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She moved slowly through the house, room by room, the voices of a past she hadn’t wanted to remember washing over her.
God damn you, you stupid whore. All I asked you to do was play hostess, not the slut…
You fucking bitch, he’s gone… Do you hear me? He left. Took the money your father gave him and ran. Are you so fucking lame you can’t even remember he didn’t want you…
Kimberly wanted to cover her ears, but there was no blocking the memories.
Her mother’s tears, her screams for mercy, and her father’s voice, rough-edged and filled with fury as he stood over her mother’s cowering body.
Whose do you want her to be?
Kimberly shuddered. How could she have forgotten that? She had been seven, hiding outside the drawing room, trembling in fear, terrified her father would actually hurt her mother.
She remembered her mother’s voice, slurred drunkenly, smug and amused.
Her mother hadn’t been crying. Kimberly stood outside the drawing room now, staring into the shadowed room, and seeing the ghosts of what had been.
Damn you, you lying bitch, I wouldn’t believe you either way,he had screamed. She’s your daughter. Yours. And likely just as depraved and perverted as you ever were…
What had her mother done?
She moved slowly through the house, room by room. The drawing room, the family room, the dining room. In each area she relived the fights, the screaming matches, her mother’s tears, her mother’s smug vindictive words laced with her bitter sobs.
He loved me… At least he loved me…
For God’s sake, the bastard took your father’s money and left. Are you so insane you’ve forgotten that… He didn’t love you, bitch, he used you…
I could have loved you…
I never wanted your love, whore… But her father’s voice had been bitter, furious…hurt.
Her bedroom. Her refuge. The one room her father had never stepped foot in. Her bed was still there. The wide, white-canopied confection of lace. It was a room made for a princess.
Remember, Kimmie, you’ll be free… Be free for both of us, Kimmie…
Each night her mother had whispered those words to her until her teen years, until her father had put a stop to it. He had sent Kimberly away to school. An exclusive girls’ school that had effectively placed a distance between her and the mother who had nurtured her. Who had nurtured a hatred for the father.
Why had she not remembered that?
She moved from her room, down the long hall, and to the room her mother had taken her last breath.
I was wrong… So many things…her mother had wheezed that last day. Don’t make my mistakes, Kimmie, swear to me, you won’t make my mistakes… I wanted you free, Kimmie… I wanted you free…
Free of what? Free of her father or free of Briar Cliff?
Each room she visited was more of the same. An unending collage of memories flooding her mind, her heart.
In the library, the walls were lined with the portraits of all those who had their time to possess Briar Cliff. From the first, Horace and Catherine St. Montrose. The first Briar Cliff family. It was said Catherine had been a creature of sexuality, a woman as comfortable with her body and her female desires as she was with the wealth she had inherited from her father, a Lord of the English realm. She and her husband had built Briar Cliff.
Her oldest daughter, Elizabeth St. Montrose Michaels and her husband, Hugh, wore the same happy, contented expressions of the first two. The portraits ranged around the room, a gleam of laughter, of satisfaction in the eyes of those inhabitants until she reached Tabitha Elizabeth Montageau and her husband, Diego Santiago. There was bitterness there, in Tabitha’s deep brown eyes, in the pinched contours of her lips. There was a sadness in her face only emphasized by the self-righteous arrogance of her husband.
It had been Tabitha who had established the Trust. Who had broken with willing the entire estate to the first-born daughter and set the restrictive and soul-destroying provisions on the inheritance. It was she, most likely at the direction of her husband, who decided that the desires the women of her line possessed were depraved and perverted and needed to be extinguished.
She had condemned her daughter and all those who came after her to a life of restriction and pain. And Kimberly had been her mother’s last hope of breaking the cycle. The Trust terminated in only five more years. But in waiting, in turning her back on what she had seen in Jared’s eyes, what would she be gaining? And what would she be losing?
Love endured. If Jared loved her, truly loved her, he would wait. He would wait. She had seen it in his eyes, heard it in his voice. He would make that sacrifice for her. But to what end?
She wandered over to the oaken locked shelf that she had been given the key to six years before. She knew what it contained, but she had never had the courage to open it. Five generations of journals and diaries. Accounts of the lives, the loves, and she knew, the pain the women of Briar Cliff had endured.
