Scarlett Sinner (The Scarletts Read online

  Here she could nurse the mammoth feeling of betrayal that seemed as if it was lodged in her chest somewhere near her heart; it refused to die down. She was trying desperately to get rid of it but it was going nowhere. This had been festering for ten months now but in the past couple of days it had mushroomed into large proportions.

  She rested her head on the steering wheel and breathed in and out slowly, hoping that her breathing would ease the tightness. It didn't. She felt mad, angry, disillusioned, joyless, and depressed.

  Lloyd Scarlett had told her just now to take it easy, not to make any rash decisions but she couldn't listen to him. He was Troy's father; he had the best interest of his family at heart, but in her head, she was no longer a part of that family. She was definitely leaving Troy. She couldn't be a stepmother to this little boy. She didn't want to be.

  She had not asked for this situation. She hated it with a passion. It was time to think about herself and what was best for her.

  Since her marriage to Troy everything had been done his way. She was always the one compromising, and she was not going to be compromising on this.

  She cast her mind bitterly over the last few years, not caring that she was painting the past with the brush of her bitter, twisted feelings of today.

  Troy was the villain in her piece. The man who had ruined her life, her happiness, and her trust.

  She had a college degree in business administration and had she ever used it? No...Troy had proposed to her just after college and they had gotten married a few weeks later. She had loved him too much to say no to the proposal.

  She had not wanted to wait to marry him, even though their parents had protested.

  It had not mattered to them that their parents had cast doubt on the proceedings. They had found it hypocritical since both sets of parents had gotten married in their early twenties too, and they had still managed to stay together.

  Shortly after their wedding they had Dahlia.

  She had been in the middle of job hunting when she found out that she was pregnant. Troy had already gotten a position as an assistant pastor at Pedro Plains church and they were living lean. Really lean. But they were happy.

  They had moved into the Pedro neighborhood in one of those fixer-upper houses that some relative of his had leased to them for a small sum. It had been fun—fixing up the old place together, planning for their baby.

  Even the fact that she was a first lady was a novel experience. She loved the people at Pedro church. They were practically family.

  After Dahlia was born, she started job hunting again and then Troy had convinced her to home-school Dahlia for a while—a while turned into two years and then three and four. Finally, at the ripe old age of twenty-six, Chelsea could not take it anymore. She needed to work, to put that business degree to good use; she was not cut out to be a housewife for the rest of her life. She loved her daughter but she was going stir crazy at home.

  So she enrolled Dahlia in the local primary school and set her sights on finding a job.

  Troy had protested because everything had to go his way.

  When she had finally gotten a job in Black River, some distance away, at a bank, Troy had vetoed it. "It is too far, Chelsea. Who is going to pick up Chelsea from school in the afternoons? We don't need the money that desperately…"

  She had given up the position and then, in the middle of May, about when Pops had died, she had gotten the bombshell that Troy was in a paternity lottery for a child.

  Five years of bliss overturned with the utterance of three letters...DNA.

  At first she had thought she heard wrongly. First of all, Troy would not have had unprotected sex with a girl like Erin. Everybody knew of Erin's reputation in university. It was whispered about in the hallways and corridors, in the classrooms and dorms, that Erin Irving was no better than a lady of the night.

  It was even rumored that she made her school fee that way and her grades were gotten that way too. She went through school using her body as currency.

  So it stood to reason that a fastidious religion student would not go anywhere near Erin, no matter how pretty she was or how provocatively she dressed. Every good girl knew that they were better than Erin and expected that their boyfriends would never stoop to Erin's level.

  The day she had found out that Troy had indeed stooped to that level, it had killed something in her. She did not care that they weren't together when he had sex with Erin.

  She didn't care that Troy had actually slept with somebody else when they had promised each other that they would both wait until marriage. She didn't even care much that for five and a half years she had been living under the illusion that she and Troy were each other's firsts.

  Nope.

  What she cared about above all else was that Troy Scarlett, her Troy Scarlett, had sexual intercourse with Erin Irving.

  The thought was gag-worthy. It could have been anybody else. Anybody! Even the old cafeteria lady with the double chins or the pretty as a picture admin lady in the president's office that all the guys used to get hot for.

  Of all the people in the whole college campus, Troy had to sleep with Erin!

  It was a thought worthy of mangling her mind.

  She had hated Erin, not just because of her reputation or her in-your–face, unapologetic brashness, but because Erin was hateful and spiteful. They had been mortal enemies.

  Troy had heard her complain enough about Erin that he should have stayed far away from her. He knew how much Erin had tried to derail her in college.

  And yet not only had he betrayed her with Erin, but he had a child with her.

  The thought was enough to make her get out of the car. She had to escape these thoughts. They had been whirling in her head like a washing machine on overdrive.

