Total pages in book: 54
Estimated words: 49114 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 246(@200wpm)___ 196(@250wpm)___ 164(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 49114 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 246(@200wpm)___ 196(@250wpm)___ 164(@300wpm)
Elaina
It had taken me almost the whole five years that I was there to actually make friends. Maybe because I was not like the others. I wasn’t the daughter of prestige as the rest of my peers were and it showed.
I certainly didn’t have a mother, or a nanny back home who cared enough to send me care packages at least once a month. I absolutely wasn’t getting weekend visits from dear old mom, or ever flown out somewhere for a holiday.
I spent the holidays shut away at school, the only one left there like the orphan I had long grown to feel like, because no, I wasn’t at all like the others.
Daughters of moneyed backgrounds who spent more in a day on garbage than my mother thought I needed to survive on in a month.
Of course it wasn’t hard to tell that I did not belong and I had long stopped wondering where she’d gotten the money. It could’ve been from dad, I’m still not sure. I thought for sure he’d paid her off in full some years back when she hit a dry patch.
You see, I am the daughter of another sordid affair that mom had had when she was a year younger than me. She’d seduced my dad into bed with her after lying about her age, only to use that against him to suck him dry once she fell pregnant.
It was because of her that he had no love for me, his daughter. She’d used me against him like a battering ram, and in order to keep his secret hidden he’d paid and paid well, not that I’d ever seen any of it.
I was nothing but a hindrance and a means to an end for Lisa. So the first chance she got she’d packed me off to boarding school which my dad most likely paid for. Their dirty little secret!
Now I was aging out so to speak. My eighteenth birthday came and went a few weeks ago and I was no longer my father’s responsibility. Mom had signed some kind of confidentiality clause in order to get all that she had out of him, or so she’s said.
So after I became an adult that threat no longer hung over his head and I’m guessing he was just as thrilled as her to be rid of me.
But, she needed someone else to bankroll her pretentious lifestyle and had set her sights on this man and his family. I felt so bad for his wife when I read the stories.
It seemed like every day there was something new, no doubt Lisa’s doing. She’s very good at that. She’d sabotage her own mother to make a buck. Not that her mother had been any different from her when she was alive.
And now she’d dragged me here to be part of her sick twisted scheme and I was too dumb to back out. I’m eighteen after all. I no longer have to follow her rules.
I have my diploma and can work my way through college like so many others before me, and had planned to before her call.
I have excellent grades, and a partial scholarship. And why didn’t I get the full scholarship that I deserve? Because my mother has made the whole world think that we were made of money. So once again I have been screwed by Lisa.
Come to think of it, maybe she did that on purpose. Maybe that was her sick entitled way of ensuring that I never have a way out; that I would have to rely on her in the future. And here I am.
Upstairs in the overly posh room that the maid had led me to I looked at myself in the bathroom mirror. What had he seen when he looked at me? Why was that my first thought?
Why was my heart still racing out of my chest uncontrollably for a man that I’d only just met? I know Luke Carstairs, at the age of twenty-nine, is some kind of hotshot businessman. I’d read the few sentences, which were all the newspapers had on him, but there were never any pictures. I can almost see why.
No one meeting the man without knowing the name or where he came from would mistake him for anything other than what he was. Though I must say he’s a bit confusing at first glance.
He has the body of a fighter, I know because my roommate loves those UFC shows and those guys are buff. He wore his black hair cut low, and his eyes, they were a piercing blue with specks of ink black, and seemed to look right through me.
He’s gorgeous, the kind of gorgeous that make silly girls like me weave dreams in their simple minds. And the kind of rich that I want nothing to do with, not that he’d have me.