A Kingpin's Obsession: Ajoni's Story (23 page)

The last time I did that earned me a second baby with the same part-time father. I am not interested in doing that again, or getting a much worse result.

“I want to go on my date while you take Anjuwan to Chucky’s.”

King nods, lets my hand go, and steps back to the sleigh bed behind him, then sits down on it and crosses his arms over his chest. “Aight, go on your date, but I can promise that you’ll be at dude’s funeral by next week.”

I realize then that it has been Calen visiting my house every afternoon, but King is sitting on my bed. I get a surge of anger, and spin around on my heels to face him. It is completely unfair that he does not want me, but does not want me with anyone else either, and I’m sure he is dead serious about killing my date.

“Why would you kill someone about me, King?”

He shrugs. “Because I know what I want.”

“Well that certainly can’t be me because you haven’t had shit to say to me since you starting coming to see Anjuwan.”

“Says who?”

“Says fucking me!” I yell and point at my chest. “I’m the one that you’ve been ignoring for two weeks while you sat in
my
house and spent time with Anjuwan! I’m surprised your ass spoke to me at all before walking in the door!”

“Lines of communication work both ways, Ajoni. I’ve been waiting for you to have something to talk about with me.”

“Talk to you for what? You made it clear before I left Mecca that you wanted nothing to do with me! I am not about to run your ass up!” No matter how much I want to.

“Did I say I wanted nothing to do with you before you left Mecca? But you’re welcome to chase me anytime you want to.”

“You didn’t have to say you didn’t want anything to do with me, King. Your actions speak as loudly as your words do.”

“Do they?” he asks softly before easing off the bed to his feet.

Self-preservation tells me to back the hell up, then ghost the room, and not let King get anywhere near me, except backing away is the wrong move. My self-preservation must be out of order because I should have sidestepped towards the closed door instead, but he is already closing in on me, dropping his hands on the dresser on each side of me, and trapping me between it and his body.

“Where are you going, Ajoni? If I have to chase you again when I said I wasn’t going to, the least you can do is stand still and make the chase easy for me.”

“You’re still a goddamn predator,” I say winded, as if I have run a mile and cannot seem to take any air in, but he sucks it up all when he is too damn close.

His head lowers, aligning our mouths. His hovers without making contact with mine—that starts to drive me insane immediately.

“It’s good that you know I’m a predator, Ajoni, but I only hunt you.”

I have never heard sweeter words out of his mouth. “You haunt me too, always have.” I swipe my hand down my stonewashed jeans above black knee boots.

King grins and moves his mouth closer to mine, then stops two hair’s breadths away. “Good, but I won’t have to do either if you marry me.”

My mouth and eyes open wide as I descend into shock. “Did you just ask me to marry you? I thought you couldn’t forgive me for keeping Anjuwan a secret and sending you to jail. You agreed with me when I told you that you didn’t want me anymore.”

I stare at his mouth, waiting for an answer and torturing myself; staring at his lips is worse than seeing an oasis in a desert and not being able to get to it.

“I never agreed with you. I shook my head, remember? That means I wasn’t agreeing, and I needed time to consider all the reasons why you didn’t choose me when Larkin forced you to. If you had rode with the Blue Kings, you would’ve given birth to Anjuwan in jail and we both probably would’ve lost her to the system. Since I never really had a family besides my crew, I couldn’t really understand why you chose your mother over them, but they’re not your family. They’re mine, and you shouldn’t have had to choose them over your blood family in the first place.

And then, there’s nothing like watching the woman you love about to lose her life in a drive-by while you watch, and knowing she wants to get rid of your child before it exists all because you can’t forgive her. All that made me see your side a little more clearly. I was slow, but I got there. I had no right to make you mine the way I did, or the right to keep forcing you to have to choose whether to take care of my babies without me or get rid of them because of my actions. But when a man is used to a certain way of living, it’s hard to change.”

“What about now?” I ask quietly, afraid of the answer.

He smiles. “I think you’ll suffer enough for keeping me and Anjuwan apart for the next nine months while carrying my other child. I
don’t
think this will be an easy pregnancy for you if you’re already sick two weeks in, but I started to forgive you when Nina got out the truck pointing a gun at you. I knew I was still putting you in fucked up situations, and knew deep down that I really have no right to be angry with how you get yourself out of them. I have been waiting for you to say that you want me in your life since you got on the plane and left my ass in Mecca without a goodbye, and you’re not the only one that thought you weren’t wanted. Every time I come here, you run into your office and hide.”

“I was giving you space to be with Anjuwan,” I lie.

“You were
hiding
,” he replies adamantly.

I bite my lip, trying desperately to not lean forward and bite into the ripeness of his bottom one. “Okay, I was hiding. It’s hell to look at what you want, and know you can’t have it.”

“So you do want me?”

“You know I love you, King. Why play?”

“You told me not to bring my lifestyle around you and Anjuwan after I met her for the first time. That’s a fucked up way to say you love someone.”

“I told you if you weren’t going to
change
it then don’t bring it around us. There’s a difference.”

He smiles. “Well, it’s changed. Raw and I are starting a cruise or yachting business here, whenever the hell he decides on which one, but you have to make a decision too and right now. Do you want King or Calen, Ajoni, because you can’t have a future with just one of them?”

That’s a good question that requires no thought.

Both sides of the man in front of me know exactly what to do with my body, and I do not want one without the other anyway. King has proven that he will kill for me, and I for him. That makes me feel protected and taken care of, while his soft side makes me feel completely loved. Calen Kingsley is everything that a woman could want in a man and former kingpin, and I would not have him any other way.

“I love you both,” I say finally.

“Good because both is what you’re going to get.”

