And oh, Lord, but he had been handsome. He’d had jet black hair, caramel-tanned skin, and eyes that were so dark they looked like wet onyx. When he stared at me, his sable irises probing penetratingly into mine, it had been like falling head first into two deep pools of thick, black ink.
Curious to the point of insatiability, I finally asked my roommate about him one afternoon in the third week of classes. Even though she wasn’t in the same course I shared with him, she still knew instantly who it was that I was talking about the second I began to describe him.
“Oh, that’s Victor Draven,” she’d said. “Every girl wants him, and only the prettiest and most ‘stacked’ girls get him. The bigger the tits, the blonder the hair, and the feebler the brain, so much the better for him; it would seem. Oh, and he also likes them short for some reason. Guess he thinks that’s cute or something. Unfortunately for those nitwits, they can’t keep him for long. No one can. I don’t think he’s dated any one person more than a few weeks at most. Still, they line up to wait for their turn, as if they somehow think that they’ll miraculously be the one to convince him to settle down. Dumbass twits,” she’d said with disdain, although I had gotten the distinct impression that she had been somewhat incensed that she hadn’t fallen into that latter category, herself. It had seemed like, just maybe, she, too, would’ve liked a shot at seeing if she could’ve been the one to pin him down.
However, at 5’11”, thirty pounds overweight, with a pudgy middle, no hips, and shoulders meant for a football player, I really didn’t see that happening. She’d also had a heavily freckled face, thick glasses, slightly buck teeth, dishwater brown hair, and an IQ triple that of most of the dingbats he apparently dated, so with his particularly demanding proclivities regarding the personal appearances of his various girlfriends, Lindsey really wouldn’t have ever stood a chance. Then again, under the limitations of that very same measuring stick; neither would have I.
“Why do they want him so bad?” I’d asked with a thinly-veiled, overly-intent curiosity.
“You mean other than the obvious?” she’d replied pointedly, and I’d known immediately that she had been referring to his drop-dead good looks and magnificent body.
“Yeah, besides the obvious,” I’d mumbled back. For some reason, it had sort of irritated me that he’d been so damned hot. And he wasn’t just simply handsome, either. Besides his looks, there was just something else about him, too; something downright mesmerizing. I simply could not seem to get him out of my mind.
“Well, because he’s a multi, multi-millionaire,” she’d said breathily, as if shocked that no one else had filled me in on that yet. “His dad owned a bunch of Fortune 500 companies before he passed away, and he left them all to his only son – his only child at all, in fact. And Victor’s learning how to run them all, too, while getting his business degree at the same damn time. As rich as he is, he could afford to go to Harvard or Oxford or something, too. Or hell, he could even have gotten a private tutor and taken classes online for that matter. But he wanted to come to the same college that his dad went to. And he’s determined to graduate in time, regardless of the fact that he has to work his ass off while he’s taking classes, too. Honestly, as busy as he is, I don’t understand how he manages to screw all the girls he does. But regardless, if you take into account each and every girl at this school; 40% of them want Victor Draven for his looks, 40% want him for his money, 5% of them are gay, and the 15% of the girls who are left - who say they don’t want him - well they’re just flat-out lying.”
I’d wanted to ask her which group she’d fallen into but I hadn’t had the heart to tease her like that. Still, my mind had been silently spinning. What she had just told me right then had taken Mr. Victor Draven off of my list of possible boyfriends forever. I certainly didn’t want a man who was going to use me and then throw me away a few weeks later. That was, if he would ever want me at all considering the fact that my breasts were au natural and only a C cup, and also considering that I certainly wasn’t a blonde-haired, blue-eyed, dim-witted beauty queen. It wasn’t that I didn’t find him attractive, because boy did I ever. But I simply hadn’t saved my virginity all through high school just to give it up to some jerk in the end.
