Dance With Me - By Hayden Braeburn Page 0,5
and it turns out that made Curtis Everett proud.” She paused, her gaze resting on each of her children before finishing, “It wasn't long before Charlie was running the bank, and we had children running around the house.”
She shook her head in disbelief. “So, so... You really don't care?”
“Do you love my brother?” Caleb asked.
“With everything I am,” she answered earnestly.
“Then, that's good enough for us,” Camryn declared.
The whole table nodded in agreement, but Kat noticed Cassidy wasn't quite as accepting as the rest of the family. She wondered briefly if that had something to do with her mother, but decided not to dump everything into the Everett's laps at once. Small doses. Her mother wasn't due out for ages and she was all the way in Richmond.
TWO
Priscilla McClaren gaped at the text message. Surely it couldn't say what she thought it did. She looked at her screen again.
Mason is getting married
No. It still said what could not possibly be true. Mason was hers. He had been out sowing his wild oats for a while, but he hadn't been seeing anyone for almost a year, and no one seriously since Melanie. She snickered. Poor girl had been as green as her dress the last time she was out with Mason. That'll teach a girl to take what wasn't hers. She snatched her phone up, replying to Cassidy's message with one word.
WHO
The answer came almost instantly, rocking her to the core.
Katerina Nemecek
She resisted the urge to throw her phone across the room purely by force of will and the inconvenience it would cause her later. The little bitch thought she could marry Mason, did she? She would not be beaten by some washed up dancer with a tiny studio. She had readjusted her time line three times for him, and now he was pulling this on her? Didn't he know she was almost thirty four? Didn't he know he had wasted the better part of her childbearing years prancing around, never settling? And now this?
Giving in to the need to throw something, she hurled her glass of iced tea into the wall, reveling in the smash of glass and the rivulets of dark liquid running down the pale plaster. How dare he do this to her?
She tore her gaze from the carnage that used to be her tumbler, and stalked the room as she thought. Right this very minute, Mason would be taking his little dancer home. She kicked over an upholstered ottoman, swearing when her delicate leather pump did nothing to protect her toes. The thought of him making love to the little whore made her seethe. She'd waited for him for sixteen years. Sixteen godforsaken years.
When all her friends were getting married and having babies, she'd waited. Even while standing up in countless weddings and attending even more baby showers, she'd never lost sight of her goal. Mason had always been hers, but she hadn't pushed him, understanding his need to grow up, make it in the banking world, and get his wildness out of his system. At first, she hadn't minded biding her time. She'd had pageants to win, degrees to obtain, and a business to learn. Now, she was ready to take what was rightfully hers.
A sly smile curved her lips. Her father and grandfather practically built Tyler by themselves, and her father still owned half the buildings in town. She tapped her fingers together as she paced. Within the next year she would take her father's place as the McClaren of McClaren Properties, with all the executive powers that entailed. She laughed. She knew just what she was going to do. Priscilla McClaren was done waiting, and she didn't care who she had to destroy to make Mason her own.
~*~
“I told you they wouldn't care,” Mason reminded Kat as he guided her to the car.
She felt a little sheepish for assuming the Everetts would be judgmental just because they were rich. What did that make her, a classist? Mason's family was nothing like she had envisioned. Where she had expected austere and stuffy, they were warm, and close, and everything she'd always thought a family should be. Huh. Maybe she was a classist. They were genuinely nice people, and she felt like she'd won them over. Well, four out of five, at least. “Cassidy didn't seem as accepting as everyone else.”
“Nugget is a little less trusting than the rest of us,” he defended. “She started working in the prosecutor’s office even before she graduated Georgetown Law.”