LOGINShare
FIFTY THREE
Last Updated:
2021-05-25 21:49:15“Margaret?”
Amber walked into the bakery to find the place cleaned up and remembered that Margaret usually closed early around this time of the year. A little girl of three years sat on top of the counter with a rainbow-coloured lollipop in her mouth. Amber knew the little girl well for she often came with her mother for Margaret’s buns and pastries. She could hear Margaret talking to the girl’s mother in the kitchen behind a swing door.
“Hello Darcy,” Amber smiled and ruffled at the little girl’s head. Darcy smiled back, swinging her legs back and forth as she sat atop the counter playing with an origami.
“Waiting for your mummy?”
Darcy nodded licking at her lollipop, her tongue was a mixture of purple, green and pink as she swooped her origami in the air mimicking the flight of a bird. Amber’s heart skipped a beat.
A paper crane.
It struck Amber as odd that the folding of
Related chapters
The CEO's Escort FIFTY FOUR
It was late in the afternoon by the time they got back to Fabian’s place. The sun had gone into hiding behind the brewing dark clouds. Lunch at Margaret’s had been wonderful and peppered with light but meaningful conversation. Fabian cupped his chin as he sat at the kitchen table smiling away at the memory of the older woman making a fuss over him. She reminded him more and more of his own mother.Not that he could remember his own mother’s face. He had been too young when she left and memories of her face had become a blur over the years. Still, he felt that his mother would probably look a bit like Margaret. They were roughly about the same age too. He liked her, a lot. And it wasn't something that happened to him often.He found it amusing that the older woman nagged at him to finish his meal and scolded him for touching dirty dishes in the sink. He chuckled.“What are you laughing at?” Amber asked. She was busy cleaning up the m
Last Updated : 2021-05-26The CEO's Escort FIFTY FIVE
Amber stepped out of the shower and towelled herself dry. A little smile played on her lips as she remembered her conversation with Margaret as they were clearing the plates. Fabian had stepped aside to answer a phone call. “When do you plan on telling him?” Amber had asked as she rinsed the plate in the dishwasher. Margaret’s kitchen was a humble one, it had no automatic dishwashers, unlike Fabian’s residence. Margaret almost dropped her sponge. She took a deep breath and closed her eyes. Her lips trembled as she answered with a question, “When did you find out?” Amber looked behind her shoulder, Fabian had walked out of the kitchen with the phone still glued to his ear. “Just recently. He misses you.” The older woman teared up upon hearing this and swallowed a lump that formed in her throat, “Thank you for today Amber….I’ve never been happier.” The two women shared an embrace in the kitchen with Amber patting Margaret’s back, and Margaret ch
Last Updated : 2021-05-26The CEO's Escort FIFTY SIX
Fabian stood facing the panoramic glass window in his bedroom. Rain splattered against his window, rapping against the glass in fury. Outside streaks of lightning flashed across the darkened sky as thunder boomed in fury. He shook his head, clenching his fists.She’s gone. He could not believe that the woman he let into his house, who gave her body with him, who looked after him when he grieved and who had just celebrated his birthday had betrayed him.You had it coming.He had shared his heart, body and soul with her! He had opened up his darkest secrets to her and this was what she gave him in return? She had slain him. She had gorged out his heart and thrown it away. He ran his hands through his hair in frustration.He should have seen it coming. There were just too many red flags.The auction that came out of nowhere. Amber and Liam alone in the ballroom. The wine. The repositioned canvas in his study. Amber and Liam m
Last Updated : 2021-05-27The CEO's Escort FIFTY SEVEN
