ME, CINDERELLA?(18)

“Valentina?”

There was only a note on the desk in the front of the room. He read it and crumpled the page in his hand. He looked out, as though expecting her to materialize from nothing into the seat where previously she had been sitting.

Eliot shoved the note into his pocket. He would not let her disappear so easily.





Fate told me I wasn’t a Disney princess, and I agreed. When the other girls at school wanted to play in imaginary royal palaces built out of cardboard and imagination, I went along. But I was never the princess. I was the funny sidekick lobster that helped the princess get the prince. What I never saw in myself—what nobody ever saw in me—was the slim grace of the hand that rests the tiara on her brow.

Instead, I looked to the older legends, to the stories my mother told me about the goddesses: their vengeances, their fury.

Me, Cinderella? A dainty, feminine orchid, destined to be plucked? No. I was Artemis, strong and intelligent and cunning.



Of Artemis,—her bow, with points drawn back,

A golden hue on her white rounded breast

Reflecting, while the arrow’s ample barb

Gleams o’er her hand, and at his heart is aim’d.



Nobody would come looking for me if I ran away, I thought.

I was wrong.

Princes don’t always go for the ones in glass slippers, it seems, and Eliot already had a hold on my heart that I could not escape from, no matter how fast or how far I ran.





CHAPTER FIVE



“Who is she?”

“I don’t know her name.”

Patterson’s brows sloped deeply into the wrinkled skin above his nose. He shook his head at Eliot, who paced across the oak floors of his office in vain.

“You have to pick a winner. We have to announce a winner. Today.”

“I have picked,” Eliot insisted.

“There is no Valentina Alastair!” Patterson looked at Eliot like he was a crazy person. Who knows, perhaps the man was right. Perhaps Eliot was crazy. But if there was one thing he knew, it was that Valentina was real, even if her name wasn’t really hers. And he wasn’t about to tell Patterson that his intended winner had turned tail and fled. It irritated him that the tablet system designed to preserve anonymity had backfired on him so miserably.

“She must have given the wrong name.”

“Then she must not want the prize. Pick another winner.”

“There isn’t another.” Even as he said this, Eliot knew the student he would pick if Valentina failed to materialize. Patterson sighed, crossing his arms and leaning back onto his desk.

Damn her! Why did she force him to chase after her? He felt ridiculous. He felt—

He felt as he had when he spoke to Clare for the first time, when she told him that her boyfriend was on his way to pick her up. He had persisted despite his mind telling him that he would surely fail, and eventually he won her over. Now, he felt the same stirrings of desire, the same desperate, ridiculous pangs of longing that made him rush headlong into foolishness.

“We can choose another for you, then. The Joseph kid. You mentioned him, and it would be beneficial for your status at the university...”

“Let me find her.” Eliot’s mouth set in a hard line. “Email the student list—”

“Dr. Herceg!” Patterson sounded incredulous. “Do you expect me to send out a missing persons alert for the winner of the most prestigious prize in the department?”

“Why not?”

“If you knew the kind of outrage that this would provoke—”

“Please!” Eliot knew he had reached the thin edge of Patterson’s tolerance, but he could not stop a last brutal effort. “Let me find her.”

“Then find her,” Patterson said. “Today. If I have not received an answer from you in the next two hours, I’m naming Mark Joseph the winner.”

“This is my internship—”

“Then stop acting like a fool! Eliot, I’ve tried to keep you here despite everything, but this is too much. I promise that the department will re-evaluate your fellowship.”

Eliot cast his eyes around the room. Truly, he must sound like a madman. Although every cell in Eliot’s body rejected it, he knew that Patterson had a point. Still, he needed to do everything he possibly could to find Valentina.

“Just one email—”

“No!” Patterson snapped down on the word as though cutting it off with his teeth. “You have until I leave campus tonight. I’ll be awaiting your reply.”

Eliot left the office, his shoulders slumped. Valentina—whatever her name actually was— had left him nothing with which to pursue her. She might well be a ghost. He had nothing of hers but her note—