Last Week: A Dark Romance

  LAST WEEK

  LUCY WILD

  Contents

  PROLOGUE

  ONE

  TWO

  THREE

  FOUR

  FIVE

  SIX

  SEVEN

  EIGHT

  NINE

  TEN

  ELEVEN

  TWELVE

  THIRTEEN

  FOURTEEN

  FIFTEEN

  SIXTEEN

  SEVENTEEN

  EIGHTEEN

  NINETEEN

  TWENTY

  TWENTY-ONE

  TWENTY-TWO

  TWENTY-THREE

  TWENTY-FOUR

  TWENTY-FIVE

  TWENTY-SIX

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  TWENTY-NINE

  THIRTY

  EPILOGUE

  ALSO BY THE SAME AUTHOR

  KEPT SAFE – SNEAK PEEK

  LUCY WILD

  She thought it was a game she could win.

  Then the rules changed.

  All Zoey Greene had to do was spend one week working in the house of a secretive billionaire. In return she will walk away with a cool million.

  Piece of cake.

  When she arrives at his mansion, Zoey uncovers the shocking truth about her new employer, Ethan Banfield. She tries to run but it’s too late. She’s trapped with a cold-hearted monster who demands nothing less than total obedience.

  With the darkness that’s been eating away at Ethan now threatening to consume them both, time is running out for Zoey to salvage what’s left of her willpower and make her captor see that with the right person by your side, even the blackest of hearts can find a way out into the light.

  © Copyright 2017 Lucy Wild

  All characters in this book exist only in the imagination of the author and bear no relation to anyone with the same name or names. They are not inspired by any individual and all incidents are pure invention.

  All Rights Reserved including the right of reproduction in whole or in part. Excepting in the case of brief quotations in articles or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced, transmitted, stored, or distributed without the express permission of the author.

  This book is intended for mature audiences and may contain explicit language and scenes which some readers may find disturbing.

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  PROLOGUE

  ETHAN

  She presented herself to me, physically and mentally.

  Knelt on all fours, her head was down, her ass up, her knees apart. She faced away from me. I took a moment to admire her, as you would a sculpture in pure marble, Venus sans fig leaf.

  Her hands were on her buttocks, holding them wide apart. There was nothing I could not see and, best of all, there was not an inch of her that did not belong to me. Michelangelo could not have created an image of purer submission than Zoey as she knelt naked on the bed.

  It was impossible to be sure whether she was doing it because she was scared of me or because she genuinely wanted to. She had every right to be scared of me. I was a dangerous person, the darkness inside me barely contained, a cold empty feeling that filled me up, worse than anger, so much more damaging than violent rage.

  It was only power that kept it under control. Power over her. She had willingly entered this arrangement, she had read the contract, she had signed gladly. She had put herself in my hands.

  Perhaps she thought it was a kind of game. She seemed innocent enough to believe that kind of nonsense, that this was role play, that I was just a weirdo getting his kicks from dominating her.

  In a way, she was right. I was getting a kick out of it. But there was much more to it than that. It was about matching, about connecting, and if I’m truthful, about consuming.

  I had spent so long planning for this, now it was happening, it was almost too easy. I only had to look at her to see that. She had gotten into position without putting up any more than token resistance.

  Everything I’d conquered had put up token resistance. I had built up an empire, burned so many bridges, ruined so many lives, and now it all came down to this. To shut myself away from the world and now take control of one final situation, take control of one woman, one last time.

  A reclusive billionaire. That was what the papers called me. Would that be how they’d report my suicide? Reclusive billionaire kills self?

  Not yet though. That’s for afterwards. I was getting ahead of myself. First I had to run out my contract with her. After all, wasn’t that what all of that was about?

  The problem with building an empire like mine is that the foundations are built on the crushed dreams of other people. I had reached higher than most people could imagine but it’s not what you’d think. The top of the mountain is empty, it’s lonely, it’s just you and you alone.

  I’d long since left my family and friends behind. I didn’t need them. They only held me back. I had gone further without them than I ever would with their help, they were the broken legged soldier asking you to carry them. Better to leave them behind and march on to total victory.

  I had achieved victory. A billion pounds. An enormous sum. But what do you do when you’ve achieved it all? When there’s nothing left to buy? When you can purchase anything? When your wealth could swallow a country or bring down a government?

  If you’re me, you get bored. It wasn’t too many years before that boredom became despair and the despair became emptiness. I shut myself away, ignoring the world. Then, six months ago, an idea came to me.

  As the only way from the top was down, I had begun to panic. That was what first led me into seclusion. I was the wrong side of thirty. Keeping these muscles honed seemed to take more out me with each workout. Eventually, I’d slide into baldness, buttons bursting off my bespoke shirts, eyesight fading, the vultures starting to circle round my empire.

