He sighed now. He couldn’t regret stabbing Piper to death. He had enjoyed every moment of it. He would jerk off in the shower just thinking about how easily that knife had sliced into her.
Fuck you, Dalio. I’m glad I killed your whore. Carter smirked to himself and turned to go back into his darkened hotel room.
Dalio Corri stepped out of the shadows, his green eyes full of rage. “This is for Piper, figlia di puttana.” And he shoved Carter with all of his strength.
Carter staggered, the railing of the balcony hitting the middle of his back, and he tipped backward, screaming as he fell the ten stories. His head impacted with the asphalt and split in two, his brain pulverized, and his eyes open and staring.
Gone.
Puglia, Italy
Three years later
Dalio stared out at the sea crashing against the rocks. The salt air filled his lungs and the rush of the waves was all he heard. He closed his eyes.
The faint touch of a hand on his arm and he looked around to see the beautiful smile on his wife’s face and the cherubic grin of his son as they came to meet him. Dalio smiled at her and Piper grinned back. “Here comes trouble,” she said, bouncing Gabriel to his father, who, laughing, took him. Gabriel had his mother’s dusky skin and his father’s bright green eyes. Dalio hugged him and kissed Piper.
“I was just thinking, we’re going to miss you around here,” he said, stroking her face. Piper pressed her lips to his.
“It’s only four days, and now that I’m partner, I have to be there,” but she smiled at him. “I’ll miss you too.”
They walked back to the sprawling farmhouse they had bought just before Gabriel was born a year previously, and Dalio accompanied her to the car. “We could come with you.”
Piper laughed. “Dude, seriously, it’s four days, and I’ll Skype you every night.”
“And morning.”
She giggled. “And morning. You, you cheeky monkey …” She kissed her son. “Be good for your papa.”
Dalio laughed at Gabriel’s wide-eyed expression, then bent down and kissed Piper’s stomach. “And you, little girl, take care of your mama.”
Piper smoothed her dress over her six-months-pregnant belly. “After this conference, I swear I’ll slow down. Until we have the other assistants trained, I need to be there.”
“I know. I’m so proud of you, Principessa.”
Piper kissed him tenderly. “I love you so much, Dalio Corri.”
“I love you, Piper Corri.”
He waved her off as she drove away from him, knowing that in no time, she would be back, and they would carry on living and loving in this fairy-tale life they had built for themselves.
The End. 8
Vengeful Seduction Preview (A Submissives’ Secrets Novel)
By Michelle Love
A young woman is the nurse to an old male billionaire. He leaves everything to her when he dies, infuriating his one grandson who’s had nothing to do with him for the last 20 years.
The grandson decides to seduce the nurse and get her to marry him. His plan is to be utterly charming until after the marriage then be so neglectful of her that she cheats on him with a friend of his that he pays to be supportive of her. Then he can divorce her and get most of his grandfather’s money back.
Sounds simple, only it’s not because the woman is a sexy saint-like person who not only gives her heart away but her virginity too. She won’t cheat no matter how hard her vengeful husband and his friend try to make her turn her back on the man she fell in love with and married.
Through her undying devotion to her husband, he falls in love with her and admits all he’s done. Will what he’s done be too much for her to take? Or will the love she has for him be so strong their marriage will survive?
Kaye
Morning dew covered the rose bushes that grew along the sidewalk. With a skip in my step, I tried my best to break the melancholy mood which struck me most mornings I went to work.
It always made me just a little bit sad to go to work.
Not because of the patients. I knew I was one of the rare people who didn’t mind working with people who needed Hospice care. Most of the other nurses did it, and did it well because it was their job, but there was always this air of resentment. Hopefully not around the patients, but around each other.
It’s never easy to know every single one of your patients will die under your care. Terminal diseases would take them all, no matter how well you cared for them. It took a particular kind of person to withstand all that comes with facing death head on and helping others accept their fate.
For me, though, I found it fascinating to interact with people in their last days. Not only did I get a chance to help them, to ease their pain and suffering, but I got hear the stories these people had in their heads. The times they’d lived through, all of the things they’d said and done, it was all there. With just a little bit of patience, these human beings had the most interesting things to say, and insights to give from another time.
Theodore Black, however, had become my favorite patient. By far. It was sort of funny, but I could still remember how terrified I had been to meet him since he was something of a local legend. The epitome of the local boy who succeeded in spite of everything that was stacked against him.
He’d ended up to be nothing but a teddy bear. An old, almost deaf, teddy bear, to be sure, but one without a mean bone in his body. A sweet, gruff old man who had won my heart almost immediately.
So it wasn’t him. He wasn’t the reason I’d been sad to come to work. Or not the whole reason. I was sad that I was going to lose him, but I knew I’d be richer for having known him.
The reason I was sad was that, in all of the time I’d been going to see Theodore , as he had insisted relatively early on I call him, I had never, not once, seen anyone with him who wasn’t a health care professional. No friends, not even any family.
