The Brides

By Corri Lee

After the devastating revelations of Blazed, Emmy White searches for clarity and a new identity in a new city on a new continent. With no friends or family close by, she seeks out company with old faces that have their own weaknesses and dark pasts.

The ruse of a 'new start' gives her the kick to overcome bad habits and rebel against demands she might have once complied with if she hadn't made a promise; a promise to a man who, even oceans apart, has power over her emotions nobody could imagine.

Through friends old and new, city-savvy Emmeline White sees new sights, meets enemies and comes head to head with secrets she never imagined she'd have the strength to face.

There again, she may not.

Strong language and adult themes throughout.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Corri Lee
• Release date: Aug 19, 2013
• ISBN: 9781301225453

Corri Lee

Self-publishing author and self-confessed fantasist, I vent my ideas into novels that I strive to make emotionally provocative and addictive. Music is referenced heavily and is a huge influence in the way I write. Those who know me well will see the pieces of my personality that I put into my words. Those who don't will see outrageous story lines, gut wrenching twists, raunchy love affairs, and heart stopping romance.Jaws will drop. Eyes will burn. Cheeks will blush. Pages will turn. If just one of those reactions is evoked from every reader, then I know that my time isn't wasted.I write in the hope that my work will be enjoyed and the word will spread. Not for the *unlikely* financial gain, but for the knowledge of knowing that I made a mark on the world by just 'being'.

Book preview

When I walked out of Hell, I walked right into the paradise next door. Strange, new smells filled the air that barely had space left between the sounds of blaring traffic and street sellers toting their goods. At night, the city lit up in neon and halogen, guiding club-goers into the chrome painted bars that hid behind inconspicuous staircases and curtained doorways right on the street.

By day, people coursed in rows around me, ably ducking between slower movers with the fluidity of dancers, racing between appointments the way they had in London.

But this wasn’t London. It was a whole new metropolis full of tiny samples of a huge population that cooperated despite it’s internal differences and difficulties. Life filled every corner, be it the chic coquettes who tiptoed on expensive heels or the trees that lined the streets. It was the urban interpretation of me; full of paradoxes, contradictions and compromise. Except I was anonymous. I was a nobody. I would be a somebody.

This was New York; a whole new kind of Hell —and boy, was I dying to become better acquainted with the sulphur pits and brimstone.

My decision to leave London didn’t go as unnoticed as I’d planned. My mother, the eminent Ivy Tudor, was sat in the family’s very expensive Mercedes when the driver, Oscar, arrived to collect me from my flat, her suitcase already packed in the boot.

That was a definite advantage of being a trophy wife to one of the richest men on the planet; she’d compromised on the ridiculous surname and bolshy husband, and been given a very liberal, comfortable life in return. As a result, she was coming with me to New York whether I liked or not, arguing that I’d never truly been alone in the world and needed breaking in.

She had no clue. I’d always been alone. If anything, I preferred it that way when my options for company were the dishonest, entitled cretins who always had a lie to spin. She should know, she married one.

In the past, I’d done my best to avoid the hilarity that surrounded us when my father, Henry Tudor, came into money very quickly and to great effect. We went from being a modest family living in an uncomfortable corner of Wales and quickly became the Tudor family of The Tudor Initiative.

Henry milked the extravagance, buying six buildings around the world as business centres and naming them after the six wives of Henry VIII. He should have stopped there, but loved the feeling of possession over everything.

In many ways, my father was an ugly man. His receding ochre hair, ruddy complexion and villainous pencil moustache was just a face to the power hungry, narcissistic spendthrift who’d been allowed to control far too much of the world’s economy. I’d gone out of my way to avoid any involvement with him and his business for it’s entire existence, despite the way he begged me to lend my brain to his ventures. However, if the old adage that ‘desperate times call for desperate measures’ was true, I was almost certainly screaming out for mercy.

Before my plane had even left the runway, I’d had several calls from my friends begging me to reconsider. How they’d found out, I had no idea. I’d wanted to slip away quietly without a fuss. Of all my pleading conversations, none came from the one person who might have actually made a difference, in spite of the flood of correspondence the night before. I was going to escape him but he might have been able to say something—anything to undo the damage.

I’d wasted my summer on Blaze, a man I’d wished for but had no idea what the cost of a granted wish was. After years of battling issues with anorexia nervosa, depression, hallucinations bordering on schizophrenic and self-harm, he was a hot blast of positivity I’d needed for too long.

