Page 1 of XX Love Affair

Part 1

XX Love Affair

The Storm Before the Calm

The calm Californian night cracked open when Helena burst from the front doors.

“Stay away from me!” In her hand was her carry-on suitcase, the one she had been living out of when not adorned in clothing bought for her by a pair of bored millionaires. There wasn’t much, really. Practical cotton underwear. Some tampons. Sports bras and comfortable T-shirts. A tablet that had been gifted to her when she graduated high school a year ago.

It was all she had, and she’d be damned if these psychos kept her from leaving without it.

“You get back here!” A frenzied shout echoed into the night, sending a murder of crows into the air. They cawed above Helena’s head, circling the scene as she made it down the front steps of the Mediterranean mansion she occasionally called home since August of the previous year. “Where the hell do you think you’re going? Josh! Do something!”

Helena continued to march on toward the taxi she had called. The poor man behind the wheel of the yellow vehicle poked his head out of the driver’s side window and looked like he was about to turn tail. Yet Helena marched with such intentional purpose that it was safer for him to stay put.

Even if Irene Feist chased after her like a mother about to beat her willful daughter.

No. No more of that shit. Helena knew her worth. She may have been quick to get into trouble, but she wouldn’t put up with crap that she wanted nothing to do with. The moment Irene Feist and her husband Joshua Dillon became too much drama, she was out. This had been a long time coming. Especially with Irene.

Helena yanked open the back door of the cab and shoved her carry-on bag onto the seat. Behind her raged Irene, who was close enough to touch – and to slam the car door shut again.

“Get your ass back in there!” Irene wasn’t even twenty years older than Helena, but she looked even younger now, with her sorority “I’ll ruin your life” eyes and the silver spoon of an heiress dangling from her teeth. Her husband, the spineless shit he was, stood at the top of the stairs. His hands were in his pockets. Know what else he keeps in there? His phone. All it would take was one call to the local sheriff’s office for Helena to either be detained or marched back into the house she had no desire to live in any longer.

Their time was up. Even Josh must have known that.

“I’m leaving!” Helena could play the same game, and she had an edge. Her voice was deeper, raspier, and louder than Irene’s. When a girl had been the captain of her high school soccer team, she had to curate a tone liable to corral a dozen teen girls in the heat of the moment.

Now she used it to banish the banshee of San Bernardino County.

Irene pushed her up against the cab. The driver’s head swerved between his phone and the scene playing out against his meal ticket. Tip him well, Pierce. If Helena had learned anything after her year of playing around with rich and depraved people, it was that tipping the common man got her far. She had some extra funds to play with now. Gifts from Irene – and her peers, all of whom enjoyed their tastes of Ms. Feist’s latest plaything.

It had been hot until it wasn’t anymore.

“You think you get to leave me?” Irene may have been drunk, but Helena knew better. At most, the woman had a glass of wine. Far from enough to get her heated like this, which happened more lately. Her true colors. She only kept them from me for so long. Helena had been blind to it at first because she loved the lifestyle Irene and Josh offered her after they met at an LA nightclub. What had started as a wild night in a hotel room soon escalated to living with them and jetting around the world. A whirlwind romance as the curio of a bored married couple.

It was fun. Until it wasn’t.

“Nobody leaves me.” Irene’s blood-red nail was so close to slicing Helena’s nostril that she flinched. “Do you understand me? I tell you when we’re all through. You think I’m done with you yet, Helena? Hm? You think I’m done defiling my little runaway? I am not. You don’t even know what that means. So naïve!”

Helena did not move. “I’m going. Any way you try to stop me will finally land your ass in jail.” She bore her teeth at the woman who was simultaneously shorter and more menacing than her. “That’s what you’d like to avoid, isn’t it? Time in a woman’s federal prison.”

She played with fire, hitting a sore spot like that one. Yet it was effective since the shock and fear in Irene’s wild eyes allowed Helena to crack open the back of the cab door and slip into the seat.

Irene attempted to yank the door open. Behind her, Josh languidly approached. What Helena had once judged as cool and masculine now made her sick. This man did whatever his wife said. To the point that she roped him into games that might land them in separate prisons!

And he stood there so nonchalantly as if they were seeing her off at the airport for spring break.

He didn’t care about Helena. He barely cared about the scene his wife caused in front of the taxi driver, who put the car in drive and threatened to take off with Irene hanging on the door.

“You can’t leave me!” Irene fell back, her heels scraping in the gravel as her hair came out of its updo and swarmed her shoulders like a hood. “Do you know who I fucking am? I’m your Mistress, Helena! I own you! Get back here!”

“Drive.” Helena leaned forward, her nose pressing against the plastic divider between her and the cabbie. “Please. I’ll tell you where I’m going once we’re away from her.”

He swung the cab around the driveway, careful to avoid the woman chasing after them. “You need the police?” he asked with a familiar Mexican accent. “Hospital?”

She met his gaze in the rearview mirror as they rumbled down the driveway. They were too fast for Irene to catch now. Yet Helena had a foreboding feeling that the woman would be chasing after her for a while. “No. That’s not necessary. I’ll be checking into the Hilton in San Bernardino. They’re expecting me.” Under an assumed name.

“You sure? Because I know a guy in the police. My cousin! He will listen to you!”

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