Destined Desires Read online

  Table of Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

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  Dirk

  I am a master. An elitist. I am at the top of my field, and I know what I am doing.

  Women want me. They worship me. They come to me to fulfill all their needs—all of them.

  I can have any one of them I want. But I only want her.

  A goddess with a perfect body. So pure, so vulnerable. She takes notice of me, but I obsess over her.

  I know how this game is played, and I know she can have her pick of the lot as well. Anyone would be lucky to have her, and everyone knows it.

  No matter what, no one else can have her. Everyone wants her, but only I can have her.

  I will have her.

  I need her.

  Charli

  I am young, strong and smart. I can make it in this world.

  I know I am beautiful, and my beauty is the kind that the world finds captivating. I turn heads everywhere I go. I might not act like I notice, but I do.

  Yet, life is a game. Love is a game. Beauty is a game.

  I am beautiful, right?

  Everyone is telling me to change. I’m not good enough as I am.

  I need to be better.

  I want to be on top of the world, but I feel knocked to my knees.

  I will rise again.

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  Destined Desires

  A Bad Boy Billionaire Romance

  By Alizeh Valentine

  ©Copyright 2018 by Alizeh Valentine – All Rights Reserved

  In no way is it legal to reproduce, duplicate, or transmit any part of this document in either electronic means or in printed format. Recording of this publication is strictly prohibited and any storage of this document is not allowed unless with written permission from the publisher. All rights are reserved.

  Respective authors own all copyrights not held by the publisher.

  Table of contents

  FREE ROMANCE STORY

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Two years later

  What can I say about Cade Lowell?

  I can say that he's arrogant, domineering, and is used to having things his own way.

  I would also have to say that he's hot as hell and that absolutely nothing has changed since we broke up in high school—he leaves me just as breathless and frustrated as he did back then, when he was the only one who had ever touched me.

  He was just a boy the last time I saw him, but when I return to White Pines to deal with my late grandmother's house, I realize that he's all man now!

  I feel electric when I’m around him, and I can tell right away he wants me too, but there's more to love than heat.

  Will he ever get past his arrogant ways to see that I want a say in things too?

  When Mara's car ends up in a ditch on a snowy night, who should rescue her but Cade Lowell, her high school sweetheart? Sparks start flying, but can they make it work this time?

  Cade thought he was over the idea of love and family, but a chance encounter with Mara, the one who got away, makes him wonder if he can see a future in her green eyes.

  Mara's past comes calling in the form of her high school boyfriend, Cade, who's all grown up, rich, and hotter than hell. Can they leave the past behind and find a Christmas romance?

  Chapter One

  Mara

  It was technically still daylight when I left my youngest sister's house in Illinois. She had said goodbye to me, but Chloe hadn't been able to take her eyes away from Alex Reed, who had been standing there all apologetic, desperate to make amends.

  They really are cute together, I thought with some amusement. Even if Alex was closer to my age than my sister's, I couldn't help regarding them both with a big sister's eye. Really, all that trouble over a little romance.

  Despite my amusement, I was happy for my fey little Chloe. Alex would steady her, and she would maybe help him take that stick out of his well-bred, rich-boy ass. He had been nearly silent all through our drive from White Pines to Elgin, so grim-faced and determined to make things up to Chloe that I thought he might pop a vein. All he had wanted was Chloe's address so that he could drive to see her, but I had refused. No way, no how.

  Nope, not if she doesn't know you're coming and might be unhappy to see you. I'll drive, or you’re not getting a thing from me.

  Alex Reed has at least one brother, so he should know what it’s like to be simultaneously frustrated with someone and incredibly protective of them. Now here I am, leaving my sister to her happy ending and making the drive north to White Pines again.

  Shannon, the middle of us Becker sisters, was probably going to be waiting up for me, and I winced a little at the thought. We still needed to talk about what we were going to do with our grandmother's house, and that wasn't a conversation either of us was looking forward to. Chloe had said she would go along with whatever Shannon and I decided, and I barely avoided rolling my eyes. Of course Chloe weaseled her way out of the difficult decisions and went home with a rich, handsome doctor. Par for the course for Chloe.

  I had been hoping to get back to White Pine by eight or nine, but as the sky darkened and large clumpy snowflakes started to fall, I pushed that estimation back, and then pushed it back again. My car, a powerful and elderly Mercedes, drove just fine in the cold and snow, but the snow was coming faster and faster. I saw other cars peeling off the exits, the traffic thinning out, but I kept going.

  It'll be fine. I'll just take it slow...

  That mantra actually worked at convincing me for almost four hours of white-knuckled driving. I drove slowly but steadily, staring so hard into the swirling white blankness ahead of me that I felt as if my eyes were drying out. Time took on a peculiarly elastic quality. I felt as if I had been on the road forever. It felt as if I would never get to White Pines. Then, miracle of miracles, I saw a sign saying I was just twenty miles away from the city limits.

