To Wanda,
You held my hand on this one, and I’ll never forget it.
And to Birgit Davis-Todd,
For always being there when I needed you.
Thanks, ladies, and here’s to many more….
Prologue
Ten Years Ago
THE LINE OF CARS heading out of the Daisy Inn was long but giddy. After all, it was prom night. The night of hopes and dreams. The night of spiked punch and lost virginity. The culmination of high school, where one was to have the time of one’s life.
Unless you were a Tremaine, of course.
In the town of Pleasantville, Ohio, the only thing worse than being a member of that family was being a female member.
Cassie Tremaine Montgomery, an extremely female Tremaine, looked over at her date. Biff Walters. Hard to imagine any mother disliking her newborn son enough to name him Biff. But his name had nothing to do with the reason why Cassie had agreed to go to the prom with the tall, blond, gorgeous—but stupid—football star.
No, the reason had everything to do with his graduation present from his daddy—a cherry-red Corvette.
Since Cassie had a love affair with all things expensive and out of her reach, the convertible had been irresistible.
“Hey, baby,” Biff said, catching her eye and putting his big, beefy, sweaty paw of a hand on her thigh. “You look hot tonight.”
How original. Not. So she was blond and five foot ten, with the stacked body of a Playboy model—she’d been that way since the age of thirteen. Which meant men had been drooling over her for four years now. Added to that was the fact that while the men in her family were bastards—some quite literally—the women were all tramps. No exceptions. There was a rumor it even said so in the law books.
She could live with the stigma, or get the hell out of Pleasantville. The town didn’t care much either way.
Unfortunately as a kid, the second option had never been viable. She and her cousin Kate had grown up learning that lesson all too well. Cassie’s mother, Flo, otherwise known as the town vixen, had long ago guaranteed her daughter’s fate by cheerfully seducing as many of the husbands in town as possible.
By default, Cassie was as unpopular—or popular if you asked the men—as her mother.
Which burned her; it always had. So Flo had a weakness. Men. So what? Everyone had a weakness. At least her mother’s was basically harmless.
“Wanna go to the lake?” Biff asked hopefully.
Ugh. The lake was the typical make-out spot just outside of town. Tonight it’d be crowded with overeager guys toting their dressed-to-the-hilt dates, if they were lucky enough to have coaxed them out there.
Not for her, thank you very much. Cassie didn’t share her mother’s weakness for men, and never would.
“Of course you want to go, you’re a Tremaine.” Biff laughed uproariously at that. His fingers squeezed her thigh and moved upward, leaving a damp streak on the designer silk dress she’d secretly purchased at a thrift store.
“All the Tremaine women love sex.” He was confident on this. “The wilder the better. It’s why I asked you to the prom. Come on, show me what you’ve got, baby.” Leaning over, he planted his mouth on the side of her neck, smearing beer breath over her skin.
Smiling when she wanted to puke, Cassie backed away and combed her fingers through the hairstyle she’d spent hours copying from an ad in Cosmo. Fine price she was going to pay for wanting a cruise through town in a hot car. Now she had to figure a way out of the rest of the night. “What’s the rush?”
“This.” Biff, panting now, put his hand on his erection to adjust himself.
Oh, good God, men were ridiculous. The smell of beer and sweat permeated the car’s close quarters. “Biff, they didn’t let us buy beer before the prom, remember? We got carded.”
“I know.” He looked extremely proud of himself.
“So why do I smell it on you?”
His grin was wide, wicked and stupid. “Jeff had a twelve-pack in the bathroom. He gave me half.”
Six beers. Cassie wasn’t afraid of much, and God knows the town thought her a brainless drunk in the making simply because of the misfortune of her genes but, contrary to popular belief, she was very fond of living. “You drank them all?”
“Yeah.” They pulled out of the inn in a show-off peel of tires. The car swerved, making Cassie grab the dashboard with a gasp.
“Don’t worry, baby.” He sent her another ridiculously dumb grin. “I drive better under the influence.”
Right. Damn it, graduation was only a week away. Freedom loomed like a rainbow over her future. Seven days and she was outta this one-horse town and she wasn’t going to ever look back. She was going to show the world she could be someone. Someone special.
But she had to be alive to do it. “Biff, pull over.”
“Now, baby—”
“Stop the car,” she said through her teeth. If he called her baby one more time she was going to scream. And then she was going to make him scream.
“Watch this.” He stomped on the gas and whipped into the oncoming traffic’s lane to pass a slower car. “Woo-hoo!” He craned his neck to look backward, flipping his middle finger at the driver as he came back into the right-hand lane with one second to spare before causing a head-on collision. “Bitchin’!”
“Biff.” Cassie’s fingernails, the ones she’d so carefully painted candy-apple red, dug into his dash. “I—”
“Ah, shit,” he said at the same time Cassie heard the whoop of a siren. Flashing lights lit up Biff’s face as he swore the air blue.
They pulled over. When Cassie saw Sheriff Richard Taggart coming toward them, all she could think was Thank God. He’d just saved her from a car accident. Or at the very least, a wrestling match with an idiot.
Biff was still swearing, and Cassie couldn’t blame him. The sheriff wasn’t exactly a warm, fuzzy sort, though she did trust him despite his being a tough hard-ass. She trusted him because he was the only man she knew who hadn’t slept with her mother, and therefore the only man she knew worthy of her respect.
He came to the driver’s window. Tipped his hat back. Switched his gum from one side to the other. Calmly and quietly assessed the situation with his sharp, sharp eyes. “You kids heading anywhere special?”
“Are you kidding? Look at my date.” Biff leaned back so the sheriff could see Cassie. “I got me a Tremaine for the night.”
The sheriff looked at Cassie. Something in his eyes shifted. “The lake, huh?” he asked.
