Hers To Keep: THE QUINTESSENCE COLLECTION I

by Akeroyd, Serena

  “Seriously?” She bit her lip, but couldn’t stop her wide grin from blooming. “Okay, challenge set. Let’s see if you can pick something I’d like.” Not that she thought he’d lose.

  Unlike her ex who’d barely noticed she tended to wear stuff with a vintage style, she highly doubted Sean, renowned and celebrated for his attention to detail, would have failed to spot she liked things kooky.

  He rubbed his hands together, and she was relieved to see he looked less green around the edges than earlier. “Challenge accepted.”

  * * *

  The ward was quiet when the other four left. The instant the door closed, Kurt settled in the armchair Sean had vacated to watch Sascha sleep.

  Those last few moments; her eyelashes had been fluttering as she fought to stay awake. Only when they’d closed and stayed that way for a handful of seconds had the guys gone.

  He’d been watching her ever since, but it was hard to sit beside her and not hold her.

  The bruises were literal stains against her skin. Sharp and dark, they highlighted her creamy fragility, and made him want to rage on her behalf. She’d done a good deed; a little boy was alive because of her, and yet this was how she’d been thanked.

  Bruises to her temple, across her cheek. Her jaw was swollen and red, and her left cheek had road burn on it.

  He wanted so badly to wrap her up in his arms, and knowing she wouldn’t reject his touch augmented his need all the more. Her acceptance of their unusual predilections had been confirmed the night before.

  She’d slept with his friend while Kurt watched. She’d accepted comfort from them all, gentle kisses to her mouth as her relieved men greeted her upon awakening…

  She was willing to be theirs, and he wanted to treat her as such.

  Among themselves, they were ebullient, crass, but always friendly. Though there were celebratory handshakes, half-hugs, and slaps on the back, they were, at heart, all men. Men’s men, too.

  Just because they shared a woman, and got off on it, didn’t mean they wanted one another. Despite the heartfelt disbelief his mother had on that particular topic, he was straight. Ever since his divorce, he’d had very few relationships though, and he missed the advantages being in a relationship had.

  Simple kisses, holding hands, hugs… Basic touch. Affection.

  He’d felt the lack recently, and he wanted to make up for it. Especially considering her current battered state.

  The need to hold her was one he was finding hard to fight. Though their own relationship hadn’t developed that far, he wanted it with an eagerness that surprised him.

  Finding one woman who suited five men should have been a statistical improbability, and yet, they’d not only found that one special lady who had fit in among them, they’d found a handful over the years.

  Sascha, though, was different.

  Of course, Sawyer and Andrei—ever rational—would tell him he was being a romantic, and maybe he was. There was no harm in that, was there? But she felt different.

  Explaining that was harder than it should have been for a celebrated writer. But creating and weaving a tale around some of Germany’s darkest days was easier than understanding his own heart.

  Perhaps not to others, but to Kurt… He’d prefer to stick pins down his nails.

  Digging into his pocket as he kept an eye on Sascha, he retrieved his cellphone. Within seconds, he’d opened up his WIP—work in progress—and was reading through the last few pages.

  He’d been stuck on this part for the past three weeks. It wasn’t like him to experience writer’s block, but where this book was concerned, and the previous two in the series, he found the novels inordinately difficult to write.

  After the fall of Hitler, within the power vacuum left behind, a force had risen from the dark into the light. As an organization, it had only ever belonged in the dark. The German Democratic Republic, or East Germany as many had known it, was a nightmare no one could dream up.

  Why was it, he wondered, that the most extreme of parties always had the most liberal of names?

  National Socialism. German Democratic Republic.

  Two entities that were neither socialist nor democratic.

  He rubbed his chin as he skimmed through the torture scene he’d been crafting for days. The knowledge that his grandfather or father might have been subjected to these techniques was more than he could handle at times.

  Kurt often asked himself why he put himself through this personal form of torture. But using that word in this context often made him feel like a coward. Reliving this horrendous history through words… how could that in anyway compare with what his parent and grandparent had endured?

