How My Brother's Best Friend Stole Christmas - Molly O'Keefe Page 0,53

used to obsess over those ten pounds, too, and all it got me was another five.

But this was what she’d done to my half-sister, Sabrina. She’d tried to bully and shame her into a size zero. The woman just couldn’t stand to see a girl eat bread. Or be happy.

I would never understand how my father could go from my beautiful, loving mother to Jennifer. They were diametrically opposed.

“Tonight…” Jennifer said, straightening herself up so she looked like the stick that had been stuck up her ass. She wore a blue dress that hugged her body so closely I could practically see her hip bones through the material. “…is important.”

I was twenty-two, not twelve. And it was my freaking night and no one needed to tell me what was important. I turned to face her instead of dodging her gaze in the mirror and I looked right at her. Something I never would have had the courage to do before the last few weeks with Clayton.

But I’ve had eight mind-bending orgasms—and they’d brought me some kind of new confidence I’d never had before.

“Jennifer,” I said, right in her frowny face. “It’s my engagement. It’s my party. It’s my body. And none of it concerns you.”

Jennifer sniffed so hard she nearly turned herself inside out.

Behind me, Trudy swallowed a laugh. She’d been brought into the upstairs dressing room of The King’s Land Ranch to literally sew me into my dress—no zippers for the girl who didn’t lose the ten pounds.

“We’re nearly done,” Trudy said around the mouth full of pins between her lips. A few more tugs and twitches on my dress and she stood back and smiled at me. “Eres bonita.”

I believed my old friend when she said I was pretty, because for one of the few times in my life—I felt pretty. I felt it down in my bones. Tonight was going to be amazing.

“Gracias.”

Trudy helped me down from the dais where I’d been standing surrounded by mirrors. A thousand reflections of myself stared back at me. It wasn’t pleasant.

“Do you know where my sister is?”

“Where do you think your sister is?” Trudy asked with a laugh, sticking the pins she’d had in her mouth into the pincushion she wore on her wrist.

I sighed. The stables. Probably in her dress, too.

“What have I said about speaking in Spanish, Veronica?” Jennifer asked.

“More than half the people who live on this ranch speak Spanish,” I said, shaking out the skirt of my sparkly tea-length gown. “You could try learning it. But if you don’t want to hear it, you should move.”

Jennifer stepped up to me so fast she was like a snake coming out of the bushes. And her face…uh-oh…I’d pissed her off.

I tried not to smile.

“I have spent the last sixteen years thinking this day would never come. That you would never find a man to get you out of this house. But it’s here and I’m so glad you are leaving.” She spat her venom all over the place. And once upon a time her words would have hurt, more than hurt, maybe. But Clayton and the orgasms were like armor. “You and your alcoholic sister need to just get out of my house.”

“Bea’s not an alcoholic,” I said, but Jennifer was already leaving. “She’s just fun!” I shouted at her back.

And then it was just me and Trudy in this stupid hall of mirrors.

Trudy touched my back, trying to be comforting, but if I had armor around myself, my weak spot was Beatrice. I would have left this house a long time ago if it hadn’t meant leaving Beatrice here. Sabrina, too, for that matter.

Someone had to take care of them.

“Don’t let her get to you. Tonight is too special,” Trudy said.

Right. I was twenty-two. Sabrina a year out of high school. I could have this life. The orgasms and Clayton.

The whole fairy tale.

“You deserve to be happy.” Trudy eyed me sideways, a smile on her face. She was married to Oscar, who ran my father’s stables, and while not employed officially by the King family, she’d stepped in when my mom died and has always been really good to me and Bea. A motherly buffer between us and our stepmother.

We hugged and Trudy left to change her clothes. Her hair was already done, with the white mock-orange flowers from the shrubs behind the house tucked into her curls. I had the same in mine. Well, sort of. They were already slipping out. I turned in the mirror