by Amanda Scott
“No. But I’m okay, really…” she said.
The cop hesitated, shook his head, and then gestured back to the parking lot of the nursing home. “Suit yourself then. We’ll send a detective to follow up with you later this evening.”
She simply nodded back to him. She was out of words, out of energy, out of anything even slightly vital.
Taylor’s senses went numb throughout the entire police escort back to her apartment.
What the hell am I going to do now?
Forget about the emotional challenges that lied ahead for her. She’d decided to focus on logistics. First step, figure out a way to get paid doing something.
The problem was that her last job, the one that she was still technically suspended from, was the only job in the entire Boston area that she was able to land. It wasn’t that she didn’t have skills, or that she didn’t work well with other people… It was something far worse, something that showed up on her background checks every single time she applied for a job that she could at least semi tolerate.
She sighed deeply as the cruiser pulled away and she walked back into her lonely apartment.
There was no way she could let her mind wander to Colton.
Focus on the basics Taylor… Paying for rent. Putting food on the table. And moving on with your life.
She’d have to pretend from this point on that Colton Marcus didn’t even exist, and there was only one way to do that…
* * *
Dressed in a sharp black business skirt and a freshly pressed white blouse, both purchased courtesy of her plastic Jesus, Taylor ducked into the university’s bathroom to double check that she was ready for this.
She was about to do the unthinkable- beg her former boss, Rebecca Stein, to reinstate her position as an office assistant at Baldpate University.
This was the lowest of the low, but the only way she could push the entire Colton escapade out of her mind was to turn her own life into one big miserable distraction. She had a knack for self-punishment; she’d learned early on that it was sometimes easier to make things worse than to strive for something better only to fail and come crashing down.
Colton Marcus was the ultimate example of that. He was gorgeous. He was ultra rich. He offered her a way out of her mundane life. All of those things should have been warning signs to her that things were too good to be true.
She made up her mind from this point on- she would never set herself up for a fall that big for as long as she lived.
She took a deep breath as she waited for the elevator door to open.
The familiar brunette receptionist wearing a tight-fitting pink polo shirt smiled at her with her private school teeth and thickly painted lips, but it was the type of smile that reeked of evil intent.
“So happy to see you, Taylor. Ms. Stein is waiting for you.”
Bullshit.
She felt like throwing up for the second time in three days as she walked into the creative writing department head’s office. All she could see was the back of her boss’s hair from behind as the middle-aged woman sat in her leather swivel office chair. “Sit down, Taylor.”
This is just so damn great.
Her boss spun around in her chair and shook her head from side to side as if she had never seen such a disgusting sight in her entire life. “You do realize that I’m the only game in town, right?
“Yes, Ms. Stein.”
“Unless you’re into scraping paint off brick buildings for minimum wage,” Stein added.
It wasn’t like this job paid all that much more than minimum wage, but Taylor didn’t think that embarking on a pay scale debate with Rebecca Stein would be a very wise choice. Hence, she nodded her head up and down in agreement.
Her boss rose from her chair and moved towards Taylor.
She didn’t seem to have it in her to make eye contact with this woman; all she could do was keep her head down as she gazed at the forty-something woman’s smooth shins and black high heels.
“Look at me!” her boss demanded. “This isn’t the principal’s office. This is the real world, Taylor. And the last time I checked, a felon like you really doesn’t deserve a second chance. Am I right?”
Taylor swallowed hard as she lifted her gaze to meet Stein’s eyes directly. “Yes,” she mumbled back softly.
“Excuse me?” her boss asked.
“I said yes,” Taylor reluctantly repeated.
Rebecca Stein’s lips curled at both ends. Taylor was convinced that this lady was put on this earth to haunt her until the day she died.
“Good. As long as you understand that you are to make absolutely no wrong moves from this point on. And…”
A loud knock on the department chair’s door interrupted administrator mid-sentence.
Taylor looked over at the door and saw that it was the same snobby receptionist who had greeted Taylor, for lack of a better word, only now her smirk was long gone and her face was at least nine shades lighter.
Stein launched a Baldpate University pen onto her dark mahogany desk as she started to reprimand the receptionist. “You’re fucking joking, right? It is hard to decipher that I’m incredibly busy right now?”
It wasn’t that Taylor enjoyed seeing other people suffer, but she wasn’t going to miss out on the advantages that karma had to offer right now.
The receptionist held out her hand, and in her hand was a white piece of paper. “It’s… it’s for you. It’s a note,” the young receptionist bumbled.
Stein grumbled as she held out her hand. “Come on, come on. I don’t have all day.”
The receptionist’s eyes glanced towards Taylor, then back at the department head. “It’s not for you, it’s… for her,” she said, shaking her head as she pointed towards Taylor herself.
Stein’s mouth opened and her jaw dropped. “For her?”
The receptionist nodded once.
“Now?” Stein asked.
The receptionist nodded again. “We got a call.”
Stein raised both brows. “A call?”
“From above.”
The department head folded her arms in front of her chest as she shook her head and rolled her eyes.
