Beautiful Illusions Read online

  Beautiful Illusions

  (Beautiful Oblivion 2)

  Addison Moore

  Edited by: Sarah Freese

  Cover Design and Photograph by: Regina Wamba of www.MaeIDesign.com

  Interior design and formatting by: Amy Eye of www.theeyesforediting.com

  Copyright © 2014 by Addison Moore

  http://addisonmoorewrites.blogspot.com/

  This novel is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to peoples either living or deceased is purely coincidental. Names, places, and characters are figments of the author’s imagination. The author holds all rights to this work. It is illegal to reproduce this novel without written expressed consent from the author herself.

  All Rights Reserved.

  Books by Addison Moore

  New Adult Romance

  Burning Through Gravity (Burning Through Gravity 1)

  A Thousand Starry Nights (Burning Through Gravity 2) 2014

  Fire in an Amber Sky (Burning Through Gravity 3) 2015

  Beautiful Oblivion (Beautiful Oblivion 1)

  Beautiful Illusions (Beautiful Oblivion 2)

  Beautiful Elixir (Beautiful Oblivion 3) 2015

  The Solitude of Passion

  Someone to Love (Someone to Love 1)

  Someone Like You (Someone to Love 2)

  Someone For Me (Someone to Love 3)

  3:AM Kisses (3:AM Kisses 1)

  Winter Kisses (3:AM Kisses 2)

  Sugar Kisses (3:AM Kisses 3)

  Whiskey Kisses (3:AM Kisses 4)

  Rock Candy Kisses (3:AM Kisses 5) 2015

  Celestra Forever After

  The Dragon and the Rose (Celestra Forever After 2) 2014

  Perfect Love (A Celestra Novella)

  Young Adult Romance

  Ethereal (Celestra Series Book 1)

  Tremble (Celestra Series Book 2)

  Burn (Celestra Series Book 3)

  Wicked (Celestra Series Book 4)

  Vex (Celestra Series Book 5)

  Expel (Celestra Series Book 6)

  Toxic Part One (Celestra Series Book 7)

  Toxic Part Two (Celestra Series Book 7.5)

  Elysian (Celestra Series Book 8)

  Ephemeral (The Countenance Trilogy 1)

  Evanescent (The Countenance Trilogy 2)

  Entropy (The Countenance Trilogy 3)

  Ethereal Knights (Celestra Knights)

  Prologue

  Demi

  The Past

  Death is a peculiar kind of tragedy. After its wake you’re either robed in immortality or plunged into eternal darkness. The living never quite know how deeply to mourn. The speculation is ours but the judgment is not. By the tender age of fifteen, I had mastered death’s destruction and racked up a body count. I had killed the only two people who ever truly loved me—my mother and my father.

  Years ago, when my parents married, they built their home from the ground up. They unleashed their wildest imaginations and created a legacy for our family so magnificent in girth and stature it dwarfed the other embarrassingly large homes that surrounded us. They had grand plans of filling it with children, four girls, four boys. My parents dreamed big and lived bigger. They christened our home Winter Haven because in the hard Connecticut winters it was just that. The icicles bled off the eaves like a fairytale, and the woodland creatures flocked to the many feeders my mother laid out. But any ideas of mass procreation that my parents harbored were cut short once I was born—their only child, a girl. I slashed my way into this world, barreling in with a curse on my back that left my mother clinging to life less than five minutes after I arrived. She didn’t make it.

  Growing up it was just my father and me. He focused his white-hot attention over my every move, and it was nirvana. I knew no other existence. The sun rarely shined over Winter Haven. The sky held a perennial cloud cover, thick as grief. It pressed over our home like a bruise. Later, my stepmother, Nora, and her son, Josh, slid into our lives swift as demons, after all, that’s what they proved to be.

  We lived in a world of shadows. My father said my mother took the sun with her and that I was his little bit of sunshine. That was his pet name for me right up until the day I killed him.

