Blazed Trilogy Read online

  BLAZED

  The Complete Trilogy

  Blazed

  Blazed: The Brides

  Blazed: The Ashes

  Combination edition

  Corri Lee

  Copyright 2013-14 by Corri Lee

  Smashwords Edition

  ‘Blazed’ first published March 2013

  ‘Blazed: The Brides’ first published May 2013

  ‘Blazed: The Ashes’ first published August 2014

  This Smashwords combination edition published September 2014

  Copyright 2013-14 by Corri Lee

  The moral right of Corri Lee to be identified as the author and owner of the cover artwork of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright Design and Patents Act, 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system without permission in writing from the author.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places and events are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  ‘In everyone's life, at some time, our inner fire goes out. It is then burst into flame by an encounter with another human being. We should all be thankful for those people who rekindle the inner spirit.’

  Albert Schweitzer

  contents

  PART ONE: BLAZED

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  PART TWO: THE BRIDES

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  27

  28

  29

  30

  31

  32

  33

  34

  35

  36

  37

  38

  PART THREE: THE ASHES

  39

  40

  41

  42

  43

  44

  45

  46

  47

  48

  49

  50

  51

  52

  53

  54

  55

  56

  57

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  AUTHOR INFORMATION

  part one

  blazed

  I wanted nothing more than a distraction. A diversion, a bolt from the blue—whatever you want to call it, I wanted it. Too much time had passed with no event; endless months of the same routine, days and days of the same old thing, over and over until I could swear I was going grey with boredom. Nobody else could see the strands of silver, of course, and were too fast to label me a drama queen. Nobody saw it from my side—that there might just be something missing from my life.

  In my wildest fantasies, I met a tall dark stranger who swept me off my feet and turned my humdrum life upside down in the wildest and most amazing ways possible. But I did always have an over-active imagination. Even if he was out there, I stood in the wrong secular circle of social rejects to find someone that... spontaneous.

  I had always felt like I was somehow different from everyone else. Not in a latent superhero or paranormal kind of way, but in that I was just extraordinarily mediocre. Everywhere I turned there were people of notable ability or beauty. In every direction there was extravagance and the exceptional. It seemed like every possible flaw that those flourishes might have deflected and centred on me.

  Despite everything, in my eyes, I would always be just a bit little ugly, a little bit frumpy, a little bit socially stunted, a little bit fat and a whole lot boring. I sucked misery in like a vacuum, digested it until it was mulch, and then found a fresh supply. It wasn’t even intentional, it was the damn apathy that did it.

  And that’s why I needed the distraction. A radical break in my woeful little cycle of self-pity to pull me out of the downward spiral that made me so pathetic. It didn’t even need to be something big, just something... new. A tiny spark, a flickering flame in the darkness to encourage me in a new direction.

  But it would have to find me itself. I was so stuck in my depressive little oubliette that I couldn’t even make the easy reach up to the trapdoor only inches above my head. Truthfully, I didn’t know how to change, and the prospect of finding out was terrifying.

  No amount of dislike and empty threats to escape it could really dispute the fact that my boring life was comfortable. My humble hovel of a flat was comfortable. My aforementioned circle of social rejects were comfortable. My job at Double Booked, a pun of an independent book shop that made promises to keep two copies of every publication in easy reach—honestly, they thought this was a unique selling point and a ‘hook’—was comfortable. Even the well known but seldom mentioned cat naps I took on the toilet there to nurse my hangovers, were comfortable.

  I was stuck in a catch twenty-two and too damned comfortable to pull myself out of it. I really couldn’t be pleased.

  My sister said I just liked to feel sorry for myself. My friends said that there was nothing wrong with my life. My father said something irrelevant that centred around money and greed, and my mother said I needed to let her set me up with a stud.

  Now that... that was the most ludicrous suggestion of them all. Not even the knowledge that lightning rarely strikes the same place twice gave me the confidence to risk that my mother didn’t, either. She was too perceptive for her own good and always had been, and that uncanny ability to match make like Cupid’s disciple was a particularly bothersome point in my life.

  She’d matched me up once before with a man I swore was my soul mate. But rather than set me up for happiness, all she’d done is given me an excuse to stay miserable. The more free time I had to lament my dull existence, the more time I had to think about him.

  Hunter had been perfect for me from the moment we’d met at a dinner party my mother had set up when we were both thirteen. I always lived under the impression that there were some people who just made you smile for no reason when they were around, and he was one of them. He affected everyone the same way and any room he stood in was a joyful place to be, right up until he left and the withdrawal immediately set in.

  Any light-hearted insult was delivered with no malice and a cheeky smile that absolved him without question. Without even trying, he was the whole world all at once and, like Atlas, I carried the weight of him on my back.

