WE ARE ONE: Volume Two

by Jewel, Bella

  Dedication

  For my admin team, my tribe, my book family.

  Words are kinda my thing, but I have none to express just how grateful I am for your support, your time, but most of all, your friendship.

  Foreword

  You can listen to the songs mentioned in this book by following this link:

  http://spoti.fi/2bVn1D9

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  End Of Part One

  Playlist

  Books by Lesley Jones

  Acknowledgements

  About the author

  Chapter 1

  I’d forgotten how late people go out in the city, or in England generally. Where I grew up, you couldn’t even get a takeaway after eight, even earlier in the winter. But here, people didn’t even start their night till around ten, and as I walked into the VIP area of the night club where Luke’s surprise party was being held, I realised my country-boy mistake. It was nine thirty on a Friday night, and aside from Will, the place was empty.

  “You’re keen, mate.” He smiled at me from where he stood behind the bar, chatting to a couple of his staff.

  “Jet lag, my body clock’s shot to shit right now.” I smiled through my lie.

  “What can I get ya?” Will asked.

  “Beer please, and none of that warm shit you serve over here either.” I winked at the barmaid as I spoke.

  “Oh, fuck me, never heard that one before. You wanna come around here and serve yourself? That is all you Aussie’s do when you come to this country, right? Work behind the bar?”

  He had me there, when I’d backpacked my way around Europe and the UK after finishing uni, I’d worked in three different pubs in London alone.

  “Not this time, too old for all that shit. What time’s the birthday boy s’posed to rock up anyway?” I asked.

  “Sometime before midnight, but don’t stress, the free bar starts at nine thirty, so people will start arriving soon. They’re not gonna wanna miss out on free drinks.” He nodded in my direction as he spoke.

  “Get fucked, I’ll pay for my beer as long as it’s below room temperature.”

  I watched as he took the pint the barmaid had just poured and passed it to me. I took a sip and pulled a face in disgust at the taste.

  “What the fuck is that?”

  Will frowned and turned towards the now terrified-looking girl standing next to him.

  “Fosters,” she said quietly, her eyes widened as they darted between Will and me. We both started laughing.

  “Darl, we don’t drink that shit where I come from. We ship it over here to you lot.”

  Again, her eyes darted between us. I’m sure the poor girl was terrified she was about to lose her job.

  “He’s not kidding, Court. Fosters is not the beer of choice in Australia,” Will told her.

  “Get me a vodka tonic, plenty of ice. I should be safe with that.” After a second, I added, “Please, Courtney,” with a wink and my best smile so she wouldn’t think that I was some kind of pretentious arsehole and spit in my drinks for the rest of the night.

  “So he’s no clue that you’re here?” Will had walked around the bar and was now leaning against the same side as me.

  “Nah, I spoke to him this arvo, and he still thinks I’ll be here next week.”

  “How long you staying for?” Will asked while passing me my vodka.

  “I’m not sure really. However long it takes to get things up and running. I’m liking Luke’s idea of renting office space out this way rather than in central London. As long as we can find somewhere suitable and attract the right kind of staff, I’m more than happy to go along with that.”

  Will nodded his head and took a sip of his own drink.

  “He’s good at what he does, I’m sure he’ll have no trouble getting you the right calibre of staff.”

  “He’s not let me down yet, and I have every faith that this new venture will be equally as successful as what we’ve achieved together in Australia.”

  Will tilted his glass towards me. “To new beginnings.”

  “To mates worth crossing time zones and drinking warm beer for,” I said with a smile and a nod of my head.

  I had met Will Bennett in Australia through Luke Carter. Luke was the reason that I was in England. We had met at a hotel in Sydney. We sat side by side at the bar, watching a rugby match between England and Australia on the television. He’d commented, loudly, about how shit the Aussie team were, I replied with a louder comment about how crappy England were at sport in general. We’d both been drinking, and things could’ve gone either way. Luke shrugged at my comment, raised his glass in my direction, and agreed. We got to chatting, and I discovered that he had a degree in business management and international relations. I had taken over the running of my family’s international recruitment and relocations company. Luke was looking for work and had a skill set we could use, and I knew in an instant, he was someone that I would like to have as part of my team. We put our sporting differences aside and enjoyed a drink together. The next night, we went out to celebrate, and he introduced me to Will, who was working as a trainee manager at K.L.U.B, quite possibly the most exclusive club in the whole of Australia.

  Luke took up a position in our Sydney offices and ended up spending the next two years in Australia working with me on the recruitment side of things. Because so many of our employees were coming from Europe and Great Britain, Luke suggested that maybe we should set up a branch in England, which of course, like most of Luke’s Ideas, a pretty good. So he’d flown home a few weeks previous to set things in motion, and I’d arrived a few days later to surprise him at his thirtieth birthday party, which had been organised by Will at the newly opened club he was now managing.

  “You divorced yet?” he asked me casually over the bourbon I knew sat in his glass.