  Then came a season of darkness, of haunted echoes, wild cries, of howls and aches—the knife of my parents’ deaths plunging into my broken heart night after night. Nora and Josh had taken the throne at Winter Haven. I was nothing more than her battering post, his shiny new plaything.

  Josh has a few years on me. He’s gorgeous and buff, every cheerleader’s dream. He has flocks of wealthy friends and no shortage of beautiful girls that linger at the house well into the night. But when all is said and done, the party is over, and all of his drunk cohorts speed off in their expensive Italian sports cars, it’s my bed he crawls into. I didn’t ask for it. I didn’t stop it either.

  “I just want to talk.” His voice is raspy, unrecognizable. He’s panting. His eyes are glossed over in an animalistic manner. “I get it. I get how much you hurt, Demi. My own father abandoned me.”

  The knife twists just enough with his words. My father did abandon me. I was so eager to buy the lie.

  Josh slips into the bed beside me until his body is pressed close to mine. My heart thumps into my throat, steady as a jackhammer. I’m quivering, scared, excited. I can’t remember the last time I was this close to another person. A part of me craves to touch him, to have him touch me. And he does. Josh slithers his viper-like arms around me, and soon I’m enveloped in the cloud of vodka spewing from his lungs. I memorize the way it feels to have someone hold me again as I take in a deep lungful of his toxic breath. The truth is I had died right alongside my father, and now I’m finally breathing again. Maybe Josh is the one who would resuscitate my corpse.

  Holding me led to his lips finding mine. Before I knew it, his fingers were between my legs. Eventually, Josh pried me open and thrust his way into my life. Night after night, I was his dirty little secret. He wouldn’t say two words to me at school, after all, he was a senior and I was a lowly freshman. But late at night, while the world slept, he became a regular visitor to my bedroom. At fifteen I didn’t know what to think, or how to react. All I knew was this gorgeous boy, who the entire school worshiped, who the girls stabbed each other in the back for, was interested in me. He wanted me. Once again I was the object of someone’s white-hot attention. No, there wasn’t any love. I was simply trying to fill the gaping hole in my heart my father left. But none of those nightly visits were ever enough to fill it.

  I missed my father, and strangely enough, my mother, too. All I had left of them was Winter Haven, an empty shell of who we once were—who we could have been. They made it powerful and beautiful, but they died, took their beauty and power with them and left me alone with a woman who openly wished I were buried too. Nora played on my grief. She assigned me a psychiatrist. I had more labels thrown at me than the canned food aisle at the supermarket, more pills to swallow than sand on the shore.

  As I grew older, I joined the august body of Mitchell University, but things had already hit a boiling point at home. Nora wasn’t about to let me too far off the leash. The idea of living on campus set her greedy teeth on edge. The more I pushed, the more she smothered me with narcotics. Nora’s nickname for me was garbage. She threw a Bible at my head, and I read that sacred tome from cover to cover. Then I prayed. I prayed God would strike dead both Nora and Josh and free me from this insolent hell. I prayed He’d change them—do the unthinkable and change me to accept them—send outside help to free me from the prison that my home had become. Her increasing cruelty grew like a weed and choked out of me any glimmer of hope that she would ever change, that I would ever survive her tyranny. An open grave waited for me if I stayed
at Winter Haven. And with each passing day, Nora became more eager to push me in it.

  God wasn’t answering my prayers.

  I was down to one alternative, answering them myself.

  So I did the only thing I could.

  Run.

  1

  Lost in Loveless

  Demi

  Three and a half years later…

  “Can I help you?” He’s dripping wet, straight from the shower with a towel draped low on his waist, and I gasp because he has the face of a god, the body of a demon, and the eyes of the bluest sky. He’s built like a linebacker, and he’s way too young to ever fit into the stereotypical johns I’m forever hearing Eva complain about.

  His lips twitch. His eyes give an amused smile as if confirming the fact he knows exactly how wickedly gorgeous he is. My body ignites like a flare. My neck heats, brightening with color the way it does when I’m having a visceral response.