“Way above,” the receptionist added.
“Whatever. Just… give her the letter.”
Taylor reached for the folded piece of paper. She tried to contain her eyes from self-combusting when she saw whom the letter was from.
She hesitated before opening up the note.
The dizzying feeling in her head was an unmistakable sign…
Whatever she was about to read inside that white piece of paper was going to change the course of her life forever.
END OF BOOK FOUR
PLEASING HIM, BOOK 5: CAPTURED
Something huge was about to happen to Taylor, so huge that she’d literally forgotten about the fact that Rebecca Stein was just inches away from her, seething and delirious with a deep need to make Taylor’s life even more miserable than it already was.
There’s just way this could be happening to me, she thought to herself as she ignored Stein altogether and looked down at the handwritten note.
“I’m sorry, but I am missing something here?” Stein hissed.
Taylor looked up at her, briefly remembering that she was still in the same room with this half-human, half-witch. “Huh? No,” she said through a breathy tone as the bitter department head looked down at her through her usual biting scowl.
“Are you sure? Because if you have something better to do right now than to beg me for your job back then by all means…” Stein’s voice trailed off as she gestured towards the door with her boney arm.
Taylor took a deep breath of air in and looked back down at the note. She had to make a decision:
If I walk out of this office right now, the chances of me ever getting another job again are somewhere between none and zero.
That said, staying seemed to pose even greater consequen
ces as she studied the words on the note intended for her eyes only: MEETING OUTSIDE YOUR OFFICE- SHOULDN’T BE HARD TO SPOT THE BLACK LIMO. JOIN AND YOU AND MARCUS STAND A CHANCE.
She did a double take at the signature on the bottom of the note- it was Mitch York’s.
As in, Mitch York of Hull Publishing.
As in, the biggest name on the planet in the book world.
As in, the one man who could either fix this mess, or somehow make it worse.
Taylor scratched the skin of her forehead and squinted her eyes. She was sweating, terrified of Stein’s reaction, but even more terrified of York’s.
She looked up at Stein whose arms were now folded in front of her chest. Taylor wanted to tell this woman who the note was from. She wanted to tell her that she had slept with Colton Marcus, and that he had just risked everything he had to save her life.
But what was the point other than to put this woman down for all of the ways she had repeatedly used her authority to make Taylor feel small in her presence?
Taylor could feel her pulse start to speed up. Not exactly a real shocker; every time she even considered standing up for herself to someone like a Rebecca Stein her palms would start to melt and her throat would feel like it was closing up on her.
Taylor’s voice shook as she spoke. “I have a meeting,” she said, looking back down at the note in an effort to avoid Stein’s cold gaze.
The department head stood up from her desk abruptly. “Nope. Ain’t happening. You can’t walk in here and think you have any say whatsoever, especially in your particular shoes.”
Taylor felt a mix of fear and rage swirl though her veins as her heart started to pound hard in her chest. She stood up and made herself as tall as she could possibly make herself.
Rebecca Stein smirked and held out her hands. “Sit down,” she said, pointing to the seat that Taylor had just risen from.
Taylor pressed her lips together and matched the woman’s smirk with an equally demeaning facial expression of her own. She knew if she said what she was about to say, there would be no possible way of ever coming back to this job again.
Or any other decent job for that matter.
But she knew if she sat back down, like the good little girl she’d spent most her life trying to be, she’d regret it from here until eternity.
Taylor marched forward and held the note up to Stein’s face. “How about you stick this up your ass?”
Stein’s eyes widened as she took a step back from behind her desk. “What did you just say to me?”
“I told you I have a meeting. And I’m not sitting back down. And I’m fucking done with you treating me like I’m just some piece of shit.”
“Excuse me, Ms. Ward? You do realize that you are a convicted criminal and that I’m the only game in town, don’t you?”
Taylor smiled and shook her head once from side to side. Then she literally walked around Stein’s desk and got directly in front of her face. It was as though a life’s worth of being forced to sit in the back of bus without fighting for herself was coming to a head in this very moment. “Do your old ass eyes work well enough to see this?” Taylor asked as she held the note up to the aging woman’s face. “This note here represents my dice. And I’m gonna roll them.”
Taylor started to turn, noticing Stein’s face as it collapsed.
And as she walked out of the department chair’s office, she knew one thing for certain.
She would never, ever, return.
As she made her way down the stairs, across the foyer, and towards the glass exit doors, her eyes caught a long, black limousine parked directly in front of Baldpate University’s creative writing department. She opened the door to the outside and swallowed hard as the limo’s door swung open. She got the sense that if in fact Mitch York, CEO and founder of Hull Publishing, was waiting to speak with her, she was about to go from one exceedingly awful personal encounter to another.
She hesitated for a slight moment, remembering that technically speaking she had choices. She could walk right past the publishing exec’s limo, get in her car, and drive west. But if she wanted answers to the questions that were practically burning a hole in her soul, she’d have to get inside the car that awaited her.
