Broken
Jordan Silver
Discover other titles by Jordan Silver
SEAL Team Series
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Logan
Zak
Tyler
Cord
The Lyon Series
Lyon’s Crew
Lyon’s Angel
Lyon’s Way
Lyon’s Heart
Lyon’s Family
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His One Sweet Thing
The Sweetest Revenge
Sweet Redemption
The Spitfire Series
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Bred
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His Wants (A Prequel)
Taking What He Wants
Stolen
The Brit
The Homecoming
The Soccer Mom’s Bad Boy
The Daughter In Law
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His Secret Child
Betrayed
Night Visits
The Soldier’s Lady
Billionaire’s Fetish
Rough Riders
Stryker
Caleb’s Blessing
The Claiming
Man of Steel
Fervor
My Little Book of Erotic Tales
Tryst
His Xmas Surprise
Tease
Brett’s Little Headaches
Strangers in The Night
My Little Farm Girl
The Bad Boys of Capitol Hill
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The Billionaire and The Pop Star
Gabriel’s Promise
Kicking and Screaming
His Holiday Gift
Diary of a Pissed Off Wife
The Crush
The Gambler
Sassy Curves
Dangerously In Love
The Billionaire
The Third Wife
Talon’s Heart
Naughty Neighbors
Forbidden
Deception
Texas Hellion
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Jordan Silver Writing as Jasmine Starr
The Purrfect Pet Series
Pet
Training His Pet
His Submissive Pet
Breeding His Pet
http://jordansilver.net
Kindle Edition, License Notes
All Rights Reserved. In accordance with the U.S Copyright Act of 1976, the scanning, uploading, and electronic sharing of any part of this book without the permission of the publisher/author is unlawful piracy and theft of the author’s intellectual property. Thank you for your support of the author’s rights.
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 Jordan Silver
First eBook edition: June 2016
First print edition: June 2016
Cover model: Adrian Boomer Michalewicz
Photography R&M Photography
Cover http://www.bookcoverartistry.com
Table of 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
Epilogue
Chapter 1
***
Kerry laid across her lonely bed feeling listless and sorry for herself. That’s the way it has been for the past three months or so. No matter how much she told herself that today was the day she was going to get up and get moving, she just could never find the energy to do much more than pick her head up off her pillow.
Today, she didn’t even have it in her for that. Why bother, what was the point? She had nothing to live for, or if she did she couldn’t think of it in that moment of melancholy.
She fought back unwanted tears as she rolled over to look at the opposite wall. It was the same every morning when she opened her eyes first thing. The debilitating and almost crippling pain that seemed to grow stronger with each new day.
She never imagined that a person could feel such despair and still survive. She hadn’t seriously contemplated taking her own life, but there were moments when she wondered what pain was worse than the one she now suffered, that led so many down that road. She didn’t even want to imagine.
As her eyes drooped in misery, she gave in to the ennui that had been nipping at her heels for longer than she cared to remember.
She sniffled and curled into herself in sorrow as she asked herself how long she would feel like this, so alone, so completely broken. But there were no answers, only a deep void of nothing. A black hole that waited to suck her in if she let it.
She’d stopped answering the phone when she had one, before her ex cut it off. Or even listening for the doorbell, when the few friends she’d had left even bothered checking in. That had been a long time now. They’d long since given up. The thought only added to her pain and misery.
At twenty-eight she felt as though her life was at an end. She’d been gutted and left for dead and all that was left was this hollow empty shell. Where had it all gone? How had it gone so wrong? More importantly, was she ever going to get out from under this or was this her end?
She had no more tears left to shed and that was the truth. The only emotion she knew these days, was hurt. There was a little bit of confusion mixed in there somewhere, but since there was no hope of her ever getting answers as to why her life had been turned so horribly upside down, that was probably going to stay with her for a long-long time.
Rolling over she pressed her face into the pillow, no longer willing to look at the bare brick walls that surrounded her. Her mind flashed to her once beautiful home. The home that she’d loved and had put so much time and effort into. The home that her ex husband now shared with her ex best friend and their child.
The scream started in the dark recesses of her mind but never made it past her lips. Pain. That’s all she knew anymore, a deep gut wrenching pain that seeped through her very pores. The anger, like extended talons, struggled to fight its way through the depression that shrouded her mind, but there was no hope for it. It was just all too awful.
