The Beginning of Connie and Isaac: Blue Butterfly Series (The Blue Butterfly Book 3) (27 page)

“Good girl!” Connie high-fived Annie and pulled her into her arms as they both made their way down to the crystal clear waters of St Lucia.

“Run!” Bullet shouted to Connie and Annie as she lay curled in Panther’s arms. Vaulting over their lazy arses, I scowled at Bullet on my way past. She poked her tongue out and then disappeared under Panther’s body when he rolled her very pregnant body over and stuck his tongue in her mouth.

“You’re too fat!” Connie shouted over her shoulder to me. “Out of shape, my love.”

I growled and sped up, desperate to get my hands on my wife’s delicious curves. Her arse wiggled deliciously at me from behind the scrap of red cotton hiding her gorgeous backside from me. “Be careful!” I shouted back. “Don’t forget Annie is with Bullet and Panther for the night. You, my love, are all mine when the sun goes down. And unfortunately,” I chuckled when I pounced on them both and brought us all tumbling into the softness of the sand, “you’re going to be punished for that smart remark.”

Annie took off running up the beach as I captured Connie beneath me and pinned her down. “I’ll get help!” she shouted before Panther screamed at her and chased her in the opposite direction.

Connie rolled her eyes then winked. “Annie seems to think I need help.”

I snorted, burying my face in her neck and tickling her soft skin with my stubble, raking it up and down until she slapped me and squirmed underneath me. “Scream for help, if you dare.” I chuckled.

She grabbed my hair and moved my face to hers. “Help me,” she whispered. “I’m being devoured by a huge fat guy.”

“You cheeky bitch!”

She laughed loudly when I rolled her beneath me, checked up the beach to see if Annie was in sight, then brought my hand down sharply on her arse. She gasped, the dirty little minx. “Again?”

“Oh God, yes please,” she panted as she lifted her backside slightly.

“Jesus H Christ!” Bullet huffed as she skipped into the water beside us. “Control yourselves.”

“You’re only jealous ‘cos you don’t get any of this,” Connie joked, cupping her very nice tits in her hands and wiggling them.

Bullet rolled her eyes. “Only ‘cos I can’t get fucking near you with this humungous belly.”

“Aww,” Connie cooed as she managed to pull out of my hold to stroke Bullet’s belly as she paddled beside her best friend. Bloody women.

Lying on my back, I looked up at the bright blue sky, marvelling at the calm in my chest as the warm waters rolled over my toes. The last year had been the most challenging of my life, but the very best. I wanted to repeat every single minute of it.

We were happy, and every time I saw the perfect smile on Connie’s face, I finally knew I had achieved something good. My life had been far from normal; it still wasn’t normal, but now we had the house of our dreams, the things we’d longed for, we even had the puppy that we’d promised to Annie. Yet, looking at my wife as she came to lie beside me, I knew that material things didn’t matter; she did. Her and my surrogate daughter. They were my life now. I wasn’t ashamed to say I’d killed dozens of people. I had tortured, maimed and slaughtered, however now I had something to kill and punish for; my family. I would protect them with my very last breath. If anyone was to threaten our perfect life, a life Connie had only dreamed for in all her suffering, then I wouldn’t take another breath until I had torn out their hearts.

“You okay?” she asked as she nuzzled into me.

Annie came bounding over to us and curled up at the other side of me as I opened my arm and pulled her in. Both Connie and Annie grinned at each other from opposite sides of my chest. “I’m happy,” I whispered as I sank a kiss into her soft hair. I grimaced at the tightness in my throat, the restriction making my words sound as choked as I felt.

But Connie didn’t look at me as though I was a wuss for showing emotion, she looked at me like I’d given her the stars and the moon. She looked at me with every single bit of love she had for me. She smiled and ran her finger across my gruff chin, her eyes shining with devotion.

Feeling another finger on the other side of my face, I turned to look at Annie who was grinning mischievously as she mimicked her aunt and dramatically stroked my chin. Then sighing with happiness, she turned her face and looked up to the sky. A huge smile covered her face and she shot up.

“Holly!” She clapped her hands in delight when the most delicate blue butterfly fluttered its wings around my little girl. “You came back!”

Connie gasped and stared open-mouthed at the butterfly. “Oh my God,” she breathed when from behind the first butterfly the most vibrant yellow one fluttered its large strong wings. They both danced around Annie’s head before they shivered in the breeze and flew away.

“Goodbye,” Connie whispered beside me as tears streamed down her face and she blew a kiss to the butterflies.

Annie turned to us and grinned. “I’ve decided what my Phantom tag will be.”

Connie coughed and I spluttered at her sudden statement.

“I’m going to be the Blue Butterfly,” she declared as she watched the two pairs of gentle wings dance into the sun.

No way was she ever becoming a Phantom.

Yet, as with the rest of my life, Annie showed me just how strong and remarkable she was. She grew into the most beautiful creature ever to grace the earth. And beside Connie and me, she blossomed from her cocoon and emerged as the most formidable assassin ever in the history of all the Phantoms.

The two butterflies visited Connie and Annie on many occasions throughout their lives, but none were ever as significant as that time because at long last, my wife, my beautiful strong wife finally said goodbye. And that was all she’d ever hoped for.

The End

Keep reading for a sneak peek of

AUNTIE CONNIE SMILED
softly as she sighed heavily and came to sit beside me on the bed, placing a small box beside her on the light grey duvet. “You okay?”

