Jasmine (7 page)

The door closed behind them before
she could say anything. She knew that her mother had been a horrible person,
but to enable your own child…well, that really shouldn’t have surprised her
either. She had drugged her so that her uncle could have sex with her to get
her pregnant. Alyssa shuddered. She was so glad that she’d found out before
that had occurred.

She picked up her phone to call
her knight in shining armor. Her husband Cain was the greatest thing that had
ever happened to her next to their son. She smiled when she thought of the news
she had for her doctor husband.

“I’m sorry Alyssa, but he’s with a
patient right now,” his nurse Sandy told her. Then she lowered her voice. “It’s
his mother. She cut her foot really badly and he’s had to stitch it up for
her.”

“Oh my, I bet he’s having a blast
with that one, isn’t he? Did she say how she cut it? Not that I care really,
but was just wondering.”

Sandy laughed. “You got that. And
not that I’m aware of. She just came in yelling for him. Even with the area
numbed she’s screaming like he’s cutting her foot off. I swear I don’t know how
she could have birthed such a wonderful man and her being…well, her I guess.”

Alyssa was still laughing when she
hung up a few minutes later. Sandy said she’d have him call her and that she’d
make sure that she told him in front of Guinevere. The entire staff had been
witness to the fights and screaming matches that she and Guinevere had. The two
of them couldn’t be in the same room without taking a bite or two out of each
other. Alyssa hated the woman and she, in turn, hated Alyssa.

~~~

Jazzie was running behind. Not
just a little either, but nearly three hours. The lawyer had made an
appointment for ten and hadn’t taken her into his office until nearly noon.
Then he proceeded to answer the phone when it rang and eat his lunch, which she
wanted. She was starving and pissed. Plus, she’d had to go to the grocery twice
because she’d forgotten something and had to turn around and get it.

The phone was ringing when she
walked in with the last bag of food. She groaned when she saw who it was. She
did not want to speak to her mother right now. She tried to smile before
picking up the receiver and only succeeded in grimacing.

“I want you to come over here. I
hurt my foot and I need you to wait on me. And bring me something for dinner.
I’m sick of eating out.”

 Jazzie pulled the phone from her
ear and stared at it before answering her mother. “No. I have plans.” Then she
felt slightly bad and asked her what she’d done. Since the entire family knew
what had happened between their mother and Lilliane on her wedding day Jazzie
had decided that she was no longer going to cater to Guinevere. No one said that
sort of thing to her sister and got away with it.

“I cut my foot and your brother
had to stitch me up. I believe he said he used over a hundred stitches.”

Jazzie pulled out her cell phone
and sent a question to her brother by text.

Treat M today?

Yes. Cut. 4 stitches. Don’t
help her. She is k.

“Cain said you were all right and
that he used four stitches. And I have plans already. You want someone to help
you, apologize to Lilliane and mean it and I’ll find someone to come there.”

“I will not apologize to your
sister. I did nothing wrong but tell her the truth. I can’t help it if she’s
too stupid to realize that she is making a mistake marrying that gimp.”

Jazzie hung up before she said
something she might not ever regret. She had about an hour before Nathan came
over. An hour to do all the things he’d asked her to and some of the things she
wanted to do for herself. She was suddenly glad she’d made an appointment with a
place she could get herself shaven before she’d gone to the lawyers.

Shifting her hips she smiled at
the way she felt. She’d had a trim job before, but not anything like she’d had
done today. Nathan had told her completely bare and she hadn’t realized that
she’d have to get her bottom cleaned as well.

He’d left her early this morning.
She’d wanted to stay in bed all day with him, but he’d told her that work had
to come before play. He’d given her instructions on what to do and she didn’t
know what he’d do when he found out she’d not been able to get most of it done.
Not even the trip to the local sex shop.

She wondered if his form of punishment
was going to be as delicious as last night’s. She’d slipped up when she’d come
and called him Nathan. He’d bent her over his knee and paddled her ass good
with his hands. Then, when she’d cried, he denied her a climax. Smiling she
