Unravel (Unbound Trilogy Book 1)
Unravel
Kathy Coopmans
Contents
Prologue
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
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
About the Author
Unravel
© 2019 Kathy Coopmans
Cover Design- Ellie McLove
Editing done by My Brother’s Editor
Proofreader- Cat Parisi.
Formatting- HJ Bellus/Small Town Girl Formatting
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real.
Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental. All rights reserved.
The unauthorized reproduction or distribution of this copyrighted work is illegal. No part of this book may be used or reproduced electronically or in print without written permission by the author. All rights are reserved.
Prologue
Ellie
Locking the door to my apartment, I slip off the sky-high heels before making my way down the short hallway and enter the bathroom where I turn on the shower and strip myself of the light blue slip dress I’d decided to splurge on. For once when I went out, I wanted to wear something besides jeans to the dance club, to tame my wild hair, to feel beautiful and let go.
And I did.
I felt gorgeous. Like Cinderella the night the Prince finds out who she was.
But, the man who swept me off my feet, he wasn’t a prince, he’s more like a knight in shiny black armor. Deep and mysterious and intriguing. A man who captures everyone’s attention with a single glance.
I knew right from the get-go he’d possess and control me.
And, I let him, despite that gnawing sense of danger in my stomach.
He looked vaguely familiar, but I was too wrapped up by the uncontrollable emotion that spun between us to place him, too off course from the usual way I lived that I became vulnerable and for once in my life, I gave in to the stirring depths of need.
“People say it's hard to find a beautiful woman, but easier to find a pretty one. I wonder what they’d say if I told them I found both in you.”
I wanted to tell him he was lying.
I didn’t.
Twisting the satiny material in my hands, I bring it to my nose and let out a whimper.
“It smells like him, and much like the sins we committed.”
Folding it neatly, I place it on the vanity and step into the shower, the scalding water stinging the marks he left on my skin only hours before as I tilt my head back and reminisce. Then I’m going to secure them in the drawers of my mind, bring them out and dust them off when I’m lonely.
I can’t help recalling first how the man ate me up all night with a lusty gleam in his eyes, how my stomach dipped after we danced, and he ran his nose along the side of my neck. How, for the first time in my life, I let myself get lost in the arms of a man.
I should have known better.
“Come home with me,” he said.
Those tempting words were all it took for me to say yes.
I shudder from the memory of his mouth as he kissed me dominantly, backing me across a darkened room until my back hit a window. The coolness of it doing nothing to calm the flame of my heated flesh.
I gasped, heart pounding when he slid his hands up my bare legs while his tongue explored my mouth with sensual glides of his velvet tongue.
“Softest skin I’ve ever felt.”
My breath caught, pants escaped the higher his hands went, and the urge to tell him to stop, the part of me that knew what I was doing was reckless and wrong rose from my lungs, but it never escaped my lips. His warm tongue left my mouth and went to my neck, his strong hands grabbed hold of my ass, and lifted, growling when he realized I wasn’t wearing any panties. My legs wrapped around his back and my arms around his neck. I wanted him, even if I’d regret it.
He pushed against me, his hard cock long and thick underneath his jeans, and God I wanted to come right there when he eased a hand down the crack of my ass, his fingertips grazing my wet folds.
“Fuck.” He growled, stroking me once, twice before plunging a finger inside me.
He used his teeth to pull both straps of my dress down my shoulders, then drew a nipple into his mouth.
I moaned, banging my head against the window as he drew, bit, licked, and fingered me into a frenzy. I ran my hands through his black hair as he scraped his teeth from one breast to the other, his stubble scratching along my flesh, his mouth showing no mercy toward my stiff peaks.
“You are so fucking tight, so fucking wet; I want to devour you.”
I couldn’t speak.
I just tugged onto his hair a little tighter.
He kissed my neck, and I shivered, everything in my body was lighting on fire.
“I want you; are you sure about this?” I still couldn’t speak, so I grabbed his face and answered by sealing my mouth to his.
Removing his finger, he circled slowly around my clit. It was delicious, wicked torture and all I could do was scream and moan from the sensation of his touch, the way he worked my body was so intense that when he placed me back on the floor, stripped me of my dress and himself of his clothes and rolled on a condom, my legs were violently shaking.
“I don’t think I can go slow, if I hurt you, please tell me.”
I nodded.
He lifted me back up as if I weighed nothing; I wrapped my legs around him once again. He palmed my ass with one hand, slid his cock between my sex with the other and thrust forward, impaling himself fully inside me.
“Oh, holy hell,” I uttered, squeezing my eyes closed. The man is just as big down there as he is tall and wide.
“Jesus, are you alright?”