  I shook my head. I felt my jaw tense. This wasn’t my favourite subject.

  “Why the fuck not? It’s been what, two years now?”

  I finished my drink and recalled the night my marriage had finally ended.

  I considered myself a reasonably successful bloke. I was lucky enough to have been born into a family that were pretty well off, I was well-educated, well-travelled, and good at most things I turned my hand too.

  Except for marriage.

  Olivia.

  The only thing I’ve ever really fucked up in my life.

  I let out a long breath before I answered him.

  “I had divorce papers drawn up, I just never got around to doing anything with them. It’s all in hand now though. I left instructions with my lawyer before I left.” I gave a small shrug as I spoke, really not wanting to think about my lying, cheating, whore of a wife, or the fact that I was a lying, cheating, whore of a husband and the mess I’d probably left behind in Sydney

  “What about you? You finally confessed all to the secret love of your life and told her how you feel yet?” I deflected.

  Will’s eyes went from mine to the barmaid’s as he gestured for two more drinks.

  “Fuck you, arsehole,” he said while passing me my vodka tonic.

  “I’ll take that as a no then?”

  “It’s . . . I’ve . . . I’ve not really seen much of her until recently to be honest, but I plan on making a move tonight.”


  “She’s gonna be here?”

  “She is.”

  Our conversation was interrupted by a bloke slapping his hand across Will’s back.

  “Evening. Not too lively in here just yet. How many you expecting?” He eyed me as he spoke to Will.

  He was a little shorter than me but still around six feet tall. Well-built and a bit too tanned . . . almost to the point of being orange, a colour that I’d noticed quite a few of the women in England also favoured. His hair was short and spiked with way too much product.

  “We invited about two hundred. Only about fifteen said they couldn’t make it, but I’m sure there’ll be a few more no-shows. Hopefully a good crowd’ll turn up for him, though.”

  Orange-tan man looked past Will to me for a few seconds before holding his hand out.

  “Declan Fox,” he stated with raised eyebrows. I think maybe he was expecting me to respond to his introduction as if I knew the name, but I had no clue who he was.

  “Sorry, Deck, this is Liam Delaney—”

  “Ah, Luke’s boss,” he interrupted.

  “Erm, business partner actually,” I corrected.

  “Yeah, but it’s your business, right? Luke’s just bought into it?”

  “No actually, the UK is a whole new venture for me, and something that Luke and I have set up on our own. Totally separate from what we were doing together in Australia. So, like I said, business partner.”

  Fucker. You ever been introduced to someone and you just don’t like them from the get-go and then everything about them just pisses you off? From the way they stand, to the way they sip their beer or crunch the ice from their drink? Yeah, that was how I already felt about this bloke.

  “Well lucky Luke fell right on his feet when he met you.”

  And comments like that justified my opinion.

  “How’s that, mate? He’s worked fucking hard over in Australia and brought a lot of new ideas to the business. A lot of which we’ll implement within what we’re gonna set up here. Luke’s not riding on anyone’s shirt tails, don’t you worry about that.”

  Who the fuck was this bloke? I already wanted to knock the fucker out. I heard loud laughter from behind us, and we all turned at once to look at the crowd of girls that had just walked in.

  “Guests are arriving. I need to go and do my bit for a little while. I’ll see ya later.” Will nodded in our general direction and then walked over to where the girls were showing the bouncer their invites.

  “So you been mates with the boys long?” I didn’t really want to engage the bloke in conversation, but it was gonna get awkward if I just stood there and ignored him.

  “Yeah, yeah. We go way back. We all went to school together, me and Will right since infant school. Then we met Luke at secondary school. “We all went our separate ways for uni, and then Will and Luke fucked off travelling and forgot to come back. Leaving the rest of us behind.” I could most definitely hear an edge of bitterness in his voice, or maybe it was jealousy.

  “You didn’t fancy giving it a go yourself, the travelling?”

  He shrugged his shoulders and gave his head a small shake, “Nah, not for me. I mean, I like Europe, and I was gonna meet up with them in Aus, but because of a bit of a misunderstanding that happened while I was at uni, I had trouble getting a visa.”

  Ah, now we were getting to the truth of the matter. The bloke was full of shit. I interviewed applicants for high-end positions all day long, and I could smell bullshit a mile off. If he’d been turned down for a visa, I would assume his offence was a little more serious than a driving conviction.

  “Yeah, they’re pretty strict on that kind of thing.”

  “Fucking ridiculous if you ask me. The country was built by prisoners, all sent from here. What right have they got to turn me down?”

  I was actually stunned into silence for a few seconds.

  “Actually, mate, if you’ve got a criminal record, they’ve got every right. The reason Australia has grown to become the country it has is because we are now so fussy about who we let in.”

  I drained my drink and quickly ordered another.

  “Yeah, well they don’t know what they’re missing out on. I’m full of idea’s me. I could be running this place, or even doing what Luke’s doing for you.”

