“Really.” She nods. “And he asked me to move in with him.”
“Isn’t he already living with you?” I joke.
“Ha, ha,” she says, rolling her eyes.
I wrap my arms around her and whisper into her ear, “I’m so excited for you.”
“I guess you are,” she says, pulling away from me. “This was not the reaction that I was expecting.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, when I told you about Logan—”
“Logan is an asshole,” I interrupt her.
“I know. But we didn’t know that back then.”
“Julie, when it comes to men you date, think of me like a dog. I can always smell the bad ones.”
Her eyes twinkle, and she wipes a small tear out of the corner of the left one.
“What’s wrong?” I pull her in closer to me.
“Nothing. I’m just so…happy. I really love him. We just mesh so well together,” she says, intertwining her fingers as she says the word mesh. “Looking back at my previous relationships, guys, it doesn’t even compare, you know?”
“That’s how you know when you’re really in love. You don’t even have to think about it.”
She nods.
“That person just becomes this part of you,” I continue.
“With Logan, I was always trying to control everything. I wanted things to be perfect. I wanted to look perfect. I wanted us to be this perfect couple with this perfect apartment. But with Martin, I can be myself. I don’t need to wear makeup or do my hair and he still looks at me as if I am the most beautiful woman in the world.”
“I didn’t notice you looking any less fabulous this whole time that he has been living with us,” I point out.
“You know I like to look good for me. But I’m no longer doing it for him.”
“That’s good, Julie. I think that it means that you have a really strong connection.”
She nods her head and wraps her arms around herself.
“Everything is just so good right now that it’s scaring me.”
I smile.
“I mean, you and Jackson are back together -”
“Well, not really.”
“You’re not?” she asks, surprised.
“We are just taking it easy for now. I still need more time to get over everything.”
“Are you telling me that you don’t want to be back in his arms again?”
Now, it’s my turn to bite my lower lip. “I wouldn’t say that exactly.”
She laughs and inhales a deep breath.
“What?” I ask. “What’s bothering you?”
The lines across her forehead relax and her face acquires an expression of total serenity. “It just all feels so perfect. I’m worried that if I make one wrong move, it’s all going to collapse. Like a house of cards.”
I pull her closer to me and bury her head in my shoulders.
“Everything is going to be fine, Julie. We’ve all been through so much, we deserve a little peace.”
After we are done with dinner, Jackson gives me his hand to help me out of the booth and I don’t let it go. Surprised, he gives me a little smile. I pull him closer to me. I miss his touch. I miss his kisses. I miss his smell.
“I miss you,” I whisper in his ear.
“I miss you, too.”
“Do you mind if we go to your place tonight?” I ask. His eyes light up with anticipation.
“I thought that you would never ask.”
When we walk out of the restaurant, our car is already waiting with the valet right at the curb. The door is open and Martin tells Julie and I to get into the back just like we did on the way here.
Julie gets in. I wait for her to move over while Jackson walks around to the driver’s seat.
A loud noise that sounds like a car backfiring startles me. Before I get the chance to react, something moving very fast runs into me at full speed, throwing me onto the pavement.
When I open my eyes, my body writhes in pain.
My head is buzzing and I can’t get up.
Someone is lying next to me.
I reach for it and when my vision stabilizes, I realize that it’s Martin.
His eyes are open and focused on mine.
There’s blood streaming down the side of his face from the bullet hole right in the center of his forehead. I close my eyes and everything goes to black.
One-click Tangled up in Love Now!
After everything that we have been through, is this finally the end of us?
Our life isn’t like other people’s.
I crashed into his perfectly ordered world, changing everything. He took my innocence and I taught him that life is better outside the walls of his cloistered mansion.
But then he came along. Parker Huntington is the man who stalked me, attacked me and kidnapped me.
No one has heard from him for a while, and I thought that I was safe. But now he’s back with a vengeance.
He will do anything to tear us apart.
What happens if he succeeds?
One-click Tangled up in Love now!
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Black Edge
Want to read a “Decadent, delicious, & dangerously addictive!” romance you will not be able to put down? The entire series is out! 1-Click Black Edge NOW!
I don’t belong here.
I’m in way over my head. But I have debts to pay.
They call my name. The spotlight is on. The auction starts.
Mr. Black is the highest bidder. He’s dark, rich, and powerful. He likes to play games.
The only rule is there are no rules.
But it’s just one night. What’s the worst that can happen?
1-Click BLACK EDGE Now!
Start Reading Black Edge on the next page!
Chapter 1- Ellie
When the invitation arrives…
“Here it is! Here it is!” my roommate Caroline yells at the top of her lungs as she runs into my room.