I was, and I wasn’t.
I was burning up, my fever rising for him to move, this man was filling and stretching me with deep-seated pain and inexperienced pleasure.
“Yes.” I urged him on by arching my back and squeezing his thick pulsating cock.
His lips met my throat as he pulled back and plunged again.
Each push and pull sent me higher, and the stranger, the man whose face I recalled, but his name sat at the tip of my tongue fucked me into oblivion against the window, our heated skin slapping against one another’s with every wicked stroke.
My arousal climbed and climbed as he kept hitting the one spot I needed most.
Never in a million years, a thousand romance books, a hundred romantic films, did I think it would feel like this.
Right. It simply felt right.
“Fucking beautiful, you are goddamn perfect — everything a man like me wants and more. If only you could see the way you look, the way you're taking my cock up against this window, the lights behind you. Christ woman, you’re an angel that’s entered my darkness. Your cunt is so tight and warm.” His husky tone, even darker words against my sweaty skin soared me higher.
A quiver ventured through my center, this man intrigued me, held me prisoner by his shade of black.
He bit my collarbone, and I cried out as the pain itself clenched my walls around him, and I came on a ragged and heaving moan.
I cried out when he pulled out of me, grabbed my hips and pressed my front to the window, bending me at the waist enough for him to thrust back in.
My hands had nothing to hold onto but the fogged up glass they slid down.
I panted and bucked as he skidded his fingers down my stomach and began circling my clit.
“Please, I need more,” I whined, my voice sounding like a child. I didn’t care, because whoever this man was, I knew I would never see him again.
I caught his reflection in the glass, his inky black eyes that drew me in earlier like gravity were a little distorted through the fog, but I knew he was a dark fantasy, a dark knight that could never be mine.
His powerful aroma came off of him in waves.
Dangerous and intoxicating.
God, I’d give about anything to remember his name, to let him seep into my veins and take away my pain. To be his dark angel and for him to be the knight to save me.
He brought my mind back when he nipped the lobe of my ear, and I moaned just as he scraped his teeth across the back of my neck.
“I’m close; I need you to come one more time before I carry you to my bed and fuck you again.”
He pistoned into me then, his manly grunts giving me what I needed to come, and when he stilled, I could feel his hot spurts filling the condom, his cock pulsing and throbbing.
When he was done, he pulled out of me, wrapped his arms around me and carried my relaxed body to his bedroom where he fucked me again before tugging me to him and ordering me to sleep.
I didn’t, because for some strange reason, my mind cleared and I remembered who he was.
Panic. It struck through my veins.
Loss and grief. My mind screamed it while my heart fought that this man didn’t pick me up to toss me back into living in my past.
Nightmares and heartache and emotions I battled hard to make disappear.
I waited until he was sound asleep, slipped on my dress, and stumbled down the long hallway to where I grabbed my heels and clutch where they’d both laid by the front door.
And I left.
And as I rock back and forth on the shower floor, I feel it.
The danger that’s coming.
Leaving me nowhere to hide.
Chapter 1
Two weeks later
Ellie
“This home is gorgeous. Is Eric’s boss moving in or out? I mean, the man who greeted us at the door just flung it open and walked away. We could rob this place blind. Not that we’d have anything to steal,” I prod jokingly at my best friend Norah; it’s with much less humor than when we walked in a bit ago and my jaw dropped when I noticed how barren of life it is.
No furniture, no paintings on the wall, no television. It’s completely empty.
There was one room with a locked wooden door at the far end of the hall upstairs. I’m assuming it’s the master bedroom since none of the others appeared to be.
The style is unusual for the Westbank of New Orleans too. It’s a remarkable log cabin home you’d generally see settled at the foot of the mountains in Colorado. High vaulted ceilings. Wood beams throughout the entire place. It’s rustic and to be able to decorate it would be beyond my wildest dreams.
I let out a trembling sigh, place my hand on the smooth wooden staircase railing and descend the stairs.
“I’m not sure; he owns Behind Closed Doors. I already told you this. Maybe the guy is redecorating. I don’t know, ask Eric.” There is something in how Norah is quick and to the point, something that sets me off balance in her attitude and it doesn’t have to do with the club the man owns. She’s lying about something; I can sense it in the air, smell it all over her. The scent is so strong it practically fills my nose.
“Forget it, it’s not my business.” I wave it off; it’s not like I’ll be coming back anytime soon anyway.
Eric is a friend of ours we met a few years ago after he moved into the apartment above the coffee shop in our neighborhood. He’s a bartender at Behind Closed Doors and working at this party. He said his boss told all his employees they could invite whoever they wanted, which now, after Norah’s weird behavior, I’m beginning to wonder if she didn’t drag me here to meet a guy.
