★★★TOP 50 WATTPAD ROMANCE NOVEL★★★
He's her English teacher and her priest... what happens when they fall hopelessly in love? A sexy, forbidden, true love romance between an American student and a Catholic priest.
[RECAP: As if being in love with a man who's married to the church wasn't stressful enough, now Leonie is being blackmailed...]
Leonie buried herself in work and rehearsals for the rest of the term. She didn't apply for the scholarship, but most people assumed that this was because she planned to go back to the States. She deliberately mentioned Juilliard a few times as a cover. If anyone had remembered her expressing interest in RADA before, they quickly forgot. At any rate there weren't too many questions.
Gabriel was horrified when she told him what had happened. "You can't do this," he said. "I know how much you wanted that scholarship."
"I've got no choice. We're both dead if she takes that letter to Mother Benedict," Leonie said. She also felt really stupid for keeping it, and not keeping it safe. She should have burnt it, as she supposed. Or at least hidden it safely at her grandmother's house.
"I can only hope she doesn't go poking around the presbytery. I've got yours there," Gabriel told her.
"Have you?"
"Of course." His blue eyes met hers, and Leonie felt a surge of longing for him. They didn't dare kiss any more as everything seemed so risky.
"I wasn't sure if if you would have kept it," she said.
"It's the first and only letter you've ever written to me. Of course I was going to keep it," Gabriel told her.
Leonie felt warm inside. She knew his letter to her by heart, but she still hated that Suki had the actual paper.
Leonie had managed to fix up spending an extra week in England at the start of the Christmas holidays. "Figgy's going to cover for me. So I can spend a whole week with you, if you still want me to. If you don't, I can just stay with Figgy's family for real."
"I'll want every day with you," Gabriel said. "Your parents didn't mind?"
"They were cool. So was my grandmother." If any of them found out the truth it would trigger the next apocalypse, but Leonie didn't want to think about that for now.
They confirmed the arrangements. Gabriel would drive down and Leonie would meet him later by train. Figgy's family would drop her at the station. "Figgy will just tell them I'm taking a train to London to my grandmother's house," Leonie said.
Her friends had all been great, united in their mutual hatred and outrage against Suki Laverne. They had rallied round to help wherever they could.
Sitting around with cups of cocoa and biscuits, they commiserated with Leonie over the situation.
"What really infuriates me is that she doesn't even need the scholarship. Her parents are loaded," Mai said. "She only wants it for the prestige." She pulled her dressing gown more closely around herself. The school heating hadn't been turned up enough to compensate for the falling temperatures. Being from Hong Kong, Mai felt the cold more than any of them.
"As Mother Benedict said, it's not even guaranteed that anyone will get in anyway. Everyone still has to go through the normal audition process," Figgy pointed out.
"If Suki fails that, she'll just buy her way in. Her parents will make a huge donation or whatever. It's a shame, because otherwise we could try and buy her silence. But she has more money than she knows what to do with," Mai said.
There was one thing Suki couldn't buy: Gabriel. Leonie knew that Suki had a massive crush on him. She guessed that the blackmail was as much about Suki's jealousy over Gabriel's relationship with Leonie, than over the RADA scholarship. Probably more so.
If Suki wasn't so constantly hateful, Leonie might have felt sorry for her. If Suki felt only a thousandth of what Leonie felt for Gabriel then it must be torture thinking of him with someone else.
Leonie shivered, and not just from cold. Figgy offered her a pair of knitted bedsocks. They had all laughed about Figgy's bedsocks when they had first arrived in the post, a gift from some elderly aunt. Now they were prized possessions.
"We have to get Leonie that letter back," Harry said. She was always the most pragmatic among them. "We just have to figure out where she's hidden it."
Various locations were suggested. In her bedside cabinet seemed too obvious. The lining of her trunk was a possibility.
"She might carry it on herself," Figgy suggested.
"Too risky. If she dropped it, or someone else caught sight of it, it would wreck her plans."
Leonie tried to think of some of the hiding places from adventure stories she had read. The hollowed out handle of a tennis racquet. A bed knob that unscrewed. The lining of a cape. In a box under the floorboards. Underneath the mattress.
Most of these weren't possible: they weren't playing tennis that term, the beds didn't have bedknobs and the floors were covered in lino. They didn't wear lined capes. Putting anything under a mattress was far too risky as Matron turned them over whenever the beds were remade.
For now it was a mystery, but one that they needed to crack.
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Where do you hide your love letters?! (Non-electronic ones)
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