by Jo Watson
“I think it’s very cute.” He let go of my face and his hands found their way under my shirt and up to my bra strap. His voice was low and dripped with the promise of sex. There was absolutely no misinterpreting the situation now. I knew what was about to happen.
I felt my bra straps loosen and then Damien pulled my shirt off.
“I’ve thought about this every night for the past year,” he said, as my bra and shirt fell to the ground. I could feel his eyes moving over my naked breasts.
“Me too.” My voice was nothing more than a tiny whisper now.
“Come.” He took me by the hand and led me across the deck to the bed he’d made where he laid me down.
I looked up at the sky. It was a deep, inky purple and the stars were starting to come out in all their glory, while the moon crept higher still.
This was the perfect night.
The perfect moment.
Damien was perfect.
And I was never going to let him go again.
This was mean to be.
This was syzygy.
And those were my last thoughts as Damien pulled his shirt off and kissed me…
Turn the page to read an excerpt from Annie’s story,
Almost a Bride
Prologue
D-day—A year ago
I knew something was wrong the second I walked up to my front door.
Call it intuition. Call it a sixth sense. But I just knew.
I blame the shoes. The shoes were undoubtedly the cause of all the problems that day. It was the shoes’ fault that I came home early, and the shoes’ fault I was fired.
I suppose I can’t blame the shoes for making me late, though—that was the alarm clock’s fault for rudely deciding not to do its job.
And when finally, through the thick haze of sleepiness, I realized that it hadn’t gone off, it was too late. I was already late for work. And when I say work, I mean my brand-new job—job of my dreams—as an intern at Glamorous Girl mag. The quintessential magazine for the “fun, fierce, and fabulously stylish South African girlTM.”
It was early days, so I was still desperately trying to impress by being perfect, polite, and oh so obliging. Whether it was the request for the latte to be served at 97.7 degrees with no sugar, soy milk froth, and a sprinkling of organic cocoa powder flown in directly from the foothills of the Andes. Or whether it was for the jasmine and lavender scented candles to be burned in the office for ten minutes before my boss arrived—I was on it.
Little Miss Annie Obliging.
Because let’s face it, the word intern is just a glammed-up euphemism for slave.
So when I realized I wouldn’t be able to attend to the scented candles, or fetch the latte, I panicked. So much so that I left the house without the said troublemaking, life-ruining, world-annihilating shoes.
Let’s take a moment to talk about the shoes. They weren’t ordinary shoes, oh no, they were none other than the just-off-the-Paris-catwalk-and-not for-sale-to-mere-mortals-yet Christian Louboutins. They also happened to be the centerpieces for that day’s shoot.
The same rushed panic that had caused me to forget the shoes in the first place had also left me with barely enough time to scrape my hair back into a casual bun and slip on a creased T-shirt and pair of jeans from my floor.
The latter is a bigger sin than you think. Because where I work, wearing anything other than the most fashionable apparel is sacrilege. People practically throw holy water at you and start wailing in Latin, for fear that you’ve been possessed by the demon of bad fashion. In fact, a real demon possession, complete with a backward-rolling head and the ability to speak in tongues, would be preferable to the demon of last season’s handbag and Crocs sandals.
So when I finally got to work, underdressed, out of breath, without the shoes, and over an hour late, I was in serious trouble.
My boss was throwing a hissy fit, due to lack of flowery scents in her office, and her personal assistant Cedric was in the throes of an overly dramatic caffeine withdrawal, due to lack of latte.
And it kept getting worse.
Two hours later the panicky fashion director summoned the Louboutins. Those shoes had been troublemakers from the start. It had been an absolute trauma getting them in the first place. They’d been flown into South Africa late the previous night, and I’d been tasked with collecting them. Everyone was holding their collective breath for the grand arrival. So when I was forced to confess to their absence…well, you can only imagine.
When lunch finally arrived, I jumped into my car and sped home. I had exactly one hour to get in and out before the photo shoot.
