Now that Wicked Obsession has been out for oh, about 2.5 months, I wanted to talk a little bit about Langley.
There were two big influences in her life that shaped who she is today. The first, of course, was being the daughter of an ambassador and being cautioned about causing issues by making people feel uncomfortable or causing a scene or doing anything else that might reflect badly on her or her family or her country.
Because of how young she was when her parents began to tell her this, it's second nature to never show what she feels and to conceal anger or hurt with politeness. It's also a facet of her perfectionism and how detail oriented she is.
Just in case you've been wondering, she's working on this. People don't change overnight, but now that she's aware of how potentially destructive it can be to a relationship, she's stopping, taking a step back, and making new decisions. I wanted to highlight this more in the epilogue, but there was so many other things to address and space was limited, so I'm afraid this didn't get called out as much as I would have liked.
The second big event that changed her behavior was the attempted rape when she was 13. Because of that, she hates being weak or even perceived of as weak. You might have noticed throughout Wicked Obsession how she kept commenting on how she didn't want to be weak. It's why she wanted to have training to be able to defend herself. She's the one who convinced her father to get her some advanced self-defense training. It's why she never balked when Ryder added to her training. She never wanted to be in a situation where she was helpless.
You can also imagine that when Ryder grabbed her out of that shack in Puerto Jardin and she believed he was a mercenary, that she felt fear. That part of the reason why she whacked him in the head with the rock and escaped was that she was afraid of being assaulted before this (believed) mercenary ransomed her back to her father. It's a pretty big deal that she trusts Ryder absolutely when the story takes place. She doesn't trust easily.
I hope you found this a little bit interesting. In the future, I'll take a look at Ryder and talk about how I saw him and some of his issues.
