Mine to Take by Alexa Kaye

Chapter 1
     

     
    Mila
     
    Confession time.
    I lied.
    On my application.
    But doesn’t everybody? I mean, how many of those girls on InternationalBrides.com really look anything like the supermodel photos they borrowed for their profile, right? And don’t get me started on the guys. They’re all, and I mean, all billionaires. And younger than my father. And hot.
    Riiiiight.
    To be fair, not everything I put on my application is a lie. My name is my name…now. I legally changed it. For a couple of reasons. For one, my given name, Miriam, never suited me.
    My photo is actually a picture of me. Not a shot of some random hot girl selling her selfies on Fiverr.
    And my measurements and age are also accurate--within a few, cough, cough, pounds.
    Oh, and yes, I’m a…this is so embarrassing...I’m a virgin. A twenty-three year old virgin.
    But the rest? Yeah, total fiction. I’m not a student from Germany, hoping to score an American husband so I can stay in the US. I was born and bred here. In Ohio. By a family who has shunned me.
    Yes, shunned .
    They’re Amish. No need to explain more, is there? I mean, you’ve all seen those television shows, about young men and women escaping the bonds of the Amish faith.
    In reality it isn’t that hard to “escape”. You just leave. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t tough. When you go, you leave behind everything. Including all your friends and family. The day I left my family wrote me off as lost.
    There’s no going back now.
    Okay, so now you’ve got the score on me. I’m a modern day (ex-Amish white-lie-telling) mail order bride. And I am debarking the plane that has carried me some million miles to meet my soon-to-be husband in person for the first time.
    Am I scared? Maybe a little. I’ve heard the horror stories, about girls being trapped in abusive marriages to total jerks.
    But to be honest, I wasn’t facing much worse as an Amish woman. You think it’s anything at all like those soppy Amish romance novels? Sorry to burst your bubble, but no. It isn’t.
    In the world of the Amish, a wife’s work is never-ending and grueling. And she’s expected to work sunrise to sunset even while pregnant, which she often is because (of course) the Amish don’t believe in birth control.
    Add to that the fact that most Amish see affection as ungodly, even toward children, and you might begin to see where I’m coming from. So yeah, I’m willing to marry a man I don’t know…well. He’s not a total stranger. We’ve chatted, emailed, even video-chatted a couple of times (the greatest discovery I've made since leaving home is the English public library, where a girl can use a computer for free).
    So far I like Jace. He isn’t your typical (old) man, looking for a hot trophy wife who will do anything and everything he demands. No, he’s young and good-looking and (though he doesn’t want to admit it) lonely. I’m happy to give him some companionship, and do his cooking and cleaning, as long as he isn’t a total wife-beating prick. If there is one thing I have learned growing up Amish, it’s how to cook and clean.
    And in exchange, I get stability. A home. All the things I can’t buy for myself with the (crappy) jobs I can get, thanks to my limited (seventh-grade) education.
    It’s my life. My choice. Mine alone. And to make sure it stays that way, I took a trip to the free clinic before I left Cleveland and got myself some birth control pills.
    The air outside is crisp as I duck through the plane’s door, stepping into the tunnel-thing that leads me from the plane to the airport terminal. This is my first flight on a plane.
    And hopefully my last.
    My teeth chatter. We’re in a semi-enclosed space and I’m already freezing. I knew it was going to be cold up here, but I figured all my years enduring brutal Ohio winters without central heat would have prepared me for this.
    Maybe not.
    At the end of the tunnel, I’m welcomed by an Alaska Airlines employee, who