RICH BOY BRIT (A Bad Boy Stepbrother Romance)
Mia Carson
Jessica
I had decided to go as a wolf. I had always loved wolves, ever since I was a girl, when I had seen them in a nature documentary. My eyes were sharp and sky-blue, my fur snow-white. I felt dangerous. Silly, maybe, but that’s how I felt. I had to lift the mask ever-so-slightly to sip at my glass of red wine. The hall was full of owls and smiling faces and foxes and zebras and fancy, decorated miscellaneous visages and all manner of strange faces. It felt good to be anonymous. Not that I was usually recognized by a lot of people in England, anyway. I did live in America. But still, it was good to walk through the room and have nobody recognize me, and not be able to recognize anybody, either.
I couldn’t take my eyes off the lion. On his right hand he had a tattoo that drew my eye again and again. It was of a winged dagger. The dagger stabbed down between the knuckles of his ring and middle finger, and the wings spread from the hilt of the dagger to the sides of his hand. He wore a suit, but it was close-fitting, and showed his muscular body. I wished I wasn’t do shy. All I had to do was walk up to him, say hello, and then . . .
But I wouldn’t. I knew I wouldn’t. That wasn’t me. I wasn’t the walk-up-to-him-and-say-hello kind of girl. A feeling of shame rose in me, reminding me of the thousand times I had wanted to do something but hadn’t, starting with first grade when I had wanted to join the dance club but some girl (I can’t even remember her name) had said my ankles were too fat. I mention this only because that was how I felt now. I was the wolf who wanted to talk to the lion, but my ankles were too fat.
Instead, I walked to the bar and ordered another glass of wine. I was supposed to be meeting some girl named Tiffany. She was the daughter of one of Dad’s old school friends. But she hadn’t turned up, unless she had changed her mask. She was supposed to come as a unicorn, so that I could find her. But I couldn’t see any unicorns in this place.
I sipped my wine, and my head began to feel a little woozy. I half-walked, half-stumbled to the edge of the large ballroom and slumped down in a seat. I closed my eyes, hard, and tried to find a center. After a few minutes, I succeeded. My breath came quick, but I forced it to be slow. Putting the drink aside, I told myself to lay off the wine for the rest of the night. I was drunk enough. I found myself sighing as I watched the masked ball. I wasn’t a part of it. I didn’t feel like a part of it at all. I was just watching. Maybe if Tiffany (whoever she was) was here, I could join in. But alone—
“You look lonely.” The voice was not like Dad’s. Dad was from the southwest, and had an English ‘farmer’s accent’. The voice that spoke now reminded me of James Bond. It was the classic ‘cool English’. Immediately, I thought: Shaken, not stirred. I loved James Bond. He was only the coolest. I looked up and saw that the voice was coming from the lion. He adjusted his bow tie. I got the sense that he was smiling down at me, though I couldn’t see his lips. I smiled back up at him through my mask.
He stood there, looking down. My heartbeat picked up, and my hands gripped the arms of my chair like talons. My teeth gnashed together so hard I thought they might shatter. Get a grip on yourself, I thought. Come on, Jess. Stop it. But I had never been a social genius. I looked at the way other girls swooped into a party and were instantly a hit, a social success, with people milling around them and a comfortable smile upon their lips, and I wondered how the hell they managed it. It was as much as I could do to stop from screaming: “James!”
I opened my mouth. Thankfully, words came out, even if they were a tad on the shaky side. “Lonely? Maybe.”
“Mind if I join you?”
“Sure.”
He sat beside me, and together we watched the party. The animals and the faces danced around the ballroom. The fox fell backward, her dress around her knees, and laughed madly when her two friends tried to help her up. The lion was so close to me I could feel the heat from his body. It was summer, a warm June evening, the sun slanting through the high-set windows in the ballroom, but compared to the heat that emanated off this anonymous lion, the sun was nothing. I found my breath coming fast again.