Undeniable

by Serena Grey

  Contents

  Title Page

  Acknowledgements

  Undeniable

  Book One

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Book Two

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  About the Author

  Books by Serena Grey

  Hey Everyone!

  UNDENIABLE

  SERENA GREY

  www.serenagrey.com

  This book is a work of fiction. All names, characters, locations, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination, and have been used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, locales, or events is entirely coincidental.

  UNDENIABLE

  Copyright © 2014 by Serena Grey.

  All rights reserved.

  Raven§Press

  Dedication

  To my love, who is everything I ever wanted.

  Here’s to a lifetime together, and a love that’s undeniable.

  Acknowledgments

  I would like to thank all the people who have read, enjoyed, and reviewed my work, as well as all the authors out there who made me fall in love with the art of storytelling.

  Thank You Always.

  Undeniable

  “Protest all you want,” he says, “It won’t change the fact that this thing we have between us, it’s undeniable.”

  Olivia Wilder fell in love with Jackson Lockewood the first time she laid her eyes on him. She gave him her heart and her love, and ended up alone, heartbroken and with scars that were almost too much for her to bear.

  Seven years later, they cross paths again. Jackson is everything she remembers, only more irresistible. Underneath his disdain, his desire to possess her lights a response within her, but she has no desire to rekindle their past, or face the pain of all those years ago.

  However, Jackson has no intention of making it easy for her, this time he’s determined to make her pay for the past, and for the future they should have had, even if it means destroying her in the process.

  Book One

  Prologue

  Past

  “YOU have to get up.”

  I hear May’s voice from what seems like a long way off. That makes no sense, I realize, through the haze of depression in my head. She’s sitting right beside my bed.

  “Livvie?” I open my eyes at the insistent tone of her voice. She’s looking at me, her brow creased in a worried frown. Vaguely, I notice that her back-length curtain of black hair has disappeared, replaced by a short spiky do. When did that happen? When did my best friend change her look? I know the answer. While I was lying in bed feeling too sorry for myself to be a real friend.

  The realization makes me all the more miserable, and I indulge the self-pity, feeling the tears that are never far away stinging at the back of my eyelids.

  “You can’t go on like this,” May is saying, “I’m worried about you, Chace is worried about you.”

  Chace is my roommate. Where is he? He’s neither in the room with May, nor hovering by the door looking as helplessly worried as May does now. The last time I saw him, he was picking up the pizza boxes that have littered the floor of my room ever since I started alternating between long periods with no appetite and times when I get so ravenous, I stuff a whole pizza in my mouth so I can feel miserable about it afterwards.

  I sigh as the first tear leaks out of my eyes and travels down the side of my face to leave a wet mark on the pillow. Chace deserves a better roommate than someone who can’t even get up to clean her own room. May deserves better than a best friend who’s been lying in bed for weeks with no intention of ever getting up and facing the world again. They all deserve someone better than me.

  May is still looking at me, expecting me to say something. I consider lying. I could tell her that I’m all right, and that she shouldn’t worry about me, the sort of things people say when they want you to leave them alone in their misery, but what’s the point? I’m not all right, and anybody can see that.

  “Livvie?”

  I ignore her and turn to my other side, away from her, closing my eyes against the light from the window. I keep the curtains drawn to block out the sun and the view, but every small ray of sunlight that finds its way inside adds to the bruised feeling in my heart. The worst thing about being depressed is seeing the sun rise and set every day, and knowing that the world will go on as always, no matter how you’re feeling. I bury my face in the pillow. I don’t know exactly how long I’ve been like this, a few weeks, maybe more. It feels like forever. It feels like I’ve always been in pain, like the pain will never go away.

  “Livvie?”

  Why won’t she leave me alone? Why does she want me to get up when it feels like I’m held down with heavy chains binding all my limbs? I just want to close my eyes and block out the worst of the pain, to try to forget that every moment I’m awake feels like a curse. At least in sleep I can escape the torture. Even if my dreams are painful, they’re nothing compared to waking up and realizing that I’m really trapped in the hopelessness that’s my life.

  “You haven’t been showing up to your classes. You’ve missed deadlines, tests. I know it hurts, but you can’t just lie down and hope to die. You have to fight whatever it is you’re feeling.”

  It’s easy for her to say. What does she know about pain? I think resentfully. I don’t care about school, deadlines, tests, or exams. I don’t care about anything.

  “What would your parents say if they saw you now?”

  Her words conjure my mother’s face, her dark hair, and deep green eyes, so like mine. She’s smiling, and my dad is with her, laughing happily, his untamable curly blond hair disheveled as always. They look exactly as they always do in my dreams, but when I try to talk to them, they never hear me.

  I start to cry, painful, racking sobs that shake my whole body.

  May sighs. “I’m sorry Livvie, but I’m not going to let you throw your life away.” She lays a soft palm on my shoulder, “You can catch up with your courses if you try. You can get your life back, and it’s my job as your friend to make sure you do?”

