Legal Heirs - Box Set Edition: Books 5-8 (Surrendering Charlotte Chronicles) Read Free Page B

“Gabrielle, you whore in bitch’s clothing come down here and face me. Oh, you insufferable little money-grubbing, gutter-crawling, social-climbing, street-walking, classless, nymphomaniac!”
    “What on earth are you yelling about, Evangeline?” Gabrielle said, as she walked down the stairs wearing one of Evangeline’s silk kimonos and holding a tall glass of vodka. She kissed both of her sister’s cheeks then ducked when Evangeline tried to slap her face. “Are you accusing me of sleeping with… him? My God, he works for you, do you honestly think I’d sleep with the hired help?”
    “He isn’t the hired help you ignorant slut, he’s my lover!” Evangeline said, taking the glass of vodka from her sister and drinking half of it at once.
    “Oh! Well, if I’d known that I would certainly have let him sleep with me,” Gabrielle said, and the sisters hugged and went into the living room to talk.
    West watched the two sisters, Gabby, as she called herself, had arrived with fifteen suitcases and an attitude that made Evangeline look like Mother Theresa. West kept his mouth shut and let her order him around only because Evangeline had said to be nice to her. Supposedly she’d had the shock of losing her aged husband and being completely disinherited by him, so she was truly grieving. She was attractive and a few years younger than Evangeline, but she didn’t have the head turning beauty and grace her sister possessed.
    “Evangeline, we need to talk,” West said, he stood over her, hands on his hips, and she and her sister looked up at him, surprised. “We need to talk now about you and the ambassador, we can do it here, or in private. I know you’ve been seeing him and I want you to stop.”
    “How dare you speak to my sister like that?” Gabby asked.
    “Hush, Gabby,” Evangeline told her. “West, there’s nothing to talk about, you know I do as I please, but I do care for you….”
    “Fine, I’m out of here. I thought we had something good, and not just in bed. I thought we were… never mind,” he said, and went upstairs to pack his bags.
    She followed him to her bedroom and watched as he gathered his belongings. The shelves she had made available for him in her closet looked empty and bereft as he packed his shirts and sweaters into his suitcases. Then the table on his side of the bed seemed lifeless without his books. He changed his shirt and she felt the thrill she always got in the hollow part of her stomach when she saw his elegantly muscled body. He made her feel the way she had felt when she was a girl in Brazil, when she lay beside a deep green lake with her first lover. West always looked at her with that same guileless love in his eyes, he loved her for who she was, and in spite of who she was. She was a bonafide narcissistic bitch and they both knew it, but he loved her anyway.
    “West, wait darling,” she said, running her hands over his chest.
    He stopped her hands and said, “Either you love me or you don’t Evangeline. I love you, but I won’t be your cabana boy. I’ll be at the Saint Regis until noon tomorrow, then I’m going home.”
    *
    Evangeline lay in bed that night and sleep wouldn’t come. She turned to West’s side of the bed and buried her face in his pillow, she wanted to cry but her eyes were dry. Several times she paced the room and thought about going to him and pressing herself to his big, hard body. When she finally slept, it was a restless, dream-filled sleep. In her dreams she was a child again in Pomerode, Brazil. She could hear her mother and father speaking German, and she could see herself praying with her little sister in the big Lutheran church. She wasn’t glamorous or perfect; she was a wild little heathen with long braids and a cotton dress her mother made just for her. She was Evangeline Sommerfeld, a pretty girl born into a small community of Germans whose ancestors settled in Brazil in the early eighteen-hundreds. A girl who had dreamt of being