Wanting by Lynn Burke
Taking
Forbidden Obsession Book 2
Chapter One - Addilyn
Five Years Later…
My ears rang as I sat stiff as marble while Mother and Lloyd’s lawyer read her will.
Mother had loved her alcohol, but she’d never once popped pills to escape reality. An overdose, the coroner had said, but I didn’t believe the autopsy report. Refused to. Even after her funeral, I couldn’t be swayed into thinking my mother would stoop to such a pedestrian level to take her own life.
She’d been living it up, having all that “me time” she’d bitched about wanting.
No more kids in the house.
No more responsibilities except for luncheons, parties, and spa treatments.
Even if she’d been miserable, she would have never taken her own life, merely out of fear of what her peers would say over her grave.
I felt sure Lloyd had something to do with her death, but I had no proof.
None.
She was gone. Mere ashes in a piece of pottery resting beneath the Alaskan soil.
She’d never truly wanted me, never loved me the way I’d needed with physical touch or kind words. I’d never been good enough, but I’d been unable to hate Mother—even when she constantly believed her husband’s word over mine about how he’d sexually abused and tormented me for those two years.
The chair my stepfather had brought into his office for me pressed hard against my bony shoulder blades and tailbone through my pantsuit. I might have found strength in order to leave home, something I hadn’t known I’d possessed through anger—but being in the presence of Lloyd swept my fortitude away like dead leaves in a winter’s wind.
He made me weak rather than pissed off. Timid, regardless of my lifted chin and straight spine. Thickness tightened my throat to the point of pain.
A hot tear slid down my cheek, but it stemmed from disappointment in myself, not grief. I didn’t bother to blot it with a tissue. It dripped free from my chin, splashing onto my clenched hands atop my lap.
I’d escaped their household, but he’d managed to gain control over me until I turned twenty-one.
I’m powerless again.
I swallowed against the harsh truth which ripped clear down to my stomach like jagged glass. I had moved out the day I graduated from high school, desperate for freedom from that monster. Gideon, Lloyd’s son, had begged me to stay away from him. He’d been dragged away in cuffs for beating up my ex-friend, his only concern my safety. Mother had encouraged the decision for me to leave and seen to my expenses without question.
But she’d always been lavish with gifts, buying pretty much whatever I wanted. I’d figured that was how she’d shown the love she had for me. Or perhaps she had believed my accusations against her husband and thought caring for me monetarily would clear her of guilt for bringing that monster into our home. But with her gone and my inheritance in his hands…
Two months until I turned twenty-one, until I had access to the funds to keep up to date on the taxes for the house Mother had bought me, to pay college tuition, to pay bills, and to put food on the small table my only friend Ciarra and I shared. I just needed to stay out of Lloyd’s hands until then.
“Do you have any questions, Miss Reed?” Mother’s lawyer asked me, breaking through the blackness of my mind and making me aware of the nausea stirring at being in close proximity with my abuser.
Glancing over at Lloyd, I didn’t bother answering the attorney. I’d heard enough—more than enough to chill and twist my insides up tight.
The heat in Lloyd’s dark eyes said it all and only made me colder. I once more shivered under his stare as I’d often done beneath his bruising touch.
He was in charge, same as when Gideon sat behind bars and I had no one to protect me from Lloyd’s advances. He would take what he wanted, or he would find a way to make me penniless, his steady gaze promised.
A tremor wracked through me, and I wrenched my focus off him before vomit rose to spew over his desk. Dark memories slithered upward, ones I’d shoved deep down into my bowels where I’d attempted to shit them out over the years. They stroked my mind with the same inky, putrid touch of Lloyd’s fingertips. His cruel lips. The hard length that had stolen my innocence with so much pain I hadn’t been able to find pleasure with anyone since, no matter how hard I tried—
“No. No questions. Excuse me,” I choked out, hopping from my chair and rushing to the powder room as my stomach roiled.
Mere bile erupted from my gut, splattering into the toilet I hugged. My hands grasped the seat in a white-knuckled grip while I heaved over and over, as though my body tried to purge the memory of Lloyd from my life.
My face broke into a sweat from gagging so violently, and my hair stuck to my cheeks. Still, my insides rolled and clenched.