It was late. The bus had moved at a snail’s pace due to poor visibility from the thunderstorm and by the time Anson disembarked from the bus, dinner time had already come and gone. To top it off, he was the last to be dropped off. As the bus drove off into the almost deserted street, he glanced at his phone. Margaret had left him a message, telling him of leftovers in the kitchen. That made him smile, he loved Margaret's cooking. Thunder rolled overhead and the storm thickened. He had to walk a little further to reach Ma’s Bakery and decided to take a shortcut instead. He was cold and hungry and didn’t want to walk under the pelting rain anymore. The shortcut was not exactly the most savoury of areas. It was a lonely street with abandoned buildings and broken windows that seemed to stare at him with hollow eyes. The flickering street lights ahead whispered for him to run out of there as fast as possible. Splish splash splish splash he quickened his pace, keep
Last Updated : 2021-05-28The CEO's Escort FIFTY EIGHT
Amber and Margaret were sucked into a world of chaos as they entered through the double doors of the emergency ward. Flashing red and blue lights accompanied by an alarming siren rang overhead. There were doctors, nurses and medical staff tending to patients of all forms.Anxiously, Amber scanned the ER for her brother, her heart pounding louder than the blaring siren. Her imagination started running wild.Did you hear about the poor young man?A pregnant woman in a wheelchair held onto her ballooning belly, her face contorted in a ball of pain. “Help me!” she screamed. “Oh, it hurts!”In another corner, a family of three stood around a hospital bed, wailing and beating their chests as they tried to rouse a loved one who had passed on. Their cries mingled with various sounds of beeping machines and doctors yelling.Amber tried to stop a passing nurse in light blue scrubs, “Can you help me look for Anson Banks?
Last Updated : 2021-05-29The CEO's Escort FIFTY NINE
The Aston Martin screeched to a halt in front of Ma’s Bakery but the shop was as dark as the midnight sky. There was no one there.Fabian frowned, reaching for his phone to call Amber again only to be directed to her voicemail. Ten seconds passed, twenty seconds passed and still, he failed to reach her. Damnit! Where is she? He should have gotten Margaret’s phone number when he had the chance.Fabian would have reached Ma’s Bakery earlier had he not taken a wrong turn. He had stubbornly refused to use the navigational system as well as the auto drive, preferring to search for Amber on his own; and was just about to reverse his car out of a godforsaken street when he saw a young man lying on his back at the side of the road. He probably would have missed the young man had a dark blue Toyota not caught his attention. It was obviously a hit and run case as the car sped off with a demonic speed into the night. And though there were only a few working
Last Updated : 2021-05-30The CEO's Escort SIXTY
Fabian sat in his car which was parked at the hospital’s basement, and in his hand lay Amber’s old phone. In a way, Margaret had done him a favor. When he had offered to bring Amber's belongings to the hospital, Margaret readily passed them to him without a second thought, not knowing what was in the phone.He had betrayed the old woman's trust. He was a bastard.He closed his eyes and sighed, “V?”“Yes, Mr Williams?”“Run through all the files in Amber Banks’ phone.” He counted his lucky stars to have synced her phone to V’s system earlier that day.“Look for anything that concerns Liam Smith. Messages, phone calls, transactions….I want to know everything.”What does the son of a bitch have over Redd?“Yes, Mr Williams. It will take a few hours. Is that alright?”“That is fine. Send the information to my computer back home.”“Yes sir.”And with that, Fabian stepped out of his car and headed
Last Updated : 2021-05-31The CEO's Escort SIXTY ONE
There was pain. At first, it was everywhere, heavy and unbearable and she struggled to return to consciousness. But when she finally managed to open her eyes, she was greeted by a magnificent dark blue skyline outside a rectangular window. It was breaking dawn.Slowly she turned her head and found herself in a strange and alien surrounding. The room was sparse but clean, and the lights had been switched off, with only blue and yellowish hues of the peeking sunlight illuminating the room. The place smelled strange too. There was a metallic tang from stainless steel in the open air and bleach wafting from the bed where she lay.She did not remember closing her eyes. Her last conscious thought was of the nurse delivering Anson’s news.Anson! I need to find him!She sat up, pushing back a light blue crocheted blanket and gingerly touched her neck only to feel a tug at her wrist.Oh.Looking down, she found a tiny IV tube poking
