Bartered Betrayal - The Billionaire's Wife 08 Read Online Free Page B

The ache in my chest that had begun to return now that I wasn't wholly focused on my work was enough to attest to that. What did money mean when you just wanted to curl up and cry? What did it mean when you couldn't pick up the phone and speak to someone you cared for? What did it mean when you had no one to trust?
    It hadn't meant anything to Anton, I realized. Anton was one of the richest men in the world, and yet so poor in love that he had to buy a wife because love hurt him so badly he didn't want to feel it again. I pitied him. I wanted to help him. My fingers itched.
    "What do you want?" my father asked. "Tell me, I'll give it to you."
    I looked at him, old and bent and penniless, his greed causing him to overreach so far that he had lost everything. I pitied him, too. But I couldn't help him. And I didn't really want to.
    "Nothing," I said. "Go away. If you come back, I'll call the police."
    I started to close the door again, but he shoved his way inside. "Felicia!" he shouted. "Felicia, you have to help me!" His hands found my shoulders, and he was shaking me so hard my teeth rattled. My father never touched me. Shocked, I let him shake me before snapping back to reality, twisting out of his grip. He was so weak now, so small. He couldn't hurt me any more. I heaved, pushing him away, and ran to my tools. One of my salvaged two-by-fours leaned against the wall, and I grabbed it, brandishing it in front of me.
    "Leave," I told him.
    He started to cry, but I found he couldn't move me any more. I knew what was really important, and it wasn't the past and the damage already done.
    Eventually, he left, and I locked the door behind him.
    With trembling hands I went back to work.
     
    *
     
    I stopped sleeping so much. I dreamed about Anton too frequently: his voice, his smile, his surprised laugh. I dreamed about his hands on me, racing up my thighs, his breath on my pussy, his tongue deep inside me, clinging to me wherever he could find purchase, like a man afraid of being swept away. I dreamed of grinding my clit into his face. I dreamed of being tied up, wrapped in plastic, fucked until neither of us was afraid any more.
    Stranger things have happened.
    I made love to my clay. My fingers caressed it, thinking of Anton's skin. I pushed against it with my heels, my back arching, my mind wandering to our couplings. My thighs always rubbed together at inconvenient times, and I would flush as I tried to carve out the patterns of my head into the flesh of my creation.
    It was beautiful, if I did say so myself. Beautiful and dangerous. Everything was there that made me think of Anton. No one who looked at it would think I was speaking of anyone else. It was my greatest work to date. Midday, when I should have been sleeping but couldn't stop thinking about it, I would get up and touch it through the wet towels I'd laid over it, preserving its plasticity until the last moment when I would dry it and fire it. I'd peek at it, and I would see all my hopes and dreams in it. My hands would wander my body, and I would grind my fingers into my pussy, thinking about Anton, but every time I came I never felt satisfied. Release eluded me.
    I chased my memories of Anton, carved them into the clay, and hoped it would be enough.
     
    *
     
    In the middle of the third week the major part of my sculpture was done, hollowed out and in pieces, ready to be fired and put back together again. Then I would paint it. In the meantime, I had to get to the rest of it. But first I had to figure out how to get it to the kiln. I have a good friend who owns a great kiln for firing clay, but getting a piece there was usually a product of several friends helping me load it into borrowed or rented trucks. Right now, I didn't want to talk to anyone. My voice was rusty with disuse. I had to go to the only person I knew who could maybe help. Luckily he was right across the street, hanging out in an empty apartment across from mine.
    "Hey, Jake," I said when he