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Chapter One
Ava
I can’t shake it.I’ve had this strange feeling for the past few days. Little prickles on the back of my neck. A weird sensation that makes the tiny hairs on my arms stand up.
I keep looking over my shoulder like I’m being watched, but nothing is ever there.
Paranoid much, Ava?I ask myself with a roll of my eyes. I’ve obviously watched one too many of those true crime documentaries. It probably doesn’t help that I watch them right before I fall asleep. That stuff is probably implanting itself deep in my subconscious or something, and that’s why I’m freaking out right now.
I finish tying my flower crown together. I crafted it from the pink and white hydrangeas that flanked the pool behind Daddy’s mansion. I’d quickly nabbed a couple of blooms when the gardener wasn’t looking before I took off into the wheat fields that line the back of our property. My father isn’t exactly a farmer, but he owns plenty of property, and he grows wheat and other crops on it. He’s more like an agricultural investor, I guess.
Whatever he does keeps him pretty busy, though. I know he just bought some new buildings, and he’s been gone more than usual.
I sigh and plop my flower crown on my head. I realize it’s childish to still make them and put them on my head—especially now that I’m officially an adult at eighteen—but I’ve been doing it ever since I was a little girl. Call it my ritual or whatever, but when I need to think or clear my head, I grab some flowers from the garden, dash out here to the wheat field, twist the flowers into a crown, and then smash them onto my head before laying in the tall wheat and staring up at the clouds as I get lost in my thoughts.
Today my thoughts are on college. I’m set to start at Emory University in just a couple of months, and Daddy has already been onto me about picking a major.
I’m still no closer to choosing than I was in high school.
It’s not that nothing interests me. On the contrary, it’s that so much interests me. How am I supposed to choose one thing to do for the rest of my life?
Of course, Daddy is pushing me to be a lawyer, but I already know he wants me to work where the money’s at—in criminal defense. But I just don’t know how I’d feel about defending people who might actually be guilty of heinous crimes. Everybody knows there’s no money in prosecution, but I think I’d want to be on the right side of the law if I was going to do it. I don’t know how I’d feel if I got someone off who was accused of doing something horrible like raping a woman—especially if come to find out they really did it.
So I’m pretty sure being a lawyer is out.
I’m not sure my heart lies is medicine either. I can devour all the latest scientific journals, but the thought of cutting into skin or dealing with blood just makes me shiver.
So there goes doctor or veterinarian.
I hold my hands up over my face and groan. Why is it so hard for me to pick something? I envy my fellow classmates who’ve known what they wanted to be since they were nine. Seriously, I know some people who’ve wanted to be teachers or doctors or lawyers or firefighters since they were little kids and are already well on their way to making those dreams become their reality.
Why is it so hard for me?
I frown. Maybe it’s because I’ve always kept my head in the clouds and daydreamed. I love nothing more than getting lost in a good book and spent countless hours out here in this very field when I was a little girl, playing with imaginary friends. As an only child, I’d had to develop a vivid imagination. I held fairy court out here where I was the fairy queen with my flower crown.
I sigh again and tell myself that I’ve still got plenty of time to choose a major. The first two years of college are mostly just core classes anyway. Surely by the time I become a college junior, I’ll have grown up enough to figure out what I want to do with the rest of my life.
I stare up at the clouds moving slowly overhead in the robin’s egg blue sky and let the stress of adult choices release from my mind. One of the clouds looks like a crab, and it makes me think of the time when my mother was still alive and she and Daddy had taken me to the Gulf in Alabama. I’d seen a live crab skittering along the beach, and it had struck me as odd that it wasn’t red like Sebastian from The Little Mermaid but a pale white color, almost blending in with the sand.
From there, my mind wanders onto how cool it would be to have an exciting life like a Disney princess. Ariel had always been my favorite princess, closely followed by Belle. Why couldn’t life be an adventure like in children’s movies or like in the books I read?
Maybe I’ll write books or the screenplays for children’s movies. That’s a job I can see myself doing for the rest of my life, but I can only imagine the disappointment on Daddy’s face if I told him I was going to a top university for an English Lit degree rather than something big like a medical or law one.
I yawn as the warm sun kisses my skin, covering me like a blanket. My limbs get heavier, and I close my eyes, floating in that hazy half awake, half asleep state of doziness.
I don’t know how long I lay there in limbo between the real world and dreamland, but when I do finally flutter my eyes open, my heart jumps up into my chest with a gasp.
Ice. The iciest, bluest eyes I’ve ever seen are gazing down at me, piercing me with their intensity.
Dark hair, hair as dark as night falls onto a strong, hard forehead, a masculine forehead.
Strong jawlines taper down until my eyes are drawn to lips that are conversely lush against the hard planes of the man’s face.
He looks like an angel—a dark angel, that is.
My heart beat ticks up—in fear or excitement or a mixture of both I’m not sure.
I open my mouth—to ask who he is or scream—but in the next moment his hand comes down to silence me with a sickly sweet-smelling cloth, and I plummet into blackness.
