Mistresses: Passionate Revenge. Trish Morey

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       Chapter Two

       ROCK bottom.

      Cleo Taylor was so there.

      Her head ached, her bruised shin stung where the vacuum cleaner had banged into it, and three weeks into this job she was exhausted, both mentally and physically. And at barely five o’clock in the afternoon, all she wanted to do was sleep.

      She dropped the machine at the foot of her bed and sank down onto the narrow stretcher, the springs that woke her every time she rolled over at night noisily protesting her presence.

      Karma. It had to be karma.

      How many people had tried to warn her? How many had urged her to be careful and not to rush in? And how many of those people had she suspected of being jealous of her because she’d found love in the unlikeliest of places, in an Internet chat room with a man halfway around the world?

      Too many.

      Oh, yes, if there was a price to pay for naivety, for blindly charging headlong for a fall, she was well and truly paying it.

      And no one would say she didn’t deserve everything that was happening to her. She’d been so stupid believing Kurt, stupid to believe the stories he’d spun, stupid to believe that he loved her.

       So pathetically naïve to trust him with both her heart and with her nanna’s money.

      And all she’d achieved was to spectacularly prove the award she’d been given in high school from the girls whose company she’d craved, but who never were and who would never be her friends.

       Cleo Taylor, girl most likely to fail.

      Wouldn’t they just love to see her now?

      A barrage of sleet splattered against the tiny louvred window high above the bed and she shivered. So much for spring.

      Reluctantly she thought about dragging herself from the rudimentary bed but there was no way she wanted to meet that man in the hallway again. She shuddered, remembering the ice-cold way his eyes—dark pits of eyes set in a slate-hard face—had raked over her and then disregarded her in the same instant without even an acknowledgment, as if she was some kind of low-life, before imperiously passing by. She’d shrunk back in-stinctively, her own greeting dying on her lips.

      It wasn’t just that he looked so out of place, so wrong for the surroundings, but the look of such a tall, powerful man sweeping through the low-ceilinged space seemed wrong, as if there wasn’t enough space and he needed more. He hadn’t just occupied the space, he’d consumed it.

      And then he’d swept past, all cashmere coat, the smell of rain and the hint of cologne the likes of which she’d never smelt in this place, and she’d never felt more like the low-life he’d taken her to be.

      But she had to get up. She couldn’t afford to fall asleep yet, even though she’d been up since five to do the breakfasts and it had taken until four to clean the last room. She reeked of stale beer and her uniform was filthy, courtesy of the group of partying students who’d been in residence in the room next door for the last three nights.

      She hated cleaning that room! It was damp and dark, the tiny en suite prone to mould and the drains smelling like a swamp, and if she hadn’t already known how low she’d sunk that room announced it in spades. The students had left it filthy, with beds looking as if they’d been torn apart, rubbish spilling from bins over the floor, and an entire stack of empty takeaway boxes and beer bottles artfully arranged in one corner all the way from the floor to the low ceiling. ‘Leaning Tower of Pizza,’ someone had scrawled on the side of one the boxes, and it had leant, so much so that it was a wonder it hadn’t already collapsed with the vibrations from the nearby tube.

      It had been waiting for her to do that. Bottles and pizza boxes raining down on her, showering her with their dregs.

      No wonder he’d looked at her as if she were some kind of scum. After the day she’d had, she felt like it.

      She dragged herself from the bed and plucked her towel off a hook and her bag of toiletries, ready to head to the first-floor bathroom. What did she care what some stranger she’d never see again thought? In ten minutes she’d be showered, tucked up in bed and fast asleep. That was all she cared about at the moment.