Last Week: A Dark Romance Page 10

  I slammed into her as soon as her climax began to fade, my own breath growing more shallow as I looked down at that perfect body of hers. “I’m going to come in your ass,” I said.

  “Yes,” she replied, eagerness evident in her voice. “Come in my ass, give it to me, Sir. I want it. I need it in my ass. Oh fuck.”

  She came again, one hand between her leg, toying with her clit. The sight of her lost in the throes of pleasure sent me over the edge and I buried myself in her, feeling cum spurt out of my cock and fill her ass to capacity. I thrust again, another spurt. Then a third.

  I slowly slid backwards, rocking as I did so, easing myself from her as she collapsed onto the grass. She looked up at me with a bewildered expression on her face. “I don’t know if I can take two more days of that,” she said with a grin. “That was so intense.”

  “You agreed to stay,” I replied, pulling her to her feet. “Now go back to the house and wait for me in your room.”

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  ZOEY

  I walked back to the house in a daze. I think that’s why I ended up in his study. I wasn’t thinking straight.

  It was hardly surprising. I’d done yet another thing I’d never done before. I’d walked naked outside just because he’d told me to. Not only that but I’d done it with a tail dangling from me, making me feel somehow more like his pet than ever. Then he’d fucked me. That word didn’t do it justice. He’d ravished me, he’d owned me, he’d taken me to a higher plane of pleasure than I thought could exist. I was still floating when I walked back across the lawn.

  My smile refused to fade. He’d been inside my ass. That magnificent, enormous, perfect cock of his had been buried all the way inside my ass. With every step I was reminded of what he’d done, the dull ache of emptiness, of nerves overworked, of muscles stretched. His cum was still inside me. I’d made him come. I’d brought him to orgasm.

  He’d done the same for me, giving me two orgasms just from fucking me, without my clit even being touched, something I didn’t think was even possible.

  I was still recovering as I entered the house. It wasn’t a door I’d used before and the size of the place meant I wasn’t sure of the best way to my room. I walked slowly, still thinking about how it had felt to have him inside my ass. I pushed open a door, hoping it might give me a clue where I was. It was a drawing room, not one I’d seen.

  I closed the door again and continued along the corridor, pushing open the next door which led into his study. I was about to close it again when I noticed the window was open and a bird was flapping against it on the inside, trying frantically to get out. It was small and fluffy with brown feathers all over though that was as far as my ornithological knowledge went. It must have slid through the open section and then got stuck.

  I crossed the room as the bird’s chirruping grew more frantic. I slid the window open further and pushed my open hands towards the bird, guiding it towards the gap. It got the hint after three attempts to peck me, flying down and then out the gap into the garden. I slid the window back down, leaving it open a sliver.

  I was walking back across the room when I saw the metal tin was still on the desk. It was open. I glanced upwards, wondering if he was watching me. I know I shouldn’t have looked but I couldn’t help myself. The way he’d frantically hidden it from my view told me it was important. I reasoned that perhaps it might contain something useful, something that might tell me why he had been so upset when I’d spoken to him yesterday.

  I picked up the photo. It was a woman, early twenties, dark hair, a hint of a smile on her face. Her cheeks were bony, her skin pale. She looked like she needed to eat a decent meal. Next to the photo was a letter. I realised I was intruding on his privacy and I went to turn away but my eye was caught by the word suicide. Then I had to read it.

  I picked up the letter. It was a suicide note and it was signed by Ethan.

  “What are you doing in here?”

  I jumped in fright, dropping the letter on the desk. Ethan was standing in the doorway, looking furious. “What is this?” I asked, pointing at the letter.

  “You weren’t supposed to see that.”

  “Are you going to kill yourself? Is that why you wanted me to go? So you could get on with it?”

  “It doesn’t concern you.”

  “It damn well does concern me. Why, Ethan? Why would you want to kill yourself? You’ve got everything to live for.”

  He let out a bitter laugh. “Have I? I’ve a family who won’t speak to me, I’ve no friends, no kids. I’ve nothing.”

  “You’ve got me.”

  “For two more days then you’re gone.”

  “Not if you don’t want me to go.”

  He shook his head. “It doesn’t matter anyway. I’m not going to do it.”

  “Oh? Just wrote it for a laugh? On the off chance?”

  “No,” he snapped, shaking his head. “Things have changed since meeting you.”

  “I don’t know you at all,” I said, shoving past him and running along the corridor.

  I’d had an uncle who’d killed himself when I was twelve. I remembered the funeral. His wife sobbing. Their two kids in pieces next to her. How could he be so selfish?

  That was why he only wanted to spend a week with me. Because he had set the time of his death as he set all his appointments. Mustn’t be late. Got to set a good impression and be on time like a good businessman. That bastard. He’d toyed with me. He’d made me want him, made me need him. I hadn’t known him a week ago, I hadn’t known he existed. But now I couldn’t imagine life without him. And yet he didn’t give a shit about me. He would get to the end of the contract and leave me to find out from the papers. Billionaire kills self. No, selfish billionaire kills self. That was more accurate.

