The Other Woman (44 page)

“Shaddup!” I cry, jumping to my feet, my breath in spurts, my fists balled.

“—will. Until I—”

“Without me you’d still have been a small-time attorney in a pokey little office—”

“—I die.”

“—with
pleather
couches—”

“So?”

“—and driving a three-year-old mid-range Mercedes, you bastard! Just you remember that. I put you on the map. Me! And soon you’re going to be one of the most famous men in Australian history. Because of me. ME!”

He shakes his head, his face etched with contempt. “Maybe. But remember this: I don’t love you. In fact, I
loathe
you, you fucking…fucking bunny boiler!”

Even though his words slice at my heart, I will not show my hurt. “Well, too bad you’re stuck with me.”

“Yeah, too bad. But this here,” he thumps his chest, “belongs to Rival. Now, go bathe the kids and get them ready for bed,” he says, in a tone my father uses on his employees.

“Really? While their mother spends a couple hours during the day with them, then relaxes the night away? Fuck you! I’m not your skivvy, Bradley.”

With his lips a thin line, he nods. “Better you
don’t
touch them,” he hisses as he walks upstairs.

“Your dirty slick might
infect
them.”

My hands shake and my eyes tear up at his unconcealed hatred for me. To prevent myself from unraveling, I reach for the bottle of half-finished vodka. I am about to pour some into the glass when I stop. The answer to my problem does not lie at the bottom of a vodka bottle. I know that. Bradley is already drinking too much – the last thing we need is for
m
e to develop an alcohol problem and derail all our plans.

I love Bradley, I really do. How could he treat me so shabbily? This is not how it’s supposed to be. It’s Rival – she’s the problem. If she wasn’t around, Bradley would love me. I know that for certain. Get rid of her, and all my problems will vanish like magic. It’s that simple. This time it has to be final, a clean cut. The question is, how?

I spend the next few minutes staring out the lounge window, revenge on my mind. After a while, I have my
Eureka!
moment. I’ve hatched an indisputable plan that crackles with brilliance. I, Scarlett, am a fucking genius. Now I can finally go to bed and sleep like a baby.

With a smug smile, I shift out of my chair and stagger out of the lounge. When I picture my bed, cold and uninviting, I stop. Turning around, I return to the lounge, pick up the vodka bottle, and prepare to pour myself one final drink. Just one. A single. Just one more. A nightcap.

But I don’t pour myself one more – instead, I find myself taking a long swig from the bottle. It scorches my throat, causing me to splutter and cough. When I calm down, I take another swig from the bottle, followed by a few more. To my surprise, in less than ten minutes, the bottle is empty. Bummer! Did I really drink a whole bottle of vodka?

“Rival, you bitch,” I mutter as I reach for another bottle, “look what you’ve done to us.”

The End

Dear Reader, if you’ve enjoyed this book, you are going to love
Derailed (
to be released early May 2015). Scarlett and Rival’s not so silent war continues and will keep you enthralled, while Ritchie and Bradley’s friendship will be tested in a huge way. Follow my blog and friend me on Facebook for updates on
Derailed.
And finally, please remember to leave a review.

Excerpt from…

BETRAYED

****

It all started with Harry Hargreaves, my stepfather.

How do I describe him?

Let’s see…smart and crafty. And mean. Very mean. That’s
my
description.

Now if you asked Mocha, my best friend, her description would be slightly different – “Pussy ass, hairy mudderfucking Harry.”

Harry swept into our lives when I was three-years-old. Ambitious and calculating (quietly at that), he was a divorcee with no kids and he had his eye on the White House.

My late father, Senator John Waterhouse had been both popular and wealthy. So when Harry met my mother, the strikingly beautiful Amelia, who was also a wealthy senator’s daughter, he thought she’d look great in photographs and as arm candy, so he married her. After all, she was ten years younger than him and docile enough for him to push her around, which he did, all the time.

Most importantly, it helped that my father had left both my mother and I financially well off.

Harry pretended to be nice to me until the day he married my mother.

From that day on, he did everything in his power to isolate me from her. I was too little to fight Harry, my mother was too meek to stand up to Harry, so he succeeded – my relationship with my mother changed for the worse.

Harry had full access to my mother’s money, which he quickly squandered on cars, a yacht, extravagant holidays and by jut by just throwing money around at strip clubs and whatever else took his fancy. Throwing my
mother’s
money around.

I was a quiet child, loved by everyone and was always told how pretty I was with my blonde tresses and blue eyes. A replica of my mother.

“She looks like a porcelain doll,” I often heard.

But Harry, for some reason hated me. Yes,
hated
me even thought I was just three-years-old and by no means a spoilt child. He always accused my mother of spoiling me and when she tried to defend me, Harry became pretty vicious towards my mother with his rants and accusations. I didn’t want my mother hurt or in tears so I kept out of Harry’s way to prevent them fighting.

Shortly after they got married, my mother gave birth to twins, Ashley and Nicole who looked just liked my mother, which meant they looked like me.

Nicole and Ashley adored me and I in turn adored them. Harry hated that they loved me and tried to isolate me from them as much as possible.

By the time I was ten, I realized that Harry despised me.

He never hit me or did anything tangible where I could cry abuse – he was smart about it – excluded me in indirect ways, making me feel unwanted and in the way, like I didn’t belong. Subtle things – buy a four-pack of cupcakes, muffins, picnic set, ice-cream. (I was a kid; those things hurt like hell.)

Then when the mistake was pointed out to him, that we were a family of
five
and not four, he’d look at me as if he was seeing me for the first time and say, “Ah, yes, so I see. My …mistake.”

