“After that night,” she says. “We were normal enough until then. But since—after what happened, after we—”
“Stop,” I hiss. “We don’t talk about it. We don’t talk about it ever.”
“Ouch,” she says, grabbing my hand that is on her arm, my grip anything but gentle. “You’re hurting me.”
I have to count to three and force myself to breathe again before my fingers ease from her arm. “We agreed that ‘the incident’ was buried.”
“Right,” she says, and now she’s hugging herself. “Because we’re so good at burying things.”
“We have to be,” I bite out, trying to soften my tone and failing. “I know you know that.”
She gives me several choppy nods. “Yes.” Her voice is tiny. “I know.” She turns pragmatic, her tone lifting. “I just need more to clutter up my mind than the SAT exam. That will come and go.”
“And then there will be more work ahead.”
“I need more,” she insists. “I need to be normal.”
“You will never—”
“I can pretend, okay? I need to feel normal even if I’m not. And even if you don’t admit it, so do you.”
My fingers curl, my nails cutting into my palms, perhaps because she’s right. Some part of me cared when I put on my best black jeans and a V-neck black sweater that shows my assets. Some part of me wanted to look as good as she does in her pink lacy off-the-shoulder blouse and faded jeans. Some part of me forgot that the “normal” ship sailed for me the day I was born to a father who aspired to be President, but still, I don’t disagree with her. I need to get her head on straight and maybe kissing Jesse is exactly the distraction that she needs do the trick. I link my arm with hers once more. “Let’s go see Jesse.”
She gives me one of her big smiles and I know that I’ve made the right decision, because when she’s smiling like that no one sees anything but beauty which is exactly how it needs to stay. And so, I make that walk with her up those steps, climbing toward what I hope is not a bad decision, when I swore I was done with those. Nevertheless, in a matter of two minutes, we’re on the giant concrete porch, a Selena Gomez song radiating from the walls and rattling my teeth.
The door flies open, and several kids I’ve seen around, but don’t know, stagger outside while Danielle pulls me into the gaudy glamour of the Michaels’ home, which is as far opposite of my conservative father as the talk show host’s politics. The floors are white and gray marble. The furniture is boxy and flat, with red and orange accents, with the added flair of newly added bottles, bags, cups, and people. There are lots of people everywhere, including on top of the grand piano. It’s like my high school class, inclusive of the football team and cheerleaders, has been dropped inside a bad Vegas hotel room. Or so I’ve heard and seen in movies. I’ve not actually been to Vegas; that would be far too scandalous for a future first daughter, or so says my father.
“Where now?” I ask, leaning into Danielle.
“He said the backyard,” she replies, scanning. “This way!” she adds, and suddenly she’s dragging me through several groups of about a half-dozen bodies.
Our destination is apparently the outdoor patio, where a fire is burning in a stone pit, and despite it being April, and in the sixties, surrounded by a cluster of ottoman-like seating and lanterns on steel poles. Plus, more people are here, and now instead of Selena Gomez rattling my teeth, it’s Rihanna.
“Danielle!” The shout comes from Jesse, who is sitting in a cluster of people to our far left. Of course, Danielle starts dragging me forward again, which has me feeling like her cute dog that doesn’t want to be walked. Correction: Her forgotten dog that doesn’t want to be walked, considering she lets go of me and runs to Jesse, giving him a big hug. I’m left with one open seat, smack between two football players: David Nelson and Ramon Miller. Both are hot. Both have dark hair, though Ramon’s is curly and excessive, and David’s is buzzed, understandably since I think I heard his dad is military. Okay, I know his dad is military because I’ve been crushing on him since he showed up at school six months ago.
I sit awkwardly between them, and stare desperately at Danielle, who just stuck her tongue down Jesse’s throat in a familiar way that says it’s not the first time. I need to leave, I think. I’ll just get up and leave, but then, what if she panics? What if she forgets that Jesse can’t be in on ‘the incident’? We can never tell anyone what happened. Why did I think this night was a good distraction?
