Morgan's Chase 7 (Trials & Tribulations)

By Lucy St. John

THE WAIT IS OVER! THE BEGINNING OF THE END OF MORGAN'S CHASE STARTS NOW!
How fleeting his happiness? Is it but a moment before we need more happiness?
At long last, Morgan Chase has found it in both her personal and professionals lives. She sits at the pinnacle as a successful CEO of her vast, global corporate empire. And, she stirs sexually sated, in her lover's arms amid a magical Montauk getaway. The ocean-swept love nest befits a billionaire with access to a corporate helicopter. And it's all in an afternoon's work for the likes of Morgan Chase.
But these precious moments are flew and fleeting amid the hectic pace that is Morgan's chase. The ever-turning treadmill is revving up once again. This time the corporate climb will involve the equally underhanded worlds of politics and the mafia. Both have an interest in Morgan's new money-minting business involving online gambling.
But it's Morgan's personal life where the stakes are the highest this time around. She has a golden opportunity to forge a forever future with the stoic, solid ex-Navy SEAL Travis Walker. He is a rock. And he quite literally provides the foundation in Morgan's topsy-turvy existence.

But can she stay still long enough to truly commit to this new start with this upstanding man? Not if the evil and now-disfigured Bree Ballentine has anything to say about it.

Spurned in her late husband's estate, defeated in her bid to breed a billionaire's heir and now badly burned in a mysterious arson assassination attempt, Bree will stop at nothing to seek revenge. And she might just have the most deadly ally ever to carry out her bent and twisted plans.
This time, everyone is a target, including Bree's former partner and part-time gigolo, Hank Savage. Travis’s Navy SEAL rival is seeking his own shot at redemption. It’s why Savage so desperately hopes to win back his one-time lover, the beguiling Alex Marsh. But turning his back on Bree Ballentine won’t be easy – or safe.

Savage can handle himself, but can he protect Alex? She, along with the entire Chase family, including Morgan's two children and her father, become targets of Bree’s fire-breathing wrath. But at the core of her cold heart’s hate remains Morgan, herself. Morgan most of all.
Who will fall in Bree's desperate attempt to settle the billion-dollar scorecard? After all, money can buy a lot of revenge. It can ruin lives and purchase injustice in our legal system.

And it can fund much death and destruction. Too much.
This time, no one is safe. No one can rest. The chase has become a matter of life, death and freedom, now.
Morgan's Chase Book 7: Trials and Tribulations
*This e-book contains 48,000 words.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lucy St. John
• Release date: Jun 6, 2013
• ISBN: 9781301495825

Lucy St. John

Lucy St. John is the super-secret Nom de Plume of a major league, highly successful female executive. She sticks to what she knows in creating her brand new, breakthrough romantic series, "Morgan's Chase." All the juicy details are ripped right from Lucy's own fast-climbing corporate life.St. John's superheated, highly evocative - and, yes, controversial -- narrative chronicles both the corporate boardroom battles and the behind-the-scenes bedroom tumbles of a corporate climbing female executive out to shatter the glass ceiling. In doing so, St. John's passionate prose is as authentic as it is addictive. Once you begin following Morgan's Chase, you won't be able to stop.Dear Reader,All of my fiction springs from the realities we women face every day in the push-and-pull of our professional and personal lives. So you know as well I that as hard as we work, as much as we try, life shows us that the forces of fate are for more powerful than all of our personal and professional struggles, combined.That's why all along the way, shocking events put Morgan's chase in perspective. At times, we find Morgan as an unlikely loser on both sides of her ongoing chase for balance in her personal and professional life. Her family is thrown for a loss, and so too is her love-life.The blows comes so fast and so furious, Morgan is pushed back on her heels like we've never seen her. There are dark times. But Morgan and her allies eventually pick themselves up and respond. And when they do, there's a new-found fury and purpose to their actions.Morgan hits her stride. She makes all the right moves in both her professional and personal lives. It appears she is on the cusp of achieving everything she ever dreamed - and more. At long last, after many false starts, she's about to reach a new level of intimacy in her romantic relationship with ex-Navy SEAL Travis Walker.Is the elusive finish line for Morgan's chase finally in sight?I welcome you to enjoy the deepest, richest, most exciting and satisfying Morgan's Chase installments yet. Indeed, it has all been leading up to this. And every character, every situation comes alive and plays a part in the wholly unexpected outcome.I just know you're going to love it!Yours,Lucy

Book preview

MORGAN’S CHASE

Book Seven:

Trials & Tribulations

By

Lucy St. John

Smashwords Edition

©Copyright 2013 by Lucy St. John

Chapter 1

The cruel, knurled hand of fate reached out for Morgan Chase once again.