  “Luke’s not doing anything for me.” I clarified. “Like I said, we’re partners.”

  I collected my drink from the barmaid and was about to escape Declan and his poisonous tongue when he asked, “You not married?”

  “Me? No, divorced. You?”

  Why? Why did I engage him?

  Jet lag was obviously affecting my ability to walk away from tanned orange men with over-inflated opinions of themselves.

  “Nah, no time. Too busy working, you know how it is.”

  Yeah, I knew all right, who the fuck would wanna get stuck with him for the rest of their life? My jaw ached where he was making me so tense. Was he jealous of my business relationship with Luke, or our friendship? I wasn’t sure, but I found his comments odd.

  “What d’ya do, for work I mean?”

  “I’ve got a couple of fitness centres, about to open a third.”

  Why was I not surprised?

  “Not that I’m short of attention from the women of course. I mean . . .” He gestured toward himself with his hand, as if to say “Look at me,” and I almost threw up in my own mouth.

  “I’m fighting them off at work. Made the mistake of banging a few that used the facilities, but that got a bit awkward when I realised that I’d fucked every girl in the place—including the married ones,” he told me with a nod and a wink.

  I zoned out for a while as he talked, mostly about himself, and instead, took a look around the room. It had filled up rapidly in the time that it’d taken Declan Fox to bore me to fucking tears.

  I noticed a tall girl, with poker-straight blonde hair staring at me. She was pretty enough to make my dick stir in my jocks, but I hadn’t had sex in almost a week, so anything female, of age, and with a pulse was probably capable of that.

  I was about to return her smile when I was jostled by someone trying to squeeze in to get served. I stepped back to give them room, and that was when I saw her. When I say “her”, I mean her arse. The most perfect arse I’d ever seen in my life. Unlike the tall, slim blonde that had been so obviously trying to get my attention a moment ago, this girl was short and curvy.

  Her straight black skirt looked as if it had been sprayed on. There was absolutely no way she could’ve possibly been wearing knickers, or even a thong underneath it. I would’ve seen the outline, believe me, I looked fucking hard enough.

  She had a big wide shiny belt around a waist that was so small I probably could’ve spanned it with my hands, and it took everything I had in me not to walk right up behind her and do exactly that.

  She turned.

  I swayed slightly and tried not to let anyone notice the adjustment I had to instantly make to my pants.

  “Fuck me.” Quietly escaped from between my gritted teeth.

  She was wearing a basque, or corset, or whatever the fuck those lace-up things that for the sanity of every hot-blooded bloke on the planet should only be worn as underwear. It looked like it had been painted on, and then it didn’t. It ended. The underwear thing that looked like it belonged in another century ended, and the most amazingly pale, flawless, creamy skin began. Her tits sat perfectly on her chest. Just the tops of them on show as they spilt out of what she was wearing. I may have groaned slightly as her exposed flesh jiggled when she moved. My eyes wandered slowly to her neck, where a piece of black satin encircled her perfect throat, and then travelled on up to her face.

  Her face.

  That face.

  You know how in cartoons when a character swallows a bomb or dynamite and it blows up inside them? There were no blood or guts, just a boom and a yellow flash as their body expands and then contracts, smoke sometimes coming out of their ears . . . Yeah, you still with m
e? Well, as I watched her walk across the room, balancing four shot glasses in her hands, I knew exactly how each and every one of those cartoon characters felt, except it wasn’t because I’d swallowed dynamite, it was my heart, my head, my entire body’s reaction to her.

  Those curves.

  That waist.

  Those tits.

  That face.

  Wide blue eyes, lined with black. Full, plump lips stained red. Shortish hair, the colour of . . . What was that colour? Blonde, with streaks of light gold or copper running through it, whatever. Just like the rest of her, it was perfect. Fucking perfect.

  I wanted to reach out and touch, stroke, lick, and suck that creamy skin, and just as if my desires had a voice, as if my need, want, and lust could be heard above the sound of “Love Don’t Let Me Go”, she stopped moving. I stopped breathing. Silently, or maybe it wasn’t, I begged her to turn around and look at me.

  And then she did.

  That heart of mine, the one that had just exploded in my chest? I wanted to cut it out. Cut it out, carve her name into it, and then hand it to her on a plate. I wanted her to own it. To do whatever the fuck she wanted with it, because it was hers, and I feared, or subconsciously hoped, that it quite possibly always would be.

  “That’s Mel, she’s Luke’s ex, so it’s no good you getting your sights set there,” Dick, I mean Declan, said from beside me. I blinked a few times as I processed what he’d just said. Shorty, the girl with that skin and the jiggle thing going on, broke our connection, turned, and walked off through the crowd.

  “What’s that, mate?” I knew exactly what he just told me, I just didn’t want it to be true. Luke had told me all about Mel, she was an ex-girlfriend of his that he’d recently recruited to work for us.