by Mara Jacobs
I spent my whole life trying to be in the driver’s seat.
And then I got behind the wheel.
I was the baby that brought down the president. But I'd put that all behind me and was living a mostly normal existence as a freshman at small, exclusive Bribury College. And then I got a car.
Not just any car, but one I didn't know how to drive. And it was delivered by the guy I least wanted to see. He offered to give me driving lessons. Yeah, like I wanted to spend time with him in the confines of a tiny sports car.
Except, I kind of did.
My past caught up with me, and we were both thrown into a world we didn't want or need. He ended up surprising me. And then I really surprised myself.
I knew it the moment I was handed the keys…
I was In Too Fast.
Published by Copper Country Press, LLC
Copyright 2014 Mara Jacobs
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems—except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews—without permission in writing from the author at [email protected]. This book is a work of fiction. The characters, events, and places portrayed in this book are products of the author’s imagination and are either fictitious or are used fictitiously. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental and not intended by the author.
For more information on the author and Mara’s works, please see www.marajacobs.com
ISBN: 978-1-940993-96-6
For every great
Enemies to Lovers romance
Chapter One
I spent my whole life trying to be in the driver’s seat.
And then I got behind the wheel.
My father stood about ten feet away from me. Or about seven bridesmaids away, smiling his father-of-the-bride smile for the wedding photographer. His arm around his daughter—the bride, my older half-sister—standing next to him.
“Bridesmaid on the end. Smile, please. Happy thoughts,” the photographer coaxed, and I realized he was talking to me.
I flashed my brightest smile. The happy thought that went through my mind was that of the photographer bursting into flames and this whole charade finally being over. He took a few more shots and then motioned the bridal party away and called out his next setup. “Bride’s side, immediate family only, please.”
I left the altar area and walked with the other bridesmaids—none of whom had said more than three words to me this whole, excruciatingly long weekend—toward the back of the church sanctuary. I couldn’t get out of there quick enough, but the other bridesmaids stopped only a few rows past where the photographer was set up in the middle of the center aisle.
The same aisle I’d marched down just over an hour ago when my half-sister, Betsy Stratton, married Jason Bohnner III.
It might not have been so bad if it was the type of processional where your corresponding groomsman walked you down the aisle. But Betsy chose the route where each bridesmaid walked down by herself, meeting up with their guy at the altar.
You could have heard a pin drop before my entrance, while the other girls walked down the aisle, accompanied by a tasteful—in a sea of tasteful, this wedding—harpist. Not so when I entered the church. Ever hear a swarm of locusts off in the distance but heading your way? Me neither (not many locust invasions at my oh-so-posh Maryland college), but I imagined that was what the low hum in the very crowded church sounded like when I began my procession.
But I held my head high, pasted on a smile, straightened my shoulders, flipped back my totally awesome hair (my mother sent me to her DC stylist last weekend—begrudgingly, after she realized no way in hell would she be permitted to accompany me to this wedding) and pretended I didn’t hear a thing and that they were all just jealous.
Like I’ve been doing most of my eighteen years.
Hey, you tell yourself something long enough, you start to believe it’s true.
The other bridesmaids all took seats, their attention on the front of the altar, where the Stratton family—plus their newest addition, Jason—were gathering for the family shot. Not being an emotional cutter (or any other kind, for that matter) I turned and started to make my way to the back of the church only to hear, “Jane, wait.”
If it were Betsy’s voice, or even my father’s, I would pretend I didn’t hear and keep walking. But it was Caroline Stratton, Betsy’s mother, my father’s ex-wife, who called to me, and so I stopped and turned around to see her motioning for me to join them at the altar.
As I walked back toward the group, I caught the look that passed between Betsy and her older brother—my half-brother (yeah, totally confusing)—Joseph Stratton, Jr.
Joey, to his friends. I didn’t consider myself amongst that group. When I did have to talk to him—which was not often—I called him Joseph. He’d never corrected me.
The look between Betsy and Joey only lasted a second, was completely silent, but could be summed up like this:
Betsy: Are you effing kidding me? I invited her to the wedding because Mom and Dad made me. I even made her a bridesmaid because Daddy is paying for the whole thing and said I had to. But the family photos? Really?
Joey: Give her an inch…just like her mother.
Some might say I was being paranoid, that you couldn’t get all that from a simple look.
But I’ve been deciphering looks between this family for years. And just because I was paranoid doesn’t mean they weren’t out to get me.
Even though they’ve tried to make me feel like shit for years (though even when they succeeded, I never gave them the satisfaction of knowing it), I do kind of understand Betsy and Joey hating me so much.
Betsy was ten and Joey twelve when I was born. It was a year or so later when their parents split up, Joseph Sr. leaving the house. Never having had a father in the house, I couldn’t relate to one leaving, but my friends who went through their parents’ divorce said it totally sucked. I believed them.
Given Joey and Betsy’s hatred of me from ever since I could remember, I really believed them.