Last Updated : 2021-06-01
Latest chapter
The CEO's Escort EIGHTY TWO
Amber slipped in and out of unconsciousness. She could hear muffled shoutings and saw a silhouette of a man hovering over her, his eyes filled with worry. Fabian? She thought and then all became black. Her eyes opened again, this time she saw gratings of white light on the ceiling whizzing past one after another as she was wheeled into a very cold room. She shivered and tried to call out but her voice got caught in her throat. It was as if her whole body was paralysed. “Don’t worry, you’re going to be fine..now breathe!” someone said and slipped an oxygen mask over her. For some reason, the gas from the mask made her feel sleepy and her eyelids slowly slid to a close and soon she drifted back into unconsciousness. *** Margaret ran together with a group of nurses pushing the bloodied stretcher that Amber laid on only to be stopped by a nurse in light blue scrubs. “Ma’am, please wait outside, we’ll take it from here.” “M
The CEO's Escort EIGHTY ONE
The eyes of the public bore into Anson Banks and he fidgeted uncomfortably in his seat, feeling his face burn. But the moment had come for him to tell the truth and to shine a light on the web of secrets and lies that surrounded the murder of Liam Smith. Anson’s eyes fell on his sister who sat with her head faced down, unable to meet his eyes. He had been selfish to force her into this madness and now it was time to set things right. He cleared his throat, feeling a sudden dryness in them as his heart beat thunderously in his chest. ‘Your Honor, allow me to tell my side of the story,” his voice came out soft and uncertain at first. The elderly judge pulled off his glasses and pressed his lips into a thin hard line before nodding his head. “I was supposed to be in the hospital on the night of the murder, but I had a feeling that Amber was up to something. You see, between us two, my sister has always been the one shouldering the burden of providing for
The CEO's Escort EIGHTY
“Order! Order!” the judge named Rodney shouted, his glasses almost falling off the bridge of his nose as he pounded his wooden gavel furiously on the sounding block. Everyone paid him no heed; all were too engrossed with the screaming, shouting and wrestling that came from the centre of the court. The place had become a circus.“ORDER!!!!!” The ultimate yell from the ageing judge finally brought an end to the chaos and a hushed silence fell across the courtroom. It became so deathly quiet one could even hear a pin drop.“Now,” the judge pushed his rimless spectacle back up, his eyes darting back and forth between Anson and Amber. “Can I have the representatives for these two come up to the bench?”Amber’s defence attorney blinked, still very much in shock over what had just happened and knocked over his chair as he clumsily made his way to the judge’s bench. “I..uh, I represent Amber Banks, your H
The CEO's Escort SEVENTY NINE
The Supreme Court of Justice was hushed as everyone waited for the judge to arrive. Amber Banks sat next to her attorney with her head held high at the Counsel’s table. Her emerald green eyes stared straight at the wooden panelled walls opposite from where she sat, not making eye contact with anyone. She was dressed in an oversized orange prisoner jumpsuit which was much too big for her petite body and her normally soft and fiery red curls were tied back in a loose ponytail.Behind her, a soft glow of warm sunlight streamed into the otherwise stuffy room filled with people, highlighting the dust particles that danced and twirled in the air.To the untrained eye, Amber came off as aloof, emanating a sense of emotional detachment from her surroundings, inwardly, however, she was breaking down. None of the jury sitting behind the bulletproof glass wall could see, but beneath the wooden table where her cuffed hands lay, she was trembling. Her hands were shaking
The CEO's Escort SEVENTY EIGHT
