HADES: Stephanie and the Ruthless Mogul: Ruthless MC Book 6 Page 2

  And that’s when I see something that stops my heart cold. Three stacked rings. On my left wedding finger. The two bottom bands are ringed with diamonds. The top band is also composed of small diamonds, but it sports a huge princess-cut, deep-red gem. Not a ruby, I guess from its darker hue, but a garnet. My birthstone.

  I’m married! The realization sends a bolt of sensation through my otherwise numb body.

  “How am I married already?” My shocked daze gives way to confusion and panic. Instead of staring at Swamp Boy, I demand to know, “And why are you here? Why am I here?”

  “You’re in the hospital,” he answers, his voice gentle but calm. “You were in an accident, and the doctors had to medically induce a coma to relieve some of the pressure on your brain. We’ve been waiting for you to come out of it for days now, but you weren’t waking up. I was afraid…”

  Tears well in his silver eyes, and I immediately feel terrible for worrying him. “It’s okay. It’s okay. I’m awake now. Thank you so much for staying by my side.”

  It suddenly occurs to me why he’d do such a thing. “Did Mama Fairgood send you? Is she here too?”

  He stills, and his face blanches.

  She’s dead. The thought emerges from the fog, clear and resolute.

  “She’s dead,” I whisper. “She’s dead, isn’t she? Oh God, she’s dead, and I never got a chance to tell her how much I loved her and appreciated her.”

  I’d planned to hunt her down after my mother fired her, ask my father for her address and drive out to the bayou to tell her how sorry I was about the way things had ended. But my father had sprung the virginity contract on me. And by the time I was an adult with my own bank account, it was time for me to go off to college.

  I’d always meant to make the time to go see her, and now it was too late.

  Hot tears well in my eyes.

  “Non, don’t cry.” Swamp Boy picks my hand back up and pulls it into his chest. “She knew. She knew you loved her, and she loved you right on back. She wouldn’t want you crying over her. C’mon now, Stephanie.”

  His words soothe me and my tears recede, but I’m still so confused. “Where are my parents? What hospital is this? Are we in New Orleans? If so, I should ask for a transfer. My father’s on the board of Lady of the Lake in Baton Rouge….”

  I trail off. Swamp Boy has gone completely still.

  “We’re in Ohio, ma belle.” The creases in his forehead appear even deeper than before as he asks, “What year do you think it is?”

  I reply in a careful tone, somehow suspecting my answer is wrong.

  Even before he replies with, “No, it’s almost ten years later than that. You’re twenty-eight. Not nineteen.”

  My stomach drops.

  Twenty-eight? I’m twenty-eight now, and apparently married and living in Ohio.

  But where is my husband? Why is Swamp Boy here instead of him? Had we hired him as a helper, like my parents had hired Mama Fairgood?

  A fleet of nurses burst in before I can ask him any of my many, many questions.

  “I’m so sorry, Mr. Fairgood,” one of them says to Swamp Boy. Meanwhile, another nurse shines a light in my eyes and ask me, “How are you feeling, sweetheart?”

  I always try to be polite, but I push away her bright light and crane my head. Something tells me I need to pay attention to what the nurse is saying to the grown-up version of Swamp Boy.

  “We were at an all-staff meeting when her monitor went off,” she continues with an apologetic wince. “But, thank goodness, it looks like your wife is finally awake. We’ll get a doctor in here right away.”

  My sluggish brain pushes to process her words as the other nurses flurry around me. Mr. Fairgood…your wife…

  The truth hits me like a thunderbolt wrapped up in a hurricane. Swamp Boy isn’t here as some kind of delegation for his dead mother. Somewhere between nineteen and twenty-eight, I’d married the god boy I couldn’t forget.

  Then I forgot him.

  “Oh my God.” I slap a hand over my mouth. “You? You’re my husband?”

  CHAPTER 2

  HADES

  There are a few tellings of the

  Hades and Persephone myth….

  Hades saw Persephone

  and fell in love with her in an instant.

  There has been much heated debate about

  whether an arrow from that rascal Cupid /Eros/Amor

  was involved since the beginning of the tale’s retelling.

  There has been even more current

  debate about whether the underworld god’s love was

  Desire,

  Obsession,

  Or

  Entitlement.

  (Perhaps it was all three?)

  In any case, Hades saw her,

  then conspired with Zeus to possess her.

  Maybe she was entrapped.

  Or perhaps she was a gift.

  Or possibly a payment of some godly sort.

  There are too many versions of her

  descent into the underworld to count.

  But however the story goes,

  she became his.

  And in almost every version of the myth,

  Persephone was incredibly unhappy

  with her sudden entrapment.

  But after a time, she came to love

  her black-hearted captor.

  And somehow they became

  one of the most surprising and best-known

  Happily-Ever-Afters

  of all time.

  However…

  Galen Fairgood did not take

  the ending of this myth

  into full account when he

  named himself Hades

  and renamed his beautiful Persephone.

  (Persy for short.)

  “You? You’re my husband?”

