by K. M. Scott
I flash her a weak smile and step back out of line as she announces that coach class can now begin boarding. More people file past me into the tube that leads to the plane as I search left and right for Kristina.
My phone vibrates and I know even before I look that I don’t want to read the message. I can’t avoid it, though, so I bring it up on the screen and see everything I’ve dreaded since yesterday.
I tried to get there but I can’t.
There’s more, but I can’t read it. Stuffing my phone back into my pocket, I get into line and make my way to the flight attendant. She gives me a sad look like she knows I’ve just spent the last fifteen minutes waiting for someone who was never going to show. Giving me a tepid smile, she wishes me a good flight and sends me down the tube to board the plane alone.
A few minutes later, I’m settled into my seat and look over at the empty seat next to me, my chest tightening as the reality sinks in. Kristina chose something over us.
Over me.
I look at my phone as everyone around me tells the attendant their drink orders and feel too sick to my stomach to even try to down any more alcohol. Her message sits there on my phone staring up at me. Dismissing me.
My publicist caught me as I tried to go to you and stopped me. I want to be there with you, but I can’t give up the chance this film offers me. Please forgive me.
My fingers don’t move to text back. I have nothing to say.
Please answer me. Say something. Anything. Please! Tell me we’re going to be okay. Tell me you forgive me. Please Ian.
The plane’s engines roar and we begin to taxi down the runway as I finally answer her message with one last text of my own.
Goodbye
As I turn my phone off, she texts again telling me she won’t let me go and that she loves me, but I don’t have anything else to say. The plane takes off into the air above Kennedy, and for me I’m not going to Rome so much as leaving her.
Leaving everything we were, including our story, behind. Whatever we had she ruined by lying to me.
Halfway over the Atlantic, I read over her messages again and see one that came in after I turned off my phone. Full of the sadness I feel, it shows the strength I love in her, and I silently pray she means what she wrote.
You said there was no running from what we are, Ian. I can’t let this be goodbye. You can’t either. We will see each other again.
Shatter
ADDICTED TO YOU #3
K.M. SCOTT
For Ian Anwell, addiction is a way of life. He can’t remember a time when he wasn’t addicted to something—heroin, alcohol, whatever made him feel good. But his newest addiction is better than all the others combined. Kristina makes him feel like the man he’s always wanted to be.
But addicts have a habit of wrecking things, even those they hold dear.
For Kristina Richards, Ian is everything. Love. Lust. Obsession. But even as she falls deeper in love with him and the madness they create together, she finds something she never expected to find in her time with him.
She finds strength she never knew she had.
Shatter was previously published as SILK Volume Three.
CHAPTER ONE
Ian
Five weeks. I haven’t seen or heard from Kristina in five weeks. Until this morning as I boarded the plane to return to New York, I would have lied if someone asked me if I still thought about her. I would have said no. Lying would have been easy four thousand miles away in that beautiful city I so looked forward to sharing with her.
Now that I’m back in New York, lying isn’t as easy anymore. The minute I stepped off the plane I felt her pull on me. For all that this city has meant in my life, after Kristina it simply reminds me of her.
I look around my apartment and see her. Everything is a memory that tortures me. The couch where we sat together as I read the words that enchanted her. The kitchen where I found joy in making meals just for her. The bed where we lost ourselves in one another. My stomach tightens as I think about us. I can’t be here right now.
Dropping my bags, I head out into a November storm that’s nothing less than raw. The feel of the cold rain on my face matches my mood. I don’t know where I’m going, but I walk fast, making the rain pelt my skin even harder. At some point I realize I’m walking toward Kristina’s place and stop dead in the middle of an intersection.
A car screeches to a stop, barely missing me, and the driver screams, “Get the fuck out of the way!”
His words barely register as I try to figure out where to go. I live in a city with practically limitless opportunities to do things, but I don’t know where to go or what to do to forget Kristina. For five weeks, I thought I’d gotten over her. I’d lied to myself, aided by the benefit of distance, but I couldn’t do that anymore.
Stumbling toward the sidewalk, I hear the guy bark again, “Get your head out of your ass!”
He has no idea how accurate his assessment of me is. I find an awning to get out of the rain as it begins to pour down and watch as a couple madly in love kisses next to me. Their happiness brings a dull ache to my chest, and I turn away, unable to watch them. I wanted Kristina and me to be that happy, but it wasn’t meant to be.
I could call her now that I’m back. I could tell her I forgive her for lying to me and letting me leave. But I can’t lie that well. Not to her. I can’t forgive her either.
That’s not true. I could forgive her for lying to me. I’ve lied for so many years I don’t even know the truth about some things anymore, so lying is a sin I can forgive.
Letting me go isn’t.
Knowing that she very well might lose me forever if she let me get on that plane alone and still letting it happen I can’t forgive. By doing that, she showed she doesn’t love me like I love her.
Madly. Completely. As if every breath I take depends on having her in my life.
I was able to lie for five long weeks as I buried myself in research and Marc Antony’s life. And drugs. I pretended like I didn’t love her more than life itself.