We were friends all through Yale and we moved to New York together after graduation.
Even though I’ve known Caroline for what feels like a million years, I am still shocked by the exuberance of her voice. It’s quite loud given the smallness of her body.
Caroline is one of those super skinny girls who can eat pretty much anything without gaining a pound.
Unfortunately, I am not that talented. In fact, my body seems to have the opposite gift. I can eat nothing but vegetables for a week straight, eat one slice of pizza, and gain a pound.
“What is it?” I ask, forcing myself to sit up.
It’s noon and I’m still in bed.
My mother thinks I’m depressed and wants me to see her shrink.
She might be right, but I can’t fathom the strength.
“The invitation!” Caroline says jumping in bed next to me.
I stare at her blankly.
And then suddenly it hits me.
This must be the invitation.
“You mean…it’s…”
“Yes!” she screams and hugs me with excitement.
“Oh my God!” She gasps for air and pulls away from me almost as quickly.
“Hey, you know I didn’t brush my teeth yet,” I say turning my face away from hers.
“Well, what are you waiting for? Go brush them,” she instructs.
Begrudgingly, I make my way to the bathroom.
We have been waiting for this invitation for some time now.
And by we, I mean Caroline.
I’ve just been playing along, pretending to care, not really expecting it to show up.
Without being able to contain her excitement
, Caroline bursts through the door when my mouth is still full of toothpaste.
She’s jumping up and down, holding a box in her hand.
“Wait, what’s that?” I mumble and wash my mouth out with water.
“This is it!” Caroline screeches and pulls me into the living room before I have a chance to wipe my mouth with a towel.
“But it’s a box,” I say staring at her.
“Okay, okay,” Caroline takes a couple of deep yoga breaths, exhaling loudly.
She puts the box carefully on our dining room table. There’s no address on it.
It looks something like a fancy gift box with a big monogrammed C in the middle.
Is the C for Caroline?
“Is this how it came? There’s no address on it?” I ask.
“It was hand-delivered,” Caroline whispers.
I hold my breath as she carefully removes the top part, revealing the satin and silk covered wood box inside.
The top of it is gold plated with whimsical twirls all around the edges, and the mirrored area is engraved with her full name.
Caroline Elizabeth Kennedy Spruce.
Underneath her name is a date, one week in the future. 8 PM.
We stare at it for a few moments until Caroline reaches for the elegant knob to open the box.
Inside, Caroline finds a custom monogram made of foil in gold on silk emblazoned on the inside of the flap cover.
There’s also a folio covered in silk. Caroline carefully opens the folio and finds another foil monogram and the invitation.
The inside invitation is one layer, shimmer white, with gold writing.
“Is this for real? How many layers of invitation are there?” I ask.
But the presentation is definitely doing its job. We are both duly impressed.
“There’s another knob,” I say, pointing to the knob in front of the box.
I’m not sure how we had missed it before.
Caroline carefully pulls on this knob, revealing a drawer that holds the inserts (a card with directions and a response card).
“Oh my God, I can’t go to this alone,” Caroline mumbles, turning to me.
I stare blankly at her.
Getting invited to this party has been her dream ever since she found out about it from someone in the Cicada 17, a super-secret society at Yale.
“Look, here, it says that I can bring a friend,” she yells out even though I’m standing right next to her.
“It probably says a date. A plus one?” I say.
“No, a friend. Girl preferred,” Caroline reads off the invitation card.
That part of the invitation is in very small ink, as if someone made the person stick it on, without their express permission.
“I don’t want to crash,” I say.
Frankly, I don’t really want to go.
These kind of upper-class events always make me feel a little bit uncomfortable.
“Hey, aren’t you supposed to be at work?” I ask.
“Eh, I took a day off,” Caroline says waving her arm. “I knew that the invitation would come today and I just couldn’t deal with work. You know how it is.”
I nod. Sort of.
Caroline and I seem like we come from the same world.
We both graduated from private school, we both went to Yale, and our parents belong to the same exclusive country club in Greenwich, Connecticut.
But we’re not really that alike.
Caroline’s family has had money for many generations going back to the railroads.
My parents were an average middle class family from Connecticut.
They were both teachers and our idea of summering was renting a 1-bedroom bungalow near Clearwater, FL for a week.
But then my parents got divorced when I was 8, and my mother started tutoring kids to make extra money.
The pay was the best in Greenwich, where parents paid more than $100 an hour.
And that’s how she met, Mitch Willoughby, my stepfather.
He was a widower with a five-year old daughter who was not doing well after her mom’s untimely death.
Even though Mom didn’t usually tutor anyone younger than 12, she agreed to take a meeting with Mitch and his daughter because $200 an hour was too much to turn down.
