April's Auction Read online

  April's Auction

  April's Auction

  A Hedonist's Revenge

  L.A White

  A.M.L&C

  Copyright © 2020 Lorraine White

  All rights reserved

  The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  Cover design by: Aria - Blake Design

  Printed in the United Kingdom

  This is for every one of my friend's, family and of course, my nightmare but lovable husband...........

  Contents

  Title Page

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Foreword

  Preface

  chapter 1

  chapter 2

  chapter 3

  chapter 4

  chapter 5

  chapter 6

  chapter 7

  chapter 8

  chapter 9

  chapter 10

  chapter 11

  chapter 12

  chapter 13

  chapter 14

  chapter 15

  chapter 16

  chapter 17

  chapter 18

  Epilogue

  Afterword

  About The Author

  Books By This Author

  Foreword

  The only way to get rid of temptation is to yield to it... I can resist everything but temptation.

  Oscar Wilde

  Preface

  A hedonistic person is committed to seeking sensual pleasure — the type of guy you might find in a massage parlour or at an all-you-can-eat buffet. There is though, a version of hedonism that dates back to the dark ages where men would seek sexual gratification by killing the woman they’d enslaved.

  As times change and years fly by, hedonism continues on but the ethics of the crimes and the release one feels through the finalising of someone else’s life is now an epidemic. It, and they, must be stopped.

  chapter 1

  Once upon a time......

  Pfst: yeah right am I starting this book like that. It's not a fairy tale and the characters don't have wings!

  Almost everyone on the planet can relate to at least some of chapter one! We've all been there and, so has she.........

  ◆◆◆

  Have you ever had one of those weeks?

  The one where a new cluster of grey hairs spring up every day: the one that has you wanting to punch the living day lights out of every stupid person that opens their mouth and says something so ridiculous you almost lose it: the one that has you drinking neat alcohol out of a pint glass, every night you get home from a job you hate?

  She has. Her name is April. Yep, she was named after the month she was born: thank God it wasn’t February or she’d be another millennial whose parents gave their kid a name that they think is unique, but in truth, is a total embarrassment. She’s thirty, near broke, fatter than she’s ever been and she has to wax her top lip more often than she would like. She's also on the diet of her life because she's sick of all the youngsters and their perfect thigh gaps, but, God knows, deep in his soul as much as she knows in hers, that she's withdrawing from a sausage MC’Muffin.

  This is her story.

  ◆◆◆

  Monday consisted of waking up late for work, arriving at the office with minutes to spare but having so much work to do she was already three hours behind.

  She stumbled through the day, her husband couldn’t be bothered to help with cooking or cleaning so she ended up going to bed in a daze at 9:30.

  ◆◆◆

  Tuesday was even worse. She’d learned she’d been demoted as she has a ‘tendency to be too soft on the sister company’ and she’s ‘too involved’. She works as an advisor for the medical field giving seminars on new hospital equipment: she couldn’t see how she favoured one hospital more than another. It was the biggest load of bollocks she'd heard in her life: it was a money saving ploy and nothing else.

  ◆◆◆

  Wednesday came, saw her working through her lunch and finishing late. She finally got home to see a message on her husband’s phone with two massive red hearts at the end. It then had her tossing and turning through the night convincing herself that he wasn’t cheating, his distant attitude lately had been because of nothing more than their work troubles.

  ◆◆◆

  Thursday was almost refreshing, in the fact that she got to work early, had some conference cancellations and had the time to have a bath before she watched episode after episode of her favourite fantasy series before going to bed.

  ◆◆◆

  Then the ‘day’ happened. Work was the usual level of bullshit. Tears streamed, harsh words were said and more than one meeting had taken place with HR. She kept her head down all day. It was a safe option.

  She walked through the door, heard her husband talking on the phone, walked closer and halted when she heard what he said to the person on the other end…. ‘I’ll see you this weekend. She thinks I’m on nights. I have to go. Yeah, I love you to!”

  The colour drained from her face. She looked as pale as the white walls that separated the yellow and grey cabinets in her kitchen. In the thirteen years they’ve been together, he had never told anyone else apart from her, that he loved them. Not his sister, his mother or his nephew. No one.

  “Wh’who the fuck was that?” her voice wavered. Not because she was nervous, but because she was staring full throttle at his green eyes and tight mouth. He was scared. He should be.

  “Sophie.” He replied: well: he blatantly lied. Sophie was his sister. She knew it wasn’t her.

  “What did she want?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Nothing?” she snarled. “You wouldn’t tell her you love her if it was nothing.” She threw her handbag on the floor. This was going to get ugly. She was going to ugly cry in his face.

  He took a step back. It dawned on him she’d heard what she shouldn’t have. He looked to the floor. “It wasn’t Sophie.”

  “I know that you dumb shit. Who the fuck was it?”

  “I need to tell you something.” He went quiet: too quiet.

  “Spit it out.”

  “I’ve been seeing someone else and she’s pregnant.”