  Good luck. I think silently. Does she think I don’t want to get up from this bed? Does she think I wouldn’t like to clean my room and make my bed, dress up and even put some make-up on, remember what it’s like to be young and happy? It’s not that I don’t want to get up. It’s just that every time I so much as consider it, the black cloud in my head envelopes me, and I just know that nothing is worth it, that nothing is worth getting up again.

  “Have you looked at your phone?” She demands softly, “You have thousands of missed calls. I had to lie to Constance and tell her you’re fine, and that you just want to be left alone for now. Blythe thinks you’re still mad, and you don’t want to talk to her.”

  What about Jackson? I almost ask. But I don’t, because I know he’s not one of the thousands of missed calls. I know he’ll never call. He hates me now, and there’s nothing I can do about it.

  “I don’t know how long you plan on lying here, but I’ve decided to put a stop to it, and Chace agrees with me.” She pauses, as if waiting for me to react, to ask her what her plan is. I don’t.

  “I’m going to call Jackson.” She says.

  I stiffen, my whole body freezing into a bundle of hope, pain and fear. Jackson. His name conjures me
mories of a different time, a happy time, but all that has been destroyed. Whatever we had is now lost in pain and ashes.

  No. My protest is desperate but silent, trapped in my head.

  “Maybe you need to see him,” May continues, “maybe if you tell him everything, you’ll feel better.”

  “He won’t come.” I whisper. Why should he? I don’t mean anything to him anymore.

  “Well I’m going to try,” May replies, her voice determined.

  No. I make another silent protest. I’d rather die than have Jackson see me like this. I already hate myself, and how pathetic I am, but Jackson’s hatred, especially when he finds out exactly what happened, it would kill me.

  Nausea rises like a wave in my stomach, and I spring up from the bed, pushing past May to get to the bathroom. I retch for what seems like hours while she holds up my hair and rubs my back. It feels as if I’m letting go of everything inside me, and when I’m well and truly empty, I turn my tear-stained face towards her.

  “Don’t call him.” I tell her.

  She looks at me for a long time, and I meet her stare, letting my face convey the resolve I’m feeling. She must have seen it too, because, after a while, she nods silently and leaves me to clean up my face.

  Chapter One

  Present

  “I know I’ve asked you a hundred times, but I’m going to ask one more time,” May says, her voice full of friendly concern¸ “Do you really think you can do this?”

  I let my eyes drift to the windows, where the sparkling surface of the Hudson River and the rich vegetation on the banks are rolling by at the speed of the train. In less than an hour, I’ll get to my stop, only about fifteen minutes’ drive to Foster, a small town on the Hudson River, where I lived from when I was fourteen to just before my eighteenth birthday.

  I sigh and move the phone to my other ear. May is still waiting for me to say something. She’s already in Long island, planning to spend most of the summer at the fifteen-room ‘cottage’ she shares with her husband Chace. I could have chosen to be there with them, taking advantage of their hospitality, enjoying a pressure free stay with friends, and teasing May about her growing belly. Instead, I’m on my way back to Foster to face a past that should stay buried.

  Can I do this?

  Of course, I can. I want to tell May, reassure her as well as myself. It’s just another job, another high profile photo shoot in a beautiful house. I’ve done many of those.

  Only this time, it’s not just any house. It’s Halcyon, the house I left seven years ago, feeling as if I would never be happy again.

  “You don’t have to do it, you know,” May continues when I don’t reply, "You could always pull the temperamental artist act and tell that editor to kiss your ass.”

  I laugh, despite the apprehension in my belly, as I imagine the elegant editor of American Homes, an internationally renowned architecture and design magazine, and one of the most powerful people at Gilt publications, doing anything as unsophisticated as kissing anyone’s ass. “Nobody tells Grace Conlin to kiss their ass. If I did that, I’d have to move to Montana, and maybe get a job tending horses.”

  “At least you’d meet some hot cowboys,” May laughs. “Think of all the hard muscles and tanned skin.” She sighs. “But seriously Liv, I don’t think you should go back, and Chace agrees with me."

  Chace and May, the only real friends I made in the four years I spent in Foster High School. They’re married now, surprisingly. Two people who couldn’t be more different. Where May has always been talkative and bubbly, Chace is studious and reserved. He was always a science nerd, and soon after college, it paid off when he made a lot of money from patenting some new kind of metal coating. Now he heads a private research facility where he can indulge his love for science. May is a dermatologist, one of those miracle ones that take new clients only by recommendation. Together, they make a sort of power couple, albeit being the most unlikely pairing I could have imagined back in high school.

  It makes sense that they wouldn’t want me to return to Halcyon. They’re among the few people who know the whole story of everything I went through seven years ago. They know how long it took for me to become a fully functional person again, and they’re worried about me, as real friends would be.