  His crystal blue eyes and daringly long waved strawberry blonde hair made him beautiful without being androgynous, his extensive knowledge of just about everything but ability to admit he was often clueless made him a modest genius without being an insufferable know-it-all, and his unfailing love and compassion for everyone might just have been the flaw he deflected into my vacuum.

  For me he had compassion and love of the wrong kind. The man who completed me wasn’t interested. I was his best friend and always would be. It was impossible to tell if I might have been happier never knowing him at all because I was a masochist where he was concerned and never dared to question who I’d be without him.

  So I’d doomed myself to this weary life of what if’s and bathroom reprieves, and was inactively waiting for divine intervention.

  “Emmy, love? Come on, go home so
I can close up shop.” That wasn’t it, but it said a lot about the state of my environment when my boss was more eager to close four hours early to escape than I was. Mrs. Reynolds, a portly and kind faced woman with soft brown eyes and tumbling burgundy ringlets, stood patiently outside the bathroom door when I finally emerged, making no excuse for my slacking. As long as the shelves were fully stocked and no customers were waiting, I could have slept in the children’s corner for all she cared.

  “It’ll pick up in September,” she promised, forcing a smile even she didn’t believe, “when the new freshers pile in.” It was true enough that students made up the bulk of our custom, swarming in with their anarchic attitudes towards the mainstream high-street book shops stealing business from us, the fiscal underdogs. They’d be all about independent this, organic that and vegan the other until their student loans were gone and they realised that being a conformist carnivore was logically far cheaper.

  But there were still a few months to go before we got to bask in their blissful ignorance and reckless spending habits while they lasted.

  “By the way,” she sneaked up on me again when I was collecting my basically redundant jacket from the stock room cum staff room. “You have a visitor waiting outside.”

  The word ‘visitor’ was always ominous, and my day was that much worse when my ‘visitor’ arrived in a shiny black Mercedes. Rarely, they came in a silver BMW that was almost as bad to see as the Merc, or more often in a lipstick red Jaguar—one car I didn’t mind seeing.

  But I knew which ‘visitor’ was bating for my blood by the car they rode in, and today it was the worst of them all. My father.

  It was a great source of embarrassment for me to be Henry Tudor’s daughter, not just because of the ridiculous ripped off historical name I never really trusted he hadn’t purchased online, but because of all he stood for.

  Academic excellence wasn’t enough for my so-called father. He would argue that he hadn’t amassed his success with just maths and a keen knowledge of geography and economics. No, he was all about force of will, networking and the micromanagement of just about anything with a pulse. More disgustingly for me, he was also pretty hot for a splash of nepotism.

  Until I left home, my life was all about following my parents and my sister, Tallulah, around stuffy popularity seeking events promoting anything from golf courses to children’s charities. Normally, nobody would object to the latter, but Henry didn’t attend to be charitable. He went there and dragged us with him to set up some kind of ruse that he was a genial family man who cared deeply for the human race.

  From this sick deception, he forged business associations and put out new roots, made friends he would betray for the smallest sniff of credit, and expanded what was already a vast multi-billion pound empire across three continents. I didn’t know of anything he didn’t control and, as impressive as that was, the man was a monster and I truly hated him for it; almost as much as I hated him trying to drag me into his soulless facade.

  Mercifully, my mother let me use her maiden name for everything and never insisted that I visited home. Instead, she came to me in the chauffeur driven Jag that always turned heads in the streets, straining at the leash Henry had so firmly in place around her neck. She was a trophy wife and as damned as a snowflake in a firestorm, but she liked to live vicariously through me and my friends.

  It was no secret that Henry hoped I’d come out of my geeky shell and become his second in command but I was resolute in my decision to have nothing to do with him and his atrocities. I didn’t want his name, I didn’t want his business and I didn’t want a single penny of his money. As much as he tried to throw the benefits of being part of what was easily one of the richest families in the world at me, I never accepted a single thing. My life was frugal and at times strained, but I preferred to spend a few days living off week old takeaway left-overs until pay day than let him think that he’d won for a single moment.

  But every time that Mercedes pulled up in front of Double Booked with it’s black tinted windows and narcisstically personalised license plate, somehow it always felt like a victory was his.

  I stared at the car for a full two minutes, debating escape routes and perfect murders, before the driver’s side door opened and the chauffeur, Oscar, stepped out to impart a brief precursory greeting. He reached gracefully over to the back passenger door and pulled it open, exposing me to the untethered beast inside.