Now I can’t anymore.
The couple next to me walks away as I stand there unsure of what to do now that I’ve admitted the truth to myself. I can’t forgive her, but I can’t live without her.
The rain begins to slow to a light drizzle, so I head out from underneath the store awning back toward my apartment. I need a drink. I need something else. I know I shouldn’t want it, but as I make my way back to my place, that need starts to push out all thoughts of Kristina.
No. As painful as it is to think of her, I can’t let my craving for heroin take over. I’ve just spent five weeks deep in it, but I promised myself once I got back here I’d stop.
My legs break into a run as I desperately try to get home, my breathing creating a cloud in the icy air around me. But as I round the last corner I see it. A picture of her on a magazine cover. She looks incredible. Fresh, soft, feminine. I stop in front of the newsstand, lost in the vision of her, and then I see the words above her head.
ACTRESS KRISTINA RICHARDS IN TORRID LOVE AFFAIR
Five fucking weeks is all we’ve been apart and she’s already involved in some torrid love affair? I can’t bear to pick up the rag and flip through the pages to read the details of this incredible love match she’s apparently made.
Instead I just stand there staring like some idiot until the man who owns the stand asks me if I need help. Yeah, I need help. I need some way to fucking forget the most important person in my life.
I need help.
I grimace and shake my head before I race back to my apartment, feeling unhappier than I’ve felt since the last time I entered rehab. By the time I get home, I want some junk so bad my hands are shaking.
Closing the front door, I press my back against it and take a deep breath, just like they taught me to do in rehab. Take a deep breath in and push all those thoughts out of your mind. The desire to feel good again—to feel nothing but pure bliss and not have to endure the pain of
knowing Kristina is with someone else—that’s what I want. If the only way to get it is snorting shit up my nose, then I’ll take it.
Thoughts of how much I want to get high again intermingle with thoughts of how much I miss her. They wrap around my brain like some horrible dream of the perfect pleasure and pain. The feeling of floating peacefully above myself without worry or sadness one minute, pushed aside by the memory of having Kristina in my arms that I know now was all a lie the next.
I slide to the floor and hang my head, silently begging for some relief from the torture of wanting something I shouldn’t have and missing someone I can’t have. All I want is to forget. That’s all I ask.
Why can’t I just forget her?
Was she with this torrid love affair guy while she was telling me she loved me? I can’t help but wonder.
Jesus, I don’t want to be like this. I don’t want to feel all this pain.
I struggle to my feet and feel a surge of anger course through me. I hate her. I love her. I need her. I can’t stand how much I miss her. I spent five weeks researching Marc Antony and she spent that time fucking another man.
My rage takes over, and I storm across the room toward my desk where all my work for the new historical fiction book sits as a sickening reminder that she let me go. With one swipe of my arm, I send the books and papers flying onto the floor, leaving only my laptop undisturbed. For a moment, I remember the nights when Kristina and I lay in bed as I read her what I’d written and then I have the laptop in my hands ready to throw it.
I don’t know how to stop my mind from racing with thoughts about her.
Slowly, I lower the laptop back down to my desk and close my eyes to concentrate on pushing all these thoughts out of my mind. Relax. Breathe. Let your mind release those thoughts and let them go.
I try, but nothing they said would work in rehab seems to be working now. Instead, all this relaxing and breathing is making me wish I had just a little junk to give me peace. That’s not good.
Scotch is, though, and if that’s what will help me forget Kristina and heroin for at least a little while, then scotch is just what I need. I pour myself a glass and instantly feel my body relax as the scent of the alcohol wafts up toward my nostrils. Good old scotch.
Three hours later, I’ve welcomed enough of my old friend back into my system that my mind isn’t racing anymore. It’s barely doing much of anything, but that’s better than the alternative. Closing my eyes, I let the scotch slide down my throat and warm my insides as I lean back against my leather couch and look forward to the moment the alcohol knocks me out.
I watch her walk toward me, her dark hair blowing in the cold October wind as she works to push it off her face. Flustered from her attempts to look like what she thinks is beautiful, she’s more charming than she even knows. I want to take her in my arms right here on the sidewalk in front of my building and kiss her like she deserves to be kissed.
Long and deep and full of the love I feel for her.
“You didn’t have to wait for me in this wind. It’s like a tornado out here!” she says as she fusses with my collar.
I touch her hands. They feel like two blocks of ice. “Let’s get upstairs. Your hands are cold.”
She gives me a gentle smile. “You’re so sweet. Do you have anything planned for us tonight?”
Sliding my tongue across my lips, I smile. “I do. Let’s get upstairs so I can show you.”
“I wish I could kiss you right here, you know that?” she whispers next to my cheek. “But the minute I do, you just know there will be someone with a camera right behind us.”
I look around pretending to scope out any potential paparazzi. “I think we’re in the clear. You’ve been laying low for a few months so the media has moved on to someone who can’t keep their dirty laundry private.”
Kristina leans away from me and knits her brows unhappily. “I don’t consider you dirty laundry, Ian.”
