“This is important, querida. This school will ensure you have the future you deserve. Please don’t argue with me. When you come home on the weekends, everything will be the same. We are still your parents and we would never ask you to turn your back on your roots. I am just asking you to play a role, like an actress. You always liked being in your school plays, Cara. It’s the same thing.” Cara continued to protest but the matter was not up for negotiation and when the twins began the year, they had absorbed the characters of well-to-do children at their parents’ tireless coaching.
They were genuinely lovely, the Castillo siblings, thick black waves and twinkling emerald green eyes, some exotic throw back from their Aztec ancestors. Even at the tender age of fifteen, Cara was blossoming into a smoldering, exquisite beauty with high cheekbones and rosebud pink lips. Her figure was already shaping into that of a woman’s with curvy hips and a budding, firm bust line. The other kids at the school noticed the new girl and her brother right away so it was no surprise that the offers came in fast and furious. But while Jaime was off relishing the attention, attending Senior parties, skipping class and dating the entire east coast, Cara was focused on school work and maintaining her fantastic grade point average. She had always had a symbiotic bond with animals and it had been her dream to be a veterinarian. She was determined to make her mother proud, given the sacrifice she and her father had made for them. That was until Damien.
Damien was also a Junior and his family owned a chain of high end jewelry stores all over New York, Pennsylvania and North Carolina. He had an aura of money which Cara was beginning to find distasteful. She was quickly finding the words wealth and arrogance to be synonymous. Above that, Damien also had a reputation for being a playboy, having slept with several of her female peers and never calling them again. Cara was well acquainted with whom was flashing her a dazzling white smile when he approached Cara one day after school. He casually invited her to a “get together” at his home in Manhattan over the weekend but Cara was not even remotely interested, even though he was physically very appealing to her eyes. She was bracing herself for an argument or cajoling by the attractive boy. Yet, to her surprise, the rejection barely fazed him in the slightest and he sauntered off down the hall, shrugging. Just as he was about to turn the corner he made a comment in a slightly raised voice but Cara still had to strain to hear his words.
“It’s too bad,” he called back to her, barely turning around. “I make the best empanadas in the world.”
Cara had felt her heart stop. What does he mean by that? Is that a dig about my background? Does he know who my parents are? Is he threatening me with exposure? Cara knew her parents would be devastated if the twins were discovered as being poor. As a rush of emotions overwhelmed Cara, she found herself chasing after Damien to demand an explanation and beg him to remain silent.
He laughed as she tugged on his shirt, forcing him to face her.
“What do you mean by that? Why would you think I like empanadas?” she challenged, her voice quavering.
“You look exactly like Esmerelda from that Disney movie,” he told her, smiling warmly. “I just assumed you had some Latina in you and might enjoy some homemade cuisine. Especially because I’m so good at cooking. My specialty is exotic cuisine.” The innuendo was not lost on her but in spite of the obvious undertones, it had somehow it had started. She had gone to that “get together” and every other party he hosted from then on. To her surprise, he remained at her side, catering to her every time they were together and introduced her to the who’s who in their school. After a few months, she was spending weekends at his home on West Fifth Avenue, in her own private room. His parents knew her well and recognized her as Damien’s friend and nothing else. Over time, the room became more hers than the one she had with her parents. Damien was always a perfect gentleman with her, never making advances as if he knew rushing things would scare her off. He would have been right. His patience was rewarded as it wasn’t long before Cara realized she was falling in love with him. She also knew logically that there was no way that it could ever work between the two of them. They were from two completely different worlds. Even after a year of dating, she still hadn’t disclosed her family situation to him, always managing to avoid having him over and changing the subject whenever the topic of her parents arose. It was all going too well until the beginning of their senior year.
