by Lola Swain
Paranormal Erotic Romance Box Set
By Lola Swain and Ava Ayers
Copyright 2013 Lola Swain, Ava Ayers and Pulp Friction Publishing, Inc.
This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to persons living or dead is purely coincidence.
Snuggle up and get ready for a ride of fantasy filled with lust, adventure and yes, even love. Best-selling authors Lola Swain and Ava Ayers bring you some of the most exciting paranormal fantasy erotic romance novels published in this four novel box set. Your journey begins with a first-class stay at an ancient hotel filled with sexy apparitions with shocking secrets in Immoral Beloved, then you are a voyeur into the lives of the rich, entitled and psychotic in the dark, erotic Parawhormal Activity, next, you spend the evening with a hot, Alpha inquisitor well-versed in the art of passionate punishment in The Inquisitor’s Song and finally, frolic with the Devil’s brood during their twisted exploits in The Master Captive Chronicles. Your voyage is bursting with a delicious, tense yearning that fills you with an insatiable desire for your own hot expedition that will end in your release. Onward, friends. But, a caveat: this book is meant for mature audiences and all characters are eighteen and over. Now, climb on.
Table of Contents
Immoral Beloved, Ava Ayers
Parawhormal Activity, Lola Swain
The Inquisitor’s Song, Ava Ayers
The Master Captive Chronicles, Lola Swain
Immoral Beloved
By Ava Ayers
For She who knows the prize she thinks she won is a curse.
PART I
“I try to reach into your page and breathe it back, but life is a trick, life is a kitten in a sack.”
Anne Sexton
My life ended on June 23, 1967. It was also the day it began.
My name is Sophia Pearson-Therrault and on that day, I was a bride. Today, I am a ghost. An apparition existing between worlds on a strand like gum that stretches from the bottom of a shoe and hot asphalt. I am that which is between. The am that I am.
And there is no more pain or panic or twisting in the wind. Gone are the days of trying to please, begging for acceptance and hoping to be loved. No longer do I strive to find completion because I am complete. In a way that was both dumbly simple and mind-bogglingly complex, in a turn of the screw, I transformed.
It was the union of three that forced my elevation: the love of a man, a passionate billionaire playboy, whose need to possess overcame his reluctance to love, a night when the Gods entered and fucked the childish out of me and my friendship with Anthony Porcco, a boy who died in 1948 after eating twenty-four poisoned baked potatoes.
I reside at the Battleroy Hotel, a grand hotel on Cape Cod. It was here that my husband Brandt Therrault and I honeymooned. And on that day, June 23, 1967, he left, but I remain. But before I was this supernatural thing, I was just Sophia Pearson…innocent, naive, neurotic and certainly no candidate for what I became.
I was the youngest of three children, born to a wealthy family from Marblehead. My brother and sister were quite a bit older than me and my parents referred to me privately as the accident.
Very much in the public eye, my parents stressed the importance of applying a heavy-handed veneer of perfection to everything we did or said. As you can imagine, the Pearsons were a total sham.
My father was as much a ghost then as I am now. My mother believed she would never be seen unless she damn-well made sure she was heard.
I was defined and confined by my mother through a series of metaphors and idioms. I could not take the ballet lessons I so desperately wanted because I had two left feet, I was constantly admonished for having my head in the clouds and that I must save myself for marriage as no man will buy the whole cow when he can get the milk for free.
I spent much time alone in my room reading, which was ridiculed by my parents as frivolous and self-serving.
“Where’s Sophia now?” My father said on occasion.
“Reading, again.” My mother said as if she had a mouthful of rotten teeth.
I longed more than anything to escape and the means to do it presented itself to me when I was fifteen-years-old and I was spotted by an agent from the Ford Modeling Agency. After this, my mother seemed to be enthusiastic toward me for the first time in my life. It pleased me so much when I finally won my mother’s endorsement, gaining her approval became my second job.
My parents were so tightly enmeshed in their own dysfunctions they had little time to encourage me to do anything other than what would be the easiest thing for them to support. And because I was told I could do no other thing, I resigned myself to the myth that my calling was to be a model and soon after, a wife. And, of course, a model wife.
“The secret to your career,” my mother said, “is to work as much as possible. Then, you need to find a man. Your looks are the first thing to go. Is that a wrinkle?”
I crammed more work into four years than most people do in a lifetime. And I hated every second of it. Even though I travelled quite a bit and fancied myself a cosmopolitan girl, I was scared to move to Manhattan by myself. The compromise was for my father to purchase a beautiful penthouse apartment for me in the heart of Boston. I met my roommate Katt Lawson during a visit to Ford and through her, I thought I had a shot to be the confident, successful girl I wanted to be.
Katt was a fellow agency girl and originally from London. A true bohemian, Katt was sophisticated, free loving and always up for a party. I marveled at the way she never backed down or away from anything. When anyone asked me what I did, I apologetically mumbled that I was a model whereas Katt shouted it from the roof.
Man, did she ever try like hell to make me shed my awkward skin.
She dragged me to every party she was invited to and used to coach me while she made me stare at my reflection in the mirror.
