Blazed Trilogy Read online

  Our Hyde Park disaster obviously got snapped but, thankfully, I wasn’t named. That didn’t stop me being recognised by the ‘coven’ who ribbed me mercilessly for the petulant scowl permanently etched across my features. Esme still didn’t believe the whole affair hadn’t been a disaster, and those pictures and Blaze’s prolonged absence didn’t really encourage her to change that opinion.

  But not even my nearest and dearest had the attention span to pick something to death. We went back to our usual routine of working by day, drinking by night, and spending our free days at Daniel and Jonathan’s swanky loft watching horror movies and munching popcorn. Esme went back to her own flat above the bar after four days and threw herself into a new cabaret project, auditioning burlesque dancers and big bands. By the time a week had passed, my knees and elbow had healed enough for me to not think about Blaze when I looked at them.

  And if I wasn’t thinking about Blaze, I was thinking about Hunter. Talk about being stuck between a rock and a hard place.

  “You sound like shit, Emmeline.” I rubbed my chest over my heart, which broke every time he called me. The nine hour time difference between us was brutal, and I knew he’d taken the evening shift so his bitch of a fiancée couldn’t listen in on us.

  Unlike me, Hunter wasn’t too proud to abuse the opportunities of family connections and had taken a job in Tokyo at his father’s hardware company without a second thought so his ‘woman’ could be near her family. How the hell he’d expected me to take it well, I had no idea. That’s probably why I didn’t find out until he was already there.

  “It was payday yesterday. You know what it’s like.”

  “Yeah, you go out and get drunk with those reprobates.”

  “They’re good friends, unlike some.” I heard him wince. We knew how to hurt each other too well. The occasional phone call and email wasn’t really enough for him to earn the privilege of still being what I considered my best friend, but I gave it to him anyway because I loved him enough to see past the distance. Why couldn’t he extend the same gesture to me? I knew I was only a minor blip on his radar.

  “I deserve that,” he confessed. “Work has been insane. Siobhan is being insane. I’m sorry, I really can’t deal with any more crazy.” Story of my life. He never had time for my crazy. Nine years of my life spent agonising over him and not once had he made the time I needed. Never said the words I needed to hear. There was only so much Daniel could offer in lieu Hunter and whatever it was he had inside him that drove me to the limits of my sanity.

  “Yeah yeah, I get it. But you can’t expect me to sit around on my tod staring at my phone waiting for you to spare me a minute. Reprobates or not—and I’m not denying that we are—they still accept me, even knowing what they know.”

  “You’re not a reprobate, you’re just confused.”

  “Fuck you, Hunter. I’m not confused about anything and that’s what makes it so god damn hard to deal with.” I took a breath, knowing that if this discussion continued, I’d end up doing something reckless. He kept me sick—I knew it and I’d never get past it. There was nothing in the world that could take away the power of something self-inflicted. Couldn’t live with him, couldn’t live without him. I’d be messed up over him for the rest of my life. “Maybe one day we’ll talk about why I collapsed in that gym.”

  “Don’t bring that shit up. You have no idea how much I hated seeing you like that. You’re my best friend, Emmeline, I love the bones of you.”

  My stomach churned at how he used the L word with me. No matter how many times he said it, it was never enough. Loving me like a friend was nothing. Not even loving me like a sister could satisfy me. I wanted him to look at me like he wanted to be inside me in every way, possessing me heart, body and soul—the way I looked at him. But it would never be that way because he was wasting my love elsewhere.

  There was a loud snap that made me jump. I looked down to see that the pencil in my hand had split and splintered after being pressed so hard into a sketch I had no idea I’d been drawing. Cartoon versions of me were torturing a cartoon Hunter in all gruesome manners of disembowelment and garrotting wire decapitations. All of my fraught conversations with him could be documented by the disturbing images that subconsciously formed on the paper when I wasn’t really paying attention, like a medium who drew the faces of death she channelled. Not really trusting that the behaviour wouldn’t earn me another sectioning, I’d never told a soul that I couldn’t control the impulse to picture him suffering horribly for what he’d done to me without even knowing it. I loved him enough to hate and resent him.

