The Titan Was Tall (Triple Threat Book 1)

by Kristen Casey

  Red ought to have seen it before, though. Everything from the way the Dentons had acted at the theater, to the way Rachel had vacillated between trying to handle him and trying to threaten him, should have told Red the truth.

  Instead, he’d been too busy chasing Piper back and forth from Maryland to pay much attention to the critical details. And in doing so, Red had jeopardized not only their relationship but possibly her career.

  Was Rachel the leak, though? Red got up and went to his study and glared down at the three personnel folders on his desk. Piper’s shock at the news had been too visceral for her to have been the leak. Besides, this felt like revenge. And that led him to either Jim or Rachel.

  Jim did not stand to gain much from disclosing anything—in fact, he probably would’ve had a vested interest in protecting himself and his parents from legal fallout.

  So, Red picked up the folder on the end. Rachel—Rachel was the only one who might’ve stood to profit. Rachel’s relationship with Jim no longer provided her with easy funds, and it didn’t shield her from getting fired for not producing new work.

  She’d known she was on the verge of being released from her contract. She’d known her efforts to win Red over were failing. If Rachel could discredit Red or PKM, though, she might have been able to buy time to salvage her tanking celebrity.

  Red tapped the folder against his desk. He needed information. A lot more information. And he might just know where to get it. He went around his desk, parked his ass in his chair, and picked up the phone.

  THE FOLLOWING MORNING, Red was already waiting beside his assistant’s desk when the man arrived at work. While Wayne unwound his scarf from around his neck and hung up his peacoat, Red stood semi-patiently nearby. He even managed a pleasant smile when Wayne settled into his chair and turned on his monitor.

  “Good morning,” Wayne said finally, turning to Red with a sardonic look. “How may I be of assistance?”

  Red slapped a copy of Rachel’s contract on Wayne’s desk. He approved of the way the young man only jumped slightly.

  “You had Contracts yet?” Red barked.

  “I’m taking it right now.”

  “Your grades any good?”

  “Perfect, if you must know.”

  “Great. Anika tells me this contract is watertight,” Red told him. “Find us a way out of it, and you’ll have a job at PKM waiting for you the moment you graduate and pass the bar.”

  “What if I don’t pass?”

  “That’s not really the kind of can-do attitude I like to see in my henchmen,” Red frowned.

  Wayne gaped, his blue eyes going wide. “Is that actually how you see me? As a henchman?”

  “Never mind that. About you passing the bar—I’m not really worried about it. Are you?”

  “Nope,” his assistant grinned.

  Red waited him out.

  “Seriously?” It was impossible to miss the hope and glee, but then Wayne never had much of a poker face.

  Red scowled at him, as a leader of henchmen would.

  “What am I saying? Naturally, you’re serious. You are always completely serious.”

  Red slapped him on the back. “Not always. But business is business. Get cracking, my little minion, and the reward will be yours.”

  WAYNE CAME TO him only two days later, looking exhausted but victorious.

  “The reporter who broke the original story is ridiculous with the midnight Twitter,” he said. “He tweeted all these hints the night before his story hit the paper, identifying his source as an author well-known not only for her award-winning fiction but also for her famous head of golden curls. He deleted it later, but my friend got a screenshot.”

  At Red’s questioning look, he added, “She knows I work here. She wanted to ask me about it.”

  Perhaps unnecessarily, Red said, “Rachel has blond curly hair.”

  “Only Rachel,” Wayne agreed, smiling. “Which means that Ms. Wilbon is in violation of this handy non-disclosure addendum the Dentons had her sign, right around the time they began throwing her some extra bucks.”

  “Wayne, you are amazing.”

  “I know, right? But wait, there’s more.”

  “What more do we need?”

  “How about proof that the Dentons paid off that award committee to make sure Rachel won?”

  “You’re shitting me.”

  “Nope. I checked your messages on the way in this morning. That PI you hired talked to some people on the Goldstein committee. Apparently, they’d heard rumors that Rachel might’ve plagiarized large chunks of her book from her college roommate’s senior project. He tracked down the roommate and left her number, so I gave her a call.”