  I was glad that I looked nothing like Henry. My eyes were subtle olive green like my mother’s, rather than the murky brown of his that reminded me of wet clay. He was paunchy and bulbous, the rosacea in his cheeks and nose emphasised by the mop of receding ochre hair that sprouted wildly from his scalp. He was more monster than man, and more Bugsy Malone mobster than monster. He even had the barely-worth-growing pencil moustache to complete the cartoon villain illusion. I couldn’t think of a one single uglier man.

  “Emmeline!” He greeted me warmly when I begrudgingly took the empty seat next to him, folding his newspaper in half and tucking it away into the door’s side pocket. He at least had the decency to still treat me like a human despite the fact I was the only person who refused to fall under his command. “How are you, sweetheart?”

  “You don’t need to spare me the pleasantries, Henry. Just tell me what you want.”

  The almost genuine smile fell from his face in an instant. To my knowledge, I was the only person both immune to Tudor charm and able to disarm the mighty business beast.

  Without any kind of prompting, Oscar set off in the direction of my flat, so I knew the conversation would be graciously short.

  “Well, I’ve come to try and sway your decision to attend the wedding.”

  “No.” He could have arrived on the back of Cerberus or a loaned stallion from one of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, taking me home via the fiery gates of Hell, and I still wouldn’t have changed my RSVP.

  “Don’t you think you’re being a little selfish? Obviously he couldn’t have you as a best man, but—”

  “Surely it would be more selfish for me to attend and make a scene?” I had absolutely no intention of provoking drama, but the threat was all Henry needed to seriously rethink his request. Any misbehaviour of mine reflected badly on him and he knew it.

  And he obviously knew how to pick his battles, because he nodded once to himself and shifted to a new, just as undesirable topic. “Then maybe I can convince you to reconsider taking over from your degenerate sister? Honestly, she’s a total liability and appears to be single-handedly turning my office into a grooming parlour. If I hadn’t been at the conception, I would honestly think she simply sprang into existence like a germ.”

  The way Henry spoke about his eldest daughter might have seemed callous and cruel if you didn’t know Tallulah directly. While I had no will to network but a keen mind, Tally had little more than a bad laugh and an Oedipus complex. The business was wasted on her, but honestly, I thought that was a fair price to pay for being corrupt. There was a fair chance that she would be the person who made the single off-hand comment to one of Henry’s associates that might ruin him, and nothing would have made me sadistically happier.

  “Still no.”

  “You won’t even come down to The Parr and sit in on a few meetings?” I didn’t let him see me roll my eyes. He owned six buildings worldwide as business centres and named each after a wife of Henry VIII. Of course, he worked in the building named for the wife who survived...

  “No.”

  He sighed and nodded again, casting a weary eye out through the window. “I’m not giving up on you yet, Emmeline. And when I do wear you down, you’ll be glad for all of the exposure you have.”

  And there it was. His true reason for turning up was subtle but detectable to the trained ear.

  “You want me at an event,” I groaned, sagging back into the soft leather interior, which creaked a little under the strain. I’d have sooner gone to the wedding, at least that wasn’t about him and his
damn networking. “No, Henry.”

  Even though I refused, he still pressed on with details I tuned out like white noise. I got that it was a mixer being held by a Cornelia Alexander—a woman I knew only as a model and an impressive drinking partner. Nothing drastic, and even less necessary for me to put myself out for, so the finer points of his monotonous droning went unheard. I could have wept with joy when my building slid into view. I let myself out of the Mercedes before it had even fully stopped.

  “Just consider it, Emmeline.”

  “Non, nein, bu, nej, den, nai, aniyo, nie, niet, nema, NO!” I somewhat childishly slammed the door behind me and set off into a ramble of expletives, not really caring whether he heard. There was no way that eleven languages of ‘no’ would mark the end his pestering, but at least I had the satisfaction of knowing that it was four more languages than he knew. Working in a book shop had it’s advantages.

  “Your round.” Chris smirked at me across our usual table in our local bar, Esme’s, and shook his head with a slow growling criticism of a laugh. “Lightweight.”

  I thought I was doing quite well considering I’d been drinking for three hours longer than usual and was still standing, or rather slumping. Past the point of feeling just fuzzy enough to forget all my problems, I was well into the realms of wanting to cry over them. This was nothing new, it was just happening three hours earlier than usual.

  I threw my purse at him, trusting him to not take advantage of the credit cards I refused to touch, and collapsed face down onto the table. Every sensible bone in my body told me to stop drinking when another work day stood on the other side of midnight, but those bones appeared to be the smallest ones in my body. The ones in my fingers, maybe. Or in my toes. More likely the bones in my ears. Any time I tried to let them take conscious control, I was met by a roar of objection from the rest of my body, which far preferred alcoholic escapism to waking up sober.