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Camilla Rose sat silently, staring out the window. Then she inhaled deeply and let it slowly out.
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nbsp; “I really don’t know how to say this,” she finally said, still looking out the window. “No one will believe it, I know. And even if they did, Mr. Morgan has proven to be untouchable.”
“I’ve heard pretty much everything.”
She turned to look at him.
“I’m sure you have. That is fine for most folks, I suppose. It’s just that we do not air such dirty laundry. Heaven knows, the paparazzi makes up enough of it without our adding more.”
Payne nodded. He had seen the wild headlines and photographs triggered by her family name.
“Mason Morgan,” she began, practically spitting out his name, “has long despised my mother for what he considered her having broken up the marriage of his mother.”
“Then Mason Morgan is your replace brother,” Payne said, his tone making it a question. “I didn’t know you had any siblings.”
“Half brother, if you please. And after what he’s done, after his brazen betrayal, I refuse to refer to him by his first name, especially to his face. Doing so would suggest we have at least, on some level, a cordial relationship. I can assure you that we do not. He was ten when my mother married our father, and I was born a year later. I can understand his displeasure with my mother—she is a five-star bitch, and she likely was a homewrecker—but I never did anything to harm him.”
She looked back out her window and laughed.
“Five-star might be shortchanging her,” she said. “I hated being a debutante. My mother made me. And she did so not for my sake—she really knew I hated it—but simply to spite my father, who tried to talk her out of it when I asked him. This was while he was fighting to cut off her alimony because everyone knew she was shacked up with that actor Tom Smyth—in essence, married to him. My mother knew that if she actually remarried—Poof!—there went the two hundred grand a month that she had fought so hard for, as she said in the divorce proceedings, ‘to maintain the lifestyle to which I have become accustomed.’ My father had had to agree to pay it—he wanted out of the marriage because he would not tolerate her infidelity—and she knew it and she really stuck it to him.”
“Two hundred thousand a month in alimony? Wow. That’s—”
“A real five-star bitch,” she said, looking at him and nodding. “And that’s not all. That was on top of the lump sum she got, and certain assets, such as the houses in Coral Gables and Pacific Palisades.”
Payne whistled.
“So, how is it that Mason is behind today’s shooting?” he asked. “How would Johnny know?”
Payne had used their first names without thinking. He realized that using “Mr.” struck him as awkward.
“Because he hates Johnny. Has since I met him. And it’s all over pure greed. And power. Same as what happened right before my father became sick.”
“Which was?”
“Father was grooming me to eventually take over the pharmaceutical business while Mason would continue running, also under father’s direction, the commercial real estate companies. I was, as now, already running the Morgan philanthropic arm, which I had built at Father’s request. He told me he was impressed with how I had started Camilla’s Kids while I still was earning my master’s.” She paused, then briefly continued, “Unfortunately, I also was getting . . .”
Her voice trailed off as she looked back out her window.
After a moment, she cleared her throat and went on: “I felt absolutely invincible back then. And because of that, I made some mistakes.”
“A lot of college kids do. Hell, most do. I did.”
“Thanks, but not like I did. I had it all. And I could do it all. Juggling school and the fund-raisers and working with my father came to me fairly easily. I worked hard . . . and so I played hard. Really hard.”
“And wound up in rehab,” Payne said, softly.
Looking out the window, she shrugged.
“Everybody was doing it,” she said. “I didn’t see the problem, especially after I finished my MBA. I’d come out of rehab and picked up where I left off. Everything was wonderful. Except I didn’t see how my father was really viewing my behavior.”
“He didn’t say anything?”
She turned and looked at him.
“Oh, sure he did. He made subtle suggestions. But we got along so well, and I told him I was fine, and my work did not suffer—I just thought all along that I still had earned his trust.”
