Chapter 2: Homecoming 

 

Six years later…

Watching Andrea Colton emerge from the backseat of the black Mercedes was like watching a movie star step out onto the red carpet. She moved with an effortlessness that came from a lifetime of ballet, and she carried herself like a woman who could handle anything life threw at her, which—so far—had been quite a lot. Her vintage shift dress and oversized sunglasses accentuated her classic beauty and remarkable bone structure, something Taliana was grateful to have inherited. Her mother may have been a few years past forty, but she still had men half her age on their knees.

“Circle around,” Andrea instructed the driver as she stepped onto the curb. “This could take a while.”

She pushed her sunglasses to the top of her head as she turned to Taliana, revealing those all-knowing gray eyes. For once, the smile that always seemed to play around her mouth was nowhere to be found.

“You don’t have to do this, honey.”

Taliana ignored her, choosing instead to untie and retie her shoelaces. She’d been doing that for the past minute to distract herself from the situation at hand.

“I mean it, Taliana. You don’t have to go.”

If the woman told Taliana that one more time, she was going to scream.

“Mom, I know.” She sighed, finally losing interest in her shoes and rising. “I want to do this. Really.”

Her mother still looked unsure. “No one is making you leave,” she continued, reaching out to take Taliana’s hand in hers. “Honey, are you sure you want to go live with your father?”

Honestly, Taliana was anything but sure about it. She hadn’t visited her father in years, and there she was about to get on a plane to go live with him. They’d talked about it over the phone a few weeks ago, and he sounded excited to have her back in Washington, DC with him, but it was still going to be odd, especially since she’d left so abruptly all those years ago.

After her expulsion from Georgetown Trinity Day School, her parents had decided it would be best if she went to live with her mother in California. It had a little to do with the fact that no other private school in DC would accept her, and a lot to do with the fact that her father was at his wits’ end with her. So he’d sent her packing off to LA with mommy dearest, and that was where she’d stayed—until now.

“I’m sure, Mom,” Taliana said, knowing that if the woman asked her one more time, she was going to throw herself at her mom and sob to go home.

And that couldn’t happen. Taliana desperately needed to get out of Los Angeles; the place had never really felt like home, and now there were too many terrible memories attached to it. She needed a fresh start, and DC could offer that, even if it held its own set of memories. But anything was better than the ones she had here.

“Why don’t you just stay?” her mom pleaded, squeezing Taliana’s hand gently. “I know some, ah, bad things have happened these past couple of months, but running away won’t solve anything.”

“I’m not running away,” Taliana grumbled as she drew her hand back, glaring at the cars that sped past the terminal. “I just need a change of scenery.”

“If you only wanted a change of scenery, you would have let me buy that gorgeous house in San Francisco,” her mom pointed out. “This is a pretty dramatic change.”

Taliana rolled her eyes and finally found the nerve to look up at her. They may have both been tall, but she still towered over Taliana in her four-inch pumps. “I was wrapped up in enough scandals last year alone to last a normal person a lifetime. I just need…out.”

Andrea sighed heavily and nodded, finally admitting defeat after weeks’ worth of trying to convince Taliana to stay. She knew better than anyone how a scandal or two could drive a person away.

“I wish you weren’t leaving. Who’s going to model all my designs in the future?”

Taliana shuddered, thinking about her mother’s latest collection. Though Andrea was a prominent fashion designer, Taliana sometimes wondered how her mother was so successful. Sure, some of her creations were beautiful, but others were, well, just plain awful.

“It’s art, Taliana!” she was always saying, but Taliana couldn’t see it. So while Andrea adorned herself in three-thousand-dollar dresses, Taliana stuck to her shorts and t-shirts and flip-flops. At least, she did whenever her mother wasn’t zipping her into various designs and shoving her in front of cameras.

In no way did Taliana consider herself to be model material, but Andrea had always thought she was perfect for it. Being five-foot-ten and skinny as a twig was exactly what the fashion industry wanted, unfortunately.

Her mother had gotten her dream come true—and Taliana’s nightmare—when she’d finally broken down and allowed her mother to shoot an ad campaign with her as the face of the line. That experience ranked in the top five worst in Taliana’s life, which was coming from someone who had been arrested too many times to count and had narrowly escaped being sent to juvie. Taliana swore she’d never do anything like it again. She had to admit though, the shots had come out okay, but she didn’t think they were anywhere nice enough to be plastered throughout magazines. Not to mention it was more than a little embarrassing to grab the nearest magazine and find her hardly recognizable face in there.

If there was one good thing about moving to DC, it meant escaping the horrible fate of having to do next season’s campaign as well.

“I’m sure you’ll find someone,” Taliana promised, trying not to get wrapped up in that again. “Maybe even an actual model this time.”

Andrea flashed a wry smile before glancing away and letting it fade. With one last sigh, she looked back at Taliana and squared her shoulders. “Well, if this is what you really want...”

“It is,” she said firmly. “Besides, I think that east coast way of life might help shape me into a proper young lady.”

Her mother laughed. “I can’t really disagree with that,” she said, reaching out to touch Taliana’s cheek with a perfectly manicured hand. “It sure as hell did wonders for me. Just don’t do anything I wouldn’t do, okay?”

Taliana was pretty sure her expression mirrored Andrea’s perfectly. “You would do just about anything, Mom.”

She wrinkled her nose but grinned. “Guess that’s true,” she admitted, dropping her hand back to her side. “Just have a good time, honey. And remember, you’re always welcome to come back here with me. You may be seventeen, but you’ll always be my baby.”