  “Oh thank god,” I muttered.

  Afterward, I couldn't figure out if it was the release of that vital bit of tension that caused what happened next, or if it was just some strange twist of fate. I was focused on the road, the conditions actually looking as if they were clearing up, and then there was a deer standing stock still in the middle of the road.

  As it was happening, it felt as if time stood still. It felt as if I had all the time in the world to look at the deer; to take in its dark eyes, its spindly legs, the round barrel of its body. All of this I saw as I wrenched the wheel to the side with a cry of shock. The deer seemed to wait until the last minute to run out of the way, and when I saw that I had cleared it, I tried to yank the car back onto the road.

  With a sense of inevitability, I felt the tires spinning underneath me as the car fishtailed, sliding backwards straight into the ditch. I rocked hard against my seat belt, and for a moment, everything went dark.

  The next thing I knew, there was a frantic tapping on the window, and I could see red lights flashing some small distance away.

  O
h god, is it the cops?

  I hastened to roll down the window an inch. Now I could see the man in the dark wool coat on the other side, a scarf pulled up to protect his face and a knit cap pulled down over his ears.

  “Are you all right?” he asked. “I saw your car in the ditch.”

  My first instinct was to say that of course I was all right, but instead, I took a moment to assess myself. I was definitely bruised and sore, but there was nothing overtly wrong with me. There was no tenderness at all around my head; I had likely simply blacked out from surprise, not impact.

  “I think I'm all right,” I said, and the man nodded.

  “Good. Turn off your car. I'll help you get to mine.”

  I turned off the engine, and I couldn't help feeling as if I had just pulled the plug on my beloved old car's life support. The thought made me feel oddly queasy, but I shoved it away, looking instead at the man on the other side of the door.

  “Are you a cop?” I asked.

  “Sorry, no,” he said. “But come on, I'll take you up the road to White Pines, at least.”

  I debated with myself for a minute, and then shrugged. The wind was howling, the car, now that it was off, was cooling off quickly, and I didn't relish waiting for a cop to finally show up.

  “All right, just...please don't be a serial killer or anything, all right?”

  He laughed at that, and I was surprised by how much I enjoyed the sound of his laughter. When I opened the door, he steadied me in the frozen weeds by the side of the road. I looked at my car, which looked like a wounded animal in the ditch, and sighed. But there was nothing to be done about that now. I followed him back to his car with its hazards blinking on the side of the road, and before I got in, I whipped out my phone and took a picture of his license plate defiantly.

  “What's that all about?” my rescuer asked as he got into the car. To my relief, the heat had been left running, and I focused on forcing some life back to my fingertips. Even that short amount of time outside had left them a little numb.

  “Texting it to my sister, to make sure that you actually get me to White Pines,” I said, flashing him a wide grin. My cocky attitude dared him to have a problem with my precaution. How a man reacted when a woman did something as simple as ensure her own safety was always telling. Some men understood, others got angry. This one laughed.

  “Well, you haven't changed a bit, have you, Mara?” he asked. “Still the same suspicious girl with the bright green eyes.”

  I felt a chill run up my spine as all sorts of explanations for his words tumbled through my mind. My hand was on the door handle when he put the car in drive and pulled away from the edge of the road. If he had moved one moment slower, I might have jumped into the blizzard and taken my chances.

  “Who the hell are you?” I demanded, feeling a little defensive—of course I was suspicious. When had the world ever given me a reason not to be?

  “You're going to hurt my feelings, darling,” he drawled. The car was warming up, and he pulled off the knit cap to reveal a head of thick, dark hair. When he glanced at me, a dozen half-intuited hints fell into place before my brain could fully catch up with what I was seeing. His face was leaner than it had been at eighteen. The strong bones there were starker, but the dark hair was the same, as were the gray eyes, visible in the overhead light.

  My hand flew to my mouth, covering it in surprise.

  “Cade...” I murmured. My tongue stuttered over his name, but the rest of me remembered well enough. It felt as if a forest fire raced through my body, making me draw a sharp breath.

  “Good to see you too, darling,” Cade said sardonically, a twinkle in his eyes, and we drove toward White Pines.

  Chapter Two

  Cade

  I had never been one to believe in fate, and I wasn't sure that I did right then. I certainly hadn't been thinking of fate when I saw the car in front of me spin off the road; the winking white tail of a deer disappearing on the other side of the road. Instead, my mind had been filled with images of death and blood, and when the woman in the car had finally stirred, I had felt a relief so profound it made me weak in the knees.

  After that, all I could think about was getting her to safety and making sure she was well. I had actually liked it when she took the picture of my license plate. There was something about the sharp way she answered me, her take-no-prisoners attitude, that drew me to her like a magnet. That was when I’d recognized her. I’d recognized the sharpness of her voice, the defiant lift of her chin, and of course by those green, green eyes that could take a man apart.