When she made a mad dash for the bathroom to throw up she figured she still had some feeling left after all. With her sweaty brow resting against the cool porcelain of the toilet bowl, she
let the tears come. Looks like that well hadn’t dried up after all.
The sound was harsh and ugly in the confined space of the musty little room. If it were possible to release your pain through tears then she would’ve been healed by now. Heaven knows she’d cried enough for three lifetimes.
But this, this felt different as she got to her hands and knees. The pain was like a weight pressing down on her, forcing her into the cold hard floor, draining what strength she had left. Despair, she knew that’s what it was, but had no way to stop it.
She clawed at the floor as she tried to escape her own misery. The pain was like a live thing in her gut as she cried her heart out there on the cold stone floor. Her life of the past year ran like a movie reel behind her tightly closed eyes, no matter how hard she tried to keep the memories at bay. Would there ever come a time when those memories would fade? Will the pain ever subside? Or will she carry this burden the rest of her life? The thought was almost too much to bear.
The divorce had been one of the worse experiences of her life. She’d had to sit there in a room with total strangers while the man she’d loved since high school had explained why he didn’t think she deserved any part of what he’d built over the years of their life together. He’d talked about her as if she were a complete stranger, as if she were just a passing fancy that he had grown tired of and now couldn’t wait to be rid of.
Overnight, he’d become someone she didn’t recognize and she’d been so blindsided by the change, that she hadn’t had time to get her bearings. Talk about a blitz attack. She’d been left reeling. Still was in fact. Maybe if she’d known? Had had some type of warning? She couldn’t see how that could’ve made a difference.
The betrayal had been almost crippling. The things he’d said…. Who was this person, this stranger that spoke about her so callously? Where was the sweet boy she’d loved with all her heart and in whom she’d placed all her hopes and dreams?
Instead, she’d seen a man who had lost all feeling for her and she couldn’t for the life of her figure out why. What had she done that had caused the man she’d once believed loved her more than anything else in this world to change so drastically towards her?
What horrible thing did he imagine? And when did it start? How could she not have known that this was in him all those years when she’d been spinning dreams of happily ever after in her head? She’d done so much, given her all.
Now instead of the love and support she’d been expecting now that the sacrifices she’d made were over, she was faced with ridicule and cold indifference from the man who was supposed to love her. Had she not seen it with her own eyes she would’ve believed it to be a hoax, some sick twisted joke at her expense.
But this was no hoax. She’d gone to bed one night believing one thing about her life, her future. So much hope. Only to be rudely awakened in the new light of day with the hard cold truth. She’d been replaced when she hadn’t even known there’d been an opening where she once stood.
But the worse, the worse were the court battles. Where their lives’ drama was played out before strangers. It was like having your guts ripped out and hung out to dry. To hear the things she’d taken such pride in doing denigrated to nothing. To hear someone whom she’d trusted, and slept next to for so many years, speak of her in such negative dispassionate terms. Except for the pain it would’ve been like watching a movie in three-D.
She’d sat there like a lump as he laid out their life, the life they’d shared, as seen through his eyes. There was no mention of the double shifts and extra jobs she’d done to put him through medical school. There was no recall of the blood sweat and tears she’d put into their relationship.
It was as though the years together, the shared dreams, the late night plans for their future as they ate Ramen noodles out of Cool Whip containers had all disappeared into thin air.
Where had he been, this stranger that spoke in hushed tones to his lawyer each time the judge asked a question? Had he not been right there with her throughout those years of hardship and turmoil? When she’d been the one shouldering the burden? Where was the man who’d been so full of gratitude and praise for her? The one who’d promised her the world one day?
Instead, he’d stomped all over her heart, and destroyed her self-esteem with his claims that she had done nothing really to contribute to what he had become. To hear him tell it, he had singlehandedly done it all on his own. While she was little more than a nuisance he now found himself saddled with.
It didn’t seem real. This could not be the same person, not her Paul. Not the boy who’d become a man in her arms as even she’d grown into womanhood in his.
She’d spent those days in the courtroom in a deep fog of disbelief and fear. There was a cloud hanging over her then. Something that seemed to be trying to cushion her mind from what was really going on. Some days that cloud felt more like it was going to strangle her.
When she did let her mind process what was going on around her, it was always too much. Until, she’d tried to disappear into her own reality in her mind. It had become too much to hear any more. To sift through what was real and what was not, from this person who now seemed to have lived in a completely different home to the one they’d shared.
