“Of course she would!” Marcella butted in. Sebastian turned to look at Marcella and then returned his gaze to Eliza.
“I will not have my feelings hurt if you would rather be alone.” He said. “Monte Carlo is a very safe destination.” He added with a genuine smile.
“No, it would be lovely if you could show me around.” Eliza said. Sebastian’s smile broadened.
“Then I shall look forward to it.” He said, picking up the menu in front of him.
Eliza managed to navigate dinner without being roped in to any other activities, although she started to fixate on spending the day with Sebastian. What if he turned out to be as big of a jerk as Beau? By the time she got back up to her room, the excessive worry and her afternoon in the sun had left her completely exhausted. Stripping down to her bra and panties she headed in to the bathroom and brushed her teeth. She had no idea how socialites kept up with the constant social demands, just one dinner with the Auclair’s and she was barely able to keep her eyes open.
Just as she threw back the bedcovers completely and set the small mint off the pillow on the night stand, there came a knock on the door. Eliza’s shoulders dropped in defeat. She was too tired to find out who it was and with a feeling of guilt she sat on the bed. Before she could swing her legs up under the covers, there was another knock and this time it was followed by a voice.
“Eliza?” Whoever it was had their mouth pressed up against the door so she couldn’t recognize their voice. With a sigh she stood up and went to fetch the bathrobe. “Eliza?” The voice came again as she tied the robe around her slender waist.
“I’m coming!” she said, a tone of frustration in her voice. She pulled her long hair out of the collar of the robe and flicked it behind her. Standing on tiptoes she looked through the peephole and saw what looked like Sebastian standing in the hall. “One second.” She slid the latch over and opened the door.
“Oh!” Sebastian said, taking one look at Eliza standing there in her bathrobe. “I am sorry to have been a bother. I did not realize you would be sleeping.”
“I was just getting ready for bed, that’s all.” Eliza said with a smile. “Is everything okay?” She asked. Sebastian’s cheeks grew pink.
“I…” A chunk of his blonde hair flopped down on his forehead. “Well, I wanted to ask if you would like a drink, but I see my timing is not so right.” Eliza smiled at him softly.
“Why don’t you come in?” She said, standing back a little further and opening the door wider.
“No, I wouldn’t want to bother you. I will make up to you tomorrow.” He said.
“Don’t be silly.” Eliza said. Although she was exhausted, she felt guilty about sending him away. “Come in.” Sebastian hesitated for a moment before stepping in to the room. “I’m afraid I don’t much feel like drinking, but I could definitely drink a hot cocoa…” She sat on the bed, tugging her robe to cover herself as much as possible.
“Hot cocoa?” Sebastian asked. Eliza nodded. “I will call downstairs, they will bring some.” He laughed quietly. “I have never had cocoa for a nightcap.” Picking up the phone he smiled at Eliza.
Eliza had gulped down a full mug of hot cocoa in record time and was regretting her choice. She had never had to pee so badly in her life, but for some reason she didn’t want to go while Sebastian was still in her room. Finally the need became so great that she had to jump off the bed and run to the bathroom.
“I’ll be right back!” She shouted as she slammed the door shut.
“You are okay?” Sebastian shouted back, concerned that she had become sick. Eliza giggled as she began to pee.
“Yes, I’m fine.”
When she came out of the bathroom a few minutes later Eliza found Sebastian waiting for her. She looked up at him awkwardly.
“I was worried you might have been...ill?” He questioned his word choice.
“Oh, no, I’m fine! I just had to…umm…” Eliza looked at him hoping he would catch on to what she meant to say. He looked back expectantly. Rather than say the word out loud she crossed her legs as though she had to go again. Sebastian burst out laughing.
“Oh! Too much cocoa.” He said. Eliza nodded.
“It was such good cocoa though!” She added. Sebastian agreed.
“They always have good chocolate here, even when you drink it!” Sebastian walked over to the tray on the table and set the empty cocoa mugs on it. “It’s getting late, you should go to bed. I will put this outside for you.” He picked up the tray.
