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  CHRYSALIS

  Book 2 of 2 in the Love Conquers None Series

  Copyright © 2017 Kilby Blades

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other, noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.

  This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser. This is a work of fiction. Any similarity between the characters and situations

  within its pages and places or persons, living or dead, is unintentional and co-incidental. This book fictionalizes medical situations, yet is not a source of real medical information or advice, and is not a substitute for medical consultation with a physician.

  Published by Luxe Press 2017

  For permission requests and other inquiries, the publisher can be reached at: [email protected].

  Editing: Tasha Harrison, www.thedirtyeditor.com

  Cover Design: Jada D’Lee Designs, www.jadadleedesigns.com

  Custom Formatting: Champagne Formats, www.champagneformats.com

  PA Services: Jennifer Reynolds, www.jenniferrpromotions.com

  PA Services: Britta Neal

  Cover Photography: Istockphoto.com

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Prologue

  Part I

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Part II

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Part III

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Epilogue

  Author's Notes

  Art of Worship Excerpt

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Books by Kilby Blades

  To Mr. Blades, my beta hero, for indulging my passion to write

  I’ve got to stop this.

  It’s the one thought that has repeated itself in my mind since I walked into the suite that I’ve had filled with 250 snapdragon blooms. But I am paralyzed, staring dumbly at the manager’s business card on the night stand while my hand palms my phone. I’m just a few keystrokes away from placing the call that is my only hope to putting this all in reverse. Despite my inertia, my mind has thought it all through.

  First, I’ll have the hotel disable her key, and I won’t answer the door when she knocks. That way, she’ll be forced to go back down to the front desk. When I’m sure she’s back in the elevator, I’ll leave the suite and show up to meet her downstairs. I’ll stall her with a drink at the bar for an hour or so. That’s when I’ll have the staff remove all traces of snapdragons from the room.

  We’ll make it back up here eventually, and have the romantic weekend getaway she thinks she’s walking into. I’ll call Dale with my resignation on Monday morning. I’ll still have to go back to Sydney for awhile—I’ll stay on as long as they need me, to wrap things up. In the meantime, I’ll figure out how to have a different talk with her, about a different ending for us. Without ever having seen the snapdragons, Darby will be none the wiser.

  Then I hear it. The door closing. And I know she’s arrived. A look back at the clock on the opposite nightstand confirms that I’ve let the time slip too far. I close my eyes for just a moment, half steeling myself for the inevitable, half rueing the day I ever dreamt up this plan. It was what she wanted, but nothing about this feels right.

  When I hear a dull thud, my heartbeat spikes. And I remember that I have no right to wallow in this moment. It’s me who should be comforting her. So I stand on legs far braver than my heart and walk from the bedroom to the grand entryway of the Presidential Suite. A lump forms in my throat as I see her first tear fall. I’ve never regretted doing anything as much as I regret this.

  “When do you leave?” She asks it so calmly that I know she knows.

  “Tomorrow…how did you find out?”

  “Andrew. He didn’t mean to tell me. He thought I knew.”

  I’m walking toward her when another tear falls. I begin to apologize, because she deserved better than to find out the way she did.

  “It’s better like this.” She shakes her head, sniffling some of her tears away.

  All I want to do right now is hold her, but if I do, we’ll both be crying messes and I can see she doesn’t want to break down.

  No messy breakups. That’s the shitty part, right?

  She’d spoken those words over a year ago. This whole scene was about sticking to them. I fucking hate this, but I owe it to her.

  “So we have tonight?” she asks, and I can see her try to strengthen her resolve.

  I nod as I take her hands in mine.

  “I missed you when I was gone,” I choke out. I’ve never spoken these words to her before.

  “I missed you too.”

  “I miss you every time I go,” I say, because if the agreement is really over, I’m throwing the rules out the window.

  “So do I.”

  I don’t let myself think about how different things might have been if we hadn’t lied to each other for so long.

  Five minutes later, we’re in the bedroom and Darby’s undressing me. The imperative is unspoken, but somehow we both know—if these are our last hours together, we should spend them intertwined. She’s walked me backwards until my thighs are up against the edge of the bed. I look between us, watching her hands as they disappear beneath my shirt. When her warm fingertips fan out above my navel until they settle on my waist, I feel it all begin.

  My eyelids lull as her palms slide their way up either side of my torso, her thumbs tickling my armpits before skating up my arms until I bend my elbows to let her pull off my shirt. My eyes are back on her the second my head is through, but she’s not looking at my face. Her hands are back on my chest, and her fingers are taking their time as they explore my skin. Her thumbs skim my nipples seconds before her palms settle over the muscles between my neck and my shoulders. When her fingers fan upward once again to caress the base of my skull before grazing behind my ears, I nearly purr.