So, I had made up my mind to steer clear of him, and I had managed to do it, too. At least for a while. All through those first, breathless two months, I had tried to flat-out ignore him; regardless of how often he stared at me, or how uncomfortable his gaze made me, or how gorgeous he was, or how bad I honestly really wanted him. And then he’d finally come up to me one day after class.
I’d been getting my things together, my textbook and binder and papers, when he’d walked up to me and put a hand on my shoulder. I’d been so startled I’d jumped, yelped softly, and dropped everything onto the floor. All my notes and reports had spilled out all over the dusty tiles. He’d chuckled as I’d bent down to swipe everything up, stuffing the papers anxiously into the binder so haphazardly they were getting bent and crumpled beyond repair. He tried to help me, gathering up as much as he could and then handing it over to me with a kind of insolent nonchalance that had flustered me even more.
My hand, as I’d taken the stack of papers, had been shaking. He obviously had been able to see right then and there what his presence did to me.
“So,” he said lightly with a bit of a lazy drawl. “I was thinking we could maybe go out this Saturday night.”
For a moment it seemed like my heart had stopped. I mean all along I’d recognized his interest; certainly I’d noticed and processed the intently sensual way in which he’d stared at me. But I don’t think I’d ever really expected him to ask me out so bluntly.
“Oh, ah, ah….” I’d stuttered stupidly. Then I’d finally choked out the rest. “Thanks but no thanks,” and I’d promptly turned on my heel and fled. I had never turned back once to see what kind of look he had on his face; to see whether he’d been mad, or startled, or mildly upset, or irritated, or perhaps even amused. I’d just run on out of there as fast as I could go, slipping in the hall and almost falling down before finally rounding the corner and escaping his line of view.
I’d never told anyone about his offer for a date, either – certainly not my roommate who would’ve merely been jealous and perhaps a little bit hurt. Instead, I just kept it to myself and prayed he wouldn’t ask me again, knowing I wouldn’t have the fortitude to keep turning him down forever.
After that day, though, he’d backed off completely, never asking me out again although he’d continued to watch me from a distance. Yet instead of feeling relieved, I remember getting oddly and bizarrely jealous every time I’d heard about him dating some buxom blonde cheerleader, or each time I’d had to watch him chatting up one of the numerous bimbos in our class. I also remember how I’d breathed an unconscious sigh of relief when he’d inevitably dumped them; just as he’d dumped all the ones who’d come before them. I don’t know why it had mattered to me so much, but unarguably, it had.
All that semester, and the next when we’d fortuitously ended up sharing one more class before his final graduation, Victor continued to keep his eyes on me; watching everything I did, and popping up in the strangest of places, often making it seem as if I was bumping into him almost every place I went. But then, he’d graduated - with honors, no less - and it had all finally stopped.
I recalled being actually almost depressed after he’d left campus and I’d no longer had to worry about running into him on the street, or stress about him staring at me in the classroom. For two long years I never saw him again, although I honestly thought of him often. I did hear updates from people every now and then, about how he was doing out there in New York, running his new businesses with an unbelievably astute and adroit aplomb.
In the first 20 months alone, he’d nearly tripled the company’s holdings, and the stocks and shareholder dividends had exponentially mushroomed accordingly. I had been glad to hear that he was doing well, but as uncomfortable as his atten
tion had once made me, I’d found myself missing his magnetic presence, nonetheless. And every now and then, I had even wondered what would have happened if I’d actually accepted his offer for a date on that one day so very long ago.
But then, at the beginning of my senior year, out of the blue and without any warning, I had bumped into Victor at the art museum one day. I’d seen him from a distance, and my heart had begun to beat triple-time. I couldn’t even explain why he had affected me so, but when I’d seen him making his way over towards me, I’d fled once again. I had no excuse for my actions, just a sheer and simple panic that had risen up from some mysterious place inside me. Within thirty minutes of jumping into my car and driving off like a moronic bat out of hell, I had regretted my rash decision to childishly run away. After all, he’d probably simply wanted to just say “hello” to an old classmate.