  “I’m beginning to think you might be pursuing the wrong line of work, you handsome devil,” Red smiled.

  “Naw. I’m just a detecting dilettante. Anyway, the roommate said the Dentons paid her to retract her accusations, and then went on to grease the wheels for Rachel to win the Goldstein. The roommate’s still pissed about it, as you can imagine. Rachel was one of her beta readers.”

  “I can imagine. And you, my friend, are a prince among men. Do you think the roommate will talk to me?”

  “Are you kidding?” Wayne asked. “I couldn’t get her to stop talking.”

  Finally, finally Red had what he needed to right his ship. And while the news of Rachel’s wrongs probably wouldn’t bring back Trident’s original investors, he had some new ideas he could try, and he could already see tomorrow’s headlines.

  “Send this to Allison in PR,” Red said. “Quote, Former Trident darling Wilbon accused of aiding in the embezzlement of royalties. Her highly-lauded book also discovered to derive large passages from college roommate’s senior project, on which she was a beta reader.”

  Wayne rubbed his hands together, relishing his role as a perfect vaudeville scoundrel. “Anything else?”

  “Give Allison everything you have. She’ll know what to do,” Red said. “I’ll be in my office, calling that district attorney we spoke to.”

  THIRTY-FOUR

  PIPER HAD BEEN trying to break the habit of thinking about Red MacLellan all the damn time, but it was slow going. Despite her best efforts to expunge him, he seemed to have infected every layer of her heart and mind. The bastard. It was just like him.

  As she sat in her car and eyed the collection of work trucks in front of her old house, she supposed she ought to thank him, though, for his crack-brained ‘move out while a stranger guts your home’ scheme.

  If Red hadn’t pushed the idea so hard, Piper might not have sifted through everything she owned, preparing to give stuff she no longer needed to charity. She might not have planned how to stockpile boxes and bags for a move or have known where to rent a good storage unit.

  However, all that preparation had made moving out for good far easier than she’d ever expected it would be. It had taken Piper only a week to pack everything up, stash the bulk of it in storage, and truck the remaining load over to a new apartment she’d rented.

  Eric had insisted on paying her the price they’d decided on, despite the additional issues uncovered in the home inspection. He’d raved about how perfect Piper’s house was going to be for his sister and her young family. He’d tried to tell Piper their names—to show her photos.

  But Piper remained suspicious that Red had somehow found another way to manipulate her life and play games with her emotions. She’d tried to stay aloof. She’d left the settlement and driven straight back to her former home, taken as many photos and videos of the empty house and yard as she could, and then she’d forced herself to walk away with her head held high.

  Things. A house was only a thing, and things came and went. Things were shed all the time. Things broke, became outdated, became useless.

  Though, come to think of it, so did people. And while prying herself from her childhood home had been physically simple, it had been emotionally hideous.

  Fredo had been lost in the move. One minu
te he was there, terrified by the commotion but still locked securely in the bathroom with Sonny, while Piper got their carriers ready. The next, Fredo was darting around stacks of boxes and through the legs of the movers, then streaking straight out the open front door.

  She’d looked and called and waited as long as she could. Well after the moving truck was gone, Piper was still scouring the yard and the trees. In the days after, she posted signs in the neighborhood and drove all over looking for him. She couldn’t sleep at night, worrying about how cold it was getting, and how scared her pet must be.

  Piper sniffed and scanned the area one last time, then put her car in gear. She hated thinking about what had come next. That first week, she’d hunkered down with a bottle of expensive sherry and her laptop and forced herself to write.

  Picturing total strangers wandering her home, changing everything, was excruciating. Imagining Fredo frightened, hungry and lost without her, was worse.

  Admitting how much she missed dirty, rotten Red was something she refused to do, though. Piper had crafted many, many chapters of breakups and revenge to pass the time.

  While she drove down the streets that would bring her to the new apartment, Piper acknowledged to herself that most of what she’d written would never find its way into any of her books—not unless her new series took a boozy, bloodthirsty spin she wasn’t expecting.

