by Hazel Kelly
N E I G H B O R S
A D A R K R O M A N C E
Hazel Kelly
© 2017 Hazel Kelly
All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, transmitted, copied, or stored in any form or by any means without prior written permission of the author. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.
This is a work of fiction. All characters, names, events, brands, companies, and locations in this story are products of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, organizations, and settings is purely coincidental.
Edited by Aquila Editing
Cover Artwork – © 2017 L.J. Anderson of Mayhem Cover Creations
TABLE OF CONTENTS
P R O L O G U E
O N E
T W O
T H R E E
F O U R
F I V E
S I X
S E V E N
E I G H T
N I N E
F L A S H B A C K
T E N
E L E V E N
T W E L V E
T H I R T E E N
F O U R T E E N
F I F T E E N
S I X T E E N
S E V E N T E E N
E I G H T E E N
F L A S H B A C K
N I N E T E E N
T W E N T Y
T W E N T Y O N E
T W E N T Y T W O
T W E N T Y T H R E E
T W E N T Y F O U R
T W E N T Y F I V E
T W E N T Y S I X
T W E N T Y S E V E N
F L A S H B A C K
T W E N T Y E I G H T
T W E N T Y N I N E
T H I R T Y
T H I R T Y O N E
T H I R T Y T W O
T H I R T Y T H R E E
T H I R T Y F O U R
T H I R T Y F I V E
T H I R T Y S I X
T H I R T Y S E V E N
T H I R T Y E I G H T
T H I R T Y N I N E
F L A S H B A C K
F O R T Y
F O R T Y O N E
F O R T Y T W O
F O R T Y T H R E E
F O R T Y F O U R
F O R T Y F I V E
E P I L O G U E
N O T E F R O M T H E A U T H O R
O T H E R B O O K S I N T H E S O U L M A T E S S E R I E S
O T H E R S E R I E S B Y H A Z E L K E L L Y
“We’re only as sick as our secrets.”
P R O L O G U E
I’m only twenty-three, but I’ve already lost my one great love.
Maybe the fact that I had one at all makes me lucky, but it doesn’t feel it.
Loving and losing at such a young age is something I wouldn’t wish on anyone, something with which I’ve had far too much experience.
But that’s all behind me now.
As for the future, I wouldn’t say it looks bleak, but— considering what I’ve become— it would be naïve to think anyone could ever love me again the way Sebastian did.
He was the kind of man people are always saying doesn’t exist anymore outside of early Hollywood films. He was handsome, intelligent, charming, and he could make me laugh even when the sadness of my life was suffocating.
I’m lucky to have known him, lucky to have loved him first…whereas he’s probably realized by now that he’s lucky I left without saying goodbye.
But I had no choice.
On the plus side, ever since then I’ve had choices. I haven’t made the best ones, of course, but who does? At least being able to make them means I have total freedom for the first time in my life.
Well, not total freedom.
I’ll never have freedom from my darkest secret…or the nightmares it provokes. I’ll never be free from the knowledge that my secret makes me unworthy of love. Or at least, the kind of love that really matters.
Oh well.
If the fact that I loved and lost remains my proudest accomplishment, then my life will not have been wasted.
Besides, it could be worse.
At least Sebastian doesn’t know the truth about what happened. At least, in his memory, I’ll always be young and carefree.
And in my darkest moments, it’s a relief to find that comfort.
O N E
- Lily -
The stranger across the table was looking at me like a piece of meat, and as usual, the feeling was bittersweet.
On the one hand, it was my job to make him want me like that, my job to make him picture me naked and fixate on my mouth and neck and cleavage. My job to make him think that if he played his cards right, I might want him back.
But that didn’t change the fact that, deep down, I knew the attraction was empty. Dirty. Wrong. Deep down, I knew there was nothing sexy about the manufactured chemistry between us.
Then again, deep down I knew he’d probably tip me at least a grand if I let him touch me between the legs, maybe even more depending on how convincingly I pretended to like it.
I always made it clear up front that sex wasn’t part of the deal, though. Just because I was prepared to sell my company didn’t mean I was happy to blur the lines of consent. As far as potential customers were concerned, I was merely a date-for-hire. Rentable arm candy.
Plus, if the sex felt like an extra— if the client felt they’d won something they weren’t guaranteed— I was much more likely to earn a tip for going above and beyond. Vivian taught me that. And as much as it often surprised me, Vivian hadn’t been wrong about anything yet, including the fact that I could do this job. That I would do it.
Like most girls, I never imagined I’d become an escort. Of course, when you’re already a criminal, it’s hard to care about sliding farther down that slippery slope, especially when the money’s so good.