What we’d had, we’d known would be complicated from the outset; I had my problems and my unrequited love for former best friend Hunter, and he had commitments to caring for a sick woman. I’d been led to believe that we’d just gotten carried away with something fated and that given half the chance, it could flourish, and that our inability to commit to each other was based on fear. I never imagined that he was babysitting a sick wife until she popped her clogs so he could reap the benefits of being next of kin. That kind of callous act was something I saw in Henry and something that had no place in my life. No amount of extravagant dates and expensive engagement rings could make me commit myself to a life of being a mistress and wondering if I was as inconsequential as she was.

I could have fixated on his mistakes until I was blue in the face. I could have obsessed over every detail and tried to twist them until my thoughts no longer made sense. I could have swallowed my pride and abandoned my morals, and gone back to a blissful life of waiting for him to spare me his free time at the weekends.

But he’d given me back the spirit I’d lost the last time I fell in love with the wrong man. His insistence that I’d be his gave me no choice but to make a stand and put myself permanently out of reach so he’d have to learn that he couldn’t have it all his way.

Yes, I admit that I was running away because I didn’t believe that I could hold on to my conviction if he found me again, and he would. But I honestly thought that it was my way forward. Better for both of us. I doubted that he’d miss me when he stopped and realised that I was far too much hard work.

The minute we touched down on American soil, I already felt like I was home. My flight had been spent poring over dozens of spreadsheets outlining the budgets for all of Henry’s companies. He hadn’t been happy about me wanting to leave London but I’d won his favour by agreeing to oversee a discrepancy in staff morale at his New York building, The Seymour. If anyone could relate to feeling oppressed and squandered, it was me.

Henry really was disgustingly rich. I whistled when I saw how much money he was pumping into each venture and felt positively queasy when I saw how much profit he reeled in despite being in the midst of a recession. I had to give the guy his dues, he never could have made it this big if he wasn’t smart. My frosty resolve towards my father might have started to thaw, but I still hated his ethics and cavalier attitude towards his business relationships.

To stop myself feeling dirty for finally involving myself in his affairs, I considered myself to be an external auditor rather than the boss’ brainy daughter, and the money I earned from my work was a wage, not an entitlement from playing my part in the family business. It really did work out to be a ridiculous salary, but delusion and I were keen bedfellows.

Besides, I had my own wicked scheme. I was going to iron out all the kinks in The Tudor Initiative and show Henry where he’d been going wrong in an attempt to make him change his ways. He wouldn’t be able to take his money with him when he died, and I was determined to make sure he still had a soul when that day came.

Ivy stayed with me for two weeks in Henry’s million dollar apartment on the Upper East Side—naturally—and as the urbane chameleon she was, she knew all the sweetest spots of The Big Apple set to exhaust and distract. She fearlessly joined the masses of dainty women battling the streets in stilettos while I stuck safely to my flats, knew exactly who to flatter and bribe for a table in the most exclusive of restaurants, and shopped until she dropped in the haute couture boutiques that charged more for one handbag than I’d earned in one month at my old job in Double Booked—a quiet independent bookshop hidden in the London back streets.

Of course, in the name of change, affluence was going to have to be something I learned to take in my stride. If I stood a chance of gaining the respect of Henry’s American clients and employees, I had to learn to stop batting an eyelid at the astronomical bills that arose from restaurants and the ridiculous price tags on the designer suits I was going to have to wear. At least that’s what I was told. Apparently there was a fine line between exerting myself in the manner befitting a billionaire’s daughter dripping in money and being a shrewd, financially sensible entrepreneur. If that line was really there, I sure as hell couldn’t make it out.

The mould I’d set myself into gradually cracked and chipped away over those first fourteen days. Refusing to let me mope over a man, Ivy took the broken daughter who’d used her maiden name, Emmy White, and rebuilt her into city savvy Emmeline Tudor, the business woman. Like a girl playing with her dollies, she took me out of the comfort of the smart casual clothes I’d had to adjust to after my last makeover and pushed me to the limits of my tolerance to turn me into a full throttle, no nonsense, cosmopolitan queen with cherry red lips and stilts for shoes.

That first week of transformation was painful in every way. It was like having to learn how to dress, walk and interact like a human all over again, not the mention the crippling beauty treatments designed to groom me into one of the sophisticated queens who prowled the city streets like sprinting in foot-deforming shoes was an innate talent. While I wanted to do nothing more than sit out on the apartment’s balcony wrapped in a blanket, drinking to mourn my failed engagement, my mother forced me to bounce around town with her, determined that a post-break up makeover would make me feel better and not at all like grieving. She didn’t understand that it almost hurt to breathe and my head throbbed from lack of sleep because I couldn’t close my eyes without seeing him. She just wanted me to look how she’d always dreamed; healthy and successful, even if I was emotionally stunted.

