Unconventional Read online

  Table of Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Unconventional

  As an English major and the editor of the Literary Magazine at Denberg University, I'm fully focused on school. Struggling with being the utter disappointment of my parents--who happen to be two amazing academics--I'm doing my best to prove myself. Stranded on campus with nowhere to go this holiday season, I'm determined to stay on task.

  But then, Maven Stone calls my name, and everything changes...

  Suddenly, I'm on a whirlwind vacation with Maven and his two fraternity brothers, Chance Montgomery and Banyan Iburgess, chasing dreams I never knew I had.

  I'm Giovanna Amsel, and this is the first part of our unconventional love story.

  Unconventional

  A Reverse Harem Story

  Rebecca Royce

  Copyright © 2018 by Rebecca Royce

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  ISBN: 978-1-947672-12-3

  Contents

  Dear Reader

  Author Note

  A Vacation from Myself

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  About the Author

  Other books by Rebecca Royce…

  Dear Reader

  Thank you so much for picking up this book. Giovanna’s journey has turned into such a favorite story to write! If you are unfamiliar with the format, this is a serial. That means this story is not complete. It comes to an appropriate end to this part of the story. But it isn’t a happily ever after yet. There will be three parts to this book. While most serials are short (just about 10,000 words and 1-2 chapters) this one is a full length novel. All three of them will be novel length. I hope you love Giovanna, Maven, Chance and Banyan.

  Best,

  Rebecca Royce

  www.rebeccaroyce.com

  Author Note

  Please Note:

  I have gone out of my way to search for Fraternity and Sorority names not currently in use in real life. But if I have stumbled upon a real one, please note that I am writing about fictionalized places. In no way should the people or circumstances described in the fraternities be thought of as real places or representing real places. They are works of fiction and in no way meant to infringe on the copyright, reputation, or intellectual property of real life fraternal organizations.

  Thanks!

  Rebecca Royce

  A Vacation from Myself

  Chapter 1

  “Hey there, library.”

  The voice. The sound of it calling to me across the street on that cold, chilly morning when I walked alone down Chow Street toward my empty dorm reaches me, not from any distance away, but through time itself. It seems odd to hear it now. Lying on my bed, I close my eyes. The baby will be here soon. I’ve gone into labor, but no one knows. I haven’t let anyone in on the news yet.

  The contractions are five minutes apart. Soon, I’ll get up and the trip to the hospital will begin. But this quiet moment is just for me.

  I’m not ready yet for the fuss, as loving as the intent to deliver attention will be.

  I just want, for one moment, to breathe and remember. To think of how I got here to this moment: twenty-five years old, ready to bring life into the world for the first time.

  Really, everything I am and everything I will be can be traced to that moment five years earlier when the voice called out to me, ‘hey there, library.’ Five days before Christmas. When I was all alone in the world.

  I clutched my black pea coat tightly around me to block out the wind. Head down, I watched my boots move as they made imprints in the snow with every step I took. I was alone at Denberg College for the entire holiday season, and I was getting a little bit tired of it. My parents were across the world in North Sentinel Island, India, seeing if they could get the Sentinelese to let them come onto the island. It was easier said than done, but my parents, the cultural anthropologists who both taught full time at Harvard, had managed this sort of feat before.

  This left me, their daughter, who worked really hard but whose struggles with dyslexia left her less-than incredible in the academic department, alone on my college campus for the entire winter holiday this year.

  I’d get to see them during the summer. Assuming the Sentinelese didn’t shoot poison darts at them and kill them. They’d been known to do that.

  There were a few of us lost souls wandering around the small, when-in-session population two thousand student college over the holidays, but not many. Most people had somewhere to go, people to see. I was an only child. It looked like this year I’d be with my books this Christmas. Introverted by nature, I’d intuited that my quietness had made my roommate’s family uncomfortable over Thanksgiving, and I hadn’t been invited back to her home with her over these holidays. I knew I was right about the awkwardness. I’d known it was happening while it was happening, and yet I’d seemed unable to stop the mess.

  That was okay. I’d spent most of the time really unsure of what to say to her relatives. No, I grew up mostly in Kenya. Yes, Kenya. No, I wasn’t from Kenya. I was from Pennsylvania originally and then lived in Boston for the rest of my time in America. It’s why I had come back here to go to school. What? No, my freckles weren’t painted on. They ran in my family. Red hair was a recessive gene. I was pretty sure.

  I shook my head. Conversations came back to me like that. All at once and overpowering, as though I had to relive them each time I thought of them. I hadn’t been raised on small talk. My parents liked serious conversations. We didn’t speak if there was nothing important to say.

  “Hey, there, library,” a voice called out, and I kept walking. It came from across the street. Someone was saying something about the library. I didn’t look over.

