Tags:
Suspense,
Erótica,
Humorous,
Literature & Fiction,
Mystery,
BDSM,
Urban,
Romantic Erotica,
Lesbian,
Lgbt,
bisexual
When she found them, Jenna was pushing through the mess of folders, unpaid bills, and various office supplies in her mother’s little secretary desk, looking for a few pages of mostly unwrinkled loose leaf paper to finish an assignment for her geography class. The stash of letters was shoved all the way to the back of the drawer, as if someone—obviously her mother—had been trying to hide them.
She recognized the return address instantly. They were letters from her stepfather, who was currently sitting in a prison cell, all of them addressed to Jenna’s mother. She flipped through them, about twenty in all, realizing that not a single letter had been opened. But why?
Her original mission and schoolwork forgotten, Jenna shoved everything back, closed up the secretary, and took the curious pile up to her room. Some of the postmarks were months old, some of them from a year or more ago.
She’d always found it odd that he’d never written, never contacted them after he’d gone to jail. In truth, she’d been a little disappointed and hurt by it, but she supposed it was because the man was ashamed of what he’d done. Jenna understood, but even from the beginning, she had felt nothing but sympathy for his predicament, even if he had done what they said he did.
She sat with his letters in her hands, realizing he’d been writing to them all along, simply stumped that not a one had been opened. Jenna smiled when she thought about her stepfather. Scott MacKenzie had never been anything but good to them both. Tall, rugged, a real blue-collar worker kind of handsome, his smile alone spoke volumes about the kind of man he was. The owner of a successful building company, his was a real all-American-dream story of working his way from swinging a hammer to entrepreneurship. He had always been generous with his wealth, showering both her mother and Jenna with everything they needed as well as almost everything they desired.
His mistake, according to Jenna’s mother, had been greed.
Scott had been caught using his company as a front to embezzle money from the retirement accounts of his employees.
She still didn’t understand how the man who had lived with them, who had taken care of them all of those years, could be a criminal. Her mother talked about how he’d grown up with nothing, insisting that a taste of money had made him greedy, but Jenna wasn’t so sure. The man she knew had been generous, but he hadn’t been greedy.
But Jenna didn’t have anything else to go on, except what her mother told her. She used to ask about him a lot, so much so that Jeanie, Jenna’s mother, had finally snapped at Jenna, telling her to stop talking about him. Period.
Jenna knew her mother was stressed. What woman whose husband was going to jail for embezzlement wouldn’t be? And when her mother was stressed, she ate. And drank. Jenna remembered, after her biological dad left, how quickly her mother had found and married Scott. It was like the woman couldn’t bear to be alone. And while Jenna had hoped her stepfather would step in as their white knight, her mother’s stress level only seemed to increase after their marriage. It didn’t make sense. They were newlyweds, they should have been happy, but Jenna’s mother had eaten her way to a size twenty-four and drank herself into a stupor regularly.
Not that Scott cared. He loved her, at any size, and told her so often. The man was a saint. Jeanie treated him like a child, she ordered him around, she told him what to do, she tried to control everything about his life—it was exactly how the woman treated her daughter—and none of that made her happy. Nothing made her happy. Scott kept trying, as did Jenna, but the woman was never satisfied.
She didn’t blame her mother for gaining weight, but Jenna didn’t really understand it either. When her mother was at her thinnest, people often thought they were sisters, even twins, with their matching red hair. Jeanie had that kind of