If She Only Knew (48 page)

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Authors: Lisa Jackson

BOOK: If She Only Knew
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“No!”
“I thought you'd do anything for money.” Lucas traced the slope of her jaw and went lower down her neck.
She batted his hand away. “Not that.”
“I won't hurt you,” he whispered.
She thought of the money and of Ian and Brent probably listening on the other side of the door, their ears and eyes pressed to the keyhole. A sick feeling swept over her.
There was something in Lucas's eyes that scared her. Something that tempted her. Something that caused her to breathe a little shallower and her blood to pound in her eardrums.
Her mother's warnings echoed through her brain. “Don't let any boy get into your pants, Kylie. They'll just use you,” Dolly had told her. “You could catch something filthy or find yourself in big trouble. I'm way too young to be a grandma!”
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,
any
thing 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.
“I know I'll lose.” For the first time Kylie noticed the lines of strain around her mother's eyes, the tired slump of her thin shoulders.
“I wouldn't give up,” Kylie declared brashly, condemning the woman who had borne her as weak. “Never.”
“Then you're foolish. Or like your father.”
“Who is?”
“Conrad Amhurst. He's married. Has a couple of kids with his wife.”
“And doesn't want to be bothered with me,” Kylie had added, wounded to her soul. She'd known she had a father of course, but hadn't realized he'd lived so close and that he never saw her, either by choice or circumstance. “What kind of a bastard is he?” she asked, then she cringed at the use of the very derogatory term she'd heard about herself.
“Powerful. Harsh. Unforgiving. Relentless.”
“He sounds like a jerk.”
“He is. But he did give me some money and then there were the hand-me-downs.”
“Crap! You mean . . . you mean those dresses you said you got at the church . . . that they were from . . .”
“His daughter. Marla.”
“His
real
daughter.”
“You are his real daughter,” her mother had said, a little of her old backbone resurfacing.
“No, Mom, I'm not. I'm just the bastard. As you said, an embarrassment.” But she'd listened to every word as Dolly explained everything then, about being a waitress at an exclusive club and being swept off her feet by the dashing, rich and very married man who had eventually gotten her pregnant. Dolly had known of his children and of a wife who, he claimed, bled him dry and would never ever consider divorce. Dolly had also learned that she hadn't meant a whit to her lover. “He gave me a hundred thousand dollars,” she admitted.
“And you blew it.”
“We lived on it, damn it, Kylie.” Dolly angrily jabbed her cigarette in the overflowing ashtray. “Someday you'll understand.”
“Never. I'd never roll over and play dead like you did!” Kylie had gone to her bedroom, thrown open the closet door and hurled all her clothes on the bed, clothes with designer labels that, though a few years old, would rival and outdo any girls' in her school. Skirts and sweaters and blouses that Kylie had worn self-consciously as they were so different from the jeans and T-shirts that her mother had bought at the discount stores.
“You have to know that you mean everything to me,” her mother had said, walking up behind her and wrapping her arms around Kylie's waist as outrage burned through Kylie's body, the sting of being unwanted biting deep. “I've always been proud of you and he should be, too. The odd thing is that you look so much like her, like Marla. The Amhurst genes run strong, I guess.”
Kylie had refused to cry but had decided to get even. With her father and with that snot of a privileged half sister. But first she had to meet them and to that end she'd devised a plan.
The first of many.
It hadn't taken long. She was barely fifteen when she was able to sneak into the city. With the help of the telephone directory, Kylie had located the offices of Amhurst Limited and gained access as far as her father's offices where a fussy secretary had bluntly told her that Mr. Amhurst was in meetings all day and far too busy a man to see her.
“Then I'll wait,” Kylie had insisted and plopped down in a wingback chair in a reception area, while pretending interest in the
Wall Street Journal.
Men in business suits occupied the leather couches and fiddled with the clasps of their briefcases, only to be called one by one through the cherrywood doors emblazoned with gold letters that read, Conrad Amhurst, President. Kylie had waited until her bladder had been ready to burst.
At five minutes after five in the afternoon, she'd been ushered outside by a no-nonsense janitor who had flatly told her to go home.
She hadn't. She'd parked herself on the bench across from the private parking lot. Chewing on red licorice and sipping a Coca-Cola, she watched as the expensive cars rolled away from their designated spaces and took off through the city. Finally, near dark, a sleek black town car with smoky windows purred out of the lot only to drive away. She'd known her father was in there, had seen a man's profile, had imagined him locking eyes with her, only to turn from her.
As if he hated the sight of her.
She'd visited his country club, only to be told by a snooty receptionist that “members only” were allowed in. She'd left messages that were never answered, telephoned his office and home only to have no call returned. It was as if, to Conrad Amhurst, she didn't exist.
Kylie didn't give up.
One Sunday she had the confrontation she'd waited for.
She knew the church he attended, had seen him from afar, with his family, walking into the cathedral-like building one fog-shrouded spring Sunday. Kylie had worn one of Marla's cast-off dresses, a deep green velvet that was too hot, but the nicest of the lot. She'd attended the service, sitting in a pew only a few rows back. Marla had seen her then, their eyes, so like each other's, had locked for a few seconds. Marla was older, but her hair was the same red-brown as Kylie's, her nose as straight, her chin a little sharper, her eyes the same green. It had been spooky, like looking into a mirror that was slightly off, the reflection not quite perfect. Victoria Amhurst had turned as if she'd sensed the intrusion into her perfect life, spied Kylie, whispered something to her husband and then quickly faced the altar, her back ramrod stiff, not so much as another glance being tossed over her shoulder as the organist started to play and the congregation launched into the first hymn. She nudged her daughter and Marla, taking the cue, never looked over her shoulder again. But she knew Kylie was there, staring at her, Kylie had
felt
the other girl's fascination, her curiosity.
After the service, on the church steps, she'd boldly walked up to the family as they were speaking with the minister. Conrad's eyes had cut Kylie to the quick. He'd turned scarlet, made a quick apology to the preacher and with a smile that looked like a grimace, he grabbed her elbow so hard it hurt. Propelling her away from his family, down the steps and into a private sanctuary where cherry blossoms littered the ground and the trees were beginning to leaf, he turned on her. A soft wind had tugged at the hem of Kylie's hand-me-down dress and ruffled the graying strands of Conrad's dark hair as the first drops of rain had begun to fall from the overcast sky.
“I think you'd better leave,” he'd whispered in an angry, don't-even-think-about-arguing-with-me tone. His face had been flushed but his lips bloodless. “And never come back to this church again.”
“It's a free country,” she'd shot back.
The hard finger dug deeper into her arm. “But some people are freer than others. That's a lesson you'd better learn.”
“I just want—”
“You get nothing. I've paid for you and paid dearly. Now leave or I'll make your life miserable, a living hell.”
“You've done that already,” she'd whispered.
“That's where you're wrong. If you think things are bad now, just you wait. You may as well know that if you cross me, you'll regret it for the rest of your life. Now.” He reached into his pocket and pulled out his wallet. From within he extracted five one hundred dollar bills. “Take this and buy yourself something nice and never, do you hear me,
never
accost me, or my family again. I won't be bullied or blackmailed or compromised.” He'd pushed the crisp bills into her fist and turned on his heel, plowing through the churchyard unaware that pink blossoms were falling on the shoulders of his crisp gray suit or that Kylie would never give up.

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