Read Everything You Want: Everything For You Trilogy 2 Online
Authors: Orla Bailey
Everything You Want: Everything For You Trilogy 2
Breaking free of Jack’s allure is the hardest thing Tabitha has ever had to do.
But he’s already tarnished her reputation in business, made her his willing plaything under the nose of the woman he really wants. And shattered her trust once more.
Her biggest mistake yet, may be to underestimate this man’s determination to punish her reckless defiance.
Because until Jack’s through with you, he isn’t through…
POMIFERA PUBLISHING
Copyright © 2015 Orla Bailey
All rights reserved
Cover design by Melody Simmons
TO THOSE WHO BRING OUT THE BEST IN US.
His voice speaks my name.
Strong arms surround me and I’m gathered to the unyielding planes of his body; held secure against him. His scent rouses my drugged senses, coaxing my weakened body back to life. My blood slows and thickens with desire at words he whispers as he carries me off to begin his relentless seduction.
I’d know him anywhere.
He places me where he desires me and I yield to him as his formidable weight dominates me from above. Insatiable hands trace each curve of my body with unerring skill, discovering me anew as my skin shivers with delight.
He unlocks me to his powerful need.
With assured resolve he strips my body, coaxing me with soft beguiling words until I surge beneath his mighty will. He drives my body to fever pitch as frustration swells within me and I reach for solid flesh begging him to deliver me from this torment.
He denies me, covering my nakedness – not with his own, as I implore him – but with a whisper of silk that blisters, it is so unwelcome to my torrid skin.
I beg him to ease me. He tells me “soon”.
It is daybreak when he slips away. The sun stretches fingers of warmth out into the darkness yet I can hear the distant fall of rain as I sink to unconsciousness, where he leaves me all alone in my despair...
* * *
Madame Chastain drags my lifeless body from the cool morning shower she shoved me under ten minutes before. She twirls a soft, warm towel around me, drying me briskly, in her no-nonsense way. Yet there is fondness in her touch.
“Better, no?” she tells me.
My understanding of the country French she uses has returned rapidly over the past few days yet she addresses me simply like I’m a child. I smile weakly at her latest attempt to pretend this is another normal day.
I am laid waste.
“Enough of this drama. You have buried yourself alive for the past four days.”
She’s the closest thing I have had to a mother since I was nine but the housekeeper at Lassec has a family of her own and she’s deserted them long enough to take care of me.
“Is it Friday already?” I ask blankly. I can’t even remember climbing the stairs to bed last night and I don’t generally sleep naked either, yet that is how Madame found me this morning. Nothing makes sense. Even time has ceased all meaning since I walked out of Belvedere on Monday. But where else would I run to? I have no-one. Nowhere else to go.
“
Ma petite folle
.” She pats my cheek, expressing the same irreverent term of affection she’s been calling me since I arrived. Destroyed.
And perhaps Madame is right. I am a little mad girl. I see ghosts everywhere. The shower tray felt damp beneath my feet even before I turned on the water and there were traces of condensation on the bathroom mirror, despite the fact it is a hot sunny morning. Did I only dream I heard rainfall in the early hours? I look up to see if there has been a leak.
She’s afraid to leave me alone. I’ve hardly slept, hardly eaten, hardly cared if I lived or died.
“I’m sorry to be so much trouble, Madame.” I’m grateful, even if she does drag me from my sleepless bed and pull me from tormented dreams I’d rather suffer than live without. Dreams I cling to like a drowning woman even knowing I must let them go just as I have let Jack Keogh go.
She shrugs her shoulders and makes the tiny “pff” sound that is so recognisably Gallic. “Walk in the morning sunshine. The warmth will bring you back to life.”
A useless solution to my problem.
Since fleeing Jack’s home at Belvedere, I’ve holed myself up at Lassec, Harry Caid’s old folly of a French Chateau in Brittany. And clearly I have
consorted with black-brow’d night
far too long. Even tussling with Shakespeare to distract my mind – like I tried to last night – slays me. I find pain in everything I do. Only one thing can take this agony away but tears threaten the moment I think his name. I want Jack so badly it hurts like a physical wound which won’t heal and is raw and weeping.
But I am determined to purge myself of this obsession.
In mockery of that resolution, my last devastating sight of him comes instantly to mind. He was beautiful and imposing, dressed in a sharp black business suit, running towards my departing taxi, calling out my name, demanding my return. I push the image of his displeasure away just as I’ve pushed away a thousand images of Jack in every tormented moment of conscious thought since; in every haunted nightmare.
However hard I try I cannot cast him from my mind. Each time I think about him I cry and I don’t want to cry anymore over what can never be. I’m hollowed out.
“Any more of these sniffles and I will telephone the doctor.” Madame wags her finger at me as if I can help it. She is vexed by my rapid decline and she’s French. She understands
l’amour
.
But she can’t change this. Nobody can.
“Please go home for the weekend, Madame, back to your family. I’ll be fine.”
She stares at me as if I’m crazy. “When you eat, I go.”
She whips the wet towel from my body with a flourish, looking aghast at my emaciated frame before herding me ahead of her like a shorn lamb, across the balcony to my bedroom.
