Total pages in book: 74
Estimated words: 71165 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 356(@200wpm)___ 285(@250wpm)___ 237(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 71165 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 356(@200wpm)___ 285(@250wpm)___ 237(@300wpm)
*************FULL BOOK START HERE*************
PROLOGUE
TIFFANY
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8tE0GjSQpes
I opened my front door to find Tiffany, my stepsister standing outside. A bit of a surprise since I hadn’t seen her in more than three months. Her pouty lips seemed more bee-stung than ever, and her hair was an even whiter shade of platinum. She was wearing pearls and a pretty blue dress that made her eyes look almost turquoise.
Right off the bat I should say, we don’t get along, so I wasn’t all that happy to see her.
“Hello. Aren’t you going to let me in?” she purred.
Wordlessly, I opened the door wider and stood back. She walked through in a cloud of exotic perfume and made her way to my couch, where she perched on the edge of it as if she was afraid it would soil her clearly expensive dress.
“Where’s your dog?” she asked, looking around her warily.
“At the dog groomers,” I said.
She visibly relaxed. As she should. Pogo hated her with a passion. He snarled, growled, and snapped whenever she got within an arm’s length of him.
“Do you want something to drink?” I asked.
“Perrier with a slice of lemon, please.”
My lips twisted. Tiffany never failed to amaze me. She really thought the whole world existed only to serve her. “I don’t have Perrier. You can have a glass of tap water if you want,” I offered, even though I had bottled water in the fridge.
Her nose wrinkled. “I’ll pass.” She flashed a fake smile and patted the space on the sofa next to her. “Come sit with me.”
I suppressed a shudder at the thought of being that close to her. Now it was my turn to be wary. “What’s up, Tiffany?”
“Nothing. I just wanted to talk to you… to tell you something.”
I moved to the sofa, but sat away from her. “Tell me what?”
She took a deep breath. “Okay. It’ll be best if I just come out and say it.”
“Go on then.”
“Steven and I are in love.”
For a quick moment, I thought I’d heard wrong, because the words she said didn’t make sense. Unless… unless by some weird coincidence it was a different Steven. “Steven?” I echoed.
“Your Steven,” she confirmed artlessly.
The shock was incredible. Never in my life had I felt so utterly shocked. Steven and her! Even the idea made me sick to my stomach. “What?” I blurted out.
Tears pooled in her big blue eyes and spilled down her beautiful face. She always could turn on the tears as if they were on a tap. She opened her purse and pulled out a tissue.
“We didn’t mean for it to happen,” she sobbed, as she carefully dabbed her cheeks. “It just did. You have to believe me.”
“What a little bitch you are. You stole my boyfriend, and you didn’t mean for it to happen?” I think I was still in shock or disbelief because my voice sounded strangely calm compared to her dramatic crying and sniffing.
She blinked with surprise. It was very rare that I was ever confrontational or horrible to her. From the time we were children, I learned, it was better to let Tiffany have her way. That way my stepmom wouldn’t complain to my dad, and my poor dad wouldn’t have to stand up for me and be trapped in fierce arguments about how he spoiled me. This was followed by the silent treatment that lasted for days on end and made my stepmother resent me even more even though outwardly she played the ‘how lucky Willow is to have such a nice and caring stepmother’ part to perfection.
Tiffany, for her part, very quickly understood she could walk all over me with no consequences. And walk all over me she did until the day my dad died, then I took a step back from my whole family, and reduced my interaction with her to a strictly necessary level.
Until now.
Unbelievable. She was unbelievable. First, she helped herself to my boyfriend, then she invited herself to my home to give me the news.
A malicious, almost cunning look came into Tiffany’s suddenly dry eyes. She tossed her head and her long white-blonde curls bounced on her shoulders. “I don’t know why you’re being so mean about it. Steven and I tried hard to resist the attraction, but we simply couldn’t. We fell madly in love with each other. It’s not like what you had with Steven. Steven told me the two of you were just fucking around.”
My eyes widened. Wow! Just fucking around!
Oh, the bastard! That was what he thought we were doing for the last two years. The coward didn’t even come to tell me himself. He left Tiffany to do his dirty work. Typical.
Tiffany was staring at me curiously, intensely, as if she was actually drinking in my pain. The betrayal was like a knife in my chest, the pain sharp, but I took a deep breath. No matter how much it hurt I would not give Tiffany the satisfaction of knowing just how much she had hurt me.