I lose a little more control and move my mouth closer to his, but he hasn’t said he loves me yet. I don’t know what I will do if he doesn’t.

“Don’t play with my emotions, King. I’m trying my hardest to get over you.”

“Why not play with your emotions while you try to do what I have already discovered that I can’t?” he asks with an arrogant smile. “You played with my emotions when you told me you didn’t want me in your life, and then scrambled my brains in the bathroom of the hotel. I have no hopes of every getting over my obsession with you. Can you live with that?”

“I wasn’t playing with your emotions, King, just trying to sort through my own obsession with you. I needed to you to give up the Blue Kings for your daughter and me, or at least for Anjuwan. I wasn’t sure that you would, but I couldn’t keep my hands to myself before I could find out. I haven’t been able to stay away from you since you laughed at me in the warehouse while I was sitting in your lap, and I don’t think I’ll ever get over you.” Once I realized there was a good man beneath the monster that everyone knows as King, and I haven’t been able to stop wanting him since.

“And you never will get over me if I can fucking help it,” he says low in his throat, then slams his mouth down on mine.

His hand slides under my shirt as his tongue flicks in and out of my mouth, blowing my senses wide open. I have enough mind left to guess that we are about to christen the sleigh bed that I brought purely because it reminded me of him, and I never wanted to forget him. It took me eight years exactly to figure that out, but I did not

need the bed or anything else materially for that. This man’s ownership is stamped on every inch of my flesh, and I cannot get it off even if I wanted to.

His hands stop roaming suddenly, his mouth stops moving against mine. “You do realize you keep calling me King, right?”

“You’re being real demanding right now. That’s the shit that King does?”

“Can you handle that?”

“Watch me,” I say just before grabbing for both sides of his head and pulling his mouth down to mine again.

He plays with my mouth for a while before he picks me up and carries me to the bed. When I am standing on my feet again at the foot of it, he pulls away then drops to one knee and reaches into the right pocket of his jeans. I know what he is about to do, and I am already crying when he looks back up at me with a tiny, blue velvet box in his hands. When he opens it, I stare down at the yellow-gold wide band with a princess-cut diamond the size of a boulder centered in a floating halo of smaller diamond.

“I have been toting this damn thing for weeks, Ajoni. I brought it the morning of your birthday and wanted to give it to you then, but you were still running from me. No more running. Be my Queen for real. I need you as my everything. You’ve been that for so long I can barely remember when you weren’t. Don’t make me live without—”

“Yes, Calen, my King!” I scream, not needing his ‘I love you’, if I am his everything, and splay the fingers of my left hand in front him.

He smiles widely while placing the ring on my finger, and it is heavy as hell, but I can handle the burden as long as my King is by my side.

The door flies open and crashes into the wall. Seeri enters with a frying pan in her hands. She stops in the doorway while we stare stupidly at her, then she sags against the door.

“Ajoni let this be the only man of yours that I have to deal with because I’m too old for this shit. King, I see you’re on your knees where you should be, and that can only mean one thing. But if you hurt my child or let anyone else do it again, I and this frying pan will find your big ass wherever it is at. It took you long enough to do right by her and Anjuwan… now bring your ass here so I can welcome you to your family with a hug.”

King stands up, hovering over me. “No one is ever going to hurt her again because I love her, Seeri.” He then turns away to give Seeri what she wants, and my family is almost complete—Jonny is the only one missing now.

~*~One year and one week later in Mecca County, Georgia at King’s old house~*~

“King,” I call upstairs from the living room now decorated with the oversized gray and black furniture, artwork, and old and new snapshots of our family from my house.

I added new black wood tables of every size and variety with round edges and pictures of Calen with and without his family. Artificial flower arrangements of every size adorn each table. I sit in front of a massive bouquet in a gray vase with white lilies, gray hydrangeas, and black magnolias, frustrated with King stomping up and down the steps because he is crabby as hell from not getting any sleep last night. Neither did the baby, Calen Jr., or CJ as we call him, who is now sleeping and teething already at three months old. He will not be asleep for long either if his father who volunteered to sit up with C.J. all night does not stop stomping around the house.

King treads heavily down the steps in black boots, a plaid red, white, and black shirt and black jeans.

“What do you want, baby?” he asks grumpily.

“I want Calen,” I say simply.

He laughs, crosses the room, and plops down on the couch beside me before leaning sideways and kicking his feet up on the lounge end of the chair that I sit in the middle of.

“Ask me for something that you don’t have already, Ajoni.”

“Calen is the only thing I don’t have right now.” I have everything else a girl could ever want; healthy family and babies, and the love of my life by my side every day.

While King was doing time in The Pen, his mother, Vanessa Moore, got her shit together, got the hell out of Mecca, and then found Calen in DC visiting Anjuwan a week after he proposed to me. She tracked him down with Raw’s help as soon as she learned that her son was out on early release, and tries to make things right between them every day. Calen lets her, King not so much.

Jonny got a day pass after a month into his six-month stint in rehab, to come to the quick wedding Raw and Seeri threw together for us in the back yard here. It was simple, beautiful, and everything a queen could want simply because everyone that counts was there
—
I cried like a damn baby and ruined my makeup twice when my father appeared at the bottom of the stairs to walk me a path of red petals that lead from the balcony doors to the pool covered with a glass top for the wedding.

Calen stood on it with Raw, as his best man, and Leek between them. I felt some type of way about Leek being at my wedding as I walked toward my husband-to-be, until I realized that Leek was wearing a preacher’s robe, and going to be the one to marry us. He apologized for his part in the bad beginning to my and King’s story for everyone to hear. With King’s eyes silently begging for me to give Leek another chance, I had no choice but to accept his apology or risk hurting the man I love again. I won’t ever do that again if I can help it, so I kept the peace and let Leek marry us.