Her Secret Life

by Tara Taylor Quinn

  The unmistakably hurt look in her eyes nicked his barriers. “I can’t believe you just asked me that.”

  He was her...sponsor...albeit secretly, unofficially and probably unnecessarily, too. But she’d wanted someone she’d have to be accountable to if she ever felt like slipping back into her old ways. Someone without undue investment in the outcome.

  “So, no?” He forced himself to remain completely noncommittal. She needed help, not judgment. He had to know whatever she could give him before he started building his investigation.

  “No.”

  “Okay, good.”

  “Why is that good?” she asked him. “Beyond the obvious of me not being drunk.”

  “I now know this was Photoshopped,” he said. It wasn’t much, but it was somewhere to begin. “I’m assuming you want to know who took the picture.”

  “I want to know who posted it,” she said. “And why.”

  “It says right here, posted by K&Ltoget...” It was just a screen name.

  “K&Ltoget didn’t post that,” she said. “It’s on some rag fan site...”

  He saw that now. Recognized the name of a public blog where pretty much anyone could post anything they considered newsworthy. Didn’t have to be true. Or really even news...

  She’d said K&Ltoget didn’t post it. As if she knew...

  “Who’s K&Ltoget?” he asked, in spite of a strong suspicion he’d figured it out. His fingers itched for his keyboard.

  “Kacey and Lacey together forever,” she said. “We never used it as a screen name, but what are the chances of someone coming up with the same exact configuration? It was our first email address. K&Ltoget. At the time, that’s as long as the address could be.”

  Her chin was firm, like she was holding emotions in check. He wanted her smiling. Always.

  “Do either of you still use the address?”

  “There’s no way Lacey would post something like this...”

  “I’m not saying she did. I’m not even thinking she could have. I want to know if either of you still use it.”

  “Only when we’re writing to each other.”

  “When was the last time either of you sent something from that account?”

  She motioned her head toward the phone he still held. “Look at my email,” she told him. “You’ll see.”

  He hit the back button. Scrolled through her inbox, careful to ignore anything that didn’t pertain to the business at hand.

  But he noticed that she’d saved his last several emails to her. She’d saved others, too.

  That was Kacey. All inclusive. One of the things he liked about her...

  “Last Wednesday,” he said, finding what he was looking for. “You sent each other a string of messages last Wednesday.”

  She nodded. “Sounds right.”

  “That’s five days ago.”

  She nodded and he asked, “Mind if I send this to myself?”

  “Of course not...”

  He did so. Quickly. Efficiently. Handed her back her phone. He needed to get back to the office.

  “Michael? That was our private email when we were kids. We never used it for business. No one ever knew it.”

  He nodded, tapped his finger on the table. Then patted a soft rhythm on his thigh.

  “You think someone hacked into our computers or phones?”

  He shrugged. “I’m not sure what’s going on.” Which was why he had to get going. “If your email was hacked, you would probably know it. You aren’t getting any new influx of spam, are you? Anything unusual coming through?”

  She shook her head but didn’t seem ready to take off, like she needed to sit with a friend she could trust for a second.

  Part of him wanted to give her that. So he stayed. This wasn’t the first time someone had posted something derogatory about her. That came with the territory. They weren’t dealing with life and death.

  So why did it feel like they were?

  CHAPTER TWO

  “WE MAKE QUITE a pair...”

  Walking beside Michael toward their cars in the run-down parking lot, Kacey wished they had just a little more time together. He was so easy to be with. The only one in her life who never seemed to want anything from her.

  Or need anything. Not that she had a problem with being needed. She didn’t. At all. She’d hate it if her loved ones didn’t need her. Still, it was nice to just be...

  Stopping between his blue SUV and her Mustang convertible, a thank-you gift to her and Lacey for a commercial they’d done and which Lacey hadn’t wanted, she looked up at him—a good five inches up—into his shaded brown eyes.

  “Why do you say that?” she asked, not sure she liked the slightly derogatory tone that had accompanied his pairing them together. Leaning back against her car, she crossed her arms to keep from reaching up to brush his longish blond hair back from the side of his face. The hair wasn’t really long enough to cover what was left of his scars, but the way he held his head, cocked to the side with the damaged side down, looked as though he was used to doing so.

  “You’re the most vivacious, beautiful, outgoing and social creature, and me... If I didn’t have a family that I needed to keep off my ass—and work to do at the Lemonade Stand—I’d happily be a recluse.”

  He didn’t talk about whatever had blown apart his left lower jaw. Or what she assumed had to have been years of surgeries to repair his face. She’d asked him about it once. He’d told her there’d been an accident during his senior year of college. And then abruptly changed the subject.

  But she’d be a ready and willing listener if he ever chose to confide in her.

  “You’re an absolutely beautiful creature, too.” The words were drawn from someplace deep inside her. Completely authentic—and a tad embarrassing out in the open.

