His To Shatter
Authors: Haley Pearce
Tags: #coming of age romance, #billionaire sex, #like shades, #contemporary erotic romance, #marriage of convenience, #billionaire romance, #Contemporary Romance
A Contemporary Romance
By
Haley Pearce
SMASHWORDS EDITION
* * * * *
PUBLISHED BY:
Infinite Muse Press on Smashwords
His To Shatter: A Contemporary Romance
Copyright © 2013 by Haley Pearce
This book is a work of fiction and any
resemblance to persons, living or dead, or places, events or
locales is purely coincidental. The characters are productions of
the author’s imagination and used fictitiously.
Adult Reading Material
The material in this document contains
explicit sexual content that is intended for mature audiences only
and is inappropriate for readers under 18 years of age.
* * * * *
A Contemporary Romance
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CONTENTS
* * * * *
Acknowledgements
* * * * *
First I would like to thank
my readers, above all, the very reason that I began writing was to
share my ideas with all of you.
His To
Shatter
is a novel that is very dear to my
heart, many of the characters are inspired by real people who I
have had the pleasure or displeasure of knowing throughout my
life.
The story of Madison's troubled upbringing
is in many ways a confession, it's my first and only real
expression of the complicated feelings that I harbor as a result of
growing up as an "adult child" of alcoholic and codependent
parents.
My heart sincerely goes out
to anyone who can relate to Madison's character in any way, this
story was written for you.
His To
Shatter
is about the triumph of the human
spirit, the realized ambitions of a girl from a bad place who
chooses to rise above her surroundings instead of wallowing in
them.
Most of all, this story is about how we
can't do anything alone in this world, nothing worth doing at
least. We all need to eventually open ourselves and trust in other
people who have earned it. We deserve success, we deserve nice
things, we deserve happiness.
* * * * *
Chapter One
* * * * *
I had already been awake for hours when the
sky began to lighten over the East River. Since moving to New York
City a year earlier, I’d fallen in love with the River Park,
especially at sunrise. Every morning, without fail, I rolled out of
bed at six o’clock, threw on my years-old running shoes, and hit
the pavement. While the rest of the Lower East Side of Manhattan
slumbered peacefully behind the closed doors of their fifth story
walkups, their penthouses, their lofts, I tore silently through the
streets. I never wore headphones while I ran through the city,
preferring the tentative silence that overtook the streets so early
in the morning. The daily hour I reserved for running was a time of
mediation, of calming; and I would need them both in spades that
day.
As I bore down on the Brooklyn Bridge,
keeping my quick but steady pace, I ran through my pitch speech for
the eighteen thousandth time. Later that day, my big interview was
finally going to happen. After a year of inquiry emails, follow-up
phone calls, and preliminary meetings, I was actually going to have
an interview with the employer of my dreams, the international
marketing firm Corelli. Just thinking the name sent shudders of
anticipation running through my already keyed-up body.
Corelli
, I thought to myself again and again, making a
mantra of the name. Ever since I’d decided to focus on
international marketing as a wide-eyed undergrad, Corelli had been
the shining beacon that I had aspired to. Now, it was actually
within my reach—and I was positively beside myself with nerves.
I slowed my pace to a walk at the end of the
first leg of my run. My roommates often made fun of me for running
my daily six miles, but that time was entirely essential to my
happiness. As I slung my leg over the back of a park bench,
stretching out my calves and quads, I breathed in the light April
air with relish. I hadn’t been prepared for how brutal New York
City winters could be, but now the cold grip of that ghastly season
was loosening. Morning glories crept along the chain link fences,
now, and tiny green sprouts popped up among the bricks. Even in New
York, spring was beginning to show its face. And after spring had
blossomed into summer, I could very well be headed to Paris for the
internship I’d been lusting over for years.
Interning at Corelli that summer was, as
childish as it may sound, my dream. I had been lucky enough to get
into the international marketing graduate program at NYU after a
somewhat fraught undergraduate career. Living in the city as a full
time student let me focus all my energy on reinventing myself. I
felt like I could finally find the resolve to put my past to rest
as an unfortunate prelude to my real life, my life as a big-time
marketing executive. And Corelli was the cornerstone of that
fantasy.
A low groan escaped my lips as I leaned
deeply into my stretch. Few things satisfied me more in life than
that sweet, slightly painful feeling. I looked out over the East
River as I switched legs, squinting across the water toward
Brooklyn. Along both shore lines, piles of driftwood and detritus
stood out like found art. The rugged mayhem of the water’s edge
contrasted the tall, gleaming, spotless skyline of Manhattan,
rising above me into the ever-lightening sky. New York was always a
beautiful city, whatever the time of day or night one wandered out
into its embrace. But sometimes, when I least expected it, the full
splendor of my new home would hit me square in the gut, its beauty
bringing real tears of joy and wonder to my eyes.