“Hey there,” David says, piercing me with his blue eyes.
“Hi,” I say.
“You look like you want to crawl under a rock,” he comments.
“Do you know where I can find one?”
He laughs. He has a good laugh. A genuine laugh and since I don’t know many people who do anything genuinely, I feel that hard spot in my belly begin to soften. “I’ll help you find one if you take me with you.”
“You don’t belong under a rock,” I say.
He arches a brow. “And you do?”
“Belong,” I say. “No. But happier there right now, yes.”
“That hurts my feelings,” he says, holding his hand to his chest as if wounded.
“Oh. No. Sorry. I just meant…I don’t do parties.”
“Because your dad is a politician,” he assumes.
“He doesn’t exactly approve of events like this.”
He laughs again. “Events. Right.” His hand settles on my leg and there is this funny sensation in my belly. “I’ll make sure nothing goes wrong. Okay?”
“No. No, I’ll make sure nothing goes wrong.”
He leans in and presses his cheek to mine, his lips by my ear. “Then I’ll give you extra protection.” I inhale, and he pulls back, suddenly no longer touching me.
My gaze lifts and I find Danielle looking at me with a big grin on her face. David hands me a shot glass and Jesse hands Danielle one. She nods, and I don’t know why, but I just do it. I down the liquid in what is my first drink ever. The next thing I know, David’s tongue is down my throat and when I blink, I’m not even sitting on the back patio anymore. I’m lying on a bed and he’s pulling his shirt off. And I don’t know how I got here. I don’t know what is happening. Panic rises with a sense of being out of control. I stand up and David reaches for me, but I shove at him.
“No!”
I dart around him and I must be drunk but I think my feet are too steady to be drunk. I run from the room and keep running down a hallway and to the stairs. I grab the railing, flashes of images in my mind. David offering me another drink. Me refusing. David kissing me and offering me yet another drink. I had refused. So why was I just on a bed and unaware of how I got there?
“Hailey!”
At the sound of David’s voice, I take off down the steps, not even sure where I’m going, but I don’t stop. I push through bodies and I’m on the porch in what feels like slow motion. I’m running down the stairs. I’m leaving. I have to get out of here.
***
I blink awake, cold, with a hard surface at my back. Gasping with the shock of disorientation, I sit up, the first orange and red of a new day in the darkness of the sky. I’m outside. I’m…I look around and realize that I’m on the bench of a picnic table. I’m in a park. I stand up and start to pace. I’m dressed in black jeans and a black sweater. The party. I went to the party. I dig my heels in. Did I get drunk? Wouldn’t I feel sick? I’m not sick. I’m not unsteady. My tiny purse I carry with me often is at my hip. I unzip it and pull out my phone. Ten calls from my mother. No messages from Danielle.
“Danielle,” I whisper. “Where is Danielle?”
I dial her number and she doesn’t answer. I dial again. And again. I press my hand to my face and look at the time. Five in the morning. My car is at Jesse’s house. I start walking, looking for a sign, anything to tell me where I’m at. Finally, I find a sign: Rock Creek Park. The party was in McLean. Rock Creek is back in Washington, a good forty minutes a
way. I lean against the sign and my mother calls again.
I answer. “Mom?”
“Thank God,” she breathes out, her voice filled with both panic and anger, two things that my mother, a gentle soul, and doctor, who loves people, rarely allows to surface. “Oh, thank God. I’ve been so worried.”
“I don’t know what happened, Mom. I blacked out and I’m at a park.”
“Near Rock Creek,” she says. “I know. I did the ‘find my phone’ search but it’s not exact and I was about to call the police. I just knew—” She sobs before adding, “I just knew you were dead in the woods. I was about to get help. I was about to have a search start.”
“I—Mom, I—”
“Go to the main parking lot.” She hangs up.
My cellphone rings with Danielle’s number. “Where are you?” I demand.
“At Jesse’s,” she says. “Where are you? I was asleep and I thought you were in a room with David, but he was with some other girl.”
“You don’t know what happened to me?” I ask.