When I saw the final result, I honestly thought I looked a little scary—like a woman who chewed up and spat out homeless folk who asked for spare change, pausing to tell them to get their acts together. I was assured that was the point, but it would never stick. Not being able to recognise my own reflection played on my old insecurities. I’d left London to ensure that I didn’t lose my identity by succumbing to temptation. If I kept this up, I was going to lose that identity anyway.

Ivy joined me for the first week of meetings in The Seymour for moral support, proving that she was definitely more than a pretty face and was far more keyed into how the businesses worked than I’d expected. I got some invaluable opportunities to tap into some of the strong relationships already forged with the head management types and a few nuggets of inside information on the real problems areas that I might not have necessarily mined if I’d strolled in on my own like She-Ra making outrageous claims to be a miracle worker. We went out for meals with board members, rubbed shoulders with some of New York’s other top running executives, lunched a la carte in Bryant Park and spared our weekends to see the sights I’d have to learn to take for granted.

But the gravity of being Henry’s trophy wife soon lured Ivy back to the Old Smoke, and she left me to make my own impression on the city. As soon as she left and I was finally alone, I ditched the heels and lipstick and let the chaos free me, walking through Central Park alone at night to invite trouble, tipping badly and missing ferries back from Coney Island. I began to acclimatise to the swell and roar of the approaching subway trains that broke the silence when I tried to sleep, distinguish every separate word yelled by the street sellers, and made a sure and certain way through crowds that didn’t end up in me being knocked sideways. I found myself falling deeper in love with the city’s lazy nonchalance—it’s self-contained lack of care for anyone else’s business. My life had once been a catastrophe of everyone knowing everyone else’s affairs, while New York threw it’s heels up and relaxed, not probing and not wanting to be told a word.

It was a selfish, taciturn city, and it was home now. This was my new stomping ground, and I made no promises to anyone, not even myself.

Emmeline Tudor, whoever she was, was waiting in the wings and it was nobody else’s job to tell me who and where she was. That was my prerogative.

There was a definite sense of smugness when I walked into The Seymour on the first Monday of September looking more human. I’d found myself in Soho the day before and stumbled across the alternative fashion stores that enticed me in with the rock music I’d grown to love through my teenage years. At twenty-two years old, the desire to be confined to suit had never been something that had really taken a place in my ethos, but if I could do it with an edge, I thought that might just be the person the city wanted me to become.

Once I had that initial idea, it grew. When I might have usually found a bar and drank alone until I could identify a heartless lay for the night, I stayed in with a bottle of wine and finally dipped into the sickeningly healthy looking bank account I’d set up separately for the allowance Henry had insisted on giving me when I left the family home in Cardiff to follow my best friend, Daniel and his civil partner into London. I raided online stores and ordered an entirely new wardrobe and footwear collection. I’d still wear the prim and proper suits Ivy had forced on me, but I’d mix them up with my new stash of slogan t-shirts, patched jeans and entirely less debilitating skater shoes and creepers in a whole host of colours.

The contact lenses she’d insisted on me wearing for meetings and dinners were also a no-goer. I loved my geeky thick rimmed glasses and they were a sticking point. They were my eyes, not hers, and in no way could I justify jabbing a finger in them and ending up feeling more tired than I really was for vanity’s sake.

The staff appreciated it. When I strolled in with my hair in scruffy pigtails, acid green Converse and a Spiderman t-shirt underneath my blazer, they instantly warmed to me as I suspected they would. Professional was good, sure, but approachable was better when they’d spent years being ruled over by the Tudor tyrant.

My apparently unorthodox approach won me lunch with the HR department for the ‘troublesome’ sector of The Tudor Initiative: a small but booming business charged with the design, manufacture and distribution of mobile phones. Could I have ended up anywhere better? It also scored me some brutal honesty regarding exactly why they were all feeling so pissed off and demoralised—nobody listened to them. Their sub-office in Flushing held their artistic types, and it was a dive. The building was cramped, poorly ventilated, poorly heated in the winter and lacked natural light. No amount of far too generous monthly bonuses and increased holiday entitlements could ever really serve as a suitable platitude when the environment they were forced to work in made them miserable. If Henry had bothered to listen, he’d know that they just wanted a new office; a far more cost effective way to keep his staff happy and productive.

