THE ARRANGEMENT
PRIVILEGE & PRESTIGE SERIES
CASSIE VERANO
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
THIS EBOOK IS A WORK of fiction. Names, characters, places, and situations are complete creative works of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner.
Resemblance to actual events or persons is entirely coincidental.
Any unauthorized reprint or use of this book or any portion thereof is prohibited. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system without express written permission from the author/publisher.
Copyright © 2020 Cassie Verano
All Rights Reserved
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Printed in the United States of America
Contents
PROLOGUE – XIOMARA
CHAPTER 1 – XIOMARA
CHAPTER 2 – LAKE
CHAPTER 3 - XIOMARA
CHAPTER 4 – LAKE
CHAPTER 5 – LAKE
CHAPTER 6 – XIOMARA
CHAPTER 7 – XIOMARA (2 MONTHS LATER)
CHAPTER 8 – LAKE
CHAPTER 9 – XIOMARA
CHAPTER 10 – LAKE
CHAPTER 11 – XIOMARA
CHAPTER 12 – LAKE
CHAPTER 13 – XIOMARA
CHAPTER 14 – LAKE
CHAPTER 15 – XIOMARA
CHAPTER 16 – LAKE
CHAPTER 17 – XIOMARA
CHAPTER 18 – XIOMARA
CHAPTER 19 – LAKE
CHAPTER 20 – XIOMARA
CHAPTER 21 – LAKE
CHAPTER 22 – XIOMARA
CHAPTER 23 – LAKE
CHAPTER 24 – XIOMARA
EPILOGUE - CHAPTER 25 – LAKE (1 ½ YEAR LATER)
SNEAK PEEK AT THE DANCE
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PROLOGUE – XIOMARA
TO UNDERSTAND WHY I made the choices I did, you must understand my story; know my people. The things I’ve done most would say that they weren’t who I was, not reflective of the person they knew.
I wasn’t a cheater, they’d say. Maybe he forced her hand. He seduced her because that wasn’t who she was. Maybe it’s all a lie, and she had done none of it.
I beg to differ. If someone’s capable of doing it, then maybe that’s who they were all along. Just waiting like a butterfly for the perfect time to break forth from their cocoon.
My father hails from a city called Dharan in Nepal. The values and norms his family held shaped his life views and eventually impacted my life.
My family moved from Dharan to the United States when my father was just a teenager, just before starting his high school career. That change would shift many of the values my father held dear, but there were some that he would never let go of.
One of my father's immediate changes after college graduation was changing his name from Gaurav Shah to Gaurav Sheffield. Although he was proud of his culture, he wanted people to see him as an American, and he felt it was an important business move.
My father’s parents and grandparents came together to find a suitable wife for him when he turned eighteen. His arranged marriage was a welcome and expected part of his life. And for seven years, it was perfect, though the union yielded no children. A few months before their eighth year of marriage, his wife, Maira, died in an airplane crash on a flight back to her city, Itahari.
When his parents approached him with the idea of another arranged marriage just three years later, he shunned the suggestion. My father was already falling for an Eritrean model who’d done some commercials for his company.
Within one year of meeting her, my father asked the woman for her hand in marriage. That woman was Semira Tesfay. After their first three years of marriage, she would produce two daughters to my father, myself, and my sister, Senait.
My mother is much younger than my father, and while his wealth didn’t sway her, the power and authority he held did. Even after she’d grown comfortable in a relationship with him, she still stood in awe of his presence. And my father used that same power over my mother to get her to yield to his demands.
However, now and then, she would show that she held genuine power. His love for her would always take a backseat to anything else. And that was going to be my saving grace.
My mother understood early on that he would instill the values of his Indian culture in his children. And because he loved her, he agreed that she, too, could instill certain Eritrean values in us, also, as long as they didn’t conflict with his beliefs.
There was one value that he was unwavering about. Arranged marriage.
My father insisted that was the best way to ensure that his daughters married well, someone of equivalent standing and that the marriage would be successful. My father’s culture believed that elders knew what it would take to make a successful marriage. They also would understand what qualities to look for in a mate and who would pair best with whom.
Although my mother’s Eritrean culture held the same beliefs, she didn’t. My mother was a bit more radical in her thinking and believed that her girls should marry for love. Her parents hadn’t been pleased with her when she’d bucked their traditional thinking and found a husband of her own.
It had created a rift between her and her family that healed in time but still caused there to be a strain between my father and his in-laws.
My father wouldn’t budge on his thoughts about whom we should marry, and in time my mother agreed with him.
I trusted that judgment for years, and although most of my classmates didn’t have an arranged marriage forecast for their future, I was okay with it. After all, that would be my sister’s lot in life, and many other family members on both sides of my family.
Lake Chambers was the reason that my mindset shifted. Eleventh grade Lake Chambers was not the same Lake Chambers of middle school, but to him, I was still the same Xiomara Sheffield, his best friend.
Although I knew that I could never have Lake, I knew that I wanted more than what my father offered. I wanted someone that made me excited when they stepped into a room. Someone who had the power to make my heartbeat speed up and my thighs tingly. A man who could leave me thinking of nothing but