  She knows how much I get off on this—her touch upon my skin. She hears the helpless sounds I make, and notices my stuttered breathing. To her, this is foreplay—a quirk of mine that she indulges—a sexy, teasing gift, like the lingerie. She still doesn’t understand how much I need to be touched for reasons that have nothing to do with sex. She has no idea that no woman’s hands on my body have ever bound me in rapture like this. I’m on the brink of whimpering in ecstasy and I’m barely even hard.


  That changes the second her hands slide down my shoulders and she leans in to bite my ear. Her teeth on any part of my body always goes straight to my dick. By the time I feel her erect nipples graze my chest through her sheer dress, my hands are already sliding around her middle. With one hand cupping her waist and the other palming her perfect ass, I roll her sex against mine. I could lie and say I do it because I want her to feel how hard she makes me, but she needs no reminder of that. I do this once, twice, three times because the friction on my cock feels so, so good.

  She still has me in the in-between place—my skin tingles from the soft touches she is delivering to my shoulders, my neck, my back. But my kitten is getting frisky and I know she wants to play. Now her every calming stroke is punctuated with a hint of sex—her nails on my back as she traces my tattoo, a rough grab to the back of my neck as the pad of her bare foot snakes beneath my jeans and sneaks up my calf. These hybrid sensations are the ones I love most of all.

  But it doesn’t last. The sex is taking over. She’s awakened my baser instincts—and my primal being wants to use every part of me to claim every part of her. My balls are getting heavy and my pants are getting tight and it’s all I can do not to rip off that hot little dress she’s wearing, but I finally get both of our clothes off. The second we’re naked, she jumps up to wrap her legs around me, and I know what she wants.

  With my hands holding her up by her ass, I walk her to the wall. Her wet heat makes me throb and I can’t wait to be inside. We both moan as I enter her in one long stroke. She craves me fucking her like this. It’s been more than two weeks since we’ve seen one another and our reunions always carry fierce urgency. We have a rhythm—slow and constant and oh, so deep. It’s as natural as breathing to us. Coming together like this is so perfect. So desperate. So right.

  But her tightness around my cock isn’t even the best part—the best part is the magic that passes between us. Our eyes say everything we won’t. Truths that we know better than our own names are easily exposed in this sacred space. The agreement has never existed here. That some of these truths have been whispered aloud a time or two may not be my imagination.

  And, God, her kisses. When her lips find mine for the first time, I whimper at the contact, the softness of her mouth mixing deliciously with the hard intensity of our fucking. When I feel her coiling tighter around me, it spurs me to bite her lip. She moans helplessly and digs her nails into my bicep. I dip down to bite her neck and she curses. We love to one-up each other like this.

  Somewhere inside me, my heart is broken. But I’m miles away from that place. Nothing exists right now, but us. Not the snapdragons in the other room. Not the red-eye I’m out on tomorrow. Not the clean break we said we’d give to each other if one of us walked away. Right now, there’s only togetherness—a divine intertwining of our souls. In this moment, we are what we were always meant to be. We are one.

  “Can I bring you something to drink, sir?”

  I recognize the flight attendant. I know them all by now. She’s never offered her name, but I’ve heard the other one—Carrie—call her Kim. Everything about this flight is a facsimile of the same leg I’ve taken a dozen times before. Flight 187 from ORD to YVR. I’m seated in 3A. Left side window. The last row in first class. I usually decline Kim’s offer, content to wait until dinner is served before I order a beer, but this flight is different. This time, I do want a drink before takeoff. This time, my ticket is one-way.

  “Just water, please.”

  I see her face fall a little when I barely make eye contact. I’ve always gone out of my way to be warm with people who others treat as nameless, faceless help. But I’ve been dismissive, and I decide I will compensate for that when she returns. In the meantime, I fish the pill bottle out of the pocket of my jeans. If I don’t take a valium soon, I might get off this plane. And what would that achieve beyond doing more to fuck up this already-fucked situation?

  Talk is cheap.

  My mother’s mantra repeats itself in my overcrowded mind. This time I believe it. What good would it do for me to tell Darby what I really want for us if sacrifices are out of the question? She’d never stand for me giving up my promotion in Sydney. She’s just been through hell to earn Chief of Psych. So I’d traded a pointless confession for an open-ended goodbye.

  “Thank you,” I say to Kim, and this time, I make eye contact, but I waste no time after she sets down the glass to pick it up and swallow my pill. This may be unwise. The flight to Vancouver is only four hours and I need to be coherent if I want to make my connection. I hate medication. But I need something to quiet the cacophony of noise inside my mind, something to stop the voices screaming that I’m making the biggest mistake of my life.