“Sebastian?” Eliza walked ahead of him to open the door.
“Yes?” He said.
“Thank you.” He frowned at her.
“Why?”
“For coming to see me, for the cocoa.” Eliza said. Sebastian smiled.
“I would bring cocoa every night for a pretty lady like you.”
http://www.amazon.com/Romance-Prince-Novella-Mystery-Suspense-ebook/dp/B016ON2X2E
Sample from Mina More
http://www.amazon.com/Romance-Cyborg-Story-Fantasy-Adventure-ebook/dp/B00IOMHKFE
Now the Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom. And we all, who with unveiled faces contemplate the Lord’s glory, are being transformed into his image with ever-increasing glory, which comes from the Lord, who is the Spirit.
2 Corinthians 3:17-18
Chapter 1
Okay, so you want everything. Right from the beginning? This could take a while.
Well, to get to the very beginning you probably have to go back about fourteen years. I was twenty-four and, weirdly enough, working for a subsidiary of Cyberlife Systems called Microsoft. Yeah, they dealt with most of the software side of a lot of CyberV.
I was just one of many ‘system technicians’ working on the base line systems of the Oceania Architecture. That doesn’t mean I was in Oceania, of course, all the server sites are held here in the UK. Not that it really mattered where the servers were being held for the sort of update work we were do-
…You’re really not too interested in those sorts of details, are you?
So, it was this great open-plan office which I’m pretty sure they had modelled on a prison sweatshop. Cyberlife like to paint themselves as some sort of radical freeing force for humanity, always did, but as you know existence inside the Cyberlife fold is all about boundaries and conformity.
My boundaries were about twenty centimetres beyond my right elbow, the same beyond my left and about a metre forward of my nose. Sometimes I’d go to stretch and accidentally rap the knuckles of both hands against either side of my little cell.
I really was in the Cyberlife fold back then, too. I didn’t have this place and I’d finally made the jump out of living at home, the easiest way to do that being a Cyberlife apartment on site. Oh yeah, no shit, I was one of the drones filing down the super nerd highways of the Clyst St. Mary complex from one kind of cell to another.
Huh…? Yeah, yeah it was here in ‘Sector 9G’ as most people call it, I’ve lived here all my life – I’m sure I must have told you that. Well… never mind.
So where was I? Right… so there I was being a good little worker bee, working away hard in my own little cell of the great honeycomb. To my left sat Antony, the goddamn biggest guy you’ve ever seen in your life. I swear, two-ten if he was a centimetre, and broad with it as well. And the poor guy got the same size cubicle as everyone else. I really don’t know how he did it – I spent every day feeling so claustrophobic in mine. Of course, it probably wasn’t just the size of my work space which caused that.
Antony was a real nice guy and we sort of shared a sense of humour – or, at least a bit of a one – so we were work buddies in that way that you almost feel close to that person at work every day, but when you take it out of the workplace you take away all the reasons that friendship had to exist. Of course, I suppose you’ve never had the chance to experience that; don’t worry, these convenient friendships are not the worst thing in life you could miss out on.
>
To my right was Wendy, possibly the most masculine woman ever to have existed. Honestly, I’m amazed that scientists didn’t try and study her – see if they could isolate the tomboy gene.
Then again, maybe they did, because one Monday morning me and Antony came in to find Wendy gone. No warning at all, and all we could find out was that she had transferred to the research complex up in Sector 1B. How fucking weird is that? I mean, as if she’s going to suddenly change her job and move three-hundred and fifty odd kilometres away without telling the people she sat next to at work. Boy, that’s always creeped me out to this day.
But, anyway, I was soon to put thoughts of Wendy to the back of my mind…
Wendy’s cubicle was only empty for two days; on the third morning Antony and I came in to find Natalie in her place. Natalie couldn’t have been more different to Wendy if scientists had isolated the tomboy gene, created its antithesis and given it form. Where Wendy was as big as me – but with far superior upper body strength – Natalie was a diminutive one fifty-five and slender everywhere but on the behind and the chest.
