To clarify, the route to the dining room wasn’tthatlong, but I did tend to take my time when walking the plank.
Closer…Step.
Nevertheless, my dreams of being CEO were dashed when I was seven years old. More specifically, on the day my father married Katherine Marie Wybler, a.k.a. Kitty Campbell now. My not-so-beloved stepmother.
Funny how I automatically thought ofCinderellawhenstepmothercame to mind, despite the fact I’d never had to lift a finger to scrub or clean a thing in my life. No, Kitty wasn’t an overbearing tyrant who insisted I did laundry and dishes, but she was a cold, mean bitch. Think Cruella De Vil, the chain-smoking, puppy-hoarding heiress hell-bent on having a fashionable coat. Only without the chain-smoking and the puppy hoarding. She was, however, evil. I could attest.
As of the day Rhett and Kitty saidI do, the future of Delta June’s had shifted, slipping right through my fingers and into the hands of … well, at this point, I wasn’t sure if that had been determined. After all, without a son to pass it down to…
Not that I could ask the big question of,Who’s next in line to get the great big toy box?Or any question, for that matter. After all, Kitty did not approve of a stepdaughter who asked questions, and even less so of one who longed for something more from life.
Not that I was complaining.
Okay, yes. I was complaining. In my defense, what else did I have to do besides make the treacherous journey from my bedroom to the dining room to endure another splendid meal with the two people who brought me so much joy in life?
Don’t get me wrong. I wasn’t Little Orphan Annie. After all, sweet little Annie did have Daddy Warbucks, and I had … well, I had Rhett and Kitty.
Yet through it all—my father’s emotional distance, Kitty’s overbearing nearness—I had been the dutiful daughter, following instructions, striving for the praise that was rarely provided by anyone who wasn’t paid to take care of me. When I earned it, I basked in the glow for far longer than was necessary.
The only problem was while aiming to be the perfect daughter, I always seemed to miss the mark. And in doing so, I also missed out on what most considered fun. Things like birthday parties and sleepovers, dances, and proms. Oh, and friends. At the ripe young age of twenty, I had precisely zero friends to call my own.
Now that I thought about it, those birthday parties and whatnot probably wouldn’t have been all that fun anyway.
And here you’d thought I was a whiny teenager wrought with frustration over being grounded by my parents. Nope. Tomorrow was my twenty-first birthday, which meant I was a full-grown adult, legally capable of seeing to my own needs, only I couldn’t because I’d been kept as a prisoner under the thumb of my evil bitch of a stepmother all these years.
Closer…Step.
Could I leave? Um … probably. I seriously doubted the stepmonster would chase me down if I waltzed out the front door and down the beach to the main road. But from there, I would be completely on my own, out in the real world with absolutely no worldly skills that would keep me from starving to death or sleeping in a cardboard box, things Kitty liked to taunt me with. I would be the first to admit I was a pampered princess, and even thinking about taking off on my own without some of the creature comforts I was accustomed to—like food, a bed, clothes—had me breaking out in a cold sweat.
The good news—yes, there was a tiny ray of hope on the horizon—was that I was now officially an adult in my stepmother’s eyes, so I figured I would have a chance to start living independently sometime in the very near future. After all, how many twenty-one-year-olds were kept under the thumb of their stepmother?
I really hope the answer to that is zero; otherwise, I am screwed.
As I paused just outside the dining room, I wondered if it was the calendar preparing to click over to the all-important twenty-one that had me feeling as though I was inching closer to death or if that had to do with the fact each step I’d just taken had brought me closer and closer to my evil stepmother.
Since Kitty had been a part of my life since I was seven, less than a year after my mother lost her short but brutal battle with ovarian cancer, I couldn’t remember many days without her. I later learned from one of the staff that my father had introduced me to Kitty shortlyafterthey’d married, almost as though I was an afterthought.Whoops! Did I forget to mention I had a kid? Because I do. Evil stepmom, meet Emily. Emily, meet the woman who’s going to make your life a living hell.
But wait. It gets better.
Not long afterthat, I was introduced to Kitty’s son. Yep, that’s right. My entire life was upended—Mommy was gone, Stepmommy took over—and now I had a new brother: Knox Anthony Montgomery. Although that brooding, pain-in-the-ass boy did not like me referring to him as such. Not then and not now.
And just when you thought that was as good as it could get … nope. Even better.
Several years ago, I learned that my stepbrother was the illegitimate son of Jeremiah Montgomery, the famous billionaire who all but created the big-box stores. Because of that, Knox had never been forced to live here, to endure, because he had his own means of supporting himself. And probably a small country, to boot.
Yay him.
I wouldn’t go so far as to say I was ever thrilled with the idea of Kitty, but I could remember the day I met Knox. He’d been a moody, grumbling teenager at the time, although to my seven-year-old heart, I’d thought he hung the moon. Needless to say, I’d fallen madly in love with Knox from the beginning. Not in the romantic sense, because, you know,sevenand all. In my defense, I had been starved for attention, so the fact that he’d bestowed me with his kindness and charm on the briefest of occasions had sealed my fate.
Of course, being eleven years older than me, Knox saw me as nothing more than an obnoxious brat most of the time. About ninety-nine-point-nine percent of the time, I’d been told. (Yes, by Kitty.) Not that I’d ever had the opportunity to irritate him the way a sibling might because shortly after Knox’s arrival at the mansion—three months, to be exact—he turned eighteen, graduated high school, and went off to college.
And he never came back.
Closer…Step.
Fine, that was a bit more drama on my part. Knox visited from time to time, making the trek from his fancy digs in New York to the Gulf Coast of Texas. Mostly on holidays. He would sweep through, stir up shit, then disappear for another year or so. And while he was here, I would soak up whatever iota of time he could carve out for me, which seemed to get smaller and smaller the older I got and, as of about six years ago, had become all but nonexistent.
And still, I felt as though Knox was one of the few people I’d ever had a connection to. Too bad he didn’t feel the same.
