Desire
Authors: Ember Chase
De
sire
Ember Chase
Copyright © 201
4 by Ember Chase
Kobo Edition
This book is a work of fiction. The names, characters, and incidents are products of the writer's imagination or have been used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, or actual events, is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the author except in the case of brief quotation embodied in critical articles and reviews.
This is part 2 of 3.
You can find the first book, Denial,
at the link below.
Table of Contents
Chapter
1
Chapter
2
Chapter
3
Chapter
4
Chapter
5
Chapter
6
Chapter
7
Chapter
8
Chapter
9
Chapter
10
Chapter
11
Chapter
12
Chapter
13
Chapter
14
Chapter
15
Chapter
16
Chapter
17
Chapter
18
Chapter
19
Chapter
20
Chapter
21
Chapter
22
Chapter
23
Chapter
24
Chapter
25
Chapter
26
Chapter
27
Chapter
28
Chapter
29
Chapter
30
Chapter
31
Chapter
32
Chapter
33
Chapter
34
Chapter
35
Chapter
36
Chapter
37
Chapter
38
Chapter
39
Chapter
40
Chapter
41
Chapter
42
Chapter
43
Chapter
44
Chapter
45
Chapter
46
Chapter
47
Chapter
48
Chapter
49
Chapter
50
Chapter
51
Jace
Isaac walks through the door and my fists clench. Then the dude just smiles and sits down across from me. Just sits down like nothing happened. He is lucky he paid me for this a month ago.
“Hey,” he says. Hey? I am gonna fucking kill him. “Jace, look, I don’t want to get into it right now.” He doesn’t want to get into it. What the hell was I thinking, why did I come here? I would have just sent it to him, but he’s staying at some top secret address again. I guess I could have left it in his top secret restaurant but I’ll be damned if I get sloppy because of his psycho ass. “Did you get it?”
“Of course I fucking got it,” I snap.
“So… I take it you’re still pissed off at me.”
“Ya think, Isaac?”
“I apologized to both of you. Profusely. You know how fucking hard that is for me.”
Because that’s a valid excuse.
“You broke his jaw. And his nose. Cody is lucky he can still see out of his left eye.”
“I feel awful about it.”
“No, you don’t.” I can’t believe this asshole sometimes.
“Okay, you know what,” he chuckles, “I really fucking don’t. I
’m supposed to, but I don’t.” That’s it. I’m out of here. I push away from the table. “Jace, wait.”
“Here’s your fucking profile. I’m not taking the job.”
“Jace!” he bellows when I get to the door and the restaurant goes silent. “Please.” Isaac doesn’t say please unless he’s talking to somebody’s mother and even then he grits his teeth. “I need to show you something. Can we talk in my office? Five minutes.”
“Fuck you.” I am not falling for this.
“Five minutes.” He grabs my arm. I spin around to push him off and then I see those freaky eyes of his. They’re big. Scared. All of the sudden he looks like the fucked up kid I met all those years ago and I remember why I can’t stay mad at this prick.
“Fine. Five minutes.”
We walk through the double swinging doors. It smells incredible back here. “Do you want something?” he asks.
“I said five minutes.”
“You’re ex-military, you eat fast.” He has a point and the dude can really fucking cook. He nods to Paul who already has my favorite dish ready. I might as well get lunch out of this. Glaring at him, I eat the perfectly cooked fries off the warm plate as I follow Isaac past the freezer. The office is dark and he gestures for me to take a seat in the high backed leather chair behind the desk as he strides over to the safe and turns around with a stack of manila folders. “Thank you very much for getting the profile.”
I blink at him in confusion. Was that a please and a thank you in the same conversation? Isaac has been honing his master manipulator skills quite a bit lately, but I know him t
oo well to fall for it. “You’re welcome,” I answer skeptically.
“Jace, I need your help.”
Oh fucking well
. “And I don’t feel bad about destroying your friend’s face, but I do regret it and I
am
sorry.” Okay, a please, a thank you, and a sorry. Who the hell are you and what have you done with my psycho best friend?
I don’t know what to say back to him. We all wanted to beat the fuck out of that douchebag and Isaac was the only one insane enough to do it. But holy shit, he turned into a tornado. It was horrifying. We should have tried harder to stop him, but it
just happened too fast.