My poor mother—may she rest in peace—would be horrified at the things I did to make ends meet. After wasting so many words explaining the difference between good touch and bad touch, she probably turned in her grave every time I let bad touch happen in exchange for a wad of cash. Then again, hindsight being what it is, I understood why she made those lectures a priority.
I also understood that she didn’t do enough. Not even close. But she wasn’t as strong as me.
Obviously, I didn’t blame her for what I’d become, but I wasn’t going to apologize for it either. I was over being a victim. What I was and what I was capable of had been tested, and I owned that truth.
Besides, if I apologized for everything I was sorry about in this world— if I indulged myself in that way—I wouldn’t be able to get out of bed, and I didn’t have the luxury of selfishness.
I watched Richard from behind coyly batting eyelashes as he ordered. He had nice broad shoulders and was on the verge of becoming a silver fox. He certainly didn’t look like the kind of man that needed to pay for women’s company, but like most rich guys his age, he was likely tired of being put through the ringer by gold diggers.
That’s usually how men like him ended up taking girls like me to lunch, anyway. They knew the true cost—financially and emotionally—of keeping a woman, and if they could skip the emotional parts, they were happy to pay extra.
As he spoke, women his age cast admiring glances his way, their gaze turning dirty when it strayed to me. I was used to that, though. After all, it’s always women’s fault in our society. It doesn’t matter if it’s an elderly man courting a younger woman, a black man dating a white woman, or a young man dating a cougar. The woman is always the predator. At least as far as other
women are concerned.
I already told Richard what I wanted so he could order for me. I even pretended to care about his opinion on what I should get since making him feel like a big man was all part of the game. When he insisted on a specific tweak for both his starter and his main course, I made a mental note that he was one of those guys who liked things customized.
Therefore, if I did decide to sleep with him (assuming he hired me for the event we were there to discuss), I’d be sure to ask him what he was into. And whether it was something I’d done before or not, I’d say it was my first time just to satisfy him. Because he wasn’t paying me to be honest. On the contrary, he was doing the exact opposite.
He was paying me to be both charmingly vacant and a deep well of sexuality that would never run dry. He was paying me to be a fantasy.
But it was no trouble. I’d rather not be myself anyway.
“So,” he said after he finally let the waiter leave. “I’m sort of new to this.”
In his case, I believed him. He’d had a kid-in-the-candy-store glow from the moment I walked in, a shine that tended to dull with regular clients.
“Maybe you could walk me through this?”
He seemed kind, which put me at ease. After some bad experiences last year, I’d been focusing on a slightly older age bracket. Younger guys weren’t as flush, and they expected too much for their money.
I’d found older men were not only more grateful for the company of a sophisticated woman, but they were also more generous in every way that counted. “Well, I thought it would be nice to meet for lunch to get comfortable with each other, since you said the gala was important to you.”
He nodded.
“So we should formulate a backstory.” I twirled the delicate charm on my necklace since his eyes were drawn there anyway. “And if there’s anything I should know about who else might be there or—”
“My ex-wife.”
“I see.”
“She fucked our gardener, and he’s living in my house in Palm Beach now, drinking cocktails bought with my alimony payments.”
I dropped my hand. “I’m so sorry, Richard.”
“Me, too.”
“So you want to win her back?”
“God, no. I just want her to realize what a con artist he is.”
I squinted at him.
“I want you to make him want you so bad she’s disgraced.”
“Excuse me?”
His expression turned so grave I felt like a PI. “I want you to do whatever it takes to make her lose faith in him, to make her see him for the manipulative user he really is.”
I took a sip of water.
“You seem surprised.”
“It’s a different angle than I was expecting.”
“I need to get that piece of shit away from my kids.”
I swallowed. “Have you told her how you feel about him?”
“Of course I have.”
I sighed. “This is sort of outside my jurisdiction. I’m in the professional dating business, not the home-wrecking business.”
“Name your price,” he said. “You’re exactly his type.”
I didn’t want to know what that meant and was relieved when he didn’t elaborate. “Aren’t you worried what people will think of you if your date comes on to someone else?”
He shook his head. “I’ll make it clear to everyone that we’re in an open relationship because my sexual appetite demands it, and I’ll look like a hero no matter what.”
Interesting.
“All I really care about is getting that guy’s feet out of my goddamn slippers and his hands off my goddamn wife.”
I leaned back in my chair and considered his proposal while the waiter presented our starters…until something distracted me, causing a shift in the air. It was the fleeting view of a man’s profile as he passed an open doorway on the far side of the restaurant.
It wasn’t that he looked familiar. I hadn’t seen him well enough. It was that he felt familiar. Fortunately, I managed to convince my mind otherwise. My body, on the other hand, was covered in goosebumps by the time I realized I’d been holding my breath.
“Are you okay, Bianca?” Richard asked.
His voice sounded like he was speaking underwater.
“Bianca?”