  “So why are you really calling?” I asked, pushing the sketchbook away and changing tack.

  “Come on, Emmeline, you know why. I want you to come to the wedding.” I suddenly wished I was still drawing. “Give me one good reason why you won’t come.”

  “I could give you a whole cart full,” I snapped evasively, knowing that telling him the real reasons why wouldn’t help my ‘crazy’ case. “But mostly I just really fucking resent flying over to Japan because the bitch demon won’t get married over here. It’s your wedding, too, Hunter. Why the hell did you give her carte blanche on location?”

  “I know how to pick my battles. Are you saying you’d come if we got married at my parents house?”

  “No. You asked me for one good reason and I gave you one good reason.”

  “You’re such a god damn brat sometimes, Emmeline. You can’t always have it your way. You can’t click your fingers and relapse to make the world revolve around you. Sometimes you have to accept that other people matter more than you do and make some compromises. If you have to grit your teeth and fake a smile to get through a wedding you don’t want to be at, you should damn well do it because it means something to me to have you here. You’re not hurting yourself this time, you’re hurting the people you’re supposed to love.”

  “Hunter?” I sucked in a deep breath and tried to gather myself before I launched a tirade in response. He was the most selfish person I knew, without a doubt, and nothing I ever did was right by him. Even when we were still in school, he had me by the proverbial balls every minute, trying to groom me into a miniature version of my mother. As much as I loved her, I had too much spirit to be a kept woman, something I still clung to by not accepting Henry’s money. I had too much spirit to be downtrodden by elocution and deportment classes. I used to have too much spirit for a lot of things.

  But when I really took a long hard look at myself, I knew that, despite his insinuation that I used my ill thoughts and actions to manipulate people, I’d hate myself for driving him away. So I simply said, “Sayonara, you self-righteous, egomaniacal pedant,” and hung up. Sometimes it was just easier to be the one who stepped back and let him think he’d won, and then pretend the conversation had never happened, than find out what would happened if I bit back.

  I just wish I’d realised that I had company ear-wigging.

  My eyes tracked up from the varnished wooden cash desk of Double Booked up to the midriff of a man standing directly in front of me on the other side. His fingers slowly brushed along the oak towards me and casually flipped open the cover of my sketchbook.

  “How long have you been standing there?”

  “Long enough to know that pissing you off is a bad idea.” My eyes snapped up to a grin I immediately and involuntarily mirrored. The thick, large pages covered in my drawings turned one by one at an almost tortuously slow pace, fanning me slightly when they dropped down. “Who’s the self-righteous, egomaniacal pedant?”

  “Best friend,” I muttered, the smile quickly fading. I always found myself getting strangely defensive where conversations about Hunter were concerned, preferring to avoid them completely. The typical reaction of ridicule for being hopelessly attached to a man who thought little of me was quite firmly etched in my mind.

  Noticing that the hands invading my art were empty, I forced my gaze down from the emerald eyes boring into the pages and focuse
d on the fractured nub of my pencil. “Was there something I can help you with?”

  The hands paused mid-movement. “Aren’t you going to ask why I haven’t been around lately?”

  “None of my business.”

  “Are you annoyed?”

  “No.” I shrugged uncaringly and raised a hand to a returning Mrs. Reynolds sneaking in from an extended lunch break. “It’s just none of my business. So can I help you?”

  “Actually, yes.” The sketchbook flapped shut in front of me, then the hands splayed out on either side of it to support their crouching owner. There was no option to escape or evade him—Blaze was back in my domain, gorgeous and stubbornly persistent. “I was hoping for some company for lunch.” If he heard my teeth grind, he didn’t give it away.

  “I’m not big on lunch.” I wasn’t big on food in the slightest.

  “Smoothies?” Oh. My resolved thawed slightly at this suggestion. He held up a finger to ask for a minute and practically sprinted out to the goblin car I hadn’t heard pull up, returning a moment later with two travel mugs.

