My Sinful Seductions

by Melissa Devenport

  Frank’s smile was a bit grim. “Well, it’s a little unremarkable but it’s a start. You have a list of interests. So…let’s think how one might develop some of them. Ever thought of blogging?” The look on my face made him laugh. “Hey now, it might not be as bad as you think! What do you know about it?”

  “Not much, I guess. Like journal entries, online, isn’t it?”

  Frank shook his head, squeezing his eyes shut as if I’d said something very stupid. “No,hon. No. You’ve probably read loads of blog entries and not realized it. Have any favorite websites? Ones that you like to read?”

  “Oh! Umm, yes, I suppose. I’ve been reading a lot from Forbes Lifestyle. And Gwyneth Paltrow! That’s a blog for sure. Just her talking about life. But I mean, I want to read her journal because she’s… well, famous.” I laughed at myself and finished my champagne as ourentrées were served.

  Frank picked up his knife and fork and eyed his steak greedily. “Well, if you write about a popular enough topic, in a unique way, it won’t matter that you aren’t an actress. But honestly, if you don’t want the travel job, just be honest with Shelley. She’ll find someone else.”

  “Okay,” I agreed.

  We ate heartily and enjoyed every bite of our meals together, after which I took Frank home for another romp in my bedroom. It was the best day I’d had in months.

  Chapter 16

  Taking a Big Decision

  My girl-date with Amber continued the good feeling I was experiencing. I really felt like I was spreading my wings and establishing the foundations for my new life. We went shopping in a few mid-range fashion boutiques and found her the perfect outfit for our literary tea appointment, to which both of us wore modest fascinators in our hair. A lengthy message from Adam was the only interruption to our afternoon.

  My brother is pigheaded but I think we’re making progress. I’ve got him to cool it on a lot of bullshit organization he’s had in place and let me handle things. At this point I can see the light at the end of tunnel, all we’re missing is someone to run staging at cost. Of course that’s tough, given no decorator in the world will work that way. God knows I can’t do it. The point is, once this detail is sorted, we’ll be on the straight and narrow. After I find the right person, it’ll just be a few months until this whole mess is straightened out.

  I let it sit.

  When the two of us arrived at the Biederman Library in the center of the city, we were in a great mood. From our chats during the shopping expedition earlier, I could tell that Amber had trouble making close friends due to her somewhat introverted lifestyle and niche interests. I considered myself lucky to have found such a gem in need of my friendship, and intended to cherish her. Both dressed in 50s-style tea dresses, we linked arms and giggled as we entered the venue.

  “There’s Ava Ernst, talking to the librarian,” Amber whispered. “See? With the short dark hair?”

  “Yep, I see her. Should I read her book?”

  “Definitely. I mean, it’s literary fiction. Are you into that?”

  “Is there any romance involved?”

  “Well, sure. There is in most genres, isn’t there?”

  I shrugged. “I’ll pick up a copy after we eat.”

  We registered at the front desk and put on our name badges before strolling to the back of the massive, high-ceilinged library to join the tea party. A big round table had been installed behind the utmost bookshelves and covered with a red-and-white chequered cloth. The table was full of painted ceramic teapots, tiered trays of sandwiches and sweets, and a dozen or so little antique teacups and saucers.

  The librarian, a sweet-faced woman with dark curls and a white cotton dress, greeted us.

  “Are you Amber and Melissa? Oh good, you’re the final members! Why don’t you come take a seat and we can all get started?”

  We found our seats and sat down among a motley gang of elderly men, young women and married couples, nodding to one another politely.

  “Welcome everyone!” The librarian sang out to all of us, standing at the head of the table with Ava. “My name is Dora Sandaster, and I’m so happy to welcome you to the Biederman Library’s book exchange and tea party! Please help yourself to tea, sandwiches and anything you like while we enjoy a short presentation from local author, Ava Ernst, reading from her latest book, Pioneer Girl!”

  Everyone at the table applauded cheerfully, and a few curious shelf-browsers leaned in to listen as Ava thanked Dora and took a seat on a high stool. She opened up her novel to a spot in the middle and began without aplomb.

  Winter at the farm was hard. Blizzards wreaked havoc on the livestock and killed so many that we brought the remaining hens and cattle into the house, letting them keep warm with us by the hearth. I pulled milk in my own sitting room every morning, while my sisters gathered eggs throughout the house wherever the hens had decided to roost. A few got lost and became rotten, filling the entire house with a stench that even the late-night winter wind couldn’t remove all at once.

  “Some mornings we couldn’t even see for the snow, despite the fact that the sun was, somewhere, overhead. Father tied a thick rope to a post outside the front door of the house and ran it to another post immediately in front of the door of the shed, so that he wouldn’t get lost in the storm during those impromptu times he needed to make the trip.

  Times were very difficult, but as children, we didn’t know any better. It was really our mother and father who suffered the most, because their lives hadn’t always been this way. They knew the joy and simplicity of a civilized winter in the cities of Europe, where little snow fell and help was always a few doors away. They must have wondered at their decision to make that fateful trip across the Pacific every day, for the rest of their lives. And, though they may have let their chosen hardships tear them apart, they, instead, grew closer. They learned to help each other, and to anticipate the other’s needs. They learned to lean on each other and solidify their love, which strengthened us children no end.”

