Page 61 of Twisted Proposal

"…after class." Artem's comment shattered my panic attack.

"What?" I stammered as he entered the bedroom and settled on the bed, prepared to watch me dress.

"I have meetings and errands today, but I'll drop you at school. We'll have dinner tonight."

"I can't tonight," I lied, scrambling for excuses.

"It wasn't a question," he replied, eyebrow arched. "Your last class ends at five. I'll finish by eight. Don't keep me waiting, princess."

He pressed his lips to mine and abandoned me, stunned and struggling for breath in his bedroom.

He knew my schedule.

He'd stocked clothes in my size.

The cage door slammed shut.

I would never escape him.

CHAPTER20

VIKTORIA

"Ms. Zat-a-sevo," the professor shouted, still butchering my last name.

His face reddened and twisted.

Several people around me looked away with hands slapped across their mouths to conceal their laughter.

Everyone else either gawked at me with open mouths or disdain in their eyes.

"I'm sorry professor, what was the question?" I asked, heat and humiliation burning my cheeks as I fell into his trap.

I knew better.

This professor hated everybody, but he seemed to loathe me the most, using every opportunity to publicly humiliate and isolate me.

From day one, I had been determined to prove him wrong, done so much to prove myself to him. Prove that I deserved to be in that class, to be learning, and that his prejudice had no basis in fact.

Worked harder than anyone else in this class and still was ridiculed for being a woman, Russian, a transfer student, someone with a community college education, and any other quality he could find lacking in me.

And now, instead of making it harder for him to single me out, I had just handed him a reason.

Everything with Artem had my mind so preoccupied that instead of focusing on whatever the professor was lecturing about, I was lost in my own little world, trying to think of ways to escape Artem's attention.

I had been going over possibilities in my mind, playing them out.

Everything from refusing to shave my legs or shower regularly to becoming such a nuisance, he'd want nothing to do with me.

I had even considered doing the opposite of what every single piece of modern advice on how to make a man fall for you told you to do, and thinking of ways to love-bomb him until he got sick of me.

"Ms. Zatasevo, I was asking you to expand on the UNIDROIT Principles," the professor said as he stood in the walkway halfway across the lecture hall.

I hated how he always insisted on walking up and down the stairs while lecturing, like getting his steps in was far more important than the ability for all the students in the class to hear him.

"The UNIDROIT Principles?" I asked.

I had no idea what that was.