His Acquisition by Ava Lore

Author:Ava Lore [Lore, Ava]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Amazon: B00AQP6YYK
Publisher: Brittle Divinity Press
Published: 2012-12-18T22:00:00+00:00

Chapter Three

At precisely four o'clock I arrived at Malcolm Ward's mansion as ready as I would ever be: primped, powdered, and wishing I were high. The house sat on a corner uptown where all the better people lived. It was a tall, red brick building with a polygonal tower and a peaked roof. The majority of the house stretched out behind the narrow facade, dotted with stained glass windows and iron railings and jutting gables, a classic example of the American Queen Anne style. It made me feel grubby and cheap, even though I'd put on a pair of expensive designer jeans and a thick sweater and taken an extra long bath at Felicia's behest.

Intellectually I knew my clothes were top-of-the-line, and Felicia and I had both had our hair done by one of the finer hairdressers in the city, but I'd been a starving artist for years, using cheap shampoo and getting all my clothes at real thrift stores, the ones that smell like mothballs, not the trendy ones in the cutesy artsy areas of Manhattan, and that sort of life is hard to shake off. I'd never, ever felt weird and out of place when I was poor. I wore my poverty like a badge of honor, flaunting it in front of the people in suits with “real” jobs who infested the city like roaches. There had been kind of an honor in it, even though most of the time it sucked. Now that I was expected to wear nice clothes and be polite, I felt poor and grubby without even having the nominal honor of actually being poor and grubby. Standing in front of Malcolm Ward's magnificent house, I felt it even more acutely than ever.

It put me in a foul mood.

I rang the doorbell. Once. Twice. Then I started compulsively pushing it, trying to force my bad mood out through my fingertip. I fell into sort of a trance. Push, push, push...

Abruptly the door opened, startling me, and I stepped back.

Malcolm Ward stood there, looking... well, magnificent. Also exhausted. Huge dark circles were smudged under his beautiful eyes, and his hair stuck out at odd angles, as though he had been running his hands through it. He also wore a plain white t-shirt and pajama bottoms. His feet were bare, and he held a huge black monster of a camera in his hand.

Now I felt overdressed.

“Uh,” I said. “Weren't you expecting me?” Had I steeled myself for nothing?

“Oh yes, of course, come in, come in.” He paused, letting his gaze sweep over me. I must have been getting used to it because this time I only felt a small, illicit shiver at the intimate touch of his gaze. “Good, good,” he murmured. “Come in.” And he stepped aside.

I slipped through the door and entered...

...a hoarder house.

Okay, maybe not that bad, but my god. I'd never seen so much stuff in one place that wasn't on television with a professional psychologist staring into the abyss as the

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