This man was the richest person I knew, but that certainly hadn’t made him happy. And that was what really depressed me, made me almost sick to my stomach when I thought about it.
No one should have to die alone, and if I were the only person who could be with him in the end, then I would be. Months ago, I’d made the request to be transferred full time to Theodore, and I had never been given cause to regret it.
“Kaye?”
Theodore had been in a particularly sour mood when I first became his nurse, and it hadn’t taken me long to figure out he mostly wanted to be left alone. Upon entering his home, I often stayed quiet, unobtrusive, until he called for me. To find him calling for me as soon as I walked in was a novelty.
The cancer inside him was eating him alive, and he had become too weak to do most things for himself. Once such a strong man, then cancer turned him into an invalid who had to be diapered, spoon feed baby food, and bathed by his caretakers. I blinked at the thought, trying to push back my tears.
The last thing a nurse should do was cry for their patients. Not in front of them, anyway. Though I knew when the inevitable happened, I would cry plenty. I had been doing this since I was twenty-two. Four years ago I started my career as a nurse for Hospice Care. During that time, I had seen far too many very incredible people die.
Theodore was something else, though. I knew his death would be even worse than any of the others I’d nursed until they passed. But I wasn’t going to let that get in the way of giving him the best possible care. So I pasted a smile on my face and bustled into the room.
“Hello, Theodore! Are you hungry?” I didn’t really expect the answer to be yes, though I was hoping it would be. In the year I’d been nursing him in his home, he’d never been a huge eater, but it had gotten to the point where he was eating almost nothing.
He looked at me, his dark eyes seemed to burn as they ran me over, from head to toe. He was taking my measure, I knew, and I looked at him right back, wanting to seem like I was the sort of person he could trust.
“Kaye,” he repeated my name
, and I fought the urge to bite my lip. He clearly wanted to know if he could count on me, and I didn’t want to show any sign of indecision.
“I’m here, Theodore,” I murmured, letting my voice be soothing. “What is it? What can I do to help?”
For a moment, I thought he wasn’t going to do it. That his old habits of secrecy would go with him to the grave. I knew who he was. A big deal businessman who had made a fortune and who had had two different wives try to take that fortune from him. I knew that from the stories about him that seemed to be pretty much common knowledge in Portland, though, not from him.
He had never spoken much about his past. The things I did know, mostly came second hand.
His eyes had once been blue, from the photos I’d seen around his opulent home. They’d gone to such a pale color. Those pale eyes drooped at the outer edges. His lips quivered with the energy it took just for him to speak, “I need you to do something for me.”
I kept my smile firmly in place. I didn’t let it widen, no matter how much I wanted to. He’d finally asked for a favor. Before now, he wouldn’t leave himself vulnerable like that.
“Anything.” I couldn’t think of a single thing he would ask for that I wouldn’t be willing to give him.
One hand pulled up from his side. A long bone thin finger pointed across the room. I followed the direction and saw he was gesturing to the landline telephone which sat on the dresser. “I need you to dial a number for me.”
My eyebrows wanted to rise, but I kept them schooled carefully. This was a big deal. He’d never asked me to make a phone call before, but I couldn’t act like it was strange, or it could alienate him.
Though a knot had formed in my throat as emotion threatened to take me over, I managed a smooth tone, “Of course.”
Just treat it as routine.
When I went to the phone, I found it had a very long cord. I took it over to sit by his bed. It was one of those old kinds, with the curled cord that always ended up tangled. Picking it up, I half listened to the dial tone. I stayed silent, somehow sensing that, whatever happened, it was going to be a big deal. I was going to find out something about this man’s life, and I didn’t want to do anything to derail it. I didn’t want him to change his mind about letting me help him this little bit he was finally allowing.
I waited. The silence stretched on, and I turned my gaze toward Theodore. He didn’t look back at me, being apparently fixated on his own wasted hands resting on his comforter, which was far thicker than most people would need with the heat of the summer lingering on into September. He was always cold, though.
Gently, I dropped the phone back into the cradle, and he turned his eyes on me. “What are you doing? I need you to call someone.”
He had always been courteous to me, even when he was in massive pain from the cancer that was eating him. The fact he wasn’t now meant this was even more serious than I thought.
All in a rush, the digits of the phone number burst out of him. “Five, five, five, six, three, one, twenty-four hundred.”
I thought it might actually be one of the more courageous things I had ever seen when this scared, sick old man trusted me enough to share his life with me. It wasn’t something he’d done much of in his life, I knew that very well.
It was a good thing I had been paying so much attention. I was able to pick the phone up again and dial the numbers before I forgot them all. Breathless, I handed the phone to him and then tried to give him some space. To act as if I wasn’t eavesdropping. Though, to be honest, I totally was.
Theodore didn’t ask me to leave, though, and that meant a lot to me, too. It was all more trust than I thought I deserved, but I couldn’t help but be deeply honored by the whole thing.