wondered if he knew how much she enjoyed fighting off what she knew was going
to be a killer and realized that he more than likely knew.

She was putting the last touches
on dinner when she heard him pull into her drive. Going to the front hall she
looked out the window and was suddenly glad she’d not stripped down like she’d
nearly done. Her sister probably wouldn’t have appreciated being met at the
door naked.

She opened the door with a smile. “You
can’t stay. I’m having company and I don’t want you here to mess up my plans,”
she told Sin. “Besides, I thought you were going on some sort of stake out or
something.”

“No, the guy confessed and there
wasn’t any…is that roasted chicken I smell? You have to feed me. Payton is on
some kind of daddy mission with Emma and I’m starved.”

“I said no. I have someone coming
over. Now get. I swear if you leave right now I’ll make you two chickens and
you can eat them all yourself.” Sin looked at her oddly. “Please?”

“I’m not leaving until you tell me
who it is. You know, I don’t believe I’ve seen you this… It’s a man, isn’t it? I
knew it. I told Quinny you were seeing someone and she swears you aren’t. Damn
it, I should have—”

They both turned to see the car
pulling in beside Sin’s vehicle. Sin turned back to look at Jazzie when Nathan
got out of the car. She looked shocked and amazed.

“You’re seeing Nathan Howard? Well,
fuck me! How long?” Sin whispered. “Fuck, this is great. I like him.”

“Hush. And if you tell anyone I’ll
tell Payton where your big stash is. And you know how he feels about you eating
healthy.” Nathan stepped up on the porch when Sin started to speak.

“Hello, Sydney. I thought you were
on a stake out or something. Did something happen?” Jazzie was surprised when
Nathan pulled her to him and kissed her quickly on the mouth. “I guess you were
on your way out?”

Sin laughed. “Yes, but not by
choice. I didn’t know you two were seeing each other. Or are you keeping it a
secret?”

“Sin, please. This is… We’re just…
Damn it, Sin, why did you have to come by now?”

“Because if I’d come by later I
would have interrupted something. This is good now. Tell me, have you been
sleeping together long?”

Nathan laughed when she simply
wanted to crawl under a rock. But before she could answer her sister or kill
her Nathan answered.

“Not long. And in actuality we
haven’t done a whole lot of sleeping. But you know how it is. We’ve only just
figured out that we like to screw each other’s brains out and, hell, why not?”

Sin waited about two seconds
before she burst out laughing. “I guess so. Okay. I’m going now and I’ll keep
your little secret. For now. But if you don’t let me be there when you tell
everyone I’m going to be really pissed off.” With a quick kiss on Jazzie’s
cheek, Sin went to her car only to stop halfway there. “Oh, by the way, you
should know that when you go to the Body Shoppe to get a trim job you should
really park your car around back or take a cab. That’s the real reason I’m
here.”

Chapter 7

“Let me guess, she’s not coming?” Guinevere
looked in the mirror at the person just behind her as she spoke. “You fucked it
up like you did everything else, didn’t you?”

Guinevere was afraid of Ginny. Not
just a little either. She was violent and sometimes she kept things from her. Like
the bloodied cat in the kitchen. She knew she knew something about it, but so
far Guinevere hadn’t been able to figure it out.

“No,” Ginny said sourly. “She’s
not coming. Cain must have told her that our foot wasn’t as bad as we’d planned
to tell her. She knew just how many stitches he’d put in your foot.”

That was another thing, how had
she really cut her foot? She’d told her that she’d walked on some broken glass
that had been knocked out of the door. Had she done it to make her feel sorry
for her? Guinevere didn’t like these games. At least not the ones where she was
in the dark and Ginny had all the answers.

“You must have told her. He’s not
allowed to give out that information because it’s something to do with patient-doctor
privilege or something. It’s against the law for him to share that stuff.”

“Not if he thinks it’s his mother.
Why did you have to go to him anyway? There are several hundred doctors in this
area and you had to go to my son?” Guinevere closed her eyes against the pain
in her head. “I know you think you can fool anyone about us looking alike, but
I’ve told you Cain isn’t the stupid one.”

“I had to see him. Christ, do you
know what it’s like to see that luscious piece of male and not have some of it?
Do you have any idea how long it’s been since I’ve had sex?”

