Chapter Ten
“Just because these parts are numbered does not mean you’ve made the instructions any easier to interpret!” Jade yelled at the piece of paper in her hands.
A person needed to have an engineering degree just to assemble a damn elliptical.
What the hell had she been thinking, assuming she could put it together herself? She should have gone up to Connecticut to pick up her old elliptical from her father’s house.
But no. No way was she diving back into that snake pit. Not with her father gone and buried and the house’s only two occupants her nasty stepmother and bastard stepbrother.
She would rather go get an engineering degree.
The ringing of her cell phone cut through her angry haze. She crawled across the living room floor to the sofa where she’d left it, and her stomach dropped when she saw the name on the screen. Her bad mood suddenly plummeted to the depths of fiery fury in an instant.
“Why are you calling me?” she barked into the phone.
“That’s some way to greet your only brother,” Lane Brigdon sneered over the line.
“Stepbrother,” she corrected. “What do you want, Lane?”
He sniffed in her ear, as if he couldn’t believe he was actually having to speak to her. “I see that coastal living hasn’t cured you of your perpetual bitchiness. Pity.”
His insults glided right off her. After so many years, she knew his game. “Big talk for someone who’s still living off mommy’s ill-gotten gold-digging gains.”
The snarl he released sent a cold shiver down Jade’s spine. His game might be all too familiar, but that didn’t mean he didn’t still creep her out.
“Because you didn’t mooch off your father for your entire life?” he shot back.
She ground her back molars together so hard it hurt. The one thing he knew would get her truly riled up was mentioning her father.
“At least I moved away and got a job. Found my own place, paid my own bills. Now I have my own business. I’m earning my way, Lane. Which is a lot more than I can say for you. By the way, how did you know I was living on the coast?”
She hadn’t dared tell him and Cassandra where she’d moved. The goal was to cut them completely out of her life for good. She didn’t want them knowing anything about her, especially where she lived. She was going to have to switch her phone number—again.
The laugh he bit out held no humor in it. Only condescension, Lane’s specialty. “Please. Do you really think you’re clever enough to hide where you’ve been, what you’ve been doing? We know all about your little bikini shack down there in redneck country. Somehow, your choice of location seems fitting.”
“Why the hell do you care?” she snapped. “If you have anything to say to me, you can call my lawyer and leave me the hell alone.”
And thank God her father’s estate was paying for that lawyer, because there was no way she could have afforded it. All she had was her savings—every cent of which had been going toward the store—and her small monthly stipend from the trust fund her father had set up before he passed. It wasn’t much, but it was enough to cover most of her meager living expenses.
But when her savings ran out in a couple of months, that stipend just wasn’t going to cut it.
Not if her store didn’t get on its feet.
Lane’s voice turned grave, an edge to the sound that made her skin crawl. “You know what we want. Come back to Connecticut and sign the papers that give Mother control over the trust. Do that, and we’ll play nice.”
As soon as her father had died six months ago, Jade had hauled ass away from her stepfamily so fast she’d left a dust trail. But that didn’t mean they weren’t always there. Hovering like vultures. The second they’d found out about the trust—the one that was in Jade’s name and her name only—they’d become relentless. Trying to find a way to weasel in and steal even more money from her father’s estate than they already had.
The monthly stipend wasn’t what they were after, though. Oh no.
They wanted to get their greedy little hands on the bulk payout of the trust—over a million dollars. Something Jade wouldn’t be receiving for another three years, on her twenty-eighth birthday.
Cassandra would have control over and access to those funds if Jade signed the papers they wanted her to. Her stepmother could possibly receive the payout even sooner than Jade could, which meant all of that money would disappear in about a week. Jade’s father’s money, which he’d earned through a lifetime of hard work.
Did they think she was insane? No freaking way was that happening.
“Give it up, Lane,” she told him. “You might as well stop trying. You and Cassandra are not going to squeeze one more dime from my family. Let it go.”
