Harlequin Desire January 2021--Box Set 1 of 2

by Maisey Yates

  Julian tossed back the duvet and swung his legs over the edge of the bed, his insides twisting with apprehension. He’d been on a high! Wrapping the movie on time if not on budget, earning the respect of the actors and the crew, collaborating with Frank—these were all things he was proud of. Getting to share the experience with the woman he loved was a surprise gift that he wasn’t sure he deserved. He was willing to go to the ends to defend this newfound happiness. He remembered his life before, and he wasn’t going back.

  He took the phone into the bathroom, and instead of wasting time scrolling through the messages, he called Kat. She answered straightaway.

  “Hey. What’s going on?”

  “Didn’t you read my texts?”

  “No. I was asleep.”

  “Is she with you?”

  It was too late to play these games. “What are you getting at?”

  “We need to speak privately.”

  “It’s all clear, just talk to me.”

  “All right. Nina Taylor kept detailed notes of your time together. Were you aware?”

  “She’s a writer.”

  “Intimate notes, Julian.”

  He breathed out through a fisted hand, forcing his brain to work. He tried coming up with the worst-case scenario. “She keeps a diary.”

  “To later publish as books.”

  “That’s not why she does it.”

  Nina had hated the experience of publishing a memoir—that much he knew. She was reluctant to write another. Besides, she didn’t have to. Screenwriting credits on your résumé had a way of widening your options.

  “I’m looking at her bio. She’s a memoirist. That’s it. Sure, she used to work at a magazine, but that was a long time ago.”

  “Why are you looking at her bio? What happened?”

  His temper flared so rarely, but everything about this conversation was pissing him off.

  “An excerpt of her diary was published on Celebrity-Soup.com.”

  He processed this, the gears of his brain grinding painfully slowly. “How did it get out?”

  “No one knows for sure, but I need you to consider that she leaked it.”

  “She didn’t.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I know.”

  An excerpt of her diary had been published on a gossip site. That was all they knew so far. But Julian knew how this worked. They would need someone to blame, someone to cast as a villain.

  “Julian, you don’t know this woman. She’s wiggled her way into your life, and now she’s writing about it. You didn’t make her sign anything. She’ll probably get a book deal.”

  “Kat.” His voice cut into the silence of the bathroom. “Be careful what you say about Nina.”

  “If I crossed a line, I’m sorry.”

  “I don’t need an apology. I need you to understand that she is not some random woman who wiggled her way into anything.”

  He’d lured Nina into his world, a world populated with paparazzi and gossip columnists. He would shield her anyway he could. She wasn’t an attention seeker. She was a writer, a thinker and a private person. He would not let anyone insult or degrade her.

  “Read the excerpt and see for yourself,” Kat said. “I sent you the link.”

  “Thanks, Kat,” he mumbled. “Sorry I jumped down your throat.”

  “Let’s talk again in the morning with cooler heads.”

  Julian ended the call. He scrolled his messages until he found the link to the website post. The title alone turned his stomach sour. One Hot Knight in Miami. Once again, his private life was served up for entertainment. He scrolled down and started reading. The words jumped at him. “May I taste?” Julian heard the tap on the bathroom door, but he couldn’t stop reading. When his tongue meets my tender skin, I’m not prepared for the rush… We haven’t made it to the bed.

  Intimate details.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  Nina was alone in bed. She was sure of it even before she opened her eyes to heavy darkness. Julian was in the bathroom arguing with someone over the phone. When silence settled in, she slipped out of bed and tapped on the bathroom door. No answer. She called out his name. Nothing. She opened the door a crack. “Everything okay?”

  He was staring intently at his phone, and when he looked up at her, the glow from the small screen gave him an eerie look.

  “Julian, what’s the matter?”

  He handed her the phone. “Explain this to me.”

  “Explain what?”

  She glanced at the screen, more concerned with the tight set of his jaw than any clandestine photo or provocative tweet. But she recognized the words as her own. He presses me against the door and hunches low. “What’s this?”

  “An excerpt from your journal.”

  Nina felt a tightening in her gut. She was going to be sick.

  “How did it end up online?” he asked.

  “I don’t know!” she cried. “You tell me!”

  “Did you leak it?” Those four words sent Nina reeling. She smacked his phone onto the counter and backed out of the doorway. He followed her into the bedroom. His voice was low when he asked the follow-up question. “Did they pay you?”

  Each word was a blow, and he wouldn’t shut up.

  “I need to hear you say it. Then we’ll figure out what to do.”

  She switched on the lights in the bedroom to better confront him. “You think I sold our story for money?”

  “I don’t. But since we don’t have a confidentiality agreement, I have to ask.”

  “A confidentiality agreement?”

  “I know. It sounds terrible, but it’s more common than you’d think.”

  On the first day they’d met, they’d hashed out an agreement. She’d promised not to write about him or anything that happened between them. She reminded him of her promise. His silence told her that it wasn’t enough. There was nothing he could add to or subtract from the equation to change the value of this revelation. Her promise, her word, was not enough.