I pulled into my driveway at speed, grabbed my house keys, ran for the front door, slipped them into the lock, and turned—
But…
Something made me stop.
Something told me not to go inside.
Something was very wrong.
I looked around nervously. Everything seemed normal. Peter across the road was blasting his TV as usual, the ratbag Chihuahua from number 45 was running up and down the garden perimeter yapping at an unseen force, and Mildred, my neighbor, was outside watering her hydrangeas.
So why was I hesitating?
I took a deep breath and inched the door open.
Nothing looked out of place.
Everything was exactly the way I’d left it.
But everything felt wrong.
I slunk down the corridor toward the kitchen, where I knew I’d find the shoes perched next to the coffeepot. But once inside, I was hit by a terribly eerie sensation…someone was in the house. A shiver licked the length of my spine when my suspicions were confirmed.
Creeeeaaakkk…A noise was coming from my bedroom directly above me.
Shit, shit, shit, there was an intruder in the house!
I launched myself at the cutlery drawer, grabbing the largest knife I could find while simultaneously dialing the police and still managing to hold on to the shoes for dear life.
“Police! Help, there’s an intruder in my house. Forty-Seven Mendelssohn Road, Oaklands. Quick.”
Now what? I’d never been in a situation like this before. What was the correct protocol? Should I hide, evacuate the house, attack the intruder, scream loudly? Or perhaps a combination of the above?
I thought for a second before deciding to get the fuck out of there! But just as I had one foot safely installed outside the front door, I heard another noise. This time it was different. It was…
It sounded like…
My blood ran cold.
But it couldn’t be? Trev was at work. Trev had a very important day in court, he told me. His client’s final hearing was today. Right now, in fact. I’d called him from my office about an hour ago and he’d told me he was in court.
He was in court, dammit!
I started climbing the stairs.
More noises.
Two voices?
But that was impossible…wasn’t it?
The noises grew louder and louder the farther up the stairs I went. I’m not really sure at what point I knew what the noises were or knew what I was going to see when I opened the door. But I just knew.
It’s one thing walking in on your boyfriend having sex with another woman, but it’s another thing entirely walking in on him the second the other woman is coming. She was facing the door, straddling him, furnishing me with a full-frontal view that has been permanently burned into my visual cortex. She threw her head back, arched her back, opened her mouth, and let out a high-pitched wail. As if that wasn’t self-explanatory enough, she decided to toss in a few words for good measure.
“Yes, Trevy, yes. Oh my God, oh my God, oh Trevy. Yes! Yes! Ah, Ah, Ah.” *Pant, pant, pant* “I’m coming!” *Long high-pitched scream*
Now…there were obviously several things wrong with this picture, aside from the obvious. Firstly, who the hell screams like that in bed? No one does! Sex is not so good that you have to break the sound barrier with your squealing dolph
in sounds. Secondly, what the hell was she wearing? She was clad in some kind of leathery studded number that looked like it had been worn by one of the Village People. And to make matters worse, Trev was blindfolded with the tie that I had bought him two Christmases ago and…OH MY GOD…were those, were those…nipple clamps?
I felt sick to my stomach.
And thirdly, who was this mystery woman without an ounce of cellulite, the tiniest trail of a stretch mark, or the slightest smidge of fat? Which woman can be that damn perfect…
…and then the answer came to me.
She can.
Tess.
Tess Blackman.
My husband’s work “colleague.” The woman I’d invited into my home on several occasions for dinner. The woman that I always phoned when I couldn’t get hold of Trev, because I knew they were probably together working on a case, tired and exhausted and burning the midnight oil when they’d rather be at home with their significant others. She had a fiancé after all.
Shame, poor them. Poor overworked Trev and Tess.
God, I was naive.
But the show didn’t end there. Tess’s eyes were still closed when Trev started making some delightful sounds. His sweaty hands reached up and grabbed at her hungrily.
Faster.
Harder.
Louder.
I was frozen. It’s hard to know what to do when you watch your partner of three years with his penis somewhere you wouldn’t even like to imagine, let alone witness in full blinding daylight.