This time, it found her in the bliss of a beach house situated on a windswept nook in faraway Montauk, N.Y. The bad news blew in like a sea breeze, ruffling the white curtains in the bedroom of the beach house, just as the sun’s ball of fire sank into the bay’s briny coolness.

It was a golden hour, following a golden day. The kind of day that changes the entire trajectory of one’s life. And Morgan had taken her moment – her life – into her hands. She had arranged everything: The sensual meal’s seafood splendor. The Montauk getaway. The corporate helicopter ride to freedom. The flowing white beach clothes that costumed Morgan and her Navy SEAL champion, Travis Walker, in Kennedy flair.

In short, it was perfect. And Morgan had not only seized it. She was its author. She had put all the pieces into place.

And what happened next between her and Travis was a product of chemistry, biology, and long pent-up passion. You can’t smother a fire. Not when the embers smolder, burn, and smoke. The slightest breath, the stillest breeze, can ignite a conflagration. One that consumes everything. Burns everything away. Everything except the two souls brought together as one: Morgan and Travis.

They had their moment, all right. Once they began hand-feeding each other the sensuous shellfish, all of their senses stirred. Feelings long repressed ran free. Passions pressed down deep inside exploded with newfound force and uncontainable energy. Hungry, thirsty mouths feasted upon one another. And sexual organs they both tried so long to ignore would no longer be denied. Erogenous zones flooded with heat, flowed with blood and absolutely ached for union. For oneness. For each other. For completeness. The yin and the yang.

Their love-making seemed to go on forever on that wonderful summer afternoon. Time faded. The rotation of the earth slowed, then stilled. And images of two bodies intertwined stood as high art in a moment frozen in time. These were images to last a lifetime. Shapes as they should always be. Two entities in their most perfect form.

But this union, so long in coming, wasn’t just chemical. Or biological. Or simply a product of animal spirits and baser instincts. It was of a higher order. As if preordained by the universe. As if the cogs and wheels that control the fate had finally slipped into place, now to operate for all eternity in the perfect gear.

This union was as spiritual as it was sexual. And each element elevated the other to a higher plain. A place once thought unachievable. Now, it was Morgan’s and Travis’s domain to rule together. Master and Mistress. Man and Woman. Husband and Wife?

Yes, Travis had proposed to Morgan. The words welled up, along with all the passion and pleasure. And this completed the union, cemented their oneness. And as the two of them put their bodies, those instruments of desire, through alternating paces of unbridled love-making and then languid dozing and nestling in each other’s arms, the bond between them only strengthened and solidified. It was as real as the fierce and fertile grip they had on one another.

In these moments, it was as if this new thing – this higher plain of existence – had always been the state of their lives. It seemed as if their souls had always been interlocked, connected, and joined since the very creation of the universe. There was no questioning any of it. After all, does one question the Periodic Table of the Elements? It just is.

This was the unbreakable bond between Morgan and Travis. All doubt had been disinfected. Fear had been vanquished. Questions had been conquered. They had become a new entity. Henceforth, their lives would be lived together. Not by choice, or arrangement or even conventions of state and religion.

But simply because there was no life without the other.

And then a cellphone rang. A terse, urgent message conveyed. And command given: Turn on the TV. Something was on CNN.

Just like that, this new and unshakable foundation anchoring Morgan and Travis together seemed to vanish in the wind, as if blown away like beach sand in the Montauk breeze.

All because Bree Ballentine – Morgan’s rival in all things: first her husband, then his fortune, then in a life-and-death struggle pitting their progeny against one another – had been the brutal victim of an apparent arson. Her posh penthouse in Pittsburgh had been fashioned into a flash-fire death trap. A violent, volatile tongue of flame had spit forth, as if from a serpent’s mouth, the moment Bree unlocked her front door.

