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The chat ended a few minutes later and she poured a glass of wine and returned to her messy desk in the study. Opening the messages in Skype, she prepared to delete BookAddictedWhore from her life. She wasn’t sure why she felt guilty about it. She’d thought that ignoring the rude comments would lead to BookAddictedWhore not saying such things anymore but the reverse was happening as though she was purposely seeking to see how far she could push Veronica.
In the distance, she heard the slamming of her front door, followed immediately by the sound of the shower starting down the hall. She sighed heavily. Brent’s home.
Mentally bracing herself for the confrontation with him, Veronica scowled at the computer screen. I’ve been bullied by better than you, bitch.
With a sigh, she put fingers to keyboard, and at the last second opened Grandma Kate’s message window instead. BookAddictedWhore and all her drama could wait. Her heart lurched at the purposeful avoidance, wishing she had the guts to take the world by the horns like Caressa.
She spent the next half hour shooting the bull with Kate, who was actually her great-aunt. As the Benedict family matriarch, Kate preferred to keep things simple for all the numerous relations and everyone addressed her as Grandma Kate. She lived in a quirky little town in central Texas. Over the years, she’d always been the one to visit Veronica’s family, whose branch of the Benedict family lived in Montana. After Veronica had moved out on her own, Kate had visited her regularly in Billings, Montana, where she leased an apartment.
Lately, Grandma Kate had been asking her to finally come to Texas for a visit. She’d never visited there before. Air travel and Veronica didn’t mix well, but she’d never revealed that to Kate. If ever there was someone in her life that she’d suck it up for, though, Kate was that person.
By the end of the conversation, Grandma Kate had convinced Veronica to make the plane trip as well as filling her in on her brothers Cord and Jackson’s news. They were engaged and embracing the Lusty ménage lifestyle and a party was planned for them in Lusty in a few days’ time. She dreaded the thought of socializing and being in crowds but she’d weather the anxiety to wish her brothers well. Of her siblings, they were the closest to her heart.
In the back of her mind was the inkling that she’d been bamboozled by the wily nonagenarian. No one else from her family would be attending the engagement party, either because they were in denial about the choice Cord and Jackson had made to commit their lives to one woman, or because busy schedules didn’t allow it. Veronica had a feeling the latter excuse was really a veiled form of the former excuse. Sometimes her family sucked.
On that note, she heard the shower shut off and she couldn’t ignore the tightening knot in her gut any longer.
Time to deal with Brent.
* * * *
Grandma Kate pressed her fingertips to her lips and then touched them to the computer screen as her beautiful relative and wildly successful romance author signed off from their Skype conversation. She’d be arriving in Lusty in a few days for a working vacation, which was better than she’d hoped for. Even though she’d kept up with the Montana Benedicts over the years, she couldn’t say her relationship with Emerson had carried forward to George and Norah—Veronica’s parents—and the rest of her siblings.
Bunch of horse’s patoots.
She reached across the desk to the stack of photos that had recently arrived in the mail. She tended to let the pictures pile up in her camera and then ordered them in bulk once or twice a year. Flipping through pictures of Chloe’s commitment ceremony, she smiled when she came across a picture of Grace Warner with her delightful spouses Jack, Ethan, and Adam. Grace glowed with happiness in the shot, and there wasn’t any reason to wonder why. Her men clearly doted on her.
Another shot slipped from the stack, this one taken in Divine the last time she’d been down when that adorable Julian Alvarez and his best friend Chris Potter had bound their hearts and lives with their lady love, Gwen Henderson. Chris had been quite the charmer and she felt a girlish giggle flutter inside of her as she remembered how he’d flirted with her after asking her for a dance at the wedding reception. Her jitterbug might be slower nowadays, but he’d stirred happy memories of dancing with her men in decades past.
