Finding Forever

by Nika Rhone

  “Oh.” What else could she say?

  “You could go see him at his apartment,” Lillian said.

  “No, actually, you can’t.” Thea sighed. “Doyle said Daryl mentioned spending some more time with his family back in South Dakota.” She offered Amelia a sympathetic look. “I’m sorry, sweetie.”

  “No, it’s okay.” And in a way, it was. The fact that Daryl was with his family after avoiding them for so long meant maybe they’d managed to mend some fences, after all. If so, then at least something good had come out of the mess of the last two weeks.

  “You could call him at the ranch,” Thea said.

  “True.” But not going to happen.

  “You know,” Lillian said slowly, “this might actually be a positive sign.”

  “Really, Lil?” Thea asked in exasperation. “Running away is positive?”

  “Not running. Retreating. Think about it,” she said when they stared at her. “What did Doyle do when you were starting to get to him last year? I mean, really get under his skin, where he couldn’t stop being tempted by you no matter how much he thought he was wrong for you? He ran as fast as he could in the other direction.”

  “Well, figuratively, yes. But he didn’t actually run anywhere.” Thea winced and shot an apologetic look at Amelia.

  “Only because he couldn’t,” Lillian said with a flick of her hand. “He was too busy protecting you from your stalker. If not for that, I guarantee he would have been on a plane back east to visit his family like that.” She snapped her fingers.

  “Maybe.”

  “I don’t know.” Amelia had to fight the small burst of hope Lillian’s words sparked. “We never really discussed what we were feeling or what we were going to do about it. It all just sort of…happened.”

  Then again, hadn’t Daryl told her that sometimes a strategic retreat could be the smartest move?

  Finally, she broke down and told them everything, from the time she’d left their hotel in Connecticut to her final tearful goodbyes to the men on the Circle R. Thea looked a little queasy when Amelia described how she helped deliver the foal, which was kind of funny because that was usually Amelia’s reaction to anything disgusting. But queasy or not, Thea and Lillian seemed impressed with everything that happened, most of all the fact she’d been the one to lay Charles out flat with her trusty thermos.

  Amelia had to admit, that was her favorite part too.

  She did, however, do a bit of serious editing when it came to certain intimate details. There were just some things too personal to share, even with her best friends. Amelia’s face heated when she admitted she’d been the one to seduce Daryl, not the other way around, but she felt a little proud at the same time, especially when Lillian gave her an enthusiastic thumbs-up. For Amelia, that night had been the turning point. She hadn’t been afraid to go after what she wanted.

  So why was she afraid now?

  Failure had never been an option before. If she couldn’t do something to perfection, then she wasn’t to try. A lesson drummed into her since childhood. It seemed there were still some old habits she needed to break. But first, she had to decide if Daryl was worth what it would cost her to try.

  Chapter Thirty

  Driving up to the massive marble steps at the front of her parents’ house, Amelia experienced a vivid sense of déjà vu. Exactly two weeks ago she’d made this same trip. Same car. Same driver. Only this time, she didn’t have the comforting presence of Daryl Raintree to keep her feeling protected as she prepared to enter the lion’s den. It was amazing how fast she’d come to think of him as her safe harbor.

  Not that she’d come alone today. Even if she wanted to, Doyle would have pulled what Thea called his “bossy routine” and insisted someone else accompany her. The fact he’d chosen to come himself told Amelia that Thea had done some behind the scenes bossing of her own.

  So, between Brennan Doyle and Sam Britten, plus the additional men there to help move the few things she’d come to retrieve—and judging by the size of them they weren’t your everyday ordinary movers—she was more than adequately protected. Not that she really needed it. Without the wedding hanging over her head, there wasn’t anything her parents could do to her now.

  Nothing mere bodyguards could protect her from anyway.

  They were met at the front door by the head of her father’s security team, Paul Kent.

  Leon hadn’t waited to see if he was going to be fired. He and several other members of the security staff had quit and were now working for Doyle, which probably accounted for the terse nod of greeting the two exchanged.

  After taking in the small show of power standing behind her, Paul offered Amelia a knowing smile. “It’s good to see you’re well, Miss Amelia. I’d say welcome home, but…”

  “But it’s not my home any longer.” Amelia patted his arm when he winced. “It’s fine. I understand this situation is uncomfortable for everyone, so let’s try to get through it as quickly and painlessly as possible, shall we?” She hesitated. “Will my parents be joining us to make sure I don’t make off with the silver?”

  Looking uncomfortable, Paul replied, “No. They, ah, left that to me.”

  “Of course.” Amelia absorbed the sting of the very calculated action, letting her know just how unimportant she was to them. Fine. She’d dreaded a confrontation with them anyway. Perhaps this was better. No yelling, no drama, just the quiet dissolution of their familial ties. Sort of like a Reno divorce.

  Amelia didn’t feel any of the sadness or sense of loss she’d expected as she walked through what had been her home and now, by the whim of her parents, was not. Instead, all she felt was an odd sense of relief. How had she never noticed before how sterile the mansion was? How devoid of any personality or warmth? How had she managed to live here without becoming just like them?