“It’s okay, Caroline,” I said as I got closer to the family. The photographer was positioning them, then stepping back to his camera, then back to them.
She’s been having me call her Caroline ever since I can remember. I only call her Mrs. Stratton when I’m speaking about her to my mother. And only then to piss off my mother. Mrs. Stratton is who my mother thought she’d become someday.
Yeah, right. Keep dreaming, Mom.
The crazy thing is, she does…keeps dreaming about it, I mean.
“Jane,” Caroline said again. “We’d like you in the photo. You’re family.”
I dutifully headed to the altar, standing next to my father. We’re a striking bunch. My father, now in his early sixties, has aged very well. He’s still movie-star handsome. He could be played in the movie version of his life by a slightly older George Clooney.
Caroline’s life showed on her face. The cheating husband, public divorce, years of cancer treatments followed by long remissions; they all showed. She looked tired, and a little on the thin side, but was still a handsome woman, and had probably had some stylists work with her today, because she was totally put together. In particular, her shoes: totally killer sling-backs with beading at the peek-a-boo toe that matched her dress.
Betsy and Joey are both white-blonde with clear blue eyes. They look like their mother. I have my father’s coloring, darker hair and green eyes. It was very much an “us” and “them” family in looks. And pretty much everything else too. Though I have my own “me” and “him” relationship with my father.
I stood with my “family”—such as it
was—and smiled.
I did it because Caroline Stratton was one woman I couldn’t pull any crap with. She was…stately…was the term they used in the political world. And this woman could have curled up and died long ago, and I don’t mean just from the cancer.
No, she took a lot of shit over the years—mostly at the hands of my mother and father—and came out a class act. Pride intact.
That was going to be me.
Again, I pushed back my shoulders, flipped my hair and tilted my head just a bit to the right; the pose I knew made me look my best. And I smiled like I’d just slept with the hottie professor I’d been trying to bag all semester.
These shots would probably be on the cover of People. At the very least they’d be all over the web, and I’d be damned if I looked the part of castoff, bastard daughter.
Even if that was what I was.
Chapter Two
I was the baby that brought down the president. Well, he wasn’t the president yet, but he was the front-runner on the election trail. Then he hooked up with my mother, got busted for the affair (did I mention he was married for, like, a zillion years and his wife had cancer?), denied being my father and dropped out of the presidential race. His wife divorced him a year later. He finally admitted to being my father, after DNA tests proved it, but his political career was totally shot.
Yeah, total douche, my dad. Biological father. Sperm donor. Whatever.
But he’s filthy rich, which was a good thing for me.
And for my mother, who was probably still sucking money out of him. Don’t ask, don’t tell was my motto on that one.
I rode to the reception at the Chesney Marriott with my father, just the two of us in the humongous limo. The other bridesmaids rode with the groomsmen, bottles of champagne already flowing. I was not asked to join them, nor did I ask to be included.
Standing up for my sister at the altar, being in the photographs, not causing a stink in any way—my job was done. I wasn’t really needed anymore, so I sat back in the seat, kicked off the God-awful pumps Betsy insisted that we wear, and stared out the window as we made our way from the church to the Marriott. I resisted the urge to pull my phone out of my bag and text my roommates. I knew that drove my dad crazy, and normally I’d do it just to tweak him, but he’d had a crappy day too, so I left it alone.
“How’s your mother, Jane?” my father asked me, no real concern in his voice. Just making conversation. I knew he was thinking about Caroline, not my mother. From what I understood, he and Caroline didn’t see each other much anymore, now that Betsy and Joey were grown and had been out of the house for a while. No real reason to communicate.
Seeing each other so much this past week during all the wedding hoopla was probably hard on both of them.
Not that I cared.
“Fine. I guess. I was only home a couple of days before coming here,” I answered.
He nodded, as if he’d just remembered I attended college. “Right. And school? How’s that going for you?”
“Good.”
He looked like he wanted to say more, but let’s face it, we’ve never really had much to say to each other. “Hey, Pops, sorry Mom wouldn’t have that abortion and save you from all that public humiliation! But, hey, if she had, we’d have missed out on all these great daddy/daughter chats.” Uh…no.
We sat in silence for the rest of the drive.
I had to team up with my designated groomsman—Jason’s former fraternity brother, Ryan Something-or-other—for our entrance into the ballroom. There was polite applause as the emcee announced us (what were they going to do? stand up and chant “bastard! bastard!”), and we made our way to the head table, which was raised up on a platform of some sort and let us look down on the rest of the gathering.
I did like the idea of that. Looking down on these smug people.
Dinner was a blur, with the two guys sitting on either side of me totally ignoring me and chatting up the girls on their other sides. I had to resist pulling out my phone and texting someone—anyone—just to feel some semblance of control.
But I didn’t text anyone. Everyone was waiting for me to do something like that, so I didn’t. I ate, and met the eyes of people in the crowd who were staring at me with polite smiles.
