Page 1 of Unwrapping Deviance
CHAPTER ONE
MIRA
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“Have you considered you might have abandonment issues, Mira?”
It was two weeks into my sessions with Dr. Eleanor Burdock. I’d been in the middle of telling her about my recurring nightmares when the statement just cut me off like the epiphany was too great to hold in.
It was the stupidest thing anyone had ever said to me and all I could do was blink at her like she’d inexplicably grown a tiny mushroom dick out of the center of her forehead.
All those fancy diplomas and characters after her name clearly weren’t being wasted with that level of deduction.
It truly took every willpower in my body, every restraint I possessed not to stare her dead in the eye and mutter,No fucking shit.
My mom lost custody of me when I was seven. She’d been addicted to pain pills and alcohol, and I would go for days without eating or bathing. I was torn away from her to live with my dad, a complete stranger who I only knew through yearly birthday cards living in a whole other province.
My boyfriend of fifteen months and best friend of eight years were both brutally murdered by a drunk driver the same day I found them inmybed fucking.
A month after attending their funeral, Dad was replacing a part in an industrial crushing machine and the barrels spun. He didn’t make it, and I was shuttled back to live with my dying mother and her fake husband who I had never met.
Two months after getting off the plane and restarting my entire life over again, Mom, who had been fighting stage 4 pancreatic cancer for nine months, succumbed to her illness and I became an official orphan a month shy of turning eighteen.
In less than three months, I lost every single person in my life in one horrificaccidentafter another. I was torn from my life with Dad and sent to watch my mom die slowly.
So, yeah, I think abandonment is a key event in my life. The only person who refuses to abandon me and should, is Daniel — my sort of stepdad and the only man I want to reenact every page in theKamasutrawith even though the whole shrink business was his idea.
I hadn’t wanted to go. The thought of paying some woman to sit with me for an hour and point out shit I could have Googled while getting paid five hundred dollars blew my mind. The sheer waste had me staring at Daniel like maybe he was the one who needed his head examined.
But Daniel won. He always does. Being a damn good lawyer, it’s very hard to argue with him. Plus, he’d cornered me in the kitchen when my guard was down, pinned me between him and the counter, cupped my chin and tricked my brain with his deep, male grumble.
“Please, baby. For me.”
I would do anything for that man when he calls me baby. I would have fallen to my knees right there and sucked every drop of his cum from his balls and thanked him for it.
Still, that afternoon, her stupidity had me promptly getting to my feet and walking out the door. According to the lengthy conversation she had with Daniel after the fact, the one that ended with her batting her lashes at him and telling him tocall her any time,my behavior indicates that I am resistant to help and should be medicated.
Not that I’m against medication, but two, two-hour sessions is hardly enough time to diagnose me with anything.
Normal people in a normal world with normal problems don’t understand when I tell them I’m being haunted by death.
They think I’m being dramatic, but when you’ve attended four funerals in three months, you have to start taking it personally, right? Maybe the universe is telling you, you don’t deserve love.
That you’re cursed.
That you’re supposed to die alone.
It’s a terrifying thought because I only have one person left and if I lose him ... if fate, or God, or whoever is in charge of making these decisions takes him from me...
“Mi?”
My lungs suck in a startled breath as I’m yanked off that cliff and dropped unceremoniously back into the front seat of Daniel’s white Ford pickup. I blink behind the dark frames of his glasses I’d stolen while he’d been pumping gas.
But rather than ask for them back, Daniel pulled the visor down to shield his honey gold eyes from the sharp patches of sunlight spearing through tangled branches.
I find it hard to believe some days that this man is real. As a dark romance junkie, he belongs on the pages of one of my filthy obsessions, not folded in the seat next to me all tall and broad and mouthwatering.
Daniel is way too big to be a lawyer. Sitting behind the wheel alone, he takes over the entire cabin with his sculpted muscles and hard chest. Hair, the color of wet driftwood, is cut biweekly to stay sheared along the sides and wavy and swept back at the top. It’s soft. Downy and silky. I love running my fingers through the strands whenever he falls asleep with his head in my lap when we’re watching a movie. I love the little noise he makes when I scrape my nails over his scalp.