Kate Hewitt - Bad Blood

“So while the other girls my age were making out in backseats and getting ready to marry their high school sweethearts,” she said quietly, as if remembered dust and despair were not choking her even now, “I was banking everything on a college scholarship.”

She could hardly bear look at him then, so beautiful and impossible, high-class and expensive, like a male fantasy made flesh. Her fantasy. The only man who had gotten under her skin in eleven long years. She didn’t know why it made her ache to see him as he sat there behind his big desk, as far away from her now as he had ever been. She told herself she wanted it that way. That the kisses they had shared, the odd moments of communion, were no more than an elaborate game to him, and she was not at all the worthy player he seemed to think. That he simply hadn’t known it, but he would now.

She told herself she was glad.

“It was one thing to be bookish,” she said, looking at the folder of the photographs that had damned her. “And something else to be pretty.” Her mouth twisted in remembered shame and trembled slightly. “And I was much too pretty. Mama’s new boyfriends were always quick to comment on it. Some of them tried to get too friendly when they were drunk. I kept my head down, hid in the library and studied. I was the top of my class—the top of the state, even. I knew I’d get some kind of scholarship—but I also knew it very likely wouldn’t be enough to cover my expenses. I’d have to do work/study, at the very least. Maybe more than one job, if I wanted textbooks. Or food. But I was destined for better things. That’s what I thought.”

“You were clearly correct.” Lucas’s voice was cool, crisp. His aristocratic accent seemed to cut through her memories of those hot Texas days like a knife through butter. But it only served to remind her how vast the gulf between them was, and how little he could ever understand her.

She did not want to think about why she wanted him to understand her in the first place.

“That fall my class took a field trip to San Antonio to see the Alamo,” Grace said, forcing herself to continue, however little she wanted to keep talking. “And that was where Roger discovered me.”

She didn’t want these memories. She wished she could excise them from her head and throw them away as easily as she’d gotten rid of all the other things that had held her back from the future she’d so desired. Like her accent. Her roots. Even her mother, who hadn’t wanted her enough, in the end. And it had all started with Roger Dambrot.

“He was a photographer,” she said. She could feel Lucas looking at her, and she had no one to blame but herself. She had started this, hadn’t she? “Quite a famous one, actually.”

She had decided to share this story of her past, but that didn’t mean she had to share all of it. Like her doomed, childish love for Roger, who had been as happy to sleep with her as he had been to disappear the moment she veered toward any emotion. She thrust the memory of that first, last heartbreak aside. She had been a colossal idiot, but wasn’t every teenage girl? She’d been so pleased with the attention. So delighted that he could make her look like that with his camera. She’d thought she’d found her calling—her ticket out of Racine and into the bright future she’d always believed she’d deserved.

“Thanks to him,” she said, fighting to stay calm, “I was offered a lot of money for a modeling contract, and it never even crossed my mind to refuse it.” She smiled, unhappily. “I was proud of it! I thought it proved that I was different—that I was special.”

“Grace …” Lucas’s voice was a caress. She shook it away.

“What I did not expect,” she said tightly, “was that appearing in a bathing suit in a national magazine meant that every one in Racine would consider me a whore. The teachers at school. The other kids. My mother’s boyfriend.”

She could remember it all so clearly, no matter how hard she’d tried to forget it over the years. Travis, her mother’s latest boyfriend, with his copy of an American sports magazine in his hands and that knowing, lustful look in his mean black eyes. The tiny bedroom in the trailer that Grace had always considered her refuge. Travis’s hands, touching her. His big body, reeking of stale beer and old cigarette smoke, pressing her back, pushing her down, making her freeze in panic and confusion.

And then her mother’s appearance in the doorway—to save her, Grace had thought. Thank God , she’d thought. It had taken so long, too long, for her brain to accept that her mother’s rage and fury was directed at her , not Travis.

“I should have known you would pull something like this!” Mary-Lynn had screamed at her. “This is how you repay me? After all these years?”

And the names she’d called Grace. Oh, the names. They were still lodged like bullets beneath Grace’s heart. She could still feel them when she breathed.

“Once they think you’re a whore,” she said quietly,

“that’s how they treat you. Even my own mother. And more to the point, her boyfriend.”

All the things she did not say hung there between them, and Lucas only looked at her, as if she was not more naked, more vulnerable, than she had ever allowed herself to be before. Grace felt a deep trembling move through her, climbing from her feet to her neck, and fought to breathe.

“I’m sorry,” Lucas said, his voice too soft, so soft it made her eyes heat with the tears she refused to shed. “As it happens, I understand completely what it is like to be judged on photographs, and the conclusions about one’s character that so many people draw from them.”

“So one would imagine,” she said. She turned around and met his gaze fully, not sure when he’d climbed to his feet and not certain she liked the reminder of his height, his surprising grace.

“Why do you care so much what so many ignorant people think?” he asked, still in that soft voice.

“Because they were my people!” Grace blinked to keep the wet heat from sliding down her cheeks. “Racine was the only thing I ever knew, and I can never go back. Do you understand what that feels like?”

“I cannot understand why you would wish to return to a place that scorned you,” Lucas said, his voice low.

“Those pictures are the reason my mother threw me out of the house when I was seventeen,” she said, as evenly as she could. “I hate them and every thing they stand for. I wanted to make some money for college, and instead I lost my family, my hometown and, for a long time, my self-respect. That’s all you need to understand.”

“But that was then,” Lucas said, smiling slightly, encouragingly. “Now they are an acknowledgment that you were always, as you are now, a beautiful woman.”

“I don’t want to be a beautiful woman , whatever that is!” Grace cried, old and new emotions boiling too hot, too wild, inside of her. Why couldn’t he understand? Her looks had never done anything but cause her trouble. She would have removed them if she could. The life she’d built had nothing to do with her body, her face. It had everything to do with how well she did her job, and she couldn’t let go of the panicked notion that if everyone knew what she looked like half-naked that would be all they knew about her, ever after. Again. What would she lose this time?

“Why should you hide yourself away?” Lucas asked, in the same light tone, because what wasn’t light to this man?

And it was just too much. Over a decade of anguish seemed to well up within her, threatening to spill over and drown her. She had already been down this road—she knew what happened. Let a man see her as a piece of meat and he would treat her that way, too. This was the truth about men. This was what Grace inspired in them. Hadn’t she spent all these years completely immersed in her job, her career, to keep from having to face the uncomfortable truth? The loneliness? Why had she wanted so desperately to believe that Lucas was any different?