Ginny’s comments tightened the
grip on her already pounding head.

“You can’t expect me to wait
around here all day long with nothing to do, can you?”

Guinevere cried out when her head
felt as if it had a vise around it. It took her a few seconds to realize that
her nose was bleeding again. She rushed to the bathroom and pressed a towel to
her face as she glared at Ginny’s reflection in the mirror. She really was
beginning to hate her.

“You should get that looked at. It’s
a nasty problem you have there.” Ginny laughed as she went away.

After cleaning up Guinevere went
to the bedroom again and changed. She was becoming more and more convinced that
Ginny was keeping things from her. Without thought as to what the other girl thought
Guinevere went to Ginny’s bedroom and started looking around. Guinevere knew
that she only had a few minutes at most before Ginny came back. She was
searching under the mattress when she felt something deep under it. She pulled
it out when she finally got her fingers around it.

Money. Lots of it, too, if the
thick plastic was any indication. She fanned the first stack of hundreds and
realized that there was more in this stack than she’d seen in a long while. She
put it back in the bag and stuffed it under the mattress. Now that she knew
about it she had to figure out why Ginny was hiding it and where the fuck she’d
gotten it.

Sitting in the living room she
pulled her own stash of things out from under the cushion. There wasn’t any
money in her baggies, but there were enough drugs there to do what she needed. And
what she needed was to put Ginny out for a while. For a long while if Guinevere
had any say in the matter. But she knew she couldn’t kill her. Not yet at any
rate. She still needed her.

Putting her things back under the
seat she sat down and propped her feet up. It was horrible of Jazzie to tell
her that she wouldn’t come over and help. Now she’d have to think of another
way to get the girl over here. Guinevere didn’t know why, but she felt she was
running out of time. She looked around the room and wondered, not for the first
time, how she’d gotten in this mess. Her husband was dead and now her kids, all
of them, were treating her as if she were the bad guy. That money-grubbing
whore Alyssa had caused all this and the sooner she was gone, the better.

All the bitch would have had to have
done was pay what was owed. Guinevere would have had her family back the way it
was and her Roscoe would be here with her instead of Ginny. He had loved her,
she was sure of it, and not Ginny. Ginny.

Ginny had begun sleeping with her
Roscoe about a year after
The Incident
. She’d always referred to it like
that and not what really happened. She still thought about knowing that Ginny
had been there all along, always in the background. And when that had happened,
well, there was no going back.

It had been the year that Gracie
Anne had left. The girls, all but Gracie Anne, had been at the mall together. She
had been ill and had stayed home to take a nap. Guinevere had heard screaming,
loud and long, but couldn’t move. Couldn’t get up off the couch, but lay frozen
in place. That was the first time Ginny had been around her children she
realized now. And it was the last time that her Roscoe had slept with her.

Gracie Anne had claimed that her
father, of all people, had raped her and that she, her own mother, had let it
happen. No matter how many times she’d tried to explain that she’d known
nothing about it Gracie Anne said she’d been there. It had taken three days to
get her daughter to return home and then their relationship had never been the
same. In fact, every time she came home for a visit Gracie Anne never said a
single word to her. A daughter shouldn’t treat her mother that way. There
should be friendship and…she never got anything from Gracie Anne, she realized.
All the other girls did; dresses, coats, even their wedding dresses and other
naughty items, but never her own mother. Guinevere frowned. She didn’t even
call her on her birthday or Mother’s Day.

She picked up the phone to call
her daughter when she realized that she didn’t know the number. What kind of
daughter didn’t give her mother her number? She started to put the phone back
when she realized that it wasn’t working. The phone was dead.

Hobbling to the kitchen to see if
it was not working there as well she noticed that the blood was still on the
floor. She had refused to clean up Ginny’s mess last night and she wasn’t doing
it now. Picking up the phone she found it didn’t work either. Their phone had
been shut off again.