  Entranced as I was with the reading, I knew when I felt my phone vibrate that it must be Adam, wondering why I wouldn’t answer. I peeked at the other people at the table to check that they wouldn’t notice if I sent a quick text, then discreetly pulled out my phone. I was right; it was Adam.

  Well? What do you think?

  At first, I was confused. What was I supposed to think about his work life? It had nothing to do with me-

  Oh.

  He was in need of a stager – a decorator – to work at cost. Someone he could trust and count on, to help him rebuild a family business. So, what did I think? Shocked and a little breathless at the realization that Adam was reaching out to me in such a serious way, I looked at Amber for help. She was focused on the reader, oblivious to my panic. I looked back down at the screen, then up at Ava, unsure whether I should run outside to avoid a public anxiety attack.

  She continued with her passage.

  “Most of all, I think they learned the value of unity in the face of any disaster, large or small. And it was this friendship and necessary trust that transformed the young, innocent couple in my parents’ wedding portrait into the weathered, wise and unquestioningly committed pair of human beings I knew in my adulthood. They worked hard, together, and they survived, together.”

  I remembered what Frank had said about a “change of venue,” and my heart beat so hard I was sure everyone at the table could hear it. I opened up Adam’s message and pressed ‘reply.’

  I do know someone with a fantastic interior design portfolio. I think you have her number, in fact.

  END

  Melissa Devenport links:

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  COMING UP NEXT

  a sample of the new series

  FORBIDDEN PASSION

  from the first book

  Cuffed & Dominated

  co-written by

  Melissa Devenport
and Camille Crosby

  Chapter 1

  The Funeral

  Charlene Penticton raised her head and stared at the shiny, somber black box at the front of the church. Her father, Charles Albert Ray Penticton had been the last family member she had left. At twenty-six she was unprepared to face the world totally alone.

  The huge church was packed. Charles had been a good, fair man and people loved him. Business associates, old and new friends and those he had mentored and befriended throughout his too short life packed the church almost full.

  The rows of pews with the somber faced, tear filled eyes were so orderly that Charlene wanted to scream. She kept her back carefully turned to them, kept her eyes glued to the front. A strange numbness settled over her. She blinked, trying to dispel the wild, detached feeling. It was like she was standing somewhere else, on the roof perhaps, if such a feat were possible, staring down at the rest of the people gathered there.

  “We commit this soul to god,” the pastor’s deep voice boomed out over the people assembled.

  Charlene barely heard it. She imagined herself, long blonde hair curled and pinned up, not a tendril out of place. Her neck was bent, exposing the strand of pearls that had been her sweet sixteen birthday gift from her father. Her black dress was expensive silk, the best she owned. It fit her well but hid the lush, womanly curves that lay below. It was a chaste dress. She’d picked it in Paris when her father took her with him on a business trip just short of her twentieth birthday.

  He had always urged her to choose her purchases with care. To create an image that reflected her personality. She’d picked the dress because she saw it as something that was classy and tasteful. Because it was black, with a tight fitting waist, flared skirt that fell to the knee and a sheer, lace pane in the back by her shoulders, it was feminine and dainty.

  Her father had loved that dress. She remembered trying it on for him, spinning around, feeling like a dark fairy. The shine of love in his eyes had been unmistakable. He’d proudly escorted her to dinner, a small place with tables that spilled into the cobbled street.

  Charlene felt the sting of tears well at the corners of her eyes. Her throat closed painfully, the fire of grief burning its way up her throat and flooding her mouth. She blinked rapidly and forced herself to take deep, steadying breaths.

  She raised her head again when she was able, slamming back down into her body. The sense of detachment was gone. She knew that in a few hours, her father would be laid to rest under layers of black soil. She would never see him again.

  “Daddy,” she breathed out, the world inaudible to anyone around her. The cancer had come so quickly for him, reducing him to a shell of the man he once was. His suffering had thankfully been brief. In less than three months it was all over. A promising, beautiful flame snuffed out, plunging Charlene’s world into darkness.

  The aged pastor droned on. This had been part of her father’s last wishes. To have a proper church burial though to the best of her knowledge, he hadn’t been religious.

  Charlene had gone through the motions of death and grief woodenly. She chose a casket with care. Drained the last of her savings account so her father could have the best in death as he’d given her in life. Throughout the last months of her father’s illness she’d nursed him. She had that consolation at least. That ironically, her profession should have been so apt. She’d quit her job at the hospital, giving up her coveted nursing position so she could be at Charles’s side day and night.

  She just hoped the will would be sorted out soon. She didn’t know how she was going to scrape together enough money to make her mortgage after all the expenses. She had enough left for one month. Enough to see her through.

  Panic welled in up Charlene’s chest as she thought of returning to her house, the cold, empty rooms providing no solace for her pent up grief and wild rage.