  I was on fraternity row. Ten fraternity houses and ten sorority houses were lined up, one after another, looking somehow both glamorous and dirty at the same time. I’d not pledged a Greek organization my freshman year. I could barely keep up with my classes. I didn’t have time to party. And there was the cost involved. My parents held my pursestrings, and they found such organizations to be pointless. Even if I could have gotten around those two facts, like by getting a job I didn’t have time for because I had to study all the time, there was the introverted issue.

  I avoided this street when school was in session. There were too many people and too much noise. I shook my head. I was a junior. This was the first holiday I had to spend alone. Every other school break, I’d gone home to Boston. My family didn’t even celebrate things. Not really, anyway. My mother was too concerned with dissecting every little bit of tradition into its root origin of something to do with harvest or fertility.

  I spent last Christmas alone in my room, reading mysteries. And… I had to snap out of this funk.

  “Hey,” that voice again. This time closer as someone’s jogging feet caught up with me. “I’m talking to you, libra
ry. Stop.”

  I turned to see who addressed me. I knew few people even for such a small campus, and no one I was familiar with was here over the holidays.

  A guy stood behind me on the sidewalk. “Why didn’t you stop?”

  I blinked. “I’m sorry?”

  “When I called out to you, why didn’t you stop?”

  I still didn’t understand. “When did you call out to me?”

  I knew better than to talk to strange men on the street. But this one wore a sweatshirt that said SPiI on it, indicating he was a brother in what I thought was referred to as the SPiI house. Sigma Pi Iota, and the students called it SPiI. My roommate, Molly, always said they were the best looking guys on campus. Apparently, their house was hard to get into. Most of the men who wanted to pledge the house were rejected, with brotherhood offered to legacies—meaning they had a father or a brother or a grandfather who had been brothers in a SPiI house somewhere—and very select few members of the community.

  Molly’s long-term boyfriend was a member of Delta Kappa Iota, or DKI. Apparently the two houses didn’t like each other. And it was sort of weird that she thought the SPiI boys were so good looking when she dated a DKI. I didn’t spend much time thinking about these things. But now that I thought about it, did the fraternities not like each other because they both used the Iota in their names? And who named them anyway?

  Still, all of those thoughts aside, I wasn’t going to stand on the street and talk to this stranger in the cold. Wasn’t he freezing? He was just in a sweatshirt and jeans and a pair of sneakers. I was chilled to the bone in my winter coat.

  “Just before.” He turned slightly to point to the white house with the SPiI letters on the front. “I called out to you from there.”

  Oh, yes. He’d been yelling from the house. “You said something about the library? You were calling to me? Sorry, I didn’t understand. Are you looking for the library? It’s not far.” I started to turn to point it out, and he laughed, stopping me.

  He was sort of… beautiful. Men weren’t usually referred to as thus, but he was. Tall, sandy blond hair, and blue eyed. He was tall, so no one would call him dainty or anything, especially with his muscles being so broad. The cleft in his chin really kept him from being feminine looking. And, oh hell, I was staring at him. I looked down at my feet.

  “I know where the library is. I’m a senior. I’ve been a few times. No, I was calling you library.”

  I stopped looking at my feet to meet his eyes. “Why were you calling me library?”

  “Because I didn’t know what to call you. I see you going in and out of the library all the time when I’m at my council meetings at the Dean’s office. In and out. Over and over. Each week. I started thinking of you as library girl. Shortened it. Library.”

  Maybe he thought he was charming. He was certainly handsome enough to get the kind of attention from women that would let him think every word out of his mouth was a gift to the female gender.

  “I had no way of knowing you called me library in your head or whatever, so it makes sense I wouldn’t know to answer to it.” Nor did I have any intention of answering to it, ever. “What did you need?”

  He put out his hand. “I wanted to say hi. I’m Maven Stone. Nice to meet you.”

  I stared at his offering before I took it. I did have manners. “Giovanna Amsel.”

  “Cool name.”

  I’d always hated it. About half the people who tried to pronounce it got it wrong. My parents called me Vonni and that was fine.

  “Well, thanks.” I nodded at him. “Was there a particular reason you wanted to say hi? Do you need something?”

  He crossed his arms over his chest. Maven, which was also a cool name, must have been getting cold. “I needed something else to call you besides library in my head.”

  “Well, then.” I cleared my throat. My mother was so personable. Her classes hung on every word she spoke. I never knew what to say, and this was so bizarre I didn’t have a good answer. “Now you do. Nice to meet you, Maven.”

  I started to leave, and he spoke again. “It’s cold out here.”

  “Yes, so you should probably go inside and put on a coat.”

  He raised both his eyebrows. “Or you could come inside with me, where it’s warm, and I could make us coffee. Or something stronger if you’d like.”