They skipped school and took a day trip to Central Park with a picnic in hand and stole away to their favorite hidden spot, the Shakespearean Garden. It was a crisp autumn day and there were a few dark clouds hovering above but they didn’t seem to notice. Damien had brought along a bottle of very expensive champagne which he had pilfered from a dinner party his parents’ had hosted the previous evening. For a brief, idealistic moment, Cara had thought he was going to propose to her. They had discussed marriage casually a few times but they had agreed that they would wait to take that step after they had finished college. Their conversations were about everything and nothing that day and when Cara thought back on the day, she couldn’t remember any specific topic they had discussed but she did recall that every so often he would reach over and brush a shiny black tendril of hair away from her cheek and place a sweet kiss on her lips. The alcohol began to warm her belly and they snacked on cheese and caviar, laughing and touching. Suddenly, Cara looked into his dark blue eyes and she realized that she was very much in love with him, not merely in the throes of some childish affection. When he leaned in for another gentle kiss, she found herself responding with eagerness, surprising him. He did not pull away but instead wrapped his hand through her thick waves and drew her face close to his. Their tongues met and teased each other playfully and Damien’s mouth found its way along the contour of her beautiful face and slowly lowered his face down her neck, his breaths warm and exciting of her goose- bumped skin. His fingers were unbuttoning her silk blouse and caring hands cupped her full, taught breasts. His tongue found his way to her nipples and Cara felt a rush of wetness between her thighs as he flicked at the erect skin. Moaning quietly, she found herself lifting her skirt to feel herself as his hands continued their journey under her panties and around her firm rear. He slowly and deliberately lowered her purple silk panties over calves, his lips following the path the delicate lingerie was taking. He sighed with excitement as he felt the moisture in the sweet cleft and sat back to undo his jeans. Cara was trembling. She had never come this far before but had never been surer that she wanted Damien deep inside her. He lowered his boxers and spread her long, tan legs open. With one quick movement, he leaned down and licked her juices with a long, firm move and then plunged himself into her swiftly. Cara cried out with passion and pain and Damien immediately slowed but she grabbed him by the hips and ground her waist against him. He pulled her close and they fell into an almost frenzied rhythm. Cara arched her back against him, her hard nipples pressing against his chest and he whispered, “I love you, Cara.”
Cara climaxed almost violently for the first time in her life and Damien followed within seconds. They lay in each other’s arms, even as the rain began to fall and then Damien shattered her entire world.
“I’ve been pre-accepted at Harvard. I’m going to be moving to Boston next fall.”
After that, Cara had been forced to come clean with him about her heritage. She had tried her best to avoid doing so but then Damien had suggested that she apply to Cornell University. It had an amazing veterinary program and they would only be five hours away from one another but still at Ivy League schools. Cara had no choice but to tell him the truth. Even with her grades and all of the scholarships the school had to offer, she was not going to be able to afford any high end school. Ever stoic and loving Damien handled her confession with his usual ease and came up with a perfect solution. Why didn’t she go work for his parents in Manhattan while they were both in college? She could save up money, they would be together every holiday and then when they graduated, they would be married. By then, Damien reaso
ned, his parents would have considered her part of the family anyway and the economic status wouldn’t be such a big issue. And young, naïve, impressionable Cara had believed his words.
The first year had gone by painfully slow for Cara. She had moved into the Carlyle house and thrown herself headfirst into her studies, attending the prestigious but not quite Ivy League New York University (a fact that all of their school friends did not let her forget). She had been a strong enough academic candidate to warrant several scholarships but the cost of tuition and books was still well over what she had expected to pay. She had run herself ragged, somehow managing both a full time work and school schedule and the only thing that had kept Cara going was the thought of Damien at the end of the tunnel. There had been endless letters and phone calls but it never seemed enough. She was exceeding lonely and Cara’s heart ached for yearning to be near him. When Damien finally had come home, they made love with wild abandon but by the time, seeming unable to get enough of one another. However, by the Christmas of the second year, Cara could sense a distance in him. He wasn’t as affectionate and he didn’t steal into her room at night as often as he had in the start. He went out most nights and later that year, Cara’s father passed away suddenly. With his death being such an emotional and financial shock to her family, Cara had been forced to drop out of college so she could work another job to help take care of her mother. Andréa Castillo, who had not been able to get over the abrupt loss of her beloved husband, spent days confined to bed without eating. Jamie forsook his party animal lifestyle to move in with their mother so Cara could continue working at the brownstone. While it had been devastating to witness her mother in such a downward spiral, Cara knew the love her mother had for her father was stronger than the death which separated them. She also felt like hers and Damien’s was just as strong and she hoped that she would die first so that she would never have to endure such agony.
The summer following the end of the second school year, Damien didn’t come home at all and went to Europe with his friends instead. Cara was still living in the Carlyle home, desperately praying for some sort of correspondence from him. He did not write to her the entire summer and there was only one phone call. While Damien did have a casual conversation with her during that call, Cara was left feeling that he had only made the connection to speak with his parents and she had answered the phone unexpectedly.
In the third year, Cara was working at the Carlyle house during the day and cleaning offices part time at night. The weekends, she picked up hours when she could and if she was not working, she would go relieve Jamie and stay with their mother. She was averaging about three hours of sleep a night and there was no reprieve in sight. Cara wanted so badly to believe that Damien still intended to come home from college and marry her but there were no more letters or phone calls. Damien barely acknowledged her when he did come home, which was not often. Cara tried to justify his aloofness as him working too hard. You just need to wait until he finished business school, she told herself. Then if he is still standoffish, you can move on. But until then, you need to hang in there.
