Total pages in book: 127
Estimated words: 127368 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 637(@200wpm)___ 509(@250wpm)___ 425(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 127368 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 637(@200wpm)___ 509(@250wpm)___ 425(@300wpm)
And now the staff knew it did.
Fodder for discussion belowstairs.
“It’s good you’re here, you can zip me up,” she said. “We’re running out of time. They said they’d be here at six twenty to escort us down, yes?”
“Yes,” I confirmed as I watched her step into a column of sequins and pull it up her body.
It was a midi sheath dress, fully sequined in burgundy, except the twin bands of silver around the waist. It was high necked and sleeveless.
And totally not Lou.
She looked like the mother of the bride, not like she’d walked hundreds of runways wearing haute couture and wasn’t even forty years old yet.
I felt my heart warm and my temper flare, seeing yet again how badly Lou wanted Portia to like her. How badly she wanted to do what she could to make this go smoothly for her stepdaughter.
Lou looked the picture of appropriate, middle-aged-woman elegance when I didn’t even think she’d admitted to herself she’d hit middle age.
I, on the other hand, was wearing a dress I’d thrown in as a spare, not expecting I was going to wear it.
It was pine green, totally simple, except it was skintight, had a plunge V that showed cleavage down nearly to my midriff, which meant my breasts were swaddled in support tapes to give them the perfect curve at the expanse of skin that was showing.
It hit the floor in a trumpet skirt with a high slit up the right leg, and I’d paired it with the fan-shaped, Divas’ Dream Bulgari necklace of rose gold, diamonds and malachite Dad bought me, with its matching earrings, bracelet and ring.
My shoes were rose gold Sophia Websters with four-inch skinny stiletto heels and the requisite dramatic butterfly embossed with crystals at the heel. I’d likely have to take them off to walk back up to my room after dinner, but by damn, I was teetering in on those damned shoes.
And my hair was fashioned in a side bun that took four tries to make look nice.
It was in your face, the tens of thousands of dollars’ worth of jewelry, the flesh bared, the shoes that were so far away from velvet Mary Jane flats it wasn’t funny, and I had zero fucks to give that it was.
I zipped up Lou and she moved to sit on the arm of the chintz chair to put on her own high heels, pretty silver sandals that showed off her beautiful feet but made no statement at all.
“You should be you,” I said quietly.
Lou didn’t look up from her shoes. “I need to be what Portia needs me to be.”
Dad had married Lou because she was famous for being gorgeous and she made him look to his cronies as cronies like Dad’s envisioned the world. Like he could pull a beautiful young woman due to his looks, virility and prowess, and not due to the sole fact he had billions of dollars.
What Dad saw only at the very end, was that Lou may have married him because her career was waning, and she had a life she wanted to sustain. But she’d stayed married to him because somewhere along the line she’d fallen in love with him, and she was going to stick, no matter what wasted him away.
And she did, through cancer wasting him away.
“I’m going to talk to her tomorrow if I can get her alone,” I vowed.
“You don’t have to do that,” Lou said.
“Part of growing up is learning how to treat people who’ve done not one thing to hurt you.”
At that, she looked at me. “I know it was a shock to you girls when your dad married me.”
“Louella, that was thirteen years ago. It’s time she got over it.”
“I get it. My dad spoiled me.”
I didn’t have to say her dad was a bus driver, so how she was spoiled was nowhere near the privilege Portia enjoyed, so I didn’t say it.
But I never played poker, and not only because I didn’t like gambling.
Thus, Lou read my expression.
“I don’t want you two girls fighting about me,” she asserted.
“We won’t fight.”
“It’s obvious this boy is important to her.”
“He’s not a boy. He’s a thirty-five-year-old man. And Portia is a twenty-eight-year-old woman. We’re all grown-ass adults here, Lou. It’s only that Portia isn’t acting like one.”
“I remember what it was like, that first flush of love.”
I did too.
It was a trick of hormones and pheromones, and millennia of a dizzying number of behavior patterns, all designed so we’d find someone with whom to procreate to make sure we didn’t allow the human race to die out.
Sadly, that first flush of love could hide what would someday become searing rivers of hate.
I just hoped my sister wasn’t following in my mother’s footsteps.
Or mine.
“What it shouldn’t be like, is losing yourself to the guy you like and trying a different look because he likes more feminine clothes. He either likes Portia as she comes, or he doesn’t. We’re going to find out soon which way that goes.”