Page 132 of Reckless Love

“I can’t wait to be your wife,” Ava says, kissing me.

As I slide into her a little while later, she whispers in my ear, “I love it when you come home to me.”

I can’t believe that I somehow ended up back here with everything I’ve ever wanted, no longer a dream but the greatest reality. “Home is my favorite place to be,” I whisper back.

Chapter Forty-Seven

Ava

True to his word, King Alexander ensures the prosecution process for my mother and Raul moves ahead smoothly and legally. We hear rumblings of them trying to intimidate witnesses or bribe judges, but nothing changes their slow march to justice.

I don’t attend a single day of Raul’s trial, but Stephen and I do pop a bottle of champagne the day my ex-husband is convicted of his crimes. Petty? Maybe. But I was celebrating my freedom as much as anything. Raul can’t touch me ever again.

Today, Stephen is testifying against my mother, who is facing multiple charges related to her most violent schemes—criminal solicitation and conspiracy along with aiding and abetting. My whole family is here, sitting on the prosecutor’s side, trying to send a message to her and to Bellerive society.

The only person sitting on her side of the courtroom is my dad, and he’s been on his phone for most of the proceedings. Mom must have a lot of dirt on him, too, because I don’t think it’s love that brought him to the courtroom every day.

Celia Tucker’s reign is over. Her children no longer condone or support the things she’s done—not that we ever truly did, but we turned away from too much, excused things we shouldn’t have, failed to ask questions that needed to be vocalized. We were complicit. Not anymore.

At the start of Stephen’s testimony, the prosecutor doesn’t shy away from the role he played for my mother, going through everything he did in detail. Stephen didn’t want any of his testimony to be a surprise for me, so he’s been doling out his crimes in late-night increments. Some of his reveals have been hard to hear, because of the positions my mother put him in but also because she used his family as leverage when he wouldn’t comply. She’d threaten to get one of his parents fired or deem them unhireable to all her socialite friends, which would have put more financial pressure on them. The depths she’d go to in order to get whatever she wanted were limitless.

My mom’s behavior, which seemed harmless to me as a kid, was actually terribly sinister.

Once Mom’s defense lawyer starts questioning Stephen, I grow tense, and Ember, who’s sitting on one side of me, grips my hand in solidarity.

“He’ll do great,” Ember whispers.

“You and Celia Tucker’s youngest daughter are currently in a relationship, is that true?” the defense lawyer asks.

“Yes,” Stephen says.

“And at the time this relationship started, she was married, is that also correct?”

“Yes,” Stephen says.

“How did you two reconnect?”

“I run the Bellerive division of Tucker Securities, and Raul Santos hired us to protect Ava Tucker and Landon Foster.”

“Your son?”

“Yes,” Stephen says.

The lawyer skirts around Landon’s paternity, probably because of my mother’s role in the cover-up, but he goes after Stephen for our affair and his conflict of interest as someone employed by my husband. Each question causes anger to bubble in me at how bad he’s trying to make Stephen look. None of this has anything to do with my mother’s crimes. Stephen isn’t on trial.

“He’s trying to discredit him,” Nathaniel whispers to me from my other side. “Stephen’s handling it well.”

“You and Ava Tucker were together before when she was much younger, is that correct?”

“We started a relationship when Ava was eighteen, yes,” Stephen says.

Take that! I want to yell. I was legal. Although I hated Stephen’s restraint back then, I’m thankful for it now.

“That would have made you twenty-six?”

“Yes,” Stephen says.

“If your eighteen-year-old sister had dated a twenty-six-year-old man, would you have been okay with that?”