When Lucas reached for the button of her jeans, she grabbed his hand. Stopped him short. “No . . . I don’t think this would be such a great idea,” she said, her voice unrecognizable. She wanted him to touch her. She was one of those kinds of girls, the kind who liked it.
“Oh, come on, Kylie. I want you so bad, baby.” He was touching her and kissing her and her mind was spinning crazily. “And no one will know.”
Just the whole universe! Ian and Brent and their big mouths would spread it all over the school. Not to mention Lucas himself. He’d brag to everyone and anyone else who would listen that he’d scored in the janitor’s closet!
Lucas kissed her. Hard. His hands opened her jeans. “Just feel good, baby.” He shoved a finger between the denim and her skin, groped and touched, squirming to reach lower.
“Don’t.” She pushed him away and nearly fell into the stack of trash cans. Her heart was thudding, her breathing rapid and she felt a forbidden want deep in the most secret part of her. “No!”
“But—”
“No way.” She shook her head and reached for the money, but he snatched it, and his stupid condom up in one fist.
“So you’re just a tease,” he snarled.
“I didn’t say I’d do anything like that!”
“Cunt. Cock tease.”
“Get out!” she cried, the horrid words echoing through her brain. Why had she agreed to come into this stupid closet anyway?
“Don’t worry. I will.”
He adjusted his fly and yanked open the door. Ian and Brent nearly toppled inside. Kylie turned around so they couldn’t see her breasts and sweeping her T-shirt off the floor, scrambled into it. She yanked it over her head. Tears streamed down her face.
“Ya get any?” Brent asked Lucas.
“Plenty.”
For the next three weeks, until school was out, Kylie’s life had been pure hell. Lucas had taunted her. Brent had snickered every time he’d seen her and Ian had avoided her eyes. The rest of the class had found out about her stripping in the closet and the story had been exaggerated a thousand horrid ways. Kylie had somehow managed to walk tall and survive, but the incident had been burned into her memory. Until the crash. All
those years ago she’d silently vowed that when she grew up she’d do anything, anything to escape the chains of poverty.
And she had. Even going so far as agreeing to give up her baby for the almighty buck.
“Oh, God,” she whispered now, tears running down her face as she sat in this tiny apartment which she’d called home for over five years. She looked into Nick’s worried eyes. “I’m . . . I’m Kylie Paris,” she whispered. Nick had never loved her. They’d never shared any romantic trysts or rendezvous. She swallowed hard, stared into his blue eyes.
“And Marla?” he asked, and the way he said her name made Kylie want to die inside. He loved another woman. Not her. “How is she involved in all this?” He motioned to the small, cozy, lived-in living room with its magazines and crossword puzzle books stacked on the tables.
Kylie sank onto the cushions of her yard-sale couch. “She’s my half sister. I—I found out about her about the time I started high school . . . my mother let it slip that Conrad Amhurst was my father, that there was a half brother who was retarded and an older sister who was . . . Conrad’s darling.” Her throat worked at the thought and remembered the day when tall glasses of iced tea had been sweltering on the small table in their apartment.
“You’ve known all along?” Kylie had challenged, glaring at her mother as Dolly sat at a small, scarred Formica table, casually leafing through the Enquirer while smoking a cigarette.
“I was sworn to secrecy,” her mother had admitted.
“About me? About my dad?” Kylie had been outraged. “Why?”
“You were an embarrassment.” Dolly, loose blond curls pulled away from her face by a headband, added, “He’s rich. Socially prominent. I was an embarrassment too.”
“But . . . but . . .” Kylie had leaned against a wheezing refrigerator. “Rich?”
“If you’re thinking about getting any of his money, forget it,” Dolly said with acrimony, her husky voice filled with recriminations. “He paid me off a long time ago.”
“That’s not legal.”
“Maybe not, but I signed some document—” She waved her long fingers in the air, disturbing the smoke curling toward the flickering fluorescent lights overhead in the tidy, spartan room. “I don’t think I want to take him and his lawyers on. I don’t have the time, or the money. It . . . it wouldn’t work.” She turned a page and tried to bury herself in an article on Princess Diana.
“Then you’re a wimp,” Kylie declared and snatched up her glass. The ice cubes clinked and she downed the tea in three long swallows.