  Alarm bells were ringing in the back of her head. She would not waste her breath trying to reassure Julian. She had to look out for herself. Someone had stolen her diary. How did they get it? Who had it now? How many people were reading, sharing and tweeting her words at this moment?

  She paced around the room. Soon Julian was doing the same. They circled each other.

  “Where’s the notebook?” he said. “Let’s see it.”

  She opened the nightstand and desk drawers, hoping her journal would magically appear. “It’s not here. To be honest, it’s been missing for weeks.”

  He faced her. “Your notebook is missing? And you said nothing?”

  “I asked the front desk if anyone had returned a missing journal. To be honest, I figured it would turn up.”

  “Let me understand. You kept a detailed record of everything we said and did together and took no measures to protect it?”

  Her breath was coming hard and fast. Legal agreements and records… Who was this man? “We’re talking about a diary, a place for my private thoughts. With or without any mention of you, I would have protected it. My diaries are private. I don’t share them with anyone.”

  “Except you do,” he said. “You turn them into books.”

  Nina’s anger snapped. “Get out.”

  “Calm down. We can talk this through.”

  “I am calm. And I want you out.”

  “Where do you want me to go? It’s the middle of the night.”

  “There’s a pullout couch in the other room,” she said. “Don’t worry. It’s comfortable.”

  Julian leaned against a chest of drawers. He’d gone pale under his honey-brown complexion. Nina turned away. Although he had hurt her, she could not bear to see him in pain. This was their first fight, and each blow had
proven to be fatal.

  * * *

  The Uber driver hummed to the tune on the radio. John Legend was crooning about everlasting love over the speakers. Nina wished she could rip the radio out of the dashboard and toss it out the window. She was living proof that love was dead.

  “How far is it?” she asked.

  “It’s way out by the zoo, so…yeah.”

  This meant nothing to Nina. “Okay.”

  “Good thing the roads are clear.”

  It was five in the morning. Nina had been up all night. With Julian banished to the other room, she packed, disentangled her phone charger from his and stuffed her makeup and important things in her tote bag. A quick text to Valerie and she had someplace to crash until she figured out her next step. The important thing was to slip out of Sand Castle undetected. She’d left Julian a note. It didn’t say much.

  The driver tapped her fingers on the steering wheel. She had long, elegant fingers and wore a princess-cut diamond on her left hand. Maybe love wasn’t dead after all. She glanced at Nina and suggested she take a nap. It was a tempting suggestion, but bad things happened when passengers dozed off in public transportation. However, pretending to nap meant that the driver could go back to humming love songs and Nina could fold into herself and mope undisturbed.

  She reclined her seat but did not close her eyes. If she did, she’d relive the night’s events. She kept her eyes locked on the tangled ribbon of highway. The minutes ticked away, and her eyes went dry from the strain. Despite her efforts, the unwelcome memories surfaced anyway and she relived it all.

  * * *

  It was close to six when Nina arrived at her cousin’s town house. Valerie lived with her husband in a tidy gated community. The porch lights were on, and she was waiting at the door. Valerie inspected her, eyes wide with concern. “Are you okay?” she asked. “What happened?”

  “We had a fight. It’s over.”

  “It’s over after one fight?”

  Nina massaged her temples. She did not want to be rude, but she really did not want to talk about it.

  “You look exhausted,” Valerie said. “I’ll take you upstairs.”

  The guest bedroom was, funny enough, a home office with a daybed pushed up against a wall. Nina stumbled onto the bed, and the enormity of what she’d lost came crushing on her. She wanted to howl with grief, but Valerie, in her pajamas and fuzzy slippers, hair tied back with a silk scarf, kept shuffling in and out of the room. She brought in a glass of water, a bottle of painkillers and a weighted blanket. Her cousin was an excellent hostess.

  “Get some sleep,” she said. “I took the day off. We can talk later.”

  “Why are you so nice?”

  Valerie paused, a hand on the doorknob. “Excuse me?”

  Nina sat up. “I’ve been nothing but standoffish with you…even bitchy. I keep hoping you’ll take the hint, and you never do.”

  Valerie’s face crumpled. Without makeup, she looked far younger than her twenty-nine years. “It’s a long story.”

  Nina shrugged. “I’d like to hear it.”

  Valerie shut the door and took a seat at the neat Ikea desk. Nina had instantly recognized it. She’d had a similar one a few years back. “My favorite uncle, your father, died when I was seven.”

  Nina was nine when her father had died in a car wreck. She hadn’t known that her absentee parent was anyone’s favorite anything. She hadn’t known much about him period. Her mother had been in her thirties when she got pregnant and not at all interested in settling down.

  “On the drive back from the funeral, my parents were talking. They said he’d wasted his life. He was handsome and charming—a so-called ladies’ man. But as you know, he never worked a day in his life.”

  “Yeah. I heard.” Nina looked down at her knuckles, embarrassed on her cousin’s behalf. Her father’s inability to hold a job was one of the reasons her mother had refused to take him seriously. When Nina was old enough, she’d explained that her father had been a fling and nothing more. “Someone to have a good time with.”

  “It was the first time, at least to my recollection, that my parents ever mentioned you by name. My cousin Nina.”