But I knew for myself only too well how he thought that throwing enough money at a problem would solve it. When I was sectioned after my suicide attempt, his idea of parenting was to pay for all the best doctors and a private room with a view when what I wanted was for him to ask me who’d pushed me to such a reckless place, and go and have cross words with them to defend my honour. In fact, not a single person had asked me ‘why’ or ‘who’ in the right way until Blaze...

I worked solidly through the month, conferring with Henry once a week via Skype. The Flushing Artists, as I called them, were more than happy to surrender their excess incentives once they found out that I’d secured them a new office on Broadway.

I turned heads. People were surprised by how calmly and efficiently I’d handled the situation, and requests flew in from across the States for me to help them in the same way. It was satisfying to say the least—to feel like I was finally doing something productive with my life. Whether Henry was looking better for it or learning anything became the least of my concern when I knew now that, as much as I’d fought it, this empire was going to be mine.

And as much as I hated to admit it, it was thanks to Blaze. He had to drive me across an ocean to make me see where I belonged, and I was grateful for that. I just wished I could stop thinking about him. What he was doing, who he was with, if he’d spoken to my friends... He seemed pretty friendly with Henry, so how had that relationship been affected with the news of his secret marriage? When I thought about it, Henry really hadn’t seemed all too surprised when I’d told him. That was enough to make me stop thinking about it. I knew I’d analyse the hell out of everything until my exodus was pointless because everything I was trying to leave behind me was dragged to the forefront of my mind.

Still, there was no denying the way my mind strayed to full colour flashbacks of our better times—memories so vivid I swore I could feel his hands and lips on me. Any time someone stood too close or crept up behind me, it felt like him. Blaze left a dull hollow ache that caught up with me every spare second I had, so I forced my smiles and drove forward.

Because I had to get past it.

Because he wasn’t mine to remember anymore.

Because even if he was, I wouldn’t be the only woman in his life. I’d have to share him and that wasn’t enough. I deserved all of him.

Towards the end of the month, I found myself studying a subway map spread across a table in a café on Canal Street. Chinatown had quickly become my favourite place to explore when I had free time—so close to Soho and a different kind of hustle and bustle from the rest of Manhattan. People began to recognise me and stopped being surprised by the lack of a language barrier, and became the closest to friends I had in the big city.

Sight-seeing? I glanced up from the map at the petite aproned girl who strolled over with a jug of coffee and shrugged. Her name tag said Sophie but I knew she’d picked a Western name for work.

Depends. Is there anything good in Astoria?

There are some museums, Hell Gate Bridge, some decent places to eat... But I’ll be offended if you trade us in for somewhere trendy.

Of course not! We grinned at each other and she set the jug down to help me make sense of all the different lines. I thanked my lucky stars that I had someone to explain it for me because I’d already gotten lost and boarded the wrong trains enough times to be thinking of doing something unspeakable; buying a car and driving in the bumper to bumper traffic.

The question was in Sophie’s eyes but she didn’t ask it: what business did I have in Astoria if not sight-seeing? Well, that was Blaze’s fault, too. Our third what I suppose you’d call a ‘date’ started out with me throwing myself down Oxford Street, trying to run away. From what? I’m still not sure. It might have been the hallucination of my overweight teenage self, it might have been the crowd that made me so anxious. It probably should have been Blaze—yes, I should have run the hell away when I had the chance and not gotten attached to the man who had been honest about his inability to forge a romance from the start.

Either way, I’d ended up flat on my back on the concrete in front of my reason to be in Astoria.

Calloway Ryan’s face left me speechless. His ice blue eyes and the way he wore a suit was still permanently engrained on my mind. I’d somehow charmed him into surrendering to me an engraved money clip crammed with pound notes wrapped in a business card and I had to return that clip. It had been one of the few things I’d packed to come with me when I left, and his card had been the inspiration I’d needed to get on a plane. He’d told me he’d come and collect it himself but it seemed like too good an excuse to escape.

I’d been bolstering myself for weeks to go to his office and now, I was going to damn well do it. It was too long a flight to not go there and return his possession.

But I hadn’t gone there for him. I chanted that over and over to myself as I rode the N line, eyes looking between my new smartphone and the windows to make sure I didn’t miss my stop on Broadway. Occasionally, I pulled out the business card to check the address, feeling like I’d seen it somewhere before.