Three months later, they were in love and six months later, he asked her to marry him on top of the Eiffel Tower.
They got married, when I was 11, in a huge 450-person ceremony in Nantucket.
So even though Caroline and I run in the same circles, we’re not really from the same circle.
It has nothing to do with her, she’s totally accepting, it’s me.
I don’t always feel like I belong.
Caroline majored in art-history at Yale, and she now works at an exclusive contemporary art gallery in Soho.
It’s chic and tiny, featuring only 3 pieces of art at a time.
Ash, the owner - I’m not sure if that’s her first or last name - mainly keeps the space as a showcase. What the gallery really specializes in is going to wealthy people’s homes and choosing their art for them.
They’re basically interior designers, but only for art.
None of the pieces sell for anything less than $200 grand, but Caroline’s take home salary is about $21,000.
Clearly, not enough to pay for our 2 bedroom apartment in Chelsea.
Her parents cover her part of the rent and pay all of her other expenses.
Mine do too, of course.
Well, Mitch does.
I only make about $27,000 at my writer’s assistant job and that’s obviously not covering my half of our $6,000 per month apartment.
So, what’s the difference between me and Caroline?
I guess the only difference is that I feel bad about taking the money.
I have a $150,000 school loan from Yale that I don't want Mitch to pay for.
It’s my loan and I’m going to pay for it myself, dammit.
Plus, unlike Caroline, I know that real people don’t really live like this.
Real people like my dad, who is being pressured to sell the house for more than a million dollars that he and my mom bought back in the late 80’s (the neighborhood has gone up in price and teachers now have to make way for tech entrepreneurs and real estate moguls).
“How can you just not go to work like that? Didn’t you use all of your sick days flying to Costa Rica last month?” I ask.
“Eh, who cares? Ash totally understands. Besides, she totally owes me. If it weren’t for me, she would’ve never closed that geek millionaire who had the hots for me and ended up buying close to a million dollars’ worth of art for his new mansion.”
Caroline does have a way with men.
She’s fun and outgoing and perky.
The trick, she once told me, is to figure out exactly what the guy wants to hear.
Because a geek millionaire, as she calls anyone who has made money in tech, does not want to hear the same thing that a football player wants to hear.
And neither of them want to hear what a trust fund playboy wants to hear.
But Caroline isn’t a gold digger.
Not at all.
Her family owns half the East Coast.
And when it comes to men, she just likes to have fun.
I look at the time.
It’s my day off, but that doesn’t mean that I want to spend it in bed in my pajamas, listening to Caroline obsessing over what she’s going to wear.
No, today, is my day to actually get some writing done.
I’m going to Starbucks, getting a table in the back, near the bathroom, and am actually going to finish this short story that I’ve been working on for a month.
Or maybe start a new one.
I go to my room and start getting dressed.
I have to wear something comfortable, but something that’s not exactly work clothes.
I hate how all of my clothes have suddenly become work clothes. It’s like they’ve been tainted.
Caroline follows me into my room and plops down on my bed.
I take off my pajamas and pull on a pair of leggings.
Ever since these have become the trend, I find myself struggling to force myself into a pair of jeans.
They’re just so comfortable!
“Okay, I’ve come to a decision,” Caroline says. “You have to come with me!”
“Oh, I have to come with you?” I ask, incredulously. “Yeah, no, I don’t think so.”
“Oh c’mon! Please! Pretty please! It will be so much fun!”
“Actually, you can’t make any of those promises. You have no idea what it will be,” I say, putting on a long sleeve shirt and a sweater with a zipper in the front.
Layers are important during this time of year.
The leaves are changing colors, winds are picking up, and you never know if it’s going to be one of those gorgeous warm, crisp New York days they like to feature in all those romantic comedies or a soggy, overcast dreary day that only shows up in one scene at the end when the two main characters fight or break up (but before they get back together again).
“Okay, yes, I see your point,” Caroline says, sitting up and crossing her legs. “But here is what we do know. We do know that it’s going to be amazing. I mean, look at the invitation. It’s a freakin’ box with engravings and everything!”
Usually, Caroline is much more eloquent and better at expressing herself.
“Okay, yes, the invitation is impressive,” I admit.
“And as you know, the invitation is everything. I mean, it really sets the mood for the party. The event! And not just the mood. It establishes a certain expectation. And this box…”
“Yes, the invitation definitely sets up a certain expectation,” I agree.
“So?”
“So?” I ask her back.
“Don’t you want to find out what that expectation is?”
“No.” I shake my head categorically.
“Okay. So what else do we know?” Caroline asks rhetorically as I pack away my Mac into my bag.
Tangled up in Hate Page 14