Prince Laisrian Fairisles is rich, spoiled, handsome and arrogant - and did I mention handsome? Growing up in the lap of luxury, he has wasted no time in becoming a notorious playboy with a reputation as damaged as he is.
Esmia Williams, on the oth...
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ESMIA Williams had just maxed out her credit card.
Again.
The vaguely displeased look on the cashier's face morphed into explicit disapproval. Esmia used to work as a cashier when she was eighteen - she knew, and even empathised, with the guy. He had a customer quota to reach and she was just holding up the queue with her inconvenient...poverty.
She sighed and dug into her jean pocket, hoping...
"Aha!"
Esmia smacked the five dollar bill in front of him, flashing the man a triumphant smile. He sniffed.
"Thank you," was the response she got for proving him, and every tittering voice behind her in the queue, wrong. Resisting the urge to flip him off, Esmia grabbed her bag of groceries and hurried out of the store.
It was only when she had made her way through the tangled web of alleys back into her little apartment (ground floor, she wasn't completely unlucky!), and placed the groceries on her wobbling kitchen table, that she let herself wallow in self-pity.
One month. That's all she had left before she would inevitably be evicted from this dilapidated cardboard-box for an apartment. Esmia had just about managed to pay the rent for this month but knew there was no way she'd get a decent enough job to scrounge up another five hundred dollars in time.
Well look at this way, she told herself, you won't have to deal with the rats anymore.
On most days, it wasn't hard being alone. Not too hard, anyway. One could make do. That used to be one of her mom's favourite things to say. One can always make do. And dad would always accompany it with "Well, what about two?" and then smile, evidently pleased that he'd come up with that all on his own. As a little girl Esmia had no idea how numbers had anything at all to do with being poor but, then again, there were so many exchanges between her parents that she'd never understood until after they'd died. It was more lonely than amusing, to remember things like that in hindsight.
And, as it turned out, numbers had everything to do with being poor.
Esmia had ensured she could make do from the get-go. She'd swallowed her grief at age twelve and moved in with the Smiths, her foster family, who were kind of creepy and super into Presbyterianism. She made do with the Bible study groups and Mrs. Smith's weird obsession with flower patterns and making sure Esmia's neck and ankles were always covered. Esmia even convinced herself she hadn't really gotten attached to them when they told her, age sixteen, that they were going to have a baby and didn't think they could cope with two children. She had a stiff-upper-lip about it all, packing all except her frilly Christian garb, into her indigo suitcase and marching out of the house, head held high.