  “The door was unlocked, so I let myself in.” My voice wobbles, and I cringe. My fingers shake as I clutch at the oversized feather duster in my hand. I’m not used to feeling out of control. I’m usually abhorrent to anything that makes me feel that way, but something in me refuses to hate him over something so petty.

  I snatch the edge of my skirt and give a little curtsey in the ridiculous French maid costume I’ve donned. It isn’t the cheap kind that reeks of polyester and Halloween. It’s the real deal with a corset that shows off my assets, a thick, layered tulle skirt that stands erect like cardboard just past my hips. If anything, this getup makes its naughty intentions crystal clear. Reeva, my so-called boss, provides nothing but the best—her clients expect nothing less.

  My legs shake so hard I lean against the bedframe in an effort to anchor myself from jittering across the room. It’s not every day my nerves are shot to hell. Then again it’s not every day I’m turning tricks for a dollar.

  He gives a wry smile. My insides pinch at how alarmingly attractive he is. I’m not one to chase after gorgeous men. I’m more the get drunk, fuck ‘em, and leave ‘em type before I ever really get a good idea of what they look like. How they look is never all that important. It’s the end game that counts—the part where they make me feel alive if just for a second. But that was before, when I was still giving it away for free. This is different. Tonight I cross a line that I can never recover from.

  “It’s pretty bad out there. I’m glad you’re inside.” His cut features make it hard to look away. Something about those hypnotic, glowing eyes magnetize me, and I’m sure every other woman, to him. “But you don’t look too prepared for what’s being billed as the snowstorm of the century.” He leans in, inspecting me from head to toe and his sizzling gaze feels as if it’s tearing a fire line up my body. He’s not the type of man I’m usually paired with, but then, this is the first time I’m advancing to a bodily exchange for cash. Up until today, Reeva kept me as a “casual” which entailed little more than putting on a nice dress and showing up for charity functions with wealthy perverts. It wasn’t big bucks, but it was enough to keep a roof over my head at Reeva’s house of depravity, at least it was up until now. She made it clear there was no more room at the inn for casual girls. If I wanted to maintain a toasty home for the winter, I needed to pull my weight, and somewhere between my desperation and her smooth talk, I agreed to sell my body and soul to the devil herself.

  “Look”—he nods past me, and his jaw tightens making him that much more alarmingly attractive—“I’ve got a pair of jeans and a T-shirt lying on the bed. If you want to toss them over, I’d more than appreciate it.”

  I eye them as if they were snakes. What the hell does he want his clothes for?

  I spot my bag lying right over them, wrinkling them into oblivion. They’re probably expensive couture jeans that, if sold on eBay, could feed an entire starving village in some third world country. If that’s the case I’ve just demoted Hot Towel Guy to douchebag. Personally, I’m allergic to wealthy assholes even though my own father had enough billions to stack to the moon. My father was a saint—too bad he didn’t raise one.

  My fingers shake as I get straight to the task of folding them but note they’re just Levis, dirty at that. His T-shirt reads, Jackson Lumber, We hack it and stack it.

  “You don’t need to do that.” He steps forward, and, instinctually, I pull my shoulders back. My stomach quivers until it feels as if I’m going to be sick. Truthfully, if he weren’t half as handsome, if he didn’t have that gentle look in his eyes, if this were some fifty-year-old sleazebag waiting to ravage me with his greasy intent, I would have vomited minutes ago. The worse thing I ever did was agree to advance my standing in Reeva’s twisted harem. I should have said no. I should have happily frozen to death in my Honda rather than die of some self-imposed STD. Although Reeva swears up and down her clients are clean, yet somehow I’m still disbelieving. God knows anything that comes from Reeva’s mouth is far from gospel. Not that this one looks disease-riddled. In fact, he looks anything but.

  “Did Ace put you up to this?” He picks up his shirt and slips it on. The fabric catches on his serrated muscles, and he kneads it down with his hands. His voice is smooth and mellow as a butter cream sky. I could fall asleep just from the sound. It reminds me of my father’s, and my heart warms at the idea. My dad didn’t have a care in the world. But that was back when we had each other, and now, all he has is a casket, and I have a hole in my heart the size of my daddy.