No doubt she remembers the last time I penned myself away like this. I was eighteen and devastated when Jack abandoned me without a word. Yet I recovered and threw myself into four years of University life and interning at CaidCo. I forgot I ever loved him.
Almost.
It was only natural I’d run back here this time too.
“You know, I’d really like a cup of your good coffee. And do you have some of that brioche?”
Her eyes light up at my lie. Madame understands how to feed away sadness. “You do not want the bacon and eggs?”
I pull a face at her little attempt to tease me with a stereotype.
“I want to be ze good French woman, like you, Madame. I like all zis drama,” I taunt her back, exaggerating her accent. “And I want to be as fashionably stick-thin as
une Parisienne
.”
Madame’s face freezes. “Pff. Everywhere is not Paris.” Raised on the farm here, she’s a healthy country woman.
I hug her to me to apologise for my mockery and kiss her cheek and she returns my affection with a pat. Every summer since Harry adopted me, I was raised by this woman. I know she loves me the way I love her.
“Bag of bones.” She pokes me in the ribs.
“Then feed me. I’m hungry for your Breton cuisine.”
“
Alors
. Coffee and brioche is not cuisine.” Her eyes roll as she puts me aside. “But it is a beginning.” She looks more contented than I’ve seen her in days. How easy it is to make Madame happy. If only I could say the same for me.
My pretence at recovery is the only way to make her return to her family and stop fretting over me. Her life is no longer her own. I’m managing to ruin hers as surely as I’ve destroyed mine and I have turned this happy place into a mausoleum long enough.
I turn to the chiffonier and pretend to search for underwear.
“You will come down when you are ready?”
“As soon as I smell the coffee.”
After a few more seconds she leaves, heading for the kitchen, and I sink to the bed exhausted with my performance. I dress, carelessly, for another interminable day.
Dispensing with the effort of turning my Chicken Run knickers the right side out, I disinterestedly pull on a pair of washed out, skimpy little shorts and a flimsy cut-off t-shirt with a moth-hole in it; summer clothes that have hung around this place since I was a teenager. The fact I have barely eaten for days means they still fit. I shove my feet into battered canvas and rope-soled espadrilles re-discovered in my room at the chateau and slap sun-block on my pallid skin. Before I leave I grab a wide-brimmed straw hat from the back of the door and head downstairs. I can be as miserable outside in the sun, away from Madame’s prying eyes, as in.
Descending the stairs, the richly brewed aroma attempts to greet me but listlessly trailing through the main living room, I have little will for coffee or for life. I stare at my violin, lying on the sofa where I left it last night as even Madame knows better than to touch it. I pick it up carefully, stroke it with wretched affection and secure it back in its case. I’ve played sad music until my out-of-practice fingers bled but I just don’t care. I care about little anymore. I’d probably be playing now if I hadn’t spared a thought for poor Madame last night, trying to snatch some rest upstairs.
I haven’t turned my work phone on once to find out what is going on at CaidCo. I haven’t the energy. My friend and PA, Libby, must be frantic with concern but, to my shame, I can’t deal with that now. I vaguely comfort myself with the fact she was always much better at handling that nasty Brent Tapper than I ever was. He’s, no doubt, lording it over everyone having assumed my place, acting as CEO. After dealing with him, perhaps everyone will discover I’m not quite so bad when I return to take control.
If, I return. I can barely command my own legs to move me through each day.
My personal cell phone has remained off too, since Jack’s repeated efforts to contact me as I fled. I rejected all his attempts, as he rejected me. I focus on his misplaced anger over those newspaper photographs of him practically ravishing me at the Commerce Ball and of me being sullied by Benn Gunn – something Jack chooses to believe happened with my consent, yet couldn’t be further from the truth.
Jack tarnishes me as the lady in red of his own machinations, of those headlines; the scarlet slut in Valentino red who defied the conventions of a Black and White ball. When in reality I’m a simple-minded mad girl who allowed herself to believe Jack’s interest in her might have been genuine. Especially after what we shared on our last night together…
My fascination with Jean Béraud’s painting is, once more, totally understandable. I am that distressed woman,
After the Misdeed
.
Why I ever opened old wounds and let him in again, I’ll never know. Not that he gave me much choice. It was him who broke into my apartment and took over my life. Only to destroy me once again. Him, who cancelled his company’s contract with mine, forcing us together so his sport could begin.
The more I try to eject him from my mind, the more he is all I can think about.
I no longer trust my own senses. At once I’m conscious of that weird sensation that comes whenever he’s near. The arid Sirocco dust of a Saharan wind scorches my throat at the same time a cool, damp chill shivers through me, body and soul. An impending summer storm. It’s finally reached the stage where I merely have to think about Jack for it to happen.
I am not crazy. I know he’s not here. He’s with her. And she’s with him.
Amanda Devereaux.
The manipulative schemer and reason he’s in London now, doing damage limitation over the media frenzy I know she created to separate us. She wants him and she has him.
Because he wants her.
I block the sight of them kissing at the ball from my mind’s eye. Of her clawed hands laying claim to him at Belvedere while they both glared their unity at me.
They’re probably kissing now, bodies entangled, sated after a morning’s passion. He offers her his reluctant farewell before facing another day as CEO of Zee-Com. I torment myself with painful imaginings of them. Together.