  It’s too early for me to recline my seat, so I slip my large padded headphones over my ears. I start to queue up the Iron and Wine album I usually like to listen to—Sam Beam’s songs play like whispered lullabies that soothe me to sleep—but Darby loves this album and it’s more than I can handle. Unable to think clearly enough to choose an alternative, I flip the headphones on and pull a black sleep mask over my eyes. I’ll settle for noise-cancelled silence instead.

  Sleep comes quickly, and is mercifully deep, and I might have slept for hours had Carrie not coaxed me awake with instructions to have me place my seat upright for descent. I am dazed as I walk through the Vancouver airport, absently content that the valium is keeping me numb.

  I take another half a pill after boarding my flight to Sydney, even though you’re only supposed to take one at a time. I’m still out of it when I meet my driver at the airport, but the winter air outside baggage claim sobers me. By the time I let myself into my apartment, it’s midnight, I’m lethargic but not tired and I feel the dreaded stretch of a sleepless night.

  What I should do is work. I’ve been ignoring my job for days. As shitty as the past forty-eight hours have been, I worked hard to make them perfect. It may not have been the right time to tell Darby the truth, but that didn’t mean I couldn’t leave her clues. I gave her as much as I could handle of the ending we agreed to—but made absolutely fucking sure she knew this isn’t over.

  We both know what this is, even if we’ve never said it. But what kind of dick would I be to say it a second before I walk out the door? It needs to happen in its own time. Not because of some job transfer. Not like this.

  And when it comes, it won’t come easily. We each kept secrets. We both told lies. And each of us knew the other one was doing it. Fixing things between us now is about more than overcoming the distance—it’s about saying what’s never been said. There are things she wants to know. She was right about me all along.

  It’s beautiful, are the only words written in the text I awake to on Wednesday morning. The vibration of my phone on the marble countertop my cheek lays upon rouses me. Her text is accompanied by a photo of her wearing the necklace I had made for her, an exotic mixture of rubies and yellow diamonds that make up the leaves of the pendant. Set in platinum on a delicate white gold chain is the bloom of a multi-colored snapdragon.

  The photo doesn’t show her full face. Somehow she’s framed herself from her nose to her décolleté with the butterfly painting I gave her in the background. I drink in her slender neck, her elegant jaw, her kissable lips, her soft hair falling in waves over her shoulder, and the necklace, quite beautiful, as it sits just below her clavicle.

  Girls love shiny things, too. They’re called diamonds.

  I text back the words she’d once said to me offhandedly when we’d been talking about men and their cars. Even then, I’d thought about a ring.

  You’re never getting the painting back.

  She thinks I gave it to her because I know she loves it. Darby can’t yet comprehend what the gesture of giving it away means to me.

  It’s been yours since the moment you laid eyes on it.

  Do you work today?

  I have to be there in an hour. I stayed in Chicago for as long as I could.

 
I’ll let you go, then. Have a good day, she returns simply, with an emoticon of the sun.

  Have a good night, baby.

  I want to say something more, but “I love you” is out of the question and everything else I think of sounds lame. So I drag myself off of the bar stool in my lonely kitchen, knowing I have to hustle if I want to make my first meeting.

  I catch a glimpse of myself in the mirrored back wall of the elevator as I step inside. The worn boots, distressed jeans and fitted jackets that Michael likes to wear have been traded for the custom-tailored suits of Mr. Blaine. Beneath today’s navy jacket is a slim-cut herringbone shirt in ivory, and cufflinks that match the fastening on my Italian leather shoes. The suits have always felt like a costume, but I know I wear them well. I’ve learned to excel at looking the part.

  Everything skips a few beats when I stride into the office. Five years ago, so much attention would have made me uncomfortable, but Dale’s mentorship has been key. He taught me how to master the art of charming intimidation—of doling out rations of the sex and charisma that draw people in, but sheathing it in a layer of gravitas thick enough to warn them not to get too close.

  My training has served me well. I’ve metamorphosed from an introverted collaborator to a quietly effective leader. I love the complexity of managing so many things at once. I spent most of my life catering to the shy comic book geek, but I think this has been inside me all along.

  Not that leadership hasn’t come at a price. The higher I climb, the less time I get to spend on meaty problems. Apart from an astonishing number of HR issues, there’s ass-kissing and political posturing now that I’m the boss. I remember what Darby said to me when I told her about the strange new feeling of everybody looking to me.

  “You know what they say,” she’d said. “Climbing the corporate ladder is like monkeys climbing a tree. When you’re on the top looking down, all you see is a bunch of smiling faces. When you’re on the bottom looking up, all you see are a bunch of assholes.”