Own My Soul (Sixty Days 3)

Chapter One

Paige

The journey took a lifetime in the back of that car that night. I cowered in the backseat, long past struggling for composure. The tears came easily, loud at first, then fading to quiet as we hit the motorway. I tried to keep an eye on the road signs, but my brain was scattered. North. We were headed north. But I’d never really been that far north. I had no idea where we could be headed and no idea what was coming when we got there.

I didn’t want sixty days with the man who’d taken me. I wanted Brandon. I wanted the trust I’d found in his touch. I wanted to serve the man who’d coaxed love in me where he shouldn’t and only him. That’s when it first started to hit me, a bigger fear than any I’d had so far.

What if this change was his doing? What if his talk of me not being with him for sixty days anymore had nothing to do with him dropping me back at university? What if instead he was passing me onto some business associate to fulfil the contract with no complications?

I didn’t want to believe it. Even the thought made my belly lurch. I could handle my body being bruised and battered. I could handle pain at his hands, no matter how far he pushed me. But pain of the heart?

Heartbreak? Was this heartbreak?

Rejection?

Was this him throwing me aside as a needy little weakling wanting love he’d never give me back in a million years?

I didn’t know.

The truth was that I didn’t know anything on that journey other than the fact that I didn’t want to be there.

I was half conscious, exhausted against the leather seats when the car finally pulled to a stop. The engine cutting out was enough to bring me to my senses, stiffening in a beat as some burly guy opened the door and reached out an arm for me.

It was the business partner’s voice that spoke to me from the darkness behind him.

“Come, Miss Emmerson, sixty-day girls are paid to do what they’re told. Get with the rules now.”

For the first time since viewing Brandon Grant’s social media profile, I really didn’t want to be a sixty-day girl.

I was rigid as the burly guy gripped my upper arm and tugged me out of there. My bare feet hit cold gravel and the shudders of winter breeze set my teeth on edge.

The manor looming tall before me wasn’t anything like the country house we’d left far behind. The windows were all illuminated, the gardens well-manicured with ornate hedgerows fencing us in. It looked like a home. One of those homes you saw in glossy magazines with smiling professionals all slick for the cameras.

My footsteps were tiny as I was led across the gravel to the main entrance. The illuminated brickwork was red. Deep, rich red. The steps up to the main doorway were wide and stone.

And so was the business partner — wide and stone.

He was tall and strong with grey hair swept back from a high forehead. It was his expression that was made of stone. His eyes were hard, lifeless. His jaw gritted, like a wolf ready to bite at any second. He paced ahead of me with barely more than a glance back in my direction, cursory at best, eying me like a piece of meat.

I guess that’s when I realised Brandon Grant had been right about me in so many ways during our loggerhead conversations.

I was naïve. Optimistic. Always wanting to see the best in everyone and everything, even when I was looking into the depths of hell.

Whatever I’d taken these sixty days to be like at his hands was nothing more than an illusion of the main event. Driven by fascination with him. The beautiful monster. The man I wanted.

The man I believed in.

Maybe I’d been stupidly naïve all the time.

The hallway opened up to a huge high ceiling once we were through the main entrance. One of those grand sweeping staircases disappearing up into the upper floors. The burly man let go of me and I dropped my arms to cover as much of my modesty as I could manage.

Brandon’s business partner laughed. He laughed right at me.

“Oh, sweet Miss Emmerson. As if modesty has any place for you here.” His glare lingered on my chest, my attempt to cover my bruised tits doing little but making me look like an idiot under bright lights. “Believe me, I’ve seen every slutty inch of you on screen.”

My voice was weak when it sounded. “Please, Brandon said we could speak. He said he’d be back to talk things out.”

“Brandon Grant says plenty he doesn’t follow through with,” the man told me with a steel glare.

I couldn’t hold back from asking the questions. They came tumbling.