Possess Me_A Billionaire Romance

by TN King

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  DEDICATION

  PROLOGUE

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  EPILOGUE

  BOOK TWO

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  POSSESS ME

  Intensity Series

  BOOK ONE

  T.N KING

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

  This is a work of fiction. All characters, places, businesses and incidents are from the author’s imagination, or they are used fictitiously and are definitely fictionalized. Any trademarks or pictures herein are not authorized by the trademark owners and do not in any way mean the work is sponsored by or associated with the trademark owners. Any trademarks or pictures used are specifically in a descriptive capacity.

  POSSESS ME

  Intensity Series

  BOOK ONE

  T.N King

  Copyright © T.N King 2018

  Book Design & Formatting: Wicked Muse

  Book Cover Art: Book Cover Luv

  DEDICATION

  To my lovely butterflies in my Butterfly Nest, thank you for your constant support and making this book possible.

  PROLOGUE

  The building sat on a lonely stretch of highway, the nearest other building another half mile down the road, and even that was only a gas station. It was part of its appeal at least that was what the regular’s liked to say, the absence of city sound that came hand in hand with so many other restaurants. It was charming, quaint, and just now a factor in the nightmare that the day had struck. A glow emanated from inside, oranges and reds leaping against the wallpaper that hadn’t been changed in the better half of the last decade, smoke pouring out of what windows had already been shattered. The usually peaceful landscape had been transformed into a hellish dance of flame and ash.

  Ellie White stood just outside of one of the busted doors at the entrance, panting, a hand held over her chest and her pallor matching that of the ash hanging in the air around her. She didn’t want to go back inside, didn’t want to chance not being as lucky in making it out as she had been the first time… but her sentiment outweighed her logic.

  Her palms were sweating, heart beat pounding away inside of her ears as she stepped forward resolutely. She knew this was quite possibly the worst idea she’d ever had. Ellie was many things, but stupid couldn’t be counted among them… at least she wouldn’t have thought so before now, walking straight back into the burning diner. She wanted to turn back around and head closer to the road, finish hacking up the sediment and smoke she had already inhaled... but she had to save the photo of her father. It didn’t matter if anyone else would view it as silly and sentimental. It didn’t matter that she was throwing caution to the wind, literally so to speak.

  Ellie wasn’t a material girl. Possessions weren’t what defined her, but that photo still hanging up in her locker went with her everywhere. She’d had it printed out the day of his passing and it was the last tangible piece of her father she had left.

  Walking back into through those doors and past the entrance, she felt like she’d entered a foreign war zone as thick, black smoke surrounded her, making the very familiar seem—different. The very air was heavy, pushing down upon her and making each breath she took, rattle through her very lungs. She began to feel light headed, the room spinning around her and each step seemingly more off kilter than the last. Yes, this was a bad idea… but she’d known that going in, she just hadn’t been able to separate the logic of it from her emotions.

  The dizziness slowly grew with each step further into what had been her place of work, her shoes seeming to drag on the vinyl despite her best efforts to pick her feet up. She wanted to turn around and run back out— but she had already made it this far, had already gone through this much trouble, and there were only so many feet left between her and her locker.

  Her heart plummeted, watery eyes blinking through the haze of smoke new tears joining those that had already begun to leak down her soot covered face. Flames poured out of the Employee’s entrance, licking their way up the door frame and to the ceiling, bathing that back patch of the diner in an eerily menacing glow even through the plumes of black and gray smoke.

  Her feet were frozen to the floor, she kept gasping for air as if it would help her find the clean oxygen that her lungs were demanding. Her form remained half-hunched as if to escape the toxins filling the air around her. She’d known this was a bad idea, and this realization kept playing on a loop through her head as if to remind her… and it did nothing at all to reroute her feet. With her father’s face, flashing through her mind that knot of desperation in her belly kept hardening.

  She couldn’t access her locker through the employee’s entrance… fine. There was still the route through the walk-in cooler she could take, the back door would take her straight to her locker… chances were that the air inside of the cooler would be some sort of respite from the air out here as well. There had to be positives, she certainly wasn’t giving up. It was a stumbling, toe-stubbing ordeal making it around the wall and trying to avoid putting her hands on any surface.

  Her elbow hit upon something cooler than the rest of what she’d been bumping into, breath catching in her chest, half afraid to be hopeful. Now almost sobbing when her hand found the handle to the walk-in, fingers slipping against the metal until she could turn it, her whole body jettisoning through that opening, inhaling with a near hysterical, shaky laugh even before the heavy door swung shut with a thud behind her. She’d been right, even if it was a small victory… the air inside of the cooler was still mostly fresh, the only smell of smoke emanating off of her body and not the inside of the cooler. Even if the smoke and flames hadn’t reached inside of this room yet at the rate they were moving, it would be only a matter of time…Ellie was impulsive, but she wasn’t trying for outright stupid.