She’d been so hurt and disillusioned by the blatant lies that even then she’d tried to convince herself that it was the attorney putting him up to it. There was no way he could really feel those things let alone say them. She’d sat there in that courtroom in the last days, as the embers from the ashes of her life died out, hoping against hope that the boy she loved would come to his senses. That he’d take one look at her, sitting there so broken, and remember all that they had meant to each other.
It never happened. The stranger in front of her was a far cry from the young kindhearted boy she’d given her innocence to those many years ago. When she was young and stupid and full of dreams for the future. Had he known then that he would one day destroy her? What did he see when he looked back on those days? What were his memories like? Were they anything like her own?
In the end, because she hadn’t been able to afford a hotshot attorney the way Paul had, she’d lost everything. When she’d sought an ounce of compassion from him, for what she knew was to become of her life once it was all over, he’d looked at her with such hate and unbridled rage that it was hard for her to comprehend.
Why? What had she done that he would turn her out onto the street with literally nothing more than the clothes on her back? And to make matters worse, after the dust had settled, he’d tried to take even those. It was as if he was trying to eliminate her very existence and the memory of their life together completely.
By then she’d given up caring anyway. Her heart had frozen inside her as she went from disbelief, to wondering if he was suffering some kind of mental break. It was hard for her to accept even then that he was no longer the boy she knew.
She’d run the gamut of every emotion known to man in those few weeks it had taken them to destroy her. Ten years disintegrated in a matter of seconds and in the end she had nothing to show for her sacrifice.
She’d pretty much lost all faith in the human race after that. If Paul the man she’d loved since childhood, the man she’d hung all her future joys on had turned on her so viciously, what else was there to say really? How could she possibly ever trust again?
Her mind went to the other player in this farce. The one she’d learned about only after the divorce was final. The reason for the change in the husband she’d adored. Where she no longer felt anything but a cold numbness where Paul was concerned, Jenny was a whole other story. The anger and hate that the other woman invoked was not to be borne.
For the first time in her life she contemplated murder. She’d always heard the question, why blame the woman and not the man? She blamed them both, but there was a special reserve for the succubus who had brought about her downfall.
When she thought of the deceit she went from feelings of rage to self-loathing a
t her own stupidity.
It wasn’t that she was letting Paul off lightly. Him she could hardly stand to think about anymore, when she wasn’t pining after him that is. But Jenny’s betrayal cut just as deep.
She’d pretended all these years to be her friend. She was the one who was always there, harping on the fact that her best friend worked herself like a dog to put a man through school. Something she claimed she would never do because men were pigs and she swore that one day Paul would trade Kerry in for a better model. Who knew the whole time she’d been plotting her take over of Kerry’s life? She’d slept with her husband in her bed. She wasn’t sure anymore whose betrayal cut deeper.
She’d never been given the opportunity to face down the other woman, to get some kind of explanation. As if anything that lying bitch said would’ve made a difference. But still it would’ve been good to have some answers. She needed that.
Instead, every time she’d tried, Paul had stood between them. Imagine, her own husband, the man she’d trusted, the man she’d given her body to for ten years, protecting another woman from her. That had been one of the harshest blows to her already shattered ego.
She’d spent many a day and night curled up in a ball, racking her brain for any signs that she’d missed along the way. By then she’d been a lump of misery, nothing made sense and the whole world had gone dark. She’d endured spurts of anger mixed with depression until eventually depression won.
Those were the darkest days. When her mind would hardly work and she couldn’t hold a thought for more than two seconds. She’d thrown up more than a drunk on a seven-day binge and madness was nipping at her heels. She was convinced that there wasn’t a therapist anywhere in the world who could fix what ailed her.
She’d even sunk so low as to hang around outside her old home, the home she’d barely had time to enjoy before being ousted. Having the cops cart you away in handcuffs because your replacement felt threatened by you hanging around her home as she carried the child that was by all rights supposed to be yours, was about as horrifying an ordeal as she could’ve imagined.
That had been the last time she’d tried. The humiliation coupled with the restraining order had finally put the nail in that coffin. And if she hadn’t exactly moved on, she’d withdrawn. She’d had to accept after all the knocks that her life was gone. The life she’d mapped out for herself had become nothing more than a tainted dream.
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