Never should have come.
Ciarra had begged me not to, but I’d had faith in my strength to look down my nose at him like the piece of shit he was. I’d expected closure from the reading of Mother’s will. Hoped for it.
No such luck.
I’d have been better off showing up with a pitchfork and stabbing him in the groin before making eye contact with the bastard who with one glance had me feeling like a powerless sixteen-year-old again.
Two months until I gained true freedom—
“Sweetheart.” Lloyd’s rumbling voice outside the bathroom door caused me to gag again, and I coughed, choking. “Are you alright?”
Eyes clenched shut, I rocked back onto my heels to suck oxygen into my lungs. “Fuck offf, Lloyd,” I spat out and coughed again.
The doorknob turned, and dread rolled through me—I hadn’t locked it.
Lloyd loomed over me in the small half-bath before I could stand, putting his groin right in front of my face.
I turned my head away from him, my stomach flayed open as memories crashed into my head, shrouding my mind with darkness and making every cell in my body as weak as a baby seal.
“Sweetheart, look at me.”
My stomach heaved again at the same words that haunted my nightmares, but nothing came up. Forced to my knees. Jaw pried open. Gagging and tears over the pain in my throat and his whispers of me being a good girl.
Eventually, I had stopped fighting. What was the point? I’d been without a choice, a toy for him to fuck with—
“Addilyn Jane.”
A sob ripped from my lips as Lloyd grasped me beneath the arm pits and hauled me up against his hard chest. Panic lay dormant from years of repetitive trauma.
“No! P-Please, don’t!” I couldn’t find the strength to do more than whisper and wish for a knife to stab into his balls.
“Shh.” He caressed my back, his lips against the top of my head as I struggled to push his heavier weight away. “There’s nothing you can do about this,” he murmured, his arms a vise around me. “I knew from the first time Ingrid showed me a picture of her beautiful daughter that you were always meant to be mine. I’ve gone three years without you… and now that she’s dead, we can finally be together.”
“I was meant to be Gideon’s!” I cried out what I knew would piss him off.
“And he hates you for what you did to him,” Lloyd reminded me.
The monster had informed me of that fact after his son got sentenced for assault on the first boy to kiss me.
“He doesn’t want to see you ever again.”
I went limp in his arms and sobbed against the memory of the heartbreak I’d felt in that moment in the courthouse. The pain and emptiness I relived every time I remembered what I had done, responsible for Gideon’s incarceration.
I shouldn’t have told the truth under oath.
Doing so would have saved him jail time—and my innocence.
“I can soothe your torment, sweetheart,” Lloyd murmured against my hair. “Let me.”
Soothe my torment…he’d never done anything but provoke it. Self-loathing for my body’s involuntary arousal to the pain he’d caused helped me summon the strength to fight.
“No!” Eyes shut tight, I wrenched my head away from his searching lips, his lips ghosting over my ear.
“Don’t fight me,” he said, all trace of nicety gone from his voice as his grip tightened around my arms, clenching me hard enough to bruise. “I hold your life in my hands, Addilyn. Every penny you stand to inherit is mine unless you do exactly as I say.”
“I’m not some teenage kid you can threaten anymore, Lloyd,” I choked out through the tears rolling down my cheeks, still straining to keep my mouth from his searching one. Heat flushed through my body, tensing my muscles. “I won’t be owned. I won’t be manipulated. Let go of me!”
“There will be rules.”
Fuck that. I’d had enough of his rules.
I’m strong. Resilient.
Lies, but I needed them in order to survive.
My attempt to stomp on his foot with my heel scuttled us sideways into the bathroom wall, knocking a painting to the tile floor. “No!”
The pressure from his hands holding me intensified to the point I cried out from the pain. “First, you’re going to grow your hair back out so I have something to grip while making love to you.”
“Let me go!”
“And you’re going to start wearing all that sparkly makeup like when you were fifteen so you look young again.”
I screamed my rage at the memories crashing into my mind and attempted to bite his arm. He wrenched me around, holding my back against his hard chest, his face pressed to my neck so I couldn’t headbutt him. My chest ached as my lungs fought to draw breath.
