Steele Hearts Redemption

Time was on my side. With a few changes to my
appearance I was able to move freely without anyone recognizing me
and make plans that will ultimately result in the demise of the
person I hated most. She has taken everything from me, even a
mother I loathe but needed and now it is my time to take everything
she loves away from her.

I discretely surveyed the building the man I
have been following for the past month entered and took note of the
security guards posted at the doors and the surveillance cameras on
the walls. Getting into the Production Company he built was going
to be tricky, too many people around, which meant I had to take him
where he lives.

Being one of America’s biggest movie stars,
he relished his privacy and chose to live in a secluded area of
Malibu beach making his home his oasis, his place of solitude,
which he preferred, very rare for a thirty-year-old man that exude
sex appeal, but his security there was very lax. Apart from a
live-in housekeeper and errand boy, his house was pretty much
empty.

The things I have planned for him would make
anyone cringe but I have decided in order to make her see how
serious I was about making her suffer, before I destroyed her, I
needed to go big and my first order of business was killing Gabriel
Steele, the hotshot movie star in her family.

A figure entering the building wearing a
familiar green jacket caught my eyes. At first, when I began
noticing this person stalking my prey I became a little worried but
it was when I saw the little stalker sneak onto the beach-house
property in the middle of the night and broke into his truck that
was parked in the driveway I realized I might have found the
distraction I needed to go about my revenge business while everyone
became distracted with the stalker.

I pulled out of the alley I had parked in
earlier and gave up on my surveillance of the Production Company.
My time would be better spent at his home. Switching on the radio
at full blast I happily sang along to the country song playing as I
made my way up to the Malibu coast.

**********

The shrilling sound reverberated through my
brain, intruding into my much-needed sleep as my eyes snapped open
and I fixated on the clock on my nightstand. 3:27 in the God-dammed
freaking morning. Whoever’s calling me at this hour better have a
good reason for doing so because the last time I looked at the time
it was 2:48, which meant I got less than an hour’s sleep. As the
fog cleared from my brain, panic sets in as I ran through the
different scenarios that may come with a phone call at this time of
night and considering the chaos that has enveloped my life lately
it could be a number of things.

I grabbed the phone off my nightstand and
without checking the caller ID, I quickly answered.

“Hello,” I croaked into the phone.

“Ally,” a voice that has haunted my dreams
and waking thoughts replied.

Images of short golden blonde hair, intense
and penetrating blue eyes, full, deliciously red lips and a
chiseled jaw flashed through my mind. Then there was that hard
muscular body that exuded power. Memories of being pressed against
that body and having his beautiful lips devour mines scuttled
around my mind. As if my life was not complicated enough, to have
Gabriel Steele call me in the middle of the night was not something
I expected, given our history.

“Ally, please don’t hang up,” he pleaded.

“Gabriel, what’s wrong?” I asked, sounding as
irritable as I felt.

“I’m fine thanks Ally, how are you?”

“Gabriel, it’s the middle of the night and I
haven’t been sleeping lately so you better have a God dammed good
reason for calling and interrupting my much needed sleep.”

“I need your help Ally,” he replied, suddenly
sounding exhausted.

“Ally, I have a problem and you’re the only
person I trust right now to ask for help from.”

The sound of his voice had me twisted up in
knots but knowing he might be in trouble make me nauseous.

“Tell me what’s wrong.”

“I have a stalker and I’m hoping you could
discretely find whoever it is.”

“Gabriel, why don’t you just go to the cops
or hire a Private Investigator in California, or even call Connor.
He’ll have Sterling put someone on it. This makes me wonder why you
are asking for my help when you could have easily called
Connor.”

Gabriel’s brother, Connor Steele a self-made
billionaire is married to my stepsister, Tessa, the only family I
have, apart from my psychotic mother who is currently in prison for
the attempted murder of Tessa and Connor and my biological sister,
Alexis, whose main focus was destroying Tessa and is currently on
the run for an actual murder. The Steele family accepted me into
their fold with loving arms, despite the tension that exist between
Gabriel and I and the thought that one of them might be in danger
meant that the whole family would rally behind that person.

Connor has an extremely competent security
team that he relies on to keep his entire family safe and I know
Sterling, his head of security, will find someone very capable of
protecting Gabriel, which brings me back to my original question,
why call me and not Connor.

“Gabriel, why didn’t you call Connor?”

“Ally, they have enough to worry about
without adding me to the mix. With Tessa being pregnant and your
sister, Alexis, still out there, somewhere, I don’t need to give
them another reason to worry.”

