PROLOGUE
CORA
12 YEARS AGO
“Mama, how could you?” I practically scream as I watch people mill around my grandparents’ house, the wordsEstate Sale& Auctionon a big ugly sign on the front lawn.
My mother lifts her chin, her nose high in the air like she’s better than all of this.
Better than me.
“It’s juststuff,Cora, and if you want to go tocollegethen this is what we have to do.” My mouth hangs open both at the audacity of the statement and the lie falling from her lips with such ease I want to shake her. She stares at me, begging me to challenge her in front of all these people so she can prove just how ungrateful I really am. Lowering her voice, she adds, “You didn’t really think he’d leave the house to you, did you?”
Her smile is as fake as the curve of her nose, but I won’t react—not here.
She’ll paint me as a charity case—her own daughter—and she’ll gain the sympathies of everyone in town.
Because no one knows the real Krista Delaney. No one knows the vindictive and greedy side of the woman who ripped the very best parts of my childhood away from me.
“And really, Cora, another T-shirt? How are you ever going to land a husband dressed like that? You have a closet full of dresses that would be so flattering on your figure.”
I want to scream, “I’m only seventeen,”but my mother had been shopping for a husband at the country club by my age. She’d married her first husband at twenty before divorcing him a few years later and marrying my father.
“Where’s the jewelry box?” I ask, calmly ignoring her previous comment, my heart threatening to beat out of my chest.
“I was just going to put it in with the estate items, but the auctioneer thought we might do a little better havin’ people bid on it.” She gives me a saccharine smile, my knees threatening to buckle at the admission.
“It was theonlything I asked for,” I rasp, tears welling in my eyes. “Youpromised.”
She shrugs one slender shoulder. “It must have slipped my mind.” Looking at her watch, she adds, “If you hurry, you might be able to place a bid on it.”
Pushing past her, I swipe at the tears rolling down my face as I enter the sitting room, the beautiful furniture and decorations now absent from the space, and I want to weep.
I cannot believe she’d do this to me—that she’d do this to us.
But honestly I can, because this is how she’s always been, though she’s hidden it so well from the rest of the world.
“Next item up is this antique jewelry box.” My ears tune to the auctioneer’s words as he describes the box, holding it this way and that. “We’ll start the bidding at twenty dollars.”
“Twenty dollars!” I yell, startling everyone in the room, including myself.
“Twenty dollars. Thank you, Miss. Do I have thirty?”
“Thirty dollars.” The voice is a snicker from my left as Talon Banks raises his hand.
No, no, no.
Please, Lord, not today.
What started out as friendly competition freshman year of high school for class president had turned into an all-out war. Talon had won that first year, but I’d beat him the last two. Rumor had it he’d already been strategizing for the fall.
I want to tell him he can be president if he just stops this, but when the auctioneer speaks again, I panic.
“Do I hear forty dollars?”
“Forty!” I yell, and Talon’s eyes narrow and I know he won’t let this go—this stupid made-up rivalry I’d give anything to make go away.
But it doesn’t and we go back and forth until Talon yells, “Two hundred and fifty dollars!” Gasps from around the room match the way everyone’s gaze is ping-ponging between us like they all know I don’t have that kind of money.
