East Rising (Naive Mistakes #2) Read online

  EAST RISING

  (NAÏVE MISTAKES - BOOK TWO)

  By Rachel Dunning

  Copyright © 2013 Rachel Dunning.

  The moral right of the author has been asserted.

  Cover Design Copyright © 2013 Rachel Dunning.

  Cover Photo Copyright © 2013 Forewer.

  Obtained from Shutterstock and used with permission.

  Smashwords Edition.

  EBook ISBN: 9781301570287

  No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission of the author, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real locales are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author's imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Discover other titles by Rachel Dunning at Smashwords.com:

  For those who took the time to share a few kind words with me about Book One — in an email, in a comment, in a tweet. Thank you.

  This one's for you.

  Table of Contents

  FOREWORD

  PROLOGUE

  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

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  EPILOGUE

  BOOK THREE, GETTING IN TOUCH, (AND A LITTLE ABOUT THE AUTHOR)

  FOREWORD

  All efforts have been made to make Book Two of the Naïve Mistakes trilogy stand on its own. You do not necessarily have to read Book One to pick up on the story where it continues. However, doing so is highly recommended for a fuller appreciation of the characters' histories, and of the story itself.

  PROLOGUE

  I screamed, muffled screams, into the leathery glove of the man I could not see but who smelled strongly of body-wash and tobacco. I screamed for the aching throb on the top of my right foot where the coffee pot had landed and for the searing pains now shooting up my shins from the scalding liquid.

  But, mostly, I screamed because of the two men who raced past me, heads wrapped in face masks and guns in hands, up the stairs and to Conall's room. I fought the man who held me. I tried to get a grip on him, but his other arm was to my neck and he squeezed, just slightly, so that I knew, if I resisted, I'd be choked to death.

  CHAPTER ONE

  -1-

  I saw him looking at me at Starbucks. At first I imagined it had been one of those mistaken glances where both pairs of eyes lock on each other, take in as much of the other as possible and then keep moving.

  But when I looked again, as my head had been turning from the supermarket cashiers (this Starbucks was in a supermarket) and to the door, his green eyes were locked on mine again.

  And he was grinning. A hardly noticeable grin, but a grin.

  Internally, I smiled, and my chest felt warm like I'd swallowed a shot of tequila followed by firewater. Outwardly, my gaze locked briefly on his. He had a short buzz cut, a sharply chiseled face, maybe twenty-two years old. And then I kept moving my head. Nothing to see here buddy! Move along now!

  In the moment straight after, I thought of Conall. And why I'd come to England to work. And the heat in my chest went cold. I bowed my head and dropped my gaze to the ground, defeated.

  -2-

  The guy was there again the next day, at the same Starbucks, same time, twelve-forty-five. My lunch break.

  As I walked in the door and took in the scene of the likely retired ninety-year-old in front of me, the off-green couches and the distinct clang of English accents, his gaze pierced into me, pausing me momentarily (In space? In time? Somewhere...)

  I felt a noticeable thump in my chest. I focused on little of this buzz-cut blonde guy in his white tee except for his lily-leaf-green eyes. I've always been a sucker for eyes. Conall's eyes are blue. A Mediterranean blue I'd swum in as he'd put his fingers inside me and brought me up from drowning water into sweet, blissful air and freshness...

  A woman bumped into me from behind. "Oh, sorry, dear," said the old lady with a cane, hair as white as her vitamin D deficient skin.

  "No, it's fine, I was..." I was thinking about Conall Williams, again, and about this guy who, yes, is still looking at me. And grinning, again?

  I felt my skin warm at my cheeks, that same firewater heat burn in my chest, and I smiled back at him this time. I flirtatiously curled a lock of my hair behind my ear. Then I squeezed my legs tight, not letting him notice, and got my coffee.

  I sat at the window. Mystery Man sat at the same settee as the day before, reading a magazine (I couldn't tell for the life of me what it was), and sipped his coffee. I tried to get through the paperback I'd bought (On Dublin Street, by Samantha Young) at one of the hospice stores in town for fifty P (which is something like eighty American cents although, after three months, I'd stopped converting) but the steamy love scene I was reading about made me sweat as I looked out into a parking lot which was being belted by sheets of icy rain.

  No, it was far from hot. Not even indoors. The sweat on my skin was from the book... Or maybe from Mr. Green Eyes...

  Like one of those beams you hear about in science fiction flicks, I felt green-eyed buzz-cut grab my head from its gaze outwards, to him, now at the door, and fucking smiling at me. Only the smile said something else now. It said, Now we're playing.

  I bit my bottom lip, did that curl-behind-the-ear thing again, but when I looked out the window to find mystery dude, he was gone. I craned my neck, stretching out to look for him, the coffee in my hand slowly burning my fingers until the coffee won and my gaze returned to it. I let it go, fingers lightly burned.

  Pain. Even that reminded me of Conall. Everything reminded me of him. It brought me back to reality.