I snapped myself out of it when I remembered that was the name I’d given him.
“You’ve gone pale.”
“Sorry,” I said, taking a deep breath. “It’s nothing.”
It couldn’t be.
T W O
- Sebastian -
After three years on Wall Street, I was living the dream—at least by most people’s standards.
There were only two commandments at my firm: make money, and make the money you make make money. Other than that, there were no rules, which was strangely liberating for a guy like me.
After all, my parents raised me to believe that rules were everything, that the law was everything, regardless of whether it was religious or political. They were good Christians and even better Americans, a privilege they took very seriously after growing up in neighborhoods in Mexico that were so poor and dangerous they’d never even gone back to visit.
Yet, despite the fact that my mother was a former librarian and my father was a retired chief of police, I sometimes doubted whether either of them had read about or experienced the kind of corruption I saw on a daily basis.
Maybe that was naïve. My dad worked a lot of cases he wouldn’t talk about. But he wouldn’t talk about a lot of things, including the fact that he was convinced my colleagues were nothing but a bunch of white collar cowboys.
That being said, he was proud of the fact that I made lots of money for myself and others, since that was the one American ideal he never quite lived up to. Still, he was my ultimate hero and making him proud was everything.
Granted, I wasn’t sure he would’ve been terribly impressed to find me drinking fifteen-dollar gin cocktails on a Friday afternoon, but it was part of the job. Not my favorite part by any stretch. Most of the time, I hated the schmoozing I had to do. But I put up with it because I liked the challenge of watching market trends and trying to predict what individual stocks would do, what people would do, what money would do.
And I was good at it.
Maybe it wasn’t as noble as following in my dad’s footsteps, but one could argue that there was nothing noble about making your wife worry her days away for thirty-five years without ever earning enough to buy her a fur coat or some fine jewelry to thank her for sticking by you. Or take her to Paris. Or Spain. Or even just somewhere she could enjoy a fifteen-dollar cocktail.
Not that I had a wife.
I wasn’t sure I wanted one, either. Every guy I worked with had a wife and at least one mistress. It was like the freaking mafia. I had a theory, though, that it only worked out that way because they’d all picked the wrong wife. Surely, if you picked the right woman, she would be enough.
But picking women wasn’t like picking stocks. You couldn’t just pick one and hope for the best. The stakes were much higher.
Frankly, I was starting to think that the right woman was never going to materialize. I was convinced she did once, but she disappeared from my life overnight without a trace, without even extending the courtesy of a fucking text message.
And so much time had passed since I last saw her that her memory had taken on the surreal quality of a mirage or a hologram. Sometimes I wondered whether she’d even existed at all.
But then I’d walk by a bouquet of lilies and my whole body would tense up at the scent, reminding me that she’d been real. That I hadn’t just known her, I’d loved her.
“I can’t believe he’s going to marry her,” Dave said, getting the waiter’s attention with a raised hand and pointing at our drinks. “He’s not doing well enough to afford a girl like that.”
I liked Dave, but he had a very transactional view of relationships. Not that I could blame him. The women who frequ
ented our social circles often had expensive taste and dollar signs in their eyes. “He loves her, Dave. What’s he supposed to do?”
“Love someone else?” he suggested, pouring some olive oil on the small plate next to our fragrant bread basket. “Someone with less expensive upkeep? Mark my words, she’ll burn through his profits, and he’ll have nothing but silicone and hair extensions to show for it.”
“You’re a terrible cynic, you know that?” I took a piece of bread and tore a corner off. “Did it ever occur to you that he might know exactly what he’s signing up for and that he might be cool with it?”
He dropped his chin. “Don’t be naïve, Sebastian. No guy ever knows what he’s signing up for.”
“You’re just jealous because she had no interest in you from the minute she started hanging out with us.”
“I reject that theory.”
“Like she rejected you.”
“I wouldn’t touch her now with a twenty-foot pole.”
“’Cause you’ve only got a two-inch one.”
He glared at me and then burst out laughing. “Her loss. I’m a freaking catch and a half.”
“Of course you are,” I said as the waiter arrived with our fresh drinks.
“And it’s more than two inches,” he said once we were alone again. “Just so you know.”
“I didn’t ask, but if anyone else does, I’ll be sure to set them straight.”
“Do,” he said, lifting his new drink to his lips without draining the dregs of his last one.
My eyes scanned the busy restaurant, lingering on people who looked familiar for their equally lush Friday lunch habits, before settling on a bouquet of white lilies in a vase across the room.
“I always get the steak, but maybe I’ll try a different cut this time,” Dave said, mostly to the menu.
I studied the flowers, which were so white they were almost glowing, until a waiter came by, picked up the vase, and walked away with it, allowing the woman seated beyond it to come into view.
My whole body stilled with shock.