Oh, hell. Two streets away from the subway station, I found my destination and immediately released why I knew the address. It was the same building the Flushing Artists had moved into three days earlier.

The building stood out of the ground like a giant obelisk—a huge steel structure with the street facing wall made entirely of reflective one-way glass tinted gold. The building had no visible name like Henry’s, just the number emblazoned above the automatic doors leading inside.

Okay, so it was an office block. A really freaking tall office block, but no more or less impressive than the ones I’d already been inside. It did look a little odd stuck in the middle of a neat row of red brick buildings, but what the hell did I know? I was no architect. And Calloway Ryan worked inside it, I just had no idea where.

I must have stood there staring for ten minutes before I finally took a breath and plastered on my business face. Nothing about this scenario was new—I’d been known as a prolific man eater before I met Blaze and I’d seen enough looming great buildings in New York to no longer find them intimidating. But somehow, I felt awkward this time, like the class out-cast making eyes at the prom king. That was a mindset that should have died off when I left school, where it was absolutely my reality.

Trying not to be dazzled by the huge glass chandelier that hung from the foyer ceiling and the glaringly golden turnstiles that beeped intermittently as they allowed employees through with their barcoded ID cards, I paced over to the black slab of a reception desk and waited patiently in the line of several other business types queuing for guest passes. I was thankful that I’d abandoned my rogue sense of fashion for a day and gone all out in a form fitting suit and shoes that pinched my toes—looking anything other than official in that crowded room would have made me an eyesore.

When I was waved forward to approach the row of unpleasantly hostile looking security staff, I squared my shoulders and took a proud step up to them. Don’t lose your cool.

Good afternoon, Miss Tudor. I faltered. How the hell did they know my name? Here to see if your staff are settling in? Oh. I guess anyone with two braincells to rub together would research someone using the name Tudor when they tried to rent out property. It was too easy to produce counterfeit ID and the ‘right’ paperwork, asking that the rent was charged to The Tudor Initiative. It wouldn’t have been the first time.

Not exactly. I was hoping to speak to a Calloway Ryan. Pulling his card from my purse, I returned their raised eyebrows with one of my own. I have something that belongs to him. I just need five minutes.

"Mr. Ryan doesn’t see anyone without an appointment. Do you have an appointment?" My eyes tracked down to the card in my hand. An appointment, you idiot. I should have called ahead. But seeing as I was there and known...

I don’t know, I squared myself even more and crossed my arms. "Do I have an appointment? Or do I have to backtrack and pretend that I’m here to see my staff after all, find out from someone useful where Mr. Ryan is and sneak there without your knowledge? My lips curled up into the sweetest of smiles. You don’t look like you want to be chasing me so soon after lunch."

They stared at me in stunned silence for a moment, turned to confer, then the female among them slapped a guest pass down on the desk and slid it across to me. Too easy. You want the top floor. Fifty bucks says you can’t get past his assistant.

Fifty? I did a mental head count of the security staff. Five at the desk—a ten dollar win for all of them. One hundred. What can I say? I liked my chances that day—I had a good feeling about it.

After some intense negotiations, they whittled me down to eighty-five dollars and looked pretty sure of themselves when I scanned through the turnstiles and hit the call button for one of the four golden doored lifts. I had a right mind to go back over and take bets on which car would come first, but didn’t have time. The doors directly in front of me slid open and revealed a completely vacant car. I was winning all over the place, or at least I was until I looked at the buttons.

Holy shit. Thirty-five floors. It didn’t look that big from outside—twenty floors at most. What the hell did you have to do to get the office on the thirty-fifth floor?

My data connection on my smartphone wasn’t great on the ride up, which was prolonged by what seemed to be a stop on every floor. As we ascended, I noticed that the calibre of people coming and going changed; starting off smart casual but gradually getting more and more formal. The suits got neater. The men got older. The women looked less friendly. I was glad to have something to centre my attention on, even if my fascinating search engine exploration of Calloway Ryan was persistently interrupted by my signal dropping out.

The private reception to his office had very little more than a waxed mahogany floor, bare eggshell walls and a monolithic desk that stood out from the back wall. A small cluster of backless leather seats were arranged underneath the only embellishment in the room; a canvas painted with slashes of bold colour and a quote written in fine calligraphy.

Face reality as it is, not as it was or as you wish it to be—Jack Welch

I knew the quote well, though wasn’t sure of what business it had being hung up in somewhere like this.

