Christmas Captive by Selina Westbrook

Author:Selina Westbrook [Westbrook, Selina]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2019-11-26T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 7

Marzia

Marzia

If the looks I was getting at the Opera House were anything to go by, I looked better than I’d ever had.

Once I’d returned to my bedroom, I’d found a floor-length, mermaid-train red satin dress waiting for me, along with a pair of black heels with red soles I didn’t want to know the cost of. The look was completed by a black and red clutch, and jewelry that caught the light and sparkled beautifully. Sawyer had attached the diamond necklace to my neck himself.

As we made our way to the Opera House, I wrapped the fur wrap I was wearing more tightly around my shoulders. I felt special when I was next to Sawyer, when he looked at me as if he had a real treasure on his hands. I was a long way off from the poor orphan I used to be. In his company, I was a queen.

The thought of Margaret was heavy on my mind, reminding me with every step of the time I’d spent with the older woman.

I’d bounced from foster home to foster home when I was younger, until I finally came to stay with Margaret when I was seventeen. But if I thought the older woman would be kind and caring the way a grandmother would be, I was sorely mistaken.

From the first day I spent at Margaret’s home, I was a slave. I did everything for her – I cooked and cleaned, I went grocery shopping, I massaged her feet, I ran errands. She had me quit school and take care of her full-time. And always, there’d be the promise on her thin lips – I’d inherit the apartment when she died. A worthy payment for all the years I’d spent waiting for her hand and foot.

Margaret was sick, she had been since I’d first met her. I prepared cocktails of drugs for her every night, and she never got better, but she never got much worse, either. And before I knew it, I’d turned eighteen, and she’d emotionally blackmailed me into staying longer. What else was I supposed to do? I had no money, no education, and no future. Taking care of Margaret was my only option. And every time she hit me for not being fast enough with her requests, I told myself it would all be worth it in the end, when she’d be – as she used to say – relieved from the constant pain. Then, I would inherit the apartment, and I could finally start taking dance lessons Margaret had always refused to pay for.

Except as it turned out, Margaret had lied to me from the start.

She passed away six months before I started dancing at Le Cabaret, and the apartment she’d promised me turned out to be a rented property, not her own. Not only was I thrown out of it within days of Margaret’s passing, I also found out the only thing I’d inherited was a debt of ten thousand pounds.

I’d spent four years convincing myself she loved me, but in the end, she delivered the worst blow of all.

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