I’d quickly learned from an associate on campus that had kept in touch with Victor via social networking sites over the years that he had just moved back to Denver sometime over the past two weeks. Having recently expanded his businesses all the way into California, he’d apparently figured that Colorado was as good a place as any to house his company’s main office suites now that he had finally begun to service both the East and West Coasts.
Yet I didn’t have to regret my decision to avoid him that one day for very long, because soon after that, I began to stumble across his path at least every few days to every few weeks. Months went by like this, and at each random meeting, Victor would always go out of his way to talk to me. I was polite, but rather vague and disinterested, and I typically tried to extricate myself and move on as soon as possible. Regardless of however blasé I tried to appear on the surface, however, inside, my heart was racing and my blood was pounding hotly through my veins whenever he was near me. Had it not been for my extensive knowledge regarding the way he used and then threw away his women, I would have been hopelessly his from that very first day.
I didn’t understand how he always seemed to know where I was going to be, often it seemed, even before I did, but one thing was for damn certain; he still made me as nervous as hell. Probably it was due mainly to the fact that I couldn’t gauge why he was so interested in me. Tall, slender, and willowy, with all my curves usually always being hidden by baggy jeans and loose t-shirts, rather than flaunted in Daisy Dukes and tight little slutty-sloganed shirts (like those with the word “Juicy” stamped right across the nipples), both of which were small enough to be worn by my ten year old step-niece, I looked nothing like his typical “girl toys”. And from the rumors I heard around school, his tastes had pretty much stayed the same over the past few years he’d been gone.
In fact, one industrious, public-interest journalist for our school newspaper had caught a shot of him at some high-society function with a piece of eye-candy practically dripping off of his arm. She’d clearly had Botox, even though she’d only been in her mid-twenties, and she’d had lips plumped by collagen and tits plumped by silicone. Her skirt had been six inches too high, her top six inches too low. And still, remarkably, I had felt that old stitch of jealousy, twisting through my gut with a sickening familiarity. Why had I cared so much?
That night, I had looked at myself in the mirror for a long time, just trying to figure out what in the hell was going on. Why did he seem to be continuing to pursue me after all these years, I had desperately wondered, while he was clearly still dating the same kind of scantily-clad, (albeit beautiful) trash as before?
I certainly was attractive, I guessed – or at least that’s what many guys had told me before. It’s not like I was disparaging myself about that where he was concerned. And it certainly wasn’t that I felt as if I wasn’t good enough for him. If anything, I felt like he wasn’t good enough for me. The way he dated women and then casually tossed them aside, not seeming to care a whit about anyone but himself. I was a much better person than that.
Yet still, I had my insecurities. It was just that I was not anything like the standard “idea” of what most American men thought was beautiful these days; at least not insofar as what Victor Draven seemed to like (and for whatever reason, that concerned me much, much more than it should). He liked them blonde-haired, blue-eyed, and big-breasted, while I had long, thick, wavy red hair, icy sea-green eyes (which had incited my father to name me ‘Tempest’ because he’d said they’d reminded him of the ocean during a storm), and milky, clear white skin. Most of my relatives had their fair share of freckles but somehow, I’d escaped that family tradition, and other than a heart-shaped birthmark on my left breast, I didn’t have a single blemish anywhere else on me.
Also, unlike most red-heads, I could actually hold a tan, and instead of turning into a flaming tomato after a day spent in the sun (like my father had before he’d died), I never had to bother with sunscreen when I went outside. I had long, slender and shapely legs, curved hips with a small waist, and a tiny rib-cage with pert, softly rounded breasts that fit my tiny frame perfectly. In fact, almost everything about my body was fairly delicate. Even my ring size was only three and a half. The only thing that wasn’t petite on me was my height. At 5’8”, I was nearly six full inches taller than the women Victor usually seemed to find attractive.