Blaze had once told me of his theory that the most beautiful people in the world were the ones with the most problems and ‘issues’. If I were to believe him, I was already prepared to accept that Calloway Ryan was going to be severely fucked in the head. If I didn’t, I could still use his words to pardon my own weirdness. But the part of me that liked the sentiment had me mulling over that quote and wondering what relevance it held to the man I was there to see.

The assistant I’d been warned about looked equally as hostile as the women I’d seen in the lift car. Her chestnut hair was groomed to perfection into a bun that looked like it was fastened so tightly it was pulling back the skin around her eyes and forehead. Her grey eyes seemed to focus on her work with laser sharp precision while her fingers moved in a blur across her keyboard, creating a clattering that filled the room.

And next to her desk, a door. The one I had an eighty-five dollar bet on getting through.

Can I help you? My eyes snapped around from the canvas that still had my full focus when she barked at me without looking away from her computer. Do you have an appointment?

Ah, no. I—

Then I suggest you leave. Mr. Ryan doesn’t take visitors without an appointment.

This, I already knew, and her obvious superiority complex was grating on me. So I heard, but I just need five minutes. I have something of his.

Her fingers stilled over the keyboard. You think I’m paid to grant five minute wishes to everyone who asks like a fairy godmother? Her eyes lifted and her head cocked with irritating arrogance. Jesus, she was annoying.

No, I think you get paid to identify exactly who you’re supposed to allow five minutes to. And considering your boss has been waiting on my call for roughly three months and I flew across an ocean to be here, I think I make a rather good case for myself.

I’m listening. Good, I had her attention.

I met Mr. Ryan when he was in London in June. He helped me out of a situation when I was mugged— allegedly mugged, —and told me to call him to arrange the return of his money clip. Seeing as I’m here, it made more sense to bring it to him.

So why don’t you have an appointment? Because I’m an idiot, and my intermittent dispassion for life has eaten away at my common sense. That’s why.

Why would I make a five minute appointment when it’s far easier for you to do your fucking job and call through to see if he’s free? I can come back—would you like me to come back? I’d come back every damn day if it took the smirk off her face. Really, it wasn’t that big a deal to me if I delivered the clip in person. Seeing the man in the flesh again would have been nice, but not essential. This had become a battle of wills and nothing else. I just fucking hated her. She reminded me of my sister.

The assistant gracefully rose to her feet and arched a brow at me. What do you know about Mr. Ryan? I scoffed to mask my ignorance. Honestly, I knew very little from the limited research I’d done on the way up in the lift. He was pure blood American, born in upstate New York—that explained the accent—but his parents ailed from Boston. Gorgeous. Almost too gorgeous. Rich, but not as rich as I suppose I was now so nobody could accuse me of being a gold digger. A young businessman at twenty-seven but headed one of the biggest telecommunication companies in North America, which seemed ironic considering my recent dealings with mobile phones. That was as far as my knowledge spread.

Enough.

She looked at me sourly, lip curling into a sneer. So enough to know that he wouldn’t bat an eyelid at buying a new money clip.

Maybe it has sentimental value. I smiled sweetly and pulled the clip from my pocket. Let me give it to him in person or give it to him yourself. I don’t care. I have better things to be doing with my time than trying to force feed desk monkeys bananas to get to their organ grinder.

Blinking in shock at my concession for her to give it to him herself, she looked at the clip in my hand and pursed her lips. He gave you that?

Yes.

Your name? Shit. There had been no formal introduction after our collision on Oxford Street. I only knew his name thanks to his business card.

Emmeline Tudor. The assistant bristled and quickly sat down. Was the T name as effective as ‘open sesame’?

"As in The Tudor Initiative?"

Heard of it have you?

Take a seat, Miss Tudor. Smugly, I sat myself down on one of the backless seats and watched from the corner of my eye as she shared a tense conversation with her boss. I’d derived some kind of sick joy from seeing her quiver at my name and thought part of me might be starting to understand why Henry loved his power.

There’s an Emmeline Tudor here to see you, sir. ... No, she doesn’t have an appointment but she’s insistent that you know her. ... London? She has your money clip, sir—the engraved one. ... No, she— The clattering of keys filled the room again. Oh. Yes, that’s definitely her, sir. ... Very well.

A palpable tension filled the room while I waited for her to speak, so weighted I was almost afraid to break it by breathing too loud. Neither of us moved a muscle, listening for any sound to shred through the silence.

The office door opened in slow motion. My head spun in it’s direction and my eyes swept over the figure who stepped out. Rivetting ice blue