His Every Desire by Shiloh Walker Read Free Book Online Page B

burgers and French fries. She barely even looked the same anymore. Her angular face had softened and her mouth looked lush in the curves of her face, instead of the wide, mobile mouth that the fashion world claimed was unique.
    No, she didn’t look the same, didn’t feel the same.
    She was happy, completely happy.
    Well, almost.
    There was just one flaw.
    For a while, part of her had waited for Joel to show up. Logically, she had understood he wasn’t going to come.
    She didn’t know where he was. She could have asked. Aleisha would have found out, tracked him down. But she hadn’t.
    Joel was the kind, that if he wanted to find her, he would. He would have tracked her down and no fake ID, or new social security number could have stopped him.
    But he’d never come—and she wasn’t going to live her life according to how a man wanted her to look, or how she might think he’d want her to look. And she liked how she looked.
    Tracy felt like a woman again, instead of a punching bag, or a rag doll. But she still looked behind her everywhere she went.
    Part of her looked for Vincent. No amount of reassurance from Aleisha could still that voice inside her head.
    Vincent was lying in a coma in Salle Memorial. The minute he stirred, Aleisha would call her.
    “I’m safe,” she murmured, wondering if she’d ever believe that.
    And there was a part of her, she knew, that still waited for Joel.
    As of now…that was going to stop. She pulled into the small town with a smile on her face. The little town by the Ohio River was as far away from her old life as she could get. Pretty, quaint, friendly.
    The mansion in Shreveport, Maine hadn’t been home for Vincent. It had been a place for private business, it had been Tracy’s prison, but it hadn’t been home. Vincent liked big, expensive cities—not pretty little small towns like this.
    And it sure as hell hadn’t been quaint and friendly. Or home.
    This was home. It was already home. She felt it in her bones before she even climbed out of the car.
    She breathed in the crisp fall air as it drifted over the river. Man, it was lovely here. It almost hurt her eyes just to stare at the sun setting over the river, the sky painted a million shades of gold, pink and red. Small wisps of clouds dotted the western horizon and as the sun hit them, they gleamed like they’d been dipped in gold.
    Behind her, the small house she had finally dared to buy waited. She’d been scared to death to buy anything larger than a pair of shoes or a new shirt.
    God, how long had it been since she’d been able buy even that—clothes, shoes—without worrying?
    And now she had a house.
    She had a career. Not a job. A career.
    Although she had always loved to write, it had been something she’d been forced to give up a long time ago. Vincent hadn’t tolerated it. The few times she had tried, he’d deleted files—and once he had beaten her bloody. Then he had calmly picked up her computer and thrown it out the window.
    When she’d tried to buy another one, he’d beaten her with a belt and locked her in her rooms for a week.
    Clenching her hand into a fist, she shoved those dark memories from her mind.
    That wasn’t part of her life now.
    Her life now was as a writer. One whose name was gaining popularity…and a contract in New York.
    The online publisher who had released her books for the past seventeen months had moved into print and was on its way to the big-time. A publisher from a major press in New York had read one of her books and offered her a contract.
    While she still had a decent amount of her mother’s money, the nest egg in the bank was growing pretty fat just from her new income alone. It wasn’t as much as she’d made when she’d been modeling, but it was more than she’d had to call her own in a long time.
    She played the reclusive author entirely too well. Partly out of a need for privacy, but more…she was still too afraid of Vincent to risk so much as putting her face on