“You’ll obey my rules—or I’ll leave you with nothing,” he hissed, his breath hot on my ear. “No house. No money. No place to call your home. You’ll be penniless without me.”
“D-Don’t care.” I yanked my arms hard enough that his fingertips marked my skin, his threats no longer heavy enough to make me care about the outcome. “Let me go!”
“Never,” he growled—and bit my damn lobe.
“Stop!” I shrieked at the zing rushing to my core that caused me to tremble with shame. I twisted and attempted to turn to escape what I didn’t want, but his hold proved relentless.
Those fantasies I’d had as a teenager about being tied up? Taken by force?
Lloyd had obliterated them to the pits of hell even though his bruising touch had roused my body to life every damn time.
I feared the dark. Feared the thought of blindfolds, of ropes, of being restrained in any way—
“You’re going to dress like a slut again, not this matronly pants and blouse shit. I want you teasing me with your short skirts and tight shirts showing off these gorgeous tits…” He licked the shell of my ear and squeezed my breast hard enough I gasped—against the pain and the beginnings of arousal I hadn’t felt in years.
Sick—I’m so damn sick.
“Obey me, and I’ll give you the world.”
Lloyd had attempted to “give me the world” once before, and all I’d ended up with was bouts of depression that lasted for months on end and nightmares that continued to haunt me three years after escaping him. The type of PTSD flare ups that hindered my ability to trust others and make friends.
“Give in, Addilyn. You’ll never be free of me.”
I knew from past experience the only option I had was to relax and let him have his way. The first, I could do. I’d promised myself the second wouldn’t ever happen again.
One day…someday, I would make him pay for stealing my innocence.
Letting out a heavy exhale, I forced my instincts I’d grown back in my time away from him to quiet so I could go limp in his arms. I allowed Lloyd to hold me like he was my everything—what the sick fuck had always lusted after and never accomplished no matter how hard he’d tried.
I had claimed no man would break me again like he’d done. And while I had escaped him physically, the sickness he’d intensified in me remained—but I refused to bend to my weakness.
“There’s my sweetheart,” he murmured, gently turning me to face him once more.
Dark eyes, full of want peered down at me as he smiled.
My stomach heaved, but I swallowed the bile down, chin lifting.
I am strong.
My lips rose—and I jerked my knee upward with every bit of strength I possessed.
“Ah!” Lloyd let out harsh grunt and jerked backward into the hallway, hands dropping to cup his nuts I’d attempted to cave in. Too bad I didn’t have a knife to slice them off. Bent over like he was, I didn’t hesitate.
I used my knee again but smashed it up into his face. He topped over backward, blood spurting from his nose. Satisfaction coursed through me at his groan.
“Sick fuck!” I spat on his face and sprinted on shaky legs to the office for my purse, my pulse pounding with adrenaline, my breaths rasped. My breast still tingled with a pain/pleasure that caused my stomach to roil again.
The lawyer had left, so I grabbed my belongings and hurried back into the hallway, hovering on the verge of losing my shit. My slip-ons slapped the marble beneath them.
Lloyd still lay groaning where I’d left him outside the powder room moaning like a pussy, and I rushed past, his grunted, “You’ll be sorry!” propelling me forward. Sobs let loose to echo around the ostentatious chandelier in the vast foyer where I’d first met him and my protector who’d failed me.
The one I had failed.
Gideon.
I slammed the heavy oak door behind me, wishing to return to that brief moment five years earlier when Gideon had covered my back with warmth and hardness there on the porch. He had caused my skin to shiver in the best way possible even though I had hated my body’s unwanted response to his nearness at the time.
He’d been the only man I hadn’t shied away from when cornered…
His father had ravaged me while I lived unwillingly in his house, under his sweaty body and heavy hand.
He took my innocence. Ruined my mind and body. And now he can take everything else.
Everything legally owed to me, my inheritance. The roof over my head, the food from my table. But I would rot in hell before I bent over for his dick like I’d been forced to do for two years. All the while, Mother had accused me of being a jealous, lying bitch.
I hadn’t spoken to her in three years—and I wouldn’t miss her one goddamn bit.
She’d brought a snake into our home, and I would gladly go homeless in the Alaskan wilderness before making myself vulnerable to his abuse ever again.
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