  It was Mara.

  It was Mara fucking Becker that I had pulled out of the snow, and if that wasn't fate, it was at least proof that the universe had a sense of humor.

  “God, Cade,” she said, and something in me thought I could hear some kind of warmth in her tone. If there was warmth there, I told myself not to trust it, but Mara had always been a straight shooter...about most things, anyway.

  “What are you doing out here?”

  “Oh the usual,” I said. “Dashing around in the snow, rescuing pretty girls. Being my regular irresponsible self.”

  God, what the hell was wrong with me? I sounded like a snarky teenager, and she would have had every right to take my head off for it. Instead she laughed a little; a warm sound that made something inside me come undone.

  “I'm not going to question it,” she said with a light laugh. “I know for a fact that you would have stopped for me ten years ago. The fact that you were still willing to stop now...I think that's to your credit.”

  Praise from the queen herself. It took effort to stop myself from warming underneath her words. I had been down that path before, and I knew that it didn’t lead anywhere good.

  “Didn't do it for your approval, princess,” I said with a shrug. “I would have stopped for anyone.”

  “Good,” she said, a little tartness entering her tone as well. “Do you want a medal for not checking to see whether a girl is cute or not before you help her out of a wreck?”

  I wanted to snap my teeth at her, and that was familiar too. Instead, I ignored her, choosing to focus on driving. The blizzard wasn't too bad, and the reports said that it would stop by two or three in the morning. My car could handle it, but I could end up in a ditch as easily as she had.

  In the old days, Mara would have sailed into a fight with her banner held high, or she would have stalked off with way more dignity and verve than any teenage girl should have. Now, though, she simply looked at me through the darkness. I could feel her gaze on me like a touch, and I drew a deep breath into my lungs, letting it out slowly.

  When I thought back to Mara and White Pines, I could never escape a shudder of pleasure; always hot, but as I grew older, strange as well. Christ, there had been plenty of women since Mara, the oldest of the Becker girls, but they were mostly gone and forgotten. None of them could draw a shudder from me the way the mere thought of Mara could. Now that she was in my passenger's seat, fully grown and with those same green eyes, those same full lips, I realized I hadn't been imagining it.

  I still wanted her, and that thought pissed me off.

  “What the hell are you looking at?” I asked, and she laughed again.

  “You, of course,” she said, and there was no anger in her voice at all. “Are you still so angry at me?”

  “I'd have to be pretty insane to still be mad about something that happened ten years ago,” I said gruffly. “Christ, we were kids.”

  “That didn't answer my question,” Mara said, but she didn't press. She looked out her window at the sleeting blizzard, and when she spoke again, there was a slightly dreamy quality to her voice.

  “I was mad at you for a long time, you know,” she said. “I might not have had a reason to be, but I was. I thought...I thought you had ruined a perfectly good thing, but now maybe I see why you did it. Why you left. Maybe it was even good that you did.”

  That stung more than I thought it would. I co
uld remember my last few nights in White Pines ten years ago. They weren't pleasant at all. The only person that had made them bearable was sitting beside me right now.

  “Was I right?” I asked. I had meant for it to come out snidely, but it was a real question. “About what you did, I mean. Did you go to a nice college out east, marry some guy with a portfolio and a perfect credit score at twenty-two, and have an adorable kid by twenty-four?”

  “I think you just described the first three or four guys I dated,” she said with a little laugh. “But no to the rest. That type of guy tends to want a housekeeper and a nanny more than a partner, and when I figured that out, I dropped out and moved to Atlanta.”

  I couldn't stop myself from laughing at that, and she shot me a look that was slightly irritated.

  “Miss Valedictorian dropped out?”

  “As a matter of fact, I did,” she retorted. “It was absolutely the right choice. I wasn't meant to work in business administration. I could see that I was surrounded by the kind of people I already wanted to kill at the age of nineteen, and if I’d kept on going with that crowd, I might have actually done it at twenty-five.”

  “All right,” I said, conciliatory in spite of myself. “I'm sure that speech worked on your parents. What did you do instead? What was in Atlanta?”

  “A guy,” she admitted, so shamefaced that I laughed again. “God, I wasn't even twenty, but I thought he knew everything—it was just dumb. We lasted about ten minutes after I’d moved down there.”

  “But you didn't move back?”

  “No. I had too much pride, but once I’d gotten over that, I’d fallen in love with the city, and by then I’d secured a magazine job. I'm an editor now. It's good work. I can do it on the road when I like. And it pays well enough.”

  I risked sneaking a look at her again. She wasn't looking at me, and she wasn't expecting me to be looking at her at all. There was a faint line of tension between her eyes.