Pretty Wicked by Georgia le Carre Page B

throng of people. One or two people called out to
him, but he waved in their general direction and dragged her even
faster toward the back of the house. In a corridor where the crowd
had thinned a little, he turned around and, still walking quickly
ahead, said, ‘Come on, let’s get a drink.’
    She noticed that he seemed tense and
different than he had been in the car.
    ‘ Come on,’ Miko urged,
when she lagged slightly. They were nearly at the kitchen by
then.
    ‘ What do you want to
drink?’ he asked, his eyes roaming around them.
    ‘ Beer,’ she said although
she didn’t really like it.
    ‘ There is fruit punch if
you prefer,’ he said.
    She nodded gratefully.
    ‘ Stay here and don’t
move,’ he instructed, putting her into a corner where there was no
one, and where no one could see her. She watched him leave her to
get the drinks.
    She was standing there, awkward and
uncomfortable, when the blonde with the clipboard came towards her.
Her eyes were glittering with malice.
    ‘ So who might you be?’ she
asked haughtily. A feat considering she was also chewing
gum.
    ‘ Sky.’
    ‘ Sky what?’ she asked
rudely.
    ‘ Why? Why do you need my
last name?’
    ‘ Because we need to know
who the winner will be.’
    ‘ The winner?’
    ‘ Yeah, Queen
Freak.’
    The blood drained from Sky’s face.
    The girl was watching her avidly. The way a
snake would watch the rat it has sunk its fangs into to die of its
poison. ‘You do want your escort to win, don’t you?’
    Sky focused her eyes on the beautiful face
in front of her. Don’t let her get the better of you, Sky. Don’t
let them win. She took a deep breath and opened her mouth.
‘Johnson. My name is Sky Johnson,’ she said slowly. Her voice
sounded far away or as if she was hearing it from underwater.
    ‘ Cool. Good luck,’ the
blonde said and flounced away.
    Sky pushed herself away from the corner.
There was a door close to her. She opened it. It gave out to a
conservatory full of beautiful flowering plants. She stumbled
toward the glass door at the end of it. Out in the garden she began
to run with the blood pounding in her ears and the tears running
down her face and falling onto her beautiful blue dress.
    She ran and she ran.
     
    ~~~~~
     

    Seven years
later…
     
    ~~~~~
     

One
    I turned away from the cashier’s counter and slammed into a
hard wall—well, it felt like it, but in fact, it was a man’s solid
chest. Large, powerful hands came around and gripped my upper arms
to steady me.
    For a second it was all right. I had the
apologetic, slightly flirtatious smile and appropriate words that
passed for polite regret in England ready—I’m ever so sorry. But
when my eyes flew past the broad shoulders up to his face my whole
world tilted crazily. I felt the blood drain away from my head. A
part of my brain screamed, No. No. No. No fucking way. Not halfway
across the world. Not after all this time.
    I opened my mouth and… Closed it like some
dumb goldfish in a bowl. Stupidly, I stared at the savagely
beautiful face, the firmly etched mouth, the jet-black eyes, the
straight eyebrows and the hard, hard jaw line—my God, the boy had
become a man: a devastatingly sexy man.
    A still functioning, rational part of my
brain hissed urgently, say I’m ever so sorry, like now, but I
couldn’t. I couldn’t do a fucking thing.
    I was like a deer in headlights. I just
stared and gaped and stared some more while his eyes remained
strangely impassive. My palms pressed against his chest and
encountered the stone-like slabs of the muscles of his pecs. His
nearness was like some sort of drug that dazed me. I scrambled to
pull myself together.
    Often with time a childhood crush becomes
endearing in a silly sort of way, but obviously I had never let him
go. I tore my gaze away from his magnetic eyes and roved, dazed and
shocked over the snowy white shirt, down the perfectly tailored
charcoal suit. Expensive. Impressive. Sexy. I had never seen him