IN HIS KEEPING: BANISHED

Sylvie was furious.  It was 4 AM.  Where the fuck was he?  The party had ended hours ago.  She’d taken a bath, lit candles, then sprayed perfume around the room, arranging herself naked on the bed for maximum effect…all for nothing.  She’d texted him six times and called twice, but he hadn’t responded.  She’d been worried sick that he’d gotten into an accident and had called security a half hour ago to see if they’d heard anything.  They told her not to worry; that as far as they knew Mr. Hudson was attending a private after-party with friends and well-wishers at an undisclosed location in the city.  Sylvie was livid!  How could he do this to her?  He said he was coming.  He’d told her he would.

There had been another one of these last week, a benefit for some museum.  Connor was in town for it, but he didn’t come to see her.  She’d waited for him, but he finally texted her he couldn’t make it.

She hadn’t been allowed to go to this one because she was being punished for ‘bad behavior.’  She’d show him bad behavior!

Sylvie blew out the candles, pulled on her panties, and grabbed a tee shirt, tugging it down over her head.  She sat down at her laptop and immediately went to a website that sold premade ebook covers.  She’d visited the site several times before.  Pretty much every time she got PO’d at Connor.  They carried a line of rather lurid BDSM cover art:  women bound and blindfolded with stern-looking alpha males looming over them.  She clicked on the ‘my covers’ file and looked at the two covers she’d saved.  One had a couple on a black background and the other silver.  She’d done each cover two ways with the title, Intimate Pleasures-A Diary of Sexual Awakening, done in a fancy red font or bright blue.  The author’s name, S. E. Jenkins, was done in white on both.  She opted for the red on black version, and after a few minutes of tweaking it to her satisfaction, she paid for it with PayPal.  It was only $69.  She got on the Kindle Direct site and started filling out the forms, putting in all the information needed to publish the book.  When she was done she uploaded the cover.

Then came the moment of truth.  Just how pissed at Connor Hudson was she?  She was more than pissed, she was seething!  She went to ‘upload book file’ and clicked on the ‘browse’ box.  She located her journal file and uploaded it.  It was over 75,000 words now.  She couldn’t seem to stop writing it.  It had become an obsession.  There was always some new hurt, new pain, or new hope to record.  All her anger, all her love, had poured out on those pages.  Connor had given her more joy then she’d ever known in her life, but falling in love with him had been a grave error in judgement on her part.  She’d been on an emotional rollercoaster since the first time they’d made love.  Her feelings whipsawing in all directions.  One day she was jubilant, soaring, thinking her life was filled with wondrous possibilities; that she and Connor could forge a future together.  The next day he’d dismiss and ignore her, and she’d be pitched into the depths of despair.  Life had been boring and uneventful before he came into her life.  She wasn’t particularly happy then; but she wasn’t sad or depressed either.  She kept asking herself if she was happy now?  Not a chance.  Maybe boring was better after all.  In her story, Sara Jenson gives Chase Holland an ultimatum: if he couldn’t give her his love then she would leave him.  That’s how it ends.  Not the HEA most romance readers were looking for.  But the way she felt right now, she couldn’t envision a ‘happily ever after’ ending to the story.  She stared at the page and then hit the ‘save and continue’ button.  By 4:30 AM she’d become a published author.  Within 24 hours her book would be live on Amazon.  An hour later, after reformatting the book to Nook Press specifications and substituting section breaks for all the page breaks, she uploaded it.  By tomorrow it would be available on Barnes & Noble.com too.  It took her three hours to get the formatting right for Smashwords, which would allow the book to be sold on iTunes and several other platforms.

Sylvie knew that if Connor found out about this, he’d be furious.  But she didn’t care.  She was beyond caring.