  “Is Ace coming, too?” It wouldn’t surprise me too much if this turns into some frat house spectacle. God, I’m going to kill Eva for saying hello to me in that greasy diner all those years ago—but something about her charmed me, and she’s been my best friend ever since.

  “Somehow I doubt that.” He shakes his head with a laugh buried in his chest. “Ace likes to pull one over on me every now and again. And I’m long overdue, so I’m not too surprised. I’m just sorry you got dragged into this.”

  Perfect. This is nothing more than a prank, and I’m the butt of the joke. Figures. A guy like this probably has them lined up around the block. The only thing he ever has to pay for is dinner.

  “I don’t know anything about Ace. All I know is Reeva said this was the place to be.”

  He arches his brow while taking back his jeans, and my insides tighten because he’s so gorgeous that I’m about to beg him to have me regardless. Those abs, those pecs, those full lips—my mouth is already demanding a taste. I don’t see why not. Reeva always takes payment from the clients upfront, so someone out there might as well get their money’s worth.

  What am I saying? I should grab my things and run like hell. I’m about to demote myself from part time slut to fulltime prostitute. I bet my father is looking down and thanking God he’s cold in a grave so he doesn’t have to hear of this. But, then again, his death is the reason I’m here to begin with.

  I glance out the window as the snow continues to pile up on the road like bolts of cotton batting. Chains or no chains, there’s no way my twenty-three-year-old Honda Civic will ever make it down that hill. I’ll probably have to sleep in the car tonight. Looks like the universe hasn’t taken freezing to death off the table just yet.

  “I don’t know what the hell Ace is thinking.” He makes his way into the bathroom and leaves the door open. I try not to look, but as soon as I hear the soft thud of his towel hit the floor, I peer over and catch him jumping into his jeans, pulling them up over his perfect bare ass, and my adrenaline skyrockets because I’m fairly certain I’ve just seen far more than he was willing to show.

  I glance around at the tiny cabin. It’s smaller than a thumbtack. Reeva said it was a boathouse, so I fully expected a stack of canoes or at least a rusted out aluminum vessel. For the entire drive up the mountain, I envisioned myself being paddled with the fat end of an oar. I’m not jaded. I don’t expect any one of Reeva’s triple X clients to make love to me, which would be a joke to begin with because true love is for fairytales, and, for damn sure, I do
n’t live in one of those. Hooker, prostitute, call it what you want—at the end of the day I’m shaping up to be quite the whore. My stepbrother, Josh, was right, he nailed it just like he nailed me for the hell of it. Our parents married when we were teenagers, and as much as I protested the idea of him sneaking into my bed, in a sick way, I wanted it. Josh had every girl in a fifty-mile radius panting. I thought it was a dream, the quarterback from school, with his dark hair and deep dimples—interested in me, of all people. He quickly made it a habit to slip into my room at night, and one disaster led to designer boots—to purses that cost more than my entire wardrobe, to scarves imported from Paris, and I thought that’s what love was. That it could be bought and sold as a commodity. I took his gifts because I thought I was his girlfriend, but he set me straight pretty quick. I was stupid then, just like I’m being now.

  The Towel God emerges with his caramel hair combed neatly back, his skin still ruddy from the shower and motions for me to have a seat on the bed while he pulls out a chair for himself at the tiny table, hardly big enough for two.

  I’m his for the night if he wants me, but something tells me he won’t. This is just one of those cruel tricks life plays. I can practically hear Josh laughing. See what you can’t have, Demi? You can never have a man like this. It’s nothing but a joke to think he’d ever want you in his bed.

  I take a seat on the edge of the mattress, slightly pissed because now all I want to do is run into the blizzard that’s reeking havoc outside the door.

  “What’s your name?” His voice is tender. His features soften as if he’s sorry for me, and it only seems to enrage me. I like the rage, the way it warms me from the inside. Oddly, it’s been the rage in my life that feels most stable since I lost my father.