Only suitable for 18+ due to adult content.
This story is for readers 18 years and upwards due to sexually explicit content. It also deals with issues that some may find difficult to read and may cause distress. There is also bad language throughout.
That being said, I hope you enjoy this enemies-to-lovers, New Adult Romance.
I don’t know why I expected anything would be different.
Why would my parents change the habit of a lifetime and put me first? I mean, it’s only my eighteenth birthday. No big deal, right? And yet, when they told me they wanted to throw me a party, that little girl I usually kept hidden from the world, the one who’d lived in the shadows for all these years, craving any scraps of attention they’d throw her way, she became excited that maybe they’d do something selfless.
But no.
Their idea of celebrating their only daughter coming of age turned out to be a pretentious, black-tie garden party, full of people of influence that they wanted to schmooze, but secretly despised behind closed doors. Men and women I’d never even met before, who didn’t have the first clue what this day meant to me. To them, it was a golden ticket to grace the social pages of some brainless magazine. A peak behind the curtain that was the picture perfect Winters’ family homestead.
To me, it was as fake as their pumped up lips and Botox frozen smiles.
Why did I expect anything to change?
I had to hand it to them, my parents had done a stellar job of making our garden look magical; otherworldly. A simulated smokescreen of perfection that’d make even David Blaine marvel. There were fairy lights in the trees, waiters and waitresses milling about with trays of champagne and canapes. Even the custom-made flower arrangements were a feat of artistic engineering, twisting around archways my mother had had specially constructed just for today.
If you didn’t know better, you’d think this was a wedding.
Who brought flower arrangements into a garden already full of flowers?
My mother, that’s who.
My father had done his part too, overseeing the set-up of an extravagant stage inside the stifling, expertly orchestrated marquee, but there was no D.J. set, no band playing. This stage was for him to address his devoted audience. To let them know what an upstanding father, husband, and pillar of the community their Member of Parliament was.
Our whole lives were a photo opportunity. A press call.
We were his ticket to winning the next election, and that was what came first and foremost, always.
I still hadn’t forgotten how he used my brother’s death to increase his popularity in the polls. I’m sure he didn’t mean to do it, not directly, anyway. But the grief I felt everyday seemed to have drifted over him pretty quickly. There was no room for emotion in politics… and families, apparently. My father had taken the stiff upper lip to a whole new level.
Standing at the doorway, leading out onto our terrace, I prayed I’d blend into the background, camouflaged from the heat of their stares and pseudo friendliness. It usually worked. I was a shadow in my world. A bystander to my own life. The after-thought of the day.
I smoothed my hands down the boring white shift dress my mother had insisted I wear. The heavy wool blend of the material clung to every curve, but not in a sexy, seductive way. No, I felt like I was being smothered by a snake, suffocating my body and bleeding me dry. Beads of sweat trickled down my back as I tried to look like I was comfortable and at ease with everything around me. I wasn’t. I’d rather have stayed in my room watching a Netflix box set, eating the Doritos I had stashed under my bed, hidden from my mother. God forbid I should ever eat such filth and gain a few extra pounds. I looked and felt like I was heading into an interview, not a party. The skirt of my restrictive dress reached safely below the knee and my dark brown curls were pinned up into a twist that mirrored my mother’s.
The perfect package for the tabloids.
Smoke and mirrors had nothing on my family. We were a goddamn fire of contradictions and falsities. My eighteenth birthday, and yet this was the last place I wanted to be.