At Any Price
Brenna Aubrey
Chapter One
I’d refreshed the web page at least twenty times during that last hour, endless minutes slipping in between each click of the button. The Manifesto was reality now, and it was about to affect my future in a very big way.
In the end, I sat back in disbelief, the wind knocked from me. It was final. A complete stranger had just pledged to pay three quarters of a million dollars in exchange for my virginity.
I blinked a few times, looking at the figure, with all the zeros following, barely able to breathe. My mouth was as parched as the Mojave but I doubted I had the strength in my legs to get up and grab a glass of ice water.
As I leaned back in my chair staring up at the ceiling, my phone rang. Without even looking at the caller ID, I knew who it was.
“Hey Heath,” I breathed.
“Welp, your crackball auction is now closed and it looks like someone wants to pay a freaking fortune to get in your pants. Are you ready to give up this redonkulous scheme yet?”
I took a deep breath and expelled it slowly, wishing my heart wasn’t thumping like I’d just run a three-minute mile. “Of course not.”
He sighed. “Yeah, I figured. But I’m not going to stop trying, Mia, you know that.”
I grimaced. “And you almost never change my mind on anything, you know that.”
He cursed under his breath. “This has been the longest and most expensive game of chicken that I’ve ever played,” he said.
“I told you, I’m not backing out. My heels are dug in nice and deep.”
He laughed. “That’s not the only thing that’s going in deep.”
I gasped, sitting up. “Shut up. You promised you weren’t going to taunt me about this.”
“Fine. But we do this on my terms or we don’t do it at all, just like we agreed. I’m not shitting you—I’ll pull my support.”
I sighed. “Yeah, yeah. You don’t have to keep saying that. I get it.”
“Stop rolling your big brown eyes. I’m not thrilled about having to sift through all the bullshit and find out what lech has been ogling your pictures on your website.”
My stomach squeezed at his words and I didn’t say anything for a long moment. This really was lunacy and every time I talked myself down from the panic that hovered at the edge of my consciousness, something else would trigger it to summit levels once again.
“You’re not helping,” I said, fighting to keep the irritation from my voice.
“Who the hell set up the damn thing? I’m a conscientious objector to your crazy ‘new paradigm’—yes—but I’m still not going to leave you hanging.”
Relieved, I coughed, wanting desperately to change the subject before he lapsed into another lecture about the self-destructive potential of my actions. “Okay so… Next steps?”
He cleared his throat. “I evaluate the top three bidders based on your all-important criteria. If they’re losers, I move down to the next batch and so on until I find someone who isn’t a dirty old creep, if indeed there is someone who isn’t a dirty old creep.”
“Okay, you have that list somewhere, right?” I grimaced, picturing the mountainous heap of papers and crap on his desk. He probably hadn’t seen it in weeks.
“Christ, Mia. I don’t need the damn list. I remember it all. He can’t be married. Needs to provide a complete lab workup to rule out STDs. Umm…”
“See? You can’t remember half of it.” I paused. “Find the list and clean your damn desk once in a while.”
He was riffling through paperwork on the other end. “It’s right here under the pile of—”
“Shit?”
“I remember another one—criminal history?”
“Uh huh…And what else?”
“Ahh. Here it is, see I told you I’d find it right under my stack of Minecraft notes. Let’s see—lab workups, marital status, yadda yadda, okay—proof of money set aside in an offshore holding account.”
“And last but not least…?”
“A really big one?”
My eyes shot to the ceiling. Typical for him to jump to something like size mattering. “We don’t all think like you do.”
“Well yeah, that would be one of my criteria—what of it? The last one is that you both make an agreement that there will be no future contact between the two parties after the terms of the contract have been fulfilled.”
I sat back. “Great. I’m in good hands, then.”
“It’s my job to make sure you will be.”
That tight feeling in my gut wrenched again. “That’s the plan.”