Page 15 of A Royally Fake French Menage
"Christ and heaven, Barclay. You have your manservant picking up lint off the floor. We have maids for that sort of rubbish. Overpaying for his services. I’ve always said…” my stepmother ranted, her lip curling upward.
I closed my eyes against every response to that sexist remark, strangling the back of the vanity chair and wished it was her throat. "Monique. I thought we were meeting you downstairs?"
My stepmother invaded the space behind us, turning about the room until her back stood to me in an overt denial of the etiquette the bitch apparently clung to. Jacques risked a glance upward, the faintest hint of a smile brushing his lips before he climbed to his feet and turned away, the picture of the perfect, subservient valet.
Who he had never been.
My heart ripped at the sight. All I wanted to do was launch myself at him and promise he was free to behave as he wanted.
In our world, that still wasn’t always the case.
Jacques watched me for a moment longer from his stilled position. Whatever he read of my body language hardened his face. A second later he removed himself from the room while I tried to regulate my breathing, his phantom touch both a tease and an absolute necessity for my survival.
"Celeste is looking after Genevieve." Monique dallied at the dresser, and then approached me with the bottle of cologne. "Your father loved this one. You should wear it."
Her words could be construed as caring and at worst condescending. But her pale, almost colorless green eyes reminded me of a viper in the nest.
"I shouldn't leave her alone too long. After all, she is American." The pretty lie Genie created and that I now fostered sat easy on my tongue.
Monique raised the bottle, her finger on the pump. I twisted away before she could spray the horrific smelling odour on my skin, desperate to retain Jacques’s faint scent of midnight illicit kisses despite that we hadn’t struck the appropriate hour yet.But we will.
None of us would sleep much tonight, I expected, not with how Genie had declared herself earlier.
But Monique, always the pushy, inappropriate bitch, stalked forward and attacked me with the bottle.
I froze in place, not allowing my fists to clench or my shoulders to tighten as I became a Barclay shaped statue beneath the glittery spray of nothing my father ever chose to wear.
All I smelled was an excess of cheap bullshit bearing a brand Monique purchased on his behalf. Every spray erased one more memory from his home. My home.
Until everything around us was hers.
Hers, hers, hers.
Sprayed with shitty perfume most likely purchased at a discount sale.
Monique pointed her bleached incisors in my direction, "There, that’s better, don’t you think? Now, your father can be with us all night."
"You make it sound like you had his ashes dropped into the thing." My gaze dropped to the swirling, purple liquid in its elegant cushion cut bottle, but no evidence of my father's interment was visible inside its glass prison.
I wouldn’t put it past her.
"You've become so American." Moniquetskedat me, sounding more British by the moment. A chameleon if there ever was one.
"You’d know, stepmother. You were born there." I clicked my heels together against the floor, wishing like Dorothy to return home, and maybe take Genie and Jacques with me.
I was still recovering from seeing him again, figuring that after a few years of absence he would have sought employment—and love—elsewhere.
"That was a long time ago."
"Yes, because you're so old."
She clucked her tongue at me, her eyes narrowing, fake smile spread wide. "Come now.” She slotted her hand through my elbow, manipulating me like a boxed toy into the shape she preferred. "Our guests will be waiting. "
I didn't look at her as she towed me towards the door. "I thought it was just family. "
Her laughter dribbled down my spine in an unpleasured and far too intimate contact. “Whoever said that?”
You did, you time waste of a fucking liar.
