I’d been sure that nothing would bother me, would penetrate the exterior I’d worked so hard to create. Especially not in one single day. But it had. It wasn’t even the day. It was one fricking minute of being in the company of these people.
“We need to get a photo for Instagram,” Harriet said, tapping at her phone and jerking me out of my head. The case was bright pink with black text reading “Cute but Psycho.”
She was anything but predictable.
“You have Instagram?” I asked, dumbfounded with the sixty-year-old woman even knowing what Instagram was.
But I shouldn’t have been surprised. Not with Harriet.
She rolled her eyes. “Of course I have Instagram. I have twenty thousand followers.” She looked up. “That doesn’t mean much considering your millions. But I think it’s pretty fucking fabulous.”
I blinked rapidly, caught up in Harriet’s entire energy. “It is fucking fabulous,” I agreed.
She regarded herself in the viewfinder of the camera, pouting, turning her head this way and that, winking at the camera.
“All right, I look great, let’s do this,” she said.
Never in my life did I let people boss me around. Well, that was a lie. Early on in my life, I did it because I had no other choice. My foster parents had controlled my food, my shelter, my hygiene. So I trained myself to obey them, even if every part of me rebelled against it.
It was a valuable skill early on in my career. But the second I had enough power behind my name, all of that stopped.
Until I watched someone get murdered, of course. Then all my agency was taken from me.
Obviously I was used to the picture thing. Everyone who approached me didn’t really want to talk to me. They wanted physical evidence of the interaction. They wanted bragging rights, they wanted likes for their social media. I wasn’t a person to them, I was social currency.
With Harriet, it was different. I was a person to her. If she had found me somehow lacking, I’d know. She wasn’t rude or cruel enough to treat me with disapproval, but I’d felt her respect, treasured it, and I wanted to preserve this moment in any way I could.
So I posed for the picture.
I even copied her gesture and flipped the bird to the camera.
She regarded the picture. “Yeah, that’s a good one,” she muttered.
I looked at the screen. She was right, it was a good one. I’d posed for millions of photos in my life. In almost every single one of them, I looked beautiful. Flawless. Empty. Something about me flipping the bird at the camera next to an eighty-year-old woman in a sequined crop top and red lipstick was different. I looked…alive. I was a person, not just an instrument for likes or social cache.
“What the fuck is going on?” a low boom demanded.
Both of us jerked with the aggression in the familiar voice.
Duke didn’t give either of us time to respond but stormed across the room to snatch the phone from Harriet.
“Weren’t you taught not to do that as a toddler?” Harriet demanded. “I should know, since I taught you to never snatch a thing from a woman, unless it’s her heart and she’s willing.”
Duke, of course, didn’t answer her. He was too busy fuming at Harriet’s phone. He tapped at the screen then looked up to me.
“We’re talking. Now.”
Harriet scowled. “I don’t remember my grandson resembling a Neanderthal the last time I saw him,” she said. “And the fact you’re fucking with my Instagram engagement is basically elder abuse.”
Duke didn’t even glance at his grandmother. “Anastasia, now.”
Again, I shouldn’t have listened. Should not have obeyed. It must’ve been something to do with this family. Something in their genes. Because instead of telling him to fuck off, like Harriet was doing with a well-practiced glare, I stood. I walked toward Duke and let him usher me out of the room.
The walk to the bedroom was silent—which was saying something considering the living area was in a whole other wing of this giant homestead.
I refused to say anything because I was so damn pissed off at myself, and Duke by proxy. I guessed that he didn’t say anything because he was too busy simmering in his macho-man fury.
He was ready to say plenty the second we set foot into “our” room.
“What the fuck do you think you were doing?” he growled, advancing on me the second the door slammed shut.
I didn’t retreat, though I wanted to, though every single fucking cell in my body told me to. There was a time when I retreated from men, submitted, bowed down. There were plenty of times I did that.
And I vowed I’d never do it again.
So I didn’t.
But it was hard.
Especially since Duke made sure to get right up in my face, so I could taste the mint on his breath, smell his cologne, mixed with the scent of him pressed into my skin. His fury covered me like a sheen of sweat, almost sticky. Uncomfortable.