I’d always carried myself so much different than they did, too. I often went without makeup, typically kept my hair swept up in a demure pony-tail or bun (instead of leaving it down where, with it being such a deep, shiny red, with lots of body and waves and hanging all the way down to my ass, it tended to garner a lot of looks), and refrained in general from trying to draw attention to myself. I’d also never bothered to flirt with any of the men who’d appeared interested in me, spending my time with my school work or my girl friends instead.
It’s not like I had been totally against landing a serious boyfriend one day, but because my mom had literally saved my whole life to send me to college, I’d promised her that while I was at school, my focus would be solely on academics. And so despite the various offers for dates, or late night “study sessions”, I had kept resolutely to myself and managed to fend them all off fairly easily.
But I was certainly not the kind of girl who would have caught, and held the attention of a man like Victor Draven for what had been, by that time, going on for more than three whole years. Yet for some reason, Victor would not give up back then. He’d kept pursuing me relentlessly, finding me where ever I happened to be, talking to me even when I tried to walk away, and learning my cell phone number regardless of how many times I actually changed it, until finally, halfway through my senior year, I capitulated.
I think at that point it was honestly straight up curiosity, wondering what exactly it was he wanted to gain from going out with me. Was the whole thing just a challenge? To see if he could get me to agree to go out with him because I’d hurt his dignity when I’d declined back in my freshman year? Or, was there something more? And, could he stop screwing around with those witless blonde bombshells long enough to date me a few dozen times or so? At least long enough to see if he was willing to give this a chance at developing into a relationship before I allowed it to go to a physical level? Because I wasn’t in the market for something casual, and about that, I was perfectly clear.
I’d also planned on making it absolutely clear to him from the beginning that I knew “casual” was typically all that he was in the market for, so if he was looking for a quick lay, he was barking up the wrong damn tree. And I’d also planned to tell him on our first date that I wasn’t the kind of girl who was going to even bother to waste my energy going out with someone who was dating other girls at the same time. It just wasn’t worth it to me.
So even though I knew it was wrong, even though I knew he was probably the most dangerous man who had ever pursued me, and even though I was well aware that he could all-too easily break my heart; I finally, finally relented and agreed to go out with him once. And when I’d called him to tell him that I’d made up my mind to go, I’d also told him that whether or no
t I would ever go out with him a second time still yet remained to be seen.
But he’d set out to impress me from the very beginning. On that first date, imagine my surprise when he’d driven me, not to a restaurant in Denver, but to a private hanger near DIA instead. He’d escorted me on board his own private plane, than had radioed his flight plan to the traffic control tower before taking off and piloting us himself; flying us safely to Aspen like a real pro. At that time of the year, the only roads going into and out of Aspen were completely snowed over and closed for the next four to five months. So, the only way to get there at all had been, in fact, by plane.
And that entire flight had been magical. Even now, I could still remember my awe at looking down from only about 3,500 feet up and seeing all the Christmas lights. It was only two weeks away then, so people had them out in force. And looking at them from up above was purely stunning.
After we landed, a limo was waiting to drive us to a fancy restaurant where he treated me to a four course meal that had to have cost more than two thousand dollars. The bottle of champagne he had bought us had cost $1750 alone. We had spent the entire time making small talk, with me being as nervous as hell, and drinking the majority of the champagne myself because, as he had so eloquently pointed out; he didn’t want to crash us into any mountains on the way back home.
Done there, he next flew us to Grand Lake where he had arranged to have his own private fireworks display. He took me out on an enormous boat, and then, as the fireworks had burst violently beautiful up above us, he had pulled me close into him. As the dark waves had lapped murky and forceful against the hull, Victor had grabbed me firmly around the waist with one arm. It was cold and windy, and I had been grateful for his warmth, but then without any warning, he’d firmly gripped the back of my head and then mashed his hard lips aggressively against mine.
The Bride Wore White (The Captive Bride Series, Book I) Page 2