  I had no kids, no one I wanted to leave it to. I had no interest in what happened to it all after I was gone. The only thing I wanted to do first was the one thing I’d never done.

  Break a woman like I’d been broken.

  It would fulfil the last dream of mine, the only ambition I had left. It had been ten years since I’d had my heart broken and I wasn’t going out of the word without wrestling control of that pain back into my grasp.

  Seven days. That was the length of the contract. I had drafted it myself. She spent seven days with me, obeying my every command without question. Then after the week was up, she would get her million like I promised but she’d get something else too. She’d get her heart broken just like mine was. Seven days then suicide.

  Then I would leave on a high. I’d exit this world in the way I had chosen with a last victory over Emilia. No slow decline for me. No waiting to see what fate had in store. I had been in charge of how I’d lived. It was only a small logical step to be in charge of how I died.

  She walked away with her soul shattered and I left this world knowing that I had the power to control not just the body of another person but also the mind. What better way to end things?

  I walked around her, my feet echoing on the wooden floorboards. She didn’t move.

  I had tried six times to do this, hiring each woman from an agency that knew how to be discreet. They’d all let me down, storming out before the week was up, unable to take the humiliation, the punishment, the tormenting. When they found out it wasn’t a game, they called me sick and then left.

  B
ut she wasn’t like them. For one thing, she hadn’t come from the agency. For another, she had submitted so readily, it was almost too easy. Would she even need punishing?

  But the way she looked, remaining perfectly still, waiting for me to give her a command, I wanted to find a reason to punish her.

  After all, it didn’t really matter what happened during her stay with me. I could do whatever I wanted to her. It wasn’t as if I was going to be around to face the consequences. I could do absolutely anything. She was locked in my house until the week was up. No one would hear if I made her scream.

  The contract had warned her I was in total control for seven days. She had signed it. She had put herself in this position. I hadn’t forced her.

  I moved towards her side. I ran my hand between her buttocks and she jolted in surprise, turning her head to glance back at me, breaking one of the most important rules. Her eyes met mine and in that moment, I came to the realisation that she wasn’t broken, not by a long shot.

  “You know the rules,” I said, watching the fear spread slowly across her face. “You broke them. You must be punished.”

  But as I looked at her, I saw something mingling with her fear. It took me a second to decipher what it was but then I realised.

  It was excitement.

  ONE

  ZOEY

  I didn’t mean to steal his wallet. I’m not a thief. It was all a mistake.

  I was feeling guilty enough before I even saw it.

  On my last night of freedom, I was sitting alone in a pub, doing the best I could to drown my sorrows and my guilt. I had a half drunk glass of Merlot in front of me and I intended to make the rest of the glass last as long as possible. Once it was gone, I would have to go home and I was in no rush to do that.

  I had been to the bank to try and explain to them that I couldn’t just conjure up the mortgage arrears out of thin air. The woman behind the desk politely nodded, agreeing with me that the text messages and letters weren’t helping. She promised they’d put them on hold for a month, give me chance to get the money from somewhere.

  I’d asked for a loan and she’d managed not to laugh but that was as positive as the conversation got. It didn’t take long to establish she wasn’t going to do anything to help. The first message hit my phone before I was even out the door.

  URGENT - Zoey Greene - You must call us at once to discuss a matter of extreme importance.

  I ignored it. I also ignored the next five that came as I walked home.

  The sixth message came just as I was walking past the pub and without even looking at my phone, I turned and headed inside. I needed a drink. Badly.

  It was a posh place, not somewhere I’d ever been in before. I did not fit in. The men were all in suits, even the bartender. The women were in dresses so tight and short, they might as well have been naked. Some of them practically were.

  I approached the bar and dug out my last ten pounds in the world. If you’re going down, what does it matter if you burn your last tenner?

  “A glass of your cheapest red,” I said, ignoring the look the bartender gave me.

  I got a penny change with my glass and as I carried the drink and my last coin to a table by the window, my phone buzzed yet again.

  I rolled my eyes as I dug it out but this time it was my mother.

  How did you get on at the bank?

  I didn’t reply. What was I supposed to say? This time next month, the entire family will be out on the streets. I had to raise five thousand pounds just to cover the arrears on the mortgage and the chances of that happening were as high as me finding a winning lottery ticket stuck to the bottom of my shoe.

  Let her hold onto her hope for a little while longer. She thought I’d somehow be able to stop the repossession process if I just said the right things to the bank. The optimism of parents. “You’re so much better with this sort of thing,” she’d said with a smile. “You’re my little star.”

  Her little star was jobless, living with her parents and grandparents like Charlie Bucket and soon to be homeless. Worst of all, there was no chocolate factory manager to solve all my problems. There was just me and I had let them all down. I had failed to keep my family safe.

  While I was working, it was all okay. Tough but okay. It was only packing boxes on a conveyor belt in a factory but it was work. Then I was made redundant and the same fate hit my father two weeks later. We have lots of luck in my family, all of it bad.

