Total pages in book: 55
Estimated words: 51889 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 259(@200wpm)___ 208(@250wpm)___ 173(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 51889 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 259(@200wpm)___ 208(@250wpm)___ 173(@300wpm)
CHAPTER TEN
Anastasia
I stared at the man slumped over the kitchen table, then frowned, looking around. Expensive looking but different from anything I had ever seen before. It was a very modern house. Not at all the style I was used to, back in Russia or at the school I had spent most of my life in.
The man sleeping in what looked like a very uncomfortable position… he was something I was definitely not used to.
I looked around for my bag. I could escape now, if I was quick about it, I realized. Simply get dressed and steal his car. How far would that get me? Maybe I should try and see what Vice had to offer first… but if I was wrong about him. If he was a villain and not a savior… I would have played right into his hands.
His very large, somehow appealingly masculine hands.
I was probably going to be on the run for the rest of my life, with or without him. What was a few more days? But deep down I believed that he did not want to hurt me. Quite the contrary, in fact.
He was almost… doting. Not quite the way Sister Margaret had been when I caught ill that time as a child. My favorite nun had sat by my side constantly throughout the illness, tending me, pressing cool cloth
s and affectionate kisses to my fevered brow.
Sometimes when I tried to imagine my own mother, I saw Sister Margaret instead. Though I did have a photograph of my mother in a small gold locket, something I wore constantly, even to this day.
I frowned, and then spied something I did want. Coffee. Half a pot of it. I walked over to it and sniffed.
I must have made a sound of disappointment because in an instant, Vice was awake and standing behind me. I nearly dropped the pot of coffee in my hand. How on earth did the man move so fast?
“What is it? What’s wrong?”
I could feel the heat coming off of him as I slowly turned around. I looked up at his face, somehow even more handsome with his sleepy, hooded eyes. The way he was looking at me, with that intense laser focus, made me feel a bit weak in the knees.
Was I crushing on my… kidnapper?
I didn’t really know his intentions. Who he was. And I hadn’t had an actual crush on a human being before, since men were kept so far away from the students that it was almost laughable. And I was watched even more carefully than the other girls, who went away on vacations and spent summers in the South of France, often returning back to school with stories of stolen kisses, and sometimes more.
So I had some second hand knowledge of what went on between boys and girls. But nothing first hand. And certainly nothing to do with an actual adult male, though a few of my friends swooned over older men, none had yet dared to tangle with one.
Oh yes, a few of my convent friends were boy crazy, to say the least. I suspected that in a few cases it had something to do with why they were sent to the convent in the first place.
But me? Not so much as a kiss. I had never even held hands. I was so unused to being around men that it still made me nervous to see them walking around like normal humans. Particularly one so overwhelming male as Vice.
My father took the whole ‘remaining a virgin until marriage’ thing very, very seriously.
A few old movie stars to get dreamy over? Sure. Rock and pop stars the girls played in their rooms at a very, verrry soft volume? Maybe a little. I did love to dance, even though I feared I wasn’t very good at it. I felt self conscious doing some of the moves the other girls seemed to embrace with ease.
So yes, I was familiar with the pangs of a crush, if only with someone who was so far out of reach they might have well been on the moon.
But this was a flesh and blood man, most likely dangerous, and definitely standing way too close to me. And for some reason, I did not want him to step back.
I swallowed and tried to sound nonchalant.
“The coffee. It’s stale.”
“That’s because I made it in the middle of the night,” he said softly, taking the pot from my hand. He stood there a moment longer, just looking at me, before I chickened out. I stepped back and watched as he took the coffee pot to the sink. He busied himself rinsing the pot and refilling it with cold water. I didn’t move until he came back and stared at me, this time with the hint of a smile on his way too handsome face.