by Golland, KM
ATTRACTION
BY K.M. GOLLAND
(A Temptation Series Stand-alone)
Cover Design by: Wade Angelo,
Pauze - Design and Multimedia
Copyright 2014
Published by K. M. Golland
ISBN: 978-0-9874977-27
All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic format without permission from the author. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. All characters and storylines are the property of the author and your support and respect is appreciated. The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author. Except the original material written by the author, all songs, song titles and lyrics contained in this book are the property of the respective songwriters and copyright holders.
For my readers and fans who requested Carly’s voice.
I question your sanity ☺.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
PROLOGUE
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
CHAPTER NINETEEN
CHAPTER TWENTY
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
EPILOGUE
DISCOVERING STELLA — COMING SOON
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
PROLOGUE
Have you ever thought that you knew exactly where your life was headed? Knew what you would be doing and who you would be doing it with? Well, I did. I had my life somewhat mapped out in my head. My life was going to be free. Free from obstructions, free from drama and free from anchors that tied me to anyone or anything. Yep, I was an anchorless ship on her maiden voyage that never ended.
I was going to sail through life on a continuous journey of good times, fashion and fun. I was carefree, fat-free, child-free and fancy-free. I had good health, good family and friends, good shoes and a good arse! My life was good. Uncomplicated.
That was until I met Derek.
Firefighter Derek. Drop-dead gorgeous Derek. Blue-eyed, dirty-talking, cocky-as-hell Derek. He was the sweetest man I’d ever met and the one person to completely change my infinite voyage of freedom.
He was my iceberg.
CHAPTER ONE
If you watch the second hand on a clock closely, you will see it pause then tick backward. Sometimes it even skips forward then bloody backward again. Don’t believe me? Watch one, I dare you. Watch it like a hawk, just like I did every day at 3.15 p.m.
EVERY. DAY.
I’m not ashamed of being able to tell you every detail about the clock in my office. It’s round, white, and it has a black circular edge. It has three hands and twelve numbers on it. It’s quite simply plain and ugly and it taunts me on a daily basis.
Rolling my neck from side to side, I attempted to rid my body of the built-up tension that primary school students placed on it. I groaned and flinched as a cracking noise sounded from my neck, the sound alone indicating that I was in need of an appointment with my super-sexy chiropractor, also known as Give-Us-A-Crack Jack. Mm, Jack ... the things that man does with his hands.
I removed the pervy smile from my face that said ‘Yes, I’m currently daydreaming about being fucked’ and, with an additional grizzle and gloomy moan, shrugged my shoulders and focussed on the remainder of my day.
It wasn’t lost on me that I sound like a whinging, whining cat, and I knew that my job as the school receptionist was not the worse job in the world. I knew it because my room-mate, Libby — or Miss Hanson as she is known to her grade three students — has a cousin who drives to numerous public places, such as shopping centres and offices, and replaces those sanitary bins that sit in the corner of a ladies toilet cubicle.
Now that’s a bad job!
And an old school friend of Lexi’s and mine, who befriended us on Facebook, well ... he cleans those whack-off rooms in sex shops. Yuck! Grossest job ever! So, no, my job wasn’t yuck or bad; it was just really draining and sucked the absolute life out of me. Why? One word: children. Curious, over-enthusiastic, loud and inquisitive children. They were the bane of my existence.
Stretching my fingers over my computer keyboard, I again watched as that bloody second hand on the clock played its evil trick on me. I had a dream once, a horrible, horrible dream that bordered on nightmare. I dreamed that the ghastly timepiece had a face ... a real face, a human face. It wasn’t even hot or sexy; it was the face of a geeky guy and it talked to me, teasing and taunting as the seconds counted down to the final school bell for the day. ‘Ten more seconds to go, Carly,’ geeky clock-man had said. ‘No, make that eleven seconds, also known as 660 billion nanoseconds. Oh, pardon me, I do stand corrected, there’s ten seconds left. Aw, now it’s twelve.’ Fuck off, geeky clock-man.
‘Miss Henkley?’ a timid voice sounded from somewhere in my vicinity, snapping me out of my recollection.
Looking up, I spotted seven-year-old Ellie Lake, standing in front of my reception counter. We had a small footstool on the ground for short students, and Ellie, being one of them, was propped on top of it, peering at me.
‘Yes, Ellie?’ I replied with my pleasant hurry-up-and-get-out-of-my-face voice.
‘I’m this week’s bell monitor,’ she advised proudly. Ooh, lucky you!
Almost instantly, the song ‘Ring my Bell’ by Collette played in my head, throwing me back into the 1980s: spandex, acid-wash denim and fluorescent pink and yellow hair scrunchies. God, I need a night at the Metro.
‘Excellent,’ I replied, a bit too sarcastically, while plastering on a faux smile.
Ellie was none the wiser.
‘Come around here, Ellie, and I’ll show you what to do.’
She jumped off the step, skipped past the reception window and came through my office door. Her ridiculous enthusiasm to press a button which inevitably sounded the last school bell of the day made me smile — children are such strange creatures.
