Into the Fire - Anne Stuart [52]
Until she saw the scrap of red and pink, wedged into a corner, tucked away underneath the T-shirts. She pulled it out, and she felt a weird clenching in her heart as she recognized it.
She hadn’t seen it in thirteen years, but she would have recognized it anywhere. She’d gone out with her friend, Carly, the one her mother had always referred to as white trash, and she’d found it on a sale rack at Macy’s. It was a dress made of a lacy pink-and-red-striped knit. The sleeves were long, with an uneven ruffle at the end, the skirt was short, and the neckline much too low. At fifteen she’d been flat-chested enough to get away with it—her now respectable 34B would make it as indecent as her mother had insisted it was.
Of course, there’d always been the little problem that the dress was see-through. It wasn’t as if Jamie hadn’t worn a full slip underneath, so that nothing showed. Carly wore things a hundred times more revealing, and Jamie had loved that dress. For the first time she’d felt beautiful. Even desirable. Back when desire was a good thing. She’d put the dress on and felt like a sexy, sultry creature, and she’d reveled in it.
Her mother had taken it, of course. Ripped it and thrown it in the trash where it belonged, Isobel had told her, and proceeded to buy her a complete new sweater outfit that made her feel like a Catholic schoolgirl.
She shook out the dress and looked at it. Maybe it was a little tacky, in retrospect, but she’d loved it. The ruffle at the neckline was ripped, but even Isobel’s strong hands hadn’t been able to do much damage to virgin polyester. She held it up to her face, breathing in the past.
It smelled like the perfume she used to wear. Just a trace of it, something light and virginal that she’d gotten for Christmas. And the faint trace of gasoline and cigarettes. Dillon.
Why in hell did he have it? Why in the first place, and why after all these years? It was crazy—he hadn’t even been aware of her when she was fifteen and had worn this dress.
If she were really honest with herself she’d admit the truth about who she’d wanted to impress with this dress. There was only one person she’d wanted to notice her, only one boy she wanted to realize she was a grown woman. At fifteen, she thought ruefully.
And that boy was Nate’s oblivious best friend, the wicked Dillon Gaynor from the wrong side of the tracks.
She’d never understood why her mother had let Nate continue his relationship with someone as problematic as Dillon, the baddest of the bad boys, and yet had ruthlessly cut off Jamie’s relationship with Carly, whose only crime was a lesser pedigree. But then, Jamie knew the answer. Nate could talk his aunt Isobel into anything, and Isobel had gritted her teeth and bore it for Nate’s sake.
She didn’t even want to begin to think about how the torn dress had gotten into Dillon’s possession. All she knew was she wasn’t going to leave it with him.
It was past time she began to stand up to the people she loved. Past time she stood up to Isobel, with her plaintive demands and her disapproval. Hell, maybe she’d even wear the damned dress when she got back.
She wasn’t going to let Dillon touch her again. The moment she heard him come up to bed she was going downstairs, climbing into the damned yellow Cadillac and driving out of there, even if she had to go straight through the wooden garage doors. She wasn’t going to be a victim to the people she cared about….
Well, not that she cared about Dillon. She despised him, always had, since the night when Paul Jameson had raped her in the back of Dillon’s car.
But then,