Page 77 of Devious Lies (Cruel Crown)
“I pity you, Miss Rhodes.” I emphasized her last name, taking pleasure in the way she reacted to it. Like I’d delivered a lashing onto her back. “Incapable of comprehending basic words. So dull. So desperate. You remind me of your mother.”
They were polar opposites, actually.
Virginia Winthrop’s societal contributions included encouraging anorexia in the Eastridge youth, slut-shaming housewives who got the dick she wanted but would never receive, and drinking enough champagne daily to render an overweight elephant unconscious.
Meanwhile, Emery made a sport of defying her mother, fighting against the Virginia 2.0 mold like her sanity depended on it. At the end of the day, however, she’d known about Gideon’s embezzlement and did nothing.
Thousands lost their jobs and savings. Angus Bedford died. Dad died. Maybe Emery was like Virginia after all.
“Take that back!” Defiance slammed into Emery’s posture as she shouted, sloping her chin upward and body forward. I had no doubt she would have lunged at me if thin glass and four feet of space didn’t separate us.
“It’s cute that you think you have any control over me.”
I stepped up to the shower until we stood nose-to-chest, the fine layer of glass and my diminishing thread of sanity the only things separating us. I dipped my fingers into my pocket and pulled out her wallet. My wallet.
The picture of Reed caught my eyes first. Sliding it out of the insert, I licked it exactly where her face sat and slammed the photo onto the shower door. The wetness bound the picture to the glass.
She flinched as it rattled, looking like she’d taken a punch in the gut. I allowed her three seconds to stare at it, memorize it, savor it one last time before I tore the Polaroid in half. A yelp traveled up her throat, and she lost the defiant edge to her face.
Good.
I wasn’t here to be friends with her.
I wasn’t even here to acknowledge her.
How desperate for attention was she that she needed to break into my penthouse and strip in my shower?
Two halves of the photograph fluttered to the floor, Reed on one half and Emery on the other. As far as I was concerned, I’d done her a favor.
Lesson number two, baby. There is no you and Reed. He is wrong for you. Docile. Predictable. Tame. The sooner you get that, the better.
“I hate you.” A faint hiss. Soft and oddly feminine. I wanted to bottle it up and listen to it whisper dirty things.
She’d said those words before in the elevator under the guise of darkness. She hadn’t meant them then, but maybe she meant them now.
“Strong words,” I taunted, kicking one ankle across the other. “Do they make you feel like you have a spine? Because all I see is something breakable.”
Fingers swiped at her hair, whipping the thick, black strands out of her face. That fire returned, tenfold, sucking up all the air in the room. If I looked down, I knew I’d see bare tits heaving with panted breaths.
I didn’t look down, but my dick wanted me to. It pointed straight at her in my dress slacks. Instead of noticing, she glared at me.
She looked so rebellious, it reminded me of when she’d turned sixteen and asked her mother for a car. I stood at the edge of the pool, cleaning it while Dad met with his doctor. Virginia reclined on a lounger, sunbathing topless as she read the latest US! Weekly.
“I know what I want for my birthday,” Emery declared before cannonballing into the pool. She popped back up at the shallow end a minute later. “A car. One of Dad’s old ones from the garage. He doesn’t use half of them.”
Virginia set her magazine down and tilted her oversized sunglasses on top of her head. “Sweetheart, the riff-raff drive cars. The Winthrops have drivers.”
And that was that.
Emery was gifted a Birkin bag made of ostrich skin the shade of vomit, which she sold the next week before begging me to drive her to the used car dealership in good ole Honda Yolanda, my 90s Accord that still ran a gazillion years later.
She bought a used junker, and on the way home, donated the rest of the Birkin money to the animal shelter, passing Virginia and her friends at the country club along the way.
The next day, Virginia had Dad drive the car to the junkyard to be crushed, and Emery had turned to Reed and said, “It was worth it,” her face making the same expression she wore now.
Defiant.
Smug.