  Nina’s heart filled with a sort of ache that she had long thought extinct. Why did she have to pry? What good was it to revive these old ghosts?

  “My mom went on and on about how beautiful you were. My dad thought my uncle was a loser for not raising his daughter. According to my folks, he didn’t like to be around your mom because they’d fight—”

  “About money,” Nina blurted. “Yeah. I know.”

  It was true her parents had fought about money, late child support payments in particular. Then her dad had died prematurely, leaving her mother to make do. Although money was tight, Nina had not wanted for anything—ever. And by the time she’d started middle school, her mother’s career had picked up. “Do you pity me? Is that it?”

  “Oh, no! It’s the opposite!” Valerie moved off the chair and onto the daybed next to Nina. “My parents talked about you like some beautiful girl in New York City. In my mind, you were Eloise living at the Plaza. I wanted us to be best friends.”

  Nina pressed a palm to her forehead. For her, it had been the opposite experience. Her father’s big, boisterous family, with their Caribbean accents and traditions and foods, were an exclusive club to which she’d been barred access. She had never wanted to have anything to do with them. Valerie shuffled out of the room and returned with a box of tissues.

  “Where are your parents now?” Nina asked.

  “Port-au-Prince. They live there six months out of the year.”

  The older generation was now out of the picture. Here was Valerie, singlehandedly trying to repair the past and reshape the future. Nina couldn’t let her do it alone. “Thanks for the tissues. I’m going to wallow now.”

  “Gotcha.” Valerie rose to her feet. The sound of water rushing through pipes made the town house hum. Valerie’s husband was likely getting ready for work. What was his name again? Oh, yes. Patrick. “The weighted blanket will help with that. It’s a comfort. Trust me.”

  Nina wondered what Valerie would have to wallow about then stopped herself before she went down that route once again. She’d made that mistake with Grace. Everybody, no matter how rich, successful, stylish and attractive, had something to wallow about.

  After Valerie left, Nina crawled under the blanket with the box of tissues, wholly determined to soak the pillows with tears.

  * * *

  Nina stayed through the weekend, which meant she spent two days in her blanket fort, wiping tears and blowing her nose into wads of tissue. It helped that in her haste to escape the hotel, she’d inadvertently grabbed one of Julian’s T-shirts. She clung to it like Linus to a blanket. Now and again, she raised it to her nose, inhaling his clean scent, and she was in his arms again. Everything she loved about him surrounding her, except his massive trust issues and his disloyal little heart.

  She was caught in an infinity loop of heartache and humiliation. It was one thing to have her heart broken and yet another to be exposed to public ridicule at the same time. The one person who could possibly understand was the jerk who’d smashed her heart in the first place.

  On Sunday, Nina had no choice but to crawl out of her cave. It was Patrick’s thirty-fifth birthday, and Valerie had organized a little gathering. Since Nina had been hiding out in the man’s home office for days, she figured she owed it to him to shower, dress, brush her hair and wish him a happy birthday. In the morning, she was flying back to New York.

  At the moment, she had a few more solid hours of blanket-fort time ahead. She wiggled around and settled in. Just as she got comfortable, Valerie burst into her room, carrying a laptop.

  “Julian made a statement. Check this out.”

  Nina’s heart took off in wild gallop. He’d made
a statement! What was there to say? She shoved off the blanket and joined Valerie at the desk. Her cousin was clicking around the web, trying to pull up a Miami Herald article without first having to subscribe to the paper, join an email list or take a survey.

  “Okay. Here goes… Wait. Okay. Damn it! Buffering.”

  A video was downloading at a snail’s pace. Nina watched the screen in terror. The slow Wi-Fi was criminal, but as much as she was eager for the video to load, she wasn’t prepared to see Julian again—not even on a computer screen.

  “Has he tried to reach out to you?” Valerie asked while they waited.

  That was anyone’s guess. “I haven’t checked my phone.”

  She’d left it on airplane mode and buried it in the bottom of a bag. Nina had needed to go dark. She could not handle the onslaught of messages that had flooded her inboxes. Her social media mentions had exploded. Last she’d checked her phone, #1HOTKNIGHT and #1KNIGHTSTAND were trending and every troll in the world agreed that she stood to gain the most from the scandal. After her agent had called with an offer from an editor to buy the rights to the “hot Knight story,” she’d had no choice but to go dark.

  “Okay. Here we go!” Valerie said.

  A brief intro and there he was, standing in the hotel’s courtyard. The fountain splashed and gurgled just a few feet away. He wore his usual T-shirt and tailored jacket combo, eyes hidden behind sunglasses.

  Nina yearned for him. She couldn’t help it. The sight of him would always move her this way.

  “We’re here today in Miami Beach with actor JL Knight,” the reporter said. “Mr. Knight, you are certainly no stranger to scandal. Let’s get to the heart of it. Who is Nina Taylor? Did you know her long?”

  Julian looked straight to camera to deliver his answer. “Nina Taylor is an acquaintance, someone that I met and worked with here in Miami. The publication of her diary was a violation of privacy. We will pursue legal action.”

  “Thank you, Mr. Knight.”