  Shaking off the feeling of a lucky escape, she opened the door to her room and walked in, only to stop and stare. The last time she’d been in here, it had been to box up her possessions for shipping to what was supposed to be her new home in Connecticut. Now, those boxes were strewn haphazardly about the room, every one of them opened, and most of them looking a lot emptier than she remembered.

  She started as Paul cleared his throat.

  “We were instructed to inventory the contents of your room, including the boxes,” he said, apology heavy in every word.

  It shouldn’t have surprised her. After all, it had taken two days and the flexing of a little legal muscle by Mr. Fordham’s team of high-powered lawyers to get her parents to agree to let her retrieve her personal belongings. This was their retaliation.

  “I take it there were some things my parents decided weren’t mine to take?” Amelia asked, her voice tight. Her temper ignited, but she fought it down. Paul was only doing his job, one he clearly took no pleasure in. There was no joy to be had in getting angry at him.

  “There were.” Removing a sheaf of papers from the clipboard he was carrying, he handed them to her. “This is the full inventory. The items marked in red were the ones deemed as having value and belonging to the estate. The rest were determined to be your personal possessions, and the ones you’ll be allowed to remove from the premises.”

  Taking the list with numb fingers, Amelia barely glanced at it. She’d known her parents would strike out at her in whatever petty way they could, because that was the kind of people they were. If you didn’t conform, you were punished. Knowing people had picked through her personal belongings rankled more than the things her parents took away from her. Her mother would have known that.

  Doyle touched her shoulder. “Amelia?”

  Finding her legendary cool was getting harder by the second, but Amelia managed to keep her true feelings from showing. She offered Doyle a small, tight smile. “I’m fine. It’s fine.” The pages in her hand crinkled. She took a deep breath and fought to relax her grip. “I guess I need to go over this and see if we’re in agreement about what is and isn’t mine.”

/>   It took longer than she expected.

  Not because there was so much left in the boxes to inventory, but because there wasn’t. Almost all her clothes had been removed, along with the shoes and accessories that went with them. Only the non-designer items, the things her mother hated her wearing, had been left behind. That and her underwear, which had been inventoried right down to the last satin demi-bra. Her face burned as they boxed those back up, but she soldiered on, determined to get this finished before she burst into actual flames from mortification.

  Gone, too, were all of her electronics. She passed over those redlined items with little more than a twinge. Most of her jewelry had been abandoned back in her bedroom at the Davenport estate, but the few pieces she’d left at home were gone as well. She didn’t care about most of it, but she did have Doyle note on the list one item that she wanted back: the bracelet Thea gave her several years ago for high school graduation. Since all three friends had been heading in different directions for college, Thea had bought each of them the same gold bracelet, a triple braid with each a different colored gold, so they’d still feel connected while they were living so far apart.

  It went on like that for hours, item by item, box by box. There were a few things she was going to push back on, but for the most part the things that were important to her were still there: photo albums, framed pictures, keepsakes from the few trips she’d taken with her friends. Things her mother deemed worthless, but to Amelia were priceless because they represented the only good memories she had. She was just glad her mother hadn’t realized how important they were, or else they probably would have ended up in the trash.

  When they got to the last box, Amelia was more than ready to be done with it all. Having her life reduced to items on a checklist was every bit as demoralizing as her parents had intended it to be. Reaching the last item, she let out a sigh of relief. The only thing left now was the furniture, and there was only one piece that was hers to take: the antique mahogany dressing table and mirror that her Aunt Josie had given her for her sixteenth birthday. She’d have to tell the movers to be extra careful in packing it up, since it was very old and very special.

  Amelia turned to point it out to them, only to keep turning when she didn’t see the table where it normally stood. Thinking it might have been moved out of the way when the boxes had first been inventoried she did another full turn. Panic bloomed in her chest like an air bubble in a diver rising too fast to the surface.

  No table.

  Frantic, she turned to Doyle, who had taken over possession of the inventory list while she went through each box. “The table.”

  “Which table?” He flipped to the page that held the list of bedroom furniture. All of it was marked red.

  “An antique dressing table. It should be right there”—she pointed emphatically—“and it’s not.”

  Doyle ran a finger down the list, shaking his head. “I don’t see anything like that. Maybe they listed it as something else?” He offered her the sheaf of papers.

  Amelia scoured the list, looking for anything that might even remotely match the description of her table, but there was nothing. “Where is it?” she asked, not sure who she was asking as she went through the pages a second time. Still finding nothing, she looked at Paul, who had tried to remain as unobtrusive as possible through the process. She shook the list that was now crumpled in her fist at him. “Why isn’t my table listed here? What happened to it?”

  “I’m…I don’t know.” Paul looked both confused and uncomfortable. “That’s everything that was in this room as of late yesterday, when I got the order for the inventory. If this table you’re looking for isn’t on it, then it wasn’t in the room when that happened.”

  Amelia stilled at his words. Of course her mother hadn’t bothered to throw away any of her keepsakes in a spiteful rage. Those would have been small hurts, easily gotten over. No, she’d chosen the one thing she knew had the most meaning to Amelia, that would hurt her the most to lose, and used it to put the angry period on her one, last act of punishment for her disobedient daughter.