  “I thought you said smoothies?” Travel mugs were something I had only known to come hand in hand with chauffeur driven hot shots’ morning coffees on the way into the office. Hot shots like Henry. At one point, when I’d practically survived on black coffee, I’d had one of my own.

  Blaze pushed one of them across to me and clipped up the seal over the hole on my behalf. “I did. Super fresh smoothies. I made them myself.”

  “In travel mugs?”

  “Sure. How else would I get them here without spilling them?”

  Baffled by the lengths he’d gone to just to bring me a nutritious liquid lunch, I shook my head and took an apprehensive sniff of the mugs hidden contents. There was an overpowering smell of banana with an undercurrent of what I suspected might be mango. My favourite.

  “How about a flask?” Blaze’s mouth opened slightly, but as soon as his face registered his disappointment that I might just be right, he waited until I took a sip and trapped his tongue between two rows of perfectly white and straight teeth. The banana hit my taste buds first, closely followed the odd combination of mango and cherry, then a flavour I recognised but couldn’t put my finger on until it’s after-burn made me cough. “Did you put rum in this?”

  He laughed and shushed me, nodding his head towards the ever pricking ears of Mrs. Reynolds hiding just out of sight. “Call it belated hair of the dog.”

  “How did you know I’d be hungover?”

  His head cocked cheekily. “Call it a foregone conclusion on the basis of your admitted self-destructive tendencies.” What I wanted to call it was arrogant and annoying. It seemed as though my day was headed down a path towards being a victim of relentless antagonism.

  I pushed the mug away with a sneer and forced my attention to fiddling with the shop’s old-as-hell computer. He couldn’t see the screen—he didn’t need to know that I was being evasive. “Well, thank you for the consideration but I can’t drink that at work.”

  “Isn’t it your lunch break?” Blaze took a long drink from his mug and licked the rogue drops of smoothie from his lightly scarred Cupid’s bow. The corners of his mouth twitched at my awkward shuffle on the spot. He was just so... hot. “Come for a walk with me. No wheels of any kind, I promise. You can walk without injuring yourself?”

  “I can walk quite capably, thank you,” I shot at him, taken aback by my own temper. Hunter’s sour words had left me reeling as always. I forced my tone to soften. “I usually just work through my lunch breaks.”

  “Emmeline...” He sighed and rounded the desk to heave me to my feet. It didn’t matter that I tried my best to be uncooperative and went lax and jelly-legged, he pulled me up effortlessly and so quickly I had to grab onto his arms for support.

  His biceps were solid and thick with muscle. Instinctively, I knew my cheeks must be pink. “I didn’t—” Blaze coughed to clear his voice of the sudden, unexpected huskiness. I smirked. There was no way he was immune to the sexual tension. “I didn’t come here to be told no. Humour me.”

  He had no idea how little me and humour had in common.

  We mingled with the frantic flow of businessmen pacing to lunch meetings, sightseeing tourists and lecture skipping students roaming the packed out streets. The slight fuzziness left by the rum smoothie did little to ease my growing panic in the unfamiliar situation—thrust into a finite tidal wave of unknown, scrutinising faces flooding my senses with harsh, judgemental stares. Every single one of them watching me, rating me, identifying my flaws and failings with passing glances faster than I could process. My feet began to fail and I could feel myself lagging behind, battling to anchor myself with both hands clasped around my travel mug.

  The majority of my life from adolescence had been spent seeking to avoid anxiety-ridden scenes like these. Central London on a Friday lunchtime was my worst nightmare and a small, dark, neglected piece of me missed the ostentatious but peaceful suburban palace I’d grown up in, with it’s tall imposing walls, looming security gates and pre-approved guest list.

  The foreign sensation of an arm wrapping around my waist grounded me slightly and slowed the surge of strangers who almost seemed to part for us.

  No, not us. They parted for the Adonis who had picked me up like, what? A pet project because I was commitment-phobic?