  The house wasn’t a mansion but it had been the one she’d been raised in since the time she was a small baby. Her mother had left them when Charlene was four years old. She hardly recalled what Clair Penticton even looked like. She didn’t even know fully why she’d left. All her father ever told Charlene over the years was that he never had any doubts her mother loved her. He shouldered the blame and never spoke ill of the woman he had loved and married, who had born his child and vanished.

  Their home had always felt like a home. Would it now be little more than a cage of memories? Charles Penticton worked hard. He traveled for business and Charlene had seen much of the world on his trips. He’d moved heaven and earth to be both father and mother to her.

  And now she had neither.

  A sudden burst of piano music brought Charlene out of her dazed memories. She struggled to tear herself away from the pit of anxious worries, of cold, hard grief that threatened to consume her. There was an elderly woman at the piano. She had a kindly face. She closed her eyes when she played.

  Charlene imagined the woman’s arms, soft and warm and grandmotherly. What would she give right now for a kind touch? For a few words of encouragement that would help her go on living.

  Soon it was all over. The pallbearers lifted the coffin and filed slowly past Charlene’s front row pew. She felt as though if she wanted to cry it would be acceptable in that moment. Ironically enough, the tears refused to come.

  She turned to watch the six men bear her father down the aisle to his final resting place, the tiny grave yard outside. It seemed perfectly suited to the man that he had been in his life, the man who valued love and family over anything else, that he should choose this quaint little Williamsburg church with the tiny plot of land beside it. In all of Virginia- no, in all of the world, nothing seemed more fitting.

  Charlene’s gaze followed the stoic, broad backs of the last two men, friends of her father. They had discussed all this when he’d found out he was ill. It was like he knew it was his time. She’d been so shocked that he arranged everything so quickly in order to spare her. He had even contacted the men who were bearing him away now, personally, before his illness had him in the grips of pain so intense it was madness.

  The church doors were opened and the bearers moved through the day lit portal. Sunbeams spilled onto the red carpet of the little church. Charlene wondered if they would ever feel warm on her skin again. Was grief always that way? Like a hard ball of ice freezing the insides so the outer layers felt no warmth?

  She copied the rest of the people assembled and rose from the pew woodenly. Her actions were guided by the masses. Her eyes fell on the last pew, the one closest to the door as she began the long, torturous journey down that same aisle her father had been borne.

  Charlene blinked when she saw him. Once. Twice. Her long, honeyed lashes framing shockingly emerald eyes. She stopped walking, shock gripping and squeezing her lungs so that they refused to take another breath. Chest on fire, she waited. He saw her and he stopped to. Their eyes met and the world closed in around them.

  He looked exactly as she remembered him.

  She was relieved when he turned his back and filed out ahead of her, into the open air. The rushing blackness rushing at the corners of her vision faded away. Her burning lungs inflated with life giving oxygen.

  Ten years. It had been ten years since she’d last seen her father’s closest friend, Clayton Ellison. Now that her father was dead he could not have prevented the man’s coming. They had broken years ago, their friendship in ruins. Had he come to pay his last respects, wish the man who was once a brother to him, a final farewell or had he come for something more?

  “Clayton,” Charlene whispered, her words evaporating in the church like the fog of breath on a cold winter morning.

  Charlene squared her shoulders and forced her wooden legs to take the required amount of steps to propel her into the heat of the mid July day. Her heart pounded wildly in her chest. A tiny spark of hope bloomed. Perhaps she wasn’t as alone as she had thought.

  Chapter 2

  A Ghost From the Past

  Clayton Ellis
on was aware of the people milling around the graveyard. Sober, black clad, their grief hanging in the air, suspended about them. His own chest felt curiously compressed. The hard bands of grief that clenched his heart told him that his college friend was dead yet he refused to believe it. Charles couldn’t be gone. Not yet. They had never officially made amends.

  The coffin was in the ground, the fresh mound of earth still standing beside the open hole. He had watched from the sidelines, hidden from view by the towering trees surrounding the graveyard and church, as Charlene Penticton threw a handful of earth on the coffin. There had been crying and handshakes, hugs and well wishes from the mourners.

  It went on for what seemed like hours until finally the last straggler paid their respects, got in their car and left.

  Only Charlene remained. She knelt at the base of the headstone, staring down at the gaping hole in the earth. She held herself perfectly still, her back erect, her bearing regal. Her honeyed hair was done up in a tight bun above her head. Her body was that of a woman now, not the girl Clayton once knew. He’d only glimpsed her face in the church and then from a distance but he could tell that she’d become the great beauty she had always promised to be.

  Stepping out from behind the towering tree that sheltered him, Clayton approached the grave and the still woman beside it. She didn’t glance up, lost in her own private world of grief and memory.

  “Charlene.” Clayton whispered her name and her face turned, her green eyes widening in surprise. Her full, lush lips parted in shock.

  “Clayton.” His name held so much, the weight of it settling between them. He stood rigidly, unsure of how to proceed. It was Charlene who broke the tense silence. “It’s been a long time.”

  He nodded, his hands at his sides. “Ten years I believe.”

  “Yes. Ten years.”

  Charlene rose from her place in the grass. The crumpled blades, flattened to the earth, began to spring back. She was a picture of grace and beauty. Tall and shapely, the lush curves of a woman so different from the girl he had once known.