No Strings Attached

Chapter One

Now

Shannon parked up her brand new Audi TT at the back of the swanky hotel that her agent had booked her into. Bracing her head back against the cushioned headrest, she absently looked up at the cosmopolitan building, with its bold silver lettering stark against the slick lines and white background.

He was haunting her – like a restless spirit, he danced around the edges of her subconscious taunting her with his words.

New words – the completely new kind – that didn’t label her a whore or a slut, but left them instead with an empty vacant space where they were neither lovers nor enemies, but awkward old acquaintances, were echoing around the corners of her mind.

If there was one thing that she couldn’t handle between them, it would have to be this emptiness in which she was free to neither love nor hate him.

It didn’t fix things between them, she marvelled at the absurd notion that he’d ever thought it could!

It took him from a place in which she’d kept him – and his memory – in the very depths of her soul. She’d been clear on how to feel, ranked him up there with every other guy that had used sex and love to keep her under their control.

He wasn’t her father, no, but in his own way, what he’d done in her eyes had been no better, and she had loathed him for it.

But at least, in that hatred, she could keep him ... somehow.

What he’d laid out on the table was now forgive or forget, and the last time she’d tried had almost killed her, she just didn’t know if she could do it all over again.

For almost two years, she’d lived in a frozen state, surviving on anti-depressants and a false smile that had pulled her into the spotlight in her career, but broken her inner resolve to pieces.

Finally, a psychologist had pointed out gently that the tablets were inhibiting her from rebuilding her self esteem after everything that had battled her down over the years to such an extent that she was almost an empty shell of humanity – alive and breathing, even smiling, but completely fucking absent.

Now she yearned for that all consuming numbness again. In fact, she’d do just about anything to get out of this tornado of emotion that was chasing his words around her head.

“I had to say something – I knew you’d never believe me if I said that I just woke up one day and didn’t love you anymore, so I had to pretend I never had.”

She didn’t suppose it had ever occurred to him that she’d had to bury every one of those memories - that she’d had to cling to the belief that he was just an absolute bastard – otherwise she was just what Daddy said – a born whore.

She didn’t suppose it had ever occurred to him what those words would do to her battered, fragile ego. Every time he had touched her had soothed away every nightmare – every hateful thing her father had ever done to her.