  He kind of smiled at her, and she figured he thought she was humoring him. She considered pressing the matter but figured it was wiser to let it go. Used to pushing forward, to going for whatever she thought should be, Kacey held back with Michael Valentine. She didn’t want to lose him.

  “And anyway, there you go, mentioning your family again, and them being on your ass.” Her tone was lighthearted, setting them back into their peaceful place. “Yet, here I am, still not meeting them.”

  As soon as the words came out of her mouth, she regretted them. She’d just told herself not to push him.

  “Forget I said that.” She reached out to touch his forearm. “I don’t know what’s wrong with me today.”

  He grinned, not seeming the least bit bothered, making her feel instantly better. Which was halfway nuts, too, because Michael never seemed bothered by anything.

  “I’ll get some answers for you, Kace,” he said, his tone as even, as soothing, as always. “How late are you working tonight?”

  “I’m only in two scenes this afternoon, so I’m thinking no later than seven.” With all of the changes in recent years, they didn’t film by scene sequence anymore. Everything was shot by set, not in time sequence, in four long days so the actors had three days off and the daytime viewers still had five episodes to watch every week. If she didn’t have a scene on a particular set, like that morning, she didn’t have to be there.

  He nodded.

  “I’ll call you when I get out,” she said—more because of this curious urge to keep talking to him than because she thought he’d have any answers for her that soon.

  He grinned at her. “You’d best get your butt into town,” he said, chucking her on the arm like a brother might do. “You’d really give them something to gossip about if you showed up on set like that.”

  She wore a wig on the show and looked completely different without her stage makeup. For the first time, she wondered if he thought the Beverly Hills Kacey looked better
than the toned-down version he always saw.

  Why it should suddenly matter made no sense.

  “You know that I know that life is about far more than looks, right?” It wasn’t like her to have these retrospective moments. She was facing the sun and had to squint to look up at him.

  Squinting caused facial lines.

  She wanted to not care, but turned so that neither of them was facing the sun.

  “What’s going on?” His question was as pointed as he’d ever been with her.

  “I don’t know.” She heard the brush-off in her words. “I really don’t, Michael. I just... I am who I am, you know?”

  “Of course I do. You have no problem here, Kace, if that’s what you’re thinking...”

  “No.” She shook her head. “It’s just, I hear myself sometimes, you know, like the first time we met...”

  She cringed even bringing up that horrid afternoon. Her second class at the Lemonade Stand. Standing at the front of the room, telling nine battered women that their looks did matter. That if they did what they could to make themselves look their best, they’d feel better about themselves, which would breed confidence, which then bred strength. If they felt good about themselves, they’d be more apt to really believe in their own worth and then stand up for themselves until they were treated respectfully.

  It was all true. All valid and important. She was helping women she’d come to care about a great deal. In a little less than a year, she’d seen two of those women get jobs, places of their own, and stand up in court and win.

  “I was the one in the wrong that day.” Hands in his pockets, he shrugged, as if there was nothing to talk about.

  He’d interrupted her at the beginning of her lecture when she’d still been talking about how much it mattered to take time to do your hair and makeup. To choose clothes purposefully for your body size and style. He’d suggested, quietly, in a completely Michael way, that she might want to consider where she was and whom she was dealing with before she started in on her beauty-pageant rhetoric.

  She’d had no idea he was a volunteer at the Lemonade Stand—one who had financed the computer repair shop that now helped support the shelter and who’d started and still oversaw computer-skill training classes there for the residents.

  “No, that’s just it.” She touched his chest, fiddled with the button on his black button-down shirt. She was naturally a toucher. With everyone. She stopped, concerned she’d offended him again. Her hands hung suspended in midair. “I mean, yes, you were wrong, but so was I. I’d seen you come in and it didn’t even occur to me to change my rhetoric.”

  She’d been talking about the value of beauty, knowing that a man with a markedly scarred face was in her small audience. She should have shown more sensitivity.

  She’d later found out that he’d shown up at her class on behalf of a group of residents who’d asked him if their reasons for not wanting to come to her class were valid. They didn’t think a woman should put so much value on her looks.

  “And you were right, too,” she quickly continued, letting one hand land on his chest—as some kind of weird compromise she was making between life as she’d known it and life as it was. “We can’t help what we’re born with or what happens to us, and there are a lot of victims of domestic violence who have had what beauty they were born with permanently altered...which doesn’t in any way diminish their worth. Their rights.”

  It felt good to speak with passion in real life, rather than just on camera. And odd and somewhat threatening, too. So many changes in the past year...

  “I was completely insensitive to the fact that the idea of judging one’s self-worth based on beauty, or by making it about external looks, is as detrimental to some as a little makeup and hairstyling is good for others,” she admitted.

  “But you were completely right, too, as I’d have known if I’d listened a little longer before jumping on my soapbox.” His grin settled her.

  And got her going again, too, in a way she was much more comfortable with.

  “No matter what we’re born with or, as you say, what happens to us, we still feel better about ourselves when we give attention to our bodies. When we do all we can with what we have,” she said, happy that her rhetoric had value.

