What I needed.
What I craved.
Gah!
I opened my eyes, slid open the shutters, and stared out to the empty courtyard.
“You are seriously stupid, Lanie Heron,” I told the window.
I did this because I knew what I craved.
A taste.
Just a taste.
A small, sweet, short taste, even if it was pretend, even if it was milk and I had to imagine it was a thick, rich, vanilla shake, a little sip of what Ty-Ty had with Tack.
I didn’t have that with Elliott. I loved him, no doubt about it. I was ready to spend the rest of my life with him. I missed him even though he was totally whacked. I’d even made the decision to stay with him knowing he was totally whacked.
I loved him so much I’d taken bullets for him.
But I’d never seen anything like what Tyra had with Tack. I’d never seen a woman get that from a man. I’d never seen the naturalness, the ease of what she gave back. I’d never seen a man and woman able to be just who they were and yet make it so plain to each other and anyone watching they appreciated what they had more than anything.
Anything.
I wanted a taste of that.
“Boy, you got it, Lanie, you big, stupid, crazy, idiot.” I kept beating myself up just as my phone rang.
My head twisted around to look at it and my eyes narrowed even as my heart skipped.
I knew who it was because this happened all the time.
Nearly midnight my time, wee hours of the morning hers.
“Shoot, shoot, damn,” I mumbled as I wandered to the phone knowing I shouldn’t pick it up. My sister Elissa always told me I shouldn’t pick it up. She didn’t pick it up. She’d learned years ago and stopped doing it, so now she’d stopped calling my sis and called me instead.
Exclusively.
Because I stupidly picked up.
I got to the bed, saw the display on my phone told me I was right and still—stupid, stupid, stupidly—I picked up.
“Hey Mom,” I answered.
“Lanie, baby, howeryoudoin?”
I switched on the light, turned, sat on the side of the bed, lifted my feet up to the padded footboard, knees closed, and dropped my forehead to my knees because I could hear it.
She was gone.
Sloshed.
Well past three sheets—she was five sheets to the wind and sailing.
I was “darling” when she was sober. When she had it together to keep up appearances. When she expended all her energy to be the Connecticut banker’s wife and buried the Tennessee farmer’s daughter. Even if that Tennessee farmer had enough acreage to build three malls and had been the richest man in the richest family in town, she was still a farmer’s daughter and that didn’t do, according to her, in Connecticut.
“Good, Mom. It’s late. What’s up?” I answered.
“Oh, nuthin’. Just wan’ed to talk to my lil’ girl.”
“You’re talking to her, Mom, but it’s nearly midnight here. I’m really tired and I should get some sleep. It’s even later there so you should get some sleep, too.”
“Doan need sleep but you need some fun, Lanie. What you doin’ home? You shud be owd on the town, paintin’ it pink or, bedder, on a date,” Mom told me, a bit of what I thought was the cute, countrified twang she’d worked for decades to get rid of coming out in her voice.
This was a constant refrain even when she wasn’t drunk out of her mind. Heck, she’d started in on me about five days after I left the hospital, after everything happened with Elliott and the Russian Mob.
Then again, she’d never liked Elliott. “He may be brilliant, darling, but men like him never get very far. Middle ground. My girl? My Lanie? Looks like yours?” She had flicked my hair off my shoulder before she finished by declaring, “Breeding and beauty like yours, darling, you deserve to be on the arm of a star!”
I shoved this memory down and replied, “I’ve had a tough week at work.” This wasn’t a total lie. “So I need a quiet weekend.” That wasn’t a total lie either.
“Okay, quiet is good,” Mom returned. “Bedder than you rubbing elbows with Tyra’s family. Whad she was thinking, I will nod ever know. Such a priddy girl, too. Total waste. Her parents must be devastated.”
Suffice it to say, not only the Connecticut banker mom but also the Tennessee farmer’s daughter mom did not approve of the Chaos MC.
“They’re good people, Mom,” I told her for the four hundred and fiftieth time.
“They’re bikers, Lanie.”
She said the word “bikers” like uttering those two syllables spontaneously filled her mouth with acid.
“Can we not talk about this?” I asked on a sigh. “Really, it’s been a tough week and I’m exhausted.”
“Okay, wad d’you wanna talk about?”
I didn’t want to talk at all.
I didn’t want a lot of things and I hadn’t wanted most of them for a long freaking time.
I didn’t want my fiancé to be dead.
I didn’t want my fiancé to be dead by being whacked by the Russian Mob.
I didn’t want to live with the knowledge, and the guilt, that his antics with the Mob got my best friend kidnapped, twice, and the second time it got her stabbed. Repeatedly.
I didn’t want to be alone.
I didn’t want to be so damned lonely.
I didn’t want to live like I was living—the nightmares, the fear, something no one would understand, something I had to hide so people I cared about didn’t get worried.
I didn’t want my Mom to be wasted… again.
I didn’t want to know she was sitting alone in the big house on all that land in that exclusive estate where I grew up, close to the country club, every single resident a snob.
I didn’t want to know she was alone because Dad was either working or on a business trip.
I didn’t want to know these were his ready and oft-used excuses, otherwise known as flat-out lies, for leaving Mom alone for a night, a weekend, a very long weekend and all of this so he could be with his mistress of thirty years.
I’d seen him with her more than once. He wasn’t careful. He was arrogant. He kept up the pretense of the secret even knowing it wasn’t a secret and hadn’t been for decades. He even gave Mom filthy looks when she was drinking even though she was drinking because the love of her life had two loves of his and he expected her to share though he’d never asked if she would. So she’d made the decision to do so because he was the love of her life but also because, without him, there would be no big house close to the country club and she wouldn’t be getting slaughtered on forty dollar bottles of wine and top-shelf martinis.