Page 67 of His Kingdom

“Owen wasn’t mine, though. I gotta go.” I cut the call before she can ask any more questions, and a text message from Melanie comes through almost immediately.

Melanie:

I love you. I’m sorry.

I swipe it off my screen, pocket my phone, and climb out of the car.

“You good?” Sammie asks me.

“Yeah.” I nod. I’m not, but my issues with my sister are just that. Mine.

ChapterThirty-One

Ipanicked. When I saw Charlotte was at the airport, I thought she was leaving me. I get it. I have fucking abandonment issues. But fuck… Just the thought had me breaking out in a sweat. I can’t let her go. I had no intentions of letting her go. But the thought she’d want to…

The door to the penthouse opens and Charlotte walks in. And straight away, all of my personal shit is shoved aside. She’s been crying. I stride over to her and tilt her face up. “Who made you cry?” I ask her.

Her brows draw down. “No one,” she says, looking away.

“Don’t lie to me, Charlotte. You’ve been crying.”

“It was one tear. I wasn’t crying and how can you even tell?”

“Because I know you. Who and why?” I press.

“It’s nothing. I called my sister.” She walks past me, setting her bag down on the table.

“What happened?”

“Nothing. I just wanted to check on her. I didn’t know how she felt about Owen. I thought she might have been upset,” Charlotte says.

“Okay. Do you want to go back to see your family? I can arrange a trip,” I offer.

“Home is the last place I want to be,” she says.

I reach forward and tug Charlotte against my body. “Home is where you’re standing right now. This is your home, sweetheart.”

“What if I don’t want to live in a casino?” she says against my chest.

“Then I’ll buy us a house,” I tell her.

“Maybe one day, when we have kids.Ifwe have kids. I just don’t think a casino is the place to raise them,” she says.

“Whenwe have kids, we will not have them anywhere near this cesspool,” I promise her.

“How’d you know where I was today?”

“Lucky guess?” I shrug, hoping she’ll drop the topic.

She shakes her head. “Try again.”

“I might have put a tracking app on your phone…”

“Why?”

“I need to know where you are, Charlotte. I have… There are people that will do anything to hurt me. As soon as the world finds out you are the single most important person to me, well, you become a target,” I explain cautiously. “But I’m not going to let anything happen to you.”

“Okay.” She sighs. “But you could have just asked me. I’ll tell you where I am. I don’t have anything to hide.”

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