Renegade Player by Dixie Browning Read Free Book Online Page A

made it to the doubtful security of her own room. She had curled up into a tight ball, dry-eyed and numb, and allowed the waves of misery and humiliation to wash over her until, sometime before daylight, she had mercifully lost consciousness.
    That was on a Wednesday. By the following Wednesday, she was in Edenton, North Carolina, a lovely, historic little town on the Chowan River, gradually thawing out under the gruff, almost impersonal kindness of her mother’s cousin, Fred Harbinger. The showdown at her father’s home had been hard, fast and furious, and Willy had discovered a side to her personality that had surprised her: she was not afraid of her father anymore. She had his backbone and stubbornness along with her mother’s easygoing nature, and she simply told her father that she was leaving and that he could make whatever restitution to Luke he thought fair, considering the broken contract between them. When Jasper had tried to talk her out of it, minimizing the financial settlement, and then had tried to explain that it had all been for her own good, to protect her from fortune-hunters, she had stared at him stonily, still more than a little bit numb, and let him finish.
    “I’m twenty, Jasper. I’m going to take enough money from my account to pay for training and then I’m going to support myself, and whether or not we continue to have any relationship at all is strictly up to you. Try to hold me here and I’ll hate you. As it is, I only despise you; but let me go and promise not to try to interfere with my life from now on, and you’ll be free to start your own marriage to Breda without a troublemaking daughter on your doorstep. And I’ll make trouble, I promise you. You have everything to lose; I have nothing at all.”
    The delivery had been made in a flat, unemotional tone, for she had no emotions left after a night of wakefulness and a day of weeping, and it had been all the more effective for that. Her father had insisted she take the car she had been using, and because it was practical, she had agreed. It had been on the long drive up the coast that she had come to enjoy the feel of an aggressive engine that responded to her every mood, and by the time she had reached Edenton, she had all but erased Luke and Jasper and the house that had never been a home since the day her father had bought it when he married his second wife.
    How could she have fooled herself into thinking she was so secure? Willy Silverthorne, self-sufficient career girl who had made a vow that neither man nor money was ever going to throw her into a tailspin again. She’d manage her own life and play whatever games she chose to play according to her own set of rules.
    That she had been successful so far was a measure of her own unexpectedly level head. It had come as a total surprise to find that she was not the undesirable creature she had supposed. Men were interested in her—some of them more than interested—without even suspecting that her father could buy and sell half the small towns in any given state, and she had had to come from behind almost every other girl her age in learning how to deal with the fact of her own attractions. That she had been fortunate so far was due partly to her genuine friendliness, partly to a natural indolence that kept her from becoming involved in too many social activities, and partly, she supposed, to pure luck.
    And now, just when she was getting along so well, she had to run up against something—someone—she was ill-equipped to handle. Vague disquiet followed her into her sleep, making uneasy dreams plague the few remaining hours of night. When the first fingers of dawn stretched up through the low-lying cloud bank out over the Atlantic, she was no closer to a solution than before.
    A moderate drinker at best, Willy regretted the wine she had consumed last night. Each one had been carefully selected for the course and drunk sparingly; nevertheless, it still added up to too much.