Chapter 19

KINLEY

I placed the last stack of cards inside the Trivial Pursuit box before closing the lid. The game was old, like everything inside Hollingbrook, earning it a spot on the donation pile.

I was focusing on the game room that day, searching for letters and organizing clutter. We weren’t allowed to get rid of anything just yet, but we’d decided to box up stuff as we moved from room to room.

I noticed The Game of Life tucked away on the bottom shelf and pulled it out, brushing an inch of dust from the top of the box. My grandparents had given it to me for my tenth birthday.

I smiled as I recalled the hours spent playing that game with my best friend. We would fantasize about what our lives would be like, and how many children we’d have.

Not one of my childhood friends had come to the funeral. Maybe they’d all moved away?

As I stared at the tiny pink and blue plastic stick figures, my mind wandered to the day before in the stables. Harland hadn’t worn a condom. I knew he was bare, and I didn’t stop him.

If that had happened with anyone else, I would’ve raced to the pharmacy for a morning after pill.

I took Plan B after my stepfather raped me. It was horrible. I puked my guts out on the bus to Rochester, and nobody would sit near me. I thought the driver was going to kick me off the bus at one point.

Then my periods were all messed up for a couple of months. One had been so heavy, I sometimes wondered if it was actually a miscarriage.

I knew it wasn’t too late, that I could still take the pill. But it was probably too early in my cycle to get pregnant anyway.

~You’re a millionaire now. You can afford to have the baby you’ve been yearning for.~

I wanted the whole package, though. The husband to go along with the babies. A dog and a cat and a white picket fence. Everything I’d missed out on. A ~normal~ life.

My stepbrother didn’t fit the profile. He was a wealthy Wall Street guy even before his billionaire father died. His life was in New York City. He’d never be content living in my dream life.

Sighing, I placed the lid back on the box and returned it to the shelf. This was going to take forever… Maybe Ellie had already found all of the letters?

I pulled Risk from the pile and lifted the lid. When I opened the game board, an envelope fell out with Harland’s name scrawled across the front.

Ellie said all of the letters she’d located were addressed to her, but it seemed unlikely that she only found the ones meant for her eyes. Was she lying? And if so, why?

I turned the envelope over in my hands. It was sealed. Harland had gone to town to do some errands and pick up Ellie from camp, so I set it on the table and continued going through the board games.

When I heard them come in, I headed out to the foyer. Ellie was telling a story about her day, gushing like a normal twelve-year-old.

I smiled. It was so nice to see her being a kid. Because she ~was~ a kid.

She wasn’t supposed to be advising her father on the day-to-day operations of his corporation and making sure the board members didn’t find out about his dementia.

That was too much responsibility to put on a kid. Regardless of their intelligence level.

“Hey there,” Harland said when he noticed me standing near the base of the stairs. He strolled over and pulled me into his arms, kissing me thoroughly while Ellie looked on.

“What are you doing?” I whispered.

“Kissing the girl I like.”

“We aren’t supposed to do this in front of Ellie.”

“I will allow kissing,” she said sternly. “But anything beyond that should be kept behind closed doors.”

Harland chuckled. “Yes, ma’am.”

“Can I talk to you in private?” I asked him.

“Absolutely. Let’s go find a closed door.”

“Gross!” Ellie shrieked, then added, “Don’t forget the prophylactic!”

The second the door closed behind us, Harland pulled me into his arms. “I missed you.”

“You were only gone a couple hours.”

“I’m kind of addicted,” he said, slipping a hand under my T-shirt.

“I have something you might want to see.”

“It can wait.” He flicked my nipple through the lace on the front of my bra as his mouth trailed light kisses down my neck.

“I found a letter.”

He straightened up, his hand still on my breast. “What did it say?”

“I don’t know. I didn’t read it.”

“How come?”

I pulled the envelope from my back pocket. “It’s addressed to you.”

“To me? I wasn’t expecting that.” He took the envelope from me and settled behind the desk, retrieving a letter opener from the drawer. “I have a notion to put it directly in the shredder.”

“I can understand that.”

He stared at the letter for a long time before slicing it open and pulling out a piece of dog-eared graph paper. He shook his head as his eyes skimmed over the letter.

“Do you want some privacy?” I asked.

“No.”

I stood awkwardly in front of the desk while he read the two-page letter, his expression turning dark just before he crumpled the sheet of paper and tossed it into the trash can.

“I need some air,” he mumbled, rising from the chair.

“Are you okay? What did it say?”

“It’s in the garbage,” he snapped. “Help yourself.”

As I watched him storm out of the office, I realized I’d never seen Harland that angry before. I retrieved the letter from the trash and smoothed it out on the desk.

