The Princess and The Jester - A.D. McCammon Page 0,8
my legs already loosening their hold on him as he speaks again. “Good thing your body is doing it for me.”
My mouth falls open as he backs away wearing a victorious grin. I’m too shocked and confused to speak, my insides quivering with rage and embarrassment. Everything that happened between us just now had been nothing more than a game to him. A way for him to prove a point and put me in my place.
His laughter grates on my skin like nails on a chalkboard as he walks away, tossing Cory’s shirt in the trash as he goes. “Sorry, Princess. We’ll have to finish this later,” he calls over his shoulder as he reaches the back door. “Some of us have responsibilities. We don’t get to lie around our castle all day with a silver spoon hanging from our mouth.”
The door slams with his exit, and I scream like a child throwing a tantrum. My wobbly legs collapse when I slide off the counter, sending me to the floor as tears roll down my cheeks. I’m not going to survive this.
Chapter Four
Present
COLE
The Rhodes estate looks even more like a castle at night, the entire house lit in a warm amber glow. It’s been so long since I’ve seen it this way, but there’s an odd sense of belonging that settles over me. That feeling quickly sours in the pit of my stomach as I park my car in the driveway outside their six-car garage. The truth is, this was never where I belonged.
I pull my vibrating phone from my pocket and climb out of the Honda, my lanky frame making it a struggle. My mother’s face lights up the screen on the iPhone, and a calmness washes over me as I slide my thumb across it to answer. “Hey, Momma.”
“Hi, sweet boy.”
I silently chuckle, shaking my head at the term of endearment. I’m probably the only seventeen-year-old whose mother still addresses him like he’s five. It definitely doesn’t match the bad boy image I portray.
“It’s so good to hear your voice,” she says. “Did you make it home from work all right?”
I close the door and lean against the car, my eyes roaming over the vast expanse of the mansion before me. It’s strange to think I once considered this my home. Before the Rhodes family offered my mother a job and a place to live, we were bouncing from one motel to another. On the particularly bad weeks, when my mother was between jobs, we even slept in our car.
My father’s sudden death left her in a bad place, unable to pay the bills with her income alone. He was the breadwinner. A rising country star who’d just been signed by a major record label. If his life hadn’t been taken from him, things would’ve been very different for us. We might’ve even had a place like this of our own one day. But fate had other plans for the Masterson family.
Mr. Rhodes was my dad’s entertainment lawyer. When he discovered how bad things had gotten for my mother, he offered up his home. Our lives went from struggling to scrap up enough money for one decent meal a day—not even knowing where we were going to lay our heads at night—to living in a fairytale. Only we weren’t the main characters in this storybook.
Now, I’m following in my mother’s footsteps—waiting on the rich and thanking them for any loose change they throw my way. I consider myself lucky, though. Most kids my age with my background end up slinging burgers for minimum wage. Thanks to my best friend and her father, I get to work in a posh hotel downtown, making decent money by catering to the wealthy guests.
“This place is far from home. But yes, I made it back safely from Nashville. Standing in the Rhodes’ driveway as we speak,” I tell her.
Deciding to come back here might not have been the best idea. It’s rousing some ugly demons. With my mother working out of state with Arwen’s dad all summer, it wasn’t like I had a lot of options. But staying here was my brilliant idea. One fueled by rage and driven by revenge. At the wheel, Gwendolyn Grace Rhodes.
The princess of this palace owned my heart until she saw fit to shatter it into tiny little pieces. I thought she was done hurting me after that. But it turns out she wasn’t done screwing with my head.