Because her questions weren’t going to go away on their own.
Will I ever get to see Colton again? Will I ever get to feel his arms wrapped around my waist? Will I ever get to taste his lips as they come crashing into mine? Will I ever get to feel the way I felt whenever he looked at me as if I was the only person on this planet?
She bent over slightly and poked her head inside of the limo’s open door, spotting only a long pair of well-dressed legs at first.
A deep, male voice called to her. It had to be the coolest, calmest, smoothest voice she’d ever heard. “Time is money, Ms. Ward. Please come in.”
Her senses were blasted with the smell of fresh leather seats and heavy cologne as she folded her body into the car.
A man with silver hair, bronze skin, and a night black, expensive-looking suit sat with his head buried in his laptop. It was most definitely Mitch York, as in, the one and only Mitch York. When it came to books and publishing, Hull publishing ruled the world.
And Mitch York ruled Hull Publishing.
“Make yourself comfortable, young lady,” he said, not looking up from his computer.
So much for manners.
“What is this about?” Taylor asked, her eyes narrowing in on the jet setting executive.
His lips cracked a subtle smile, but his eyes stayed locked on his laptop. “I’ll be with you in one…” his slightly callous voice trailed off as he closed his laptop abruptly and reached for the door of the shiny black mini fridge in front of him. “Thirsty, Taylor?” he asked as he pulled out a chilled bottle of scotch.
“I haven’t had breakfast yet,” she muttered back, looking down at the bottle in his hands.
“Neither have I. Here,” he said, handing her an empty glass.
She reluctantly grabbed onto the glass. “What is this meeting about?” she asked.
York smiled. “This meeting?” he asked, holding up his glass that was now half-filled with alcohol. “This is about fulfilling a quench. Nothing more, nothing less.” He swirled the alcohol around in his glass. “Have you ever felt so goddamn insatiable that you had to do whatever it took to satisfy that need?” he asked as he poured some of the scotch into her glass.
She cocked her head feeling half confused, and half on edge. Where was he going with all of this? What did he want from her that he felt it was so damn necessary to force her away from her job at a moment’s notice?
She couldn’t keep it under control anymore. She threw back a swig of the bitter, brown alcohol. It was the first time alcohol had ever touched her lips at the same time that breakfast was still being served throughout the city. “Where is Colton?” she blurted out.
He studied her body, but not in a creepy guy sort of way. Nope, the way he looked at her body made her feel much worse than any creep had ever made her feel. It was as if he knew things about her that she didn’t even know about herself.
York chuckled as he sipped his drink. “Do you know how much money my company earns on a quarterly basis?”
She shook her head from side to side.
“Didn’t think so. But you know it’s a lot, right?” he said.
“Yes. I know Hull Publishing is the best in show,” she said.
His lips formed a wide, proud smile. “The best indeed,” he said as he poured more alcohol into his glass. “More?” he asked, gesturing towards her own glass.
She shook her head and pulled her glass away. “No. Like I said, I usually eat breakfast before I get liquored up.”
He let out a loud belly laugh. Then his face suddenly went numb as he drew his lips into a hard, straight line. “I’m going to be honest with you, Taylor. Is that okay with you?”
She swallowed visibly hard
. “Of course, Mr. York.”
“The Colton Marcus brand is a vital component of our business. To be more precise, the revenue his books generate constitutes nearly fifty percent of our entire profit share.” The corporate exec loosened his tie and leaned towards Taylor. “In other words, I need your Marcus guy to get his ass back on track.”
A wave of heat flooded Taylor’s cheeks and trickled down her neck. She didn’t like being this close to a man who could literally obliterate her from the face of the earth by making a simple phone call to the right person.
“My Marcus guy?” she said.
He frowned, making it perfectly damn clear that he knew she was bullshitting him right now.
She cleared her throat and adjusted her posture, sitting as tall as she possibly could in the back of his limo.
Take two.
“With all due respect, sir, can you please tell me why you sent for me?”
He leaned back in his warm leather seat and dipped the tip of his finger in his glass. “It’s simple, Ms. Ward. I know two things. I know that Marcus can help my company sell more books than any other author on this planet. And,” he paused as he sucked the expensive booze off the tip of his finger, “I know that he’s a sinking ship right now, and you seem to be the only one who can keep him from going under.”
She narrowed her eyes in confusion. “Sir?”
He smiled, but it was the type of grin that Taylor had learned to mistrust through her years of hard living. “Your boy Colton has gotten himself in a huge, huge legal mess. No matter how it gets spun from some lawyer, he’s facing manslaughter charges even if he did save your life.”
“Twice,” she interjected.
“Excuse me?”
“Twice. That sick pig of a man tried to hurt me twice. And Colton managed to save me from him twice so… twice.”
The publishing exec tilted his head slightly back. “Right, well I have no doubt that fate has brought you two together. Now the only question is, can you two stay together?”
Desperation flooded her voice. “I’ll do whatever it takes. I can testify. I saw the whole thing. I know he did the only thing he could and-“