“The latest charge was two weeks ago. The night before your incident.”
Danica sat down in one of the chairs, weary. Alicia resisted the urge to go to her.I want to touch her. To console her. To let her know that I will always be here for her. That I love her!No, no, the spite was still necessary. Alicia couldn’t fold so easily.
“I can’t believe he would do that.” Danica placed her head in her hands. Her voice was muffled. “He would kill the two women I have loved the most.” She sat back up. “Why?Whywould he do that to my mother?”
Alicia pulled out another chair. “Your mother told me that she tried to see you after the divorce. She went to your school, but security caught her and threw her out. She was attacked shortly thereafter. Your father was doing the same thing he did to me. If not killing her, then sending a serious message. She got it.”
Danica shook her head. What she said next was not something Alicia expected.
“I had Ms. Clayborn contact her the other day. I’m supposed to meet her tonight.”
“Wow.”
Danica met her gaze from across the table.Here I go, falling into those pools of amber again.“Come with me, Alicia. I want you there with me when I meet my mother for the first time in years.”
She opened her purse and pulled out the emerald ring. It was still in the plastic Ziploc that the hospital had put it and her choker in.
Alicia slid the ring across the table. Danica caught it with a deft hand.
“There’s something else you need to do first.”
“You’re right,” she said, reclaiming that commanding presence Alicia succumbed to so easily. Danica rounded the table. “I’m not meeting my mother until we agree about this fiancée thing.”
One thing even the most cynical corners of Alicia’s heart could say: the woman was damn convincing. Especially when she kissed her like that!
“Danica?” A weak yet hopeful voice sang down the hallway. “Danica!”
Nothing could stop the woman barreling down her hallway. Not Alicia, not the bodyguard, and definitely not Danica Moreau, who opened her arms to her crying mother.
To think – the last time this woman held her daughter was almost twenty-five years ago, when she was no taller than her waist. Now, Danica was big enough to pick up her mother and coddle her like Julia used to when she was a child.
Alicia had a feeling that Julia’s country house didn’t hear many tears… of heartbreaking happiness.
Chapter 17
“Something will have to be done about my father,” Danica said at midnight, sitting in front of the unlit fireplace in Julia Moreau’s study. “I can’t be around either of you until something is done about him.”
Julia, sitting across from her daughter and Alicia on another couch, nodded. “He is a vindictive, twisted man. Should he find out about either me or Alicia… it won’t be good. Our bodyguards will only be able to do so much. Assuming they’re not paid more to look the other way, like mine used to be.”
Danica flinched as she leaned forward. Alicia remained wrapped around her arm. The emerald ring twinkled on her finger. “I have a plan. I’ll need both of you to help me, though.” She fondly looked at her fiancée. “I’ll need your cooperation the most of all, my love.”
Alicia stroked Danica’s cheek. “Anything for you.”
She meant it, too. That spite was still in her heart. Only now it was no longer directed at Danica. It was directed at Russell, atthe people who would come between her and Danica. The world. The industries and hierarchies waiting for them to fall.
Alicia had seen her future, as Danica had seen hers years ago. To make her dreams come true, however, she would have to assume the mantle of a woman she still barely knew. Both in herself and sitting across from her.
She looked up at Julia, who in turn watched her carefully. “Tell me everything I need to know,” Alicia said. “I want to be prepared for anything.”
The first time alone with her Mistress was one of the most relieving of Alicia’s life.
“I missed you so much,” Danica muttered, kissing every inch of her throat as she held Alicia in the back of the limo. She had already arranged a hotel room for their reunion, but someone was unable to wait until they got there. “I am never going without you again.”
“I don’t want you to, ma’am,” Alicia replied. She was happy to do whatever Danica wanted. Soft and slow? Beautiful. Fast and furiously carnal? Delightful. Both summed up their relationship quite succinctly. “I want to always be available to you.”
She kissed her so hard that Alicia whimpered against her lips.
Alicia soon found herself falling over Danica’s lap.