But it wasn’t just the immolation of a sworn enemy that insinuated a new and unsettling sense of distance between Morgan and Travis. It was all the troubling implications this heinous act of arson carried with it.

Could Morgan’s well-meaning but misguided firefighter father have had something to do with this latest strike in the war between multi-millionaires? After all, the weapon of choice was Big Al’s frenemy, fire. The element he’d spent his life’s work trying to control, attempting to tame – always out to vanquish but never extinguish. Because he loved it a little. He loved to fight it, to beat it, to best it. Because then, he’d have power over it. Or at least Big Al thought that he did.

So could Al have tried to use that fire power to settle the score between the Chases and Bree Ballentine? And if he had? If Big Al had gone and done something stupid and foolish, what were the implications for the billion-dollar conglomerate Morgan now ran for the benefit of her two children, billionaire Ballentine heirs Samantha and Geoff?

Shudders and shivers rippled through Morgan’s insides at all the unpleasant prospects and dark implications. Suddenly, all that shellfish she’d consumed wasn’t sitting so kindly in her stomach, either. The sense of fullness and warmth that had radiated from Travis’s love and his love-making had given way to chills. Clouds had rolled in over their blissful beach house. The sun was but a memory. So was its heat and strength.

Reality – and all its unpleasantness – had found them. It had found her. Again.

And that unsettled feeling deep inside Morgan’s protesting stomach?

That was the chase, revving up for another relentless run.

Chapter 2

Morgan, who’d risen from bed, her nude body bathed in fading golden light, turned from the flickering images of the news report, her widened eyes lifting to Travis. He remained naked, too, but was covered in the swirl of sheets on the mattress that had been the couple’s oasis of ecstasy just moments before.

We need to get back, she muttered in a soft, breathy exhale full of import. Then, she began getting dressed.

Travis watched her, his broad back resting on the headboard of the bed.

She had turned on a dime, Morgan had. The complete openness of her eyes, her face, her entire body and soul throughout the magical afternoon, was gone now. Shut down and replaced by laser-focus and far-away, inaccessible thoughts.

Would it always be this way? Would Travis receive Morgan’s love and passion only in pieces parceled out in between corporate crises and family emergencies? And if that were the case, would it be enough for him? Could he love Morgan completely and utterly – giving his whole self, his entire being to her – only to receive spare parts in return? Would all the golden moments with Morgan need to be stolen time and special occasions, as had been the magic of Montauk?

Watching Morgan methodically getting dressed – putting on the vestiges of her corporate uniform, not the carefree, underwear-less white linens they had donned for their beach house getaway – Travis didn’t know. Right then, he was looking at his ever-efficient Morgan with the detached yet bemused interest of a scientist studying a research subject. In this case: Morgan Chase, the ultimate high-climbing female executive so cruelly adept at compartmentalizing her life. Chopping it up. Slicing and dicing work, family, love -- and then putting all the pieces into little boxes so never the differing fragments of her so-called life shall mix.

Morgan was a woman divided against herself. Hobbled like this, how could she keep running? How could she keep chasing the ever-elusive balance that Travis believed did not exist?

He didn’t know. And he didn’t have any more time to think about the answer. Just then, a nearly dressed Morgan plucked Travis’s business suit from the closet rack and flung it on the bed.

Get dressed, she ordered, without turning to him, not so much as looking at him.

Her tone was that of a boss, which Morgan was. Not a lover, which she had been moments ago. Not a fiancé, which technically she was, though there was no ring. Just a passionate proposal, proffered and accepted. But do such exchanges, made during manufactured moments stolen away from real life, survive in the light of day? Could their commitment exist amid the rush of Morgan’s chase?