  The comparison, as always, succeeded in making him feel nauseated. The text ended, leaving behind a white blankness that surprised him with its power to intimidate.

  How could space be intimidating? But it was.

  Blowing out a breath, he frowned as he clicked on the screen and started a sentence.

  His editor had been ragging him for the past three weeks for the first half of the manuscript, but he was barely a quarter of the way through the intended plotline he’d formulated for the novel.

  Pressure normally inspired him. He had a way of working well when stress was bogging him down, but this time, it wasn’t doing anything other than making him nervous.

  It was an odd admission to make but he kind of wished he hadn’t won the Pulitzer. Then, he felt like a dick, because that Pulitzer had highlighted his work, brought more of the horrors that had been everyday life in East Germany to the twenty-first century. People forgot, seemed to view it as a kind of divine punishment for the Second World War, but what had replaced the Nazis had been a tyrannical power that the world needed to know about.

  How could he regret shining a light on that?

  Yet, he did.

  And it made him feel selfish as hell.

  Grimacing, he stared at the document, trying to magic up the next line, another paragraph, one more page worth of stimulating and engaging narrative… Instead, he jolted in his seat as his phone buzzed in his hand with an incoming call.

  “Scheisse,” he spat under his breath, then grinned at himself for jumping like a little girl. Shooting Sascha a look, and seeing she was out for the count, he accepted the call. Deciding to speak in English so that the harsh and alien German wouldn’t disturb Sascha’s sleep, he murmured, “Katrin? The Decree Nisi came through three months ago. I was hoping you’d deleted my number.”

  “Like you’d deleted mine?” came the purred retort that had him rolling his eyes. Katrin seemed to believe that she was a sex Goddess. Her sole duty on Earth to spread the love around. Hence the forty cases of adultery he’d used in his divorce suit against her.

  “Forewarned is forearmed. I can’t screen call if I don’t know who’s calling, can I?” he retorted.

  She still had the power to irritate him, something that angered him more. She meant nothing to him. Hadn’t for a long time, and yet, here she was, disrupting his day.

  With his eyes on Sascha, he had to shake his head. Katrin was old world elegance. Sascha was vintage charm. Like him, Katrin came from old money, so she could afford to be elegant. It was a state she cultivated. Sascha was far more innocent, far more naïve.

  He doubted she’d agree with that statement, though.

  Like he wielded the word as a sword meant to cause offense, he thought with an inner smirk. If anything, it was a compliment.

  After his ex, the last thing he wanted was contrived interaction with yet another woman.

  “I’m hurt, Liebchen,” she remarked, a genuine note of sorrow to the endearment.

  “Yeah? That’s a first. I didn’t manage to wound you in all the years we wasted together.”

  “All the years?” she snorted. “We lived together for maybe a full year of those six we were officially wed. The rest of the time you spent with them.”

  Kurt sighed. This was what had fed his mother’s horrified be
lief he was gay, and that the house where they lived was the scene for nightly orgies and unchristian acts of debauchery.

  Katrin fed it, and fed it well. If he had one regret about his marriage, and the truth was, he had many things to regret, it was the fact Katrin had grown so close to his mother. It meant she listened to the shit Katrin spilled. Still, to this day, Margritte couldn’t understand why he’d divorced her. Even though he’d had proof of over four dozen acts of adultery.

  Considering Katrin knew his taste for watching, that she’d chosen to cuckold him without letting him join in, her affairs spoke a lot for her intentions.

  Sighing again because this conversation was an old, oft repeated, and damn boring one, he asked, “What do you want, Katrin?”

  “Your help.”

  “Why?” He frowned. She’d never needed his damn help before.

  “Andrei won’t return my calls. I need him to look into my investment portfolio. I think my hedge fund manager is… Well, I don’t know what’s going on. I just don’t trust it.”

  Kurt let out an amused laugh. “This has to be a first, Katrin. Are you on bended knee asking me?” he mocked. “I’d like to see that.” The ways in which she’d verbally castrated him over the years, he’d probably snapshot the scene just to relive it.

