“Yes, Mother, he had a choice after I reached eighteen,” Tess reminded her bleakly. “But I believe he still sends you money and provides whatever you need, just as he does me. He doesn’t have to do this.”
“Conscience money,” Ella spat out, her pretty face twisting into lines of anger and bitter fury. “He knows he did us wrong, Tess. He threw us out—“
“No, you elected to leave, if I remember correctly.” Tess wanted to scream in frustration.
The argument never ended. It was never over. She felt as though she continually paid for her father’s choices because her mother had no way of making him pay.
“He’s depraved. As though you need to spend a week in his house.” Ella was shaking now with fury, contempt lacing each word out of her mouth. “Those parties he throws are excuses for orgies, and that wife of his—“
“I don’t want to hear it, Mother—“
“You think your father and his new family are so respectable and kind,” she sneered. “You think I don’t know how you watched that brother of hers. That I didn’t know about the flowers he sent you last year. They’re monsters, Tess.” She pointed a thin, accusing finger at Tess. “Depraved and conscienceless. He’ll turn you into a tramp.”
Tess felt her face flame. She had fought for years to hide her attraction to Cole. She had heard all the rumors, knew his sexual exploits were often gossiped about. He had more or less admitted them to her on several occasions.
“No one can turn me into a tramp, Mother,” she bit out. “Just as there’s no way you can change the fact that I have a father. I can’t ignore him or pretend he doesn’t exist, and I don’t want to.”
Tess faced her parent, feeling the same, horrible fear that always filled her at the thought of making her too angry. Of disappointing her in any way. But as she faced her fear, she felt her own anger festering inside her. For so many years she had tried to make up for the divorce her father had somehow forced. She knew he took the blame for it. Just as her mother vowed complete innocence. She was beginning to wonder if either of them would ever tell her the truth.
“You’ll end up just like him,” Ella accused, her eyes narrowing hatefully.
Tess could only shake her head.
“I’ll be home in a week, Mother,” she said, picking up her luggage.
In the back of her mind, she knew she would not be returning though. She had stayed out of guilt and out of fear of failing somehow in her mother’s eyes. She was only now realizing, she could never succeed in her mother’s opinion though. She was fighting a losing battle. A battle she didn’t want to win to begin with.
* * * * *
Tess was still trembling when she pulled into the large circular driveway of her father’s home. The shadows of evening were washing over his stately Virginia mansion, spilling long shadows over the three-story house and the tree shrouded yard. The drive from New York wasn’t a hard one, but her nervousness left her feeling exhausted. She definitely wasn’t up to facing Cole. Her face flushed at the thought. She had tried not to think about the phone call that morning, or the core of heat it had left lingering inside her.
It had nearly been enough to have her turning around several times and heading back to her safe, comfortable life in her mother’s home. She would have too, until she thought of her mother. Ella was too frightened of the world to draw her head out of her books and see the things she was missing. She had lost her husband years before their divorce because of her distaste of his sexual demands. She told Tess often how disgusting, how shameful she found sex to be.
Tess didn’t want to grow old, knowing she had passed up the exciting things in life. She didn’t want to ache all her life for the one thing she needed the most and passed up. But she didn’t want her heart broken. And Tess had a feeling Cole could break her heart.
She wanted him too badly. She had realized that in the past months. The dreams were driving her crazy. Dreams of Cole tying her to his bed, teasing her, touching her, his dark voice whispering his sexual promises to her. She was awaking more and more often, her cunt soaked, her breathing ragged, a plea on her lips.
Tess had known he was bad news even before her father married his sister. His eyes were too wicked, his looks too sensual. He was wickedly sexy, sinfully sensuous. She moaned in rising excitement and fear.
Leaving her keys in the ignition for the butler to park it, Tess jumped from the car. Night was already rolling in, and she would be damned if she would sit out in that car because she was too scared to walk into the house. Hopefully, Cole wouldn’t be there. He wasn’t always there.
“Good evening, Miss Delacourte.” The butler, a large, burly ex-bouncer opened the door for her as she stepped up to it.
Thomas was well over fifty, Tess knew, but he didn’t look a day over thirty-five. He was six feet tall, heavily muscled and sported a crooked nose and several small scars on his broad face. He was Irish, he said, with a mix of Cherokee Indian and German ancestry. His thick, brown hair was in a crew cut, his large face creased with a smile.
“Good evening, Thomas. Is Father in?” She stepped into the house, more uncomfortable than she had thought she would be.
This was the home she had grown up in, the one she had raced through with the puppy her father had once bought her, but her mother had gotten rid of. The home where her father had once patched skinned knees and a bruised heart. The home her mother had taken her out of when her father demanded his rights as a husband, or a divorce.
“Your father and Mrs. Delacourte are out for the evening, Miss,” he told her as she stepped into the house. “Will you be staying for a while?”
“Yes.” She took a deep breath. “My luggage is outside. Is my room still available?”
There was an edge of pain as she asked the question. She had learned that Missy had opened her room for guests, rather than keeping it up for Tess’s infrequent returns.
“I’m sorry, Miss Tess,” Thomas said softly. “The room is being redecorated. But the turret room is available. I prepared it myself this morning.”
The turret room was the furthest away from the guest or family bedrooms. At the back of the house, on the third floor. The turret had been added decades ago by her grandfather and she had loved it as a child. Now she resented the fact that it was not a family room, but the one she knew Missy used for those visitors she could barely tolerate. Evidently, Tess thought, she had slipped a few notches in her stepmother’s graces.