  On the third day, buzz-cut guy didn't return. He was a man by size, but a boy by his looks. His face looked young and naughty, carefree, just as I had been not so long ago. Same on the fourth day — no Mystery Man. Friday became Saturday, Sunday. On Monday he wasn't there still. And this seemed all too familiar to me. The only difference is buzz-cut hadn't been inside me. He hadn't taken all of me with him and left me bare, with no explanation, no official closure. Just a piece of meat hanging at a butcher shop, ready to be taken and used by the next sick fuck who needed a meal.

  Urgh. Shudders.

  I texted Conall:

  Leora: I'm tired of waiting. I've been here three months. When can we meet?

  If I'd had guts, I'd have added: ...or else I'm gone for good. But I was too afraid he'd act on that. No, I wasn't desperate. No, I wasn't chasing him around the globe. I'd decided to travel Europe and that's what I was doing. Only I'd started it early. January is not a good time to go around Europe with a backpack, neither is February. It was March now. I had nothing left for me back home in the states, in my expensive condo that nearly echoed with my calls inside its emptiness (except for when Maria was there, sweet Maria who always looked out for me and cooked for me and was there for me when I needed someone — unlike my mother, who can't even cook for herself, let alone me.)

  Kayla had practically moved in with Brad. The two of them were
so much an item and "having such unbelievable sex, like, three times a day on an average day" that it wasn't helping, in the cold winter months, to be with her. It's not that Kayla dumped me. She didn't. It's that she moved on, found what she always needed, what we all need. Love. Or as close to it as can be found. Brad was — is — a good guy. Kayla deserves that.

  And me? No, I wasn't running around the world chasing the man who'd entered my soul so deeply I could think of nothing but him in the cold New York nights that had followed after he'd left me in the lurch, despite promising me he'd be back a week later. What I wanted was closure. What I wanted was for Conall Williams to be the fucking man I thought he was when I'd met him. The man who made my skin tingle with pleasure as he'd blown on it after wetting me with his tongue. If things were going to end, Conall was going to have to tell me to my frickin face.

  And that is what I was doing here, in England. Well, that, and trying to figure out what the hell I was going to do with my life, regardless of Conall. Because, after school had ended, so had the simplicity which it had brought:

  Wake up. Go to school. Bitch about Bianca Henshaw and her drug-dealing pimp of a boyfriend. Pump weights. (Although I'd stopped doing that so much here. Who'd have thought?) Party on a Friday. Do it again the following week.

  After Conall had left, and school had ended, going to college had seemed to me to be the final nail in the coffin of a life which seemed to be over before it had really begun. Because isn't that how we all die? Little by little, day by day, as our dreams get stomped on by fate?

  I couldn't do it. And so I faced up to my mom, told her I didn't "give a fuck how much money you keep from me, I'm going to Europe for a year!"

  And I did, and here I was, three months in.

  -3-

  "Hey love!" cried Dani as she walked into the Starbucks. Only, with her accent, it came out as 'ey luff! I'd noticed that: many of the English didn't pronounce their H's or their T's (although when they actually say the letter H as itself they say haytch.)

  The Other Guy Who I Really Missed never spoke like that. He spoke like someone straight out of Cambridge, or Oxford (which he was from.) And there I was again, still thinking of Conall...

  "Hey, honey," I said, putting my paperback face down, open, on the table. Dani grabbed it with her small, pudgy fingers. She picked it up, glanced at it cursorily, then put it back down. Dani wasn't fat as such. She was, well, "rounded." She'd said once about her weight: It's the curse of a typical English diet. Big-arse English breakfast and lots of beer on the weekends. Doesn't stop me from getting shagged, so why bother worrying about it?

  Only, when she'd said it, she, of course, had said: ge'ing shagged. No T's.

  I didn't doubt her. With her crystal blue eyes and bottle-blonde hair, small rounded lips and lightly rouged cheeks, she was the kind of girl who probably got a guy's testosterone pumping very quickly. And then there was also that other benefit of being "rounded" — her cup size. And she didn't play it down, not at all, pushing her chest out whenever the boys ordered pints of Guinness and Heinekens at Jolly Roger (where we both worked), batting her eyes, lightly caressing guys' hands as she passed them their drinks. Dani didn't only take home the better tips, she took home the better guys.

  Who am I kidding? She took home guys, period. I never took anyone home. I hadn't been with anyone since Conall had left the states about six months earlier. And before him I'd never been with anyone either. Not really.

  "Luff? Thinking about your beau again?" Finking. Her hand was on mine. My gaze was on the sheets of rain splashing down on the cars outside.

  I shook my head, smiled wanly. "Is it that obvious?"

  "Well, I said a few things to you and you never heard me."

  Her sweet blue eyes quivered with concern. "Oh, just forget it!" I said, leaning back in my very uncomfortable wooden chair and crossing my arms. My gaze fell briefly to my book.

  "And, any good?" Dani asked me, catching what I was looking at.

  I shrugged. "It's hot, very steamy."

  She snatched it again. "E.L. James hot?"

  I shrugged again.

  "Oh, right, you've never read that, have you?" I shook my head, my mind still firmly on what it was always on...

  "Talk to me," I said to her, leaning forward on the table and scrunching my shoulders. "Distract me."