  Well, maybe not.

  His bitterness was fading. In fact, he’d barely thought about Katrin since Sascha had entered their household. She had a way about her…

  When Snow White used the forest creatures to help her clean up the Seven Dwarves’ home—that was Sascha. Well, without the dress. More like a pencil skirt so tight it looked like the seams could split at any moment—a sight he’d pay to see, and one he’d take immediate advantage of—and a blouse fitted to her waist with such tight tucks, her breasts looked like they could spill out.

  Plus, Sascha was a redhead, not brunette. Shit comparison, he guessed, but that kind of bouncy joy Snow White had seemed to emanate? That was Sascha too.

  She’d come into their lives, and with the help of bluebirds and fucking squirrels, managed to sweep out the shit.

  Katrin broke into his thoughts with a huff. “Kurt! Are you even listening to me?”

  He cast a look at Sascha, studied her peaceful expression and felt a smile curve his lips. “I don’t have to anymore,” he told her, and he knew he should be ashamed at his gleeful tone, but he found he couldn’t be.

  “I need your help, Kurt. How can you be so cruel?” Before he could answer, tell her that she’d know because she was the queen of cruelty, she inserted, “I could ask Margritte.”

  He snorted. “I’m usually in my mother’s bad books, Katrin. You throwing me further into the shit won’t do me much harm. No more than you’ve already done our relationship anyway.” Though his tone was mocking, that was only for her benefit.

  His at-odds relationship with his mother was a constant source of pain.

  He’d lost his father at a young age to a Stasi prison cell. She and his paternal grandmother had been all the family he’d had left. Though his father had eventually returned to the family home, what had happened to him had changed him forever. However he’d been tortured, it had damaged him permanently. Now, with Oma gone, and his father a living ghost, Kurt wished he and Margritte were closer.

  He’d tried and failed to please her over the years. Marrying Katrin had been one such attempt, but the divorce had been the final straw for Margritte; not only from the shame but because he’d moved back into the Kensington house. As a result, he hadn’t heard from her in two years.

  The saddest thing was, he didn’t miss her. She was too demanding, too invasive and insistent. Life was easier without her in it, and he hated that. Wished it weren’t so.

  “Please, Kurt,” she whispered, her haughtiness fading in a way that told him she was genuinely concerned. “Speak to Andrei. I need him to investigate.”

  “Sean’s the investigator,” Kurt retorted, reshifting his phone against his ear so it was more comfortable and kicking his legs out, so he could cross his feet at the ankles.

  “You know what I mean,” she spat. “I need Andrei. He’s a quantitative analyst. I need him to look into this situation, see where my money has gone.”

  He clucked his tongue. “Always about the Euros, Katrin.”

  She hissed, and he could imagine her stamping her foot against the ground in exasperation. Yeah, she really was that big of a brat. “This is about theft, Kurt! You know that. Please, speak to Andrei. I know he hates me. But we don’t have to meet in person. I can send the files over.”

  Kurt rubbed his chin, but as he deliberated his answer—genuinely unsure as to whether or not he’d help—she whispered, “Kurt, you have every reason to hate me. I wouldn’t ask you if I wasn’t scared. And I am.”

  Though Kurt’s family had wealth, that was nothing to Katrin’s—a fact that might have changed with his recent success with his writing, but either way, he’d never sought out an alimony payment. Had been grateful to get out of the marriage with his balls intact, his manhood dented only slightly rather than sliced through.

  Her fear was the only thing that would probably pierce the armor he’d developed over years of dealing with her.

  That she was worried enough to feel fear, had him wondering how much she’d lost. It must have been a lot. Millions. Maybe even tens of millions for her to sound this overwrought.

  “I’ll talk to him.”

  With that, he cut the call. Blowing out a breath as the screen reverted to his Word document, he was about to save the paltry few words he’d written, when Sascha murmured, “I didn’t think you were going to help her for a moment.”

  His gaze cut to hers. “Hey. I thought you were sleeping.”

  “I was,” she said with a smile. “Now I’m not.”