“Well, I’m going to have to do something to change that,” I say with a grin as I think about all the things I want to do to her as soon as we get upstairs.
“Let’s go inside then and you can show me what you have planned.”
I take her by the hand and tug her into the lobby of my building as Michael, the doorman, flashes me a knowing smile and gives me a nod. I feel like a teenager sneaking a girl into my parents’ house. It’s silly and stupid, but this is the effect she has on me.
Somehow this gentle soul makes my dark one lighter.
We make out in the elevator, and when the old woman from the floor above me gets on with us, there’s no mistaking her look of disgust at our impropriety at kissing in public. Kristina hides her face in the collar of my wool jacket, but Mrs. Jenkins’ judgment doesn’t affect me. She never liked me anyway.
At least that’s how I took her comment that one day that the only history worth any New Yorker’s time was American history. As if studying and writing about anything older than the seventeenth century made me some kind of fucking literary criminal.
Crazy old bag.
We get off at my floor, but not before my neighbor shoots us another nasty look for having fun. She’s lucky my hands are still cold or she would have gotten a real show since I can’t keep them off Kristina.
As we head down my hallway, I say to her, “There’s our future, you know that?”
Kristina turns toward me and shakes her head in disbelief. “Like her? I can’t imagine either of us so miserable about other people’s happiness.”
I unlock my front door and nod. “Age does things to people, I guess. Not that I can ever imagine cranky old Mrs. Jenkins as anything other than the person she is now. She was probably born old and crotchety.”
Kristina giggles. “That would be one ugly baby, Ian.”
Closing the door, I walk up behind her and slide my hands under her coat as I nuzzle her warm skin. “Enough talk about her. I’ve got much better things in mind.”
“Like what?” she asks with a playful lilt to her voice.
She slips out of her coat, and I hang it up near the door. “I think we’ll eat first and then I thought we’d relax. Maybe do a little research for something I want to put into the book.”
Kristina gives me a knowing smile, but she has no idea what I mean. As I sat writing this afternoon while the wind blew and the raindrops hit the windows, I had an idea for a scene with Kate that I’m dying to try with my muse.
No woman I’ve ever known can play the coquette like Kristina, and my announcement about what I have planned for the night brings out the a flirtatiousness only she can carry off with a combination of demure looks and excitement in her soft blue eyes that telegraphs her desire for our time together to begin.
“What’s for dinner?”
I trail my fingertip over the swell of her lower lip and suck it gently into my mouth before I pull away and say, “Fuck dinner. Follow me.”
Taking her by the hand, I lead her to my bedroom. Of all the times we’ve been together on all the surfaces of my apartment, there’s just one that we’ve never tried.
The bathroom. More specifically, the sunken bathtub.
I stop in the doorway and hear Kristina’s sharp intake of breath as she first sees the bathroom. “I thought the bathroom I always use was impressive. What is this?”
“The couple who lived here before me had a thing for bathrooms. This was a third bedroom at one point, but they turned it into their own personal spa. I don’t usually bother with it, but as I was writing this afternoon, I couldn’t get the idea of you and me in that tub out of my head.”
She steps into the room and slowly spins around trying to take in all the stunning design. I have to admit it’s impressive. Black marble mixed with white subway tiles gives the room a sexy look. I may not need a bathroom like this, but I know luxury when I see it. A pristine white marble tub in the center of the room surrounded by a platform gives it a sunken tub feel all the way up here on the fourteenth floor.
Kr
istina’s eyes light up as she spies the shower area. “Is that a rainfall shower? I saw that in a magazine once and swore I’d have one if I had to make fifty movies to get it.”
I slip my arms around her waist and kiss her neck. “Yeah, but the scene I have in my mind takes place in the tub.”
Her body melts into mine, and she leans her head back on my shoulder. “Why not both? Then you could choose between them and pick the one that works best.”
“I like the way you think.”
She turns in my hold and wraps her arms around my neck. “So how does this scene begin?”
Sliding her sweater dress over her head, I step back to admire her matching bra and garter belt. I swipe my tongue over my lips at the sight of Kristina so incredibly sexy and smile. “Just like this.”
I unhook the fire engine red silk bra and let it slide to the marble floor, and she seductively removes her tights, garter belt, and red stiletto heels. Standing there in front of me, she’s naked and more gorgeous than any woman I’ve ever seen in my life. My mind begins to fill with ideas that contradict the scene I’d created hours earlier, but that doesn’t matter now.
“So now what happens?” she asks shyly. “How does the scene go?”
“I think we should forget all that and make it up as we go along.”
Kristina bites her lower lip and smiles as her hands travel to unzip my fly. “Do you think we can improve on what you envisioned this afternoon? You are the author.”
She palms my cock and strokes it as I struggle to control my desire to fuck her right there before we get anywhere close to the tub or the shower. Swallowing hard, I answer, “I think it might turn out to be even better.”
“Mmmm…good. Did you happen to see me on my knees and sucking your cock when you thought about this scene?”
My eyes roll back in my head at the mere mention of her mouth on me, and nearly panting, I say, “No, but you see how improvising is making it better already?”
