Forbidden Christmas With The Bellamys

Chapter 1 ~ Hailey ~ The rock hit me in the shoulder before I'd even finished checking the address. I yelped and spun around, one hand flying up to where it had landed. A small grey stone bounced once on the pavement and rolled to a stop near my shoe. "Hailey?" Trice was still half inside the car, my phone in her hand. "Is this the right address..." "Someone just threw a rock at me." "What?" Across the street, a man in a leather jacket stood with his arm still hanging in the air, like he hadn't quite decided whether to lower it. Behind him, three motorcycles were parked nose-to-tail along the curb, their riders leaning against them, watching. Watching me. He'd been skipping stones. There was a little drainage pond behind him, the kind rich neighbourhoods put in to pretend they care about the environment. He'd been skipping stones, and one of them had found my shoulder. I waited for the apology. The sheepish wave. The jog across the street and the embarrassed grin. He smirked. That was it. A slow, lazy smirk, the kind that said he'd seen me, registered the hit, and decided I wasn't worth the walk. Heat climbed up my neck. "Hailey." Trice was out of the car now, voice low. "Don't." I bent down and picked up the rock. "Hailey, no. No. Look at them, they're literally a gang—" I threw it back. I'd like to say I aimed. I didn't. I just wound up and threw the way you throw when you're twenty-eight years old and tired and nobody has apologised to you for anything in a very long time. The rock travelled in a clean, almost graceful arc. And hit him in the temple. There was a sound — not loud, but somehow audible across the whole quiet street — like a knuckle rapping on a door. His head snapped sideways. His hand came up slowly, almost lazily, to touch the spot. When he looked at his fingers, then back at me, the smirk was gone. In its place was something much worse. "Oh." Trice's hand closed around my wrist. "Oh, oh, oh. Car. Car now." Behind him, three engines kicked over at once. I have never moved so fast in my life. I was in the driver's seat with the door slammed before I registered that my hands were shaking too hard to find the ignition. The key skidded off the column. Trice was making a noise that wasn't quite words. The motorcycles were a low, building roar. "Hailey—" "I know, I know—" The engine caught. I floored it. My little Honda fishtailed off the curb and onto the road, and that was when I finally looked at where I was driving. The Bellamy Residences. Lawns like green felt. Hedges trimmed into shapes. Three-car garages and stone fountains and the kind of streetlamps you only see in films about people you'll never be. And at the very end of the long curving drive, set back behind a wrought-iron gate, a house that wasn't a house. A mansion. The kind with wings. That was the address on my phone. That was where my step-sister Yvonne — who I hadn't spoken to in six months, who'd never held a job longer than a season, who'd borrowed two hundred dollars off me last spring and forgotten to mention paying it back — apparently lived. "They're gaining," Trice said tightly. In the rearview, four headlights. Closing. "Why did you throw it back?" Her voice was climbing. "Hailey, why would you—" "He hit me first." "It was an accident!" "Was it?" The gates appeared ahead, ten feet of black iron and a little security booth with warm yellow light spilling from the window. I leaned on the horn and didn't let up. The guard stepped out of the booth at the pace of a man who has never in his life believed anything was an emergency. "Open the gate. Open the gate, open the gate, please—" "Miss—" "They're going to kill us." I checked the mirror. The bikes were forty feet back. Thirty. Then they stopped. All four of them, in a loose line across the road, engines still growling, headlights washing the back of my car in white. The one in front — the one I'd hit — sat very still on his bike. He wasn't looking at the guard. He wasn't looking at the gate. He was looking at me. Slowly, the way you look at something you're going to come back for. "ID, miss?" I fumbled my wallet, dropped it on the floor, scraped it up. My license stuck to my fingers. The guard took his time. He looked at the license. He looked at me. He looked at the license again. Behind us, the bikers waited. "Why aren't they coming any closer?" Trice whispered. I didn't have an answer. They'd chased us like we'd done murder, and now they were just... sitting there, sixty feet back, like a line had been drawn on the road that they wouldn't cross. "You're cleared." The guard handed back my license. "Welcome to The Bellamy Estate." The gates groaned open. I drove through them slowly, eyes still on the mirror. The bikers didn't move. The lead one tilted his head, just slightly, as if he were filing me away for later, and then the gates closed and cut him out of the frame. * * * I parked badly. I didn't care. I cut the engine and sat there with my hands on the wheel. "What," Trice said, very carefully, "is your sister doing in a house like this." "I don't know." "Hailey." "I don't know." The front doors burst open before I'd worked out how to make my legs function. Yvonne flew down the marble steps in a pale silk dress that swung around her knees, arms thrown wide, her hair longer than I remembered, her teeth whiter than I remembered, every single thing about her more expensive than I remembered. "You made it!" She got my door open before I did. She was already hugging me before I was out of the seat, and she smelled like a perfume I couldn't have afforded to sniff at a counter. "Yvonne—" "Come inside, come on, you're freezing, come on—" "Yvonne." I planted my feet. "Whose house is this." She laughed. It was too bright. The kind of laugh she used to do at school when a teacher caught her doing something and she needed thirty seconds to come up with a story. "It's mine," she said. "Ours. Well. It's—" A man stepped out of the front door. My first thought, embarrassingly, was: oh. He was older. Sixty, maybe. Silver hair swept back from a high forehead, a trimmed silver beard, a jaw you could have used to open a tin. He was wearing a soft grey sweater that probably cost more than my rent and he was smiling at me the way you smile at someone you've already decided to like. Beside me, Trice made a small noise. "You must be Hailey." He came down the steps and put out his hand. His voice was warm. Cultured. The kind of voice you trust against your better judgement. "I'm Jackson. Welcome." I shook his hand. I think I said something. I'm not certain what. "And you must be Trice." He turned to her with the same easy warmth. She managed a nod that looked like it cost her. "Girls." Yvonne was almost bouncing. She thrust her left hand out, fingers splayed. The diamond on it was obscene. "Meet Jackson. My fiancé." There was a very long second. "Fiancé," I said. "Three months," Jackson said gently, sliding his arm around her waist. She fitted herself against him with the kind of practiced ease that took weeks of mirror-work to look that natural. "I know how it sounds. But when you know, you know." Three months. I had not spoken to my step-sister in six months. In that gap, she had met this man, moved into his house, and put his ring on her finger, and not picked up the phone once. "I'm so happy for you," I said. It came out almost level. I was proud of that. Yvonne squealed and dragged me into another hug, and over her shoulder, through one of the floor-to-ceiling windows that ran along the front of the house, I caught a flicker of movement. A man, standing just inside, watching us. Leather jacket. Arms crossed. A red mark already blooming at his temple. Every working part of my body went cold at once. "Oh!" Jackson followed my gaze and his face brightened. "Navine's home. I didn't realise he'd come in." He raised his voice toward the window, half-laughing. "Son! Come out and meet your new family properly." Son. Trice's fingers closed around my wrist, ice-cold. "Hailey," she whispered. "Please tell me that isn't—" "It is." The front door opened. He came down the steps slowly, hands in his pockets, that smirk creeping back onto his face like it had never left. He didn't look at his father. He didn't look at Yvonne. He looked at me. And he smiled, slow and wide, like Christmas had come early.