He barely made it to the Christmas holiday his first year at Georgetown Preparatory. When he arrived home for vacation and saw his mother, he wept in her arms and begged her not to send him back to that horrible, wretched place, and she didn’t. Instead she allowed him to go abroad and become a ski bum for the rest of the year. It was because of this and his late birthday that he was now a repeat sophomore at Collegiate. He knew some people called him a mama’s boy, but he didn’t care. Being back in Manhattan and living with a full-time nanny was worth it.

This was why Vronsky was feeling so out of sorts when it came to Anna. Yes, she was gorgeous and beautifully dressed, but there were hundreds of such girls in the city—he had a constant rotation of at least three such girls at any given moment. There was something special about Anna. Why else was he so taken with her after only meeting her once?

After he dropped the homeless man’s dog at the dog walker’s apartment, he’d headed over to Steven’s house, hoping he could see Anna for just a moment more. It was Steven who answered the door and told him Anna was otherwise engaged with saving his ass from the wrath of his angry girlfriend. Having no other choice, Vronsky small-talked with Steven and waited. It figured that she finally appeared right as he was leaving, but Anna was worth the wait. By God, he would wait ten thousand hours to spend ten seconds with her.

Suddenly he remembered that Beatrice, his favorite cousin, was a classmate of Anna’s in Greenwich. He stopped in his tracks, not caring that the wind was picking up and the icy snow was pelting him in the face, and texted Bea, who was a big party girl and often spent her nights in the city crashing at the SoHo apartment of her older stepbrother. Bubbles appeared, followed by a text telling him to come to her favorite hangout in the Village. She was with two hot models who were just his type. Giddy with anticipation, he wasted no time hailing a cab. His cousin would surely be able to give him what he ravenously desired: inside info on the winsome creature known as Anna K.

XV

Vronsky entered the Beatrice Inn to find his cousin sitting on the bar, her Jimmy Choo thigh-high boots dangling, and her head thrown back in abandon. Behind her an extremely tall hipster bartender poured their most expensive tequila into her mouth straight from the bottle. His cousin Bea had always been one of the most popular girls in Greenwich and by the end of freshman year she had secured her queen bee status and quickly set her sights on Manhattan.