Travis threw back the sheets and stood, naked. The woman who had worshiped at the altar of his body just minutes before, took little note and showed virtually no interest. He plucked the suit pants from the hanger, pulling them on. His biceps flexing, his Navy SEAL tattoo of the skull in the Scuba mask moving along with his taut sinew. Travis was nothing if not the good soldier. He would do as ordered. But this was no way to begin a relationship, much less an engagement. Travis knew all of this as he dutifully donned his designer business suit, the uniform of his position as director of security for all of Ballentine Equity Partners, the multi-company corporate behemoth inherited by Morgan’s two children and safeguarded by her status as company CEO.

But a man – a real man like Travis Walker – could not be both employee and Alpha Male lover/fiancé/husband. Something would have to give. And it would have to give soon. But now was not the time for such discussions. Not with Morgan in crisis mode. Not with her CEO mind in overdrive, strategizing over the fallout from the arson-executed assassination attempt on Bree Ballentine.

Questions percolated and pumped through Morgan’s nervous system, now on high alert. How would publicity from the attack affect Ballentine Equity’s corporate interests, including a just-consummated deal to enter the politically charged, mob-connected world of Internet gambling? What if a brooding Big Al, estranged from his family after grossly overacting to a misguided play for attention by Geoff that had ignited the protective firefighter’s last nerve, did have something to do with the fire-laced attempt to incinerate Bree? After all, the vile woman was believed to be the architect behind Samantha’s psychiatrist-motivated suicide attempt. And the late Brock Ballentine’s spurned second wife so nakedly thirsted for control of her tycoon’s husband vast empire. All that stood in the way of Bree and her unborn baby’s multi-billion-dollar windfall was Morgan’s two children, the rightful heirs to their father’s unfathomably large estate.

Just one thing seemed clear in those early hours of the latest Ballentine corporate/family crisis: The fortunes of Morgan’s father, her two children and their corporate inheritance all rode upon the outcome of the just-unfolding investigation into Bree’s attack.

The intermodal, tri-state commute back to the sprawling Ballentine Estate southeast of Pittsburgh was quiet. At least in terms of the terse, sparse, and sparing words uttered between Morgan and Travis, it was quiet. These utterances accounted for little more than directives from Morgan for her security chief to begin an all-out intelligence gathering operation on the arson assassination attempt and the resulting law enforcement investigation. Then, both took to their air phones: Morgan, in touch with Peggy Coyle and her wired-in access to all of Ballentine’s board of directors and the company’s upper-crust management, via the network of all-hearing, all-seeing secretaries that served them.

For his part, Travis turned to his top deputy in the corporate security department, Sara Grimes. She answered his call on the second ring.

Grimes.

What do we know about the Bree Ballentine incident? Travis asked by way of a greeting and other such pleasantries. His voice was low as he spoke from a jetliner captain’s chair next to Morgan, who was consumed by her own air phone conversation, anyway.

I’d say she’s medium-well right about now, Grimes deadpanned.

Travis grunted. Stick to security, he said. Humor isn’t your strong suit.

I thought you’d be popping champagne corks, Sara offered. Wasn’t this bitch a major league pain in the ass for your boss?

Sara liked rubbing in the fact that Travis was subservient to Morgan. The woman he dated also signed his paychecks. Wait until Sara found out the two were engaged, Travis thought. Oh, what the hell. It was a sign of the times. Estrogen was increasingly in charge – on Wall Street, on Main Street, and even in the Pentagon.

Not if there’s blowback from the investigation, Travis corrected.

Blowback how? Sara said.

You put your finger on it a second ago, he added. Who benefits the most from roasting Bree Ballentine’s surgically enhanced ass?

There was a moment of silence, then Sara exhaled. Morgan, she said.

And her children, Travis added.

You don’t think… Sara’s words fell away.

I don’t think Morgan had anything to do with it, no, Travis said. And I know we didn’t, either. What I’m not sure about -- Now it was Travis who couldn’t find the right words to verbalize his suspicions.

The father. Sara finished the thought for him, her words ripe with realization. The firefighter. A guy who would know his way around an arson. You have to know all the ways fires can be set in order to fight them, I suppose.

Travis blew out air from 30,000 feet, as the Ballentine corporate jet raced toward Pittsburgh airspace.

Something like that, he muttered. Do we know anything about Big Al’s whereabouts these days?

You mean after he bolted that paranoia-packed gathering you called a picnic at the Ballentine estate? Sara cracked.