  It was lunch-time. Dani and I always met up at Starbucks — the one inside the Tesco, which is like a UK-version Wal-Mart or Target — and spoke about shit. If we worked the early shift, we met at lunch-time. If we worked the late shift, we met at lunch-time. If we worked no shift, lunch-time we'd meet at Starbucks. She was like my second Kayla (my bestest friend in the whole universe who was now so deeply in love with Brad from Bushwick that it had only enhanced my own loneliness when I'd been back home.) I was happy for Kayla. I really was. So fucking happy that it hurt all the way down to the bottom of my stomach.

  "Well, a hot guy came over just after you left work," said Dani. "Blue eyed. A little pudgy around the belly, but, hell, who am I to complain?"

  I waited for it. When it didn't come, I raised my eyebrow suspiciously.

  "And I'm seeing him tonight." She blushed as she'd said it. That was Dani, loose as a child's laces but shy as a new kid in kindergarten.

  I gave a half-chuckle and shook my head.

  "Hey! Beats sitting here every afternoon losing yourself in book boyfriends you know you're never going to meet, luff." She picked up the book once more and threw it on the table to emphasize the point.

  Only, Dani was wrong. Conall was that boyfriend. He was that man. He was my Travis Maddox, my Dean Holder, my everything...

  "He's stopped texting me," I said to her. This statement shocked her. Dani was light-hearted — as Kayla was — but this was beyond joking. The one thing Conall had always done was answer me back, to tell me he was coming back, to tell me that he would explain it all when we got together. Now there was just silence.

  Fucking coward, I thought now.

  "When was the last time you got a message from him?"

  I fought the tears back, steadied my chin, tried to answer, but ended up taking a sip of my coffee instead.

  Damn it. This guy had fucked me up. He'd fucked me up big time. And I had no idea why. Or why I even hoped he would still see me one more time, finally settle things, tell me to my face that he'd lied. I deserved at least that much, didn't I?

  "I still don't understand why you don't just show up at his work, tell him he's a fucking arsehole in front of the secretary he's probably doing, and then have it over with?" said Dani.

  I rolled my eyes.

  "Yes, yes, I've heard your 'pride' speech. But if someone had screwed me over the way your Mr. Wrong has done you, I'd have done that. I'd have gone right to his turf and given him a piece of my mind, and a backhand. And a knee to the cahoonies." Dani sat back, cross-legged, arms folded, looking like a bouncer who hadn't quite reached full-age yet.

  I sat silent. She looked at me from the corner of her eye. "I'm getting a coffee," she said finally.

  She came back with a Frappuccino the size of my arm, with extra cream, and sauce, and probably an extra shot of espresso as well.

  "Still drinking the good stuff, I see," I said, my mood lightening at its sight.

  "Well, I know I'm supposed to be a replacement for your Kayla friend, so I'm trying. All I need are the extra earrings, although I think I'm getting close..." She turned her ears left and right to me, showing me the two extra piercings she'd gotten. She was up to four on each side now. Shave the side of her head and she'd be a tubbier version of Kayla.

  I laughed.

  "Anyway, all this decadence" — she licked the cream lasciviously and eyed me like I was the latest hot guy she was going to jump — "is making me think of something much more interesting..." She licked her lips. "Any news from Green-Eyes?"

  The mention of the grinning guy of a week-or-so earlier gave me an unsteady feeling at the pit of my stomach, like lea
d had dropped in it. But it also made me smile.

  Why did he do that to me? I'd seen my fair share of hot looking dudes at the pub. Hell knows a bunch of them tried to flirt with me. None of them even got a featherweight of an effect on me. And yet, this guy, this smirking guy who'd happened to be at Starbucks two days in a row and who had somehow gotten me even to flirt with him, had made me — if only for a nanosecond — forget the one and only guy I'd ever loved.

  Dani noticed my involuntary smile. I took a long swig of coffee, sat back in the uncomfortable chair and started reading my paperback, imagining, while the author told me about lingerie and seduction, that it was my Green-Eyed-Boy. And me.

  My boy. That's what I called him, because in my mind, they were all mine.

  And they never left me.

  -4-

  "The name's Dorian. Dorian Brant."

  The statement, in a rumbling baritone, spoken to me while I'd been pouring some friendly old guy a draught beer at Jolly Roger, from behind the counter, came to me with such precision and strength that, even though I wasn't talking to anyone else, I knew it had been aimed at me. I turned my head, my hand pushing down on the draught lever, my other holding the glass, and then I went blank, everything stopped, and the beer spilled. I dropped the glass. My black uniform pants were now all wet and I smelled like the back alley of a pub after a long Friday night. The glass had smashed. The old guy said, "Oh, goodness, dear. Are you alright?" I turned my head down to the glass, but my mind was still on Green-Eyes, my Green Eyes, who'd just introduced himself, and I said, "Uh, um, er..."

  And then I ran away, into the back, practically knocking Dani over as I tried to find somewhere to hide (a hole? under a bed? the friggin states!?) as well as wash myself off. I didn't get far. To get to the bathrooms I'd have to actually walk out into the main pub area. And green eyes, no, Dorian Brant (God, the name gave me dreamy shivers) was out there... And he was tall. And he had the kind of eyes that...