  “Is the table important?” Doyle asked. She knew what he was really asking. Was it worth starting a fight over?

  “To me, yes. Which is exactly why my mother had it removed.”

  “We can add it to the list we’ll be giving to the attorneys—”

  “There’s no need.” With the grim sense the entire day had been heading toward this moment with all the inevitability of the Titanic and its iceberg, Amelia asked Paul, “Where exactly might I find my mother?”

  ****

  The formal dining room in the Westlake mansion was a cavernous space filled with polished mahogany furniture and Swarovski crystal chandeliers, its ceiling covered in a Renaissance-inspired fresco that would have looked more at home in the Sistine Chapel. It was a room meant to impress and intimidate in equal measure.

  For Amelia, it was the site of far too many uncomfortable meals with her parents, and even more unhappy disagreements with her stomach. In a room meant to hold forty, having just the three of them seated in elegant grandeur had felt both oppressive and wrong, and, in retrospect, just a little sad. There was a smaller room that would have been much more appropriate for when they were dining en famille, but Amelia couldn’t remember anyone ever using it but her.

  As usual, her mother was ensconced at one head of the long table. Someone else might have thought the elaborate place setting of china and crystal had been laid for Amelia’s benefit, but the truth was her mother always dined in similar splendor. Limoges and Waterford at every meal, even when it was simply lunch for one.

  That her mother had sat down to a meal while her only daughter was picking through the miscellany of her life just a floor away was supposed to be another slap in the face, but Amelia was too bloody furious to care. Her mother had done a lot of awful things over the years, but this time Amelia had no intention of backing down for the sake of preserving the peace. For the first time in her life, she was looking forward to the confrontation.

  Stalking to the end of the table, Amelia curled her fingers around the back of the chair at her mother’s left and demanded in a low, firm voice, “What did you do with my table?” At first, it seemed as though her mother would ignore her, as she finished chewing her bite of food and then took a measured sip of wine. But Amelia recognized the tactic for exactly what it was and decided it was past time to fight fire with fire. Because it would drive her mother insane, she pulled the chair back with a loud screech against the parquet floor and dropped into it.

  “Must you?” her mother asked in a put-upon tone, touching her temple with one manicured hand to emphasize how distressing she found the noise.

  “Must I what, Mother?” Amelia leaned back in the hard, wooden seat and crossed her legs, not her ankles, letting her foot swing in defiance of every etiquette lesson ever drummed into her.

  “Must you prove yet again what a complete and utter failure you’ve turned out to be at becoming the kind of daughter I’d hoped for?”

  Amelia’s foot swung a little faster. “Hmm,” she said as though considering the matter. Then she smiled. “Yes. Yes, I must. Although if you were the one trying to mold me into your perfect image of what a daughter should be, doesn’t that mean that you’ve failed as well?” The tightening of her mother’s lips indicated a direct hit.

  Ha!

  “Why are you even in here?” Her mother sliced viciously into her salmon, which was drowning in thick cream sauce and truffles, one of the heavy meals turned out by her mother’s snooty chef Amelia had truly despised. Even now the smell made her want to gag. “Mr. Kent had very clear instructions that you were to be allowed into the upstairs bedroom only, and then only under his direct supervision. You have no business coming into any other part of the house.”

  The bedroom, not your bedroom. A deliberate choice of words meant to cut as deeply as the knife slicing through the fish on her plate.

  “Oh, please, Mother, let�
��s just cut the crap, shall we?” Amelia felt a spiteful burst of satisfaction at the way her mother flinched at the casual vulgarity. “You not only knew I’d come and find you, you made sure it would happen. Because that’s what you do. You manipulate people into reacting exactly the way you want them to.”

  “Do I?” Her mother took another sip of wine. “How positively Machiavellian of me.”

  “Oh, I’d say you put good old Niccolo to shame. But we’ve strayed from my original question. What have you done with my dressing table?”

  “Yours? You’re quite mistaken. There isn’t a single thing in this house that is yours. The fact that I’m allowing you to remove anything at all is only done out of the goodness of my heart.”

  At that, Amelia couldn’t help but laugh. “Heart? You don’t have a heart. You have a balance sheet. Every single thing you do is weighed against what it will cost you and what it will gain you. Sentiment plays no role in your life choices. It never has. Especially when it comes to me.”

  “Please.” After tapping the corners of her mouth with the pristine white linen napkin, her mother placed it on the table. “If this is leading up to a ‘poor me’ party, spare me.”

  “It’s pity party, and no, I wouldn’t waste my time because in order to elicit pity, one must first have some sort of empathy, and you, Mother, don’t have an ounce of that in your body.”

  “Because I didn’t spend my days coddling you as a child?”

  “Coddle? I can barely remember a time that you even touched me as a child unless it was to correct my posture or to pose for a publicity photo. I had a closer relationship with my nannies than I ever did with you!”

  “You never understood. You never appreciated how much effort went into supporting your father’s career. How important that was.”

  “Oh, I knew. I just thought that maybe someday the two of you might decide to put at least a tenth of that effort into your parenting.” Amelia laughed softly at herself. “More fool, me.”