“No. Jesus. What happened?”
Headlights shine in my direction from a parking lot. “I’ll call you later,” I say. “I have to deal with my mother.” I hang up and start running toward the lights. By the time I’m at the driver’s side of my mother’s Mercedes, she’s there, too, out of the car and reaching for me.
“You have so much to explain,” she attacks, grabbing my arms and hugging me. “I am furious with you. You scared me.”
“I scared me, too,” I say hugging her, starting to cry, the scent of her jasmine perfume, consuming my senses, and calming me. “I don’t know what happened.”
She pulls back. “Did you drink and do drugs?”
“No. I mean—one drink. I’m fine. I—”
“One drink. We both know what that means. This wasn’t the first time.”
“No. Mom. It was. One drink. I don’t know what happened. Someone drugged me. They had to have drugged me.”
Her lips purse. “Get in the car.”
“Mom—”
“Get in the car.”
I nod and do as I’m told. I get in the car. The minute she’s in with me, I try to explain. “Mom, I—”
“Do not speak to me until I calm down.” He seatbelt warning beeps.
“Mom—”
“Shut up, Hailey,” she says, putting us in motion.
I suck in air at the harsh words that do not fit my mother, who is not just beautiful, but graceful in her actions and words. Perfect, actually, and everything I aspire to be. I click my belt while her warning continues to go off. She turns us onto the highway and I listen to the warning going off, trying to fill the blank space in my head with answers I can give her. But there are none and suddenly she lets out a choked sound and hits the brakes. My eyes jolt open, but everything is spinning. We’re spinning. I can’t see or move. “Mom!” I shout, I think. Or maybe I don’t. Glass shatters. I feel it on my face, cutting me, digging into my skin.
We jolt again, no longer spinning, but the world goes black.
Time is still.
And then there are sirens and I try to catch my breath, but my chest hurts so badly. “Mom,” I whisper, turning to look at her but she’s not there. She’s not there. Panic rises fast and hard and I unhook my belt and ball my fist at my aching chest. Forcing myself to move, I sit up to find my mother on the hood of the car, a huge chunk of steel through her body.
I scream and I can’t stop screaming. I can’t stop screaming.
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THE NAKED TRILOGY
BOOK ONE, ONE MAN, IS AVAILABLE EVERYWHERE NOW! BOOKS TWO AND THREE ARE AVAILABLE FOR PRE-ORDER AND WILL BE RELEASED THIS YEAR!
One man can change everything. That man can touch you and you tremble all over. That man can wake you up and allow you to breathe when life leaves you unable to catch your breath. For me that ONE MAN is Jax North. He's handsome, brutally so, and wealthy, money and power easily at his fingertips. He's dark, and yet, he can make me smile with a single look or word. He's a force when he walks into a room.
Our first encounter is intense, overwhelmingly intense. I go with it. I go with him and how can I not? He's that ONE MAN for me and what a ride it is. But there are things about me that he doesn't know, he can't know, so I say goodbye. Only you don't say goodbye to a man like Jax if he doesn't want you to. I've challenged him without trying. He wants me. I don't want to want him, and yet, I crave him. He tears me down, my resistance, my walls. But those walls protect me. They seal my secrets inside. And I forget that being alone is safe. I forget that there are reasons I can’t be with Jax North. I forget that once he knows, everything will change.
Because I need him.
Because he's my ONE MAN.
TURN THE PAGE TO READ CHAPTER ONE!
CHAPTER ONE OF ONE MAN
Jax...
The moon glows with white light and hangs low and round over the nearby ocean darkened by night as if it, like the hundreds of guests in the garden of one of the San Francisco Knight hotels, is watching the beautiful brunette and star of the night. Emma Knight, the twenty-eight-year-old heiress to the hotel chain’s worldwide empire, and who, in fact, lost her father one month ago. Now, her brother Chance rules their hotel empire and her mother has fled to Europe for reasons few, I suspect Emma included, knows.
But I know.
