Very Wicked Beginnings by Ilsa Madden-Mills Page B

skin. My mother was Brazilian and beautiful—everyone said so. She’d met and married my father while they’d both been students at Baylor University, both of them in the business department. He had light brown hair with pale skin and freckles while she was petite and exotic. They were opposites in personality too. He was gregarious and fun and loved to talk. She, well, wasn’t. Not anymore.
    He loved to tell the story of how they met. About how he fell in love with her as soon as she walked into his dorm room on his buddy’s arm. Yeah, my dad loved her so much he stole his friend’s girl. Oh, he’d had to work for it because apparently she’d played hard to get, but he’d eventually won her over with his charming personality and relentless pursuit. His motto was all’s fair in love when a drop-dead gorgeous Brazilian is involved . I smiled, picturing him wooing my mom. Begging her to go to dinner with him. Asking her to marry him.
    That had been nearly twenty years ago, though, and now they didn’t even share the same bed. And I don’t think it was dad’s choice. I’d watch him look at her sometimes. Like she hung the fucking moon. Like she was his star in the sky. But she never gazed at him. Or me.
    I leaned down and moved a wayward curl, brushing my lips against her cheek. She smelled good, and dammit if it didn’t make my whole body draw up in pain, remembering a time when she’d hug me and tell me she loved me. Rubbing my aching chest, I took a step back, putting distance between us, wanting to run out of that room.
    Not wanting to face the reality of her sickness.
    I just missed her. I missed her singing along with a song on the radio; I missed her coming to my football games; I missed the way we used to be.
    But I got it. I understood. She was hurting, slouching around the house with this hopeless look on her face. And that expression paralyzed me, yet ripped me up inside. Because she was withering away right in front of us, and no matter what we said or did, she refused to come out of it.
    Her diagnosis was severe depression. Not cancer. Not even close. Physically, I guess she was healthy, if you overlooked the twenty pounds she’d put on in the past four years.
    She stirred, and I took another step closer to the door. I didn’t want her eyes to search the room and find mine. Because I knew what I’d see … blame. The same thing I saw every day when I looked at myself in the mirror.
    Because her sickness was all my fault.
     

     
    I HEADED BACK to my room for a shower.
    As I stripped off my track pants and shirt, I checked out the tattoo Dad had taken me to get for my birthday this past year, the first of many tats I planned to get. This one was a long vine of twisting red roses, resting on my upper arm and curving back on my shoulder. Most of the roses were in full bloom while one—a black one—was closed up, a circle of thorns protecting it. I’d gotten that flower for my sister, Cara. I flexed my heavy bicep muscles, watching the flowers move around on my skin.
    Like that dark bloom, Cara was dead. She’d been gone for four years, but not a day went by that I didn’t think of her snaggle-toothed smile and strawberry-scented hair. She’d been born eight years after me, a surprise baby. A tiny replica of my mother, she’d been adored by everyone.
    And at that thought, a slice of pain cut into me, and I nearly doubled over on the sink. Shit, what a fuck-up I was.
    Must not think about her , I told myself.
    So I thought about Ballet Girl.
    I cranked up my radio and got in the shower. Before the water was even warm, I spread my legs and wrapped a hand around my cock, picturing her again, dancing, only this time I was the only one in the room with her. In my head, I stood behind her and watched her perform. My fantasy got hotter as she swayed and twirled like a beautiful goddess sent from the heavens to entertain me, looking ethereal and too damn perfect for this messed up world. I imagined her