  She wanted to touch his face. Had wanted to so many times over the months she’d known him, but never so much as she did in that moment. Wanted him to know he didn’t have to tilt his head slightly to the side to hide himself from her view.

  “I really do find you beautiful, Michael.” The words were all wrong. She knew it as soon as they spilled out.

  He didn’t push her away. He’d never be that cruel. He just stepped back until her hand fell from his chest and down to her thigh.

  “You don’t need to work me, Kace,” he said, a note of bitterness mixed with pity in his tone. If such a thing were possible.

  She felt pitied as he looked at her.

  “I’ll find your hacker. And I’ll find out why you appear to have been targeted for things you don’t do anymore. But I’ll do it because I’m under the impression that we’ve become friends. Not because you turn on your charm.”

  Stung to the core, she felt real tears spring to her eyes. And blinked hard a couple of times so they’d leave before they showed. She was an actress—a good one—she could do calm and unaffected just fine.

  With a laugh, she tapped his chest again, hoping it wasn’t out of a pathetic need to show them both that she was allowed to do so. “I’m not working you, honey,” she said with an obviously made-up drawl. And then, more seriously, “If I ever work you, Michael, you won’t know what hit you.”

  What in the hell did she mean by that?

  This whole stalking thing—not that she was anywhere close to being stalked—but seeing herself framed as the drunk she’d once been had upset her. A lot. She didn’t like that woman. Was ashamed of her.

  Didn’t want her family to see her in that light.

  She wasn’t that woman anymore.

  “I’m sorry,” she told Michael. “I just... It feels kind of like someone is trying to force me to be the old Kacey whether I choose to or not...”

  “I know.” He nodded. Didn’t smile. The look in those chocolate-brown eyes was kind.

  She had to go. And let him get back to his life, too. It was selfish of her, the way she’d call and let him come running.

  Her butt landed against her car when she leaned back rather than turning. “I meant what I said. I was not working you.”

  He nodded.

  “You’re a beautiful man. Outside and in.”

  She saw his Adam’s apple move as he swallowed. Not something that she’d noticed before.

  “I’m smart enough to figure out, based on your scars, that at one point, the left side of your face was difficult to look at.” She was staring him straight in the eye. “It’s not anymore, Michael. The scars, they show strength...” She shrugged. “I don’t know, integrity, somehow. Like you have what it takes to wear them well.”

  She was a class-A idiot. Lacey had said, on more than one occasion, that she didn’t know how to let things lie. Always had to prod to the fullest degree.

  But then, Lacey was a happy, newly married woman and stepmother partially because of Kacey’s prodding, so it wasn’t like her identical twin could complain too much.

  Michael wasn’t speaking. But he hadn’t left her standing there alone, either.

  “Okay, well, I have to get back to the city,” she said. Sliding toward her door, she spun and grabbed the handle, pulled, started to lower herself to the black leather bucket seat.

  “Kace?”

  “Yeah?” She was staring up into the sun again. Couldn’t make out his expression.

  “I think you’re beautiful, too. Inside and out.”

 
With that he was gone.

  And she was left with thoughts of him consuming her. All the way back to real life.

  CHAPTER THREE

  MIKE KNEW, AS he put off dinner with his youngest sister and her family to focus on Kacey’s job, that she’d worked him. Just like she worked every single person she met.

  The woman oozed charm by nature, not by choice.

  He’d fallen under her spell months ago and had chosen to stay there.

  Not only did she add a fascinating little sidebar to his satisfying but rather boring life, but he genuinely liked her. She was flirty and dramatic and could act as well as she played the authenticity card, but she had a bigger heart than most.

  One she was just starting to learn to live with. To the world she was a star. A rich, successful actress.

  To him she was like a fledgling bird, one that would grow into the dove of peace and be able to save the world, as long as her vulnerabilities were tended to and she was treated with care.

  She wasn’t too hard on the eyes, either. He didn’t know a heterosexual guy alive who wouldn’t choose to have alone time with her, given the chance.

  He was given the chance. And quite happily took it.

  For what it was worth. Not for something it would never be.

  He wished he had better news for her when seven o’clock rolled around. He’d settled out by the pool with a shot of bourbon in the backyard of his three-bedroom home.

  The home he’d owned in a gated community and had lived in, alone, for the past five years, was situated on a golf course he’d never played.

  He hated the sport.

  But the lush green grass added value to the property and was nice to look at.

  Noticing a theme to his thoughts—surrounding himself with things and people who were nice to look at—he took a sip from his glass and set it down on the table in front of him. Opened his computer and booted up.

  His phone rang at a quarter after.

  He could hear voices in the background. “You still at work?”

  “No, I...” She paused, as though listening to someone else. “I’m sorry, Michael. Bo showed up at the studio this evening and surprised me with dinner and tickets to a show I’ve been dying to see. Anyway, I’m in the restroom at the restaurant now, so we can have some privacy. What did you find out?”