The Perfect Homecoming (Pine River) (11 page)

All her life, Emma had envied her friends and the dads who loved them, who drove them to movies and out to the beach, who told their boyfriends they better have them home by midnight, and who teared up with pride when their daughters dressed to go out. Emma had wanted that, too, and Emma had believed Grant had really, truly, come at last to be that person for her. He’d ridden into her life like a knight, sporting a miraculous change of heart about being a dad and truly loving her, his flesh and blood.

Laura was the one person who knew how much hope Emma held for him.

The first few weeks in Vegas had been great. Emma and Laura had the time of their lives living in Grant’s lavish penthouse with a rooftop pool. There were lots of parties and shopping and late nights with Grant’s “friends,” who would give them alcohol and pass joints to them and whisper that they could show them the world while grabbing their asses. Emma was willing to put up with it all, because she was Grant’s daughter, protected by her status as his blood. She was his pet, his princess, and woe betide the man who took it too far.

But as the summer wore on, Grant became less and less available to her. When he came in late, he said he was working. Emma knew that meant he was gambling. That’s how he’d afforded those digs. It came with the territory.

And then Laura met a guy.

“Who is he?” Emma had asked when Laura told her, eyes bright with the excitement of a new love.

“I’m not ready to say,” Laura had said coyly. “I want to make sure it’s going to work out before I tell you.”

“You can tell me!” Emma had insisted. “We tell each other everything!”

“No, I can’t!” Laura had said, laughing. “When it’s official, I promise, you’ll be the first to know.”

“Does he have another girlfriend? Is he married? What does official mean, anyway?”

“Nothing like that. It’s sort of complicated. He said he’d know when the time was right. Until then, I can’t tell you!” And Laura had giggled like a girl.

Emma hadn’t liked it, but she’d made a game of it, studying the young men who showed up at the pool, looking for any sign of affection from Laura. Emma had finally decided it was the lifeguard, and was convinced of that until the early morning she’d gone looking for Grant and had stumbled on Laura in his bed.

Emma had knocked softly, and when there was no answer, she’d turned the knob and poked her head into her father’s room, intending to wake him up. She could still remember how the day’s heat had already begun to seep in through the windows and up through the floor, how it had felt as if her skin was burning as she stared at Laura, alone and naked under the sheets of her father’s bed, her face ashen.

And still, Emma was so naïve that she’d felt wildly protective of her stepsister, thinking Laura had used Grant’s bed for a tryst with the boyfriend.
“Laura!”
she’d whispered. “You have to get out of here before he finds you!”

As she spoke, the bathroom door opened and her father had walked out wearing nothing but a towel, and Emma’s whole world had turned upside down, tumbling over itself, splintering and shattering into shards of rose-colored glass. That day, everything Emma thought she knew, everything she thought she understood, went flying out that twelfth-floor window. She’d been so stunned, so repulsed, so
hurt,
that she’d fled Las Vegas, throwing her things in the leather tote that was now under her bed up at the ranch, hitching a ride to the airport. She’d called her mother from there, begging for a ticket home.

Laura had followed her a week later. Her arrival home was marked by a lot of shouting and crying, and in the end, Laura was deemed the ruined one, the used one. She’d been the victim of big, bad Grant Tyler, a terrible, horrible man. The catastrophe in Emma’s world became all about Laura, and the pain of Laura and Grant’s betrayal was insignificant to anyone but her. Laura had been cruelly used! Emma had merely been hurt. Was there really any comparison? No one seemed to care what Laura and Grant
together
had done to Emma. What they’d done to her all summer long.

When Emma couldn’t speak civilly to Laura or sit at the dinner table with her, when she couldn’t swallow the betrayal and move on as commanded by her parents, her mother had lost patience with her.

“You think you’re the only one hurt by this? Think about Laura! Think what that bastard must have said, how he must have lured her in. She’s
humiliated
, and the fact that you won’t forgive her just makes it that much worse!”

“
Forgive
her?” Emma had cried. “She was sleeping with my father!”

