Page 15 of Reckless Curves
Chapter Six
Kendra had asked her best friend Stella Perry to pop over. She had grown up in the same neighborhood, Beverly Hills: a world away from where she lived now. She couldn’t blame Stella for not understanding why she lived like this. Why would any sane person give up a life in high society? But she refused to let herself be under her father’s thumb. He thought he could control her as he controlled her mother, but she would show him.
To be fair, she wasn’t sure if she’d have gotten through the cancer if her father hadn’t been their fighting with her and providing her with the best treatment money could buy, but once she’d recovered, he thought it meant he could control every facet of her life. That she owed him her life for helping to save it.
He’d tried to map out her future, even to the point of arranging a marriage to a lawyer in her firm.
“Forget college, my dear. Women raise the children and run the household so the men can earn the money.”
For fuck’s sake—really? In this day and age?
The day she’d told him she was pregnant and wouldn’t reveal the father’s name, he’d got so mad. She thought for a moment he might hit her. He disowned her when she refused his plan to marry her off by tricking the lawyer in his firm into thinking the baby was his. So she’d been on her own, with only Marcus and Stella helping her ever since.
Stella shifted Connor to her other hip. “I’m just saying. Marcus will not let you keep dodging his questions about Connor’s father forever.”
“Tell me something I don’t know,” Kendra said while putting on some coffee. “He rips my head off every time he comes to see me and Connor. He hates me living in this neighborhood.”
At least Marcus still wanted her in his life. In contrast, her father was a wealthy, prominent lawyer and having a pregnant, unmarried daughter was damaging to his reputation. Her mother was so browbeaten by her father that she always took her father’s side.
“I don’t understand why you won’t take Marcus up on his offer to set you up in a better neighborhood,” Stella said.
“If I give in on that, he’ll think he can run my life just like my father. Believe me, he’s more like my father than he wants to admit.”
“If you ask me, you both are,” Stella took a seat in the chair by the window. “Why do you think you have to do all this on your own?”
How could she make her friend understand? For most of her life she’d been Marcus’s quiet, shadow-like, sickly little sister. Mr. and Mrs. Black’s little girl, whom everyone had needed to look after because she’d spent much of her childhood in the hospital battling her leukemia. She still hated how cancer had defined her.
She wanted to stand on her own two feet for a change, to prove to the world she wasn’t as weak and helpless as they all thought her to be. No more pampering for her.
That’s what had attracted her to Tom. He’d never treated her like some fragile vase that would shatter at the slightest touch. He’d never tried to protect her. He never thought of her as the sick girl. At their very first meeting he’d treated her like the survivor she was, daring her to push back and take a swim in the pool if she wanted to. Perhaps that is why she fell so hard for him.
Wanting to end the conversation, Kendra fell back on her usual excuse. “I don’t expect you to understand, but I need to be independent.”
Stella knew not to push her, but she said, “So, now that Tom knows about Connor, is he going to step up and help you out?”
“Tom’s not just a wallet, you know. He’s Connor’s father. He popped by and met Connor today.” She tried to act like it was no big deal. “Oh, and he suggested we try being a real family.”
Stella choked on the sip of wine she’d just taken as she and Kendra sat in the living room later that night. “He said what?” she croaked.
Kendra crossed her arms and deepened her voice while giving Stella a hard look. “Let’s get married, Kendra,” she mimicked and cracked up. “I can’t believe it. He’s absolutely serious, though.”
Stella sat her wineglass on the coffee table. “I certainly wasn’t expecting him to react like that. He doesn’t seem like the marrying kind.”
Tom was a more casual sex kind of guy. Relationship was a foreign language.
Running a fingertip around the rim of her wineglass, Kendra said, “There’s more to Tom than I suspected.” She might still consider him a man-whore, but how many people knew he didn’t drink? She suspected there was more to him than anyone knew, more than she knew. She understood that his shitty childhood probably tarnished his views on happy families. That’s what scared her about his offer. Did he even know what he was doing?
Stella arched an eyebrow at her. “You could do worse. I mean, you still have the hots for him and he’s a rich stud.”
Kendra gaped at Stella for a moment. “What happened to you hating Tom and calling him a prick?”
Stella’s shoulders lifted. “If he didn’t know… He gets points for taking responsibility now he does. Are you sure that he didn’t know?”
Bold lines of text rose in Kendra’s mind. “Yeah. I’m sure. None of the emails were opened. He’d never read them.” Why did he keep them?
“He’s still an ass for not opening them or listening to your voicemails, but he’s not quite as big a jerk as I thought,” Stella said.
“No, he’s not. Tom was never a jerk to me,” Kendra said. “He was the one person who didn’t sugar coat stuff or treat me like a fragile piece of china. I liked how honest he was with me.”