She stands next to Randall Montgomery, her brother's right-hand and confidant, a man who might be fit enough and decent enough looking if he didn’t act like he has a stick up his ass. A man on my radar for reasons he’ll soon regret. He wants Emma and her money. She is the furthest down the food chain of them all, and based on her history with her father, even further down than would be expected. No doubt, she inherited with her father’s death, but I wouldn’t be shocked to discover she was given a token instead of a goldmine.
The announcer stands at a podium and begins lavishly speaking of Emma’s father with purpose. Tonight, with women in fancy gowns and men in tuxedos, ice carved into sculptures and champagne poured in glasses, Emma is here to accept a philanthropy award on his behalf while her brother is curiously absent. If he were here, I wouldn’t be here. Neither I nor any of the North family could stand her father, not that I find her brother any more palatable. Her father is gone, though, and now Emma is the proverbial queen of the hour. And the queen, unaware that she is, has had my attention for quite some time.
There’s irony in the fact that I, Jax North, the eldest now of the living North family offspring is, in fact, the man who watches her. An irony she’ll understand soon, but not too soon. For now, I stand at one of the rows of white-clothed tables, deep enough beyond in the crowd of people to be as good as in the shadows, a man whose family has done business with her family for decades, though l have been in the shadows in those endeavors just as I am here now. Present but unseen.
Emma steps to the podium, but not before I catch a glimpse of her pale pink floor-length dress that is elegant in its simplicity, in the way it highlights her slender but womanly figure. Her hands grip the sides of the podium and for a long moment, a full minute at least, she simply looks out across the crowd but doesn’t speak. There’s a charge of expectation in the room, a sense of the crowd pushing her to speak and when finally, her pink-painted lips part, the microphone crackles and squeaks. This seems to jolt her and she laughs nervously, a soft sweet laugh to match her sweet little ass. Perhaps the only sweet things about the Knight family.
“Thank you all for being here,” she finally says, and her voice is strained but suitably strong. “It’s emotional to be here tonight, among those honored who are living while my father is no longer with us. To be here at a hotel that was the center of the world for him.” She cuts her stare and I can almost feel her struggling for composure, the way I struggle when I speak of my older brother.
“I loved my father so ve
ry much,” Emma adds, and the pain in her voice is it for me. I run a hand over the silk of my light blue tie, barely contained impatience in the action, but tonight isn’t the time; it’s not when I’m meant to find Emma and Emma me. It’s a thought that has me turning away and disappearing into the gardens, entering the hotel by a side door. I’m here in this hotel for one reason: Emma. She’s here and it’s long past due that we meet. It’s long past due that she learns about the connection between her family and mine. I stroll a carpeted hallway with elegant chandeliers dipping low at strategic locations, about to turn into the bar when I come face to face with Eric Mitchell, a man who is quite literally a genius. He’s also vice president in one of the largest corporations in the world.
“Long time, man,” he greets, offering me his hand. It’s a strong hand, and when I look into his blue eyes, I see the man born a savant, the man who see numbers more than words. I see the man who helped Bennett Enterprises reach beyond a legal powerhouse to a conglomerate, even before acquiring an NFL team.
“Doesn’t Bennett own hotels, which would make you the Knights’ competition?”
His lips curve. “Keep your friends close and your enemies closer. I went to school with Chance. Good guy.”
Good guy my fucking ass. “We should talk.”
“About?”
“All things green. How about lunch tomorrow?”
“I can make that happen. “
We set-up the meeting and the ways this little encounter has inspired me are many. I cut right into a dimly lit bar that’s desolate at the moment and thank fuck for it. The damn hotel is filled to the rim for that awards ceremony. Alone suits me just fine right about now and I walk to the back of the bar and sit down in a red leather booth that overlooks a room with couches, cushy chairs, and dangling lights but also provides a curtain for privacy. The Knight name is all about luxury and comfort, but at its core, it’s about greed. At my core right now, I’m about that speech Emma was giving, about the pain at its core. That pain is why I’m here.
Love Me Dead Page 20