Page 10 of Queen Of Diamonds
Any second now, some creepy dead chick would appear and point me back in the direction I came, warning me to stay the hell away.
My grandmother and uncle were already in the foyer like two eager dogs before I was all the way inside.
“So–––.”
“Can we not do this yet? I need to shower and, I need to be alone right now.”
My uncle opened his mouth, no doubt to say something condescending but my grandmother held up a hand to keep him quiet.
“Of course,diosa. We can talk in the morning.” She smiled, it wasn’t genuine.
I felt their eyes on me the entire way up the stairs. The whispering began before my doors were fully shut.
I gotin the shower to wash the days grime away and, of course, that’s when my mind decided to wander straight back to a man with golden eyes I couldn’t seem to stop thinking about. How fucking cliché was it to be overly attracted to a dangerous, enigmatic, stranger?
Very cliché. Textbook cliché.
Mateo was the perfect advocate for all the dubious warnings mothers gave their daughters about men.
He had the whole tall, handsome, and mysterious thing going for him with a smile that could mask the most sinister of intentions. Exactly the kind of narcotic I craved.
I understood why so many women fixated on him. He was the pointed top of the metaphorical pyramid: rich, savage, and seductive. I’d been in his presence for all of five minutes and that was long enough to let me know Mateo Remmington was a disturbingly alluring man. There were too many reasons why I needed to stay away from him and a million others why I couldn’t. And triple that why I didn’t want to.
Ugh, this was bullshit.
“Goddamnit Eva,” I cursed my sister’s name, excessively over-scrubbing my olive skin with a purple loufa.
I glared at the grey and white mosaic tiled wall, blinking away tears.
I’d told her countless times not to come back to this place, but she wouldn’t listen. Glamour and wealth were powerful addictions to girls who felt they had nothing but poverty and squalor.
She soaked up this lavish lifestyle and all the attention people gave her like a sponge, immersing herself further and further past the point of no return.
It was everything our father had tried to protect us from. He’d never wanted us back here. It was the last thing he told us before we were carted off. We hadn’t received one phone call, letter, or e-mail since that day in spite of my many efforts to reach out to him any way I could.
Eva thought he’d been happy to shove us out of his life. She swore he had a mistress and didn’t want us anymore. She grew even more irrational when he died.
Instead of being upset, she was pissed he didn’t leave us any of his assets and gave our grandmother control of his estate.
I saw it as him further ensuring we never returned. My father was, by all means, a controlling man, a hard-hearted, family man. He was never a coward, so whatever caused him to do the things he did I found warranted. That was before I grew up.
In true Eva fashion, she went against his wishes with a dramatic flair before he was cold in the ground. And now hereIwas with a tangled web to unweave that I could already feel reeling me in, being accosted by the notorious Remmington heir.
It was like the beginning of a Grimm brother’s fairytale.
I could only pray I got a better ending because no one would be coming to save me. No knight was waiting to ride in on a white horse and sweep me away. There was onlyhim– a cruel seductive king who ruled over a court of nightmares.
I assumed Eva was the reason Mateo reacted to me the way he did. But that wasn’t reflected in his eyes, and he claimed not to know her. From what Peyton had dug up–if they did interact it was rare. Mateo was the top and Eva had barely made it out of the bottom.
Besides, I could easily disprove my own theory. Eva and I weren’t one hundred percent identical. We had easily noticeable differences. My slightly wavy dark hair hung to mid-back, hers was cut into a sleek bob with fuchsia tips.
She had a large beauty mark on the left side of her face. I didn’t.
We were both curvy waists, and rounder hips kind of girls thanks to our mother’s genes but, Eva’s recent breast implants had boosted her cups above me.
How she afforded them was something I never wanted the answer to.
Looking back, I should have asked. I should have done so many things differently.
