Billionaire Protector - Alexa Hart Page 0,79
could. My mother bought me a new, high-end wardrobe for the job before I moved and while I am now dressed for it, I’m still not ready to face the crowd of New Canaan elite likely already gathering at the mansion. I can hear Bon Jovi playing quietly on the radio and the driver taps along on the steering wheel. Reginald was a classical music lover or at least pretended to be - everyone who ever worked for my mother and stepfather had to play the part, but this guy, like everything else right now, feels off. Nothing about this scene feels right. Or real.
As we pull up to the first security gate, the driver rolls down his window and gives a quick flick of the wrist to the security guard. Real or not, here we are.
We drive on another quarter mile past the gate and onto the family property. Ahead of us, the wide U-shaped driveway is already full of fancy cars, Bentleys and BMWs, all polished to a shiny gleam. My mother and stepfather didn’t have many close friends, so you would think the turnout would be small. But in New Canaan, money, not friendship, determines the success of your funeral. And my mother had money. Loads of it.
As the driver parks the car in the garage, I smooth the few wrinkles that have formed in my modest, knee-length, black cocktail dress.
My grandmother, a pearl-clutching ice queen, hates nothing more than too-low necklines and too-short hemlines. She will surely approve of this dress. I pull out a small mirror from my purse to look myself over. I’m exhausted after taking the redeye flight from Milan and I didn’t manage to sleep a wink on the plane. I’d felt sick, not grieving exactly, but a mix of dread, fear and regret, ever since my stepfather had called to tell me the news. My mother - a wild, extravagant, outrageous beauty, (and a deeply unhappy and wounded woman) - had died in her sleep three days earlier of a sleeping pill overdose. It appeared up for debate whether the overdose was accidental or if she had chosen to take her own life, though my stepfather strongly hinted at the latter.
I missed the burial by an hour, but I’d gotten the earliest flight I could and my stepfather had refused to wait. He said I would still make it in time for the reception and that he had a very important business meeting this evening that he didn’t want to delay. Though, more likely it was an important mistress he didn’t want to miss sleeping with.
He’d had more side pieces than I could stand to count, so I highly doubt that he is truly mourning the loss of my mother. It was his disdain and coldness – the coldness of his entire family - that had driven my mother to drink, self-medicate, and spend her money on every half-baked depression or detox guru under the sun. She had been desperately searching for some vestige of happiness, and still, she never divorced him. She liked the power his name brought her too much to let it go.
My mother was first a trophy wife and then, later, merely a useful bank account, she had never been worth much more to my stepfather. Not that Belinda Yates, for all her early beauty and wealth, had made it easy for anyone to love her. She didn’t even make it easy for me, her own daughter, to love her.
I walk into the large marble foyer of our house and take in the scene. The place is crawling with people dressed in demure black, mingling and drinking as caterers move about with trays of Hors d'oeuvres and flutes of champagne. Only their jewelry and watches and expensive shoes give away the amount of accumulated wealth in the room. Connecticut’s wealth is demure, not tacky like my beauty queen mother was.
The scene almost feels like a somber dinner party instead of a memorial service for a woman who could never shake her Texas accent (even after hiring a speech therapist so she could, in her own words, “sound more well-bred”).
The only evidence that this gathering is even about my mother at all is the giant glossy photo of her propped up on an easel and surrounded by a wreath of lilies and peonies. The photo is a glamour shot from when she was young, maybe nineteen, and still full of hope.
She’d moved from Texas to Los Angeles trying