Leave it to the sweetest boyfriend on Earth to make sure I could eat my fill when I returned to him.
A warm resolution tightened my chest as I made a beeline toward the guy I should have wanted above all others.
He was right. That contract probably wasn’t legally binding. No more hesitating. Tonight, I was going to give him what he wanted. What he deserved. Forget Dad’s stupid con—
“We need to talk.” My father appeared out of nowhere, his face as grim as Mama’s mausoleum stone. And he completely blocked out my view of Lukas.
Oh, geez. Not this again.
Maybe I could have handled an argument with Dad two glasses of champagne ago. But my head was all fuzzy, and that delicious plate of food in Lukas’s hand was so close to being achieved.
So instead of explaining the apparently foreign concept of a woman having agency over her own body, I went into pampered-Southern-daughter mode.
“Oh, Dad, Luk was just joking. Please don’t do this,” I wheedled. “You can reprimand me as much as you want tomorrow. It’s my birthday. Let me have tonight.”
“Yes, it’s your birthday.” My father’s expression remained unchanged.
He tended to drink too much at my annual galas, but tonight his words came out crisp and precise, without any slurring. Or joviality. “You’re twenty-one now. That’s exactly why we must talk.”
He took me by the arm, and this time he didn’t give me a chance to protest before dragging me back up the stairs to his office.
CHAPTER 3
STEPHANIE
I awoke face down in a cold, dark room. At least I thought it was a room. The dark surrounding me was so absolute and black, I couldn’t see anything. Not even shadows.
But I assumed I had to be in a room. The frigid air didn’t have any movement. It just covered me like a cold, wet blanket.
A literal cold, wet blanket. I found that out when a few icy drips of water hit the backs of my arms.
What the…?
I lifted my heavy, aching head and crooked an arm to pull what turned out to be a towel from my back.
Pain!
I cried out when a terrible, hot, stinging pain lit up the entirety of my back.
My Intro to Anthropology professor had been right. Humans were just a few DNA steps away from animals, and we often reverted to our primordial instincts when scared or wounded.
I couldn’t form words, could only curl up in the fetal position, even though that did nothing whatsoever to lessen the wretched burn across my back.
There came the sound of a door opening. Then a voice said, “She’s awake. Let H know.”
A small flicking sound came out of the dark, and then another wave of pain hit me—this time in the form of eye-scalding white fluorescent light.
The voice sounded soft, almost feminine. But her hands roughly pulled me into a sitting position.
“Here, take this,” she said, pressing a pill to my dry, cracked lips. “It will help with the pain.”
Normally, I’d be asking all sorts of questions before taking some random stranger’s pills. But she had me at “help with the pain.” I immediately opened my mouth to receive a bitter, chalky pill.
Even better, she tipped a bottle of sweet liquid into my mouth to wash it down. I thought it might be Coke. But it had been so long since the non-diet version passed my lips, I could no longer tell the difference between any of the brands.
It didn’t matter. I guzzled the sugary concoction down my dry throat until she tipped the bottle away from my mouth. “Careful. Don’t want you throwing up again.”
Again?
