Billionaire Erotic Romance Boxed Set: 7 Steamy Full-Length Novels (54 page)

I stared into the hollow metal barrel pointed directly at my face.

Chapter 17

In the movies, when someone points a gun at the heroine, she’s unafraid. Maybe a fight breaks out and she’s able to wrestle away the gun or avoid the bullets. This wasn’t a movie. In real life, when someone points a gun at you, your heart stops.

“We were
meant to be togethe
r!” Marilyn yelled, rising from the desk.

I stammered over my words, forcing something out that would hopefully save me.

“Calm down,” I said. It was the best I could do but it was still lame. I was pretty sure we were past the point of Marilyn calming down. “You don’t need the gun, Marilyn. I’ll do whatever you want.”

“We are bound together! Don’t you see that, you stupid whore?!” Marilyn yelled, pointing the gun at my head, her eyes growing wide and bloodshot. I raised my hands and backed into the couch.

“Yes!” I cried out. “I see, I see!”

I thought of a show that I had seen on PBS once about dogs and how they sensed fear. Fear was mistaken for aggression and only exacerbated a bad situation. I needed to control myself and bring the intensity of the room down. If I started to cry or freaked out, who knew what Marilyn would do.

“Ok,” I said. “We can talk if you just point the gun away from me. Is that acceptable?” I asked calmly. My heart slammed against my chest and sweat poured down my back in cold waves of panic, but my voice was a steady dam against my emotion.

Marilyn rested back against my desk and lowered the gun. She still held it in her hand, her finger on the trigger, but it was pointed down to the floor.

“Thank you,” I said soothingly. The situation had escalated into an entirely new thing and I needed to act accordingly. I had no idea how I was going to maneuver myself out of this mess, but I felt confident that I could. There had to be a way. Marilyn was a torrent of emotion, but I was sure that she had not come here to kill me.

“Call Leon,” Marilyn said coldly. “Make him come here.”

“Marilyn,” I said calmly. “I can’t make Leon come here. He’s not even a client of mine anymore. He won’t come.”

Marilyn’s brow darkened as her eyebrows lowered. The gun twitched in her hand and my eyes fixated on it. If I could get her to put the gun away, everything would be so much better. Her hand gripped the gun even tighter and I saw the veins bulge out of her hand. When I looked up to her face, she was as dark as night.

“Liar,” she hissed. “You’re a lying whore. So you just fuck him and then kick him to the curb?”

I paused, considering whether to tell her everything that had happened. Would it upset her further or make her sympathize with me? I had no idea, but I didn’t want to give her the slightest idea that I was lying.

“No, it’s the truth. I went to his office this morning and he was with another woman,” I admitted. The pain of the morning wormed its way into my voice and Marilyn’s face lightened slightly when she looked at me. She believed me. Good.

“So what?” asked Marilyn harshly. She studied me as I searched for a response and then her eyes opened wide as she began to understand. “You have feelings for him, don’t you?”

“No, it’s not that at all,” I said quickly. Too quickly.

A dark shadow cast down over Marilyn’s face as her brow dropped again. There was no confusing the look on her face; she was angry.

“So, you fall for my Leon and then when you see him enjoying himself, you get all hurt and run off crying like some little schoolgirl? Did you really think he could ever care for you? I doubt he even finds you attractive. Leon likes to seduce. You were probably just a little practice for him.”

I barely registered her insults. The tone of her voice was startling. While she dismissed me as nothing, she was becoming visibly upset. I tried not to look at the gun but my eyes defied me and stole a quick glance. Marilyn had raised it to her waist as she crossed her arms. The gun pointed towards the door, towards my purse.

“No,” I said. “I never thought he had feelings for me. How could he have?” I said, pandering to her. I needed her to believe that I agreed with her, pride be damned. Marilyn was obviously more unstable than even Leon had thought and now I was face to face with this woman’s wrath.

Marilyn said nothing. She studied me with eyes that looked as if they were staring at something far away and alien. I felt like her eyes were dissecting me, trying to see inside me. My skin crawled as those eyes focused in on me, but I refused to turn away.

“Call him,” Marilyn said.

“Marilyn,” I began.