“What the hell are you going to do with it?” he said caustically. “Waste it on your pathetic beach shack?”
“As opposed to feeding your mom’s Botox addiction?” she retorted. “Or buying you another Ferrari that you’ll just wreck in a month? Definitely.”
What her father had ever seen in Cassandra, Jade still could not understand. The woman didn’t have one redeeming quality as far as she was concerned. That went double for her son. She must have put on her innocent Stepford wife face around Jade’s father to get that ring on her finger. But as soon as he was out of the picture, that had morphed into a face of pure malice.
“Do you really think you’re going to make it, down there on your own?” Lane snarled. “I give it maybe another two months before you come crawling back up here with your tail between your legs. Only this time, you won’t have daddy to bail you out—”
She hung up.
She couldn’t stand to hear Lane’s whining for one more second.
Bringing her knees up to her chest, she leaned back against the sofa cushions and slowed her breathing. Why had she even answered the phone?
She hated that Lane and Cassandra were able to get under her skin. It was the reason she had stayed away from Connecticut for so long. The one stipulation of Jade’s trust and getting the payout in three years was that she go back up there and sign the inheritance documents.
That was it. Just sign the legal docs.
A world of difference from signing the papers Cassandra and Lane wanted her to sign.
But she hadn’t been able to do even that. It meant going to Connecticut.
Ever since her father married Cassandra when Jade was in high school, all she’d heard from her stepmother and stepbrother was how weak Jade was, how much of a letdown she was to her father. How she couldn’t make it in this world without having the Hollingsworth name and money to fall back on.
Going back to Connecticut would be like stepping right back into the lion’s den. And as much as she hated to admit it, she was afraid of being torn apart.
Sitting here, being reminded of her father, made her heart ache. She missed him terribly. Memories of birthday parties and holidays where he was both dad and mom flashed through her mind. And of summers spent in the Hamptons. Of afternoons riding horses together.
And as always when she thought of him, she thought about the letter.
The one her father had written to her that she was supposed to have opened months ago, upon his death, but never had. She’d felt that by seeing his handwriting on paper, hearing his voice in the words, all the pain of his loss would come rushing back, making her relive it all over again.
So it continued to sit there, unopened in her shoebox. The box she’d guarded with her life on the trip down South. It now sat on a shelf in her closet, gathering dust, as did the rest of her memories from happier times.
Times when her father had been happy because her mother was still alive. After she died, Jade’s father had never been the same again. His heart had been utterly destroyed the day they buried her mother.
And when he’d finally attempted to love again, his battered heart had once again been shattered by his new bride’s lying, money-hungry ways, which had only come out after the ring was safely on her finger. He’d been in a perpetual state of heartache for the last part of his life, and Jade hadn’t been able to bear it.
One of the many reasons she would never fall victim to the same circumstances.
Because she had no intention of letting herself fall in love.
Ever.
The way she saw it, love eventually resulted in pain. Always. In one way or another. Whether it was through a bad breakup, or from untimely death, relationships didn’t last forever. And when they ended, misery inevitably ensued.
The heart was fragile and vulnerable, and frankly, she didn’t want to wind up miserable. Again. Losing her mother, then her father, had been bad enough. Losing a man she loved would finish her.
If she never again surrendered her heart to anyone else, she would never again have to experience heartbreak.
That was realistic. Happily ever afters were not.
If that made her a bitter cynic, then fine. She would rather be cynical than emotionally devastated.
Which was the main reason she’d been avoiding Hunter at every turn. Not that she had fallen in love with him—hell, no! But she felt something for him, and it scared the hell out of her. If they spent any time at all together, the potential to feel even more was a real possibility…
Her gaze suddenly caught on something dark crawling across the hardwood floor. Something with too many legs. Something—
She screamed. Loudly.
Clutching the edge of the sofa behind her, she searched desperately for a weapon.
Suddenly her front door flew open with a loud crash.
She screamed again.
And stared in shock at the large man standing in her doorway, a fierce, determined expression on his face.
“Hunter?”