Sacrilege!
If there ever was a Johnny I’d want for the night, it’d be him. He meets all the check boxes. Gorgeous. Funny. Intelligent. Sweet. And from the way he’s been throwing himself around, he’s a sure thing.
I spend the next ten minutes watching Max flirt with every woman within arms-reach, including my mom, before I pep myself up enough to talk to him. I don’t really like men who flirt, but I like that he’s an equal opportunity flirt. No woman is safe from him. Old, young, thick and thin, he’s all over it, and I see he’s moved on to Nina, who isn’t left unaffected. As he takes her hand and kisses it over and over again, she lifts her free hand to cover her mouth as she fights a smile.
This is my chance. I’ve found my in.
As I approach, Nina removes herself from his wandering arms—the fool—and moves on to chat with Mimi by the bar. With no new potential victims near, Max pulls his phone out of his pocket and begins to scroll.
You like to flirt, Max? Get ready to meet your match.
With every step closer I take to him, my stomach flips and flops around in anticipation. I’m excited! Finally, I reach his side and gently clear my throat. He glances up at me with his brows raised before looking back down at his phone. “Hey, Helen. How you doin’?”
My smile falters.
Helen? Really?
Well…not a good start.
He continues to play around on his phone, brows drawn as I speak, “Uh, it’s Helena, actually. Anyways, I was wondering if you’d like to have a drink with m—”
Before I can get another word in, he mutters, “Cool. Nice to see you again, Helen,” then he walks away, never taking his face from his phone, leaving me standing in the middle of the courtyard, mouth gaping. I blink as a frown overtakes my face. I try to make sense of what happened here. The serial flirt, the man who flirts with anything with a pulse, anything that moves, did not flirt with me.
Hmmm. If my calculations are correct, that would deem me undesirable.
Embarrassment flows through me, heating my cheeks. My embarrassment quickly turns to forced disinterest. I turn my nose up and stand taller. That’s fine. He doesn’t have to like me. Sometimes people just don’t like other people. It happens. It’s all good. And, hey, this is a good thing, I think. I mean, I sure as hell don’t hold a candle for Max Leokov.
Not anymore.
Chapter One
Helena
“Helena, mail!” my father shouts from the kitchen.
I jump up from my laying position and bounce off my bed. My feet try to move quicker than physically possible, causing my sock covered tootsies to slip and slide on the floorboards. A casualty is made quickly. My knee slams into my nightstand so hard the photo frames on the top fall over and the half-full glass of water topples, spilling aqua all over my open textbook.
Gasping with wide eyes, I clutch at it, willing the pain away, but the agony continues, stronger than before, and in a moment of clarity, I think to myself, This is it…this is how it all ends.
Okay, so maybe I’m a little dramatic, but damn, that hurts!
Oh, dear God. Will the pain never end?
My throbbing knee numbs, and I know it’ll have to go. I’ll likely be the only nightstand amputee. Just another statistic. I crawl over to my bedroom door and lie dying in the open doorway. I call out to the only person who can save me. “Ta, help!”
There’s a moment of silence before my father’s heavily accented voice calls back, “No.”
I’d like to say he’s a terrible father and he wants me to die, but he’s a great dad. Maybe a tad dramatic (hence my own dramatics), but a great dad. And I may have claimed death being on my door a few times before. Once or twice. But this time, it’s actually happening. My vision starts to darken. I see the light. “Ta, help me! I’m fading fast!”
My father sighs long and hard. “What happen this time? You get a paper cut, or plug your toe?”
A disgruntled expression crosses my face, and I use my elbows to elevate my body into a semi-sitting position. “Firstly, old man, it’s stub your toe, not plug your toe. You need English lessons. Secondly, I stubbed it really bad that time. It was hanging by a thread! If I didn’t use the Band-Aid when I did, not even a plastic surgeon would have been able to save my pinkie toe.”
My father’s chortle fills the kitchen. “Yes, my English is no good, but you, my sweet, are a hurt in my butt.”
I try really hard not to laugh, but he’s adorable sometimes. “It’s pain in the ass, Ta! God!”
Flipping over, injury forgotten, I calculate this being the three-hundred-and-twelfth time I’ve cheated death by injuries caused by my clumsiness. I use the term clumsiness loosely. Sometimes my body just thinks it knows what its doing, brain be damned. My body seems to come with an auto-pilot function other bodies don’t have. As far as I’m concerned, it’s just an added extra.