  I found the staircase at last, running up to my bedroom and slamming the door shut. I burst into tears, throwing myself on the bed.

  What hurt the most was finding out how little he cared about me. He had lied to me. All the time I had thought this was a game, that he was doing this for kicks. And then I found out it was his swansong, his goodbye fuck. That was all I was to him, a last toy to play with before he went.

  I had heard him say he wasn’t going to do it anymore, that things had changed since meeting me. But I knew that was a lie, just like everything else he’d said to me since we’d met. A person who isn’t going to do it doesn’t keep the letter on his desk, next to a photo of some woman. No doubt she was his first love, the one he still loved, the one who he dumped and never forgot. She was who he really loved. Not me. He didn’t care about me.

  There came a knock on the bedroom door. “Can I come in?” he asked, pushing it open. I didn’t look at him. I couldn’t.

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  ETHAN

  My first reaction when I saw her in my study was guilt. It coalesced rapidly into anger, primarily aimed at myself. I should have locked the door. I should have led her directly to her room. I should have put the tin away in the drawer last night, not left everything sprawled out for her to find.

  Then she’d run off, leaving me to follow her upstairs, wondering what the hell I was going to say to her.

  “I want to be honest with you,” I said as I walked into the bedroom. “Will you listen to me?”

  “I can’t believe you would be that selfish,” she said, raising her bed from the pillow and turning to face me. She’d put the white dress on again and she looked stunningly beautiful.

  “I wrote that letter before I met you.”

  “What?”

  “The suicide note. I wrote it six months ago.”

  She sat up on the bed, wiping the tears from her cheeks as she stared at me without saying anything.

  I sank into the armchair by the window, looking outside, watching a bird pecking at the grass on the lawn. “Things have changed,” I said quietly, glancing at her. “I can’t go through with it.”

  “I can’t believe you would even want to. Think of the damage
you’ll do, how hurt your family will be.”

  “My family don’t care about me and I don’t blame them. I screwed them all over to get where I am.”

  “How can you be so sure?”

  “I just can.”

  “So you were going to groom me, break me, ruin me, then kill yourself? What about me, Ethan? What was supposed to happen to me?”

  I sighed, rubbing my eyes as a headache appeared from nowhere, making my temple throb. “It wasn’t about you. It was about Emilia.”

  “Who’s Emilia? The girl in the photo?”

  I nodded. “It was my way of getting revenge on her.”

  “Do you know how screwed up that sounds?”

  “Of course I do. But it’s changed, I’ve changed. I don’t want to do it anymore. I don’t care about beating her. All I care about is not hurting you any more.”

  “So you’ve enjoyed hurting me up to now?” She paused. “Sorry, that wasn’t fair.”

  “Yes, it was,” I replied. “I’ve been cruel to you, Zoey. And I’m sorry for that. I wasn’t honest with why I invited you here. I really think it would be better if you leave.”

  “I told you. I’m not going anywhere.”

  “But why?”

  She sat bolt up right. “Because this had been the greatest week of my life, Ethan. I’ve never felt so alive.”

  “You’re not serious?”

  “You’ve given me more attention and affection than anyone ever has. You’re an idiot if you can’t see how good that has been for me. I’ve learned more about me in a few days with you than in my entire life. That’s why I’m so cross with you. You’ve done so much for me and you think I’m only doing it for the money. I don’t care about the money. Keep it. Give it away to charity. Create a foundation for the victims of sadistic billionaires, do anything. Just don’t give up.” She crossed the floor and took my hands in hers. “Don’t ever give up.”

  I didn’t know what to say. For the first time, I had no idea what to say. I’d tried to break her and in doing so, I’d achieved something completely different, I’d made her care about me. She didn’t rely on me, she wasn’t clinging to me, she was independently deciding that I had done a good thing for her. Had I? The idea was confusing and it didn’t help my headache to try and think about it.

  She continued looking down at me as I found it hard to meet her eye. “Let me in, Ethan,” she said. “If you were so lost that you thought that was your only option, you need help. I had no idea.”

  “I’m good at hiding things.”

  “Unless they’re laid out on your desk.”

  She managed to make me smile. I looked up at her, saw the sincerity in her face and I wasn’t sure I could handle the sight of it.

  “You’re on a road right now,” she continued. “It might look like it’s going to be dark forever but it’s not, trust me. It’ll come out into the light if you just start moving.”

  “Who made you so wise?” I asked as I felt a tear forming in my eye, a tear that had spent ten years waiting to come out.

  “You did,” she replied, squeezing my hand.

  That was when the tears began to fall. I managed to get a grip of myself before they completely took over but it was far more emotion than I thought I was capable of anymore.

  “I will help you if you let me,” she said. “After all, the week’s not up yet.”

  “I can’t believe you still want to stay, even after finding out the truth.”

  She nodded, slipping onto my lap and throwing her arms around me. “I think you were supposed to meet me,” she whispered into my ear. “I think you were supposed to scare the hell out of me, trap me here, spank the living daylights out of me. I needed it. It shook me out of my despair, it distracted me from the world. It taught me what I really am.”

  “What are you?”

  “I’m yours, if you’ll have me.”