  The woman he nicknamed Persy back when she belonged to him stares up at him from the VIP suite’s hospital bed with her mouth hanging open. For a time, he had possessed her body and soul, refusing to consider or care about the ethics of doing so. She’d been Persephone to his Hades. A reluctant bride gifted to him.

  “A blood debt.”

  That had been his short answer to the few who dared to asked him about her sudden appearance in his life, including Persy herself.

  “You are a blood debt. Your father gave you to me in exchange for his own life.”

  And that had been his version of the Hades and Persephone story.

  Until now….

  There’s no indignation or fury in her expression. Only surprise and confusion.

  Persy doesn’t remember him. His skin tingles with a matching shock.

  She’d called him by his long-lost name, Swamp Boy—the superhero he’d wanted to be when he was a boy. Because that was who she saw when she woke up to the sight of him. The thunderstruck twenty-one-year-old American hero by her pool. Not the cruel god he’d become.

  She doesn’t remember Hades. Only Swamp Boy.

  Also, she expects an answer to her question.

  He’s not sure what to tell Persy….How to explain why he lied to the nurses and the rest of the hospital about their status. That he wanted…no he needed to be close to her after he found out about her accident.

  The charge nurse who’d apologized to him speaks before he can come up with anything.

  “Do you not remember your husband, Mrs. Fairgood?” she asks. Her forehead knots with worry.

  “I don’t,” Persy admits to the nurse while continuing to stare wide-eyed at Hades. “I remember meeting you, but not dating or marrying you.”

  By some act of God, other than major bruising, nothing was broken in the accident, and they’d taken the bandages off once the swelling had gone down.

  But she still looks fragile as a leaf. Fear and confusion shadow over her gorgeous face, and her voice quavers as she tells him, “I’m so sorry. I can’t believe this….”

  Hades has to look away. A lump of pain forms in his throat, too thick to
swallow down.

  Merde. He needs to speak up. Explain to both Persy and the nurse that this isn’t a lapse of memory on her part but an outright lie on his. He has to—

  “I can’t believe I’m actually married to you. This is like waking up to a secret dream come true!”

  Persy reverses the hold on their hands, and a new expression burst across her face. One of pure happiness, innocent and bright.

  Her smile hits him like a grenade, and it explodes in his chest, obliterating all the words he was about to speak—all the solemn explanations he’d been prepared to give her when…if….she woke up.

  “Non, ma belle, you are my dream come true.” He kisses her hand. “It is the other way around.”

  Somewhere in the background, one of the nurses audibly sighs, while another one whispers under her breath, “I wouldn’t mind waking up to him myself.”

  But the charge nurse continues to eye Persy with a concerned expression. “If you’re really having trouble remembering, we’ll need to get the doctor in here right away. Mr. Fairgood, if you don’t mind waiting outside while we—”

  “No!” Persy cries out. She grips his hand tight in her much smaller one. “I want him to stay here. With me.”

  She doesn’t remember him. But it’s him she turns her large brown eyes up to and beseeches, “I’m scared. Please don’t leave!”

  She’s never touched him like this. She was spitting furious at him during the first few weeks of her unwilling imprisonment and psychological torture. Sometimes her small hands would curl into unconscious fists with the instinct to claw his eyes out.

  Good, he’d thought back then. He’d wanted to reduce her to swearing and tears, bring her down to his level where rage and desire walked the same thin primal line.

  His cruel god desire for her went beyond possession. He wanted to break her out of that pretty, refined princess mold. Mentally, physically, and emotionally. At a soul level, he wanted her to understand she was little more than an animal who belonged to him. At the time he’d been convinced that was the only way to reconcile letting the daughter of his mother’s murderer live.

  But no matter what he threw at her, she’d remained exactly what she was—what he secretly feared: better than him…too good for him.

  Back then, her clear but unuttered hate had been a balm of sorts. Every grind of her teeth, every flash of her eyes filled him with a cold pleasure.

  But that was then. Now…

  “Please do not leave me,” she says again, her voice soft and broken.

  Her plea nearly buckles his knees.

  Never in a thousand years would he have ever thought he’d hear Persy beg him to stay by her side, to provide her with the comfort of his presence.

  “Of course. I am not going anywhere, cher bebe.” He switches her hand to his left palm so that he can wrap an arm around her shoulders. “Do not worry yourself about that. Ssh, everything will be all right. I am here. I am here for as long as you need me, ma belle.”

  She buries her head in his chest and asks him questions as if he were a doctor. Why can’t she remember him? What’s happening? How long have they been married? Wait, do they have any children?

  He answers the best he can. “I don’t know….Let’s see what the doctor says….About seven years….No, not yet.”

  Three truths and a lie. It feels like some kind of game he and his sister would play with Nanan Cherise, the Cajun godmother who raised him while his mother worked for the Perreaults.

  “Is French her native language? Should I page a translator along with the doctor?”

  Hades doesn’t realize they’ve fallen into speaking his preferred language until the charge nurse asks him these questions.

  Apparently, neither did Persy. Her body tightens underneath his arm. “I speak fluent French? When did I learn to do that?”