“You are one lucky bastard.” Actually, he’s probably the unluckiest person on the face of the earth and I feel like shit as soon as the words come out of my mouth. “
Cody wanted to press charges, but your father showed up and threatened him.”
“He did? Like, personally?”
“Yeah, the second time. The goons he sent over with a briefcase full of cash weren’t enough to convince him.”
“You’re sure it was my Dad?” he whispers, and now he really looks like a little kid. A strange smile crosses his face. That is so messed up.
“Yes. When Baron fucking Kavanagh shows up at your door and tells you he’s going to put you in the ground if you mess with his son, you’re sure it’s him.”
“Wow.” Isaac looks down at the table and rubs his temples. “Obviously
Cody didn’t tell you that I gave him five grand and pre-paid for the reconstructive surgery from the best plastic surgeon in Boston, bumping him up about three months on the waiting list.”
“No. He left that part out.” And it’s a lot more than the prick deserves. I can already tell I’m not as pissed off as I want to be and this burger is beyond fantastic, I don’t want to rush through it.
“Well I did. I’m not a fucking monster.”
That’s funny. Typically he says the opposite. “What the fuck is up with you
, Isaac?”
“You have to do this job, Jace. Not for me. For her.”
“Her?” He points at my file folder in the middle of the desk. “Maya Sheffield?”
“Sheffield,” he says quietly. And smiles again. What the hell is going on? “What’s her middle name?”
“Elizabeth.”
“Maya Elizabeth Sheffield.”
“She was born Moriah Jo Tuttle,” I inform him.
He grabs the folder and opens it, staring at her picture for a long time before saying anything. “So you got everything?”
“It took a while, but yes. Everything there is to know about her is right there in that folder. I even got a newspaper article from the time she almost won the State spelling bee in third grade.”
He stops before he flips over the first page. Hell, he might have stopped breathing. “Fuck,” he whispers, shaking his head and letting out a small laugh. “Dammit Maya.” Tossing the folder back on the desk, he looks me dead in the eye. “I need you to keep this and don’t let me open it. Ever.”
“Why the hell would I do that? You begged me to get that information and paid me a shit ton of money. Now you don’t want it?”
“Oh, I fucking want it. But I can’t look, it wouldn’t be fair.”
“Fair?”
“We’re at a bit of a standoff when it comes to sharing personal information. This is
definitely cheating.”
“So, she is one of your clients,” I assume. He doesn’t look at me and he doesn’t have to. “Goddammit, I told you I’m not getting involved in that shit. What the fuck, Isaac?”
“You’re not.”
“Where the hell is this client right now, Isaac?”
She better not be tied up in your trunk.
“She was at a bullshit salon appointment, but now she’s hopefully having lunch with her friend.”
“Oh.” I used to be so jealous of him, well, of the nonstop freaky sex he had with the hottest women imaginable. I don’t think there’s a guy on the planet that wouldn’t want to have some of those chicks naked and bound before him, ready and willing to do whatever he said. Who wouldn’t want to ‘train’ a girl to shut the hell up already and open her legs on command? It seemed like a dream come true. But then he started to disappear. Those pills are killing him, this life is fucking killing him and he can’t get away. I left for two years and came back to a shell. The dude has worse PTSD than the guys that disarm IEDs.
It all fell apart six months ago. I just thought it was some whips and chains and a lot of money. But he showed up on my doorstep with blood on his hands that night, sobbing uncontrollably like he used to when we were little, and the shit he told me that he did, that he does… It explained a lot. I always thought
Isaac was a hypocrite. He is basically a militant feminist in some ways, worse than a dreadlocked hippie lesbian that doesn’t shave. You do not say the word bitch around him, or slut, anything like that, and you certainly don’t brag about being less than honest to get a girl in bed because he will lose his shit. Violently. And when Cody’s smart mouth started bragging about how he likes to ‘accidentally’ slip his dick in his girlfriend’s ass to see her get mad while they fuck, I wasn’t exactly surprised to see Isaac turn his face into hamburger. We’re lucky he didn’t beat him to death.
“Well go ahead. F
ucking ask me,” he snarls. “Ask me if I hurt her.” I can’t look at him. “That’s what you’re all waiting for, the day I finally lose control and strangle one of them for real while I fuck her to death.”