“Don’t say that,” her mother had said angrily. “Never let me hear you say that out loud!”

“But it’s true, Mom!” Emma had insisted. “They were having sex in his bed while I was in my room reading a stupid book.”

Her mother had sighed and pressed her fingers to the base of her jaw and made little circular motions. “Why do you always do this? Why do you always make things so goddamn hard? This situation is bad enough as it is, and you’re just making it
so much harder
, Emma! You’re selfish! Why does everything have to be about
you
?
Are you
jealous
of Laura? Is that it? Look, I can completely understand it if you are, but you don’t need to kick her when she’s down, don’t you get that?”

“You have to be kidding,” Emma had said flatly.

“I’m not! I can’t understand why you make such a big deal out of something that happened to Laura!”

Emma was stunned. How could her own mother not see what had happened to
her
? “She
betrayed
me, Mom! She ruined my chance to know my dad, and he betrayed me, too! He came for me, and she stole him!”

“Oh, Emma,” her mother had said, and with a sigh, she’d tucked in a stray wisp of Emma’s blond hair. “You’e so naïve. Do you really think Grant came here for you? He came here for
me
. I’ve told you, he’s always been crazy about me. He came to see if I would leave Wes for him now that he’s got money, and save him the child-support hassle.”

Emma had been so stunned she could scarcely speak. “That
. . .
that’s not true,” she’d stammered. “He said he came for me.”

“Whatever,” her mother had said, and had smiled sadly. “I’m sorry, baby,” she said, patting Emma’s leg. “But that’s what he wanted, and when he couldn’t have me, I guess he used Laura to hurt me. You know the only reason I agreed to let you go to Vegas with him was because I thought it would be good for you to see something other than Southern California. I should have known you wouldn’t see anything but despicable behavior.” Her mother had gone on to say some other things that all boiled down to how Emma needed to get over her hurt because Laura was naïve, too, and hadn’t known what she was doing, had been lured in by the big bad wolf, bless her heart.

Emma wished she could will it all away and forget that summer had happened. She wished she could simply forget how painful it was, and how twisted it was that she ached over Laura’s betrayal. She’d never told anyone, but it somehow felt as if her father had cheated on
her
, had picked Laura over her.

It was sick,
so sick
, to be jealous of what had happened with Laura. Not what she’d done with Emma’s father—that was disgusting. But in some twisted way, her father had preferred Laura over her. Emma
was
jealous, and that pain had turned into her secret, her dark, awful secret.

Emma had been trying to get over it for ten years. She lured men in. Not just any man—
never
good-looking men like Cooper who, if they could see past her looks, would be turned off by her personality. No, Emma went after older men. Men who were old enough or desperate enough or horny enough that they didn’t care what she said, if she was nice or not. Men who would choose her over a woman like Laura, who was all smiles and sweetness. Emma wanted to be Laura, if only for an evening. She wanted to be the preferred one. So she sought the easy men out, enjoyed the attention, enjoyed watching their eyes light up with the possibility of touching her. She enjoyed a weird sense of victory when those men chose
her.
Not Laura. Her.

Of course that behavior came with consequences. The thrill of it ended when she allowed the man to catch her. Anything that came after—sex, if she had to, less if she could get away with it—felt dirty and cheap and empty. The moment the men chose her, the thrill was gone, and Emma felt so disgusting that she willingly left a piece of herself behind, then took something of theirs to remind her of how she’d been the one. If only for a night, she’d been the one.

The behavior had become habit now. She didn’t think it had much to do with Laura and Grant anymore, but something so deeply rooted that it would take an axe to cleave out of her.

Sick, sick, sick.

Who could ever love her? She couldn’t even love herself.

With ten years of hindsight, Emma knew that the blame lay with her dead father. She knew if he hadn’t come into her life when he had, if he hadn’t played on her young emotions and her desperate hope that he would really be the father she dreamed of having, none of it ever would have happened.

