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“If you’re doing anything you won’t be doing it alone,” Peyton scoffed. “You’re going to need a few rich friends and who better than the two you know will always have your back?”
“He’s right. Let’s make a pact here and now. No matter what happens we do this together. We don’t lie to one another, and if we do tell a lie we let each other know so we can back them up,” Melody said.
I looked at them and couldn’t help but feel their love for me. These two were my best-friends through and through. Distance––even practically being worlds apart––couldn’t sever our connection. It felt like we were picking up right where we left off. This was my tribe, even if it was small and missing two other people. I was blessed to have them.
“I can agree to that. Now let me go in here before she comes out,” I opened the door, immediately engulfed in heat. “I’ll text you guys.” Shutting the door, I made my way into the house feeling as if I were on the set of a horror movie.
Any second now, some creepy dead chick would appear and point me back in the direction I came, warning me to stay the hell away.
My grandmother and uncle were already in the foyer like two eager dogs before I was all the way inside.
“So–––.”
“Can we not do this yet? I need to shower and, I need to be alone right now.”
My uncle opened his mouth, no doubt to say something condescending but my grandmother held up a hand to keep him quiet.
“Of course, diosa. We can talk in the morning.” She smiled, it wasn’t genuine.
I felt their eyes on me the entire
way up the stairs. The whispering began before my doors were fully shut.
I got in the shower to wash the days grime away and, of course, that’s when my mind decided to wander straight back to a man with golden eyes I couldn’t seem to stop thinking about. How fucking cliché was it to be overly attracted to a dangerous, enigmatic, stranger?
Very cliché. Textbook cliché.
Mateo was the perfect advocate for all the dubious warnings mothers gave their daughters about men.
He had the whole tall, handsome, and mysterious thing going for him with a smile that could mask the most sinister of intentions. Exactly the kind of narcotic I craved.
I understood why so many women fixated on him. He was the pointed top of the metaphorical pyramid: rich, savage, and seductive. I’d been in his presence for all of five minutes and that was long enough to let me know Mateo Remmington was a disturbingly alluring man. There were too many reasons why I needed to stay away from him and a million others why I couldn’t. And triple that why I didn’t want to.
Ugh, this was bullshit.
“Goddamnit Eva,” I cursed my sister’s name, excessively over-scrubbing my olive skin with a purple loufa.
I glared at the grey and white mosaic tiled wall, blinking away tears.
I’d told her countless times not to come back to this place, but she wouldn’t listen. Glamour and wealth were powerful addictions to girls who felt they had nothing but poverty and squalor.
She soaked up this lavish lifestyle and all the attention people gave her like a sponge, immersing herself further and further past the point of no return.
It was everything our father had tried to protect us from. He’d never wanted us back here. It was the last thing he told us before we were carted off. We hadn’t received one phone call, letter, or e-mail since that day in spite of my many efforts to reach out to him any way I could.
Eva thought he’d been happy to shove us out of his life. She swore he had a mistress and didn’t want us anymore. She grew even more irrational when he died.
Instead of being upset, she was pissed he didn’t leave us any of his assets and gave our grandmother control of his estate.
I saw it as him further ensuring we never returned. My father was, by all means, a controlling man, a hard-hearted, family man. He was never a coward, so whatever caused him to do the things he did I found warranted. That was before I grew up.
In true Eva fashion, she went against his wishes with a dramatic flair before he was cold in the ground. And now here I was with a tangled web to unweave that I could already feel reeling me in, being accosted by the notorious Remmington heir.
It was like the beginning of a Grimm brother’s fairytale.
I could only pray I got a better ending because no one would be coming to save me. No knight was waiting to ride in on a white horse and sweep me away. There was only him– a cruel seductive king who ruled over a court of nightmares.
I assumed Eva was the reason Mateo reacted to me the way he did. But that wasn’t reflected in his eyes, and he claimed not to know her. From what Peyton had dug up–if they did interact it was rare. Mateo was the top and Eva had barely made it out of the bottom.
