trying to justify what Krissan did, but it was helping him with the harrowing pain.

He was an asshole, he knew. And life wasn’t ever kind to assholes. Life gave everyone their fair share of shit according to how they themselves dish it out to others. He couldn’t have possibly believed after all of his sins and debauchery, using and manipulating people, God would just send him some sweet little girl who’d be too innocent and pure to fuck him over.

Not him.

For rest of the world, life did good for them, life came around for them, life gave them chances. But for him, he had to do good for himself. He had to go his own route because life’s favorable wind never blew in his direction, and he had to make his own choices and take his own chances. Life hated the shit out of him, yet it couldn’t do what it wanted to do and
leave
him. Screw it. He’d love when
he
was ready to love. He’d die when
he
was ready to die.

Trevillo entered Krissan’s bedroom, picked up her brown LV workbag from the armchair where she said it would be, and turned to leave the house. He wasn’t taking a goddamn thing else. He would get her a houseful of new shit. Whatever she wanted. Everything here was getting left behind.

Krissan Kingston was still his angel’s feather despite what he’d witnessed tonight. She’d only gotten the tip of her feather dirty.

One conclusion he’d came to throughout it all, was that he would not lose her. He was in love with her, and he wasn’t letting her go. He chose her. Decidedly chose her. Mind made up. No turning back.

He wasn’t about to let a minor fuck-up of hers which was induced by a great fuck-up of his shamble that choice. The choice to make her his legally, contractually, sexually, emotionally, every goddamn ‘ly’. He wanted her to share his billions with him. His businesses. His life. He wanted her to write shitloads of songs for him and sing them to him — naked, with just her guitar across her shoulders — after a hard day of work. He wanted to cook for her and spoon-feed her for the rest of her life. He wanted to buy her ten more Audis. Let her drive his One-77. Whatever the hell she wanted, he wanted to give it to her. As long as she remained his. As long as she remained chosen. As long as she remained …