I understood what was happening. The rejection. It had been inevitable, in a way. This was what I got for wanting something.
Anything.
But I was not a child on my wedding night. I was a woman who’d endured enough of a man’s disdain.
“Fuck you,” I said through gritted teeth and reached for the doorknob. He moved so fast I didn’t get it open before he was right in front of me again. His fingers cupping my face.
“Keep your blood up. You’re going to need it. Be smart. Now, go.”
I jerked my head out of his grip and was out that door like an Irish devil was on my heels. But of course, when I turned at the end of the hallway, he wasn’t there.
I had no idea where my purse was, so I left it and my phone, and I stepped out onto the windy 27th street and, like magic, there was my car. My driver. My life operating as it always had.
When I felt somehow . . . changed.
“Ma’am?” my driver said. The wind whipped his coat away from his body, lifted his pale hair off his head.
“Yes?” We stood by the open door. A storm was blowing in from someplace.
“Are you all right?” he asked. He had a nice face my driver. And he was younger than I thought.
So much sudden concern from the men in my life.
“I think so. Yes,” I said and climbed into the back seat. He slammed the door behind me and then we were pulling away from the curb. The party.
The car ride home I spent squashing the lingering fires in my body. Distancing myself from the memory of his fingers around my throat. The open-mouthed kisses on my neck. I pushed them away and framed them up like they weren’t my memories. It was exactly what I did to survive being married to Jim. They were a book I read. Or a movie I saw.
The shame of having to do it again was unwanted, so I turned it into anger.
And I seethed with that anger all the way up to Bishop’s Landing.
The house was dark. And I was alone. The alarm beeped as I entered the front door, and I punched in the code to make it stop.
Theo, the driver, lived in the cottage at the end of the property. Jim’s bodyguard was no longer around. It was just me and seven empty bedrooms. An office wing. A formal dining room. Eight and a half baths.
There was so much room, and I rattled around inside it like a lost toy.
In the dark I went to the drink cart in the sitting room, and I poured myself a glass of something that burned as I shot it back. I poured myself another one and took off my light-as-air, pencil-thin Jimmy Choo stilettos and walked barefoot with my drink through the kitchen and the sliding glass door to the pool deck. Another drink and with nowhere to put the glass I heaved it at the far end of the patio stones where it smashed spectacularly.
Tonight . . . tonight had to be the end of something. Or the beginning. The way Caroline changed the speech. The way I came apart in Ronan’s hands only to be tossed aside the second he’d taken me apart. I was being used by everyone. Enough.
I lit a fire in the small fire pit I’d made out of bricks and stone, and I took off the dress and the thong and naked in the moonlight I burned them.
Shivering, I watched my old life burn.
My blood was up. And I was ready for a fight.
9
The next morning, my head pounding from my night of fury drinking, I walked the two miles over the ridge from my house to the giant Constantine compound on the very top of the hill. The 300-year-old mansion was known as The Queen of Bishop’s Landing. Originally an apple orchard and farm, the land got sold bit by bit, but the house never changed hands. Hundreds of years of Constantine matriarchs and patriarchs, adding wings and electricity. Bathrooms and theaters. Tennis courts. Guard houses. Swimming pools. Manicured gardens. Helicopter pad.
Since the last troubles with the Morellis, it had been heavily guarded with armed men on the various balconies and in guard houses along the long driveway. Winston had bought the houses closest to the compound, so for a mile in every direction it was Constantine land.
My parent’s old house was part of that. The willow tree and pond.
Rumor was that the Morellis used to have a house on this hill. I didn’t know if that was true or not.
It was damp in the early sunlight, and the fog clung to the hedgerows and the tall trees. Despite the compound and the bulldozing of houses, most of Bishop’s Landing was still forested.