Don’t look at me like that! You want the real story or the EU approved version? Very well then…
She had long, blonde hair that looked like it took more looking after than a new born baby and an interpretation of smart casual that just…
Okay, okay, I’m moving on.
But, as you might expect, she was as ditzy as shit. Lovely, totally sweet and innocent, but not so much an air head as a ‘helium head’. You know... a head so far up in the clouds that it threatened to break free of the Earth’s atmosphere. And I don’t know, maybe I was a bit prejudiced, you know, with an oversimplified picture of the world, but I couldn’t quite equate this girl who thought that crampons were for bad period pains with someone who was a more talented coder than I would ever be. And I was a real nerd.
Yep, ha-ha… real funny.
And this really intrigued me. Of course, for ‘intrigued’, read ‘any flimsy excuse to fancy her that meant I didn’t have to face the fact that it was about looks’. Oh yeah, I used to be all man, baby.
So me, Antony and Nat became a new little work posse. A little gang that would sit in the corner of the lunch hall and quietly bitch about Microsoft and Cyberlife, competing with each other to find the funniest way to deride our employers so we could avoid facing up to the fact that all of us depended upon sucking from the oily corporate tit for our continued existence. Or that’s how I liked to see it, at least.
Actually, it was probably more a case of me and Antony competing to make Nat laugh harder than the other one did. But God did I love those days; they were so simple in a way. And I was in love, too; in love for all the wrong reasons… and it felt great.
That X-mas our section went out in town for our work X-mas party. After a few hours, the whole group was breaking up and either going home, or onto whichever bar or club they normally frequented. I didn’t normally frequent anywhere, but me, Antony, and Nat ended up at this tatty upstairs club just off the High Street Complex… Um, the name had something to do with broken glass. Yeah, real inviting name.
Antony popped straight off to the toilet when we got inside, and me and Nat went up to the bar. She was really quite drunk, I was mildly so. Next thing, some guy who knows Nat – or evidently thinks he does – comes up and starts chatting away to her. Before I know it, he’s running his hand through her hair in this really creepy way. She’s still smiling – and Nat was one of those girls with whom any smile would look like a come on to most men – and I’m way out of my depth, stood there half-wanting to click my heels together and Dorothy myself home and half-wanting to jump in and whisk Nat away to some sunset somewhere. Then Nat kind of forced my hand.
She wheeled round a little so that the guy had his back to me – he hadn’t taken one bit of notice of me since he had arrived – and the next time he leaned in to kiss her cheek (he was going for the lips, but Nat had evidently been in this situation before) she fixed me with a wide-eyed, pleading look and mouthed “Help me, p-l-e-a-s-e,” over his shoulder.
Bugger. You know? I mean, this guy was a lot bigger than me. But that didn’t really matter; he could have been a metre high and armless, any sort of confrontation tended to fill my stomach with bile and my bladder with the urge to perform a fire drill. But this was my moment – and so much more of a potential moment than I had ever really expected. It was my chance to be her knight in shining armour; well, actually her knight in a ten euro T-shirt which screamed ‘Get some clothes sense, saddo!’ What you going to do, huh?
“Hi,” I said, laying a gentle hand on the guy’s shoulder. I leaned over and kissed Nat’s cheek, aware of a gaze on me that said, ‘Anywhere quieter and I would pile drive you into the ground and then shit on your broken face’. Or so I imagined.
I turned back to my unexpected rival, (actually, let’s face it, I was the unexpected one), and held out my hand. “Hi, I’m Tim.”
As he stood there, his expression moved from annoyed to stunned as Nat made her way (not a little drunkenly) behind me and, wrapping her arms around my torso, brushed her lips gently across my triceps, what there is of them. His handshake, which had been trying to crush my hand, quickly started to loosen and his eyes widened in utter disbelief as he saw this.
“Um, hi Tim,” he said, (the music was loud, so I’m guessing). “So… nice to see you, I should get back to my friends.” And so he hurriedly backed away as if he’d just realised that he’d bought a ticket to the freak circus where girls like Nat went for guys like me. Me, I would have sold my soul for a season ticket to that show.