  The shock on her face would have scared her neighbours. That she hadn’t expected. That really wasn’t Sophie. He was seeing someone else. She was pregnant.

  Bile rose to the back of her throat and she swallowed it down. She coughed. She leant forward as the wind was knocked out of her chest. She stood back up.

  How could he do this to her? He’s her everything, and since the moment they met, she naïvely thought she was his. She feels betrayed, disgusted and numb.

  Images with other woman wrapped in his arms filled her mind, his beard tickling someone else’s cheeks had filled her vision and his body tangled with someone else’s in the throes of passion, had her heart breaking.

  The worst of it all is that a part of her knew this day would come.

  She could never give him what this woman could. She was barren. She cannot get pregnant and when and if she does, she cannot carry the baby to term. She was an anomaly. She has an extremely rare blood group and a foetus gets attacked from her cells as though it’s a parasite. She wasn’t woman enough to be a proper wife to him. She was a convenience until he found better things.

  She couldn’t say anything back. He looked devastated that he had to tell her this but relieved at t
he same time. She knew he was going to leave her and she didn’t want to hear it. Actually, she couldn’t hear it and didn’t bother staying long enough so she would. She ran up her thirteen stairs to her blue painted bedroom, slipped into her black jeans and a white hoodie and shoved on her trainers. She took her secret stash of cannabis, packed a rucksack, and got her purse, a roll of loo paper and her black rain coat.

  She left. She walked out of the house and didn’t take any notice in his advances to make her stop. He knew they had to air this out in the open but she wasn’t willing to give him the moment. She’d slammed the door, run down the hill to the garage and brought the biggest bottle of whisky they sold. She brought large Rizzla, twenty cigarettes and struggled to hold back tears the whole time.

  God knows what the woman behind the counter must have thought. She usually swans around in posh office clothes and high heels but today, she looked as though she’d taken a gap year in the Everglade Marshes and had just got off the plane.

  She walked. She walked fast and nimbly away from everything that threatened to let the dam inside her break. She was almost crying as she got to the fork in the road and had to stop quickly before she walked out in front of a car. “Look where you’re going you idiot” bellowed out of the window to her and she didn’t even have it in her to flip him the bird.

  She carried on walking, more gingerly than before as she didn’t want to die in an RTA, and still didn’t know where she was walking to. All she knew is that she had to get away for a bit, had to gain some air space between herself and the betraying bastard in her home. She saw a dip in the fence that ran alongside the A-roads near her town, and took it. She caught her foot as she climbed over and nearly stumbled on her face. She didn’t, but that didn’t stop her from swearing into the sky in a blind rage.

  She carried on walking. Through fields, up hills, pass cow dung and next to bales of hay; she strode like she was walking towards her new life. She could have, and would have, run, if her backpack wasn’t weighted down by so much junk. She got to the top of the hill and saw a huge tree trunk nestled between some oaks. That was where she was headed. She got there and sat down on shaky legs: this being the most exercise she had done in months: and let the tears fly.

  ‘I can’t believe this. I cannot believe he has done this to me. Why? I’ve been nothing but a good wife. I doted, I cleaned, I obeyed and adhered to his every whim and need, and yet it wasn’t good enough. I was never going to be good enough.’

  She wiped streaming gushes from her cheeks and almost laughed. She forgot she was wearing mascara.

  She took everything out of her bag and made the largest joint she could, considering the wind and how it blew the contents away at the last minute. She lit it up, took the lid off the whiskey bottled and stared. She stared straight ahead, her mind full of vile thoughts of what this really meant.

  They’d had a rough nine months. She’d always tried to be intimate with him, wearing sexy lingerie and willing to try new things and all he could tell her was no. Not even using an excuse like a headache or he was tired, just one simple and degrading word…. No. She should have known something was going on. She shouldn’t have been so fucking stupid. She thought his recent neglect was from stress at work, she didn’t fathom it was from an affair.

  She kept looking straight ahead of her. On top of the hill was a forest behind a large clearing with healthy but uncultivated land. It was odd. This would be a great place for farm animals to graze or for crop to be sown, but it hadn’t been. It just seemed as though someone had forgotten about it and she couldn’t help thinking what a waste of potential someone was missing out on.

  She took more puffs of the Devil’s lettuce and wished it was having more of an effect. She gulped down the whisky from the bottle like it was water and had hoped it too, would have had more of a numbing side to her pain.

  Her phone rang. It didn’t take a genius to know who it was. She looked down at the screen to see her husband’s face pop up. She didn’t answer.

  ‘Fuck you Matt.’

  It rang again and again, each time for longer before her voicemail cut it off, and each time she didn’t answer. He text her. She didn’t reply. She simply swigged and puffed and felt a vast amount of pleasure in knowing he was probably screwing on the other end.

  He called again and again, and by this time she had a nice buzz from the illegal and legal intoxicants then thought, you know what: bring it on you cheating dick.

