AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Prologue
Alissa
At twenty-two years old I was drinking my first martini ever. I felt proud as I settled in at the little corner table in the bar. My parents would have lost their minds at the prospect of me drinking alcohol, and doing so in a public bar would have been unthinkable.
Ever since leaving home at eighteen, I’d slowly come up with a game plan for my life. Junior college, work, a comparative religions class, therapy, and a series of experiments with different vices—I guess you could call it reverse brainwashing.
My parents’ list of what constituted as vice had sounded crazy tame when they’d read it to me when I was ten, and sounded even tamer now that I was using it as a to-do list. Most of my experiments had left me wondering what the big deal was. But I’d been having a lot of fun along the way.
I had watched dozens of R-rated movies, tasted beer, coffee, soda, and all kinds of desserts and junk food, and stayed up after midnight on countless occasions.
I didn’t like short skirts too much, as they made me feel too exposed, but I loved baring my arms. Especially in such hot weather. I actually had a tan, and thanks to all the exercise I was getting sorting and making deliveries at my job, I even had some nice muscle definition going. I had clipped my hip-length, ash-blonde hair into a pixie cut in another act of wild defiance and donated almost two decades of uncut hair to a wig charity.
The makeup was a sin, too, along with the hint of rose perfume. I couldn’t walk well in heels yet, or I would have been wearing those as well. And I couldn’t afford luxuries like silk or gold, aside from the odd secondhand scarf or dress. One day, though, I would. I had promised myself a better life than I had ever dreamed of while trapped with my parents.
Working and earning my own money? Sin. Reading fiction? Sin. Dating? All the sin. Not that that had been anything to write home about so far. But I was still hopeful.
I loved being free. It was hard and scary sometimes, and even after a few years a lot of it was unfamiliar. I stumbled over social rules I didn’t know, and my shyness didn’t help things. But even though there were mistakes, mishaps, and even acts of malice that hurt so much along the way, I never regretted leaving.
The worst part of my new life had been figuring out how to handle my social life. After spending almost my entire first two decades being told to shun outsiders, I had started out painfully shy and awkward. I had always been worried that I would say or do something the person I was talking to would find offensive simply because I didn’t know better. Sometimes I still worried, though I had gotten a lot more confidence along the way. I even had five really good friends I could count on.
Aside from being out at the bar and having a stiff drink, I was also looking to check something else off my sin list, and that had me a little more nervous than I had felt in over six months.
Thebigsin. The one my mother would have really lost her mind over.
Having good sex.
I had slept with all of two guys in my years of freedom, and it had been pretty underwhelming. I was tired of bad lovers. From now on, I would find out if a guy was good in bed before getting into a relationship, and if he wasn’t, whether he was willing to learn and do what I liked. I absolutely refused to go through an orgasm-free long-term relationship.
After watching the insanity of my parents’ marriage, I was determined to hold my partner to some actual standards. The tired speech my mother had given me at seventeen about ‘marital duties’, with resentment simmering in her eyes the whole time, had been a warning in itself. I was done with the idea of ‘lying back and thinking of Jesus’ while some jackass used my body like a sex doll. I just wasn’t willing to settle for a man who was selfish and inept in bed.
The problem there was that I didn’t yet know what I liked. Nobody had explored that with me. I knew from the books I had read what things sounded sexy or fun, but I didn’t have any idea which ones would actually feel good. I needed a man who liked pleasing women to help me figure all of this out. But I didn’t want to burn through a whole relationship just to learn what my body liked.
My martini arrived on a thin cork coaster printed with the bar’s logo. I scooped it up and took an experimental sip.
A few seconds later, I set it down with my eyes watering. Holy crap, that was pretty much straight gin.
It tasted herbal, aromatic, slightly citrusy, and like liquid death from all the alcohol. I dabbed at my eyes carefully with my napkin so my mascara wouldn’t run. It occurred to me, between this and the beer sampler I had choked down a week ago, that I simply might not be much of a drinker. As I took anotherswallow of the martini and almost gagged, I just couldn’t see how this stuff could appeal to anyone.
By the time I had thoroughly confirmed that the tastiest thing about a martini was the olive, someone in the bar had caught my eye. He had settled into a seat at a table near mine. He was huge and Slavic-looking, with a strong, high cheekbones, a long, straight nose, and deep-set gray eyes. His hair fell to his shoulders in black-brown waves. Wrapped in a light overcoat of some slightly shiny black fabric, his sleek, powerful build caught my attention in a way that made my stomach do a little flip.
He caught me looking right away, his eyes flicking up to meet mine so quickly that it startled me. He smiled, looking amused—I smiled back, feeling incredibly awkward. That seemed to amuse him more. Was he into shy nerds? Only one way to find out.
He was drinking an iced Irish coffee that looked a lot tastier than the waste of money I was slowly choking down. I made a mental note to try that the next time I walked into a bar. I was captivated by his large, long-fingered hands, and by his thin, well-shaped lips. I wondered what he thought of the young woman half his size who kept taking peeks at him.
Just as I was trying to work my way up to walking over and trying to talk to him, he grabbed his drink and stood up. Before I knew what was happening, he had stepped over to my table and stood across from me, gazing down at me with that same small, amused smile.
“May I sit?” he asked, his voice deep, raspy, and cordial in tone. He had a very slight accent, almost imperceptible.
I nodded, and he pulled out the chair and slid into it, setting his glass down on the coaster in front of him. “Call me Dimitri,” he said mildly. “What should I call you?”
“Alissa.”
He took a swallow of his drink. “Well, Miss Alissa, what brings you out tonight?”
“Looking for company and trying my first cocktail.” I touched my glass for emphasis, but no force on earth could have convinced me to take another mouthful. My stomach felt a little pickled already.
“Your first? Did you just turn twenty-one?”