Amber washed her face and dried it with the back of her sleeves before looking down and pressing her stomach with both hands. Her eyebrows knitted together as she thought back to what the tattooed inmate said earlier.Pregnant? She shook her head at the absurdity; her ponytail swinging along as she did. She was sure her bouts of nausea and vomiting were due to some kind of food poisoning.But didn’t you miss taking the morning pills after consummating with Fabian? A little voice whispered in her mind.And not just once. You missed the pill twice! The voice grew stronger, eating away her earlier assumption about food poisoning. Gently, her hand cradled her stomach as the possibility of carrying a life within her own body tugged at her heart. It was a strange feeling.“Sweetheart, it’s time. If you want, we can have a doctor take a look at you after the trial,” the police officer hurried her, snapping Amber
The CEO's Escort SEVENTY SEVEN
Anson Banks sat at the edge of the bed looking at a photo on his mobile. It was a selfie of both Amber and himself taken during his high school graduation. His graduation hat was lopsided and she had on a goofy grin; how happy they had been then. It was a picture worth a thousand words. “There you go,” Kirk the policeman stood back up, taking the cuffs from Anson’s ankles. “You’re a free man now.” A free man….the words danced around his mind like gipsies around a bonfire. Only the fire was too bright and too hot. He winced at the words knowing that his freedom came at a price - a price that his sister was paying for with her own freedom. Anson sighed and slipped the phone into the back pocket of his loose khaki slacks. The bandages had come off but his skin was still raw and extremely sensitive. Part of the skin on his thigh had been scraped off when he hit the asphalt in the accident and because of that, the doctor had advised him to wear loose and
The CEO's Escort SEVENTY SIX
It was Amber’s third day in the detention centre and to her surprise, she found herself adapting quite well to the place. In fact, she had been sleeping a lot in her holding cell, often waking up only for meals or to answer nature’s call. All requests for visitations from Margaret and Fabian had been denied. She did not want to talk to them.It’s better this way, she thought to herself as she sat huddled on her makeshift bed and staring up at the lone window to her cell. A warm stream of sunlight shone on her bed, and she gently waved her hands through the sunbeam, playing with the dust particles.“Lunchtime!” a police officer called out as she slid a tray of pepperoni pizza, wobbly strawberry gelatin and bottled water into Amber’s cell. In the next cell, a young inmate with about a million piercings stood up from her bed and cheered, “Pizza! My favourite!”Amber took one look at her lunch tray and a nause
The CEO's Escort SEVENTY FIVE
Fabian walked to the nurse’s station and frowned, rapping his knuckles against the surface of the desk. “Fabian Williams!” A lanky young man in a janitor’s jumper shot straight up at the sight of him from a chair at the nurse’s station. He had been slouching off, ogling at the busty nurse who was also too engrossed with the man’s busy hands to notice Fabian’s arrival. “I’m here to see Anson Banks.” “Oh, but we have orders to restrict the number of visitors…” the same nurse from the day before got up from her chair, soothing her crumpled uniform. It seemed to Fabian that the man in the janitor’s jumper did more than just ogle at the nurse. But it was non of his business and Fabian was not used to taking ‘no’ for an answer, “Where’s the official notice? I don’t see any.” The man in the jumper scratched the back of his neck sheepishly and stammered, “Well..uh…Detective Grant said –“ Fabian’s eyes narrowed with disapproval as he lo
The CEO's Escort SEVENTY FOUR
The detention centre was a simple one. It held two barred cells, each with a makeshift bed with a thin woolly blanket and a standalone sink. The walls were all painted a depressing dull grey with only a little square window at the top of each cell. Amber gulped as she stepped forward towards a desk where an intimidating female police officer sat, going through her files.“Name?” the officer asked, not looking up.“Amber Banks,” Amber answered, her bright green eyes darting back and forth taking in her grim surrounding. The officer nodded as she pressed a stamp onto Amber’s file.Fabian was outside the detention centre with his attorney, trying to get Amber out on bail but she had a feeling that chances were slim. After all, who would let a murder suspect out on bail?“Age?”“Twenty-one.”“Hun, you gotta speak louder. You’re as soft as a mouse!”Amber jumped a litt