  “Hey,” Blaze whispered down at me, driving me to look up and find his eyes beating down on me like two shimmering green comets. Even though he’d spoken so quietly, his voice was still louder than the roar around me. “Are you all right?”

  “I don’t like crowds,” I muttered. “Sorry.”

  “Don’t apologise.” His arm tensed around me and he pulled me closer to his body, fingers kneading into my left side tenderly. All of my breath got trapped in my chest and my brain shut out the rest of the world around me. The combination of dumbfounding fear and unexpected comfort kept my feet moving when I might have crumbled to the floor in a heap, and before I knew it the streets began to clear and quiet. Blaze had damn near guided me safely through Hell.

  He pulled me into an inconspicuous restaurant and up a staircase with ornately carved spindles to a sheltered mezzanine area overlooking the street below. I was sure I recognised the red table cloths that matched the immaculate parasols from a magazine. My anchoring travel mug was prized from my grip and set down on the table in front of the chair he ushered me into by the shoulders, and a glass of water crammed with shell shaped ice cubes quickly placed next to it.

  “I don’t have time to be here, Blaze. I have to go back to work.” The idea of having to traverse through that crowd again made me feel sick. I was suddenly grateful for the water in front of me and made a hasty grab at the glass.

  Blaze pulled his chair around the table to sit next to me rather than opposite, and pulled the lank ends of my ponytail over my shoulder into his hand. “You have plenty of time, we were only walking for ten minutes.” How was that possible? It had seemed like so much longer. “Well, you’re not wearing it down but it’s much better this way. His fingers combed through my tethered hair gently. I didn’t even try to hide my frown at what he was doing—treating me tenderly the way Daniel had done every time I was having a ‘saga’. He didn’t like the word ‘relapse’.

  I caught Blaze’s fingers in my fist and slowly pulled them away. “Are you always so hands on with people?” He gazed at me like he didn’t understand, rubbing his thumb over the pale knuckles trapping the rest of his hand.

  “No,” he said eventually, “at least I don’t think so. I don’t really think about it and analyse my actions before they happen—I’m the type to go with the flow. Life is too short to second guess your every move.”

  “Does your ‘flow’ usually come with a side order of cliché?” He grinned at me and rested his free hand on my knee. Holy crap... I really wished he’d just bed me then disappear back to whichever smoking volcano he’d erupted from eight days earlier. “You’re very intense
.”

  “Am I making you uncomfortable?”

  My eyes tracked down to his hand still on my knee, warm and alien, but... “No.” I answered honestly. He frustrated me, intellectually and sexually, but once the sand he persistently kicked in my eyes settled, I was no more uncomfortable at that moment than I had been when he’d dropped me off at my flat and said a friendly goodbye. “You say you go with the flow, and yet you go out of your way to avoid women.” Except me...

  He shrugged. “The irony isn’t lost on me but I know where to draw certain lines. However, may I snoop?”

  My automatic reaction was to smirk. “You’re asking my permission? I thought you had me pegged.”

  “I do.” He pulled his hand free of mine to wave to a waitress hovering around the doorway out onto the mezzanine. She approached us, all luscious curves and auburn haired, and curtseyed politely as she delivered a sandwich to the table.

  Curtseyed? I waited until she was out of earshot before I laughed at her. Yes, she was definitely one of those women Blaze sought to avoid.

  “Something funny?”

  “Not at all. You were snooping?”

  He held out the plate, offering to share his sandwich, but I shook my head firmly to decline. “It’s really more seeking supplementary information in regards to an observation.”

  “Spit it out.”

  He sighed and ran a finger over the small scar on his upper lip. “Your so call friends—Esme and the egomaniacal pedant—they really seem to talk down to you.”

  My mouth dropped open an inch. “And?” I got a very pointed look in return for my snapping before he turned and took a large bite from his sandwich. He wanted to know why, of course he did. “It’s concern,” I sighed. “I suppose it’s hard for them to treat me like I’m at my best when they’ve seen me at my worst.”