The Devil Inside: A Paranormal Romance

This short story is a paranormal romance. It follows long-time friends as they become lovers.

Twenty-five-year-old businessman Wade Scott knows he shouldn’t be attracted to financial services consultant Jo Chesterton. He’d known that right from the beginning. When she was sixteen, he was twenty-three, and as he watched her grow up with an alcoholic mum, he kept telling himself she needed an older brother, not an older lover.

Eighteen-year-old Jo Chesterton and her mum are struggling financially. Because her mother had been swindled out of her investment firm four years ago, she needs Jo more than ever now. The power had been cut off in their unit, and for both Jo and her mum, money has become tight.

Wade is the man Jo has grown up crushing over, and now he finally notices she's a woman, not a girl. They sleep together, and Jo feels as though the world is not such a bad place. After they make love, Wade comments there is a position available at the same investment firm her mother had lost—the same firm he now controls. He offers Jo the job.

But on Jo’s first day, she realizes things aren’t as she thought they would be. She has had her financial services certificate for a year, and she thought she’d be working with Wade himself. Instead, she finds herself working as his receptionist, answering his phone, maybe even making his coffee. And when she stands at Wade’s door, suddenly feeling as though he’d taken advantage of her, the strange presence of a cockatiel in his office signals that Wade himself is not all right.