  Her legs felt leaden, held in place while she made it through the cooler, aware that she wasn’t taking it nearly as slow as she should’ve been to fill her lungs with the clean air. A window could be seen at the end of the door, leading into the locker room. She could see the smoke filling the space, even if the flames hadn’t quite made it there yet… If she were trying to be careful she might have stayed inside of the cooler, might have waited the fire out. But she was too worried about that picture, as usual she became a dangerous mix of impetuous and headstrong.

  Taking one last steadying breath with her hand on the door handle, she inhaled as much of the clean cold air as she could hold within her lungs. Twisting her wrist, flinging the door open she nearly tossed herself into the smoke filled room with a kind of reckless abandon. Her feet slammed against the floor, her stuttered running steps carrying her in an uneven zig-zag across the space towards her locker. Her hands fumbled uselessly for a moment, fumbling against the metal until she could reach the latch- “Owww!” leaving her lips in a high-pitched, pain-filled squeal as the burning metal connected with her thumb.

  “Oh crap,” she cursed, nursing her hand up near her breast and turning in a full circle in the middle of the room. She could feel the burned skin, throbbing and stinging even with how she held it, that smoke filling the room more and more with each passing second and all she wanted to do was fall to her butt and
cry. She just wanted that picture, just needed to get into her locker and then she could make a mad dash for another exit, but first… she had to get the picture. She turned again, her eyes searching the room in vain.

  It had just become so hard to see much of anything through the thick screen of smoke that hung in the air, her cough sputtering out of her ribcage and her body turning uselessly again. If she could just find where the dirty hamper was… she knew it was close, within tossing distance of her very locker from having done just that at near the end of every one of her shifts. Her resolve was wavering and again, so taking a half step forward with a shaky inhale, she put her hand out slowly, being sure to use the one that had already been burned, and began feeling around the air as she moved, waiting for her hand to hit something. She had half been expecting to touch metal again accidentally, thereby burning her hand further, but she’d gotten lucky in hitting the mound of dirty dish rags that sat atop it instead. She would never curse another employee ever, for not taking it into the laundry room before it was overflowing. Never again. Grabbing the dampest one from the top and wrapping it around her hand carefully, she used it to protect that burned section of her skin.

  This’ll have to work. She braced herself while turning back towards her locker. She couldn’t run any longer, her coughing no longer intermittent but every other step. She stumbled back against the locker once more, using her now half-bandaged hand to quickly open the metal latch, door swinging open and the picture she’d been so focused on was front and center, clipped with a magnet to the inside of it.

  It had been taken before that last month of hospital visits, his skin not nearly as wrinkled and desiccated as it had become over those last few weeks. His blue eyes were dancing merrily, lips pulled into an easy grin, just short of the laughter she knew he would dissolve into, right after the camera lens had clicked. She’d been pulling the most ridiculous faces, poking and prodding at him to try and raise his spirits, and somehow, even as silly as it had been, it had worked… it was the single last good memory she had of him. The only copy she’d thought to make at the time. With her non-burnt thumb brushing over the edge of the photograph, tears pooled in her eyes having nothing now to do with the smoke. She loved that old man, more than she would ever be able to put into words, and missed him every single day since he’d been gone.

  Somewhere behind her shelves fell, crashing to the floor in a groaning, screaming mess of wood and metal, flames licking up the sides and taking down even more of the structure after the initial crash. Her whole body felt leaden, held in place…she needed to move. She knew it, but getting herself to actually do so was a different story entirely, her breath catching up within her chest and her eyes closing briefly. She had the picture, fingers carefully moving around the edges of the polaroid, so she could shove it down into her shirt, half between her bra and skin.

  Now Ellie had the picture…she just needed to get out of here before the building came down around her head.

  She turned, looking around the room in dismay. In her preoccupation with the photograph, more smoke had poured in, and what had once been the wall between the hallway and the locker room was now a half wall of crumbling, fiery debris. All around her smoke and flame played throughout the drywall, her watery eyes making it even harder to make anything out. The cooler locked automatically behind you when you came in, a safety feature that was to her disadvantage now… and one she hadn’t considered at all when she’d been coming through the cooler in the first place.

  If she’d been smart, she would have tried blocking it open but she’d been so focused on that photograph and now she was paying the consequences. Her frustration mounted, turning again and almost choking on her next round of coughing, the dish rag she had wrapped around her burnt thumb remembered and her fingers working at untwisting it from her hand even as she walked. She needed to keep moving, there wasn’t any other option, but her vision was blurring at the edges and the pounding in her head had begun to crescendo all on its own.

  Desperately, she lifted that rag to her face, holding it over her mouth and nose, trying in vain to stifle her coughing. Coughing was wasting too much oxygen, forcing her to use up what already very little store of it she had. If she wasn’t careful, she wasn’t even going to have time to find an exit, much less make it out. With tears coming more rapidly as she turned again—the room reverberated once more.