“Call him now!” Marilyn screamed. Her voice broke as she yelled. Rage twisted her face into a distorted parody of the beautiful girl she normally was. My hands began to shake and now I was running on pure adrenaline.

“Alright, let me get my phone,” I said. I got up from the couch and walked over to the door, slowly.

The exit was agonizingly close. I fought back the urge to just run away, but Marilyn was far too unpredictable for that. If I scared her or made her feel threatened, she might do something crazy like shoot me. I would play it cool.

“We were made for each other. Two sides of the same coin. Puzzle pieces joined together. I am the bottom, he is the top. Do you get it?” Marilyn asked wildly. Her voice was becoming more frantic now, more manic. Every word seemed to pulse with a nervous energy that made the sweat on my skin grow cold with fear. Marilyn was breaking down in front of me with a gun in her hand that she had already pointed at me once.

“Yes,” I said, my hands fumbling. I reached into my purse and pulled out the phone. Marilyn was holding the gun up again, pointing it at me. I noticed the gun was shaking slightly.

I pressed the button on my phone to bring it to life and tried my best to steady my hand. I closed my eyes for a moment and breathed in deeply, calming myself. I felt the weight on my shoulders lift slightly when I opened my eyes. Don’t panic. Breathe. Everything is going to be fine. I entered the code on the front screen of my phone and brought up the keypad on the digital screen.

“I’m calling him now. Can you stop pointing the gun at me?” I asked calmly. Marilyn lowered the gun, but it was still pointing at me vaguely, albeit not at any vital organs.

I began to bring up Leon’s contact information and then thought it over. If I called Leon and convinced him to come over, what would Marilyn do? She wouldn’t hurt him, but that didn’t mean she wouldn’t hurt me to prove a point to him. I canceled looking up his info and dialed 911 slowly, trying to mock that I was pressing other numbers as well. When the phone began to ring, I lifted it to my ear.

“Give me that,” Marilyn hissed as she walked over and grabbed the phone out of my hand.

Marilyn stared at me and then I saw rage boil over her like a volcano erupting with hot magma. Her voice became sweet as honey when she spoke, a stark contrast to how she actually felt.

“Oh my god! I’m so sorry! I meant to call a friend.”

“Help me! I’m being—” I yelled, but it was too late. Marilyn had hung up the phone and cut me off by throwing it at me. I raised my arms defensively and the phone bounced off my forearms.

The gun was raised, pointing at me. Before I had time to think, before I had time to even move, I heard Marilyn yell something. Then the sound of the gunshot drowned out her voice. Everything fell away and the world turned dark.

Chapter 18

The music was still on. I could hear a band playing soft, sensual harmonies, the kind of harmonies you could enjoy while having sex with a stranger and a few drinks in you. Thoughts came to me from far away, much like the music, and I wondered where I was.

A searing pain was tearing through my chest, burning a hole through me. It felt like I had been stabbed with a hot iron that entered my chest and exited through my back shoulder. Everything hurt. My head hurt. My chest screamed out with pain. Even my legs seemed to whine with a sore throb. But it was all far away. Distant.

I thought I could hear sirens in the distance, but that could have easily just been the music.

Everything was so distant, so far away, that it was as if it was happening on a television with low volume. When I tried to move myself, nothing seemed to work. All the energy was sucked out of me.

My hand was wet with some fluid. My eyes slowly looked around, noticing the bright lights that were fuzzy and clouded through my blurred vision. I blinked a few times, trying to clear my eyes, but I could only get glimpses of images. When my sight finally found my wet hand, red filled my vision. I managed to open and close my hand slowly, and I saw that red dripped from it as I did so.

Blood,
I thought from far away.
My hand is covered in blood. But whose blood?

The sirens, eons away, grew louder. I heard doors opening and the sounds of footsteps coming closer, but all I could do was open and close my hand dripping with red. Pairs of legs moved past my vision and surrounded me.

“Dispatch, we’ve got a gunshot victim at...” a man’s voice said before it faded out into a steady hum. Darkness enveloped my vision and I fought it, trying to stay awake, but to no use.