  My mother wanted to work but her hip had been failing for years, the result of trying to care for her own parents in a house that was too small for the number of people in it. She did her best but whichever way you looked at it, we were screwed.

  My boyfriend left me when I lost my job, happily telling me he’d been sleeping around for the entire time we’d been together. I had done everything for him, never raised my voice, never asked for anything, and yet it wasn’t enough. I wasn’t good enough for him. If I didn’t have money, I wasn’t worth being around.

  So I had a glass of wine to drown it out for a few short minutes. It was expensive and I couldn’t afford it but I had it anyway.

  I was sipping slowly at it when I saw the wallet.

  The entire time I’d been sat there, opposite me there had been a man and a woman. She’d been laughing the laugh of the rich and carefree, he’d been talking in a lower voice, his muscular body crammed into a suit that looked like it cost more than my house.

  She was stunningly beautiful, like she’d walked straight off a film set into here, long shining blonde hair, full of life, perfect make up, dangling gaudy earrings that screamed money. It was somehow worse that she was no older than me. She was twenty, maybe twenty-one at most.

  He was older, in his thirties at least. Short, neat hair, no grey that I could see. Prominent brow, strong chin, hint of stubble that he probably slapped thousands of pounds of moisturiser on to keep it looking like that. I couldn’t see his eyes properly but I bet they were lit up, staring at her ample chest as she tossed her hair and thrust it towards him, her hand sliding over the table to touch his. I felt a flare of jealousy without knowing why.

  I found myself watching them interact, feeling a bubbling rage of jealousy, combined with despair, bitterness, and sorrow all rolled into one noxious bundle. They didn’t know what it was like to be me. They had no idea what it was like being poor, having to struggle to survive. People like that would never know.

  I had to force myself to look away from them, feeling a tear forming in my eye. When I looked up again, they had parted. She was heading out of one door and he’d gone out of another.

  That was when I saw the wallet. I didn’t think of stealing it straight away. I was sure he’d come back for it, realise his mistake.

  But he didn’t.

  By the time I’d emptied my glass, he still hadn’t returned. It was still there, half hidden by the cushion on his chair. It must have fallen out of his pocket. The bartender hadn’t noticed it when he collected their glasses. Only I had.

  The emotions inside me coalesced into anger. Anger at him for flaunting his wealth, at her for having such an easy life when mine was such a relentless effort just to stay afloat.

  I didn’t want to spend their money. I only wanted to make their lives difficult, just for a few minutes. Give them a hint of the problems other people had.

  So I stood up and walked past his seat, leaning down and grabbing the wallet in a single fluid motion, ready to drop it as soon as anyone said anything.

  No one did. They were all too wrapped up in their own worlds. With the wallet safely tucked inside my jacket, I pushed open the door and headed outside.

  TWO

  ZOEY

  I felt guilt wash over me in waves as I walked away from the place. I had a cold certainty that the arm of the law would descend on me within seconds, twenty riot vans skidding to a halt before I reached the first corner, dragging me off to some Dickensian jail cell for the combined offences of being a thief and being penniles
s.

  Not penniless, I thought. I still had the one from my change. As I walked by a charity shop, an elderly man with a shock of white hair stepped in front of me, “Help the homeless,” he said, holding a collection tin out towards me.

  I shrugged, digging out the penny and dropping it into his tin. He smiled and nodded. “Thanks, love.”

  I didn’t tell him I would probably be one of the homeless who needed help by the end of the month. Or that I’d given him my last penny in the world. What was the point?

  The house.

  It was scary to think about losing the house. But I couldn’t see any way out of the predicament. I would just have to go home and break the news to them that it was all over. The bank had won. The arrears were just too much. The repossession was going ahead. I didn’t have a good enough credit rating to get any kind of help, no one would lend me more than a couple of hundred. We were ruined.

  I couldn’t help but think that it was all my fault. If only I’d worked harder at school, found a better job, done what the woman in the bar had clearly been doing, grease my way up to a sugar daddy, then it might have been all right.

  What if he had money in the wallet? I could use that. It was a dark thought and I didn’t like it. He was rich, there might be a wad of banknotes in there. He’d not miss them. I could use them to help my family.

  I shook my head, continuing on my way, the guilt pressing down on me. I was penniless but I wasn’t a criminal.

  Yes I was. I had stolen a wallet. I was a thief. What if they had CCTV in there? What if they’d filmed me? It wouldn’t be hard to track me down. A man like that, he’d probably have the most expensive lawyers in the country, just waiting to walk all over me, send me away for the rest of my life.

  What was I doing?

  I stopped dead in the middle of the pavement. This was a mistake. I was an idiot. I hadn’t made his life harder. He would laugh about it. I’d made my life harder, an impressive feat given everything that had happened recently.