Free Winner Takes All (A Full Length Erotic Romance Novel) by Sherilyn Gray Page A

Sasha was damn lucky she hadn’t
twisted her ankle and gone sprawling in the grass.
     
    She parked the car in the cramped parking lot, watching her new
neighbors as she sat behind the wheel after turning off the engine. A couple of
women lay stretched out on a balcony in their underwear, smoking cigarettes and
staring out into the rain. A man dashed through the parking lot with a folded
newspaper held over his head. As he ran, his white t-shirt flapped up,
revealing the handle of a pistol tucked in his waistband. A clothesline hung
with wet and limp t-shirts, dresses, and baby onesies was strung between two
balconies. The sound of heavy, pounding bass jolted out into the dark afternoon,
a counterpoint to her miserably beating heart. This neighborhood was too much
like the one she and James had grown up in with their parents. Sasha wiped
raindrops from her face, tucked her hair behind her ear.
     
    Taking a deep breath, she heaved herself from the car, her body feeling
heavy and unwieldy. Paying little attention to the rain that started to come
down harder, she trudged up from the parking lot. At the door to her apartment,
a smaller place than she’d had before and in a rougher part of town than she
would have liked, she wiped her feet on the welcome mat.
     
    The apartment and the neighborhood were both admittedly awful. But it
was all she had been able to afford after getting evicted from her studio
apartment for nonpayment of rent. Even now, the humiliation of it stung her
cheeks. The surprise on the office woman’s face when she’d seen that after five
years of an impeccable rental history, Sasha had stopped paying the rent.
     
    The woman, pretty and brown-skinned with kind eyes, had asked if she
could do anything for Sasha, if there was anything that she could set in motion
to help her keep her apartment. But Sasha hadn’t been able to think of
anything. She just didn’t have the money. She pulled good salary at a really
great job. There was no assistance that she could qualify for. Nothing that
could be done for her.
     
    In the end, the woman had given Sasha the names of several cheaper
apartments where she could stay and that would overlook her current eviction.
She had thanked the woman, fighting tears of gratitude that a stranger had gone
out of her way to help while it was her own brother who had brought her to such
a low point in her life.
     
    Of the half dozen apartments the woman had suggested, Sasha had only
been able to afford one of them after taking out the amount of money her
brother demanded of her every month. The six thousand dollars he leeched from
her was barely keeping him afloat, if what he said to her on the phone was to
be believed. She’d lived on less than half that amount every month herself,
leaving the rest of her salary in savings. But now, she had no savings. She
barely had any of her salary left after James was done with her.
     
    Sasha wiped feet on the indoor mat, slipped off her shoes and left them
near the door. She stared around her new place. The boxes in haphazard piles on
the floor. The walls with their cracked plaster and peeling paint. The
water-stained roof and overhead light that would not come on.
     
    It was nearly three in the afternoon, but it felt like the dead of
night. Dark clouds hovered in the sky, thick with rain and misery. Occasional
flashes of lightning burned across the sky while thunder rumbled in the
distance. Sasha turned on the floor lamp and huddled on the couch over her
boxes, searching through her belongings for valuables she could sell. Already,
she’d put aside her diamond earrings, the small flat-screen television, a
couple of gold rings she bought years ago but had barely worn.
     
    She looked through the boxes, in theory unpacking her meager belongings
into what had turned out to be the smallest and dingiest apartment she’d ever
lived in. But she had done very little unpacking and instead was salvaging as
many valuables from the wreckage of