  She went into the house and headed to her room. She had left a collection of different clothes in the chest of drawers. She took out a blue and white polka-dot summer dress that was sleeveless and comfortable. She pushed her feet into white flip-flops, exchanged her head band for a white one and headed outside to the beach. She could easily walk on the shoreline from where she was to Calabash Bay. Maybe a seven mile walk would do good to clear her mind of the thoughts cluttering her head, or at least tire her too much to think.

  She opened the back gate and started walking. She would think happy thoughts that did not involve Troy, or Erin, or the son they had together.

  She would think about job hunting once again and moving away from Treasure Beach all together.

  She and Dahlia would start over. She could do it. She was strong. Life moved on; she would just have to move with it.

  *****

  Walking was not proving to be the therapy that she had thought that it would be, Chelsea realized. After walking this far up the beach her feet were burning. She had long taken off her flip-flops and was walking barefooted in the sand. That was not a good idea and she should have known better.

  Her family had lived in the area long enough for her to know the effects of walking on hot sand for an extended period. She sat down on a washed-up log and looked at the dying rays of the sunset. Sometimes the sea came far enough up to where she was sitting to soothe her tired feet. She needed to head back home. She didn't want Daisy to bring Dahlia by and she wasn't there. She didn't want to be known as the absent parent. She knew she was already regarded as high-strung and volatile, and God knows what else Troy was saying about her.

  She overheard Reuben calling her a diva.

  She was no diva, never had been, but obviously in this little scenario she was the bad one because she didn't want to take in the little orphan boy. She should just fall in line and meekly accept this dark mark on her life like a true Christian.

  Take in the stray child of Erin Irving, forget that her husband had betrayed her in the worst possible way in the past and suck it up with a smile on her face.

  Obviously, they did not know her, nor did they know how devastated she was.

  Chelsea clos
ed her eyes.

  She hated to revisit her college days in her mind’s eye. Troy had killed it all for her now but she just couldn't seem to help herself. As soon as she thought about Erin and Troy it just came back...

  Chapter Three

  2003-Mount Faith University

  The auditorium was crowded. It was the final day of orientation and the final day to pay school fees and work out financing. She had gone through the pay-in-full line. There were not many students in that line. She was fortunate. Her parents had been saving for her university from the moment she was born. Her father worked as a senior engineer at Aluminum Partners of Jamaica and her mother was a loan officer at a Farmers Cooperative. They could afford to pay her way through university with ease.

  They had just moved to Treasure Beach from the cool hills of Malvern. Her father had a hankering to be close to the sea and had bought a sprawling bungalow near the sea.

  Chelsea was the only child still at home and she had hated the move at first. She understood the allure of living near the sea and all of that, but she preferred living in the hills where it was cool. That was why she had applied to Mount Faith University, though it was a more expensive than the universities in Kingston.

  She stood near one of the windows of the auditorium looked out at the pretty campus and inhaled deeply. She was going to love it here. She turned around slightly from her contemplation and her eyes made four with a guy.

  He had been steadily staring at her. It was funny but she had felt his stare earlier. She had no idea that a stare could be so physical.

  She looked at him, a frown puckering her brow. He was sitting in a chair in one of the student loans lines. He was tall—she could see that from where she stood—and lean, almost too lean, like he could do with a meal or two. His green sweatshirt seemed to swamp him a little.

  His face was angular, with a square chin and a dimple in his left cheek. He looked like one of those guys who could get a woman to take off her clothes just by raising an eyebrow. He had that brooding, sensual look about him.

  Chelsea turned away from him as swiftly as the thought came and walked out of the auditorium. Maybe she would crash in her dorm room for the time being, until her friends sorted out their financial stuff.

  The guy gave her an unsettled feeling, which was strange because she had seen several good looking guys since the start of orientation but none had that effect on her.

  She had just reached the door to go outside when she felt a tap on her shoulder.

  It was him.

  He grinned at her. "I didn't get your name."

  They were almost on the same height; he was a little taller, which meant that he was tall. She was six feet flat and she had always been super-conscious about her height; she felt like a giant compared to the rest of the petite girls around.

  "We were not having a conversation," Chelsea said. Her voice was dismissive. Who did he think he was?

  "Yes, we were." He looked at her knowingly. "With our eyes. I was saying come on over and say hi. And you were mentally nodding, wanting to drift closer, but then you changed your mind."

  Chelsea flushed. He wasn't far off the truth, this mind reader guy.

  "My name is Troy Scarlett." He moved out of the way of someone who was coming through the door and in the process moved closer to her. "I have to go back to my seat. Erin is holding it for me."

  Chelsea looked over where he was seated to see a girl looking at the two of them curiously. She was pretty, heart-shaped face, eyebrows plucked a little bit too severely, very light complexion. She had in a blonde weave that complimented her skin.

  "I need to know your name and dorm so that I can come by and look for you after I sort out things at the business office."

  Troy had looked at her as if it was a done deal that she would fall all over herself to give him her details or even allow him to come to her dorm. He was cute but she was no easy girl.

  "My name is none of your business," Chelsea replied waspishly. "You don't want to hang out with me, you already have, er, what's her name?"