Plus, I’d made a deal with Grayson Spaulding to not only be a bridesmaid, but to behave as if I wanted to be there. (“And the Oscar goes to…Jane Winters!”)
After dinner, Betsy and Jason danced the first dance together. Then they announced the bride and her father would dance, and the groom and his mother. My father took Betsy and led her into a nice dance to some song that I’d never heard about children growing up. We, the bridal party, made our way to the edge of the dance floor, as we were supposed to do the next dance with our partner.
That would be the last call of duty for Ryan, and then he could hang with all the friends of Jason (of which there were many) or try to hook up with Chrissy, one of Betsy’s bridesmaids that he’d been eyeing all night.
Caroline Stratton sat at her table on the edge of the dance floor amongst her friends, and watched her ex-husband dance with their daughter. The table she sat at wasn’t far from me, and I was able to see her quite well. She was wearing a tasteful lilac gown and had her hair swept up. Very mother of the bride.
She smiled brightly as she watched Betsy and my father dance. It was her public smile, the one she wore when she knew everyone was watching her—which of course they were—waiting to see her reaction.
I had practiced that smile in the mirror when I was ten years old. I’d had a People magazine open next to me on the bathroom counter, opened to the article about my tenth birthday. There was Caroline, walking into the hotel where I was spending the weekend with my father, presents in her arms, her serene smile the only thing she’d give the throng of paparazzi that had camped out in front of the hotel the whole weekend.
Other kids had friends over for their birthdays. Or went to a Chuck E. Cheese’s or some other bullshit place.
I’d spent my tenth birthday in a hotel suite in Baltimore, my mother having to leave the room while my father’s ex-wife came and brought me a present. It was the first year she hadn’t dragged Betsy and Joey with her; they were both in college by then.
“Jaybird Turns Ten!” the headline of the article read. There was a shot of the exterior of the swanky hotel (my father didn’t stay in anything less than swanky), the picture of Caroline and a shot of me leaving after the weekend, holding my mother’s hand.
I could still remember my mother hissing at me just as we left the safety of the hotel lobby, “Smile, Jaybird—show the cameras what a lovely time you had with your mommy and daddy together.”
What the cameras caught, what showed up in the magazines, tabloids and all over the net, was the look of bewilderment and disgust that I shot my mother seconds after she’d said that.
Oh, and I heard about it from her too, after the mags hit the stand. That was why I’d sat in my bathroom for hours on end practicing the smile Caroline Stratton was now pointing toward the happy, dancing couple.
Shortly after that birthday I demanded that everyone call me Jane, not that stupid-ass name my mother gave me, Jaybird. (It had something to do with being free, flying, some New-Agey crap like that.)
I wanted something simple, plain, classic. And I had just read the biography of Miss Jane Pittman, so it had been on my mind. Perfect ten-year-old logic.
I saw flashbulbs going off around me now, and realized that not only was Caroline being studied for her reaction, I was as well. I pretended I didn’t see them as I smiled brightly at Betsy and my father (was this the longest song ever, or what?). I looked at them as if I was thinking how happy they were, and how much I would enjoy it being time to dance with my father when I was a bride. More flashbulbs went off.
See what practicing a fake smile in the mirror for years can do for you?
The wedding photographer was one of those with a camera, but there were also a few with pres
s passes on. I assumed they were scheduled to be there, as I’d practically had to give a DNA swab to even get in here with the security my father hired.
Never one to pass up a positive press spin, my father. The master of good press…right up until my birth.
“What a dog and pony show,” I heard beside me, and turned to see Joey. He watched Betsy and my dad too. He had a smile plastered on his face, but there was definitely tone in his voice.
“Yeah, I guess,” I said, all non-committal. Was it a trap? Joey never spoke directly to me unless his mom was standing behind him urging him to do so. Of course, that was several years ago. He was a man now.
Time to put away childish things? Like hating your half-sister for being born?
“You seem to be enjoying it,” he said. I wasn’t sure if he was commenting on my fabulous acting skills or that he was just surprised that I could possibly be truly enjoying this.
“Yeah. I’d like to thank the Academy…” I said. Out of the corner of my eye I saw him nod. No surprise to him.
“Listen,” he said, turning fully to me now. I was relieved to be able to turn to him—turn away from the dance floor. “I’m hitting the road in a couple of days. Heading to Africa—several places in Africa, actually—for a year. I wasn’t sure if Dad had told you or not.”
I shook my head. My father didn’t say much to me in general, and almost nothing about Joey or Betsy. “No, he didn’t.”
“Figures. Well, I have a great opportunity to work with a relief group in Africa. Given the shit that’s about to go down here, I took it. But if you need to talk or anything. I know I was an ass to you when I was a kid, but if you need anything…”
I nodded, touched, then stopped. “What do you mean? What’s about to go down here?”
He looked to the dance floor, then back to me, disgust on his face. “Are you serious? No one’s told you?” I shook my head. “Dad’s going back into politics. He’s running for governor of Maryland.”