He leveled me a look. “We’ll see.”
I tilted my head to the side. “I get it. You’re pissed off I moved in. Well, newsflash, asshole. I don’t want to be here. How about you just stay out of my way and I’ll pretend like you don’t exist. Deal?”
His snarl morphed into something of a self-righteous grin. “Where is the fun in that? I have big plans for you, sis.” He pushed off the doorframe and shoved his hands into his front pockets, strutting down the hall.
I slammed the door shut, the sound echoing down the hall. “Asshole,” I muttered as I flipped the lock.
Chapter Three
Turning, I pressed my back against the door, my chest heaving. I stayed like that for a minute, focused on the bed until my breathing evened out. I stared at the large room with its white furnishings. It wasn’t my bedroom. Not really. And the sight of the soft gray walls and blush pink decor caused a pang of sadness in my chest for my old room. It was too damn whimsical for my taste but was probably my teen mom’s bedroom of her dreams. I preferred splashes of color to soft pastels.
How had I been here for three months already? And yet, the feeling of being a guest wouldn’t go away. Nothing about this place felt likehometo me. I slept in a stranger’s bed.
The house as a whole lacked charm and character. No warmth. Just modern coldness encased in soulless white bricks.
Who cared about making a life inside these walls when what really mattered was how the grounds looked on the outside? The only opinion important to these people was everyone else’s.
I decided to change and forgo the shower I intended before bed. After the altercation with my mother and then Carter, I just wanted to sleep, forget where I was and all the drama in my life.
Slipping the too-damn-tight jeans past my hips and wiggling out of them, I tossed my clothes on the floor and rummaged through the dresser drawers. I changed into a tank and shorts before staring down at the four-poster bed framed in a gauzy white canopy. About thirty-seven pillows were piled on top. Just looking at it, I couldn’t even tell there was a bed under all those decorative pillows in various shapes. Who the hell needed that many on one bed? What was the fucking point? To annoy me each night before I went to bed?
Mission achieved.
Sweeping my arm across the bed, I knocked off half of them before shoving the rest over the edge with my feet. Tomorrow, they’d be right back, neatly made on my bed. Nothing like a discreet household staff, though I wished they would spare themselves the trouble. I didn’t care whether my room looked picture-perfect. Nobody ever cleaned my room for me before. The best part: everything had been right where I’d left it.
I turned out the lights and slipped under the cool satin sheets—they were nice. It pained me to admit it. Rolling over to my side, I closed my eyes, willing myself to sleep, but the crickets were happily singing outside. They were happy.
And I was miserable.
I had never been so alone in my life.
Ironic, considering I was surrounded by so many people. The staff. I still didn’t know all their names. Carter constantly had his jagoff friends over. Steven often conducted business meetings at the house. Mom organized and hosted her committees and charity events. It seemed as if something was always happening.
It was times like this I missed Dad. I wished he had fought harder for me during the custody battle. Time and time again, I expressed my desire to stay with him, but the judge seemed to think a life with my mother in the Pattersons’ household was a betterfit. My ass. It probably helped that Steven’s lawyers had thrown his money around like it was raining cash in the courtroom. I wouldn’t doubt if the judge was somehow on my stepfather’s payroll. Money talked in this part of town.
There was a time when Dad cared about what I had to say, listened to my opinions as if they mattered. I couldn’t help feel as if he abandoned me to the wolves.
I stopped thinking of Angie as my mom after the divorce and her rushed wedding a month later to Steven. It pissed her off when I used her actual name, which more or less made me want to continue calling her Angie. I shouldn’t provoke her, but I had so much pent-up anger. She had changed so much these last few months. I hardly recognized the woman who ran this household. She wasn’t my mother.
On the surface, she presented herself to be a cultured lady. Classy. Respected. Dignified. The picture made me laugh. She was actually just a small-town girl from a poor family who had big dreams. Those visions of flashing lights and red carpets all ended when she became pregnant with me and that translated into me ruining her life.
No one forced her to marry my father. Or have me, for that matter. Those were choices she made. Choices she had to live with.
Perhaps she had a hard life growing up with a single parent and having to watch her mom die from emphysema and cirrhosis. She had been left alone at the age of seventeen to face the world on her own.
In other words, I had some pretty amazing genes. I was really batting a thousand in the DNA department. I don’t know what that said about me… probably that I needed to find a good shrink.
Fuck me.
I was nothing like her. And I vowed never to be. I would graduate from the damn Academy with honors and get into Hamilton University. I would make something of myself without her help or the Pattersons’ money. I didn’t need a damn thing from anyone.
* * *
My best friend was bouncing off the walls on the other end of the phone. I flipped over on my back, staring at the trimmed-out tray ceiling above the bed. “Ains, I’m not going,” I said into the phone for the third time.
“Pleeeease,” she begged. “It is the party of the summer.”
I fumbled with my bracelet, propping the phone between my shoulder and ear. “You said that about the last one.”