Page 1 of Audacity

Prologue - Athena

Moments of note don’t always feel noteworthy.

So when a woman whose poise, whose elegance,wouldbe noteworthy if we were in any city other than Paris presses upon me a fresh flute of champagne, this moment of my fingers closing around its weighty crystal as my eyes meet hers offers little more than a mild flicker of curiosity.

My first guess—orassumption, more accurately—is that she wants me. This I’m used to, from both men and women. Apparently, I give off carnal vibes, even when I’m at my most sedate and polished.

Especiallywhen I’m at my most sedate and polished.

She’s eyeing me with a combination of approval and pleasure. It’s ashe’ll do nicelylook.

‘Vous-êtes anglaise?’she asks me. Her accent is decent, but there’s an unmistakable British roundness to the vowels of hervousthat gives her away. I get it. It’s hard for us Brits to relearn the actual linguistics that will allow us to form authentic French vowels. I suppose she, like most people, prioritises the ability to speak fluently and accurately over the sheer joy of one’s mouth speaking the words as they are meant to be spoken.

‘I am.’

I leave it there.

She’ll tell me what she wants from me soon enough.

‘I thought so,’ she says. ‘You’re a perfect English rose.’

She has a cut-glass accent, but it’s a trite phrase, and one I’ve heard a thousand times before. To her credit, she doesn’t try to dress it up as anything more impressive than a mere matter of fact. I am, apparently, an English rose. People have catalogued me as such all my life, although if I pressed them on the datapoints that make up that category, I’m sure they’d fumble.

One man even told me I looked like a Rossetti painting, which I frankly found offensive. His muses had decidedly horsey jaws.Notattractive. No, I’d rather bask in the heady warmth of being compared to one of Sargent’s ethereal subjects in all their doe-eyed, pale-skinned, rosy-lipped glory.

Some of them, like the beautiful Duchess of Portland, even have a beguiling pink flush on their cheeks, almost as if the painter burrowed under all that lustrous oyster-coloured satin to seek out their most intimate parts and made them climax on his fingers for the sole purpose of capturing that shameful, intimate bloom on their skin.

I’ve got myself off to that fantasy before.

This is also one of my working theories on why people have carnal reactions to me: I look like someone, or something, pristine that they want to violate. To overpower. To smash.

I shrug at this immaculate woman’s underwhelming descriptor. There isn’t much to say when someone simply states facts at you.

She holds out her hand, her pose at the correct end of the jutting-slash-languid spectrum. Nobody likes a languidly extended hand.

‘I’m Camille St John.’

Camille.Maybe she has a French mother. She really should work harder on those vowels. There’s no excuse for sloppiness.

‘Athena.’ I shake. I don’t see a reason why I should offer her my surname at this point. That she gave hers freely is not my problem.

She smiles then, and it’s a fierce, unguarded smile. It makes her far more likeable. ‘God, I love that.’

‘Thank you,’ I say, quietly amused.

Her eyes dart over my face. I suspect the meekness of my countenance and the unavoidable connotations of my name strike her as incongruous.

‘Goddess of handicrafts. Do you crochet?’

Athena. Goddess of war. Of wisdom. Lauded for her resourcefulness. For her lack of promiscuity.

If ever a female-presenting Greek deity was not to be trifled with, it was Athena.

And this woman chose fuckinghandicrafts.

‘Interesting that you went there. Do I look like I crochet?’

‘You do not. It felt less invasive than asking you outright if you were a virgin goddess. Although the goddess part is indisputable.’

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