  “What” She demanded into the phone.

  “April where are you, we need to talk about this?”

  “Talk… Talk? You’re lucky I didn’t punch you in the throat before I left.”

  “I’m sorry this has happened. I didn’t mean for any of this.”

  She laughed. Such a scathing laugh the underground would have soiled themselves. “You didn’t mean for it to happen? You didn’t mean to dip your wick, over and over again till she was pregnant. You didn’t mean to fall in love with someone else. You didn’t mean to hurt me? What the flying fuck did you think was going to happen? You have unprotected sex with someone else for fuck knows how long and now you try and tell me you didn’t mean it? Are you for fucking real?”

  She waited for his reply. She knew he was trying to navigate his way through all the F bombs and come up with an answer.

  “I don’t know what to say April. I never meant to hurt you. You know me. You know what I’m like!”

  “I thought I knew you Matt. Hell, thirteen years is a long time to get to know someone, but this, this is something beyond anything I ever imagined you would do to me. You might as well take the house and the cat because I want nothing from you. I don’t want your pity, I don’t want your handouts and I don’t want her dirty left overs. Go and fucking die.” She hung up.

  ‘I didn’t need to say that last bit. I don’t want him dead; but like hell am I letting up. He has betrayed me in the deepest way. He deserved to hear it.’

  She stood. She took another gulp of whiskey and rolled her eyes. As the last drop burned down her throat, she regretted not buying another. One litre wasn’t enough it seemed. By this time she was consumed by anger. She was writhing in it. Her limbs were shaking, her hands were cold but sweaty at the same time and her chest felt like it was being squeezed in a vice. She looked to the sky and saw clouds darker than her mood. The first drop of rain fell on her face and that was it. Bubbling inside her was a wrath so destructive she could do nothing but scream. She put her head back and at the top of her lungs; let all her anger go “uuuurrrggggghhh.”

  As the sound faded off on the hills she looked over to her left in absolute horror. The tip of a big and expensive gun was poking its way out of the trees around her and one thing crossed her mind.

  ‘I’m a gonna….’

  As fight or flight and self-survival pounded in her heart, she turned around on shaky feet and tried to make a run for it. Only: her foot hit the tree stump and she took a comical tumble. Her temple smashed on the ground and her back bent the wrong way. The pain was agonising. It took her a moment to notice the blood dripping down her face and to see flickers of light across her eyes, before everything went black.

  chapter 2

  “Shit. What the shit? Why did she run?”

  “Pick her up and bring her in.”

  “I don’t think that’s a good idea Boss. This woman seems psycho.”

  “Call another woman psycho in my presence again you arsehole, go one, one more bloody time.” Ethan looked to the floor. The Boss’ misses was volatile at the best of times but when she was heavily pregnant with the Boss’ child, her mood swings were all over the place.

  Whatever happened to that woman and the reason for her being there: the Boss didn’t like it: Ethan could tell by the way his eyebrows had dangerously dipped over his blue eyes and his square jaw was taught. It was a formidable look that would make the bravest of men, go and hide under a blanket wishing to never be found.

  When the woman arrived at the to
p of the hill, Ethan had let the Boss know she was there. It was unusual for people to wander this close to their encampment and facility. The fact she couldn’t see it or hear any of them around her told everyone that she was just as fooled by the stealth tech as all of the random ramblers before her.

  The Boss and Amelia were headed down town to see the midwives and the protection detail were training outside the front. Only when they saw the woman guzzling alcohol like she was dying of thirst, did they all stop to watch. Ethan’s heart went out to her. She’d just found out her husband was leaving her for someone he knocked up, and the poor woman didn’t know whether to cry or by the looks of it, go on a killing spree.

  “Jesus Amelia. Aren’t pregnant women meant to be happy and cheery? Anger won’t help the baby you know! Trust me: I’m a doctor!”

  “A doctor that seems to be ten minutes delayed in his response. Smart you are!”

  Thankfully Amelia smiled. Ethan was the youngest of the facilities employees but also one of the most ruthless. This alone had earned him his title of protector when it came to Amelia. She had to put up with him, latched to her side since they found out she was the first, and 90% of the time it was a working battle. The last 10% had Amelia letting her guard down and treating Ethan like the brother she’d always wanted.

  The Boss looked Ethan’s way. He wouldn’t smile that Ethan had made Amelia happy, he wouldn’t agree that Amelia should let up and chill out: he wouldn’t back down from his possessive posture.

  “Ethan.” The one ruling word was enough to get his hairs on end.

  Ethan looked over to the woman. He was almost scared shitless of touching her in case she’d broken a bone in her back from the angle that she fell into, but when the Boss gave a command, no one refused. The male could burn holes in your soul just by looking down at you and sod if Ethan was going to be on the end of his wrath. He’d learned hard and fast that no matter whom you were or what you thought was right or wrong, the Boss had the final say and if you disobeyed, you died. The Boss had proven that time and time again to get to the top of the food chain.