Once all their postcoital panting had tapered off, Tess opened her eyes and saw me standing in the doorway. The look on her face was indescribable. Shock and horror and fear all at the same time. And then she opened her mouth and screamed.
Trev then turned—once he realized she wasn’t having a sudden spontaneous orgasm—and looked directly at me.
And then he did something truly bizarre. Unexpected. He grabbed Tess by the hand and dragged her to the other side of the bed.
“Anne, please…You don’t want to do this.” Trev threw his hands in the air defensively. He looked terrified. She was bleating hysterically by this stage.
What the hell was going on? Wasn’t I the jilted one? Wasn’t I the one that was supposed to be upset? I started walking toward them, which seemed to only make matters worse.
“Anne, please. Please.” He seemed to be begging now. “Think about what you’re doing. I know this is bad, but this isn’t the way to handle it. Please don’t do this.”
Things happened pretty quickly after that. Suddenly, the room was filled with armed police officers. I was about to tell them they could all go home when Trev cut me off.
“She has a knife. She’s going to kill us!” he shouted, pointing at me.
What knife? I glanced at my hands and that’s when I realized I was still holding the large knife, and it was pointed in their direction.
I quickly turned to explain, “I wasn’t going to—”
“Ma’am…” One of the police officers cut me off and started creeping toward me as if I was a feral pit bull that hadn’t eaten in a week. “Put down your weapon.”
“I swear, this isn’t what you think, I was just trying to—”
BAM! Face on floor, handcuffs around wrists.
Two really painful things happened at that point: One, the knife slipped and cut the entire length of my palm, and two, the crystal-encrusted, six-inch heel of the priceless Louboutin snapped off, rolled across the floor lifelessly, and disappeared under the bed. As I was being dragged out I glanced up and saw that Trev was clutching Tess in his arms. He gently planted a kiss on her forehead.
“It’s going to be okay, baby, it’s going to be okay.”
Acknowledgments
Firstly, to my amazing husband, Gareth, who is a creative genius and helps me come up with all my book ideas. He spent hours and HOURS helping me with this story and is just super-awesome. Without him, his input, encouragement, and endless babysitting help, Lilly and Damien would never have come to life, so thank you! A big thanks to Jessica Smit who was instrumental in getting Burning Moon going. Thanks to my cheerleaders Owen and Lance who have been there since the beginning of Burning Moon and have celebrated all my achievements along the way.
I would also like to thank my agent Erica Spellman Silverman who took a chance on an unknown author from the other side of the world with bad cell phone signal. I’m super-thrilled to be a part of the Forever family. Thanks to Amy Pierpont, my editor, and everyone else there for believing in the book, taking me on, and making this happen.
And lastly, to my fellow authors, regular sounding boards, rant listeners, and friends Sarah White, Avril Tremayne, Melinda di Lorenzo, Claire Chilton, and Amber Lindley. We all started this journey together, and will hopefully continue it together for years to come.
About the Author
Jo Watson is an award-winning writer of romantic comedies. Burning Moon won a Watty Award in 2014. Jo is an Adidas addict and a Depeche Mode devotee. She lives in South Africa with her family.
Also by Jo Watson
Almost a Bride
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Contents
Cover
Title Page
Welcome
Dedication
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
An Excerpt from ALMOST A BRIDE
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Also by Jo Watson
Newsletters
Copyright
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.
Copyright © 2016 by Jo Watson
Excerpt from Almost a Bride copyright © 2016 by Jo Watson
Cover image from Shutterstock
Cover design by Elizabeth Turner
Cover copyright © 2016 by Hachette Book Group, Inc.
Hachette Book Group supports the right to free expression and the value of copyright. The purpose of copyright is to encourage writers and artists to produce the creative works that enrich our culture.
The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book without permission is a theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like permission to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), please contact [email protected]. Thank you for your support of the author’s rights.
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First Edition: August 2016
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ISBN: 978-1-4555-9548-8 (ebook)
E3-20160707-DA-PC