The Perfect Homecoming (Pine River #3)

Carl.

Emma definitely didn’t want to think of the night with him because it made her sick. She squeezed her eyes shut, trying to block the image of his bloated body and that hideous diamond ring twinkling on his pinkie. She remembered his square hands, and how he’d groped her. Men always groped, grabbing and squeezing like a kid with a mound of Play-Doh.

Emma hated herself for that night at Carl’s. She always hated herself after nights like that. And though she’d managed to escape the worst with the excuse that she wasn’t feeling well, she felt as disgusting as if she’d allowed him to use her completely.

And then she’d taken that stupid medal. But that’s what she did. She let men grope her or worse, and then she took things from them.

God, if only Emma could understand what was wrong with her. She didn’t want any of the things she took—they were meaningless items with no value other than that they’d been in a place where she’d happened to have been, being groped and hating herself. She’d even Googled it once—stealing from so-called lovers. Kleptomania was what WebMD labeled it, but Emma wasn’t buying that. She didn’t have any of the other symptoms of that disorder. She didn’t have other compulsions or obsessions, and she didn’t feel the need to steal from anyone but men she allowed to pick her up. What she had was an undeniable desire to take something from men before they took something from her.

There was no WebMD diagnosis for that.

Every time it happened, Emma vowed she’d never do it again. She bargained with God, promised to be good and do right. But then . . . then something would click in her brain and it was impossible for her to prevent it. Physically, emotionally, it was impossible.

Once, she’d even made an appointment and gone to see a therapist in Dana Point about it. Emma was fairly rational. She’d realized that what she was doing—the sleeping around, the stealing—was beyond nutty, and nutty things required intervention. The psychologist, a young woman with rectangular glasses and frizzy hair, had given her a sad smile and had said, “We have some work to do, don’t we?”

Emma never went back. She didn’t want to work, she didn’t want to examine every angle of her life to discover why she did it. She knew why she did it. She just wanted to stop doing it. Give her the magic pill, show her how it was done, and voila, she’d be over it!

She’d just kept on, keeping to herself, trying to resist the urge and failing. But then her boss, Melissa, had called one day. What happened to the candlesticks, Emma? We borrowed those from Haute Interiors.

That call was the thing that turned everything on its ear. It had happened only a couple of days after Emma had left Carl snoring like a beach bum in Malibu, the medal in her purse. Emma had never once taken anything from work, had never even had the desire to take something. Why that night? Because Keith, the other vice president at CEM, had run his hand over her ass and told her he could make her scream? Keith was always saying things like that, and Emma had never felt the unbearable need to take something of his.

Maybe it was simpler than that. Maybe it was because Carl was calling her, leaving nasty messages on her phone about that medal. Or maybe it was because she had run into her stepsister that night.

Emma’s contact with Laura had been sporadic over the last few years—a few family events here and there, the occasional funeral or wedding. Emma didn’t hate Laura for what happened the summer of her seventeenth year. Still, it wasn’t easy to see her, and every time she did, Emma was reminded of the betrayal and the wound that wouldn’t heal. It was a slow, dull throb in the back of her head, replaying itself at the most unexpected and inopportune moments.

Laura had barely turned eighteen, Emma’s eighteenth only a few short months away, when Grant Tyler had showed up in Orange County a second time. He’d told Emma that after all those years, he’d realized what a bad father he’d been to her. He’d been apologetic and contrite, and well he should have been, because he had been the worst of fathers. Emma had never heard from him after the reconciliation with her mother had failed, and her mother complained endlessly about his failure to pay child support.

But there he was, wearing expensive clothes and driving a Jaguar, a self-proclaimed new man, desperate to make amends and be the father to her he’d never been. He told her earnestly that she deserved it.