‘Okay, so when the clock says 3.20 p.m. exactly, you press this button right here,’ I explained, pointing to the circular red button. ‘Three times, like this: One. Two. Three.’
Unfortunately, I had to be precise with my instructions, making sure I clearly exaggerated the pause between each push. Last week, Jet Bradley — aged eight — decided that he would try to be the fastest bell-button pusher in history. OneTwoThree — no pauses. So to avoid a similar scenario — because superfast bell-button pushers were not what we were after as bell monitors — I reiterated the tempo of the push. Somebody please kill me now.
Thank everything in the world that is wonderful, though, because tomorrow is Saturday, which means no school and more importantly, no school children. Tomorrow was the beginning of the school holidays. Oh, and it was also my best friend Alexis’ birthday.
Lexi and I have been friends for a
s long as we could remember, both of us having first met each other at the age of four when Mum and Dad bought the property next to her parents’ farm in Shepparton. Mr and Mrs Blaxlo — also known as Graeme and Maryann — owned twenty-eight hectares of land which they used to farm beef cattle, whereas our farm was a little smaller and contained sheep: smelly, ugly, boring sheep.
Now, I wouldn’t call myself an animal hater. In fact, I liked most animals. I even have a Mexican walking fish named Rico and an eight-month-old golden retriever named Sasha. I just didn’t like cows, cats, mice, spiders or sheep ... especially sheep. Baa, baa, fucking baa.
Alexis — my partner in crime for the past thirty-one years — was having a birthday party at her extremely wealthy, and sexy as hell, boyfriend’s penthouse apartment the following night. Apparently also her apartment, too. She moved in with Mr Sex-on-a-stick Bryce Clark a couple of months back after she found out her husband of twelve years — Rick ‘arsehole’ Summers — had cheated on her and spawned a love child he just recently found out about. Who needs Days of Our Lives when I have Days of Alexis’ Life?
Jokes aside, though, their separation and the revelation of Rick’s past was heartbreaking for Lexi. Luckily, Alexis had Bryce with her every step of the way to pick up the pieces of her broken heart. And not only did he pick them up, he forged the pieces together like a Herculean god, building a new heart for Alexis that he decided was his sole mission in life to look after and protect.
Hmm ... thinking of Herculean gods, might have to download the movie 300 tonight and get my fix of triple-chocolate swirl ice cream and Gerard Butler. Damn, that Scotsman is fine.
‘One. Two. Three,’ Ellie quietly chanted while waiting for the time to tick over.
Subduing a smile, I returned to thinking about my best friend’s crazy-as-fuck life. You see, Lexi and Rick have two children: Nate, aged nine, and Charlotte, aged six. As I’ve said, children are the bane of my existence, but Nate and Charli are the exception. I love those two gorgeous twerps like they are my own. My own? Ha, never! Carly Josephine Henkley is never having children. Not until sheep fly ... fly the fuck off, that is.
Before Lexi found out about Rick’s infidelity, she’d fairly recently gone back to work after staying at home and raising Nate and Charli for nine years. All well and good ... until she fell in love with her obscenely rich and sizzling-hot boss, Bryce Clark, and he just as madly, if not more so, fell in love with her.
The whirlwind that has been their romance could only be rivalled by the one that swept Dorothy’s house from Kansas. But as explained by Alexis, it was as though the two of them were woven from the same cloth: made for each other, a romance written in the stars. And I couldn’t say that I disagreed with her. Their connection was undeniably perfect ... akin to chocolate and peanut butter, or lamb and mint sauce. Mm ... lamb and mint sauce. That’s dinner sorted. What? I may not like sheep, but I am more than happy to eat them.
Ellie shuffled impatiently, eyeing the taunting clock as the seconds ticked down, the anxious wait to perform her duty painted across her little face. I was of half a mind to ask if the second hand jumped back and forth for her as it did for me, but I didn’t. Instead, I started to arrange the individual class folders in a pile, ready for me to input the day’s final attendance record into my computer.
As I sat down on my seat and smoothed my black pencil-pleat skirt down my thighs, I noticed that my fingernails needed a new coat of polish. Shit! Mental note: don’t forget to prettify my digits before the party. One of my cardinal rules — known as Carly’s Cardinals — was that, as a female, one’s nails should always look stunning. They should be pretty and intimidatingly scary, all at the same time. Not to mention that I couldn’t possibly go to Lexi’s party without fingernails that could stop traffic. Surely Bryce had hot friends ... wealthy friends, friends that came from the same planet as him. I’m guessing Krypton. Surely he was not the only super-sexy, smart, obscenely handsome, successful businessman in Melbourne. Odds were, he wasn’t.
That was why my nails had to be smokin’ hot and enticing enough to have one of his friends want nothing more than for me to drag them down his back in a moment of ecstasy. Well, that’s my plan, anyway.
I once read in Cosmopolitan magazine that men notice women’s nails because they fantasise about being scratched by them. I also read that men like hosiery because they think women who wear hosiery also wear a sexy garter belt. Oh, and men like long hair because they want to grab hold of it while they fuck you from behind. Okay, so the magazine didn’t say that. I just know that for a fact.
