Strange Secrets

by Lexy Timms

  I pushed that kiss to the back of my mind and put my focus on work, work, work until the article was done, totally polished to the point that I knew nobody could argue with what I had put out there. I turned it in to Allison, who came back to me with just a couple of edits before she accepted it.

  And then I was done for the day. I tried not to think about what the article might do when it came out tomorrow—tried not to think about what Jesse was going to say when he saw it. All that mattered for now was the fact that I could go home and get some rest. And that I had another high-profile article in the Press to my name as soon as our edition tomorrow hit the proverbial shelves.

  And that was something to be proud of. Even if I couldn’t help but feel a nagging guilt where the pride should have been.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Jesse

  AS I CHECKED MY EMAILS for that morning, I found a smile curling up my face. Which wasn’t my standard reaction to having to pass some extra time at work, but with someone like her to fill my mind, why shouldn’t I be a little happier than normal?

  I knew that everything on that date had gone about as well as it could have, and I intended to revel in that right down to the last second. We were good together—really good together. The chemistry we shared was intense, and I could tell from the way she had looked at me when she had stepped out of that car that she wanted nothing more than for me to call her back and take her back to my place.

  And, as tempting as it had been to do just that, I had better things to focus on right now than getting her into bed. I wanted to get to know her first. I wanted to be sure that I had made the right choice in selecting her as the woman that I had drawn into this part of my life. We were good together, so far, but that didn’t mean that it was going to translate long-term...

  Or maybe I was just already putting a few restraints in place because I was worried that I might just fuck this up and didn’t want to have to handle carrying the weight of that on my shoulders. I had no idea what the hell dating even looked like in this day and age, let alone if I could do it—let alone if I could make it work with someone like her. She was passionate, intelligent, funny, beautiful—she had everything going for her, and I had no idea if she would be willing to settle for someone like me. Not really.

  Perhaps she had just gone out with me to find out a little more about my background. And sure, I had given it to her—not enough that she would ever find out the truth, of course, but enough to make her feel like she could. Luke had interrogated me the night after, when I had come down to the Rosewater for a drink, about how it had gone, what had happened, what I had told her, and I had managed to keep him from freaking the fuck out about all of it. I considered that a major win. I knew that he was never going to be happy with the idea of me letting someone get close to us, but I didn’t care about that right now—I couldn’t spend my whole life bending over backwards to make sure that my little brother was happy, not when he was a grown-ass adult in his own right. That was on him. And everything else? Well, that was on me.

  I had come into the office this Sunday to pass some time, mainly because sitting around at home alone I had found myself stuck with the memories of the date and everything that had happened Friday night. I wanted to see her again so badly, but I wasn’t interested in coming off as desperate—the two of us had something, for sure, and if it was as serious as I felt like it was, then there was no reason for me to go chasing it down. It would come to me. I knew that it would.

  Besides, all the talk we’d shared last night about Kingston and everything that I had done to improve this town had me jonesing to go through some of the new files that had been submitted to the business. I intended to choose a few of them to go through to the next stage—honestly, it was hard to pick these days, because everything that people put over to me seemed like a good idea. And, in the good mood I was in right now, I didn’t want to let anyone down at all.

  I sat back from my desk, closed my eyes, and scrubbed my hand over my face. I swear, sometimes it felt like the emails that I was going through burned their way into the inside of my retinas. But it was worth it. When I handed over the money, when I used my effort and my energy to do something useful, I knew that it was worth all the hassle that came with this life. I would never complain about everything that had brought me here because being able to switch things up and change for the better was about the best gift that I could give to this town.

  Talking about it with Sarah on Friday, it had struck me how lucky I had been to fall into a place like Kingston. It could have been anywhere in the world, but it had been here—I had driven randomly until I had found a place I could hide out in, and Kingston had taken me in without any questions. The least I could do for it was pay it back in kind, with the support that it needed to keep growing.

  And now that the interview with the Press was done, I could finally sit back and relax and know that I had secured my place here for at least a little while longer. It might not have been much, but it was enough for me to work with right now. Things were looking up, and I was going to enjoy this optimism that seemed to have wiped clean the slate from all the nightmares that I had been having this month.

  I was about to get to my feet to go for a coffee, when my phone rang.

  “Hello?” I asked, wondering if this might be Sarah, calling to ask for another date. I might tease her a little before I said yes, but I had no intention of disagreeing—I wanted to see her again, and I knew that our second date would probably be way more exciting than our first...

  “Jesse,” Luke’s voice came down the line. I stifled a sigh. I shouldn’t have been disappointed by my own damn brother, and I wasn’t about to let him think that hearing from him was a let-down.

  “Have you seen the Press website today?” he demanded. He sounded urgent. I furrowed my brow.

  “No, why not?” I asked.