With El Libido safely on his way, Natalie’s arms predictably unfastened themselves from around my waist. I turned to her and she gave me the sweetest smile I had yet seen her give. (However, the effect that large quantities of alcohol were having on her ability to control her facial muscles might have been the real reason for such softness in her smile.) But that was the extent of her gratitude, so it seemed – not even a ‘Thank you’ mouthed silently in concession to the deafening sequence of screeches, beeps and scraping sounds that the club was trying to pass for dance music.
So we queued for our drinks again and Antony rejoined us, and neither Nat nor myself made mention of the incident to him. Antony suggested we take our drinks closer to the dance floor and turned to head across the crowded club. – The guy was like a human battering ram in crowded places like that. As Nat and I turned to follow him, I suddenly felt a small, clammy hand gently take mine and squeeze it.
It literally took me a moment to be sure it was hers. The relief quickly turned into two very conflicting feelings: One of them was panic; the other was warm and fuzzy – a kind of ‘Don’t worry, you’re probably just hallucinating but hey, aren’t mind-altering drugs fun?’ kind of feeling.
It soon became apparent that whatever Nat was doing, she was trying to do it without Antony noticing. The three of us stood leaning against this railing which surrounded the dance floor with some sort of laminate-covered shelf running above it to put your drinks on. Nat was in the middle, me one side and Antony on the other.
To the casual observer, it might have looked like Nat was pretty much ignoring me in favour of face-to-face conversation with Antony. But one hand casually tossed behind her back rubbed a thumb back and forth across my palm in a way that probably isn’t always as arousing as it was right there, that night. My mind raced: did she really like me or was it just the booze and some faux heroism on my part? Was there a way I could duck the issue by hiding away until I figured out which, and thereby avoid having to kill myself if I was wrong? Apparently not…
“So,” Antony said while we waited for Nat to return from the coat queue as we left the club, “What’s going on with you and Nat then?”
Bastard.
Chapter 2
Work came on Monday – still two weeks until the X-mas break. I’d spent the weekend going from vaguely fancying Nat because she was the most attractive thing in m
y week five days out of seven, to somehow deciding that she was my soul mate and the most perfect thing on two legs. Well, any amount of legs, actually.
So what if she could name forty-two different shades of hair dye? Difference is the spice of life… or, possibly variety. And I liked the way that she smelled; like home might smell if every fear of loneliness and social failure were taken away. She smelled like a real life that a real man might lead, not some boy who’d only recently moved out of home and was now doing the same thing he’d been doing since he was twelve for a job.
She was beautiful and tanned and had perfectly straight hair and expertly manicured nails. What’s wrong with that? She made every man’s head turn, but she liked me… Possibly.
She wasn’t exactly showing it, but then she wasn’t being unfriendly either. She was being… like normal. And ‘like normal’ was pretty friendly. Nonetheless, I felt a little twist of jealousy in the pit of my stomach every time that she laughed a little harder at one of Antony’s jokes than she just had at one of mine. Hey, hands off you slimy, great oaf, I’d think. As you can see, my growing feelings for Nat were really helping me mature as a person.
But you’ve got to understand; I was a fairly ugly young man – still am now – and even the idea that someone like Nat could find me attractive promised to banish every bad experience and humiliation that I had suffered since puberty. It wouldn’t change the image that I saw in the mirror every day, (though with the sort of grooming tips that girl could’ve imparted, who knows), but it would disprove my experiences up to that point – that when it comes to sex and finding a relationship, the way your face looks is the greatest thing that people judge you on.
Okay, I do see the quite monstrously-sized hypocrisy that I’m currently laying out before you here. If all I’m after is a sexy-looking woman, then surely I’m no better than Rowena Wots-Her-Name who spectacularly rejected me by turning grey and looking like she was going to vomit in front of the whole class at school. And maybe if Nat was only half as attractive, I might have needed to have twice as much in common with her to have been as interested (and damn-near obsessed) as I was.
The Love I Lost (Ariadne Silver Romance Mystery #2) Page 13