He was right. Even though she doesn’t show
it, I know the mess with Alexis is taking a toll on Tess and with
her becoming pregnant the second they got married, she didn’t need
any added stress on her, which was the main reason I didn’t tell
her I was fired from my job at the FBI more than a month ago.

“You’re right, but what do you think I could
I do that the cops or a PI couldn’t do?” I asked, looking for a
reason not to commit myself to going to California and being near
him.

“I could trust you to be discrete and not
leak any of this to the press, something I can’t trust anyone else,
not even the cops, to do Ally. I don’t need this mess escalating
any further than it should. If you come, we can go over everything
that’s happened within the last six months and if you still think I
should go to the cops I’ll go,” he pleaded.

“Besides I know you have the time Al, I know
you were let go from the FBI.”

I knew he didn’t mean to be hurtful but
hearing the words from him stunned as well as stung.

“How did you know,” I asked.

“My dad,” he replied, “He told me in
confidence, and no one else knows. He didn’t say anything to you
because he’s trying to find a way to get you reinstated.”

If I weren’t already lying down, I would have
been knocked of my feet. Conrad Steele was one of the kindest and
most caring men I knew. I didn’t want to know how he knew or what
he was doing but just the fact that he was trying his best to get
me back the job I love brought tears to my eyes. The least I could
do was helping his son when he needed it.

“I’ll fly out to California as soon as I can
Gabriel, I just need to come up with an excuse to give to everyone
for my leaving town.”

“Thank you Ally. Call me with the details of
your arrival and I’ll pick you up at the airport.”

Shortly after, I hung up with him and
resigned myself to another sleepless night.

**********

I was anxious as well as nervous knowing she
was coming to California. Anxious to see her and have her close to
me but nervous as hell to know what she might think of my lifestyle
here even though she’s the least judgmental person I know.

From the first moment I saw her I was
bewitched, with her quiet reserve and immense beauty. Her long
midnight black hair and contrasting soul-searching blue eyes
captivated me, combined with her full, lush pink lips and slender
yet enticing figure. I knew I wanted her from the moment I laid
eyes on her but I played down my attraction to her. With all the
chaos that was happening around her when I first met her I threaded
lightly but nothing prepared me for the overwhelming passion I felt
the first time I held her in my arms, even though that ultimately
ended in disaster. Thinking about her now made me hard. Being near
her always made me hard. I wanted to possess her in everyway but I
also wanted her to know me, the real me, not just the persona that
the public knows and loves. I could use her time in California as
an opportunity to show her the real me and then, maybe, she might
give me a chance to redeem myself and reclaim that passion I denied
us both.

The mess with my alleged stalker was becoming
serious. I choose to ignore the books containing the photos that
were sent to me months ago thinking it might be an over zealous fan
and barely registered any concern over it, but after receiving the
last one containing photos of me in Switzerland, where I was for
two months filming my new movie, with the words “I see who you
are.” inscribed on the inner cover, my concern grew. All the photos
I received before were local, taken at my favorite restaurants or
events I was obligated to attend but the ones taken in Switzerland
were all close range telling me that this person was on set while I
was filming. What’s even more worrisome was that whoever was behind
those photos placed them in my truck, which was on my property,
sometime during the night, knowing I would find them the next
morning. Having my privacy was tantamount to breathing in the world
I live in, where the smallest action I make in public can be
misconstrued as something that it wasn’t. I play by my own rules,
giving the public what I think they deserved of me but to have
someone break those rules and dared to encroach on my
much-cherished privacy made me livid.

My hope now lies in Ally, hope that she can
find out whose behind the mysterious packages and put a stop to
this mess before it escalated and people I care about ended up
getting hurt.

From what my dad told me I knew Ally was good
at her job and was considered a rising star within the agency at
the age of twenty-six. She was methodical and had a knack for
reading people. Her boss even had plans to encourager her to become
a profiler but because of one mistake, a mistake she made trying to
find answers that she knew would heal her family, her whole career
was taken away from her.

**********

“Alexandria Riley, what do you mean by you’re
going to California for a work thing and you’re not sure when
you’ll be back?” Tessa screamed at me for what seemed like the
hundredth time since I told her about my trip to California.

Maybe I should have gone with my first
instinct and called her when I was already in California to avoid
her meltdown instead of catching her before she left for the
office. Being pregnant meant all her hormones, emotions, maternal
instincts and every other wacky display of affection she had was
being thrown-in in the mix, which also meant I had to use a little
finesse to try to calm her down.