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CHAPTER 8

AURORA

M inty foam gathered at the corners of my mouth as I stopped brushing my teeth and just stared at my reflection. I didn’t look any different. Same weird reddish-brown hair and boring blue eyes. I leaned over the sink to take a closer look. Nope. My skin was its usual pale complexion. My cheeks especially didn’t have a rosy tint.

It was a little disappointing.

All those television shows and books that talked about women having a beautiful glow after sex were freaking lying. Granted, I technically didn’t have sex with Roman last night but it sure as hell felt like I did. At least it was the closest to sex I’d ever come. After such a traumatic and emotional experience, you would think I’d at least have gotten a dewy glow to my cheeks.

After spitting the toothpaste in the sink and rinsing out my mouth, I looked again.

My lips were tinted a darker shade of pink and they were slightly fuller.

Although being kissed senseless while pinned against the wall by a terrifyingly dangerous, albeit handsome, man was hardly the way I wanted to achieve a fashionably sexy pout each morning.

I finished buttoning my white school uniform blouse and straightened my blue and gold plaid skirt. I couldn’t wait to burn this uniform the moment I graduated.

I opened the bathroom door a crack and peered into the empty hallway. I listened for several moments for any signs of life. There was only silence. I quickly scurried across the hall to my bedroom and shut and locked the door. It would have been a miracle if either my mother or stepfather were up at this early hour, but I didn’t want to take the chance.

Last night, neither of them thought to check on me after Roman left but I could hear their drunken argument through the heating vent. My bedroom happened to be over the living room. From the snatches of conversation I could hear, they were more concerned with their money and their social reputation than they were over what their daughter had just endured because of their actions.

I knew my mother always resented my existence, but to be slapped in the face with just how little she cared was devastating. I was her only child, for heaven’s sake! How could she just let a grown adult man take me up to my bedroom and not have done anything to stop it?

My phone pinged. The screen lit up with a text message from my best friend Eleanor.

Gotcha. See you soon.

Usually I spent the morning practicing my piano, although I typically had to engage the soft pedal to lower the volume of the sound since my mother often complained of the early morning ’racket’ making her hangover worse. Not today. I wanted to get as far away from this house and them as possible. I had texted Eleanor about meeting in the library at school an hour before class to go over our English assignment.

Plus it would be quiet and empty, so I could tell Eleanor about Roman without risking one of the school’s busybodies overhearing. The last thing I needed were rumors circulating about me. I had managed to spend the last few years surviving secondary school by keeping my head down and focusing on schoolwork and my piano. I didn’t want to change that now that I only had two months to go.

I headed over to my bed to pack up the rest of my books before leaving.

I stopped and stared at the rumpled green bedcover.

Last night.

Roman.

His hands.

His mouth.

I took a deep steadying breath. After he left, I had curled up into a ball and cried. It was a surreal moment. I wasn’t angry or sad or scared, I was just… emotional. Like all of it was too much to take in. My parents’ embezzlement. Their betrayal. Roman singling me out as a tool for his revenge. My response to his touch. My first orgasm with a guy. My first sexual experience really. It was too much to even try to think about then. Or now.

I was sure his threat about a next time was just that, a threat. Something designed to rattle my parents more than me probably. Roman didn’t realize that hurting me wouldn’t hurt my parents. In fact, they were probably happy he took his anger out on me and not them. They had, after all, literally thrown me to the wolf!

The fact that he was an incredibly exciting, handsome, and sexy wolf who made my insides turn to ash was beside the point. I needed to stop thinking about him—about what happened. He’d only done it to spite my stepfather.

A man like Roman Winterbourne was not interested in someone like me, not really. I was probably just a silly schoolgirl to him, a means to an end. And I knew that, I did. Really. It wasn’t like I’d be writing his name with a heart around it in my notebook today. The man may be handsome and sophisticated and sexy and way hotter than any of the boys at my school, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t also arrogant, domineering, dangerous, and scary as fuck.

I should be glad I would never see him again.

He had made his point last night.

My stepfather would return the money.

I’d move to Paris to attend university and the whole thing would be forgotten.

Well, not forgotten. The memory of his touch was burned onto my skin, and I doubted I would ever have another birthday that didn’t remind me of last night, but at least there would be a channel of water between us. I’d be on another continent. Away from my horrible stepfather and my terrible mother, but more important, far, far away from Roman Winterbourne.

I opened my bedroom door a crack and peeked out to be on the safe side. The hallway was empty. I grabbed the worn leather messenger bag I got once in a tiny shop in SoHo to the horror of my mother and hustled down the front staircase and out the door, not even bothering to lock it as I headed the few blocks down the street to my school.

I waved to Eleanor as we both approached the school entrance.

“What about Bella?” asked Eleanor.

I transferred the bag I was carrying to my other arm as I opened the side door to our school. “A bit Twilight -y, don’t you think?” I responded.

Eleanor had always hated her name with a passion. She was trying to come up with a new name before leaving for university in the fall.

She wrinkled her nose. “You have a point. You’re so lucky to have a cool name.”

“Aurora is not a cool name. It’s weird and no one ever spells it right.”

“Yeah, but no one calls you Aurora other than your parents. Everyone else calls you Rory, which is a cool name.”