But that didn’t make it any easier to be around Laura, or her betrayal any easier to accept. It didn’t make it okay for Laura now to pretend that Emma had always been unreasonable, had always tried to make trouble for her. It didn’t make it okay that in the course of family holidays, Emma’s mother and stepfather preferred to sweep it under the rug and let it go that Laura had been fucking a middle-aged guy who just happened to be Emma’s father.

Eventually, Emma stopped going to the Fourth of July barbecues and the Christmas parties. She retreated slowly from her family, tiny fragments of her leaving each day until she’d retreated so deeply from them and from herself that she didn’t know how to make her way back even if she’d wanted to.

The night Emma unexpectedly encountered Laura, she realized two years had passed since they’d met. Laura had been as gorgeous as always with her dark auburn hair, her sky-blue eyes. She was more fit than Emma remembered her, toned and sleek. Her date was a real estate broker, one of the high rollers who appeared on TV shows about flipping houses.

Laura had smiled warmly when she saw Emma. “Wow, I wasn’t expecting to see
you
here.”

Emma hadn’t known what to say. And as she’d searched for something, Laura had touched her hand. “You look great,” she’d said. “Really great. You must be doing well.”

“Ah
. . .
okay, I guess,” Emma had stammered. “You look good, too, Laura.”

Laura had beamed at the compliment. “Thanks! My trainer is Godzilla. He really works me,” she said. “Hey, I’m starring on
Days of Our Lives
. Have you seen it?”

“Ummm
. . .
I haven’t seen it.” Emma’s mother gleefully kept her informed of Laura’s glam life.

“The storyline is so hard to follow. Did I or did I not kill my husband?” Laura said with a flippant roll of her eyes. “Let me introduce you to Josh Hyland,” she said, and without taking her gaze from Emma, she reached to her right, touching her date’s hand.

Josh Hyland turned toward Emma, and with a flick of his gaze, he made a quick appraisal of her and smiled appreciatively. “Who do we have here?” he asked, his eyes sliding to her breasts and up again.

“Josh, this is my stepsister, Emma.”

“Well, well,” Josh said, his gaze now taking her in like she was some fatted calf at market. “I don’t know what’s in the water in Orange County, but it’s impossible to believe there are
two
women like you out there. But of course, you’re related.”

That salacious look of his, that smile, had flipped a switch in Emma. The hatches closed, the shutters came up. “We’re not related. We’re stepsisters.”

“I meant, you came from the same house. So you share the same space, basically. Two gorgeous women sharing the same air.” He winked at Emma, as if she should be happy with that assessment.

“We really don’t share anything, to be honest,” Emma said. “Well
. . .
except my father. I guess you could say we shared him.” The words fell from her mouth before she could stop them.

Laura’s mouth dropped open; she glared at Emma. “I don’t believe you,” she said, so softly that Emma scarcely heard her. Or maybe Laura had shouted it—Emma couldn’t hear over the rush of blood in her own head, the result of being appalled by what she’d just said.

“Sorry—”

“There’s an old guy over there, Emma. Maybe you should just go and do him and get it over with,” Laura had snapped. She turned away, striding as quickly as she could without appearing to run, her long auburn curls bouncing above her hips, and Josh, looking confused, running after her like a dog.

That night, the candlesticks had ended up in Emma’s car. Two days later, Melissa believed Emma when she said she’d picked up the sticks with many other things and had forgotten them. Of course Melissa would believe that—Emma was a vice president, a trusted employee. But taking those candlesticks had frightened Emma so badly that she needed to get out of town, to go somewhere and get a grip.

It so happened that Libby had called her early in the fall, wanting her help to set up a race. It was as good a time as any to go, and with stupid Carl pissed and wanting back the thing she’d taken in exchange for the piece of her she’d left in Malibu, Emma had snapped. She’d quit her job, packed up, and taken off.

She never dreamed that stupid pig would send someone after her. What was his deal, anyway? That medal had been in a box under some folded laundry. It had obviously been there a long time, unnoticed, unimportant.

The sound of a woman calling out startled Emma out of her rumination. Across the street, the mother of the children had stepped out onto the porch and was calling to them to come home. The three of them answered like little birds, then gathered up their toys and scampered across the playground.