  I yawn and look out the windows again, watching the river gleam in the late summer sun, the same river that flows through the back of the grounds at Halcyon, marking the edge of the property. I turn away from the view, closing my eyes as I fight a wave of tiredness. I’ve only just returned from shooting a newly renovated chateau in the south of France for a well-known magazine, and I was only able to spend a few moments in my apartment before I had to start my journey to Halcyon. I should feel lucky that I get to travel and take pictures of exotic places, but sometimes all I want to do is sleep.

  “It’s just a house.” I tell May, “and an empty one at that. The family isn’t there now. It’ll just be me, and the crew from Gilt. We won’t even be staying there. We have rooms at the Foster Inn for the duration of the shoot."

  “Well, if you say so.” She doesn’t sound convinced.

  “Photographing a house like Halcyon for Gilt is a wonderful opportunity for any photographer.” I add reasonably, in a final attempt to convince her, or myself.

  Not that it isn’t. When Grace Conlin had called me about the chance to photograph Halcyon for a two hundred page book that would contain detailed articles and pictures of the most important homes in the United States, I couldn’t ignore the fact that it was a great career opportunity for me. Halcyon had never been really photographed before, and I would be the first photographer to do an extensive feature on one of the most beautiful homes in the United States, for a book from a publishing giant that would grace coffee tables and libraries from New York to Timbuktu.

  Yet, my first instinct had been to refuse, and I’d almost said no. The thought of returning to Halcyon and facing the people who had hurt me was enough to make me panic. I didn’t want to face all those demons from my past. I didn’t want to return to the scene of my disillusionment and re-live the pain again.

  “Of course you should know the house belongs to Jackson Lockewood,” Grace had said. She was one of those well-kept women whose age it was always impossible to guess. Her power and position however, were fully apparent as she sat across from me on her massive chrome and glass desk, with the Manhattan skyline showing through the windows behind her desk. She gave me an arch look to make sure I knew that she was talking about the Lockewoods. The two hundred year old dynasty that had survived the Civil War and the Great Depression, produced two presidents, three senators, successful businessmen, and at least one extremely eligible bachelor in every generation. For a moment, I wondered what she would say if I told her just how well I knew them.

  “However, he doesn’t live there, and neither do his sister and aunt,” she had continued, unaware of the direction of my thoughts. "So it’ll be just you, Elaine Black, who’s writing the feature, Nick Fischer, who’s in charge, and whoever else he requires to assist. The staff at the house will assist you with everything you need.”

  Ultimately, it was the chance to see Halcyon again without having to encounter Jackson or his family that had made me accept the job. That, coupled with the fact that nobody said no to Grace Conlin.

  “I want you to be strong enough to face your memories without any problems,” May is saying now on the phone, “but as your friend, I can’t help being worried.”

  “It’s just a few days.” I reassure her, “and I won’t be alone with my memories. Nick Fischer’s in charge of the feature and the shoot, and some short fiction writer with a couple of literary prizes is writing the article. Nick will probably try to get into her pants, and whether she says yes or no, there’ll be enough drama to keep my mind off my memories.”

  “Ah, Nick.” I can almost hear May’s smile.“Cute bastard."

  “Bastard being the operative word,” I say with a laugh. Nick Fischer is the m
ost talented editor I know. I first met him when he was a features editor at one of the men’s style magazines owned by Gilt. Since then he has risen to the position of international editor at large, with regular features in any one of the many magazines under Gilt’s portfolio. When he’s not trying to see if any of his lines would work on me, he can be a good friend, an effective mentor, and a perfect occasional date at work related events, but he’s also a man whore to the depths of his soul. With his smooth British accent, deep pockets, and impossible good looks, women fall over themselves to get to him, and keep coming back for more regardless of how carelessly he treats them.

  “Maybe you should give him a chance,” May offers. “I’ve heard that promiscuous men like him often make ideal husbands when they settle down.”

  “Try telling him he’s promiscuous,” I say with a laugh. “He thinks the words, ‘promiscuous’ and ‘man’ are synonyms." I shake my head. “Anyway, Chace didn’t have to be a man whore in the past to become an ideal husband.”

  I can almost hear her happy smile. “Chace is different,” She says, “He was made for me.”

  And Jackson was made for me. I don’t say it, though the words almost slip out. I shake my head, disgusted with myself. Seven years, and I still can’t imagine a life with anyone else.

  “Well I’m going to take a nap,” May says, unaware of my thoughts, “being pregnant and all.” She pauses, “All the best in Foster, Liv, and stay happy.”

  “I will.”

  Less than half an hour later, I get to my stop. Across the street from the station, there are a couple of taxis. I originally planned to take one of them to the Foster Inn, but Nick sent a text saying he’ll come to the station to pick me up. He’s been in Foster with Elaine Black for almost a week already, working on the story and an angle for the feature.