At the end of the third school year, just when she had basically given up hope of reconciliation with the love of her life, the old Damien returned to her. From the moment he walked in the door for the summer, he was the old Damien, the playful, joking, loving man she had fallen so deeply in love with. He was sneaking into her room in the middle of the night, waking her up with kisses and endless lovemaking marathons, even trying different positions he had never attempted prior. They were back to how they were when it had all started, heart racing, stars in their eyes. The following August, he embraced her tightly their last night together, told her he loved her and gave her the longest, sweetest kiss before he returned to Harvard that morning. Cara was happy again. The endless work, the lack of sleep and the feelings of depression had all dissipated like a vapor in a scorching sunray. She was glad she had waited for him and she spent hours daydreaming about their wedding and the life they would build. She would go back to school once he had established his career and they would move to a modest farm upstate where she could raise horses and they would grow their own food. Their closest neighbors would be miles away and they could make unadulterated love in the barn and under the stars. They would have four children, two girls and two boys, maybe even a set of twins. The girls would look like her and the boys, exactly like Damien. The dreams were so real, she could almost sense what their country home would smell like.
When he came home that summer, Cara and Damien were together every day and while he still hadn’t told his parents, Cara knew that he was biding his time before he popped the question. She understood what he was potentially sacrificing by telling his family about his relationship with her. She was, after all, a poor, maid of Mexican immigrants. Yes, the Carlyle’s had grown to love her like a daughter but even the most liberal of prosperous people would not hand pick such a mate for their child Realistically, Cara knew that the senior Carlyle’s were going to be an obstacle they would need to overcome. Of course Damien was in no rush to address this but in her heart, she also knew a proposal was on the horizon. A few months later, her proposal prophecy became a reality. The ring was absolutely stunning. It was a platinum band holding a heart shaped diamond with a small sapphire and an emerald (the exact shade as Cara’s eyes) surrounding the almost ostentatiously sized center rock. Damien popped the question on a hot air balloon ride over Central Park on a perfect autumn afternoon, reminiscent of the day Cara had given him her virginity with so much idealism. There had even been a bottle of the same champagne they had drunk during their picnic. She said yes, of course, and her name was Yvette Montrose. Her family had legitimately been in oil for generations, unlike Cara’s fake claim to riches from her school days. Actually, Yvette was everything Cara was not; tall, blonde and pale with the pinched expression of old entitlement and a clipped, condescending nature to match. She and Damien had met at Harvard and they had been together since their second year, moving into an apartment together within months of beginning their relationship. Damien and Yvette were married the following summer in a widely publicized event at the Plaza Hotel and the Carlyle’s had made arrangements for Cara to work the reception as a server.
“You and Damien are practically siblings, dear,” Mrs. Carlyle had told Cara. “It’s only fitting that you be there for his wedding. I would put you in it myself but of course Yvette has other ideas.” Of course, Cara had thought but she had not protested and proceeded with the job without incident even though her heart had turned to stone watching her Damien solidify his union with a goofy but passionate kiss.
The newlyweds moved into the Carlyle brownstone and Cara often served them breakfast in bed on mornings after Damien spent the night in Cara’s room. The two would make love three or four times before he returned to his wife in the wee hours before dawn. It was a sick, sordid and messy situation and Cara was not proud of what she was doing but she truly felt that Damien belonged with her, not Yvette. Cara believed that his wife had stolen him away and not vice versa so she continued to play the role as Damien’s mistress, biding her time. She knew in her heart that he would realize he had married Yvette to make his parents happy, come to his senses and return to her.
So when the test turned up positive three years after Damien and Yvette were wed, she knew she finally was going to get her man. It didn’t occur to her that Damien would not leave his wife. It had never crossed her mind that he wouldn’t want their child. But the words he spoke to her after she broke the news of her pregnancy had left her so cold and devastated that Cara had fled the house that night and never looked back. He had brought her poor economic background into play, her lack of formal education and then accused her of attempting to trap him by getting deliberately pregnant and ruin his future with Yvette. Cara had never seen this side of him and she was completely thrown off guard by his response to what she had considered joyous news. He literally tossed a few one hundred dollar bills at her an
d demanded she end the pregnancy. Emotionally broken, Cara sent his parents a vague letter of apology, explaining that she had a family emergency that could not be ignored and that she would not be returning as a result. After years of chasing their wretched son, she was afraid of what she might have told the older Carlyles face to face. Sincerely, Cara did not hate Damien. She was furious at herself for being so willfully blind but she could not blame a scorpion for being a scorpion. She had fair warning of his reputation and had deliberately ignored it. She had believed he would treat her differently than all of the other women he had left in his wake despite the fact that all of the signs showed he did not care about her. She had merely been another pawn in a long line.
