POV: Leonardo
The moment she stepped into my car, I knew exactly who she was. It’s not because I could see her face clearly through the dim interior lights of the Rolls Royce, and not because John had nervously whispered her name into my earpiece seconds before Luther shoved her toward my vehicle.
No...
I knew because of the scent wrapped around her skin. I took in a deep breath after she sat next to me, Sunshine and lavender. It was my gift, the perfume I had custom made six years ago. I lost it’s that night, after a drunken woman with teary eyes and a reckless smile stumbled into my private lounge during her bachelorette party and changed the entire course of my life without even realizing it.
My body reacted before my mind could catch up. A violent pulse slammed through me the second she slid onto the leather seat beside me, her soft thigh brushing the edge of my suit pants as she tried to sit properly without touching me too much. Heat exploded low in my stomach so suddenly that I nearly cursed aloud.
Fuck!
Not now, not after years of control. I clenched my jaw hard enough to ache and slowly turned my face toward the tinted window so she wouldn’t notice the immediate change in my breathing.
Six years...
Six fucking years, and my body still reacted to her like a starving man finding water in the desert. The customized pills my doctors developed after that night had worked for a while.
Barely...
They dulled the edge enough for me to function, enough for me to continue building my empire and dismantling trafficking routes across my city without losing control every time her face crossed my mind.
But the pills only worked when she was far away, when she wasn’t sitting inches from me smelling exactly like that night, that cursed, beautiful night. I closed my eyes briefly, and against my will, memory dragged me backward.
June 5th...
Magic Fingers nightclub, the night everything changed. She had been drunk out of her mind when her friends dragged her into my club wearing a ridiculous silver sash that read BRIDE TO BE in glittering letters. She had complained loudly about her heels hurting while her friends laughed at her dramatic whining.
I remembered watching her from the upper balcony while handling a shipment interception downstairs. At first, she looked like every other rich socialite who wandered into my club looking for thrills before returning to their polished lives by morning.
Then she looked at me and smiled, and my entire fucking world tilted. She wasn’t the prettiest woman in the room that night, she wasn’t the skinniest either.
But there was something painfully warm about her, something alive and unguarded that pulled at me in ways I didn’t understand. She laughed with her whole body, danced badly, stole drinks from her friends and laughed about it.
Then somehow, after too much tequila and several terrible decisions, she wandered upstairs into my private suite by mistake. Or maybe fate was just cruel. I still remembered the moment she looked at me sitting alone near the window. Most people feared me instantly, but she didn’t.
“You look lonely,” she had slurred softly, walking toward me with unsteady heels and glossy eyes. Nobody had ever spoken to me like that before, not after the massacre, not after I became Leonardo Blackstone instead of simply Leo.
That night, she sat beside me for hours talking nonsense while I listened like a man possessed. She told me she was getting married soon. Told me she was scared. Told me she loved her fiancé so much that it physically hurt her sometimes.
Then she cried...
And I made the mistake of touching her, just mere touch. One touch became another, then another. And before I realized what was happening, the lonely drunk bride-to-be was underneath me in my bed moaning my name like she belonged there.
Mine...
Even now, years later, remembering it made my body tighten painfully. She had been a virgin, I remembered the shock in her watery eyes afterward, followed immediately by panic.
Then the raid happened before we could even speak properly the next morning. Federal agents stormed one of my lower warehouses after we intercepted a trafficking route tied to a corrupt senator. The entire club descended into chaos within minutes.
And by the time I returned upstairs, she was gone. Gone with my perfume that sat on the bedside table, a gift I intended to give her just to show how much I love her and how much she means to me.
She was gone with my sanity, gone with the ability to control my own goddamn body. At first, I thought it would pass, I thought it was just stress, obsession, a temporary attraction. But days became weeks, and suddenly no woman in the world could affect me anymore.
Except her...
Only her...
Doctors called it an extreme psychological sexual fixation disorder triggered by emotional imprinting and trauma. A rare condition intensified by years of emotional suppression after my family’s murder.
I called it hell...
Because after that night, I became a prisoner inside my own body. I could be surrounded by naked women and feel absolutely nothing.
But one thought of her, one memory, one scent, and I would lose control instantly. The first time it happened publicly was a year ago at one of Zachary Jonas’s charity parties.
I had attended under a false identity to monitor one of his trafficking associates. Then someone shoved Kesley into the swimming pool during an argument between drunken socialites.
Nobody moved to help her, not Zach, not the guests, not even security. She surfaced gasping while people laughed. And before I could think, I was already in the water pulling her against my chest.
The moment her soaked body touched mine, I got hard so fast it nearly crippled me. I disappeared before anyone noticed, and that was the moment I realized something terrifying.
She truly didn’t remember me, she didn’t remember our night together, probably didn’t remember losing her virginity to a stranger days before marrying Zachary Jonas.
She must have buried the memory completely out of guilt or shame, convincing herself it was alcohol-induced nonsense she needed to forget in order to survive her marriage.
And I let her...
Because what else could I do?
Tell her the truth?
Tell a married woman trapped in a miserable relationship that her body still haunted mine six years later?
No...
Staying away was safer, for both of us. I built distance, discipline and control. I swallowed pills like candy and focused on my war against traffickers, against corrupt businessmen, against men like Zachary Jonas who sold women and children while pretending to be respectable members of society.
Then tonight happened...
Tonight, Zach unknowingly sent his own wife directly into my hands. I should have laughed at his foolishness. Instead, I was fighting for my fucking life in the backseat of my own car.
“You’re the one Zach sent?” I finally asked, my voice rougher than usual. She looked up cautiously, clearly trying not to annoy me.
“Yes,” she answered softly.
“I’m Kesley.” The sound of her voice wrapped around my nerves like fire. I flexed my fingers slowly against my knee, trying to regain control before she noticed anything strange.