  “For the rest of the week?”

  “How about we start with that and see how things go from there?”

  She turned my face to hers and I kissed her, our first kiss. My lips brushed over hers and I felt a tingling spark deep inside me. It felt different to when I’d kissed Emilia. There wasn’t the urgent obsessive feel to it, there was something else, something stronger, more solid. It was hard to define but as our embrace continued, I let my wondering thoughts go and just fell into the moment, something I should have learned to do, long ago.

  TWENTY-NINE

  ETHAN

  Our week was up. She had gone. The house was empty again. Just me and my thoughts. Our last night together had been spent in my bed, my arms wrapped around her as she slept, trying to get used to the fact that she’d be gone in the morning.

  And the morning had come. I hadn’t wanted it to. A week wasn’t enough time to get to know her. She’d brought light into my darkness in a way I still didn’t really understand. It had all seemed to happen in the blink of an eye. One minute she was screaming to be let out of an empty room, the next she was far wiser and more mature than me, taking me by the hand, guiding me through my pain. It was something I could never have predicted would happen.

  I had been so sure I was on the right path.

  I was alone again. I stood in the garden, looking at the spot on the wall where she’d stood, the tail dangling down between her buttocks, her body presented ready for me to take. It was a happy memory tinged with pain. I doubted I’d ever forget it. Each time I walked into the garden, I’d see that vision of her, the poignant reminder of the person who’d come into my life like a lighthouse, illuminating the blackest night and guiding this old sailor back to port.

  Walking back to the house, I wondered what she was doing now. Had she shown her family the cheque? A million pounds for lasting the week in my house. She’d earned it. She’d earned far more. But she refused to take more. It had been hard enough persuading her to take the million. In the end I’d had to point to the contract. She had insisted on staying the week. I was able to insist she got what she was due.

  They would be happy with her. They would be more than happy. She had solved their problems.

  She’d told me in bed about the mortgage arrears, about how close they were to losing their home. There was no chance of that now. She had been justly rewarded for surviving the fucked up guy that I was. She’d lasted a week. It was a week in which everything had changed.

  There was her bedroom. If I breathed in deeply enough, I could still smell her. The bathroom where I’d bathed and shaved her. The room where she’d first been brought. All of it a reminder of her, a reminder of the loss I felt now she was gone.

  I found the blindfold, carrying it in my hand as I walked back downstairs. The hallway, guiding her in and introducing her to my world. It felt like it had happened a lifetime ago. She had been gone less than two hours and already my heart ached for her. I missed her so much.

  I walked into the study, settling behind the desk and pulling open the drawer. “You didn’t win,” I said to Emilia’s photo as I held it in my hand. “Because I stopped playing the game.”

  I tore it in half, tossing the two sides down onto the desk. It was over. I picked up my suicide note and read through it. A multitude of emotions ran through my head as I finished. A weight of expectation settled on me as I put it down next to the two halves of the photo, leaving it open, the words visible in the corner of my eye as I reached down into the drawer.

  I brought out the bottle of pills. The whisky bottle was already there on the desk, ready for me.

  I had bought the pills when the idea first came to me. They were not officially legal grade medicine but you’d be surprised what money can buy you. It would take no more than three to kill a man and there were ten in the bottle.

  “Goodbye, Emilia,” I said, pouring a glass of whisky out. “I am grateful for what you did. Because of you, I met Zoey.” I lifted the glass to the photo before taking a sip.

  I picked up the bottle of pills, holding it up to the light. Ten tiny little pin
k capsules, so innocent, so small and innocuous, just waiting patiently for what I was going to do next.

  I thought about my life, about what it had become, about what it had been. Had it been a success? A failure? Or something in between. How did it compare to Zoey’s? To Emilia’s?

  I thought about my father, about my childhood, my siblings. So many thoughts all came to me as I rolled the bottle round in my fingers, still staring at the pills, the sunlight behind creating a kaleidoscopic effect, the light refracting and changing as I looked in at the bottle.

  A bird called outside. It hopped onto the sill, looking in at me. What do you think of me? I asked myself as I looked at the bird. Do you think I’m a good man or a bad one?

  Zoey had thought I was a good man. Would a good man do what I was about to? Would a good man do what I’d done with my life?

  I had so much money.

  The thing about money is that it brings as much stress as it takes away. I might not have ever had Zoey’s fear of being made homeless but I had a deeper fear for many years, that somehow circumstances would conspire to wrest my empire away, leave me with nothing. I had gripped onto my money with inhuman strength, fighting off any attempt to reduce it. I bought and bought, vacuumed up one company after another.

  In the end, of course, it hadn’t been circumstances that had conspired against me. It had been my own mind. It had twisted and reshaped itself until I had forgotten what mattered in life.

  What mattered was connecting. What was the point in infinite wealth if you were alone? Zoey was gone. I was alone. I set the bottle down on the desk and unscrewed the lid.

  “Goodbye,” I said out loud before picking up the bottle and pouring the contents into the bin next to the desk.

  Once that was done, I reached across the desk and grabbed the phone, dialling the number I knew by heart, wondering if it was still the right one.