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CHAPTER 8
Veronica was sitting upright now, ignoring the pounding pain in her head as she glared belligerently at Sasha.
“You don’t know what you’re talking about! J.J. doesn’t... he isn’t...”
She stopped, shaking her head. How could she explain to Sasha of all people, about the thing that drove her, the memories and the fears? As a teenager, she had done so many foolish things and even let down the people who had loved and supported her.
Her involvement with Wayne was something she knew she would always regret. She hadn’t known at the time, of course, just what he was. In her innocent naiveté, Veronica had never guessed that he was anything other than someone who had bought a handful of recreational drugs to pass on to people at rave parties.
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MY FAVORITE SCAR CHAPTER 9
Hard on the heels of the acute envy, Veronica had felt when she had first seen the exterior of the house came to a pang of sadness for its inner neglect. Oh, it was clean enough, if you discounted the air possessing a sharp, almost chemical smell that made Veronica wrinkle her nose a little, but it was a long, long way from the home she had so lovingly mentally created. She heard Sasha moving around in the hall behind her.“Let’s go… I’ll take you up to your room,” he told her. “Have you got something for your headache?”“Yes, I have, but they’re in my luggage… which is in my hire car… That you left behind…” Veronica told him grimly. In the excitement of seeing the house, her headache had abated slightly, but now the strong smell in the hallway had made it return and… with interest. She
MY FAVORITE SCAR CHAPTER 10
Sasha grimaced as he studied the very obviously cut-through pieces of fencing wire. This was no accident… Someone had quite definitely used wire cutters on them, which meant... The lambs which had been born early in the spring had all gone now, his breeding stock the only flock that remained. And the deer roaming the home park was a tempting target for poachers. The last time he had seen Henry, the two of them had discussed the pros and cons of tagging their deer. Like him, Henry had a small herd on his estate, but since their marriage, Mollie, his wife, had added a new strain to them in the shape of the same miniature deer that she had bred so successfully. As Sasha glanced towards the line of bushes that separated the parkland from the main gardens to the H
MY FAVORITE SCAR CHAPTER 11
Instinctively her free hand went to her body to check just how far up her T-shirt had ridden.“What is it?” Sasha asked her, his attention caught by the movement of her hand.“Uh… You’re heavy, Sasha. You’re still on top of me and you’re hurting me,” Veronica told him, not entirely truthfully. She tried to bury herself in the night’s cloaking shadows, but it was too late and she could see from the sudden narrowing of his gaze as it followed the action of her hand that he realized, as she had just done herself, that her wretched T-shirt had ridden up far enough to expose the lower curve of her breasts. The last thing, the very last thing Veronica wanted was for Sasha to study her body in any way at all. So why, in God’s name?... Why,
MY FAVORITE SCAR CHAPTER 12
Veronica frowned as she started to double-check what she had just been reading. In a detailed account for the work involved in treating both the wet and dry rot to Elsinore Hall, she had only just noticed something strange. Just slipped in at the back of the file, was an additional sheet reporting on some dry rot infestation in the Rectory, Sasha’s private property, and with it was a brief note confirming that the work on the Rectory would be put in hand before the contractors started working on Elsinore Hall itself. She could feel her heart starting to thump heavily with a mixture of anger and pain as she read the sheet again. It wasn’t unknown for the owners of the properties the Trust took over to try to drive as hard a bargain as they possibly could.&nbs
MY FAVORITE SCAR CHAPTER 13
“What? What the hell are you talking about?” Sasha demanded ominously quietly, his expression as well as his voice betraying his outrage. “Listen, Veronica, I don’t like what you’re trying to suggest,” he told her sharply. She shook her head and replied thinly.“Neither do I, Sasha. But the facts speak for themselves.”“Do they?” His mouth twisted bitterly.“I rather think it’s your overheated imagination that’s doing the ‘speaking’ through your totally mistaken interpretation of them,” Sasha added through gritted teeth.“You can say what you want at this point… But you can’t deny the evidence of this report,” Veronica reminded him sternly.“What evidence?” Sasha demanded. “This is
MY FAVORITE SCAR CHAPTER 14
The fact that he was just shrugging on his jacket as she came down the stairs allowed Veronica to have an unwanted glimpse of the lethal maleness of the muscles in his torso and made her hesitate betrayingly just for a second before continuing walking down the stairs. He had changed his clothes simply to have dinner with her… Why? Because Sasha knew very well the effect his appearance would have on any susceptible woman and because he intended to use that fact to distract her, to confuse her when she needed all her attention, all her concentration to ascertain the truth about what he did? Or was she letting her imagination run away with her again? Was the woman he had dressed so elegantly her or was it…? Was he perhaps seeing the other woman after their meeting had finished?“We&r
MY FAVORITE SCAR CHAPTER 15
Wearily, Veronica looked at the luminous face of her watch. Half-past one in the morning. She had been awake for the last hour, stubbornly evading sleep, angrily refusing to allow her thoughts to take control, to force her to remember. She was too hyped up for sleep, too afraid to sleep just in case she... In case she did what? Dreamed of Sasha? Veronica looked across at the desk in front of the window. One of the small pleasures of living in the depths of the country was that one didn’t need to close the curtains at night. There was nothing she liked more than being able to see the night sky. When her mother had first married Henry’s father and they had gone to live in his ancestral home, Veronica had been overwhelmed at first by the darkness of the huge house.&
MY FAVORITE SCAR CHAPTER 16
She had guessed that Wayne was his supplier but had naively assumed then that Wayne was no more than a generous-minded individual who had the contacts to supply his friends with drugs, and that it was they who pressured him into obtaining them for them rather than the other way around. Without directly saying so, Wayne had implied that they were two of a kind, individuals who stood out from the crowd. His street-wise sophistication had reminded Veronica in some odd way of Sasha. Perhaps because, like Sasha, Wayne was older than her and the friends she’d mixed with. Veronica had listened half enviously when he had told her of his plans to spend the summer with a group of eco-warriors, traveling the country, defending and protecting the nature.&nbs
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