The Ceo's Angel

Chapter 2 Ashlynn

Warning mention of abuse, physical, s*xual, mental and emotional.

Ashlynn

What a grump. I can’t believe that’s what I am going to have to deal with for the next few months until the company can find a permanent solution. I can’t let his negativity get me down. No, I was the new and improved Ashlynn Walker. I was no longer a doormat, I was no longer someone that would be beat down physically, mentally or emotionally. Nope not anymore.

Keep telling yourself that girl and maybe it will stick one day. Daily affirmations, remember what your therapist said. Speak it into truth. Sighing, I kicked off my shoes as I entered my one-bedroom apartment, which wasn’t too shabby. It was on the top floor of the Bently apartment complex. It had its own balcony that I had decorated with Christmas lights, and it had the most important thing during a Colorado winter. Heating.

I walked to the kitchen and started on making some homemade hot chocolate. I also got ingredients out to make some Italian Wedding cookies and Chocolate Chip cookies. For the next hour, I baked and filled four thermoses with hot chocolate. As I baked the cookies I thought about how long it had taken me to get to where I am at today.

Three years ago I was newly married to who I thought was the love of my life. Ben, who I had met at the hotel I was working at. I was working at the front desk at Hotel Lemonde. An upscale hotel that catered to the very rich.

Ben was the assistant to Harry Kilmore, one of the richest men in Colorado. He owned almost all the commercial real estate in Aurora and Englewood. He was trying to conquer Denver at the moment, which was why he was at Hotel Lemonde.

While Ben worked during the day, he would stop by the front desk and flirt with me. I was twenty-two and he was a sophisticated thirty-five. He was truly smooth with his flattery. I fell hard and fast. He wined and dined me while he was at the Lemonde. We both caught feelings, and we married down at city hall. It was dumb on his part because he made massive amounts more money than I did, and he never made me sign a prenup. It was dumb on my part, because I didn’t know the real Ben Newsome. Right away he wanted me to quit my job and stay home. His reasoning was he wanted to get me pregnant right away, and he wanted a housewife. I refused at first, which started our first fight, but then I relented, because I loved him.

Home for him was in Boulder, Colorado, so I packed up my stuff and moved to my father's consternation. He didn’t like Ben, especially because of the way we married. He felt it was sneaky. We didn’t tell anyone. Our witnesses were two people we pulled off of the street before we walked into City Hall.

It didn’t last six months before I found the phone numbers on napkins. Lipstick marks on his work shirt collars, and open condom wrappers in his car, and jacket pockets.

I confronted him and he said I was delusional. That those wrappers could have been there from before we got married, or from us. That the lipstick marks were just from friends that he had hugged. The phone numbers he said he ignored. Then why keep them?

I secretly stayed on birth control because I couldn’t bring myself to have a child with him, if he was going to cheat on me. I needed a way out, so I started gathering evidence. I took video of me cleaning out his jacket pockets and, low and behold, more condom wrappers and numbers. I took pictures of his stained shirt collars. I followed him for two days and took pictures of him making out with different women in dance clubs and restaurants. I rigged the house with tiny cameras in case he brought his bimbos home while I was out. And he did. It hurt at first, but as time went on I became numb to the pain.

The first time he hit me was when I first tried to leave. I stupidly waited for him to come home one night because I just had to give him my piece of mind. He walked through the door, saw my packed bags and looked at me with an angry expression.

“What’s all this?”

“I can’t do this anymore. I can’t be the wife that gets cheated on. I want someone faithful, someone that only wants me,” I had yelled with tears streaming down my face. I wanted him to see how hurt I was.

He laughed. He f*cking laughed.

“You really think someone is going to want your dumpy fat a*s? You’re lucky I even looked twice at you. But you were just so f*cking easy and eager to please. I’ll admit you give great f*cking head, especially since I am the one that showed you what I liked, but anything else, you’re like a dead fish that just lays there.”

That confused me, because I always rode him, he liked to watch my t*ts bounce. I was the one that suggested different positions, but he refused.

“No, you aren’t going anywhere. Now go make me some f*cking dinner. And make sure it’s edible, because the sh*t you’ve been cooking lately has no flavor.”

Total f*cking lie on his part. Every meal I cooked he praised how delicious it was. And I know my food is good. I was raised by my father who was a chef that worked at a five-star restaurant. He taught me everything I knew.

“No, Ben. I am leaving. You don’t love me like you said you did, and I deserve to be loved.”

He backhanded me for that comment.

“I have given you everything. This house, your car, the clothes on your f*cking back.”

“I’ll give you the clothes. You’re right. You bought most of those, but the house is yours, and so is the car. It’s in your name. I left every piece of jewelry you ever gave me, including my wedding and engagement rings in our room. I am only taking the clothes I came with, the jewelry I came with and all my important papers,” I gritted out. My lip was swollen from his hit. I refused to cry anymore.

“You aren’t going f*cking anywhere.”

He charged me, grabbed me, and threw me over his shoulder. He stomped to our bedroom where he forced himself on me. He smacked me a couple of times while fighting him until I was dazed and laid there like he accused me of before. He tied me to the bed for three days. He took my phone and every other electronic that was in the house, so I couldn’t reach out to anyone. I was defeated. For the next year, I was his slave. He changed all the locks on the doors so they only opened from the outside. He put bars on the windows. He truly made our home into a prison.

He didn’t hide his affairs anymore. No, he brought them home and made me watch them. I never forgot about the tiny cameras. I knew they backed up to my cloud every twelve hours, because that was how I had scheduled it. And I made sure the batteries still worked every three months. So while he did everything to me for a year, I had the evidence I needed for divorce and to put him behind bars.

One day he had forgotten to take his phone to work. I called the police immediately. And finally, after a year of torture, I was saved. I turned over all the evidence, the videos, the recordings. It took another year of trial, and now he is in jail. I was granted a divorce and I got half of everything. I didn’t live off that money though. No, I had it in a trust for my future children. Later, when I have them, I will add them to the trust.

Because of the exposure I had gotten from the trial, I made a lot of friends, most of them women, and a lot of them had very influential husbands.

I was even a personal assistant for one of those wives for six months before they left for the winter to go to Florida. So, when I heard about the CEO of Jtech needing a personal assistant, I jumped on that chance. I first moved back to Denver, got my little luxury apartment and put in my resume. I had only been back for two weeks before I got the call for an interview. I had asked if I could come in after my therapist appointment since I would already be close. It worked out great. I wish I would have known what a jerk the boss was though. But it was okay. I have obviously dealt with worse, and I was going to kill him with kindness, hot chocolate, cookies, and holiday cheer.