Free Awakening (A Dangerous Man, #1) by Serena Grey

Chapter One
    I like to look at the framed picture of the young girl
that hangs in my room. She is smiling, and her dark blonde hair is ruffled. She
looks happy. I would do anything to get to know her, to see that smile and hear
her laugh, but I can’t. She’s dead. She died giving birth to me.
    The door opens, and Aunt Josephine walks in. I don’t have
a lock, and she never knocks. It’s her house after all, and I am only twelve.
She doesn’t look cross, but I know she is, she always is. It’s never anything
I’ve done or haven’t done, although she always makes it seem as if it’s my
fault. I know now that I can never make her not cross with me. She hates me. She
hates that she has to take care of me until I’ grow up.
    I am glad that I’m going to boarding school this year,
even though Aunt Josephine says that the nuns will ‘discipline my mother’s faults
away’. The nuns may be bad, but they can’t be as bad as Aunt Josephine. Nobody
can.
    She comes towards me. She is tall and thin, and her skin
always looks shiny. I look away from the picture, but not quickly enough. Her
face is a tight mask of disapproval as she studies it.
    “Why do I even bother?” She snaps at last. “Anybody can
see that you’re going to end up exactly like her, pregnant with God knows who’s
child.” Her black eyes flash, and I can’t stop myself from flinching. “Just
don’t think I’ll be wasting another eighteen years of my life looking after
your bastard.”
    “Sophie? Are you alright?”
    I look up from the spot on the wall where I’ve been staring
while my thoughts wander, and give Stacey Carver a smile. I have perfected the
smile that says I’m fine, even though most of the time, I feel far from it.
    “I’m fine.” I tell her, turning my attention back to cleaning
a shelf, which is what I should have been doing in the first place. “I was just
thinking.”
    “You’ve been doing that a lot.” Her voice is so full of
concern that immediately I start to feel guilty. She is my boss at the gift
shop where I work as an assistant, and she worries about me, more than she should.
I wish she wouldn’t, she has enough things to worry about without adding me to
the list. 
    She has already done too much for me. When my Aunt Josephine
died very suddenly, a little more than four months ago, and I found out that I
had little money, no home, and absolutely no plans, she literally became my
guardian angel. While her husband, my aunt’s lawyer, took care of discharging
the will and settling the estate, which Aunt Josephine bequeathed almost entirely
to the local library, Stacey helped me find a small apartment in town, and gave
me a job working as an assistant in her gift shop.
    “Really, I’m fine.” I smile again for good measure. She nods
and turns towards the front of the shop. She is a pretty woman, small,
brown-haired, and always nicely dressed.
    I can’t see her face anymore, but I can tell that she is
frowning. She is worried because the gift shop cannot afford to keep me much
longer. Business is worse than usual, but she doesn’t know how to tell me. For
some reason, she feels responsible for me, maybe because she was friends with my
mother all those years ago, but it’s time for me to be responsible for myself.
    I still have the fifteen hundred dollars my aunt left me.
Her estate was worth a lot more. Even though she hardly ever left the house,
she had been earning an income from indexing textbooks for years. In a way, I’m
glad she didn’t leave me more. If she had shown me any sympathy at the end, I would
probably spend the rest of my life wondering if I had misjudged her.
    “I’ve been thinking of moving to Bellevue and finding a
job,” I tell Stacey.
     “A job? Are you sure?” She looks skeptical. “That may be
harder than it sounds, in this economy.” She thinks for a minute, and I’m sure
she is trying to come up with a better idea. “What about Art school? It’s what
you’ve always