Triggered by Love by Rachelle Ayala

Author:Rachelle Ayala [Ayala, Rachelle]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Lovely Hearts Press
Published: 2020-06-09T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter Thirty-Three

Sometime in the night, Jason must have picked her dead weight up and tucked her into her bed. Avery opened her eyes and closed them again to prolong the early morning peace of the humming air conditioner and faint traffic noises percolating up to her apartment.

She tried to let her mind go blank, the way it had when she must have crashed last night. She’d drained herself. Filtering her memories through a sieve was tiring. She’d given Jason enough background on a few of her parents’ friends without any smoking guns pointing to anyone she cared about.

The Leaches were part of her parents’ social circle. They were a privileged group. Influential people with influential friends, mixing friendship with business and politics. Her dad always aspired to be more than a military man. Her mother didn’t portray herself as the typical military wife. For one thing, she never moved from the house she inherited from her grandparents. There was no such thing as living on a military base for her. She was an artist and hung out in The Village. She was also twenty years younger—an entire generation apart from the dutiful housewife type who juggled babies and puppies in cooking and cleaning.

Dad deployed, and Mom painted and partied. Her father had married late and was close to retirement when Avery was born. While the older three remembered their father going to war, she, Damon, and Harper had a father who commuted no farther than The City.

The Manor was their world, and they’d grown up sheltered and coddled in private schools where everyone won a participation trophy. Success and adulation were bestowed by the sheer fact of their parents’ position on the financial and social hierarchy.

It wasn’t an easy upbringing, and definitely not painless. But in her stiff upper lip world, she didn’t go around crying.

She was a pretty girl who grew to be a pretty woman.

“She’s so beautiful. She should be a model,” was spoken from the time she was in a bassinet to her awkward braces and knock-kneed preadolescent stage. As she blossomed in her teens, it was the path she was predestined for.

Beauty had its stiff price, even in the rarified and privileged world of a general’s daughter.

Her parents socialized heavily, and her young life had been dominated by hiding in her room during dinner parties. The boys tormented the guests, played pranks, and got away with it. Her baby sister was cute and noisy enough to be sent to the nanny’s house.

Guests wandered the hallways, mistaking her bedroom for a bathroom or making some other excuse to invade her private space.

Some were embarrassed, but others leered like they’d won a prize. When she was ten, she made the mistake of sitting on a hard lap in exchange for a chocolate bar.

She learned not to fight or scream or the hand would clamp harder over her mouth. She learned to play dumb and allow the touching and groping, the sniffing of her hair, the fondling of her

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