Runaway Girl - The Secrets of Avelina Chronicles 1

Chapter 20

It was early the next morning when Maria woke. The sun was bright in the sky and streaming into the room through the windows. The curtains were open. As she sat up in bed and looked around the room, she wondered where the master was who fed her and treated her so kindly the night before. And yet, as she slipped out of bed, she wondered why there was a dress laid out across the chaise longue as if for her to wear. She wasn't a dress girl. In fact, she was barely a skirt girl. It wasn't until she caught sight of herself in the full length mirror at the side of the room that she saw she was wearing a white negligee and her hair hung loose over her shoulders. It was a far cry from the jeans and a t-shirt combo she had arrived in, with her hair pulled back in a ponytail.

Then she remembered the dream she awoke from, about Angela and the twelve days. Holding a hand to her head as the thought hit home, she realized that maybe her dream wasn't just a dream after all.

She could still remember the touch of those hands drifting over her body, removing her clothes, the gentle caress of a hand on her face as a soothing voice told her the most heartbreaking thing she had ever heard. Looking around the room for her own clothes, she wasn't surprised to find that they were nowhere to be found. So she fixed her hair in the mirror and made her way out of the room and down the grand staircase. She wasn't sure how she knew the layout of the house, but she did. And she knew it well.

Maria didn't even think about what she was doing as she marched across the room to the wall on her right and pressed a panel in the decorative wall. Suddenly, a secret door opened and the master, Damian, was sitting with the same four people she had met the night before upon her arrival.

"Is it true?" Maria asked outright.

Damian smiled, taking in the way she looked that morning, much more appealing to his weary eyes from the night before. He felt better after a few hours sleep, though it wasn't much, and he sighed at the state of undress she had appeared in.

"Maria. How very nice of you to join us. You could at least have put on some clothes," he gently chided as she stepped into the room.

She wondered why Noah, who had rescued her from her prison in Captain Middleton's house, was grinning at her like a lovesick schoolboy, but she ignored him and turned her attention back to Damian. "When I woke, I found myself in ... in ..." she motioned to the silky negligee, "... this nighty," Maria complained, then continued, "Now, whose fault is it that I'm dressed like this?"

"Mine, I suppose," Damian smiled, amused at her temper. He had no intention of seducing her as he had been ordered to. She just wasn't his type. The only reason he had undressed her was because her clothes were dirty and disgusting after her confinement in Captain Middleton's panic room, but he was too much of a gentleman to tell her so.

"Is it true? Would tonight have been my twelfth night? Did you trick me into staying a vampire?" Maria asked.

Noah hung his head in disappointment, believing that Damian had finished turning Maria so he could have her for himself, when he was about to ask for her as his own companion. But who was he to deny the master what he wanted? It wasn't his place. He never realized that Damian would have happily handed her over to him.

"Am I just like Angela?" Maria demanded, infuriating Damian. The mere mention of his wife's name reminded him that it felt like he was betraying her every time he pretended to seduce other women. He still felt married and whether or not he was allowed to wear the ring for the remainder of his mission, he still felt the power of it on his finger. He hated Maria for the reminder.

"You are," Damian snapped at her, unwilling to argue about it in front of the Charcot clan, who had no idea about his past. And he certainly wasn't going to talk about it in front of Noah, who could so easily put the pieces together.