Love the Way You Lie (Stripped 1)

Then Kip calls me back, because they’ve reached the bottom, the hollow beneath the fountain.

Of course we find a pile of dirt and leaves, sprinkled in by the storms. There are also cigarette butts and other unsavory items. The fountain is in front of a strip club, after all.

And we find a leather case that contains a lifetime’s worth of jewels. Of treasure.

A bounty that even my father couldn’t have matched.

Kip is holding the box, looking inside. I wonder what he sees. Not the dusty, vibrant jewels. His father’s sin? His mother’s shame?

I place a hand on his arm. “Now you can have everything your mother wanted you to.”

He looks up at me, bemused. “What?”

“The mansion. The trips around the world.”

He smiles. “I keep my mother’s house in her memory. I’ve hardly lived there. I’ve mostly been traveling. Some for my job—private security. Others were just places I wanted to go.”

“Oh.”

“It’s yours anyway,” he says softly. “It belongs to your mother, to you, not me.”

Yes, I could use the money. Far more than Kip, apparently, with his private security jobs and jet-setting ways. I had a few thousand stuffed under the mattress back at the motel. And my father’s money, most of which was funneled into offshore accounts I didn’t have access to.

Dirty money. I’m better off without it. I believe that, but it also means I’m broke.

But I don’t want to take the jewels either.

Kip doesn’t see their rich colors, the shimmery strands of gold and cut jewels. And neither do I. I see my mother’s wish for true love—and her betrayal when she left me behind to find it. I see my father’s deepest pain when his wife left him…and the strange mercy he showed when he let her live.

These jewels belonged to my mother, but they were gifts from my father. Bought with money from booking and prostituting and shaking down other criminals. And then Kip’s father stole the jewels. So who’s to say who they rightfully belong to?

“Clara,” I say.

Kip raises an eyebrow. “A legacy?”

“We won’t tell her how they came to be here. Just that they’re all that’s left from our mother. And they’re for her. She can buy herself a mansion or travel the world. Whatever she wants to do.”

He picks up a ruby pendant, blood-red against his tanned skin. “And you? What do you want to do?”

“I wouldn’t mind traveling.” I look down at a crack in the sidewalk. No flower grows up between it. This isn’t a place for miracles. But I’m wishing for one anyway. “Mostly I want to stay in the house with the yellow curtains and the old books.”

He takes me into his arms, hands circling my waist, pulling me close. “Not much of a legacy for a mafioso’s daughter.”

I look into his eyes—this man of hard muscles and tattoos, of leather and chrome, of heart and honor. “We’ll make our own legacy.”

He brushes his lips across my cheek…my jaw…and lower. “I like the sound of that.”

“That wasn’t a euphemism.”

“Mhmm.” He’s got a very hard legacy pressed against my stomach now, rocking gently.

“Kip, we’re outside. In daylight.” At least the afternoon hour means the club is closed for business. Ivan grumbled about the hassle of it all, tearing down the fountain and the money it will take to put it back to rights, but he backed down again under Kip’s quiet demands. I suspect he has some dirt on Ivan actually—and isn’t above using it.

Some things run in the family.

Like the fact that I’m just fine with that. This bounty rightfully belongs to my sister. And for once, finally, I know I did the right thing in running. I know she’s better off in the spare room in Kip’s house, going to college, and then making her way free of the ties of her past.

As for me, I have my own bounty. And that is definitely a euphemism.