Total pages in book: 92
Estimated words: 84002 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 420(@200wpm)___ 336(@250wpm)___ 280(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 84002 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 420(@200wpm)___ 336(@250wpm)___ 280(@300wpm)
She’d pretty much monopolized his life from the age of fourteen until now, and all of his experiences had been with her until his eyes started to wander. That’s where the trouble began when he started realizing that he could get what he was getting from her elsewhere and may be better now that she was no longer a spring chicken.
She hadn’t planned for these things to happen, hadn’t expected to be still getting blood on her hands at this stage in life. She was getting too old and too tired for this mess, but she had to do it for self- preservation. She knew she was getting up there in years, that she was no longer the hot number that had so easily seduced the teenage boy all those many years ago.
If their house of cards should start crumbling and the life she’d built around them should suddenly start unraveling, the fallout would be too much to bear, especially at her age. Just the thought of it made her shudder, and she was rethinking, exposing their true relationship as mother and son so soon. Especially in front of the detective who seemed a bit too savvy for the small-town rube she’d first thought her to be.
They’d always stuck mostly to big cities where everyone tended to mind their own, but after the last time, Don had panicked so bad it was all she could do to get him to even leave the house. The only way she could get him not to do something stupid was to convince him that moving to a small town somewhere on the other side of the country would be safe enough and far enough away for the trouble not to reach them.
She’d thought for sure that after the fear of exposure, he’d settle down again and go back to being the boy who adored his mommy. But once they’d settled here, he’d gone back to his old ways again it seemed, and she’d had no choice but to act. She was staring either a retirement or nursing home hard in the face in the next few years, and the only way to avoid that was to keep the control she had over her stepson. That’s why she couldn’t allow any of these young money-grubbing sluts to get their hooks into him, where would that leave her then? It was the one thing she hadn’t planned for.
Now she gets nervous whenever there’s a new woman around her Donnie because she knows that if the right one should come along, it could threaten everything they have. It was her biggest fear and had kept her up many a night. She hadn’t always been like this. She used to be a self-confident, vivacious woman who had men eating out of the palm of her hand.
That’s how she’d landed Don’s dad all those years ago, back when men fell for such things, and there was no Internet and no easy way to look into the past of the new woman in town. She’d moved to the new town with a plan already set in motion unbeknownst to her new neighbors and friends. It was an easy thing for someone like her back then to do the kind of research needed to facilitate her plans.
Her job as the secretary of a very successful lawyer in the town she lived in had given her access to the law review and many more law publications, which in those days listed all the successful men of the profession throughout the country. She didn’t need to cull through the muck and mire since the publications pretty much did that for her, listing only the crème de la crème.
Since her boss’ wife was growing suspicious of their late-night business sessions, she knew it was time to hit the road before she was thrown out of town in shame, and so she’d moved on before things got too sticky. She had Don senior already picked out as her next target before she even landed in the town.
It had been easy work getting rid of his then secretary. Just a few well-placed lies in the right ears that had spread like wildfire, and the poor thing had run with her tail tucked between her legs for parts unknown—never knowing that it was her new best friend who’d tarnished her up until then unblemished reputation.
She wasn’t working for him three weeks before she’d made her way into his bed. The fact that he had an ailing wife made no difference to her and, in fact, was one of the reasons she’d chosen him—that along with his immense wealth. Small town southern lawyers on the fast track did very well for themselves in those days.
So, along with screwing his brains out at the office every chance she got, she’d played the doting maternal type, showing concern for his son. The son who didn’t have a mother at home to care for him. She knew not to be too pushy, just how far to go to get what she wanted.