I could see Marilyn standing in front of me. I wanted to run but my legs wouldn’t move. The sound of the gun shot through the office like a crack of lightning and a searing pain tore through me. Blood pooling out across my dress as I dropped to the ground. On my knees, struggling to stay up, I heard Marilyn run out of the office. My phone had been so far away, impossibly far away. I had reached for it before collapsing entirely.

“Jesus, she’s fucking lucky that the woman upstairs heard the shot. If not for that who knows what...”

Hot, white pain exploded through my shoulder. My eyes shot open and then closed again. I was being lifted up and whatever surface I was on jostled me. It felt like a sword of acid tearing through my shoulder, masticating the flesh and burning my skin. Everything was still far away, but the pain had been the exception. The pain had become my world.

Bright lights blinded my eyes. They would only open a crack, but I could see that I was somewhere new. The office was completely gone. Everything was washed white with light and people moved frantically around me. I tried to lift my head and a strap rubbed around my forehead.

“Ma'am,” a woman’s voice said. “You have to stay still, we’re getting you to a hospital. You’ve had a really close call and you’re not out of the woods yet.”

I opened my mouth to speak and no words would come out. I let out a sigh and closed my mouth, my tongue dry and uncomfortable.

The pain was unbearable. If I had any energy, I would have writhed and screamed. It was as if the bullet was continuously tearing through me, eating through the flesh as it entered and exited me. Tears fell down the sides of my face and I closed my eyes, praying to pass out again. Even if I died, it would be better than this pain.

A prick of a needle injecting into my arm caused me to try to open my eyes again, but they seemed to fight me. Soon, a pleasant warmth flowed up my arm and wrapped itself around the pain in my chest and shoulder. It rained down heaven on the white hot pain and it dropped away, a distant memory of the excruciating wound that once was. A fuzziness blanketed my head and I let out a long sigh of relief.

Morphine, I thought, the word coming out of the fog of darkness. Or maybe I had heard somebody say it. Either way, I began to praise the word in my mind, not sure as to what it even really meant. All I knew is that the warmth was associated with the morphine. Morphine was the salvation from the horror of my pain.

A calm, loving embrace of darkness touched me and I welcomed its reprieve. The lights of the ambulance faded away and I was left floating alone, floating down an unknown road to an unknown destination. A woman had told me we were going to a hospital. In the warm darkness, that sounded just fine to me.

I floated, devoid of body and mind. Only the sensation of weightlessness was with me. My mouth hung open, far away, feeling as though it belonged to someone else entirely. From somewhere in the darkness, an alarm was going off. The alarm was trying to wake me up. A loud ringing, a siren that screamed for me to flee from the darkness. Bodiless, I was unable to turn away or close my ears to the sound. Soon, it grew so loud that it was the darkness itself.

“We’re moving her to surgery, now!” a different woman’s voice exclaimed. Blinding lights cut through the darkness as my eyes were pried open. A woman dressed in blue scrubs was pointing a flashlight into my left eye and then she pried open the next eye and did the same. I looked at her intently and her face was determined and stoic.

“Miss Facet,” the woman said. A word floated up into my mind and I grasped onto it: doctor. “You’re in good hands. We’re gonna patch you right up.”

“Ok,” I croaked, the syllables coming out slowly and disjointed.

I was moving, strapped to a gurney or some sort of bed. People were yelling all around me, but not angrily. There was a dialogue occurring all around me that I couldn’t understand, yet I knew it was about me. At some point, I felt scissors caress against my skin as they cut through the dress that was soaked with my blood. I randomly thought of the carpet in my office, now stained with the spilled glass of whiskey and my blood. If I could have laughed, I would have.

My eyes opened to slits and I saw people staring down at me, faces clad in hospital masks and hair hidden with blue caps. Everything on them was blue. When a gloved hand lifted above me, I saw a plastic apparatus in the hand that was fastened around my mouth. The people around me clad in blue began to hand each other things and talk in stern, collected voices. In the distance, I could hear classical music.

I breathed in. A dreamless sleep grew with every break that cut out all of my vision and left the sky full dark.

I awoke. My eyes opened half-way and I looked around. Beige walls surrounded me. A machine beeped next to me and I strained to turn my head to look at it. Screens showed numbers that I had no reference for and one machine showed a line that jumped every few seconds with a beep. I saw a number next to the line and figured out that this was my heart-rate.