The Price Of Success (Fighting For Fireworks) Read online

  Corri Lee

  The Price Of Success

  First book in the ‘Fighting For Fireworks’ series

  First published on Kindle™ 2012

  Copyright © 2012 by Corri Lee

  The moral right of Corri Lee to be identified as the author of this work and the artist of the cover artwork has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright Design and Patents Act, 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system without permission in writing from the author.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organisations, products, places and events are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  For aspirations, dreamers, and those who won’t compromise.

  Table Of Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter One

  "Congratulations!" Bethany popped the cork from a bottle of Cava in my face with a whoop and a girlish giggle. She was the kind of painfully bubbly and sickeningly beautiful woman I could only ever be in my wildest dreams. Her usually neatly pinned white blonde hair hung limp around her shoulders and her blue eyes twinkled at me with excitement.

  "I've only finished writing it, it's not like I'm published yet."

  "That's still cause for celebration in my books. I would never have the patience to slog over my laptop for years like you have." She wasn’t joking. She barely had the patience to string together a sentence. I rolled my eyes at her and collected two glasses from the kitchen cupboard, holding them aloft for her to supply me with some much needed alcohol.

  "Will you still take the manuscript into work for me and see if you can push it forward?"

  She looked at me blankly for a second before smiling sweetly and winking. "I'll certainly submit it for you and have a sly word with Eleanor, but it'll cost you.” The sparkle in her soft blue eyes told me that I already knew her terms.

  I held my hands up in surrender and made a grab for my phone “Alright, alright. I’ll give you Adam’s number.” She clapped her hands jubilantly and jigged on the spot. Her enthusiasm was exhausting but contagious, and I counted on her unconditional exuberance to push me through the doors in to work and back out the other side of closing. “You’re insane for having two jobs- you do know that, don’t you?”

  She went cross-eyed to validate her diminished mentality and emptied her glass in one mouthful. “You have two jobs, Cici.” Yeah, definitely diminished.

  “Job: paid position of regular employment. Nobody pays me to articulate my creativity through fiction.”

  “Yet.” She waved a hand for me to drink up and grabbed her handbag from the faux leather couch where she had thrown it on her return from job number one. “Nobody pays you for your novels yet.” Her optimism was encouraging but not catching- I knew that my chances of becoming a published author were dire, even with her help. I could have self-published, but I didn’t have the kind of network of contacts that would be essential to success.

  My eyes traced her idealistic hourglass silhouette and part of me wilted. Genetics told me that I could never look even half as good as her, and my secret internet research told me that my only chances of obtaining that kind of waistline involved expensive surgery or torturous steel boned body contouring corsets. I was bereft of both a fortune and a pain tolerance.

  Bethany caught me off guard with my house keys. “Save your daydreaming for another book and get your shoes on!”

  The bar was packed to the rafters with overly friendly old gentlemen and younger Burberry clad yobs who supported their alcoholism with their unemployment benefits and their grandparents’ pension giros. Dotted sporadically through the crowd were the occasional passer-through looking to wet their whistle before they headed to a nightclub, the attractive young men who drank here only to ogle Bethany, and hidden between them were our genuinely pleasant regulars who drank here for the atmosphere. These were the patrons we liked the best.

  Bethany pored over my manuscript mercilessly as I stemmed the heaving flow of custom singlehandedly and without hesitation. Writing I was good at, but pulling pints? I was a genius. Through the huddled masses, I spotted Cole- all six foot six of him- and he shot me a smile that sent a shudder of delight through the veins of anyone in close proximity. He slunk up to the bar with a refined grace that left most women breathless and yearning for his touch. I, however, didn’t. It was him who wanted me, and he’d spent the past sixty-five Thursdays making damn sure that I knew it. He hovered next to Bethany, who promptly succumbed to his charms with a swoon, and let his gaze linger over my manuscript. And then he looked up at me. His smile said that he was keen on the idea of me running my hands through his softly spiked black hair as he nurtured my deepest sexual fantasies, but his determined brown eyes said that he meant business.

  I kept myself as busy as possible for as long as I could to avoid engaging in conversation with him. By ten o’clock, the bar had quietened and my pace was less rushed- every customer had a drink and Cole’s entrance to me was wide open. I mopped, I polished, I restocked and I hid in a corner eating Scampi Fries to impede his advance. I sent a hurried SOS text message to Bethany, but she didn’t reply. Instead she gave an exaggerated cough and tapped her empty glass on the bar, forcing me to go out and refresh her vodka and cranberry. I glared at her for being unsupportive and she responded with her don’t-hate-me-because-I’m-beautiful pout and fluttered lashes.

  She pushed her glass across to me with an impish grin. “Best thing I’ve read in months, Cici. I’m sure I can push this for you tomorrow.” Cole’s eyes gleamed next to her and I knew what he was thinking.