  It was no rack of shelving that had hit the floor this time, but the remainder of the wall separating the back of the diner from the front. Daylight streamed murkily through the cloud of dust and debris joining the already smoke filled room, just enough to be seen through the conglomeration. To her, standing there, it looked like an opening from a burning hell into the passage of heaven. She didn’t waste any time thinking on it further, didn’t wait for that wall to cave in even further and leave her without any exit at all—she ran. Like her life depended on it, and the realization that it really might was almost too much, her knees buckling and her body hunching as she gagged on the putrid cloud of air.

  She could make it…she knew she could. Only her body didn’t seem to be under the same impression.

  Like some cataclysmic joke her knees buckled, the air escaping her lungs in one foul whoosh. She couldn’t breathe. Even with the weight suddenly pressing on her chest, Ellie tried. She’d been so sure she could do it… so positive she could get that picture of her father and make it out of the building as well. She couldn’t quit, her legs dragging behind her as she pulled her torso with her arms. Like she was mimicking some bastardized version of the army crawl, she struggled, panting in attempt to get any sort of oxygen in her body as she did so.

  Just a little further.

  The exit was right there, within sight, all that she had to do was make it to it.

  She almost felt like laughing, but there was no humor to it, the wheeze of air that actually made it out of her lips was feeble. She blinked for too long, forcing her eyes back open again with another fit of coughing and trying to keep herself alert.

  Stay awake.

  She just needed to stay awake, but out of nowhere, she suddenly felt so sleepy. She was so close… her lame attempts at crawling began to slow, each new attempt lowering her stamina even further.

  Almost there…

  But her head was lowering, the side of her face pushing into the floor and the smell of burning ash permeating her nose.

  Get up!

  She tried, both mentally and physically, to at all stimulate herself into following the command she knew she ought to… but she just couldn’t move. Her body was stuck, her strength played out, and what had started out as a dumb idea was quickly morphing into what looked like might be her last idea ever.

  She tried lifting her head one last time, blurred vision looking towards that exit as if she could will herself to it alone. Of course, she couldn’t, and she knew this, but her mind seemed to be playing another trick on her entirely. Imagining a tall, dark figure rushing through that opening of light towards her, light emanating off of the form almost like an outline of heavenly light. Like a halo lighting its way through the smoke thickened air. Only her imagination wasn’t nearly so vivid as to produce the details her vision was providing, her tired, bogged down mind attempting to come up with some explanation, any explanation.

  Is it an angel? It must be.

  No one else would be dumb enough to have gone into a burning building as she had, no one else would have braved the smoke and flames. She knew, with the way her body felt, with the way that her lungs were seizing, that she would very likely be seeing more of her father than just the still photograph next to her chest much sooner than she planned. She wondered, hazily, if her father had been sent this same angel to be taken from the hospital.

  Her thoughts petered, slowly fading from consciousness as her body sagged further into the floor. Ellie was lost, that thick black smoke rolling in waves further into the diner, the crashing and popping from deeper within the building fading in her
ears.

  If he isn’t an angel—he is now like me, someone else with—a bad i-d-e-a-aaaa…

  CHAPTER ONE

  The world spun, shifting and cavorting around itself like a kaleidoscope devoid of color. With it, Ellie’s stomach heaved, her eyes trying to move before she realized they were still shut. With great difficulty, she opened them, blinking slowly and allowing the world to return to focus. All she could see for a moment was darkness, blurry shapes coming slowly into focus with her urging, to see a dark shadow hovering over her, light outlining the large mass.

  The angel!

  Although her gasp of surprise forced her to rethink this assessment as surely, one didn’t need to breathe if they were dead.

  “Are you okay?”

  The deep baritone rumbled, slowly filtering into her consciousness as her mind tried to process what was going on around her. She was outside of the diner, obviously, and that in itself was a lot to comprehend. It wasn’t an angel in front of her, but rather a man, and her fuzzy recollection of the events leading up to her being on the ground where she was didn’t make much sense to her. She was alive. She was breathing. A large man loomed above before her speaking with a very deep voice. Behind him, the noise of the fire seemed suddenly overwhelming.

  The diner she’d worked at was on fire and firefighters battled the blaze, their trucks pulling up as close to the catastrophe as they could manage Firefighters yelling out over the flames and maneuvering hoses to try and coordinate their efforts. Passersbys stood and watched the flames that licked at the sides of the old Liberty Bell Diner, the oranges and reds bathing them in a menacing, fiery light. They occasionally pointed at her—everything echoed loud and chaotic around her, and at the center of all of these new details was the man. The angel her mind seemed to want to remind her, even if she’d already processed the unlikelihood of such a thing.