~My dearest son,~

~If you’re reading this, I’m either dead or in a care home having my ass wiped by sexy young nurses.~

~I know my mind is slipping, more every day, so I need to tell you something while I can still string words together. It’s a horrible feeling to know you’re losing your faculties.~

~I want to leave this world with a clean slate, but I have a lot to atone for. Too much for one letter. I’ll write the other one later. It’s important too. So is this.~

~I was a bad man. The worst. I did things that are unforgivable, my boy. I’m glad I’ll never have to face you now that you know.~

~You see, the thing is, I did things I shouldn’t have. Hurt people. Put my own needs ahead of theirs. Looking back, I realize I was sick.~

~It started out with household staff. I thought I could do whatever I wanted. Fuck whatever pussy I desired. The younger the better. Don’t misunderstand. I’m not a pedophile. I waited patiently until they were eighteen.~

I closed my eyes, sucking in a big gulp of air. I knew I should stop reading. But I couldn’t help Harland if I didn’t know what the letter said.

~I went through a prostitute phase when I was in my thirties, but most of them were too old for my liking. I purchased a mail order bride from Russia. Eighteen. That’s my favorite age.~

~They’re fully developed, but still innocent. And so tight.~

~But I accidentally knocked her up. Oops. She ended up miscarrying, and she was so distraught that one night she overdosed on antidepressants. I was bored with her anyway. Problem solved.~

“What a horrible bastard,” I muttered.

~When I hired your mother to work at the club, I knew I wanted to break her in when she turned eighteen. But I was pissed when I found out she was a whore. I did a terrible thing, son. I bent her over my desk and raped her.~

~She begged me to stop, but I didn’t. And when she told me she was pregnant, I decided I wanted you. So I paid her off. And she took it. She could’ve said no, but she wanted the money more than she wanted you.~

~I met Susan in Bangor. She was in the supermarket with Kinley the first time I saw her, and I knew right then that the day that girl turned eighteen, she was gonna be mine. She was so beautiful. Kinley. Not her dimwit mother.~

~I married Susan so I would have access to her daughter. Don’t get me wrong, Susan was pretty young then. Twenty-five with lots of fuckable years left in her. But Kinley, she was the one I wanted.~

~I waited patiently until her eighteenth birthday. I knew it was wrong. She begged me to stop. But I was so obsessed and had waited so long to spread her legs and take her sweet virginity, I couldn’t stop myself.~

~And when it was over, I wanted more. I’m the reason she left.~

~I hope you can forgive me. I wrote Kinley a letter too. Make sure she gets it. And look for your other letter. There’s important stuff in there that you need to know.~

~Dad~

The letter slipped from my fingers as tears welled up in my eyes. He’d hurt so many people. I was just one in a long line of victims, including Harland’s mother.

Did my mother know the truth? That her husband only married her to get to me?

I shivered at the thought of him watching me all those years while I went through puberty under his roof. He’d been waiting for the day he could rape me.

Poor Harland. Confirmation that you were conceived during rape must be a horrible thing to hear. His mother had hinted at it at the funeral, but the letter confirmed it.

I folded the letter and placed it back in the envelope, then went upstairs to my bedroom and tucked it away in the nightstand. Ellie didn’t need to read that.

“What’s going on?” Ellie asked when I found her in the kitchen with Joanne. “Harland was really upset.”

“Do either of you know where he went?”

“If he’s not in the stables,” Joanne said, “he’s probably down at the lookout. He always went there when he was a kid and he needed to think.”

“I don’t remember how to get there.”

“I’ll draw you a map,” Ellie offered.

***

As I started up the path, my mind was still spinning with the contents of the letter. Orland Hollingbrook was a horrible man. A sexual predator. And he’d never had to pay for his crimes. It wasn’t fair.

The lookout wasn’t that far, only a fifteen-minute walk from the stables. I grabbed a blanket from the tack room on my way by.

When I arrived, Harland was there—just as Joanne had predicted—staring out across the gorgeous valley with the mountains in the distance.

“Hey,” I said quietly.

“Hey,” he responded without turning around.

“I can leave if you want to be alone.”

“Stay.”

“I brought a blanket,” I said, spreading out the red checkered throw on the grass.

Harland sighed. “I’m so sorry, Kinley.”

“For what?”

“For what my father did to you.”

“It wasn’t your fault.”

“He was sick.”

“Yes, he was.”

“I don’t want to read any more of his letters. Any we find, we burn.”

“Agreed.” I held out my hand to shake on it.

He yanked me down and we fell backward in the grass, our mouths coming together, desperate and hungry, our tongues tangling as our hands worked to remove clothing.

He rolled me over onto the blanket, tugging my shorts and panties down in one swift movement before running his fingers along my slick folds.

“I need to be inside you, baby.” He pushed his own shorts down, kicking them off, then spread my thighs apart and pushed my legs back against my chest as he positioned himself on his knees. “Brace your feet on my chest.”

I pressed the soles of my feet against his pecs, my ass lifting off the blanket as he rubbed his cock up and down my slit.

“Are you ready?” he asked.

“Yes,” I panted.

He nudged at my entrance, then pushed forward with one hard thrust. The position he had me in allowed him to go deep.

He drove in and out of my pussy, maintaining a quick, steady rhythm while our flesh slapped together, his grunts mixing with my cries and carrying across the valley.

My orgasm was quick, tearing through my pelvis a second before Harland’s cock exploded inside me, filling my unprotected womb for the second day in a row.