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I will admit, I spent more time than usual in the shower with my handheld last night after he locked eyes with me as I left the penthouse. I felt a tap dance start down between my legs and it didn’t give up until I found relief as the warm water pulsed against my throbbing clit. Now he’s standing here, arms crossed, and I wonder where he got the shiner because it wasn’t there when I saw him last night.
Sweat breaks out on my forehead and my palms turn clammy as I make a ‘T’ with my hands and look around at my rag-tag team of volunteers and residents from the Welsh Children’s Center.
I grew up with so many advantages. My mother taught me to always be mindful of others and because of her, our holidays were often spent at soup kitchens and shelters, including the Welsh Children’s center for displaced youth, exchanging our time for someone else’s comfort.
Over the years, the Children’s Center took hold of my heart thanks to a little red-headed boy with glasses and a lisp, who one Christmas morning when I was fifteen, there to help pass out gifts, that I was the prettiest girl he’d ever seen.
Now, I volunteer as head of their outreach department. Technically, I’m employed there, but I negotiated a salary of one dollar just to keep things above board for their non-profit paperwork. I also mentor and tutor several young people on math, life skills, career prep…anything and everything I can offer.
“I’ll be back. Just practice throwing,” I say to my team moving toward the sidelines, my stomach doing this wiggly, clutching thing like it did when I went to my first One Direction concert back when I was all glasses and braces and self-doubt.
I’ve never been attracted to the type of men in my father’s world. Bad boys. Dangerous men. That fascination has never been my thing. They are not my type. But, truth is, I have never found my type.
In fact, I promised myself at a very young age that if and when I decided to pursue any sort of romantic life, I would be choosing from the right side of the law.
A doctor, maybe. Teacher, possibly. Maybe an astrophysicist.
Morally gray was not going to be my favorite color.
I grew up in that kind of world and as much as I love my father and my family, I would never wish that life on my own kids. You grow up too fast. See too much. Even when they try to shield you from most of it, kids know.
My childhood was a frenzy of mobsters and gangsters coming and going at all hours. We had security guards and systems but that didn’t stop my father from getting two bullets in his chest when I was ten and my brother coming home beaten to within an inch of his life when some shady deal went south and he had no back up.
Although none of that stopped him from loving that life. He moved to Chicago to branch out the family business, and he becomes more entrenched in the darkness as the years go by.
I told myself my life would be orderly. Charities and truthful 1040’s. W-2 jobs with health benefits and 401K’s.
Unfortunately, none of that matters to my father, who is applying an inordinate amount of guilt and pressure for me to accept an engagement to one of his old business partner’s sons.
Alex Sokolov.
Ugg.
Arranged marriages in my family are as old as time itself and even my mother is not backing me up on this one. I can’t blame her. She had a small stroke a year ago and her mind hasn’t ever quite been the same. She sees everything through rose colored glasses now and even though she can carry out most of her daily activities like she used to, she’s just a little left of center most of the time.
I’d love to go to college, start my own life but in our family, the women don’t leave until you are married and right now, working at the center and keeping track of my father’s finances leaves me no time for my own dreams.
I’ve used every stalling technique in my arsenal to put off this arrangement with Alex, but next weekend there’s a special ‘dinner’ planned at our house and, reading between the lines, I’m pretty sure it’s going to be an engagement party.
I do my best to push away the thought of being a sort of broodmare, sold off to secure the family fortune or whatever, and narrow my eyes at the magnificent if not somewhat frightening Cyrus Saman marching my way in the sunlight like a walking monolith.
He’s six foot seven inches of thick muscle and darkness. He has the jutting brow but it’s balanced with a chin dimple like a Neanderthal Kirk Douglas.
He’s hard edges packed into worn Levi’s and a gray t-shirt filled out with mile wide pectoral muscles and thighs like tree trunks. His head is in proportion to his massive body and is topped with dark hair that makes my fingers twitch wishing I could reach out and see if it’s as soft as it looks.
“Are you…where is Niko Farkas daughter? Niko sent me,” he says in a voice that could melt a diamond, and I curse at my Judas nipples for tingling and standing up front and center, poking through my jersey.
“I’m his daughter. Anna.”
“No, you are fucking not.” His pinches the bridge of his nose for a moment mumbling something I can’t make out.
The hairs on the back of my neck prickle as he eyes me like I’m the creamy center of his favorite eclair. His day-old beard is obnoxiously sexy, as is the crooked angle of his nose and the glint of white teeth behind annoyingly kissable lips.
“I know who you are.” I toss the softball into my mitt a couple times, snapping my gum against my teeth. “You know how to play, I take it?”
“Yeah. State champs all through high school. Played all four years at college.”
“Why didn’t you go pro?”
