Free Sleepless: (Billionaire Bound: Part 2) A Dark New Adult Romance by Ella Slade

Chapter 1
    “Hello? Earth to Bethany Monroe?” Kylie’s words barely made it through the angst-ridden haze of memory and sleeplessness, and only long enough for Beth to realize she was standing in front of one of her ovens in the bakery, the door held ajar so that the bright heat invaded the rest of the kitchen. She shook her head to clear it of fogginess and then quickly reached down to snag a batch of peanut butter cookies from the oven.
    “Sorry, sorry,” she mumbled, looking toward the blonde, who stood in her kitchen, a brow lifted skeptically in her direction. “I haven’t been getting a lot of sleep lately.”
    “Yeah, I’ve noticed,” Kylie agreed, glancing around the kitchen as though afraid to enter it fully. “You’ve been totally out of it since Cavanaugh’s party. Where did you even go that night, anyway?”
    “I left,” Bethany answered without hesitation, the same answer she had been giving for the last two weeks whenever Kylie asked. “I was completely out of place there. I left as soon as I saw Mr. Cavanaugh, I went home, and I went to bed.” None of which was a lie, she reminded herself as she scraped off half-burnt cookies from the baking sheet. Kylie needed to know nothing about the fact that she had been alone with Ciaran that night. That he had started kissing her, ordered her to strip naked… Kylie didn’t need to know that he had tied her up to a piano bench and teased at her slit until she had had an orgasm, with all his guests in the other room and the possibility of being found at any time, by anyone.
    And she definitely didn’t need to know that Beth hadn’t been able to sleep soundly since that party. She would try to sleep, had even tried cheating once or twice by swallowing half a cold pill, but whenever she closed her eyes, she could see Ciaran’s face and hear his voice, and she hadn’t been able to sleep. She would wake up at two in the morning, grab her laptop and find herself on sites that hosted poorly written bondage stories. It made her ache that she was probably never going to see that man again—and that she was never going to find anyone who would ever touch her that way again. It was the most intense pleasure she had ever felt in her life. It was starting to distract her while she was working, however, which was a problem.
    “Oh, c’mon, there must be more to it than that!” Kylie insisted, leaning against the doorframe. “You’ve been daydreaming every time I’ve come in here since then, and don’t give me that BS about it just being about worrying about bills. I know how much he paid you just upfront for catering that party, and whatever tip he gave you was surely just as amazing as the first! C’mon, Beth, what happened?”
    That was a whole different wrinkle thrown into the mix—the fact that he had given her a tip after doing that to her. She told herself over and over that it was just a courtesy for the job she had done in providing all those cakes and cupcakes, but another part of her chanted over and over that he had paid her for letting him tie her up. She hadn’t yet determined if that aroused her more or less than the rest of it.
    “I am perfectly within my rights to still worry about how I’m going to pay my bills, Kylie,” she answered stubbornly as she headed back out to the front of the store and shooed her friend out from behind the counter. “I won’t deny that what he gave me will help significantly for the next few months, but there are a dozen other expenses that that money needs to go to as well, so it’s going to be eaten up way faster than you think it is. I need to make it last as long as I can so that I’ll have actual customers by the time it does run out.”
    Changing the subject to something like that usually did the trick with getting Kylie to stop talking about something; this time didn’t seem like an exception. “Well, what about that idea of getting some advertising space? I mean seriously, some ads in