Was I? Would I ever be?

“Strangely, yes,” I answered truthfully as I stared down at my hands, turning them over as if I expected them to still be covered in blood. She gripped hold of them tightly and I looked up to her face. She looked sad, pained even. Her teeth were worrying her bottom lip as her throat dipped with her anguish.

“The first is always the worst, Annie, but I won’t lie and say it doesn’t get easier.”

“How can it ever get easier?” Nothing made sense in my head. But it wasn’t the guilt or the disgust eating me up, it was the fact that I didn’t feel either of those emotions that made my gut clench with nausea. “How can I even feel like this?”

Connie smiled, her eyes foretelling her love for me. She had watched me grow into a twenty one year old. She had nurtured me like a mother, taught me right from wrong, and last night she had trained me exactly how to gut a man with the minimum outflow of blood.

“You’re so very much like your mother, Annie.” Her sadness was extreme, the potency of it swallowing my tears and forcing my dry eyes to blink in effort to release the wetness that never came. Since I was four, the day I had cried at the death of my father I had never shed a tear again. It wasn’t that I was heartless, or even cold, it was just a case of nothing could ever match the pain from that day. Don’t get me wrong, I hadn’t suffered as a child, or missed out on anything, Connie and Isaac had loved me enough for what I had lost from the death of my parents, yet a part of me would never be filled with their absence.

I smiled in reply to her words but when she reached out to me with something in her hands, my mouth dried and the heartache tripled with what my eyes witnessed.

“Your father’s journal,” Connie whispered as we both stared at it. “I wanted to give it to you so many times but it never quite felt right. But now, now you’ll understand.”

Tentatively I took it from her, the feel of it heavy in my hands, and my soul. “Have you read it?”

She nodded. “Yes. It’s not light reading Ann, in fact it’s fucking heart wrenching at times, and nauseating at others, but maybe it will help you to accept who you are.” As if reluctant, she pulled something else out of the box she had carried in. She stared down at a folded piece of material and my heart twisted when a lone tear rolled down her cheek. Slowly, she raised it to her face and inhaled its scent, then passed it to me. “And this was something very dear to your mother. At first I didn’t understand how significant it was to her, until I read Daniel’s journal.”

The soft pink cotton opened in my hands until a long pink slip lay across my lap. “This was my mother’s?”

Connie nodded, her eyes now flooding with her tears but still she smiled. “Yes.” Saying nothing else, she gently kissed the top of my head then left me alone.

Reaching for the journal, I flicked through the pages until it opened at a specific point.

13th January 2009

My heart stilled today for the very first time in the entirety of my life. Mae was wearing the pink slip left out for her, whether it was herself or Pauline that dressed her I am unsure, but my eyes no longer saw the little lamb as a provision for money, but as a stunning creature. Her scar is disregarded by my eyes, and my soul, her exquisite beauty the only thing I saw today.

The Temptation of Annie

The final book in the Blue Butterfly series

Coming early 2016

Coming Soon

Night Fires

An erotic romance novel

From D H Sidebottom

Prologue

The vicar didn’t make any sense, his mouth moved but foreign words filled my ears, my brain unable to decode the poetic way he spoke. All I heard was the creak of the wood when my brother’s coffin landed on top of my parents with a soft thud.

A faint puff of air left me and I pulled my black wool coat tighter around me as I shivered against the cold wind that blew through the cemetery. Snow covered the grass, disguising the only thing of colour around me, nothing but grey and more grey enveloped me.

Faint sobs from the other mourners filtered in but I couldn’t join them, the walls that had built around me refused to allow my own despair to be vocal. Loneliness was all that surrounded me. Loneliness and numbness. And the eternal scent of smoke – and death.

The vicar’s eyes were fixed on me as if awaiting for some sort of acknowledgment. Not understanding, or caring, I nodded vaguely to him, hoping that was enough. It seemed to be when he nodded to the men stood beside the six foot square of hollow earth and they slowly started to lower the small coffin. The final coffin. My eyes watched but my heart refused to. All I could think was how all they all managed to fit into such a small hole.

I turned to look to the side when a man came to stand beside me. Mutely, I lifted a questioning brow to him but he shook his head slowly, sadly, and returned his gaze to my family descending below the ground. Taking my hand, he leaned towards me. “I promise, Alice. Before I go I will give you a smile once again.”

I didn’t answer him. For one, I couldn’t take my eyes away from my dead family, and for two, I didn’t hold the same confidence.

Without waiting for the service to finish, I dropped Brandon’s hand and walked towards the final resting place of the only people I loved and blew them a final kiss.

“Look after them Billy. I love you all. Forever.”

Dove

An erotic thriller by D H Sidebottom

After her mother abandoned her when she was just fourteen, Dove fled the only life she’d known with her younger sister, Serenity, frightened that the authorities would tear them both apart.

Leaving behind a life of poverty and constant hardship with the group of traveller’s she had grown up with, Dove has no choice but to turn to a life of debauchery and prostitution to feed their bellies and provide them with shelter and security.

Span forwards ten years and life is so very different. Dove, now a world famous, high class escort receives a job that will change her life forever.

Her once best friend and fellow traveller, Flick O’Kane, now a billionaire Hollywood star, hires Dove to accompany him to a charity ball, unaware just who exactly this premium whore really is.