“I know, I know. You’ve given me the speech a thousand times already. If I want to come back, I’ll just hop on a plane and do it.”

Andrea smiled sadly and reached up to sweep a stray lock of dark hair out of her eyes, the massive diamond on her right hand glinting in the light. The sun’s rays splashed rainbows across the sidewalk, distracting both of them for a moment, until she finally slipped the ring off her finger.

“Take this,” she commanded, holding out the massive diamond ring. “I think it’s about time I gave it to you.”

Though Taliana had seen the thing thousands of times before in the past, its sheer size never ceased to amaze her. It was a family heirloom that had been passed down from mother to daughter in their family for generations, a semblance of wealth that the women could call their own. Taliana had marveled at it when she was younger, wanting to wear it as soon as she could, but she’d long since outgrown her obsession with sparkly things, and had practically forgotten it was going to be hers one day.

“It’s...big,” Taliana muttered weakly, unable to make herself reach out and take it.

“Your grandmother loved things over the top, that’s for sure. This actually started out as a diamond necklace that she got from her mother, but of course she preferred to wear her wealth on her finger.” She shook her head wistfully at the memory of her mother before focusing her attention on Taliana again. “She gave this to me when I went off to college. Now, I know you’re not going off to college just yet, but you’re still leaving me.”

Andrea looked like she was trying hard not to cry as she pressed the ring into Taliana’s hand, curling her fingers around it.

“Keep it safe, all right? Your grandmother will haunt you from the grave if you lose that thing.”

The thought of her grandma’s ghost coming to haunt her was enough to make Taliana snicker. “I’ll be sure to remember that.” She tucked it into a small pocket in her carry-on bag. Once it was safely inside, she flung herself at her mother and hugged her tightly, trying not to cry either. “Love you, Mom.”

“Love you, too, sweetie,” she replied, voice thick with tears. She hugged Taliana back briefly before pulling away and nudging her toward the entrance of the airport. “Get going. You don’t want to miss your flight.”

Taliana offered her mother one last smile before turning her back on LA and her past life.

It could only get better from here.

***

If there was one thing Sebastian Phillips hated about living in the nation’s capital, it was the tourists.

“Excuse me,” a rosy-cheeked man in a tacky shirt cut in, disrupting the calm of the museum. “Could you tell me how to get to the White House from here?”

Though the man was probably just an innocent sightseer from some Midwestern state, Sebastian was having a difficult time keeping his temper in check. Then again, it didn’t take much to piss him off.

“Do I look like a fucking geographer to you?” he snapped. “Go buy a map.”

It was the fourth time in this museum alone that some over eager tourist or one of their snotty nosed brats had made him want to break someone’s neck. God, he couldn’t wait for summer to end and for all of them to get the hell out of the city.

“You done offending middle America?”

Sebastian glanced to his right, gaze landing on his smirking companion. “I hate tourist season,” he scowled. “It makes me crazy.”

Michael Richardson pushed off the wall he’d been leaning against, sparing one last look at the offended vacationer before turning back to his best friend since birth. “Just about everything does that to you.”

Sebastian rolled his eyes as he scrawled notes about the exhibit onto a sheet of paper. He wasn't usually this easily annoyed, but the past couple of weeks had been stressful. After returning from a whirlwind trip to Paris, Milan, Monte Carlo, and Dubai, he had devoted his summer to an internship at his family’s oil company, finishing obligatory projects for school, and planning his eighteenth birthday party.

While the internship and projects were hard in their own right, planning this party seemed to take up most of his time. No matter how many people were onboard to help pull it off, it still seemed like there was a ton of work ahead of him. The fact that the party was in two days didn't make it any better.

“Aw, cheer up, buttercup,” Michael teased as he narrowly avoided being run down by a group of chattering preschoolers. “What’s got you feeling so murderous? This stupid assignment?”

Sebastian sighed as he gave up on answering the questions required for one of his classes that started next week, too distracted to finish it. “No, my party,” he muttered, tucking the sheet into the back pocket of his jeans. “It’ll be a miracle if this entire thing actually comes together by Saturday night. If not, I’m going to be the laughingstock of Georgetown Trinity. Everyone expects this to be the best party of the year.”

“Oh, please,” the other boy scoffed, rolling his eyes. “Like anyone would have the nerve to laugh at you.”

“You never know,” Sebastian replied, though his answer trailed off when a girl breezed by.

With fiery red hair, ivory skin, and a smattering of freckles across the bridge of her nose, she could have been considered simply cute, but the fact that her “I heart DC” t-shirt was two sizes too small for her impressive chest and her shorts barely cleared her ass meant she was firmly in the hot as hell category instead. Though her attire all but screamed that she was a visitor to the city, she was attractive enough to make him wonder if tourist season was entirely bad after all.

And he wasn't the only one eyeing her.

“Think the carpet matches the drapes?” Michael murmured amusedly, just loud enough for him to hear.

A smirk found its way to Sebastian’s lips as he let his gaze linger, watching as she strolled through the exhibit. She wasn’t his usual type, but fuck it, he needed a distraction.

“Doubt it,” he answered, dragging a hand through his hair. “But I wouldn't mind finding out.”

“Fifty bucks says you never will.”

Sebastian had always prided himself on never backing down from a challenge, and honestly, he didn’t think it would be too difficult.

“You’re on.”