  Coffee I loved. I didn’t drink alcohol because I had a million reasons not to become intoxicated. But I wasn’t going inside with him, either way. “Thank you for the offer, but no thank you.”

  I’d never been in a fraternity house, and I wasn’t going into one, alone, with a guy who yelled at me on the street. That sounded like the beginning of a novel where the frat boy murdered a girl, no one knew what happened to her, and some detective had to figure it out. It was even a perfect set up. My bereaved parents wouldn’t hear what happened to me for six months when they return from being the first people to learn the language of a previously-untouched-by-the-modern-world people to try to get answers about why their daughter was dead.

  Although I had a hard time picturing Maven as a murderer. He had kindness in his eyes. Most people didn’t.

  “Hey,” someone shouted from the SPiI porch. “What are you doing?”

  A dark-haired guy wearing jeans and a t-shirt and, I realized as he got closer, no shoes ran towards us. There was snow on the ground. What was the matter with these people? Didn’t they have any sense? This wasn’t Harvard, but test scores to get in here had to be high. They couldn’t be this dumb.

  “Hey.” The dark-haired, green-eyed guy grinned. “What’s going on? Saw you two out here. Maven. Giovanna, hi.”

  He knew my name? I tried to place if I had ever met this person before in my life. He was as tall as Maven and also buff. Did they work out all the time? He had an earring in his left ear and ink visible just barely through his shirtsleeves. His face was long and his cheekbones high. I really couldn’t remember ever seeing his face before.

  “Oh, so you two know each other?” Maven looked between us.

  “No, I don’t think so.” Maybe I should have pretended, but I didn’t have a clue who the new addition to this odd conversation was.

  The dark-haired newbie clutched his heart. “Ouch. Beautiful redhead doesn’t remember meeting me. I am mortally wounded.”

  Maven rolled his eyes. “Chance Montgomery, meet Giovanna Amsel. Giovanna, my fraternity brother, Chance. He is our pledge master. He’s good with faces and names. I don’t think he ever forgets anyone once he’s met them or learned their name. It’s kind of a requirement for the job.”

  That was interesting. I was going to have to learn more about this at some point. When I was alone on my computer.

  “We met, once,” Chance spoke again. He had, if my ears didn’t deceive me, a New York accent. With Maven, I hadn’t detected any noticeable regional inflections at all. Chance’s wasn’t strong, but it was there. “Or not met, per se. But you were in my psychology class two years ago. You sat toward the back of the room in the corner, to the left. I sat, mostly, in the center. You didn’t talk much, but when you did, you were always right.”

  I had hated that class with a passion. I was an English major, and psychology certainly helped with the study of English, particularly Freud who was used more in studying English literature now than he was in actual psychology. The problem I had was I’d spent so much time around college professors in my life. I’d become adept at determining who was the real deal. I could tell who was passionate about their subject, anxious to teach, happy to really make themselves relevant in their field versus the ones who just wanted to be worshiped by a bunch of twenty somethings too enamored with their teachers to know their instructors were mediocre at best and usually on an ego trip.

  Or maybe I should spend more time in psychology classes to get a grasp on my own negativity.

  There was nothing more important than a good teacher. That psychology class? Professor King had not been a good one.

&nbs
p; I had to speak. I’d been quiet too long. “I’m not good with people. I don’t usually remember those I don’t spend a lot of time with. Um, faces sometimes more than names. Sorry, please don’t be offended. I’m better with books.” I looked at Maven. “Hence the library.”

  He smiled, a real grin. Maybe we’d just had a moment, some kind of inside joke. Okay, time for me to leave.

  “Did you invite her inside? It’s cold out here.”

  I pointed at his feet. “Particularly because you’re not wearing shoes?”

  “What?” He stared down at his feet. “Damn, no I’m not.”

  “Did you seriously not know you weren’t wearing shoes?” Maven shoved Chance’s shoulder. “Pick your head up from the books for ten minutes and join us here in the real world please before you lose sense of reality altogether.”

  Chance pointed at Maven. “Thinks he’s my father. You have such pretty hair, Giovanna. Couldn’t miss you in the back of that room.”

  “Oh, thank you.” I took another step away. I didn’t know if I was pretty or not. It was hard to tell, really. My parents didn’t tell me I was. They were more interested in intellectual pursuits, and my dyslexia, which they had taught me to deal with, had put a real stop to their plans for me to be the next Einstein or whatever it was they wanted.

  Guys didn’t look at me much. Or maybe I didn’t look at them. I’d had one boyfriend, briefly, in high school, when we’d moved to Boston. He hadn’t talked much either. We were two introverts who spent a lot of time unsure of what to do with the other one. The sex had been great. But that had been about it.