  “Check it. Now,” he ordered me. I sat back down at my desk and pulled up my browser, typed in the site for the Kingston Press, and then, a moment later, I saw it.

  And my stomach felt like it had just dropped into my shoes. Because right there, on the front page, with no warning, was a picture of me from when I was a teenager. Under a giant block-capitals headline—THE SECRET HISTORY OF KINGSTON’S BILLIONAIRE PHILANTHROPIST.

  I stared for a little while longer, waiting for this to blink out of existence in front of me. There was no way that this could be real, could it? No, no, not a chance in hell. I must have been misreading it...

  “How did they get a picture of you from when you were younger?” my brother asked. His voice sounded distant down the other end of the line, and I had nearly forgotten that he had called me at all.

  “I don’t know,” I muttered, shaking my head. “I don’t...”

  I stared at the picture of me, wondering if it might have been a shop, but there was no way that they could have gotten the details right—the scar under my left eye, the shorn haircut to keep it all out of my face when I was busy taking care of jobs in the city. This was me. A picture of me. I didn’t know how they had managed to get their hands on it, but there was no doubt at all in my mind.

  And that was seriously bad news.

  “Did you know they were going to run this on you?” he asked.

  “No, I didn’t,” I replied. “I just knew about the interview, that’s it.”

  “Yeah, okay,” Luke muttered. “So why did they follow up with something like this?”

  “Guess they weren’t happy with what they had,” I replied. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. And, as I scrolled down, something even worse came to my attention.

  Sarah’s name was attached to the article.

  I furrowed my brow. I had to be reading this wrong. There was no way that this could—there was no way that she had gone out with me on Friday and kissed me in the car and looked at me like that with every intention of publishing something like this about me as soon as she got the chance.

  I tried to scroll t
hrough the article, but my vision was so blurred that I couldn’t take any of it in. I needed to get my head together. I didn’t know how I could do that, when there was—when this was out there, just out there for anyone to find. That picture of me as a kid, right alongside the images of me as a grown-ass adult in Kingston—if someone from my past saw this and put the two pieces together, then everything that I had worked so hard to contain might have come flowing out like a tidal wave to engulf the whole of my new life here.

  “Do you think it has anything to do with the guy who was at the Rosewater last week?” Luke asked me. I hadn’t even thought about that.

  “I doubt it,” I assured him quickly. “Don’t worry about it.”

  I knew that he already was. Luke was the more neurotic of the two of us, and I knew that this, combined with the invasion into the Rosewater the last week, must have been sending him spiraling into a panic that he couldn’t control.

  “Pretty hard to do that,” he replied. “You think they have anything on me?”

  “I don’t think there’s anything to get on you,” I replied. He snorted with something close to amusement, though not exactly like it.

  “Fair point,” he agreed. “What are you going to do about it?”

  “I haven’t decided yet,” I replied. “I need to go. I’ll talk to you later.”

  “But—”

  Before he could say another word, I had hung up the phone. I needed to be done with this, with all of it. I had to get out of my head. And I had to get this article off the website before someone from my past saw it—and made my life a whole hell of a lot harder than it already was.

  I walked the rest of the way home, not caring about the biting wind and ignoring the way that it stung my skin. I had places to be. Anywhere but alone in that office, feeling like the weight of the world was pressing down on my shoulders.

  I had to find out how they had gotten that picture. I had to make sure that no versions of it were even close to existing any longer. I wanted to tear my hair out, to cover my face and make sure that nobody could get a second look at me. Were more people staring at me than normal? Usually, I couldn’t even tell, but right now, I was certain that I could feel the weight of their eyes on me, scanning me, trying to read me, probably wondering if I had seen those pictures in the Press.

  But all I could think about was the name that was attached to it. And just what the hell she had been trying to do on our date. Because if I found out that this had been a plan to expose me—I was ready to expose her right back.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Sarah

  AS I SAT IN MY APARTMENT, a glass of wine in hand, scrolling through the article once more, I couldn’t keep the big, cheesy grin off my face. How could I not indulge myself in feeling a little stab of victory, knowing that I had pulled this off? I had done it. I had written a damn good article, and I had proved that I had a place in this industry just the same way that anyone else who worked at the Press did.

  A few people had come over to congratulate me on how well the article was doing—apparently, it was pulling in big numbers, though I could hardly believe that people had that much interest in something that I had done. It didn’t seem as though it could be possible, but here I was—sitting in this place, staring at the shares and likes and the comments that were stacking up with every passing second.

  Most of the comments revolved around Jesse, of course—particularly, how much he had helped people. It seemed as though every person in this town had a story of how he had helped them or their cousin or their best friend out of some hellish nightmare and then managed to save them in the process. He really was an awesome guy, no doubt about it, using all that money for good. Sure, this article might have been more about what we didn’t know, but it seemed like most of this town only cared about what they did know for sure about him. And that that was pretty damn flattering, actually.