He’s not wrong. The guy is a ticking time bomb. It’s only a matter of time until this self-control freak turns to the dark side. Luckily, his father will clean it up, b
ut Isaac will never come back from that. He’ll try to kill himself again and he’ll eventually succeed. “What did you do?” I ask quietly. I don’t even want to know.
“You’re not going to believe it.”
“You can tell me.”
I don’t want you to, but you can
. I need to see it coming. It’s going to be the shittiest phone call that I’ll ever get. The day Sloane tells me that bastard finally broke his son and he’s really gone.
“I fell in love with her,” he whispers.
“You what?”
“I can’t hurt her. I can’t choke her. I can’t hold a gun to her helpless head
and fuck her while she cries. And I can’t make her touch herself while I call her a whore and blow my load all over her beautiful face because I am in love with her.”
I just stare at his shaky hands for a few seconds at a total loss for words. “Shit.”
“She finally figured out that she can’t do this and decided to leave him. I don’t have the heart to tell her that Lukas Williams is never going to let that happen because he will kill her first. It won’t be quick and it won’t be clean, either.”
“Fuck.”
“I can’t protect her myself because if my father finds out,
he
will kill her. And he’ll probably make me watch her get gang raped while Luke slices her up and beats her to death before my Dad kills me.”
“Slow down a second.”
I promised myself that I wasn’t going to get involved. “Are you sure Luke will go that far? He has a lot to lose.”
“I was absolutely positive until I found out her best friend Piper is the DA’s daughter.”
“Yeah, I did notice that giant fucking complication in your whole nonstop surveillance request.”
“Maya isn’t just another toy out for his money.”
Yes, she is.
“Luke wants to marry her.”
That just makes her the best gold digger of the bunch, dude.
“She is a big part of his plan and he is not going to take this well. He won’t be thinking clearly and might not consider all of the consequences.”
“Man, I don’t know. This is a seriously complicated undertaking, not to mention extremely illegal. What if she’s not in that much danger?”
Snorting out a bitter laugh, Isaac shakes his head. “Trust me, she is.” He tosses me a file folder of his own. My stomach falls when I open it and I’m glad I finished eating. “This is Jane,” he says. Damn. Jane’s face is so battered she barely looks human anymore. “One of Luke’s girlfriends, one that he never really cared about, actually. She was also my first client.”
“Did you…”
“No,” he murmurs. I shouldn’t have asked that. “No, that isn’t my handiwork. It’s never that bad and it’s never the face. She left him recently and this is what he did. Not personally, he sent a squad and it wasn’t pretty. There’s a hospital report in there, see for yourself.”
“Holy shit, dude.” Now that is fucking sadistic.
“The guy she left him for got it even worse, he is actually blind in one eye now.” Fuckin A. “And like I said, Jane didn’t mean shit to him. Maya is the woman that he’s chosen to have his fucking children.”
I take a deep breath. I’ve never been good at refusing Isaac, he’s like a little brother to me. And as much as I get really frustrated with chicks and their never ending bullshit, especially little gold diggers like Maya Sheffield, no one deserves this. Except for
the assholes Isaac works for.
“Isaac, what the hell were you thinking
when you fell for this girl?”
“I wasn’t thinking. It just happened.”
“And you’re sure she wants out?”
“Yes. Definitely.”
“To be with you?” I ask hesitantly.
“Now that part I’m not sure
about, but it doesn’t matter. I will not leave her hanging like that.”
“So this is about protecting her, not fueling some fucked up obsession you have?”
“Jace, look at that picture. I’ll never fucking forgive myself.”
“You know she’s just after your money, right?”
“Actually, I’m pretty sure she’s more interested in using me for sex, but that’s nothing new. And it doesn’t change anything on my end. She’s nice to me. I feel like a normal person when I’m with her.”
God, I hate when he talks like that. Isaac has no idea what normal is, not a fucking clue.
“You feel like a normal person in that fucked up sex chamber house?”
“It’s as close as I’ll ever get to normal, you know that.” He has a point. “And we usually keep that door closed.”
“I thought you said she was using you for sex.”
“I don’t need any toys to blow her mind, dude,” he laughs. “That’s what I do.” Isaac is one cocky son of a bitch, but he’s right. And generous. I’ve picked up some tricks that
keep me on the top of a few fuck buddy lists. “I’m not in it for the sex, if that makes a difference. It’s the stuff that happens in between. We’re sort of… friends now.”