  “It’s finished? I believe you owe me a date, Cecelia.” I could have kicked myself for making such a foolish agreement with him. At the time, I had never believed for a moment that I would actually finish my novel.

  My voice cracked a fraction before I spoke. “I… I really don’t-“

  “You promised.” He leaned on his elbows across the bar and increased his proximity just marginally, but enough to force me to take a step backwards. “You said you had to focus your attention on your writing and had no time to date. Now you’ve finished, and now you have time.” While I was flattered by his pursuing me, I wasn’t interested. He was attractive, maybe even beautiful, but I’d seen his type before.
I knew what his interpretation of a date would be and I wasn’t a fuck-on-the-first-date kind of woman.

  “I’m not in the mood for a fumble, Cole. I’m a deep woman. I write novels, I read Dickens and I sleep with lavender under my pillow. I have needs and they don’t centre around a brutal assault on my cervix.” He raised an eyebrow and I saw something dangerous in his eye that told me that he wouldn’t be deterred.

  He leaned back slightly with one hand on the bar top and brushed his fingers back and forth across the splintered wood that lay under his palm. “I thought you might give me a little more credit than to think I’ve waited around for over a year just for a one night stand. Cecelia, you wound me.” My phone buzzed in my pocket and provided a welcome refuge from those intense brown eyes.

  It’s just one date.

  I looked up at Bethany and she gave me an unhelpful smile with the intention of goading me. It didn’t work- I was still no more interested in him then than I was thirty seconds earlier. There was no chemistry. I didn’t lust for him like other women did- nothing about that olive skin make me weak at the knees and he made no lasting impressions that evoked a will to embark in a sordid danger-fuck. I housed a raging suspicion that he pursued me for no reason other than that I was a challenge and he got a kick out of making women want him. We were friendly and he provided me with an intelligent conversation once a week, but that was as far as our common ground stretched.

  I leaned back against the shelves of glasses behind me and crossed my arms, regarding Cole critically and with intense scrutiny. There was no denying that he was savagely attractive, but I simply couldn’t imagine ever willingly going to bed with him. “You just don’t do it for me. Sorry.”

  Bethany scoffed at me like I’d uttered a witch’s curse. “Have you ever actually spoken without a bar between you?” Cole cocked his head at me with a sly smirk and trapped the tip of his tongue between his canines.

  “You know, I don’t think we have.”

  “Maybe if you came in more than once a week, you’d know that you have some fierce competition for my attention.” I nod my head towards an elderly bearded gentleman named Joe, and he raised his glass and blew me a kiss in return.

  “I’ll come here every night if needs must.”

  “I could get you barred for harassing the staff.” He looked at me coolly, not even slightly fazed by my relentless rejection. I saw something wicked flash across Bethany’s face in the periphery of my vision and found myself mortified when she rose, disappeared, and then emerged on my side of the bar.

  She nodded and said, “No, you’re right. He’s different from this view point” and then put her hand on the small of my back and guided me around to the lounge side of the bar, returning to occupy my prided place in front of the glasses shelves.

  I felt dwarfed in his presence- the lounge seemed unfamiliarly large and gloomy, but his figure glowed like an angel. He had a one foot height advantage over me that I never really considered from the safety of our raised bar and there was no doubting that he exuded raw sensuality that was so overpowering it made my teeth ache just looking at him. “Okay, point proven.” I made for a hasty retreat behind the bar but found myself paused by his voice.

  “Hold it right there, Douglas.” I felt him sneak up behind me without even turning around. His hand crept across my shoulder and settled at the nape of my neck. “What point has been proven exactly?”

  “The point that you do it for me.” I used the term loosely. I might have considered clubbing him around the head and dragging him back to my cave for a night.

  “So you’ll come out on a date with me?” Hell no. I paused for a beat before stepping away. I may have been no different than every other woman by being attracted to him, but I was unique in that I still wasn’t interested.

  “No. I told you, I have needs.” I took another step towards my sanctuary but was halted by him grabbing my hand with a vice like grip.

  “Hold it,” he said, “I have a bargaining chip.” I turned around to face him and was rendered utterly vulnerable under the gaze of those chocolate irises. All my other senses were temporarily obliterated by the scent of his Paco Rabanne aftershave. Plus, to his advantage, he wore a suit.

  “I very much doubt that you have anything I want, Cole. Let me go back to work.”

  “Hear him out, Cici.” I shot Bethany the death stare, knowing that she revelled in observing soap operaesque catastrophes such as these.

  Cole’s hand slid up my arm and a finger grazed my collar bone as he spoke. “Would you consider an adjustment of terms?” I couldn’t for the life of me understand why I was endeared when he spoke so… corporately.

  “I’m listening.”

  “One kiss.” My mind boggled.

