Carla Neggers - Betrayals

Sofi slipped into the room, breathless, and handed Rebecca a pair of low white sandals with very skinny straps. “This was the best I could do. It’s reasonably warm tonight-”

Lenny grabbed them. “But these are perfection!”

He insisted on slipping them onto Rebecca’s feet himself. Sofi was highly entertained. “My, my, Cinderella in the flesh.”

“Sofi…”

“Hey, just kidding. You look great. I mean it. If this were an Aztec party you were going to, they’d sacrifice you on the altar.”

“You’re a big help.”

There was a knock at the door. Lenny picked up Rebecca’s hand and gave it a gentle squeeze. “Have a wonderful time.”

“Thanks.” Rebecca gave him a hug. “I’m not used to fussing over my appearance. I appreciate what you’ve done, and I’ll try not to ruin the dress.”

“I hope your man tears it off you.”

“Lenny,” Alex said, “you’re making her blush.”

“Of course I am. I want her to have fresh color in her cheeks when she walks out the door.”

Thanking them again, Rebecca shot out into the hall before one or another of the three could make one last remark. She quickly shut her door behind her so Jared wouldn’t see her entourage and room filled with cast-off clothes and think she’d put any effort into the evening.

He was breathtaking in a black evening suit. “Sorry I’m late. I forgot your room number.”

“You’ve been here awhile?”

“A few minutes.” He tried to hold back a smile, but failed.

“Um…You met my roommate Sofi?”

“Was she the one running up and down the hall looking for virgin shoes in size eight?”

So much, Rebecca thought, for illusions of sophistication, but by the time she and Jared reached the elevator they were both laughing.

“I won’t have her here.”

Jared stiffened in anger at his aunt’s words and looked to Quentin for support, but his cousin remained silent. Annette seemed hardly aware of her son’s presence in the small sitting room off the elegant drawing room where dozens of guests had gathered. Jared could see Rebecca smiling as she took a glass of champagne. She was so damned beautiful. His aunt, elegant in diamonds and black silk, had pulled him aside moments after they’d arrived at her Mt. Vernon Street house.

It was her party, she was his aunt, and Jared, despite his irritation, tried to be patient. “Aunt Annette, I don’t see why you’re carrying a grudge against her.”

“I’m not. She’s a Blackburn, Jared, and while that may be no fault of hers, it’s certainly none of mine.” Annette sighed, her expression softening as she touched her nephew’s hand. “I know this must be frustrating and embarrassing for you, but please try and understand. There are reporters here tonight. If they find out that’s Rebecca Blackburn over there, they’ll be all over me-and her. And I’d rather not have the past dredged up right now. I’m sure she wouldn’t, either. If not for my sake, then for hers, take her home.”

“Mother’s right,” Quentin, who’d been standing mutely beside her, added.

Jared shot his cousin an annoyed look. “You don’t believe that rationalization, do you? I doubt a single reporter here would care if Thomas Blackburn himself had come tonight. They just want free drinks and a chance to rub elbows with the Winstons and Sloans, although I don’t think I’ll really ever understand why.”

With a pained look on his handsome face, Quentin started to backtrack, but Annette put up a hand and he broke off. Jared sighed, not surprised. In Quentin’s place, he’d move as far from Boston as he could. Saigon was far, but Quentin was still working for his mother there-and he hadn’t said a word about not coming home. Annette had given him a year, and Jared was sure that’d be all Quentin took. Before her husband’s death, Annette’s parenting had been nonchalant, allowing her son a generous amount of freedom. All that was sharply curtailed when Benjamin Reed didn’t make it home from Vietnam. Jared didn’t think Annette loved her son any more than she had when Benjamin was alive. She was just more determined to control him, although, perversely, whenever she succeeded she was disappointed in him, more convinced he was a weakling. Jared had quit trying to figure the two of them out years ago, but he did feel sorry for his cousin. No matter what he did, Quentin would never please his mother.

Annette maintained her regal calm. “Be angry if you want,” she told her nephew. “Just get that girl out of my house.”

Which was what he did.

To her credit, Rebecca knew exactly what was going on. “I’m being booted, huh?”

She was trying to sound as if she didn’t give a damn, but Jared could see the flash of anger-and humiliation-in her eyes and red-stained cheeks. “I’m sorry,” he said tightly.

She polished off the last of her champagne. “Don’t be.”

But he was. He’d been a fool to think his aunt would have tolerated a Blackburn in her house, and if Rebecca was going to be polite and not tell him so, her grandfather had no such compunction. They took their frustrations down to West Cedar Street, but after Thomas Blackburn politely told Jared it was good to see him, he waved off their complaints without sympathy.

“What on earth did you expect?” he asked them.

Rebecca kicked off her thin-strapped shoes and paced on the worn carpet in her stocking feet. “Am I going to be damned forever for something I didn’t even do?”

It was a rhetorical question not meant to be answered, but Thomas said, “Probably,” and disappeared into the kitchen.

Jared stood awkwardly in the middle of the dimly lit parlor, a fire going to take the chill off the raw spring night. He didn’t know if he ought to leave or stick around. He was half-Winston and had to be an annoying physical reminder of the Blackburns’ loss of prestige. For centuries, their moral and intellectual rectitude had kept them within the circles of power, even to the point of having presidents consult them on any number of topics. They had been the conscience of Beacon Hill, a shining example of “doing the right thing.” They hadn’t needed money to maintain their particular kind of authority. Jared could remember when Thomas Blackburn’s name had evoked respect and his opinions had made people think, listen, change their minds.

An ambush in the rice paddies of the Mekong Delta had changed all that, and even if it was something the Blackburns could get used to, it wasn’t anything Annette Winston Reed was likely to let them-or anyone else-forget. She wasn’t a forgiving woman on the best of days, and her husband was dead because of Thomas Blackburn. If she hadn’t stolen their moral authority from them, she was content not to let them earn it back.

But Jared hoped Rebecca would take his friendship with her grandfather as a cue that he didn’t share his aunt’s relentless hatred, nor her vindictiveness. Because Jared didn’t want to leave the shabby West Cedar Street house.

He wanted, he admitted to himself, to get to know Rebecca again. When they were kids, she was the big sister to a passel of brothers and had sought Jared out just because he was five years older. She had never idolized him; that wasn’t R. J. Blackburn’s style. Sometimes she’d fight and kick and yell and act like a little sister asserting her independence, and then sometimes she’d find a common ground with him that was more mature than the bond she’d share with her younger brothers-something Jared could see now. At the time, more often than not, he’d viewed her as bossy as hell and a royal pest.

“I’m choking in this dress,” she said, unclasping the hook-and-eye at the nape of her neck. She fastened her gaze on Jared. “You can go on back to the party, you know. I’ll be fine here.”