Total pages in book: 86
Estimated words: 80919 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 405(@200wpm)___ 324(@250wpm)___ 270(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 80919 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 405(@200wpm)___ 324(@250wpm)___ 270(@300wpm)
Each time I did something for me, something that I wanted, my mother insinuated I was a willful girl and a whore.
Was a woman who lived on her own terms, selling her body? Was saying it was so, a way to keep those women down and discredit them? Was I willing to let that happen to me? Did I care what society said?
No, I didn’t. The only way I would be in good standing in society was if I married Luc, chained myself to a man who used me for a business deal, and just accepted that was all my life was ever going to be.
The more I thought about it, the less I found that acceptable. It was time for me to take control of my own life and live for me, not for society.
I thought it was the first time I considered wanting something that did not exist within the confines of my mother’s expectations. The opportunities were limitless for a young woman of means. I just had to decide what I wanted to do with my life.
Sitting there for an hour, staring at the woman who might have been a prostitute, I could only come up with a single answer. I had no idea what it would look like, but I wanted to live my life.
Live, not exist to serve the needs of others. Not to be solely a wife or a mother, but to experience everything life had to offer: challenges, struggles, victories, and defeat. I didn’t want to live in some bubble anymore, surrounded, both figuratively and literally, with endless shades of beige. My life needed color, and I intended to give it just that.
First thing I had to do was return.
Nowhere else in the world compared to New York, and I didn’t want to give up the Met, and the smaller galleries in Soho and Brooklyn.
Why should I have to? New York was massive. And how hard would it be to hide from Luc and my mother? The sad fact was that I didn’t want to leave New York. I would always be a true New Yorker. It was in my blood. All I wanted was out from under my mother’s thumb, and I didn’t want to replace her control with Luc’s.
New York was the most populated city in the country, and my mother stayed in a tiny block of the Upper East Side. Luc probably never left the Financial District. That gave me everywhere else.
I could find a place in the city and hide in plain sight. The closest I had ever come to freedom had been college, and even then, I’d had a dorm room but had rarely been allowed to stay there. Mother wanted me home every night, which was fine. I’d told myself it was a reasonable compromise, but now…
I needed that time. For most people, college was their first taste of freedom and how they became who they were meant to be. I needed to figure out who I was, what I wanted, and what I was capable of. I needed the chance to fail.
Thinking about what I was going to do next, I stood up, brushed the dirt from my dress, and wandered aimlessly through the gardens, looking to the statues for some inspiration.
Even if I did return to the city and made it on my own, it left one large gaping hole in my life.
Luc Manwarring.
Even after hearing everything he’d said in his office, I wanted him. I hated myself for it, but it was true. I missed him in a way I didn’t know was possible, that went bone deep.
A particular bronze statue caught my eye, and I headed toward it.
It was called First Love, and it was beautiful. Two figures sat next to each other, the more feminine one leaning on the chest of the more masculine one.
They were intertwined in an embrace, apparently completely absorbed in that intimate moment, like nothing happening outside of their own little world was relevant. As long as they had each other, nothing could touch them.
That was what I wanted, a man who saw me as an equal, who was as enraptured with me as I was with him.
Was that kind of love too much to ask for?
If I had been asked yesterday if Luc was capable of that connection, I would have laughed.
That was before he’d played the part of my dark prince and pulled me out of my mother’s clutches. The way we’d talked, the way he’d touched me, aiming to give pleasure instead of taking it… I just didn’t know.
Then I’d heard him with his father, and I no longer knew which Luc was the real one. Was he the sweet man who’d fed me chocolate and marshmallows, the lonely boy who’d grown up in a drafty boarding school, or the ruthless man who’d laughed about blackmailing my mother to win my hand and my father’s business deals?