  "Erin," Troy said solemnly, though his eyes were laughing, telegraphing to her that he knew she had taken one look at Erin and had gone into instant jealousy mode.

  "I just met her. She was sitting beside me in the line. She said she'd keep my space till I return."

  Chelsea smiled. She couldn't help herself. Erin didn’t have a claim on him. He had left the line just to meet her.

  "Well, in that case...my name is Chelsea Padmore. I live in Blue Palm Apartments."

  Troy whistled. "Rich girl. I live off campus, can't afford to live on. I'll need your number. I'll call you when I am done here."

  Chelsea gave it to him and he had entered it into his phone, a satisfied smile on his face. She headed out of the auditorium, wondering what on earth had possessed her to just give away her number like that.

  And why she had yearned for him to call her during the day, sighing with blatant relief when he finally did.

  *****

  Chelsea tried to rouse herself from her memories and get up from the log. It was okay thinking about the first year of university. Those were the good times. She and Troy had been inseparable back then. He did religion, she did business; they met up for lunch most days in the school cafeteria. They were perfect together until some over-enthusiastic journalist wannabe had named them most good-looking freshman couple of the year.

  At first she had taken the constant ribbing and good-natured jokes about her and Troy with wry humor, but little did she know that the article would have caught Erin's attention and stirred up a dormant jealousy which Chelsea until then had been unaware of.

  She had not even registered Erin's presence on campus, even though they were in the same department and doing the same major. She had been just a girl, an ordinary student, a party girl type with a not—so—savory reputation even then.

  That one article had brought out the worst in Erin. Suddenly she was everywhere. She moved into Chelsea's dormitory and had made her sophomore year quite hellish for her.

  First she started with the spreading of lies, whispering to anyone who would listen that Chelsea was an undercover lesbian, Chelsea cheated on tests, Chelsea was stealing money at the business office where she worked as a student worker. Chelsea was having an affair with the president. It had not even occurred to Chelsea that she had been the culprit. The two—faced snake had actually befriended her and had alternated between being a friend and an enemy.

  It had been exhausting having Erin around. It was in the third year that Erin upped her game; she became Troy’s off—campus neighbor. Chelsea was sure that she would have jumped at the opportunity to live in the same house as Troy if the opportunity presented itself.

  Erin had started spying on Troy and taunting Chelsea with the things that he supposedly got up to. He lived in a house where a few other girls lived, too, and of course Erin was always front and center with the news, especially about Joy Marie, a fellow religion major who studied with Troy.

  Chelsea became paranoid and suspicious and started doubting Troy. By fourth year it had gotten so bad that they were breaking up every other week. Troy thought she was unhinged and she thought he didn't love her.

  And that final month before exams she had told Troy in no uncertain terms that she couldn't deal with him and his drama anymore.

  As usual, Troy had looked as if he had no clue what she was talking about but he had seemed to reach a breaking point too and had agreed that yes they should part.

  And that was when Erin had moved in on him. It had taken her three and a half years to break them up. She had played Chelsea like a pawn and had won.

  Chelsea remembered Erin's final conversation with her like it was yesterday...

  April 2007

  "Hey, Chelsea Padmore!"

  Chelsea was in the process of handing in her borrowed library books when she spun around and literally bumped into Erin and her friend Keira Willis.

  It was final ye
ar and Erin had gone through something of a metamorphosis. Maybe it was Keira's influence, because Keira was a genuinely nice person; everybody liked her. Since spending time with her Erin was looking surprisingly conservative. Her hair color was back to natural tones, her dressing had changed from a come-hither vibe to a more professional vibe.

  Like today: she was dressed in a plain white blouse that was buttoned up to her neck and she had on a not-so-tight pinstripe skirt that had a split at the side. Usually the blouse would be unbuttoned to near her nipples and the skirt would not be a little above her knee. It would probably be way up in the middle of her thighs, showing off her legs.

  While she admired the subtle change, Chelsea could not warm to Erin as a person. She was still the same rotten person she had always been.

  Chelsea barely restrained herself from snarling at her. Somebody had reported to her Business Statistics professor that she had cheated on her final exam, an offense that was punishable by expulsion, and she knew that Erin had told the lie on her.

  She knew it in her bones.

  She had to do over the exam to prove her innocence, even after Professor Gillings had listened to her protests with a certain benign air, as if he was humoring her. He had then set an exam time that was so close to another important exam that she was practically run off her feet.

  To make matters worse, Gillings had seemed to revel in her predicament. He had been one of the lecturers rumored to be one of Erin's lovers. Chelsea had chafed at the unfairness of it all.

  Luckily she had aced the exam, getting an even higher grade than the one she had supposedly cheated on.

  The feeling of injustice had been following her for weeks. If she was a violent person she could just wring Erin's scrawny neck now.

  "Chelsea...hello." Keira waved her hand in front of her face. "You are just standing there with a scowl."