Reb grimaced, regretting that the best he could claim in his latest campaign to quit was having cut back and switched to an ultra low tar/nicotine brand.
‘Yeah, that too,’ he said. ‘Maybe this year I’ll manage to give them right away, huh?’
‘Well, I’m givin’ ’em away,’ Debbie asserted proudly. ‘And I’m doin’ it cold turkey. It’s time I set Alanna a good example.’
‘I wish I could’ve managed that. Good luck, Deb; take it from me, you’re in for a tough time.’
‘Mentionin’ tough… What’s this I hear about Savvy givin’ you the slip?’
Reb paused as a means of checking the anger the question reignited. His fifteen-year-old cousin was going to be lucky if he didn’t wring her neck first chance he got.
‘We had a disagreement about her going to some party tonight,’ he said finally. ‘As usual she holed up in her bedroom sulking. Then, while I was talking to Aman—er—a customer,’ he amended quickly, ‘she bolted. I didn’t know she wasn’t upstairs until about an hour later, after I finished working on Mrs Kelly’s FJ.’
‘Bolted? You mean ran away?’
‘No, no,’ Reb said quickly, responding to the alarm in Debbie’s expression. ‘She hasn’t taken any of her stuff. Just snuck off for the night. The brat left a note saying “Gone to party. Don’t wait up.” I’ll kick her butt into the middle of next month when I get hold of her,’ he promised.
‘I’m surprised you just didn’t go right out an’ haul her butt home.’
‘I would’ve if I’d had the slightest clue where the party was,’ Reb said curtly. ‘It’s because she wouldn’t give me any details in the first place that I said she couldn’t go. And her friends were predictably close-mouthed when I rang around trying to find out where it was. Her life won’t be worth living when I get my hands on her.’
‘Can’t be too tough on her, Reb,’ she said. ‘I mean, she’s a kid. Didn’t you do the same thing at fifteen?’
Reb hadn’t. There had been no point in sneaking out or even asking permission to do something or go somewhere when his old man had let him run his own race from the time he’d been able to walk. He hadn’t even started school the first time the cops had brought him home after finding him wandering along the highway. When his old man had died, he’d moved in with his uncle, but the then toddling Savannah was such a handful that Bill had relied on Reb’s self-sufficiency to extend to taking care of her as well. Trouble was, the teenage Savvy was proving more of a handful than the hyperactive two-year-old version had ever been.
‘Fairness isn’t high on my priority list right now,’ he grumbled. ‘I’ve got more than enough problems on my plate without all the stunts she’s been pulling these last few months.’
‘Problems?’ Immediate concern wrinkled Debbie’s features. ‘With the business?’
‘No, thank God! That’s the one part of my life that’s not currently causing me headaches. Although I’ll probably jinx myself sayin—’ Reb broke off at the sound of Joe Cocker’s voice cranked to a volume loud enough to shatter ice at both poles.
Debbie cursed. ‘I just told Gunna not to connect those other two amps! We’ll have the cops out here shortly.’
‘I don’t think you have to worry about breaking any noise acts tonight, Deb. Apart from it being New Year’s Eve there’s not another house for miles.’
‘I hope you’re right,’ she muttered. ‘There’s at least a dozen guys here who could get busted just on sight.’ She grimaced ruefully. ‘But then what else is new, right?
‘Now c’mon,’ she urged, grabbing his arm. ‘It’s almost time to count in the New Year and I reckon you and me are the only two still sober enough to manage it!’
It was dark when Amanda-Jayne awoke with a stomach that was mercifully settled and now craving food. Rolling over, she looked at the clock and smiled; at 11:50 p.m. on New Year’s Eve even the domestic staff wouldn’t be around, but more importantly neither would Patricia. Once again she wondered why she’d been cursed with the Cinderella version of a stepmother when other girls she’d known had got ones who would have crawled over crushed glass for them.
She’d been very young when her father married Patricia and any hopes she’d held that, after being motherless for two years, the quality of her life would only be improved by the marriage had been dashed long before its first anniversary. By then she’d been whole-heartedly entrenched in competition with her stepmother for every scrap of her father’s affection. Yet youthful enthusiasm was no match for experienced scheming and Patricia had been so adept at concealing her dislike of her stepdaughter from her husband that it was Amanda-Jayne who’d invariably come out looking bad. For all her late father’s famed all-seeing business vision, when it came to seeing through his second wife’s charade of ‘loving stepmother’ Andrew Vaughan had been pathetically myopic and insensitive to how lonely and excluded his daughter had come to feel in her own home. The situation had only worsened when Patricia had given birth to Joshua.
On the rare occasions it was deemed convenient for Amanda-Jayne to spend a weekend home from boarding-school, Patricia had made her feel like an outsider. Therefore, as soon as she’d turned eighteen Amanda-Jayne had chosen to move permanently to Sydney, returning to Vaughan’s Landing for only brief command visits to please her father. Since his death, she only returned to meet the terms of his will, but all that would change in forty-four months’ time. Come her thirtieth birthday, she’d have full legal title and control over the house.
Making her way down the small staff staircase leading from the upper floor to the kitchen, she couldn’t suppress the satisfaction she felt at knowing that Patricia knew she was on borrowed time as head of the house. Thanks to Amanda-Jayne’s great-grandfather’s very un-Victorian sense of equality, his will stated that in all future generations the Vaughan Hill house must pass to the eldest child regardless of sex. So, although the income from the Vaughans’ prosperous, century-old horse and cattle stud was to be equally divided between Joshua and herself, Amanda-Jayne was the heir to the family home. A situation which peeved Patricia no end since it granted her stepdaughter the power to exile her to the small cottage at the other side of the property once she assumed full control of her inheritance. In fact if her father hadn’t unreasonably stipulated that Amanda-Jayne couldn’t take full control until her thirtieth birthday, Patricia would have been ‘slumming it’ in the much smaller four-bedroom residence right now instead of still playing lady of the manor.
Some people might think it was mean to force Patricia to move to the smaller house, but Amanda-Jayne refused to acknowledge any guilt about what she intended to do. Considering the way she kicked me into boarding-school, she thought, why should I? By her father’s own admission the decision to send her away to school at age ten had been entirely her stepmother’s.
‘Patricia feels your mother and I were being extremely short-sighted and selfish in deciding to keep you in day school until senior high,’ he’d told her the day before she’d been shipped off to Sydney. ‘Patricia did two years of an education degree at university so she’s better qualified to make this decision than I am. You’ll thank her in the end.’
Well, ‘the end’ was still out of sight in any direction Amanda-Jayne looked, especially since whatever arguments her stepmother had used to convince her husband that she was an ‘education expert’ must have exceeded their use-by date when it had come time for her son’s education. Joshua hadn’t started boarding-school until this past year and already Patricia was dropping hints—the largest being the Ferrari Josh had got the day he’d gained his licence—that he wouldn’t be returning for his final year and silently daring Amanda-Jayne to challenge her on the subject.
Amanda-Jayne had refused to rise to the bait by demanding to know