Prologue
VERONICA
No one had ever told me about orgasms.
Like, I had a sense, from movies or whatever. But no one ever gave me the complete picture. How they were tricky. How you had to be patient and vulnerable. Naked in a lot of ways—more than just, you know, actually naked. No one told me that they were a little frightening, that feeling of chugging up the incline of a roller coaster. Of something powerful and scary being just over the edge of a cliff.
Really, what no one told me was how freaking consuming they were.
After having some (eight, to be exact), it was literally all I could think about. Even in this stupid dress with the suffocating shapewear and the itchy netting. The boning in the bodice that dug into my armpits and didn’t let me breathe. The way my boobs—always a problem, except in the orgasm department—were squished and flattened.
All of this should be awful. But it wasn’t. Not really.
Because it was my engagement party.
And all I could think about was sex.
And Clayton.
“You didn’t lose the ten pounds you were supposed to, did you?” my stepmother, Jennifer, asked. She had her disapproving sniff going at full speed.
“Nope,” I answered.
“Veronica,” she said and then sighed, the most disappointed sigh. “You were going to try.”
“Was I?”
Clearly, while I’d been thinking about sex, my stepmother had been thinking about the ten pounds she wanted me to lose. The urge to tell her to just calm down, was hard to resist, but I managed -- because orgasms. I used to obsess over those ten pounds, too, and all it got me was another five.
But this was what she’d done to my half-sister, Sabrina. She’d tried to bully and shame her into a size zero. The woman just couldn’t stand to see a girl eat bread. Or be happy.
I would never understand how my father could go from my beautiful, loving mother to Jennifer. They were diametrically opposed.
“Tonight…” Jennifer said, straightening herself up so she looked like the stick that had been stuck up her ass. She wore a blue dress that hugged her body so closely I could practically see her hip bones through the material. “…is important.”
I was twenty-two, not twelve. And it was my freaking night and no one needed to tell me what was important. I turned to face her instead of dodging her gaze in the mirror and I looked right at her. Something I never would have had the courage to do before the last few weeks with Clayton.
But I’ve had eight mind-bending orgasms—and they’d brought me some kind of new confidence I’d never had before.
“Jennifer,” I said, right in her frowny face. “It’s my engagement. It’s my party. It’s my body. And none of it concerns you.”
Jennifer sniffed so hard she nearly turned herself inside out.
Behind me, Trudy swallowed a laugh. She’d been brought into the upstairs dressing room of The King’s Land Ranch to literally sew me into my dress—no zippers for the girl who didn’t lose the ten pounds.
“We’re nearly done,” Trudy said around the mouth full of pins between her lips. A few more tugs and twitches on my dress and she stood back and smiled at me. “Eres bonita.”
I believed my old friend when she said I was pretty, because for one of the few times in my life—I felt pretty. I felt it down in my bones. Tonight was going to be amazing.
“Gracias.”
Trudy helped me down from the dais where I’d been standing surrounded by mirrors. A thousand reflections of myself stared back at me. It wasn’t pleasant.
“Do you know where my sister is?”
“Where do you think your sister is?” Trudy asked with a laugh, sticking the pins she’d had in her mouth into the pincushion she wore on her wrist.
I sighed. The stables. Probably in her dress, too.
“What have I said about speaking in Spanish, Veronica?” Jennifer asked.
“More than half the people who live on this ranch speak Spanish,” I said, shaking out the skirt of my sparkly tea-length gown. “You could try learning it. But if you don’t want to hear it, you should move.”
Jennifer stepped up to me so fast she was like a snake coming out of the bushes. And her face…uh-oh…I’d pissed her off.
I tried not to smile.
“I have spent the last sixteen years thinking this day would never come. That you would never find a man to get you out of this house. But it’s here and I’m so glad you are leaving.” She spat her venom all over the place. And once upon a time her words would have hurt, more than hurt, maybe. But Clayton and the orgasms were like armor. “You and your alcoholic sister need to just get out of my house.”
“Bea’s not an alcoholic,” I said, but Jennifer was already leaving. “She’s just fun!” I shouted at her back.