There was one other person who called me Aurora.

Roman.

You’re mine now, Aurora. Don’t fight me on this, or next time I won’t be so nice.

I clenched my abdominal muscles to kill the butterflies in my stomach that started fluttering at the memory. I had to stop thinking about him, about last night.

Eleanor looked me over as we tossed our bags onto the smooth oak table in the back of the library. “You look like crap.”

“Thanks,” I quipped. “I didn’t get much sleep last night.”

Eleanor fished out a Nescafé bottled mocha from her designer Prada backpack and cracked it open. “Here, chug this.” After I took the bottle, she continued, “What’s the matter, did the skinny stick prance you around late last night pretending to celebrate your birthday in front of her friends?”

Skinny stick was Eleanor’s nickname for my mother.

I wiped a drop of coffee off my lip and nodded. “Yes, but that wasn’t the half of it.”

I looked around to make sure we were alone. The only other person here was the librarian, who was over eighty years old and behind the information desk across the room.

I sat down across from Eleanor and whispered, “You have to promise not to tell a soul what I’m about to tell you.”

Eleanor leaned in and matched my whisper. “I promise. What happened?”

I then told her what happened with Roman last night. Mostly. I shared everything with Eleanor but I couldn’t bring myself to talk about everything that happened, especially the way he’d spanked me and I’d shamelessly liked it.

“So he kissed you?”

“Yes.”

“And you both were alone in your bedroom?”

“Yup.”

“Did he say anything?”

I’m going to delight in hearing your cries for mercy as I whip you over and over again with my leather belt until your entire existence is dependent on the pain and pleasure only I can give you.

My cheeks burned with the memory. I peeled a section of the mocha label off the glass bottle. “Not really. Just how he was mad at my stepfather for taking the money and that he hoped it pissed him and my mother off that he was with me alone in my bedroom.”

Eleanor scoffed as she snatched the bottle from my hand and took a swig. “Shows you how much he knows! More like the skinny stick was pissed it wasn’t her the bastard duke was snogging against the wall.”

I was keeping my face averted as I gathered up the tiny, shredded pieces of label, but now I looked up. “The bastard duke?”

Her eyes widened. “Oh, my God. Don’t tell me you don’t know that’s what they call Roman Winterbourne?”

“How do you even know who Roman is? Since when do you care about stuffy CEOs?”

“Um, since when they’re hot as hell and uber-rich with a bad boy reputation.”

Eleanor picked up her phone and furiously typed before showing me the screen. There was a headline in bold, Bastard Duke Boldly Defies Monarchy , from an article published a few years ago about Roman attending some fancy event. The accompanying photo was him looking insanely James Bond-good in a well-fitted tuxedo.

Warming up to the subject, she leaned in further. “I forgot you only came to England five years ago and aren’t monarchy mad like me. So here’s the deal, it was a huge scandal like thirty years ago. Roman’s mother was a maid in the Duke of Winterbourne’s household. He tossed her out when he knocked her up.”

“What the hell? This is like an old bodice ripper. I didn’t think they still did that sort of thing.”

Eleanor rolled her eyes. “This is the aristocracy we’re talking about. I wouldn’t be surprised if some of those old tossers still wish they could behead their wives instead of having to divorce them. Anyway, Roman’s mom died soon after childbirth.”

“Aw. That’s so sad.” My mother may have been a cold-hearted, selfish bitch who never cared for me but that didn’t mean I wasn’t sad to learn when someone else was deprived of a mother’s love, even someone like Roman.

Eleanor leaned back and smirked. “She got her revenge. Even though the duke refused to acknowledge the baby was his, she put the name Winterbourne on the birth certificate, giving her baby the surname of the duke’s title, just to spite him.”

“Is that even allowed?”

She shrugged. “I guess. So his half-brother, who was born only a few weeks before him, is the super yummy and equally rich Richard Payne, the current Duke of Winterbourne. According to the gossip websites, the men hate… like really hate … each other.”

“Why?”

Eleanor took another sip of the mocha coffee we were sharing. “Probably because Richard inherited the title and all the money while Roman had to make his own way in the world. None of his mom’s relatives would take him in so he grew up in an orphanage.”

I shook my head. “Could this story get more British? It’s like Henry the Eighth meets Oliver Twist .”

“Right? So anyway, apparently Roman is some business genius who made tons of money investing and now he’s just as uber-rich as his brother, but without the title. Or, well, without a real title. Everyone calls him the Bastard Duke—although probably not to his face.”

I ripped the rest of the label off the bottle. Somehow learning about Roman’s early childhood humanized him. Up until now he was just this larger-than-life dark figure who appeared suddenly in my life and disappeared just as quickly. I had almost convinced myself it didn’t happen. Now learning more about him made it seem even more real. Terrifyingly so.

Roman Winterbourne is a man.

A real man.

A real, dangerous man with money and connections.

And he was in my bedroom kissing me last night.

Spanking me.

And worse, he threatened to return.

I gave myself a mental shake as noise from the corridor outside the library started to rise in volume. Students were arriving. Classes would begin soon. It was time to put the dark fantasy of Roman Winterbourne out of my mind and get back to my real life.

Just then a scratchy voice announced over the intercom system, “Will Rory Barlowe please come to the office.”

What could that be about?