When he put the key in the ignition and the car roared to life, he chuckled. I almost expected him to rub his hands together in glee.
Instead, he placed one hand on the wheel and put the car in gear with the other. Although I knew the sports car was capable of insanely quick acceleration, he pulled smoothly around the circular driveway at a reasonable speed.
Despite the fact that he wasn’t able to test the limits of the Porsche’s features, he still radiated pure pleasure.
“You really like fancy cars, huh?” I said, remembering his over-the-top collection that he kept protected in his massive garage.
He glanced over at me, sharing his tilted smile before pulling through the open gate at the end of his drive. “Guilty,” he affirmed. “How did you manage to figure me out?”
He was teasing me, and I suppressed the impulse to stick my tongue out at him. It was far too easy to slip into acting playful with Mateo when he was exuding this excitable energy.
“Your collection is almost hoarder-levels of insane,” I replied blandly, teasing right back. “Do you really need to own a working replica of the Batmobile?”
His rich, deep laugh boomed through the car, filling the space with warmth. I relaxed back into my leather seat, just like I wanted to snuggle into his big body.
“What man wouldn’t want to own a working replica of the Batmobile? I’m living the dream. Besides.” He shot me a smirk. “What else am I supposed to drive when some little troublemaker destroyed my favorite Ferrari?”
“Sorry,” I apologized quietly, my levity melting in the wake of guilt. His flashy cars obviously brought him great joy, and I’d broken one of them. “Did I totally ruin it?”
He shrugged, the softer smile he offered reassuring. “It’ll take a while to get all the parts to repair it, but you don’t have to be sorry. The damage to the Ferrari was my fault for scaring you so badly. Don’t worry about it. Adrián owed me a new ride, anyway. He just dropped off this sweet baby this morning.” He patted the Porsche’s dashboard.
My brows rose. “That’s a really nice gift.”
I was accustomed to my own family’s limitless supply of disposable wealth, but the idea of anyone offering such an expensive vehicle as a present was mind-boggling, even for me.
“It’s not a gift,” he explained. “It’s payment. Adrián ordered me to wreck my last one, and he made the mistake of promising to replace it with any model I wanted. I traded up.”
“Why would he order you to wreck your car?” Concern furrowed my brow. In my world, a car wreck wasn’t something to be taken lightly, but Mateo spoke about it so matter-of-factly. “Did you get hurt?”
He laughed. “Nothing was damaged other than my favorite Porsche. We had to ditch it when we took Valentina away from her husband. It was too conspicuous and easy to trace. Adrián made me abandon my baby to be dismantled and sold for parts. And I’d just bought her, too.”
“You helped Adrián rescue Valentina?”
His expression shuttered, enigmatic. “I helped him get her away from her husband and bring her back to LA from Bogotá. She’s safe from Hugo now. He’ll never hurt her again. Adrián made sure of that.”
I bit my lip, struggling to sort through my conflicted feelings. Adrián had always scared me, but now that I knew what he really was, he was downright terrifying.
Valentina wasn’t frightening at all. She was kind and compassionate: the total opposite of Adrián, as far as I could tell.
Her love for him was obviously genuine and utterly unshakable. It was evident in her glowing expression and reverential mannerisms every time she mentioned his name. I didn’t understand how she could love him, but she did.
And he must love her, too. I didn’t have a full understanding of the circumstances surrounding my kidnapping by Mateo, but I did know enough to realize that Adrián had risked a lot to rescue Valentina from her abusive husband. When Daddy had stolen her to send her back into that hellish marriage, Adrián had made the ruthless decision to take me as a hostage.
Mateo had ensured that I hadn’t been harmed in any way, but I understood that things were beyond tense and were balanced on a knife’s edge between Adrián and my father. When I’d first woken up in his house, Mateo had warned me that things would get very bloody if he gave me back to Daddy.
Adrián had put himself and Mateo in a potentially deadly situation so that he could save Valentina, the woman he loved.
The complexities of this dark new world I found myself in were far more confusing than I’d initially thought. When I’d still been living in my normal little bubble, drug lords and criminals were bad men who did evil things.