  No, he won’t leave. Or tell her the truth. Not yet. Not while she clings to him, needing him for the first time in her life. He holds her close for the next hour as the nurses examine her and three doctors from three separate departments ask her the same series of questions.

  She has amnesia—obviously. But the doctors want to run several acronymed tests before they make any formal declarations.

  They don’t need any tests to tell them what she lost, though. Nearly a decade of memory, along with their version of the Hades and Persephone story.

  And yes, she also speaks French now with an effortless flow and a slight Cajun accent. If not for the memory loss, he’d find it impossibly cute. And irresistibly attractive.

  At this level of French, she was the kind of woman his godmother dreamed of for him.

  Nanan Cherise had been a battle-ax of a woman, fierce and prideful. But she’d gone fast after receiving the news of his mother’s death. So fast, he’d wondered for the first time in his young life if the two women who’d somehow come to raise a family together had been something more complicated than the sister friends they claimed to be.

  They’d slept in the same room for as long as Hades could remember. On twin beds, sure, but there had been no nightstand placed between them. And there had been several ugly fights behind closed doors after his mother announced she was pregnant with Ellie…followed by months and months of angry silences.

  Had that been less about his mother being a gros couillion—a big fool, as Nanan Cherise had claimed? Those boyhood memories rewrote themselves in his adult head as he and his little sister stood by their godmother’s hospice death bed just a few weeks after they gave his mother a proper cremation and spread her ashes in the swamp.

  Ellie and he each held a hand as she dispensed her last wishes.

  Between the COPD and the heart failure she hadn’t bothered to get diagnosed before a trip to the hospital was required, it was an effort to talk. But she used her last breaths to call Ellie a tete de cabri, a head of a goat, the colorful Cajun version of stubborn. Then she made her promise never to change.

  “Bien, bien,” she wheezed after Ellie assured her she wouldn’t with tears streaming down her cheeks. “You gon’ need that goat head in this hard world, cherie.”

  Then Cherise turned her rheumy eyes to her godson. “Promise me you’ll marry a woman who speaks French, cher.”

  It didn’t matter that he wasn’t her blood son or Cajun by birth. His real name, Galen, sounded Gallic enough, and Cajun French was dying. “Raise your kids up in our language.”

  Back then, his only plan had been revenge. Their mother had died terribly because of Antoine Perreault, and decades before her time, and now he and Ellie were losing their second mother too.

  “I’ll try,” he answered, merely to appease her.

  Either that was enough for Nanan Cherise, or she just didn’t have any more fight left in her. On that weak promise, she closed her eyes, and a few minutes later a medical professional entered the hospice room to call her time of death.

  “This is not what you expected, non?”

  Persy’s voice pulls him out of the memory

  They’re back in her suite, awaiting the results of the many tests her doctors had ordered. Persy is still speaking in French, playing around with the found talent like it’s a toy, a consolation prize for the many years she lost.

  “Non,” he admits, also speaking in French. “But I am happy you are alive.”

  She stares at him, then seems to force herself to blink. “I am sorry, I cannot stop looking at you. It is only, you are incroyablement beau gosse….”

  She breaks off with an embarrassed dip of her head and finally switches back to English. “Oh, my God, I just said that. Out loud. Please tell me I was a lot cooler than this when we were dating—like, I didn’t spend the entire time staring at you and calling you unbelievably hot in French.”

  He smiles at the image. “Non, you played it very cool. And don’t worry, I called you ma belle and spent a whole lot of time staring back at you.”

  “My beauty…wow. I’m beginning to see why I got so serious about improving m
y high school French.”

  She laughs in a delighted way that makes parallel timelines play out in his head. What would it have been like to date her like a normal guy? To have married her and raised a family with her as Nanan Cherise had wanted.

  “Did I call you mon beau?” she asks with a hopeful tone.

  “Non, you never called me that,” he admits, struggling to keep the conflicting thoughts off his face.

  He must not have done a great job of it.

  Her smile fades and she asks, seemingly out of the blue, “My mom’s dead, isn’t she?”

  “Yes,” he answers, fully in English. “How did you know?”

  She just looks away and asks, “And my father too?”

  The painful knot forms in his throat again as all her forgotten memories flash through his head. He can’t talk. Still can’t speak that man’s name out loud. So he simply nods.

  And she blinks a few times before saying, “I think I must have known that. I don’t feel upset or shocked. Just a little sad.”

  Just a little sad….A silent movie of all the events that ruined their happy ending unspools in his head. “Hades, don’t. Please, don’t. If you truly love me, don’t do this.”

  “Did my mother die before or after we became a thing?”

  Her question pauses the terrible movie mid-frame.

  “We were a thing the moment our eyes met,” he snarls. “You were mine from the start, even if I had to wait…”

  He breaks off. Remembering the situation. Remembering himself.

  “You dropped out of college to be with me. But she didn’t know about us before she died, if that’s what you’re asking.”

  “Okay, I get it.” She gives him a chagrinned smile. “I wasn’t able to resist you when you showed back up in my life. But I also wasn’t able to disappoint my mom. That tracks. You must have hated me for being such a coward.”