A Slow Twisting Place, Excerpt/Chapter One

“Hey, little girl,” a male voice said from above.  “Where are you going in such a hurry?”

I looked up.  When my rescuer smiled at me I blinked hard.

The man lowered himself so that he was level with me; deep blue eyes studied me closely. “Did I hurt you?”

  

I shook my head—although if he had hurt me, I wouldn’t have cared.  Because here before me knelt the most beautiful man I had ever seen. 

Obviously I was still dreaming.  There was no way this man could exist in the real world.  The chiseled features, the dark hair, the olive skin…my god.   I reached out and touched his face, certain that the mirage still holding onto me would vanish into a poof of air.

And yet he didn’t.  He remained very much in front of me, as I traced a line over his sculpted cheekbone, down to his freshly-shaven chin.  Without thinking I let out the breath I’d been holding.  He was not a hallucination.  He was real.  “Hi,” I whispered.  “Hi,” he said back, and smiled again.

I had met this man before.  I even knew his name, and why he had come here.  I just could not believe it.  Otherwise it would be impossible to reconcile how what I’d been told, let alone what I remembered, could be so completely wrong.   He seemed much too safe, and smelled far too good, to be the person we had all been bemoaning for the past twelve hours, not to mention the holiday visitor of fleeting duration.  Now, in the protective fold of his arms, I felt something so different from fear that it nearly throttled me.  He was not the same person.  He couldn’t be.  And yet, he looked exactly like him!  Unable to make sense of this conundrum, I asked him, “Who are you?”

“You know who I am,” he answered, and with that the last vestiges of my fear vanished forever.   The immediate love I felt for Bryan Jennings was as inevitable as it was baffling.     

“Let’s get you dressed, missy,” Bryan said.  He then kissed me on the cheek and turned us toward the bedroom, where Julia was standing in the doorway.  Something about the expression on her face let me know she would hate the man in her hallway forever.  “I’m sorry,” she began, but Bryan cut her off cold.  “I told you last night what time I was coming.  Rachel should have been ready an hour ago.”  His words left tiny icicles in their wake.  

My life with Bryan Jennings had begun.

*From Chapter One of A Slow Twisting Place, my free serialized novel.  To read more click here.