  It made me proud to think that this was the guy who had shown such an interest in me. He really liked me—he wanted to see me again, in fact—and he must have known that he could have had his pick of anyone in this town, man or woman. I tried not to think about all the competition that I must have been fighting off in that moment because I knew that he was only focused on me, and that was all that mattered.

  I knew that this was an important piece for me, the first that I would proudly display in my portfolio if I ever went to get another job. It carefully toed the line between coming outright and saying that there was something fishy about his past and acknowledging everything that we knew about his present. It was a solid article, impressive enough that Allison had only changed a couple of details on it before she had put it out on the site. I knew that it would be the talk of the town over the week to come, and I could hardly wait to see what everyone had to say about it.

  Because surely someone knew something that I didn’t about what had drawn Jesse to this place, right? I was still curious to know why he had been so eager to leave his past life behind. What had happened? What had gone down that he had wanted nothing more than to forget that it had ever happened? I was sure that it had to be something serious, but I had no clue what he could have been involved in. Why did he change his name? Why did he shut down when I asked him certain questions about his past? There was so much I wanted to know, and I knew that I was going to have to go deep-diving for all of it if I wanted to find out the truth. He was never going to come clean with me, and I just had to find a way to deal with that.

  Even if I knew that my curiosity was going to get the better of me sooner or later.

  Well, we had another date soon—I didn’t know when, but surely, he wouldn’t leave me waiting too long after that incredible kiss in his car. Even just thinking about it now was enough to make the soles of my feet tingle. Did he think about me as much as I thought about him? I hoped so. I wanted to see the look on his face when we laid eyes on each other once more, that confirmation, once and for all, that all that chemistry wasn’t going to go to waste.

  I kept scrolling through the comments idly, flicking my eyes back and forth over the words and taking in all the praise for him that seemed determined to insulate against any of the questions that might have been swirling around him now that my article was out. People wanted to cover for him, that much was for sure, and I had to admit, I didn’t blame them. With everything that he had done for this town, it was hard to think of him as anything other than a do-gooder who should be protected at all costs. After all, who could say when they might be the ones in need of his help...?

  I slowed as I saw a comment that broke from the theme of the rest of them. It was short and written in a blunt language that made my stomach stir.

  We all have to pay for our sins sometime.

  I stared at it for a little while, trying to work out if it was meant for another article—it was cheesy, sounded like the tagline for a movie that the arts department might have reviewed or something. What was it doing on my post? I clicked on the blank icon next to it to find out who had left it there, but there was no name attached to it, no face, no nothing. Just that strange statement, laced with a vague threat, that made a shiver run down my spine.

  I closed the laptop. Well, I could catch up on what everyone else had been saying later—for now, I wanted to get myself another glass of wine, maybe order some takeout, and revel in the fact that I had actually managed to pull this off. I had hardly pictured this being my very first major article on the site—writing about the history of a man that I had been on a date with just a few days before—but hey, you take the wins where you can get them, right?

  I heard a car outside but didn’t bother going to check who it was—likely just one of the neighbors coming back late from work or something. Maybe they would have questions about me, about the article, about Jesse—if they waylaid me in the stairwell, I wasn’t sure that I would be able to provide them much in the way of answers, but I would try my best. Since it seemed as though I was becoming the resident expert on Jesse Miller
in this town...

  Suddenly, there were footsteps on the stairs—they sounded urgent, as though whoever was coming up here had reason to be in a rush. I thought about cracking the door, sticking my nose out to make sure that they were okay, but I decided against it. I wanted to relax tonight. I didn’t want to deal with anyone else’s shit. I felt like I had done enough of that as it was, going into Jesse the way that I had, and I intended to make the rest of the evening totally and utterly and completely about nothing but myself.

  I was about to pour myself another glass of wine when I heard an urgent thumping on the door. It made me jump—who the hell was that? One of my adoring public already? I tried to keep it light in my head, but I couldn’t. There was something about the sound of those fists beating on the door that made my stomach feel like it was curdling, and I couldn’t handle the dread that was already beginning to inch up inside of me at the sound of it.

  I peered through the peephole—and, to my total and utter surprise, I saw Jesse standing on the other side of the door. He looked ferociously pissed. I winced. Whatever this was, whatever he was doing here, I doubted that it was good news for me. I opened the door and stared at him for a moment, and he just glared back at me as though he was having to restrain himself from ripping the damn door off its hinges.

  “Jesse, what are you doing here?” I began, but before I could get any further, he stormed into the room, pushing past me without asking for permission to come on. My eyebrows shot up, and I felt a bristle of annoyance in my chest at the way that he was acting. Who the fuck did he think he was? He couldn’t just barge in here with no warning—we might have agreed to another date, but that didn’t mean that I was just going to lie down and let him walk all the hell over me like this.