Page 89 of Vengefully Matched

Agatha stared at her, blue eyes unblinking for a few seconds and then narrowing, as though trying to sort through a complicated puzzle.

“I’m sorry, do I know you?” She stared, and Priscilla bit back the scream building in her throat, swallowing her emotions, the way she’d practiced for years. Agatha continued, “I have the strangest feeling that I do, but I just can’t place you.” Her lips curled into a smirk, eyes raking up and down Priscilla’s body appreciatively. “I’ll be honest. I wouldn’t hate getting to know you. I don’t really do this, but would you like to come in?”

CHAPTER 29 Agatha

The sound of a bird—a thrush, perhaps—had woken her halfway that morning. Gradually, she became aware of other things. A creek trickling steadily, the noise slipping through the window, which was cracked open, not too wide, just enough to let in sound.

Cool mountain air, and the soft whir of a fan above her. The feel of clean bedsheets, the pillow her face was partially buried into. The slat of sunlight streaming onto the white comforter when she opened her eyes halfway. The warm glow of the wood panels of the cabin when she opened them all the way, sat up, and yawned.

God, her head ached. Either her allergies were acting up offseason or she’d had more than the two glasses of wine she remembered drinking last night while putting the finishing touches on her research proposal.

She checked the clock. It was already past 9 a.m.

Fuck. She only had the cabin for another month, and if she didn’t get this proposal done on time, there was a good chance the university wouldn’t invite her back as an adjunct for the fall semester.

And if that happened, she’d be royally screwed. Subletting the room would only float her for so long. She had a few months’ rent that could take her until the semester, but only if she had a job. Without that job, she’d have to take up waitressing or resort to running a foot fetish camgirl site.

She did have nice toes, so there was that at least.

She wished, not for the first time, that she could teach the sort of specialty electives she had loved so much as a student, but here she was, slogging along with her work on research, assisting the professor of Rhetorical Applications of Grammar. Which, sure, sounded like it could be fun for an English nerd like her, but ended up being a snooze fest at the hands of Dr. Ventura Calliope Hogglesbury, who apparently believed that putting undergraduate and graduate students alike to sleep was crucial to the study of grammatical argument.

It was not Agatha’s favorite part of the job, but it was the only way she could get a foot in the door at the University of Havenwall.

And now, here she was, in the cabin for the rest of the month, determined to get done with this alarmingly boring research contribution. Then she could dress up her CV enough to convince them to keep her on again in the fall for as large a load as possible of English 101.

This was not how she’d seen her life going, and when she shut her eyes against the beautiful morning sunshine, she could almost imagine a life where she was powerful, successful, and going to work every day to do exciting things that she loved.

Maybe in that life, she’d have something other than a steady rotation of nice jeans and pastel flannels that at least set her apart from some of the other adjuncts in their colorful hue.

But no, in this one, here she was, in a cabin… somewhere.

That was odd. She’d certainly been here for what, at least a few days? And this was the cabin she always went to, wasn’t it? And yet here she was, unable to think for one second about where the hell she might be.

The creek sounded familiar, and the bed felt right. The only thing uncanny was where she fit into it all. Maybe she really had hit the wine harder than she’d intended. She had a vague memory of watching TV and drinking, curled up on the couch by the fireplace, but she couldn’t for the life of her remember when she’d gone to bed or what she’d been watching.

To calm herself, she remembered that leatherback turtles had survived every mass extinction, and that sea turtles had been swimming in the oceans for one hundred million years. Surely she could survive a few too many glasses of wine.

Agatha decided that this must be the work of an accidental hangover, and she reasoned that, schedule or not, she really could afford to take a few more hours of sleep. It would be nice if she had some sort of magic wand to wave, to make the feeling go away. But magic wasn’t real, and she was an overworked and underpaid English professor, not a fairy princess.

Agatha shut her eyes and let the world fall away for a moment, hair against the pillowcase, lulled to sleep by the chirping of the birds and the tinkle of the stream cutting through the woods. It really was quite lovely here. Shaking herself awake, she couldn’t put her finger on what she needed so badly to remember. It must be stress about her work.

So she got up, worked through breakfast and lunch with the desperation of someone who knew there was absolutely no way to catch up to her deadline completely, and yet wanted so much to try.

A knock at the front interrupted her train of thought, and she sighed, rubbing at the crease between her eyebrows and getting up to answer.

The woman at her door was an unexpected distraction, and not one she could really afford, having already let herself sleep in far too late.

But she couldn’t even remember the last time she’d gotten laid. Agatha frowned. Come to think of it, she also couldn’t remember the last time she’d gone out on a date. Or the name of her last boyfriend. Or girlfriend?

Goodness, this deadline was really crushing her brain.

Still, opportunity had come knocking, and who was she to turn down a tall, slender girl in a black cropped sweater that looked like it cost Agatha’s monthly salary, tailored black pants that had to have been made specifically for her, and bright red nails and lips with the potential to be oh so beautiful and oh so cruel.

Agatha felt as though she knew this woman. For a moment, her brain misfired, and she almost called her Cherry, but the woman said her name was Priscilla. Perhaps that sense of trust and familiarity was just the intensity of the attraction. And perhaps that was why she threw caution to the wind and invited a complete stranger into her cabin.

“I’m Agatha. Would you like to come in?”

The woman eyed her carefully at the repeated invitation, brown eyes wide. She had a few little specks of amber—no, gold, it was gold—in her eyes, and the edges of them, just around the rims, were gold too. She’d never seen anything like that, or rather, for some reason, she felt like she had. Agatha blinked, trying to recall why those strange, enchanting eyes felt like home.