Broken Girl(58)

“Yes it does. See, I’m Rose, the f*cking hooker you picked up in the tenderloin of the city. I did my job and it’s time to move on. There ain’t enough room for people like me in the lives of all the Garrett Chadwick’s of the world. I knew better. Never again.”

He pulls on his pants and a white undershirt. His demeanor runs cold, unattached and distant.

“I’m going to give you some space. Take your time to collect your things. The dresses in the foyer closet are yours, please take them. When I get back, I’ll expect you to be gone,” he states as he calmly puts on his socks and shoes.

“That’s it? Just like that, you’re done! Just because I don’t take your deal and you can’t keep me, you’re gonna wash your hands of me? You’re one cold-ass bastard. You know that?”

“Rose, you’re such a beautiful woman, much too beautiful to talk like that. And, you’re much too smart to be selling your body. You’re still young, your whole life ahead of you. Take the money I gave you and make something of yourself, outside of this.”

“Fuck you!”

I go to slap him, but he grabs my wrist. His eyes constrict, his cock hardens and presses firmly against my thigh.

Was he getting turned on watching me suffer . . . lose . . . hurt?

Sick motherf*cker.

He pulls me against his chest, his words are just above a whisper.

“I like you, Rosebud. I really do, but I’m not going to stand here and tell you what you want to hear.”

I crumble in his words. He doesn’t want me. I’m not good enough. Torn apart, shredded and lost. This is all I’m ever going to be to him, a convenient f*ck . . .





IT HAD BEEN over a year since Garrett Chadwick, AKA-Mister, AKA-Mr. C, AKA-whoever the f*ck I thought he was, left me broken in the penthouse suite of the Shelby Hotel. From that point on I promised myself I wouldn’t give my heart to anyone ever again. And up until Shane, I had kept that promise to myself.

It only took Mister three days to make me open up, and fall in love with him and just one night to completely break me. He destroyed every last drop of trust I had mustered to be with him. Sure, we f*cked, but it was different with him. Mister peeled back my walls, dug under them and broke through like nobody before. He made me vulnerable and unprotected, and he methodically collected everything I gave to him. Selfishly, he took the small broken pieces of who I was, molded them into something presentable, something that made me believe I was worthy of a man’s loving touch. I never thought he’d have the power to convince me to then turn my own weapon of insecurity in on myself and pull the trigger. Garrett Chadwick was the worst kind of devil who contaminated me with the most venomous type of poison, love.

He broke me, destroyed the delicate, and was the annihilator of who I thought I was going to become. He was responsible for the iron-clad lock around my heart. Looking back now, maybe I was in love with the idea of him loving me.

It wasn’t until three weeks later when Garrett Chadwick sent me the first of many packages that I realized just how deep the idea of him resided under my skin. Every three weeks like clockwork, another gift would show up at my front door. At first it would obliterate me, and I would relive all the pain he created, eventually, his gifts became the codependency in which I craved the strange routine. It woke up those feelings that lingered just under my skin, and for a split second of total confusion in which I believed he still wanted me, needed me, and maybe even loved me.

In the exact precision of his character, whether it was clockwork or perfect presentation nothing would flank the packages but a label, handwritten in black Sharpie pen. FROM: MISTER / TO: ROSEBUD. When you spend your nights working instead of sleeping, it wasn’t too hard to forget the demons that hide under your bed, in the dark. But Garrett Chadwick made sure I’d never go too long without thinking about him, just long enough to begin to forget, but always fleeting enough to draw him right back to the surface of my skin. It’s been a year now, and I hadn’t opened one, never gave any of the packages a second glance, until today . . . until I was broken enough to accept his invitation to a world of hurt.

Now, I was fighting to keep a handle on my life. My heart’s being ripped to shreds by the death of my best friend and the gaping void that was growing every minute. Sybil was the only woman I ever trusted. The walls were closing in on me, my life was crumbling to nothing more than memories of painful betrayal, and the people I’d lost because of it. Even Shane, who claimed he loved me has become collateral damage.

Shane . . . just thinking about him confused me, drove shivers down my spine straight into the guilt of wishing he was here. There was no way I could’ve dealt with it if I had seen him. What he once meant to me had now become the fuel for letting him go, especially now that he had found out what I was. The friendship we created and the unfulfilled desire I had couldn’t become anything more than memories of a life I once desired. I had to let him go. Let everyone go and move on. Besides, Shane was with Martie, he had a woman who loved him, and no matter how screwed up she was, I’d never be able to compete with her. I just didn’t have it in me, not anymore. I was a girl who had nothing to offer him. Nothing that would last longer than a three-minute roll in the sack.

‘Good thing you cut him off before you made that mistake.’ A wave of relief thundered through my body as the voice in my head interrupted my self-induced f*ck-off party.