The Guardian's Virgin Ward. CAITLIN CREWSЧитать онлайн книгу.

       CHAPTER ONE

      “THIS PARTY IS finally looking like the birthday gift to you it’s supposed to be, Lily!”

      Liliana’s roommate Kay was practically shivering with glee as she bounded into the narrow kitchen, which was normal for her even in the middle of the loud, crowded party they were currently hosting in their Bronx, New York apartment.

      “The most beautiful man I’ve ever seen in my entire life just walked into our living room and asked for you. You promised you were going to change your life, remember?” Kay grinned and let her smile go a little bit salacious. “And believe me when I tell you that doing anything at all with this particular man will not be a hardship.”

      Liliana Girard Brooks, who’d gone by Lily Bertrand since she’d started college, to put a little space between her brand-new life and her internationally recognizable name with all that history attached to it, had vowed earlier that chilly November evening that her twenty-third birthday party was going to change her boring, stiflingly barren existence as a latter-day nun once and for all.

      She hadn’t really expected to have an opportunity to keep that vow. Especially this early in the night.

      “You’re finally going to lose your virginity!” her second roommate Jules had cried over pizza, punching her fist in the air as punctuation. This was also normal. “Welcome to the twenty-first century at last!”

      “You don’t have to lose anything,” Kay had countered, frowning at Jules when Liliana had frozen solid where she sat with a slice of pepperoni halfway to her mouth. “You don’t have to do anything you don’t want to do.”

      “The other side of that being you can do anything you do want to do, once and for all,” Jules had retorted, wholly unchastened.

      “Don’t worry,” Liliana had replied, opting not to remind her roommates that she’d only ever been kissed once during their senior year in college, and it had been embarrassing for everyone concerned. They knew that. Sometimes it felt as if the entire population of New York City knew that, too. “My ugly-duckling years are over. I hereby declare that tonight is the night I’ll transform into a swan at last!”

      They’d all cheered and hugged, then turned up the music, and Liliana had channeled her shaky certainty into her wineglass, where she’d helped herself to far more white wine than was usual for a girl who had believed it when the terrifying headmistress at her prison-like boarding school in Switzerland had told her wine made women into whores.

      “Is that the legacy you wish to build as the last living heir to two mighty bloodlines?” Madame had asked with stern distaste, as if Liliana had already been discovered turning tricks on the shores of Lake Geneva. At that time Liliana had been fourteen and far more concerned with the solo careers of certain former boy band members than mighty bloodlines of any description. Particularly her own. “There are any number of rich, vacuous whores cluttering up the tabloids. It is up to you whether you wish to make a spectacle of yourself in this way or not.”

      Here in the safety of their tiny kitchen, Liliana toasted her former prison warden and her roommate’s expectant expression with one lift of her glass, then took a deep pull from it.

      Sweet white wine, she thought happily. Maybe too happily. Making ugly ducklings into swans since the first grape was crushed underfoot.

      If only in her own head.

      “This is the new and improved Lily Bertrand you’re looking at,” she told Kay grandly and with a great deal of confidence she didn’t actually feel. “Beautiful men are nothing but my due.”

      “Damn right,” Kay replied. She nudged Liliana with her shoulder. “But you might have to leave the kitchen to collect what’s owed you, you know.”

      Liliana did not want to leave the kitchen. The party was loud and silly and as vaguely unsettling as all parties always seemed to her. It was also packed full of the approximately seventeen million friends Kay and Jules had made during their years at Barnard.

      Liliana, by contrast, had made exactly two friends at Barnard: Kay and Jules.

      Wine, she reminded herself as she forced herself out of the narrow galley kitchen and edged her way into the crowded living room. Wine understands. Wine is here to help.

      She took another sip. Okay, maybe it was a gulp. Either way, it made leaving the relative safety of the kitchen feel a whole lot more like a powerful choice she was opting to make instead of a terrifying dare she had no choice but to perform, thanks to her big mouth.

      Luckily, the more she drank, the more mellow she felt and the less she cared about the consequences of ill-considered vow-making. Almost as if everything she’d said—and, yes, foolishly vowed—to her roommates tonight was true, instead of little more than wishful thinking. And maybe alcohol didn’t disagree with her after all, the way Liliana had always claimed it did because that minor lie was easier than admitting that a dour Frenchwoman she hadn’t seen since her high school graduation still took up so much real estate in her head.

      It’s not just Madame who’s cluttering things up in here, a small voice reminded her then, but she shoved that aside. The last thing she wanted to think about was the impossible, overwhelming guardian who made his presence felt from afar with such ease. Not here. Certainly not now.

      The edges of the funky apartment, tucked away in a more creative than strictly safe part of the Bronx, began to blur in a pleasant sort of way. Liliana dared to imagine herself a little bit blurrily, as well, as the carefree and intrepid girl she’d always daydreamed she might have been had she not been locked away in the strictest finishing school in Europe throughout her lonely childhood. The kind of girl who was as easygoing as her roommates, perfectly capable of charging up to a man deemed beautiful by her friends to announce that it was his lucky night, because he’d been declared her birthday present.

      Maybe it wasn’t that she was a freak and a weirdo for never really indulging in the kinds of romantic adventures her friends had repeatedly had throughout their college years and were still having this first year after graduation. Maybe it wasn’t that she was gangly and awkward at best when infamous heiresses were meant to be as effortlessly chic and beautiful as her own mother had been, forever standing in as revered muses for fashion designers or draping themselves on the arms of movie stars. Tonight, inching into her own living room despite the fact it was packed with strangers, and letting the wine do its good work this once, Liliana toyed with the notion that maybe—just maybe—she’d simply never given herself the opportunity to explore the less prim and buttoned-up side of herself that she was positive was lurking inside of her somewhere.

      It had taken at least two years out of boarding school to stop imagining that Madame would appear the way she always had in the Chateau to strike Liliana down for any and all inappropriate or not entirely ladylike thoughts.

      “Your mouth belongs in the gutters,” Madame had always told the girls who’d defied her. “Perhaps it is you who belong there, too.”

      It had taken another couple of years for Liliana to relax enough to dare to say the things that she thought, if only to her very few, carefully chosen friends. And it was only now, at the beginning of her sixth month after graduating from Barnard, that Liliana felt as if she finally had the faintest notion of who she really was once she let herself relax into her life.

      For one thing, she was no longer the sad, locked-away-in-a-tower heiress. No longer marked by the great Girard and Brooks fortunes she would one day control. She might always be famous for the sudden, shocking loss of her parents and her subsequent banishment to a European boarding school at the direction of the famously ruthless and remote guardian she