mother called, her voice carrying over the crowd, making Olivia wince. “Just because you made them doesn’t mean you get to eat them all.”
Olivia just kept walking, heading toward the kitchen.
She hadn’t just made the cookies for tonight’s little soiree. She’d made the cupcakes, the pastries, the truffles, the tarts and the petit fours. Why shouldn’t she taste her efforts? She knew she was a little too heavy, according to the height and weight chart at the doctor’s office as well as her mother’s discerning eye, but she enjoyed baking. And she enjoyed eating what she baked.
In the kitchen, she informed the “help” that they were out of crab cakes. There were a dozen people working in their giant kitchen, pulling trays out of the oven, putting ice in buckets. Someone would handle the crab cake crisis. In the meantime, Olivia was going to sneak up the back stairs instead of trying to make it up the main ones this time. Then she was going to change and find a quiet place to draw for a while.
She wrapped half a dozen of her favorite cookies—salted peanut butter chocolate chip—in a napkin before she headed up the back stairs.
Her room was at the far end of the hall. She stripped down to bra and panties, leaving the white elastic torture device her mother had forced her to wear under her dress on the floor. But she hung the dress on a hanger. She’d seen the price tag. It was a three-thousand dollar dress. Olivia munched on a cookie as she slipped an over-size men’s dress shirt on, buttoning it over her curves. Her skin was pale, crisscrossed with angry red marks that would fade, now that she was no longer snugged into the “slimming” device, as her mother called it.
Olivia kicked the thing across the room, lamenting the fact that she hadn’t snuck up a glass of milk with her cookies, as she slipped on a pair of comfy jeans. There, that was much better. She wrapped up the remaining five cookies and grabbed her sketchpad and colored pencils. She considered staying in her room, but that was a bad idea. It was the place her mother would look for her first, when she noticed her missing.
The good news was, the house was more than big enough to get lost in. She could easily find an out-of-the-way room to hide and draw in. The upstairs library would be perfect. It was smaller than the one downstairs, divided by book shelves with recliners in between. There was a big old desk at the back. It was perfect for hiding in. The long, padded window seat on the back wall was her favorite place to draw. She could squeeze into the little cubby and sketch while she watched the help try to get guests and their cars out an in orderly fashion. That, at least, would be amusing, because of course all of the guests believed they were too important to wait.
Olivia wended her way through the hallways, carrying her cookies, pad and pencils. She could occasionally still get lost in her own house, it was true, but she knew the way to the little library. Her mother’s comment about the cookies still made her cheeks burn. It was true, two of Olivia’s favorite things in the world were snacking and drawing. Her mother didn’t have a creative bone in her body—the woman had made her living leeching off other people’s creativity—so she didn’t understand the inclination. And as for snacking, Catherine had more willpower than anyone Olivia had ever known.
She really didn’t know how in the world they were related to each other.
Olivia heard a noise as she stepped into the library, one of the doors wide open. A dim light lit the room—likely the desk lamp. She was familiar with its glow, how it shaded her paper as she sketched.
The sound was a woman’s soft sigh, followed by a man’s low grunt. She ducked in between the last row of books that blocked the view of the window seat. Creeping along the heavy, floor-to-ceiling, oak bookcase, set up just like a real library, she scooted a few books aside to see if she