  “If I’m going to slide straight into first base with you, I may as well get a free dinner out of it first.” He looked as though he was contemplating my retort for a moment, but then he nodded and went to turn away.

  “Oh. Well then. I’ll pick you up tomorrow at eight.” My head whipped round to Bethany, who was laughing at me for falling into such an obvious trap.

  “Wait.” I reached out and involuntarily inhaled deeply when my fingers brushed his arm. “Elaborate on your adjusted terms.” My voice was uncontrollably breathy, a clear sign that my battle was almost lost. I must have been getting soft with age.

  Cole hiked himself up onto a stool and sprawled out across the bar with calculated elegance and a snap of arrogance. He was stunning and he bloody well knew it. “One kiss. If you react the way that I think you will, then I get my date. One date. If you react the way that you think you will, I’ll stop pursuing you. Everybody is a winner in this scenario. I get to kiss those beautiful ruby lips I’ve revered for over a year and potentially win the opportunity to romance you, and you get either the opportunity to walk away feeling smug as the only woman to turn me down or your free dinner and a new romantic interest.” I was riveted. His proposition was conceited and presumptuous but the way he articulated it had me lusting after him. I paced up to him with conviction, certain that indulging his ridiculous request would put an end to this foolishness. Besides, I was curious.

  “You’ve got yourself a deal, Mr-… uh-…”

  “Fiore.” Of course. Italian. That explained it all- the confidence, the animal magnetism and the inherent godliness.

  I stepped up to him with brazen determination and pushed up onto my tiptoes to press my lips against his briefly. I stepped back victorious, having not felt so much as a flicker of excitement. “If I were a smarter woman, I would have put money on that, Cole. Stop nagging me now.” I turned on my heels to retreat but felt his hand on my arm again and withered.

  “That was a mistletoe kiss with old Joe over there,” he eased me around by my elbow and stood that so he towered over me. His right hand moved up to my chin and nudged me up to match his line of sight.

  “Kiss me properly.” I saw him come at me like a speeding train but I was paralysed and intoxicated by his audacity.

  My breath caught as his mouth enveloped mine and he kissed me with a passion that rippled through my nerves, making my toes tingle and my head spin. He stilled, lips still on mine, clearly waiting for me to reciprocate. I didn’t. Doing so would have suggested that he’d won so I kept him hanging. His hand moved from my chin and his fingertips grazed my skin as they shifted to rest on my neck. A thumb brushed my jaw before he sucked gently on my lip, urging me to make my move.

  “Oh Cici, don’t be such a stick in the mud. It’s only one date.” My eyes swivelled around to Bethany and rolled. She was right, of course. I grabbed Cole’s free hand and clapped it over my behind before combing my hands through his hair and pulling him into a deeper kiss. The patrons around us whooped crudely and cheered as I taunted him with the tip of my tongue and let him take from me what he wanted.

  I pulled away feeling a little hot around the collar but none too flustered. “Well then, enough of your nonsense now.” I patted Cole on the arm
sympathetically and made my way back to my rightful place behind the bar. He and Bethany both smirked at me as I leaned back against the fridges.

  “What?”

  “Have you seen your face?” Bethany spun me around on the spot and forced me to face my reflection in the mirrored recess behind a selection of shot glasses and fruit cordials. I was confronted with a face that I knew so well but saw so infrequently- my just-fucked face.

  “Oh hell.” I saw Cole grin in the mirror behind me and raised a single finger to him in response.

  “Tomorrow at eight, Cecelia. Bring your ‘needs’ with you, I’m eager to discuss.”

  Chapter Two

  I battled with the tangle of wires for my retro games console with my jaw clenched and my forehead beaded with sweat. I’d disconnected the damn thing a year earlier and exiled it into the loft to prevent my attention from begin swayed from my writing. But now I was free again I had every intention of indulging my inner geek.

  I finally tugged free the knots with a smug flourish and an internal promise to just download an emulator for my laptop instead, and then set to connecting the console to our television. The back of my mind goaded me and emphasised that this was entirely the wrong way to be getting hot and sweaty and that if I ever brought a man home, their reaction to my pastime had a fifty-fifty chance of being entirely negative. Still, I wasn’t willing to concede that my hobbies were childish and about due a permanent eviction from my repertoire of late nights, lay ins, fast food and lager filled drip trays.

  My mind spun with my low expectations for my date with Cole that night. The circumstances of my begrudged acceptance had set an unfortunate precedence for our further interactions; that my romance with him- or lack thereof- would be based on compromise. I didn’t compromise on anything, particularly love, and that was why I’d remained stringently single for ten years. Holding hands and a quick fumble once a week wasn’t enough for me. I had certainly had my fair share of casual encounters, but I needed fireworks. I needed extravagance. I needed passion. Cole may have been a beautiful specimen of a man but he was yet to fill any of the aforementioned criteria. I wasn’t optimistic.