“Look at yourself,” Katt said as she held her mirror to my face. “You are fucking beautiful, but your attitude conveys ugly duckling.”
“I’m not like you,” I said and sighed.
Despite my attributes, I was hopeless when it came to men. Every function I went to started out the same: four or five handsome men gathered around me, I interviewed each man to see if they would please my mother and one by one, they drifted away, never to be seen again. I was to men what the Titanic was to its unfortunate passengers.
The only men who stuck through my clumsiness were the predators. I had the men who were only interested in my body, but when I made it clear that this cow’s milk was not free, they disappeared. And then there were the men who gleaned they could set themselves up financially through me, but Katt scared those guys away.
In April of 1967, Katt booked a series of jobs that kept her in Europe for five weeks.
“I can’t believe you’re leaving me,” I said to Katt as she sat on her suitcase and tried to close the overstuffed box.
“Five weeks, Sophia,” Katt said.
“But what will I do without you?”
“Oh, you will pine and eat bad food and mope around with your nose shoved in a book. You will probably not venture outside these walls except to work or visit with your destructive parental figures,” she said. “But that will be done when I come back, right?”
“Perhaps I’ll prove you wrong,” I said.
But as she usually was, Katt’s prophecy proved spot on. But by the second week, I decided to shove my nose in a book in a place other than our apartment.
It was in Boston, down Newbury Street, I met Nellie Daniels.
“We are all born marked for evil.”
Charles Baudelaire
On the day I met Nellie Daniels, I sat at the counter in the cof
fee shop where she worked reading a suspenseful and juicy romance novel.
“I’ve read that too,” she said as she refilled my coffee mug.
I looked up from my book, gave her a half-smile and went back to my reading.
“Didn’t you just want to die when Officer Carlson revealed that Jamie was Mike’s killer?” she said.
I slammed the book shut and stared at her. She looked down at the countertop and picked at a dried blob of ketchup on the Formica.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I always manage to stick my foot in it.”
From her reaction, I realized I shot her one of my mother’s looks.
“It’s okay, it was boring me anyway,” I said and smiled.
Her complexion had the rough look of one of the wharf women who worked the docks icing the fish the men hauled in from the sea, but she couldn’t have been much older than me. She had a horsey smile that looked forced and her eyes were so pale blue, I imagined that she had to squint to look at anything. Her blond hair hung lifelessly on either side of her round face like a wet newspaper.
I stared at her crooked nametag. It was pinned to her blue polyester diner uniform that was stained and pilled and much too tight for her short, stocky frame. She flopped a piece of her hair over her shoulder and twisted toward me.
“Nellie,” she said as she jutted her bulbous breast toward my face. “Nellie Daniels.”
“I see that,” I said.
I studied the cover of my book and hoped that she would go away. I was in no mood to keep company with the unfortunate-looking girl who ruined the end of my book.
“And…” she said as she shoved her chubby hand in my face.
“And?” I said and leaned back a bit.
“Your name? I mean, you know my name. What’s yours?”
“Oh, Sophia. Sophia Pearson,” I said as she grabbed my hand.
She had a grip like a man, but it wasn’t confident. It was suffocating.
The skin on her hand was so rough it felt like an emery board. Her ragged nails were bitten to the quick and surrounded by dried, splintered cuticles. It was the most unpleasant handshake of my life. But because her hand was damp, I was able to slip mine from hers. Nellie caught me blotting my hand on my napkin and she ran her hands down the sides of her uniform.
“Sorry, they sweat,” she said.
“It’s okay, mine do too,” I said.
“Come on,” she said and shook her head, “you’re fibbing. You don’t look like you sweat at all.”
“Sure, I do. Everyone does.”
“Hey look, I feel really bad about blurting out the end of the book. Let me get you a piece of pie. It’s fresh and it’s on me,” Nellie said and grabbed a white plate from a stack on the counter.
“I don’t even care about that and you’ve freed me up to start the next book on my list so, thank you,” I said.
“I am glad you feel that way,” Nellie said and put her damp hand on top of mine. “But you still get the pie. I already offered it, so you get it.”
“No, really,” I said and slid my hand out from under hers, “I don’t want the pie. Let’s just leave it at that.”
But Nellie smiled and walked to the pie rack and pulled a tin out of the case.
“Oh, this smells so good,” Nellie said as she held the pie under her nose and took a deep breath. “Man, I wish I could have a piece, but I gain weight just looking at food, honestly. That one whiff just put five pounds on my ass!”
Nellie cut a big wedge of pie and plopped it on the plate as she prattled on about her propensity to gain weight when she smelled food.
“Nellie, I know I told you that I do not want any pie.”
She looked up at the plate and cocked her head to the side as she stared at me.
“I’ve already sliced it. I can’t put it back now.”
“Well, I’m sorry, but I told you I don’t want any pie.”
“But, who says no to pie?” she said as if she expected me to know the official census figures of Boston’s pie-eating citizenry.
“I do, Nellie,” I said and took my napkin off my lap and folded it on the counter. “I have a job tomorrow modeling swimsuits. Nothing passes these lips but water, coffee and lettuce until after my shoot.”