A guy for her, not me.
Behind Closed Doors isn’t just a normal club either; it’s a sex club for swingers. It’s what Eric calls the whole sexual experience, and here I am standing in the middle of one of the Kingpin’s home. A worshipped pimp from my understanding.
I might have recently had a one-night stand with a man I don’t know, a man that drudged up the worst memory, but that type of lifestyle scares the ever-loving shit out of me. I would never have sex in front of someone else, let alone multiple partners.
But that’s me.
I wave off the weird vibes floating off my best friend, my thoughts drifting to this stunning house.
This home is meant to impress, all open and airy, it’s ravishing. There’s something about the intricately designed place with high ceilings and impeccable detail that screams dangerous and lonely. Like if you made a tiny gap in the shiny hardwood floor, it would leak story after story that would tinge a beautiful soul with sadness before turning it the blackest of black.
This place reminds me of the happiest and worst days of my life.
Unlike this home that could use some tender loving care, I used to live in a gorgeous decorated house that was bright and lively. It screamed life despite being too big for a family of three.
Until one day it was nothing but cold, damp and empty.
It started the day my mother died at the age of forty-two from early onset Alzheimer’s. I was seven. It was less than two years after the diagnosis when her mind surrendered to the disease, and from there on, she declined rapidly. She lost her memory of who I was; it was even harder a year later because when she died, a part of my father died too, the part that made the man care he had a daughter to look after.
It wasn’t until I turned twelve when he introduced me to a woman named Elizabeth that I got my tentative father back. Elizabeth and her two children, Whitney, who was the same age as me and her son Shadow, who was two years older, brought life into our house.
After the two of them married, Whitney and I did everything together; she was the sister I never had. And Shadow, after a while, his true colors came out. He was the perfect definition of what his name meant. A dark shape that follows everywhere you go.
I was polite and friendly to him when we were around our parents. The minute we stepped out of their sight, I avoided him at all costs.
He was a constant unwanted observer. A psycho who I knew was trouble. For the sake of my father’s happiness, I kept the way he acted at school and the rumors that followed him like the disease he was to myself.
Doing so was the worst mistake I ever made.
Then one day, my life crumbled. Whitney and I came home from school to find reporters surrounding the gates leading to the house, police officers inside, my stepmother sitting stoically and without tears in my father’s favorite chair and Shadow sitting smugly by her side.
Grief and sorrow.
They seeped into my veins and clung all over the faces of my family’s employees.
And there was absolutely nothing that could have prepared me for the shattering news that came out of the detective’s mouth. My father was dead.
He and several business associates died in an explosion on one of his oil rigs. A freak accident that left me an orphan at an early age.
The investigators ruled it accidental. If it wouldn’t have been for some of the other men who died, families being satisfied with the ruling, I’d have thought they were murdered, especially after the things that went on the minute the case closed.
It wasn’t a few short days later; I overheard Elizabeth talking with Shadow. She went on and on about how in a few short years, Shadow was to leave for trainin
g for his birthright next to her brother, and he needed to behave himself until the time came. Elizabeth was the sister of an Irish mobster, and after I heard her, it didn’t take long to put two and two together.
I ran to my room and recalled the happenings around our home before my father died. Elizabeth must have persuaded and turned him into a dishonest man; he became involved in some shady business deals with some even shadier people. At the time of the investigation, I didn’t quite understand what the detective meant when he’d ask me questions about my father’s business.
Elizabeth is nothing but a poisonous black widow who played on my father’s grief of never getting over losing my mother.
Things declined from that day forward. I could hear them whispering behind my back. My mother’s jewelry disappeared from the safe in my father’s office. Shadow became more of a stalker, and the three of them spent money on unnecessary things. Before I knew it, I became an unwanted girl in my own house.
She got rid of everyone and everything that meant anything to me. No more household staff who were like family, because they were all fired. Every single one in a blink of my young girl eye.
My entire life as I knew it stripped away. Elizabeth and her devil children sold everything in an estate sale to the highest bidder and when I screamed and fought and attacked, letting them know how cruel they were. They laughed in my face and let me know my father’s oil business was handed over to her family. From there it would be sold. My legacy and the hard work my father put into owning a successful business was gone.
Then Elizabeth shoved me into the system with nothing but my wealthy-known last name. I was all alone and rightfully scared.
The thought of how scared I was makes me want to weep.
Thankfully, after two months of living in foster care, I was saved by our family’s cook — the woman who taught my mother and me so much about life. Renita Williamson fumed her way into social services and demanded they place me in her care. It was a quick transfer for Renita to become my guardian due to my age and the fact I knew her.