1 #3
Her gaze lifted to the top shelf where she spied a fold of denim peeping from under the extra quilt she kept for cold nights.
She extracted the jeans, still festooned with the tags they had come with.
Lilith had given them to her for Christmas, but she’d never worn them.
In fact, she’d never tried them on. When she saw the Neiman-Marcus tags, she cringed.
The jeans probably cost the earth, only to be shoved into the top of the closet and then forgotten.
Rhett shook out the denim and pulled on the jeans.
She approached the full-length mirror on the back of the bedroom door sideways, as if to take her image by surprise.
The jeans hugged her body more than her other clothes did, and if that put all her flaws on display then a preemptive peek into the mirror would be best.
Through narrowed eyes she checked out the side view.
Her mouth dropped open in astonishment, and she faced her reflection head on.
Well, hot damn. These things looked nice.
No, they looked great. Her thighs actually came across as slender, and her legs appeared ten miles long.
Smiling in delight, Rhett turned around and looked over her shoulder to take in the rear view.
Double hot damn! There was her ass, and a nice ass it was, too.
What kind of jeans were these, anyway? She pulled out the store tag attached to the waistband and peered down at the name.
Rhett shrugged. She didn’t know who or what 7 For All Mankind was, but if they could make a pair of jeans that gave her shapely thighs and an honest-to-goodness ass, they were okay by her.
With a little extra swagger in her walk, she went to the dresser and opened the bottom drawer, the repository for all the clothes kept for sentimental reasons but never worn.
After a bit of digging, she came up with the T-shirt she loved more than anything else she owned.
It might have been twenty years old, but it still retained most of its deep cobalt blue color, and the name of the band jumped out in clear, shocking red.
Illicit, Rhett's favorite band, the band whose music rocked her soul, the band with the lead singer who set her fantasies on fire and led her dreams into delicious, naughty directions for the past twenty-five years.
Her current mood of Fuck-It was perfect for an Illicit T-shirt.
She pulled it on and returned to the mirror.
The blue cotton was a tad snug over her breasts, and the bottom of the shirt barely reached the waistband of her jeans.
All in all, though, not bad. A fashion photo shoot didn’t appear to be on today’s schedule, and besides, everyone thought she was at work.
Work. Reaction set in, and she sat on the edge of the bed before her shaking knees dumped her to the floor.
What the hell had she done? Quitting a job without having another lined up went against the way she was raised.
It was irresponsible, and no one had had reason to attach that description to Rhett in years.
Her mother made sure both her girls knew and practiced responsibility and drilled into them from an early age the value of hard work.
Everything Rhett did that morning flew in the face of those teachings.
The thought of her mother made her blanch. The minute Bettina Vandergriff found out what her daughter had done, she was sure to utter the phrase Rhett dreaded hearing.
“You’re just like your father.”
Myles Vandergriff had been the polar opposite of responsible.
No one would attach that term to a man who ran off and abandoned his family when Rhett was seven and her sister Melanie was ten.
Left to raise her daughters alone, Bettina turned into a hard, no-nonsense woman, vocal in her criticism of any deviation from her personal rules of acceptable behavior.
Or maybe she'd always been that way. Rhett couldn’t remember her mother as anything other than a woman who worked her fingers to the bone as a waitress at the Claiborne Grill and ruled her house with an iron fist. All of it was done with a sense of martyrdom that even little Rhett was able to comprehend.
And the worst thing Rhett or Mel could do was to behave in a way their mother deemed just like their father.
Nothing stung worse than having her behavior compared to that of a man who hadn’t bothered to contact his children since he disappeared from their lives.
Rhett had spent her life trying to escape the taint of her father’s blood, but now she’d gone and done something truly Myles-worthy.
The last time she’d done anything deemed just like her father was when she allowed the best-looking wide receiver to ever play football at Claiborne High School to impregnate her just before senior year.
It took almost twenty years to live that one down.
Now she’d given her mother and the rest of the town twenty more years worth of ammunition.
All of a sudden, moving to Dallas and becoming a high-priced call girl sounded like the best idea she’d ever had.