Nellie placed the plate containing the huge slice of pie on the counter in front of me. My mouth watered as I inhaled the aroma of the apples, coated thickly in a glossy glaze of vanilla and cinnamon and brown sugar.
“I told you, I don’t want that,” I said and pushed the plate toward her with the tip of my finger.
“I know,” she said as she bent forward, heaving her pendulous breasts on the counter, “I’m gonna eat the pie. So, I figured you were a model, I mean, look at you.”
“Thank you,” I said barely able to look at her as she shoveled forkfuls of pie into her mouth.
“Oh, fuck me,” Nellie said through her overstuffed mouth. “This is almost as good as sex!”
Flakes of piecrust fell from her mouth and dotted her uniform-covered breasts like dandruff.
“So,” she said as she licked her dry lips, “where do you live?”
“Uh, here,” I said and moved my napkin back and forth on the counter.
“I think I would have noticed if you lived in the diner, silly,” Nellie said as she reached over the counter and nudged me.
“Boston,” I said.
“Well yeah, I figured. But it’s a big city. Where in Boston do you live?”
“Back Bay.”
“Ah, now we’re talking. Must be nice to be rich,” she said.
“Money is really not all that important,” I said and sat up in my chair.
“You know who says money is not all that important? People with money,” Nellie said and snorted.
“I should really be going,” I said as I looked at my wrist. “It’s getting pretty late.”
“How do you know?” Nellie said as she swirled her finger around the remaining remnants of pie on her plate and popped her finger in her mouth. “You looked at your wrist, but you’re not wearing a watch.”
“I…yes, habit. My watch is being repaired. I just need to go.”
But she never stopped talking. For the next six hours, I learned all about Nellie Daniels and was fascinated.
She grew up in Rockport and her father was a fisherman. When he died in a bar fight three years before, her mother moved her and her brother to Lynn where they lived in an old row house. Nellie stressed the importance of getting out of there, how her mother was an abusive drunk and her brother did things to her.
“Things?” I said.
“Yes, things,” she said and bowed her head. “The worst kind of things.”
“You mean, he rapes you?”
“Often.”
“Nellie, you have to tell someone.”
She looked up at me and smiled. There was something in her ice-blue eyes that told me she had the same reluctance toward life that I did.
“Tell who, Sophia…my mother? She knows what he does to me. No, I just need to get out,” she said as she wiped her hands on the front of her uniform.
“But get out, where?” I said.
“Somewhere far away from them.”
Nellie looked out the glass window at the people walking by dressed in clothes that probably cost more than she made in a year.
“Sophia, do you ever have those days where making a bowl of cereal seems like too much work? Did you ever just want to escape from your entire life?”
She looked at me and closed her eyes.
“No, I wouldn’t expect someone like you would,” she said.
“Of course I do, Nellie. I imagine everyone wants to escape at one time or another. For some people it’s impossible and for others, they find they can escape and sort of reinvent themselves.”
“That’s all I want,” she said. “I want to reinvent myself. And I will too. You mark my words, Sophia Pearson.”
“I believe you, Nellie Daniels. I’m sorry that t
here’s nothing I can do for you in the meantime.”
And when I saw the brightness in her face, as soon as the words came out of my mouth, I wished I could stuff them back in.
“Oh,” she said and slammed her mannish hands on the counter, “there is something you could do for me! Do you have a boyfriend? You probably do, of course.”
“No, I don’t,” I said.
“Perfect! Tomorrow, a small group of us are going out. My childhood friend Brandt’s buddy is in town from Providence and he wants to take him out. Very cool cats. How about if you come with us?”
“I have a photo shoot,” I said.
“We’re not going until late. Come on, I’m always the only girl and it would be nice to bring a friend along. It’ll be fun and something real different. I can tell you don’t get wild very often.”
Very often? I never got wild at all.
“I don’t think so, but thank you for the invitation.”
“Why not?”
“I have to work and I don’t know how long.”
“What time will it be over? We’ll just wait,” she said.
“No, I wouldn’t want to hold up the group. Let’s do it another time.”
“When?”
“When? Well, possibly next week some time, I—”
“Look, Sophia, if you don’t want to go, just say so.”
“It’s not that at all, Nellie.”
“Then what is it?”
My mind was totally blank as I tried to think of why I couldn’t go out with them. My mother was the only person who pressed me as hard to do things I didn’t want to do and I always folded like a deck of cards no matter how strong I thought I was.
“Sophia, if you don’t want to go out, or even be my friend, then just tell me. It’s always better to be honest about these things.”
Nellie picked at a red patch of skin on the back of her hand as she stared at me. Nellie Daniels and I could not be friends. I knew I’d never in a million years bring her around my friends, I’d be too scared of how they’d judge me while they judged her. But at the same time, Nellie fascinated me the way a fetal pig floating in a jar of formaldehyde did.
“Okay, sure,” I said. “Why not?”
“Really?” she said and slammed the countertop. “You know, I knew it the day I saw you walk in this place that you and I were destine to be friends. This may sound creepy, but every time you came in here, I tried to work up the nerve to talk to you. I’m a little shy.”
