A look I know all too well.
She is lost and wanting to be found.
I’ve been in this manor for a month after inheriting it, pacing its grand halls and empty rooms waiting for something I couldn’t name.
But now I know.
I want her.Chapter TwoBellaThere are a million places I’d like to be right now. My college apartment back in Spokane, celebrating the end of winter term with my best friend Lacey. My dad’s house in front of the fire, with my Kindle in my lap and a mug of tea in my hand. Or, even at the campus library where I work, checking in books, five shifts a week.
So, to be stuck ten miles from my dad’s place, when I was coming home three days early as a Christmas surprise, totally blows. But the snow started dumping buckets a few miles back and I knew I was screwed.
Thankfully, there’s a house up on the mountain ridge. While the single glow of light in an upstairs room chills me to some degree, it’s nowhere near as freezing as I’d be stuck in my car overnight.
I mean, I’d be more than frozen. I’d be dead. Which isn’t exactly how I want to ring in the new year.
Not that it will be rung in in some special way. I’ve never had a man to kiss as the clock strikes midnight and I have no reason this think this year will be any different.
Right now, so far as I can tell, I’m just lucky to be alive.
I pull my duffel bag over my shoulder before I don my gloves and zip up my winter parka. I lock the car and put the keys in my pocket. However, it is unlikely that anyone would come to steal the piece of crap.
What in the heck was I thinking? My spontaneity usually gets in the way of rational thought and this decision, to come here in the spur of the moment, is no exception.
My dad won’t be worried, since he didn’t even know I was coming in early. Although he’d be a basket case if he knew what I was up to. He knows the mountain like the back of his hand. He grew up in this tiny, barely-able-to-survive town of Hollow’s End, and so did I.
Most of the town struggled to find work now that the plans for the ski resort came to a grinding halt. The owner just decided it wasn’t going to be as profitable as he thought and left.
My dad felt the pain of that business mogul’s decision especially hard. He had bought new excavating equipment for his forest clearing company when the resort was going to be built. He had gotten loans to purchase the machines which he planned on paying off once the contracts were up and running.
But then the plans fell through, and my father’s now buried in debt. It breaks my heart that he can hardly pay his bills, so I want to make this Christmas especially good for him.
He loves Hollow’s End. He’s memorized the pass up and down. He’d know the snow conditions... and being the spontaneous woman I am, I didn’t pause long enough to consider them myself.
And now I’m here. Knocking on the biggest door I’ve ever seen. Everything about this place is foreboding and mysterious. It’s like the romance novel I read last semester for my literature class; a story set in a gothic castle, with a monster living inside and a princess locked inside a tower. That is until he takes her from prisoner to lover.
The story stirred something deep inside me. I remember lying in my bed, slipping my fingers beneath my panties, touching myself until I came, moaning as I imagined a monster taking me. Moving harder against my hand as I replayed the scenes from the book in my mind.
He pinned her against the wall, pushing up her dress and pulling her breasts into his mouth, gripping her bare ass as he took her hand and wrapped her fingers around his massive cock. She stroked him, and she tasted him. She moaned as he filled her so completely.
He was more than a man. He was a beast.
And I wanted him to capture me.
It felt wrong to be so turned on by such a threatening male, but maybe the fact that I’ve never been with a man at all has turned my innocence into something desperate.
My stomach is in knots as I wait for someone to answer.
The window on the massive door is inlaid with stained glass. The pattern is of red rose blossoms with thorns on the stem. It’s beautiful and so delicate, and for a moment my fear fades and I imagine a little old woman living in this grand home.
I tuck a loose hair behind my ear, fantasizing that instead of an unexpected rendezvous, that I will be welcomed with a kind smile. It’s probably more practical to dream of being granted a place to warm up until the storm passes. Which at the rate the snow is falling, might be a few days.