Sweetened With a Kiss (10 page)

“Surely you aren’t that naïve? The Sellers keep you wrapped in cotton wool but you have to understand, there’s a lot at stake when it comes to your trust fund.”

That’s when the ice had started to invade her system, crystallizing in her blood stream, even as the puzzle pieces started to fit in place. “My trust fund?” she echoed, feeling suddenly very tired. “But Stefan doesn’t need the money.”

“Not the money, Jen. The stock.”

Jen had gone very still, unable to do anything but listen to the brutal words Madlyn was delivering with such compassion. It all suddenly made really nauseating sense. She was a first class fool. There was no such thing as dreams coming true.

“Don’t be too hard on yourself. He’s very good at getting exactly what he wants - no matter what he has to do to get it,” Madlyn had said, the picture of sympathy and concern. But it didn’t reach her eyes, Jen noted absently. Madlyn’s eyes were dead, like a shark’s. She was a cold, deadly predator and as Jen finally grew up in the space of those seconds, she knew without a doubt that Madlyn had her own agenda for telling her these things. But it didn’t make her wrong. Oh no, everything Madlyn said was absolutely correct. And Jen had started to understand why Lizzie called her the Red Queen. Madlyn was calm. She was helpful. She might explain the rules of the game, but only because it would make winning even sweeter for her if Jen knew exactly what was going on and still lost. Everything Madlyn had said was the raw, painful truth.

“You think I don’t know what you’re doing?” Jen had whispered.

Madlyn had eyed her carefully, then slowly gotten to her feet. “My motivations don’t matter, Jen. Only the outcome.”

“He may not really be mine,” Jen had admitted slowly. “But he’s not yours either.”

Madlyn had leaned down, her black eyes making Jen shiver. “You still don’t get it, Jen. I can still have him anytime I want.”

Jen had glanced down at the solitaire flashing fire at her in the moonlight.

“Are you really that desperate, Jen?” Madlyn’s smile had been so sympathetic, bile started to rise up Jen’s throat. “Ask yourself why would a man like Stefan Sellers ever want to attach himself to a broken little girl? He wouldn’t. And if he really desired you, would he have paraded his girlfriends in front of you the way he has all these years? He doesn’t see you that way.”

She’d stood up then, smoothing the lines of her red skirt. “If you go through with this marriage, Jen, he’ll grow to resent you. Is that what you want for him? If you really love him, you won’t let him trap himself in a marriage he will only regret one day.”

Jen had watched her walk away and join the party. Madlyn had headed straight for Stefan. He’d leaned in to tell her something and she’d laughed and laughed. Jen had watched them together for a minute. They were perfect together. Both tall, handsome, intelligent, and powerful. And what was she? A mousy little broken doll.

But even mousy little broken dolls didn’t enjoy being made fools of. So while her heart had slowly broken into sharp, jagged pieces, the rest of her cringed in humiliation. She’d lost track of how long she sat there, watching but not seeing the party inside.

“Why are you out here by yourself?” Stefan had asked, when he found her later.

“I’m sorry. It was just too loud,” she’d said, wondering where the calm words came from. Part of her had just died. She must have been running on auto pilot. “Can you take me home? I’m really not feeling very well.”

Later, when he’d dropped her off at his parents’ house and walked her to the front door, Jen had turned quickly towards him when he’d leaned to kiss her good night. Desperate to prove Madlyn wrong, Jen had dived into the kiss with an urgency that surprised him. He’d set her back from him and she’d realized with icy clarity that he did still see a little girl. He might never see her as anything else. He wasn’t in love with her. Not even close.

“What’s going on?” he’d asked her, laughter teasing the edges of his mouth.

“Just tired,” she’d lied, as the rest of all her girlish hopes and dreams floated away. Funny, she was so numb by then, it didn’t even hurt anymore.

The numb feeling hadn’t gone away. She’d called Jared the next morning and met him for lunch. He’d just passed the bar, finishing the last of his father’s requirements for freedom. He wasn’t actually going to join the Marshall Law Firm, because his father hadn’t been specific enough when he’d said, “You can do whatever the hell you want as soon as you pass the bar.”

“I guess he just assumed that if I passed it, I’d go ahead and buy the three-piece suit too,” Jared had laughed. “Imagine his surprise when I told him about Paris.”

Jen had smiled but it hadn’t met her eyes.

Jared’s smug expression flickered to real concern. “You gonna tell me what’s happened or do I have to beat it out of you? What did Prince Charming do now?”

She’d shaken her head.

“Did you tell Sellers about Paris? I’m guessing it didn’t go well.”

“No, not yet.” She hadn’t told Stefan that she’d been accepted to pastry school because she hadn’t planned on going. She’d been trying to think of a way to tell Jared she couldn’t go, knowing he would be furious with her. Now, she was relieved she’d been such a coward. It seemed like a lifeboat in the middle of the Arctic sea. “But I will.”

Jared had pulled his chair closer to the table and had leaned across, reaching out to gently tap her jaw with his knuckles. “Buck up, fairy princess. Your white knight will wait for you.”

Jen’s eyes had narrowed and her spine materialized out of nowhere. “Screw you,” she’d hissed at him.

Jared had sat back, throwing his head back and laughing like crazy. “That’s my girl. One day we’re going to exorcise that princess gene completely. Now, unless you’re here to tell me you aren’t going to Paris, tell me what the fuck happened. Oh, and just a warning, you are going to pastry school even if I have to hogtie you and hold you down on the plane.”