  “I’m sorry if I woke you,” he told her regretfully.

  “You didn’t. The pain was bad. Anyway, they’ll probably be waking me up soon to check on me if I have concussion.”

  He looked at the clock on his phone. “Another ten minutes. You’d only been sleeping for about three-quarters of an hour.”

  “Really? Feels like I was asleep for hours.” She studied him a second, a tension to her face that had nothing to do with the pain she was in. “Who was that on the phone?”

  “My ex-wife.”

  She tilted her head to the side. “Acrimonious split by the sounds of it?”

  He grunted. “What gave it away?”

  “I heard her side of the conversation. At the risk of sounding like a Mother Hen, you have your phone set way too loud than is good for your hearing.” Her teasing smile fell off the mark. “I didn’t hear the start of the call though, what did she want?”

  “To use me again,” he told Sascha without bitterness.

  She pleated the blanket between her fingers. “It sounded like she was genuinely scared.”

  “You have good ears,” he murmured wryly, watching her concede that by wrinkling her nose. “That’s the only reason I said I’d help her. Katrin is… she’s very good at manipulating people. I escaped that wonderful fate a long time ago. I have no desire to be embroiled in it again.”

  “So why have you?”

  “Technically, I’ve embroiled Andrei in it, and he can always say no. He’s under no obligation to help her—not after the way she treated him. But, in all the years we were together, I’ve never heard her scared.” He shrugged. “I don’t have to like her to behave with basic human decency.”

  She shuffled about on the bed. “Dammit,” she grunted out after a few minutes of shuffling. “Can you help me sit higher?”

  His lips twitched. “The remote is beside your good hand. I put it there earlier.”

  She cast him a grateful, all be it, shamed glance. “Sorry for snapping.”

  “You didn’t. You’re uncomfortable, in pain, and in a hospital ward… I’d expected you to behave worse than you’ve done so far.” He grinned. “I’d have offered to help, gladly, but I did
n’t think you’d want me panting over you.”

  The bed began moving at the start of his remark, but by the last comment, it froze as her finger slipped off the button. Their eyes caught and held as they’d done only yesterday when he’d watched Andrei fuck her in the living room.

  She licked her lips, but her eyes—already heavily lidded after the day’s events—seemed to fall into a deeper half-mast. “I’m not up to word games,” she said hoarsely. “My head aches too much.”

  He wrinkled his nose. “They say orgasms are good for pain management. In a few days’ time, feel free to test the hypothesis out on me.”

  Sascha snorted, then plucked at the sheets, settling them on her lap as the top half of the bed shifted higher so she wasn’t lying flat. “I might do that. My head doesn’t appreciate the banging, but my pussy probably would.”

  A laugh escaped him. “And you said you weren’t up for word games.”

  She winked at him, making his laugh deepen. “That’s as much as I’m capable of.” A heavy breath escaped her. “I’m not sure if I’m horny now or hurting.” With her good hand, she rubbed her temple then let out a little grunt. “Wow, it hurts. And I think they caught my hair under this stupid bandage.” She gently fingered the gauze on her forehead. “What’s even under there? Can I take it off?”

  “One of many cuts and bruises, and no. They wouldn’t have put it on there, silly, if it wasn’t necessary. Do you want the nurse to adjust it or to grab you some pain meds?” he asked, sitting up, preparing to head out and seek help if she needed it.

  Sascha held up her hand—cast and all—then as pain crossed her features at the jerky move, gritted out, “No, it’s okay. Women can go through childbirth without an epidural. I can deal with a headache. I’d kill for some water though.”

  He blinked at her even as he passed her a bottle he had at his side. “Okay. I’m not sure what one has to do with the other. And don’t drink too much. You’ve already been sick a few times. There's a reason you’re being monitored.”

  “I didn’t expect you to understand the correlation between labor and my headache,” she said with a snort, then moaned in delight after she took a small sip of water. “Anyway, they won’t give me anything. Not with a concussion.” She winced. “I’ll just have to put up and shut up.”