I let out a little laugh as I pulled myself
together. Leave it to me to cry over a sunrise. I turned on my heel
and started back toward my apartment. The rhythmic pounding of my
sneakers against the asphalt comforted me like nothing else could.
I’d been running for years, having discovered the healing powers of
a good long dash when I was still a skinny, awkward kid. I’d done
my growing up in West Chester, Pennsylvania—otherwise known as the
middle of nowhere, for someone like me. There had been very little
to do in my hometown once my friends and I outgrew trekking through
the wooded hills and hunting for salamanders in the streams. When
the kids I went to school with started entertaining themselves with
booze and weed, bouncing from basement to basement with no
motivation except getting high, I was left to my own devices. I
didn’t touch drugs and alcohol as a rule—not after what they’d done
to my once-happy family.
Bitterness rose within me the instant I let
my thoughts touch upon my family. I made a habit of leaving my
former home out of my mind; it was the only way I could get through
the day. When I left for college, I started the drawn-out process
of extricating myself from the wreckage of my home life. If I
concentrated very hard, I could remember a time when my family had
been intact, supportive, and even wholesome. But those memories
were nothing more than fleeting shapes and shadows; the years I
could actually remember were nothing but darkness, shame, and
grief.
Maybe growing up would have been easier, if
I’d had siblings. But it was just me and my parents, alone in our
little converted farm house in the low hills of Pennsylvania. My
parents had married young, after becoming unexpectedly pregnant
with me. My mother, Francie, had only been nineteen when I was
born; my father, Steve, had been twenty. Neither had gone to
college, but for a while it seemed as though they might do OK for
themselves anyway. Mom started working at a bank, once I was old
enough for day care, and Dad had a decent job at the local high
school, coaching one sport a season and teaching PE to boot.
The day that everything fell to pieces was
one that I knew I would remember forever. I was five years old, and
had just finished my first week of kindergarten. As soon as I
walked through the doors of my elementary school, I was hooked.
There were books, crafts, and other kids
everywhere
. That
first week of school had been a dream; flying across the monkey
bars at recess, trading my white milk for chocolate in the lunch
line, napping alongside my newfound friends in our cozy classroom.
For a brief, beautiful moment, I thought that life would be perfect
from then on out. I could never have known just how wrong that
thought was.
Dad was found out that week, at long last.
The police showed up at our house on Friday night and arrested him
for a slew of charges. As it happened, he’d been engaging in some
rather inappropriate behavior with his older students. Weekends
would often find him partying with the kids on his team, showing up
to basement gatherings like an overgrown teenager. One of his
students had finally come forward and alerted the authorities to
his behavior. Apparently, he was not shy about providing booze to
the kids he coached, nor was he resolute in keeping his hands off
the girls. My mother had cried for a full day after they took Dad
away, baffled by his actions. I had done my best to take care of
her as she rearranged our finances to bail Dad out. The one thing
she kept saying, over and over again, was “Your father is a good
man. Your father is a good man.”
But even then, I no longer believed that in
my heart.
The high school fired Dad without ceremony.
None of the girls he’d fooled around with were under eighteen, so
at least he didn’t have to add “pedophile” to the list of traits
people might assign him. But to me, from that time on, he was a
pervert—a desperate old man past his prime, delusional with false
power. And once he was let go from the school, those delusions and
aggressions only got worse. With no job to go to, Dad found a new
hobby: drinking incessantly. His descent into alcoholism wasn't
even surprising, it was just sad.
Worse still was the way that my mother
defended his pathetic behavior. Mom had always been insecure about
her relationship with Dad. He’d spent the better part of their
marriage accusing her of trapping him with a baby, of keeping him
penned up during the prime years of his life. And after being
blamed so many times, Mom really started to believe it. And so,
when Dad’s philandering came out into the open, she wasn’t even
angry with him. She believed wholeheartedly that it was her fault
he had strayed; she hadn’t been attentive enough, lusty enough for
a man of his stature. It was his right to cheat, or so he convinced
her. By the time I was old enough to realize how warped her mind
had become, it was too late for me to intervene. Even as a child, I
could see that my mother had been corralled into cowardice, and
that my father was a lumbering, misogynistic brute. Mine was not a
particularly sunny childhood.
My legs began to pump faster as memories of
my youth flooded my consciousness. I sprinted along the East River,
trying to outrun recollections of my mother’s idiotic, deferential
simpering, and my father’s ruthless, cutting criticism of
everything that I did. Dad was not afraid to raise his hand to my
mother and I. But as many times as he pushed and slapped me around,
no wounds hurt so badly as those he left with his words. I grew up
being told that I’d amount to nothing, that I was a fool to try and
elevate myself above my upbringing.