“I’m going,” Jen had assured him.

“Good, because there is no way you can marry him, Jen. Have you looked in a mirror? There will be nothing left of you to put in a dress.” He’d shoved his strawberry napoleon across the table at her. “Put it in your mouth, chew, and swallow,” he’d said impatiently, looking like some demonic angel. “Stall, tell him you need time. Because, sweetheart, you do need time. You need to get your head straight, and you can’t do that with him around. When we get back, we’ll be so busy opening our bakery, he’ll have to give you more time.”

“You’re right,” she’d whispered, cutting a corner off the Napoleon and forcing herself to eat it.

“I’m always right. Here.” He’d pulled a piece of paper out of his jacket pocket, unfolded it, and laid it on the table between them. It was a sketch of a cupcake with a big swirly top. The cupcake had a zombie face and there was a big chunk bitten out of the frosting swirl. Jared had surrounded the cupcake with the words
Jen’s Voodoo Snacks and Sweets
. “What do you think?”

“I love it,” she’d whispered, wondering if normal people got all misty eyed at the sight of a zombie cupcake. Further proof that she was broken. “It’s perfect.”

“It’s happening,” Jared had said. “We are going to rock the pastry world. They won’t know what hit them.”

She’d nodded, let him brow beat her some more, then done exactly what he said. Two days later, she told Stefan that she’d been accepted to pastry school. Listening to Jared had probably saved her sanity. Jared was the one person she knew who didn’t treat her like she was about to fall apart. He could be overbearing and bossy, but never mean. He was funny, and sometimes too crude—okay, usually too crude. But he never told her to get down off a ladder and had no qualms about handing her a heavy box to carry. She loved him. He was the closest thing she had to family and the one real, steady friendship in her life that had no connection to any of the Sellers. He was just about the only one she could really trust.

“Let’s go,” Stefan snapped from the office doorway, dragging her back into the present.

Jen looked up, shaking off the memories.

“Elliot is holding a table for us.”

She nodded, pushing herself to her feet. She was stiff and the light was fading outside. How long had she been sitting there? She’d lost time. That hadn’t happened in a long time. When she reached him in the doorway, he tossed his car keys at her. “You drive,” he barked and spun around, leaving her to follow him out of the office.

Jen stared at herself in the mirror and swallowed hard. The dress was worse than she remembered. What had ever possessed her to buy it? She turned in the mirror and looked over her shoulder and cringed. The draped back was open all the way to her waist where the suddenly tight skirt stopped well above her knees. The front draped too but not nearly as dramatically. It was suspended by two razor thin jeweled straps that looked ready to break at any minute. She loved it and hated it at the same time.

The dress made her feel exposed and, if she were honest, just a little reckless. She stepped into the Manolos and took a deep breath. She didn’t have another dress to change into. Elliot’s restaurant wasn’t formal but he didn’t allow jeans after six.

Telling herself Stefan probably wouldn’t notice, she took the stairs carefully in her heels, then stepped into the living room where she heard the flat screen on a game. Half-expecting to find him on the sofa talking on his cell phone, she froze when he stepped into the room from the guest room and stopped dead.

“Oh, hell no.”

“What?” Her eyes narrowed as she watched him walk into the room.

“You’re not wearing that,” he told her, stopping a few feet from her. The frost giant was back. “Go change.”

Her jaw dropped slightly. Had he really just said that to her? “You can’t tell me what to wear.”

“You’re not going out with me dressed like that,” he amended.

“We’re not going out,” she reminded him. “It’s just dinner.”

“Go change,” he said, his voice short and his eyes just a little mean.

Something snapped in Jen. And whatever it was crawled right up her spine and went ramrod straight. “No,” she said, not as loudly as she wanted to, but not so softly that he didn’t hear her.

Apparently he had only been about half frost giant, because his expression went subzero and his face turned so hard it could have been carved from marble. “You aren’t going out with me dressed like that,” he repeated.

Her fingers curled into small fists at her side. “Like what?” she demanded.

“Like some...” he stopped, something breaking in his expression. “Fuck it. Wear what you want.”

“I will,” she told him, blinking back hot tears as she imagined him finishing that sentence in all sorts of horrible ways, “cheap tramp” being her top vote.

The silence raged between them as he slipped on his jacket. He headed towards the door without a word, jerking it wide and holding it open until she finally crossed the room and walked through it. Whatever was locked into her spine kept her head held high and her face calm as she moved past him.

Fuck, there were little bows on the ankles of those sheer black stockings. He noticed them as she swept past him out the door in a light cloud of perfume that almost made his knees buckle. Then he looked up and knew he’d made a huge mistake. The dress had no back. The slinky black material draped all the way to the base of her spine where it suddenly went skin tight. If he got through the next few hours without breaking at least three laws, he would be the luckiest man alive.

Maybe the wrong plane had touched down in Kenner after all. It made a lot more sense that this was evil Jen. His Jen would never have tried that dress on, much less worn it out in public. She’d have turned beet red at the very idea. The sexiest thing he’d ever seen her in was her skinny jeans and a white cotton blouse she hadn’t realized was so sheer that the blue lace on her bra showed through it. And that hadn’t lasted long because he’d spilled something on it the first chance he’d got, forcing her to change into a T-shirt.  Even the bathing suits she wore didn’t affect his blood pressure like this scrap of black fabric. All he could think about was pushing her down and the dress up. He’d make her leave on those stockings with the tiny black bows. And the shoes.