One week after she moved back into her mother’s tiny apartment in Brooklyn, she miscarried their baby. One month later to the day, she was standing in the shadows of an uninviting house, wanting to run again.
Run where? Back to mom and Jamie? She shook her head as if trying to shake some sense into herself and stepped out from behind the curtains. There was no way she could face her mother after what she had put Andréa through. The woman had worked so hard to secure a future for the twins and neither one of them had amounted to anything. The oldest living Castillo was coping with an earth shattering loss of her own and Cara refused to put an unnecessary burden on her. She could not go back to her mother. Not yet. She had to at least give this opportunity a real shot. Cara had a two-year plan. It consisted of working as hard as she had in Manhattan and saving every penny so she could finally get the education she had so pointlessly thrown away. She had put her own life on hold for too long and she hadn’t stepped out of her comfort zone since she was a teenager. It was high time she acted like a woman. Cara pulled her shoulders back, trying to muster some confidence and moved for the door, determined to make the best out whatever came her way. Just before she reached the hallway, she caught glimpse of another doorway inside the giant dining room, away from the hall. She had almost missed it as it blended into the wall, as if it was a part of the wainscoting. Cara crunched her brow, trying to make sense of what she was seeing. The door didn’t make any structural sense. It should have technically led outside but it was a solid wood door as if it opened into another room, somehow built into the wall of the dining room. This is an old house. Maybe it’s a secret passageway? Curiosity got the best of her and she ventured around the table. Upon turning the crystal doorknob, she recognized it was locked. She was about to turn away when she remembered she had picked up the set of keys Tabitha had left for her in the staff room. She pulled the large ring out of her dress pocket and stared at the mound of metal in her hand, trying to decipher which key might unlock the strange door. It took her three tries before she found the proper one. The heavy door fell away with an gentle groan and Cara stepped over the threshold. Her eyes took a moment to adjust to the eerie darkness but when the fog in her vision cleared, Cara was left staring at the most impressive library she had ever seen. It wasn’t so much the size of the room which stole away her breath but the incredible detail in every aspect. She slipped further inside and slowly turned around. It was two levels of wall to wall books, separated by a delicate catwalk with a lovely hand carved railing. Sparsely decorated, only a lone wood burning fireplace and winged chair sat on the lower level with a blood red velvet settee. There was a single, oval end table with a soapstone ashtray atop and that was the extent of the furnishings. The ceiling was dome shaped like a cathedral and there was something religious or spiritual about the chamber itself and as Cara began to study the book titles, it became clear that her new employer was peculiar. Sunlight spilled through the stain glass panes of the skylight but it was muffled by the dark colors of the glass panes and as she walked, strange prisms tattooed every corner of the hidden chamber. Where the average billionaire would boast first edition classic literature on his or her shelves, Connor Lamoreaux seemed particular to anything new age or paranormal. There were books about various fringe science subjects and medical books upon medical books. She found journals about lobotomies and neuroscience in the 19th century, depicting gruesome drawings of people having the tops of their skulls sawed open. Books pertaining to psychology, sociology and anthropology were amid volumes about telekinesis and telepathy. Writings about astrology eastern and western as well as numerology filled an entire wall, another full shelf held tarot cards in dozens of decks in numerous languages. The complete works of Carlos Castaneda was among folklore from dozens of countries on all continents from Haiti to Ireland. I work for a nutcase mad scientist, she decided, smiling slightly. Although she wasn’t overly put off by the discovery, it did add to the sense of unease in her. Cara noticed small desk behind one of the bookcases and wandered over. There were spiral notebooks scattered across the top of the scarred wooden table and it was unlike anything else she had seen in the house, almost like it was an afterthought garage sale purchase. Above the table was a single, non-descript shelf which was home to half a dozen dolls. She peered at them and recognized them to be a compilation of authentic voodoo and worry dolls, as well as some others she could not identify. Cara reached forward to touch one of the books, sensing that something extremely profound was written within their pages. Before she could make contact, she shuddered violently, almost like someone had smacked her in the back of the head. She spun on her heel to confront whatever was on her tail. Staring at her from the doorway, more than twenty feet away were two steel colored eyes framed in darkness.
Romance: The Campus Player: A College Romance Page 22