I could hear the phone as he clasped it in his shaking hand. I heard it ring, once, twice, a third time, and then the line abruptly went to voicemail. I heard a strong, confident, deeply masculine voice pick up, but there was a canned quality to it that let me know it was a recording.
I couldn’t hear the exact words, but I could tell from Theodore’s expression, too carefully neutral to be anything but artificial, that he was deeply hurt.
His hand shook as he placed the phone back into the cradle. “He never answers.” No one who wasn’t looking right into his eyes would be able to tell how much this had hurt him.
“Who?” I dared to ask. It was rude, and I was probably pushing the bonds of our friendship just a little bit too much. Being deeply presumptuous he’d tell me who it was he wanted to speak to. But there was no way I could keep that one word to myself. It was more than I had in me.
Maybe he’d been waiting for me to ask, though. He certainly showed no signs of hesitation in answering me, “My grandson. My only grandson.” His voice did a strange thing. It didn’t quite break, he was too strong for that, but it dipped down a little lower. Subtle. Not the sort of thing that I would have noticed if I hadn’t been paying strict attention.
My heart clenched in my chest, and I had this sudden feeling like I’d been drenched with ice water. Not on the outside, though. On the inside, so that it froze me more surely and deeply. My heart broke for this poor, strong man, so alone and still so brave.
I started to dislike this grandson immediately. I didn’t know what had happened between them, and I didn’t really care, honestly. Nothing could excuse this man, whoever he was, from ignoring his dying grandfather.
I had to do something to curtail the hurt the poor man was enduring. “Maybe he just wasn’t home.” I had to try to cheer the poor guy up but also wanted to be fair to this grandson. I didn’t know the man, after all. I was tempted to judge him, but what did I know?
“That’s his cell phone. He never answers it.” Theodore let out a soft sigh, one I was sure I wasn’t supposed to hear. “Not for me, anyway.”
Just like that, the dislike was back. Or something like dislike, anyway. The situation seemed pretty grim when a man could ignore his grandfather like this. I couldn’t even imagine doing such a thing.
“I’ve tried calling so many times,” he murmured, his voice even smaller than it had been before. There was a brief moment of silence between us, and then, when he spoke again, his voice was stronger.
“I’d like some water, Kaye if you don’t mind,” he said, and I smiled a little though my heart was breaking for the man. He was always so polite, even though he didn’t have to be. A bit cold and remote, but always a gentleman.
“Of course,” I kept my voice as cheerful as I could as I went off to get him his water.
Damn, that grandson of his. The fool better wake up and smell the coffee.
He was Theodore’s only heir. The man might decide to leave it all to charities or something if he didn’t eventually contact his grandfather.
Being how the man never saw fit to make a visit to his dying grandfather, maybe the riches should go to charity. At least then, the money would be appreciated.
David
When the phone rang, I didn’t have any idea who it could be, at first.
I should have. My grandfather had always been a stubborn man, and it had been years that he’d been trying to reach me. Years of him calling at least every month. Over the past year, it had been more like once a week, if not twice.
Not once had I answered. It had been twelve years since the last time I’d laid eyes on my grandfather, or even heard his voice. Twelve years that I’d been utterly unable to make myself face the one and only member of my family who was still alive.
When my mother had taken off on us when I was only five, that had truly sucked. It had been okay, though. I’d been able to get through it because I still had my father, and the two of us had got through just fine.
Maybe my mother leaving hadn’t left me entirely without scars. I didn’t trust women from that day, and though I’d had lovers and even relationships, none of them had lasted. At the age of thirty, I had no desire to marry. Why bother, when whoever I married would just leave me anyway?
&nbs
p; Everyone left me eventually. anyway.
I’d been seventeen when my father had been in the car accident that had taken him from me. It was a drunk driver. The guy had plowed into my father going at least forty miles above the speed limit. They said my dad didn’t suffer at all, that his death would have been instant.
Then it was just me, and I thought it was probably better that way. My father had started a tech company, and I took it over on his death. I couldn’t do much with it at first, but once I’d made it through college, that was a different story.
I didn’t need anyone. Why count on someone and then have them leave you? There was no point. I had friends, of course, but no one that I was super close to, and I liked it that way.
I would never give anyone that sort of power over myself.
Never.
So that’s why I let the call from my grandfather go to voicemail each and every single time. The last time that I had seen him was at my father’s funeral, twelve years ago. It had hurt to watch him. He was basically an older version of my dad, right down to the tone of his voice and the subtle hint of humor in his dark blue eyes.
After all this time, I had no idea why he would be calling me. I kept expecting him to give up, and I thought that might be best for everyone involved. He needed to not expect anything from me.
Or, maybe more to the point, I needed not to expect anything more from him. One thing I’d learned about people is that, whether they wanted to or not, they left you.
So I watched as his number flashed on my call display screen. Grandpa, it said, as though I didn’t already know that. As though I hadn’t memorized every digit of that phone number.
His Sweet Torment: A Bad Boy Billionaire Romance Page 19
