Nathanial:

Nathanial Clayton Hawthorne the third sat on the edge of a filthy seat, using his handkerchief to turn the pages of the photo album before him. On the other side of the rickety desk sat a woman that insisted on calling herself Mother Abigail, a greedy smile on her wrinkled face.

Usually, he wouldn’t be caught dead in a place like this, and he hated himself for even being here, but his father forced his hand. Nathanial Clayton Hawthorne the second had given his son an ultimatum – get married, produce an heir, or be disowned and stripped of his title as CEO of Hawthorne Enterprises.

Nathan never planned on getting married again. After he caught his first wife in bed with his best friend, he swore off women forever. When he felt like it, he’d find one he could use for the night, and send her on her way with taxi fare the next day.

Named the country’s most eligible bachelor for three years running, he never had any shortage of female attention. Invariably, each of his conquests would think she was the one who could break through the wall around his heart and become the next Missus Hawthorne, but so far, none had succeeded. He wouldn’t allow it. They were there for his money, not him, and he was happy enough to give them the money, but not his heart.

He vowed that he’d never feel the way he did on the day his wife told him that she was pregnant with another man’s baby, and leaving him. Not only did she betray him and bore another man’s child, the courts decided he needed to pay her for the privilege of breaking his heart. She went off with millions of his family’s fortune. At that point, he was happy to pay it just to get her out of his life. Watching her growing belly, the way she bloomed before his eyes, knowing the baby growing inside her wasn’t his, was more than he could handle.

She made him small. Powerless. Emasculated him. Never again.

Now this. He wouldn’t be forced into this situation if he didn’t decide he’d lie to his father, telling him that he met a woman while away on a business trip, and planned on marrying her before returning home. It shut the old man up, but now he was nearing the end of the trip and he still didn’t have a wife.

He looked into the bright blue eyes of one of the most beautiful women he had ever seen. Curly black hair, elven features, full, red lips. “Bridgett,” Abigail said, “perfect for you.”

Nathan nodded. “She is beautiful.”

“Shall I summon her?”

“No,” he said. “Not yet.”

Something compelled him to keep turning the pages, feeling sick as he looked into the forlorn women’s eyes. He found her on the second-to-last page. She was nothing spectacular. A slip of a girl, with mousy, dark blonde hair and unremarkable, plain features…but it was her eyes that drew him in. Soft, golden brown eyes stared out at him from the photo, no smile on her lips.

He turned back to Bridgett, staring at her photograph, but something about that girl with the sad, brown eyes haunted him. He flipped back to her page. “This one,” he said, pulling the young woman’s photo from the folder.

“Leah,” Abigail said. “Forgive me for saying so, Mister Hawthorne, but she’s hardly becoming for a man of your stature.”

He ignored her comment. “How old is she?”

“She is almost twenty-one.”

Nathan nodded. “And what will you do with her when she turns twenty-one and you can’t find a buyer?”

Abigail shrugged. “Sell her to a family as a servant…or use her in my--” the woman stopped talking abruptly.

She didn’t have to say the words, he knew there was a brothel in this building. “Has she been used by men before?”

“No,” Mother Abigail said. “I’m not a complete monster. I don’t sell children.”

“I’ll have Leah,” he said.

“You should know she is…damaged.”

“In what way?”

“She is scarred. Her body…she was in a terrible accident when she was a small girl.”

He looked at the photograph again, shrugged, “I don’t want her for her body.”

Abigail nodded. “Very well. I can arrange--”

Nathanial Hawthorn stood up, his business done here for the time being. He threw an envelope filled with cash on the table. “Your deposit. I’ll be back in a week for the wedding.”

“Don’t you want to meet the girl?”

“No need. Do you make the arrangements?”

Abigail nodded.

Nathan folded his coat over his arm, and without looking back, he walked out of the establishment into a stinking, dark alley. He only made it a few steps, before he fell forward against the wall. Bracing himself on the rough stone with one hand, he vomited violently into the gutter. He couldn’t believe what he had just done, and it made him sick.

Wiping his mouth with his handkerchief, he slipped out of the alley unnoticed, and five minutes later drove away in his rented luxury vehicle. He planned on spending the rest of the night getting blackout drunk.