Hot Commodity (Banks / Kincaid Family #1)(23)

She stayed down.

Vivian snorted. "God, you’re just like your father." She sneered. "All he ever thought about was what woman’s legs he could spread next."

Olivia didn’t move, but lay as still as death on the cold tile at her mother’s and stepfather’s feet with her arms curled protectively around her head.

"You owe me!" Vivian added, nudging her in the ribs with a sharp-toed shoe as if trying to get her attention. "Every day, you sit around my house and spend my money on your shopping sprees. Well, it’s time to pay up, little sister. You will meet Banks and you will work your damnedest to seduce him. Do I make myself clear?" When Olivia didn’t respond fast enough, Vivian stomped her foot, causing the floor to vibrate around her. "Do I?"

"Y-yes."

Her mother remained quiet a moment. Then she snorted. "God, you’re pathetic. I must be out of my mind to think you’ll ever attract a powerful man like Banks. Maybe you should just put yourself out of your misery like your worthless father did and give us all a little peace and quiet."

Olivia stayed curled in a ball on the floor as Vivian strode from the room half a second later, closely followed by Nolan, who looked like a horny buck chasing a doe in heat.

Cheek stinging as if it’d been carved open with a machete instead of a fingernail, Olivia let her shoulders slump in relief, glad Vivian was gone.

Her mother had only slapped her twice before. Once, when she’d been seventeen and attempted to run away with a boyfriend. They’d been caught five miles from home. Vivian slapped her as soon as she’d been ushered through the front door. Then she’d locked Olivia in her room for two weeks. Olivia had never seen Derrick again, though she heard he’d been forcibly recruited into the army.

The second slap came the day her father died.

Olivia rose unsteadily to her feet and stumbled to a chair where she sank down. She realized her fingers were trembling when she lifted them to her face. Suddenly, a vivid picture entered her head. Glancing around the room, she didn’t see it as it was now, but how it had been then.

Olivia didn’t mourn Roger Donovan, not as a normal daughter should. She’d never been close to him, and he’d never loved her. She distinctly remembered overhearing Roger one time say, "I had to get a vasectomy after Olivia was born because I couldn’t stomach the thought of giving Vivian another worthless brat."

Of course, a vasectomy also helped him run off and have as many affairs as he wished without the consequence of siring bastard children. Vivian didn’t seem to care about his indiscretion. She said it kept him away from her. So the two parents lived happily enough, ignoring each other and the single daughter they’d created together.

Her father killed himself on an April morning. At the time, Olivia was fifteen. It was one of those crisp spring days with lilies blooming in the yard and singing birds swarming home from their winter beak. Olivia was sitting at the breakfast table to the right side of her mother when her life changed forever.

After taking on one new mistress, Roger had actually become enamored. He even announced he was in love. Then the word divorce was mentioned, and Vivian finally grew fed up. Thinking her husband might cause a scandal, she made Roger’s lover disappear.

But Roger hadn’t taken it well.

Olivia could still remember what she’d been eating—toast with grape jelly, a glass of orange juice, and a plate full of strawberries covered in powered sugar—when Roger barreled down the stairs to confront his wife over the matter.

As usual, Vivian sat at the head of the table, reading the Wall Street Journal when he stalked in.

No one looked up.

But he stomped his foot, and Olivia finally lifted her face. When she saw the gun in his hand, she gasped, which finally gained Vivian’s attention as well.

At first, Olivia thought her own father would murder her and Vivian then and there. But that’s not what happened. Roger shook, his skin glazed with sweat, as he turned the gun to his own temple and stared at Vivian with glossy, vacant eyes.

Not once did he glance at Olivia, his one and only child. He merely glared at his wife with a bone-deep hatred and gritted his teeth.

Vivian laughed. "Go ahead." She waved an unconcerned hand for him to proceed. "With all the insurance I’ve got on you, your worthless ass is worth more to me dead than alive, anyway." Not that she’d collected a penny from his suicide, but that was the kind of thing she liked to say.

It was enough encouragement to make Roger pull the trigger.

Blood splattered on Olivia, on her toast, and even in her orange juice.

At first, the flash-bang of sound and spray of red rendered her motionless. Her ears rang from the explosion. She’d thought she’d gone deaf, but then she heard the thud as her father’s lifeless body hit the floor.

She looked down, and the screams that followed were ripped from her throat with a terror she’d never felt before or since.

Vivian sprang to her feet. She lurched from the head of the table and hurled herself toward Olivia.

Grabbing her daughter’s shoulders in a vise-like grip, she shook her. But Olivia only screamed louder. Finally, Vivian smacked her full across the mouth.

Stunned mute, Olivia gaped at Vivian with glazed eyes.

Vivian hissed, "Listen to me. I was not in here. If anyone asks, I was not in this room when he did it. Do you understand me?" She shook her daughter again. "Olivia?"