Or he’d say, “Forgot that you lived here.” Comments that would cut deep, as I was a kind and sensitive child.

As I got older, he’d say things like, “Didn’t expect to see you here. Thought you’d be out with your friends. Oh, I forgot, you don’t have any friends.”

I was a shy child, so no; I didn’t have that many friends. I was also a bookworm and preferred to spend time with my books rather than hang out with dumb friends who wanted to live at the mall and flirt with boys.

Sometimes, I’d hear Harry and my mom in their bedroom laughing and playing with the twins, with their bedroom door closed. I longed to be part of that laughter and wished he’d invite me in to romp with them, but nobody was allowed in their bedroom, unless Senator Harry invited them in.

To drown out their laughter and to staunch the flow of negative thoughts – that I didn’t belong, that I wasn’t good enough, that my mother loved the twins more than me, that my mother didn’t care, I’d slap on headphones and bury myself in my books. If I couldn’t hear their laughter, maybe it wouldn’t hurt that much.

My favorite game with Ashley and Nicole was playing school. I was the teacher and they were the students. They loved it cos I would dramatize their lessons.

My teachers told me that I would make a great school teacher one day. They said I was nurturing by nature. I wasn’t sure what that meant, but I liked how they said it.

Of course, being the daughter of a Senator, I attended private schools and I managed to get great grades. Teachers waxed lyrical about me at parent-teacher meetings.

Unfortunately, Nicole and Ashley were not so lucky. They struggled in school and had to have extra lessons to keep up – a mild form of ADHD.

This didn’t sit well with Harry – he took it as a personal failure and became angry at
me
. Whenever I was reading, he’d call me to do something that didn’t need to be done, nag me about the state of my room, about my music being too loud, pick on me about my hair, my shoes, my clothes, my nails, the fact that I was too quiet at the dinner table, mock me when I
said
something at the dinner table.

I lived in a state of stress when Harry was around and I particularly hated dinner times when we were in close proximity to each other.

He had a voice that he used on the twins, an endearing one, and a separate one that he used on me, blunt, curt, irritable. He could reduce me to tears with just a few words and one look.

I was a cry-baby – cried easily, cried buckets when Simba’s father died in
The Lion King.

As I got older, to cope, I dressed my hurt and confusion in a coat of arrogance – a don’t-give-a-damn attitude. That made things worse as I gave him ammunition to use against me.

“You are just arrogant and disrespectful,” he’d complain.

Where was my mother in all of this?

She was around but shit-scared of him. He’d have a serious go at her if she gave him lip. Threatened to divorce her and leave her destitute many times.

She was especially scared of that, as she had no working skills and came from a family that never encouraged women to work. Also, she no longer had money and had to rely on Harry to support her.

“Mom, he’s horrible to me,” I complained. “He’s mean to you too. Let’s leave him. Let’s take Nic and Ash and go live far away, Mom. We can do it. I will help with the twins. We’ll be happy, mom, I promise you.”

“Okay, Kat,” she said as she wound strands of blonde locks around her fingers and tugged out clumps of hair, adding to the bald patches on her scalp. “Do you want some chamomile tea? It’ll calm you down.”

After seeing that, I decided never to do bring that up again.

I loved my mother, but quietly I resented the fact that she didn’t do enough to protect me from Harry.

But my sisters were great – they hated it when Harry put me down, and being the feisty little things they were, they stood up for me. They never hesitated to tell Harry off. After an episode of Harry being mean to me, they’d bring me treats and give me hugs to cheer me up.

They hated Harry more when he was mean to my mom, and often told him that they didn’t love him and that they wished that Uncle John, his kind friend, was their daddy.

He didn’t like that at all and accused my mother of having an affair with Uncle John, which was not true.

I also think he was scared of losing the love of his daughters, but he was doing a good job of doing precisely that.

By the time I was sixteen, I had had enough of Harry’s meanness and bullying ways and tried to find a way out of my house.

Most of my school friends were from society homes, privileged girls that were as superficial and mean as the girl next to them.

I felt trapped, alone and unwanted.

I was an affectionate child by nature, but I seldom got hugs from my family. Untouched. That’s how I felt.

One day, in the year 2002, on a chilly winter’s day, while crying at the bus stop over Harry’s nastiness – his insistence that I take the bus to school in future and not get my mother to drive me to school, I met Mocha.

For a while she watched me cry silently from a distance, then she approached me.

“Gurl, you got boyfrien’ trouble?”

I shook my head.

“School?”

“Step-father,” I murmured.

She nodded and gently tucked my hair behind my ears, a sympathetic look on her face.

“Okay, okay, you can tell Mocha,” she said. “Go on.”

“Mocha?” I said through my tears.

“Yeah, ain’t too coffee, ain’t too hot-chocolaty,” she said, circling her thumb and her forefinger. “Jest right.”

I smiled.

Mocha, who I learned attended public school whenever she felt like it, which was about thrice a month, was sixteen too, but older than me by a couple of months. Her mother was black and her father, who she didn’t know, was white, but she was one hundred percent hood and refused to be anything else.

She was pretty – dark, tight curls that fell around her shoulders, liquid brown eyes, caramel skin, a curvy soft body, big boobs, big ass, Angelina Jolie lips and a smile that made her eyes sparkle.

After glancing around, she dropped her voice and said, “My mama name me Jane, but you tell anyone dat and I will throw you under dat bus.” She winked. “Have a rep to maintain and Jane, dat name, it don’ cut it cos I ain’t gon get me no Tarzan anytime soon.”