Regardless of what men like, I keep up my appearance for myself. I like my long ash-blonde hair. I like to wear the latest fashion. And I like to adorn my face in MAC and L’Oréal. Because I’m worth it.
I giggled to myself. I loved those ads.
‘Is it time yet?’ Ellie asked, her finger hovering nervously over the button.
I looked up at the clock and took note of the time. Urgh ... I wish it was. ‘No, one more minute,’ I informed her.
She bopped her head eagerly. ‘Okay.’
God, I can’t wait for tomorrow. I hadn’t seen Lexi since she fled to her parents’ farm, soon after finding out about Rick’s infidelity; at the same time she also found out that Bryce had paid Rick five million dollars to allow Alexis to spend a week with him — ‘him’ being Bryce. I told you, Days of Alexis’ Life.
Apparently, Bryce discovered that Rick had had an affair. He’d also discovered that Rick was desperate for money, so Bryce offered the five mil to Rick for him to come clean to Alexis, which inevitably sent her directly into Bryce’s waiting arms. Fucking genius if you ask me, although I never told Lexi that.
Despite my appreciation of Bryce’s ingenuity, I still fretted over Lexi being in the middle of a love triangle to end all love triangles and that her marriage was in disarray. She had always been grounded, content and settled, having been with Rick since the age of seventeen. So I was concerned when her life went to shit, and not only because she found out that her husband was a cheating arse-wipe, but because she also had a charming, hot-as-hell wealthy man pursuing her relentlessly at the same time.
As exciting as that concept sounded, it had worried me. Lexi was not used to so much drama. It wasn’t until I saw her and Bryce together that I realised he was her saving grace — they just clicked.
Ding. Ding. Ding. The bell sounded and Ellie turned to me with an expression that sought approval. I gave her a thumbs-up and sent her on her way.
‘’Bye, Miss Henkley. Have a good weekend.’
‘You, too, Ellie,’ I replied, watching her smile as she skipped out the door with her schoolbag, which was nearly bigger than she was.
With the end of my working week behind me, and the ringing bell prompting a huge smile to form on my face, I casually leaned back in my chair, putting my hands behind my head and spinning in a 360° twirl.
TGIF!
CHAPTER TWO
The following day, I drove my Suzuki Swift Sport — known as Suzi — toward the waiting valet attendant at City Towers, which was Bryce’s hotel. He owned the entire City Towers Entertainment Complex, which comprised three hotels plus a shopping and entertainment precinct. According to Alexis, his company — Clark Incorporated — had many hotels worldwide. She’d told me that she tried not to think about it all too much because it freaked her out. Personally, I thought she was bloody crazy. She was shacked up with one of the wealthiest and sexiest men on the face of the earth. What’s not to think about?
Stepping out of the car, I handed my keys to the waiting attendant.
‘Thank you, ma’am,’ he said with a courteous smile. I checked him out for the slightest of seconds, taking in his baby-cute face. Na, too young.
Continuing toward the lobby, I stopped and craned my neck, looking up at the forty-three storey building towering over me while shielding my eyes from the rays of sunlight that shone through the overhead glass awning. I had been here numerous tim
es, but never to the penthouse apartment. And I had never used the hotel’s valet service before. I felt a bit spesh.
Last week Bryce had sent me a text message explaining that he was organising a birthday party for Alexis and I was invited to help celebrate. Of course I would help celebrate. Lexi and I had been at each other’s birthday parties every year since we were four years old, birthday number six being one of our finest celebrations. I’m not sure whose idea it was — probably mine, seeing as it involved getting naked — but we had decided that games such as pass the parcel and pin the tail on the donkey were boring, opting to strip off our clothes and roll around in the grass and mud instead. What better way to spend one’s birthday in none other than one’s birthday suit, right?
I wished I had thought of that particular excuse at age six, because ‘mud feels good between my toes’ and ‘Alexis told me to do it’ did not cut it in the face of my mother’s questioning. Let’s just say that we put our clothes back on after Mum and Maryann gave us an eardrum scolding. They also took incriminating photographs which reared their ugly heads at both of our twenty-first birthday parties.
Making my way to the reception desk after a bellboy kindly received my funky Kate Hill overnight bag, I stopped at the counter and was greeted by a vivacious young man.
‘Good afternoon, ma’am. How can I help you today?’ he asked with a courteous yet chirpy tone.
‘Hi. My name is Carly Henkley. I’m checking in as one of the guests attending Alexis Summers’ birthday party.’
‘Oh, you’re Carls. Alexis has told me all about you,’ he said with a mischievous grin, shedding his professionalism like a snakeskin.
I narrowed my eyes, spying his identification badge and taking note of his name. ‘Liam,’ I said as I met his eyes, ‘Alexis is full of shit ... unless what she has told you is all good and nothing but good.’
Liam smiled and leaned to the side, placing one elbow on top of his counter. He quickly scanned the room and then lowered his voice. ‘Don’t tell her I said this, but she mentioned once that you reminded her of a horny Barbie doll on crack.’