  As it was, she’d taken the step of running her finally-complete manuscript past a developmental editor before handing it over to Trident. Piper trusted herself so little at this point—she’d had to be sure.

  The verdict was a mixed bag. Apparently, the first two-thirds were her best work yet, but the last section was so dark and pessimistic that the editor had inquired if Piper had used a ghostwriter. Who could say what would happen to the story now—to the whole project? The happy words she needed just wouldn’t come.

  Life itself had proven to be very unpredictable lately. Why should her ability to write a book be any different?

  Piper pulled into her new garage and forced herself to remember how much she’d cried. She’d felt like an arid wasteland after she’d kicked Red to the curb, but that had been nothing compared to the tears she shed over her grandparents’ old house and Fredo—those had been like some kind of biblical flood, annihilating everything in their path. Maybe that was how misfortunes worked—one piggybacked on the next, and the stack grew taller and more devastating.

  As Piper trudged up the stairs and unlocked her front door, she tried to see the positives. She’d stayed afloat somehow. Her parents had driven out to help paint and unpack the few things she’d brought to the apartment, and by the time they left again, it had felt almost normal. She had felt almost normal.

  It helped that they’d been so serene about everything. But then, they’d already gone through their own version of mourning when they’d sold the house to Piper. They’d undoubtedly been able to assuage her feelings of guilt and failure so easily because they’d already had to process those exact emotions themselves.

  And, while Piper’s father had probably never really believed she was up to the task of caring for that house, he had stoically refrained from saying “I told you so.”

  So…yeah. On the home front, so to speak, Piper was mostly fine. She was at peace. Her apartment was new, easy to clean, and beginning to feel sort of homey. It did not creak or leak, or otherwise behave in ways it shouldn’t. It would be fine.

  It would give Piper shelter while she decided what she was going to do now that she wasn’t saddled with the twin albatrosses of history and nostalgia, or by the promise of a future with a man who only wanted to use her.

  Piper wandered into her kitchen and decided to brew herself some tea, to ward off the depressing effects of the cold, gray day. While the water heated, she turned on lights to brighten things up, then wadded a blanket around Sonny, tucked tightly into a corner of the couch while he snoozed.

  The only thing left to do, really, was for Piper to exorcise the last, lingering vestiges of Red. However, that job would be a heck of a lot easier if he would stop calling, or texting, or sending cards and letters that she would not read.

  Each time Red’s handwriting appeared amongst her bills and junk mail, Piper wondered again why she’d bothered having her mail forwarded. What was the point? Nothing Red could say would fix what he’d done. Nothing.

  Trust him, her ass. Red could go take a long walk off a short pier for all she cared.

  Piper just hoped that the fates would eventually grow tired of being vengeful with her. With luck, they would try out some mercy soon—because once she wrangled her new book into shape, Piper was going to need Red MacLellan to stay as far away from Trident as humanly possible.

  Red needed to go out and find some new project to manage the hell out of. If he was distracted, maybe he’d finally give up and leave her alone. Maybe he’d forget all about her.

  So Piper could forget about him.

  She’d known from the very beginning that they made about as much sense together as…well, two people who made no sense together.

  The chemistry between them could be explained away easily enough. Lust was just a chemical reaction that could strike anyone, anytime, and for no reason more compelling than biological imperative. It was all about perpetuation of the species, nothing more.

  Piper merely wished that meaningless chemistry wasn’t so good at masquerading as emotional intimacy. When lust pretended to be love, it led to so much humiliation. A girl could get hurt out there when she desired someone.

  Not Piper, though—not anymore. She’d been naïve to think that Kyle had taught her a thing or two about protecting her heart, but it was silly to blame herself. The Kyles of the world were nothing compared to Red. She’d know better, now. Piper would not be so blind ever again.

  If and when the time came for her to venture out into the dating world once more, Piper would make sure she was shrouded in every piece of emotional armor there was, and she would be far, far smarter about staying in her own weight class. No more heavyweights for her, no way—the next man who got a chance to fight for her heart was going to have about as much piss and vinegar in him as a piece of Christmas fudge.

  PIPER’S PARENTS CAME for another visit that weekend, bearing two house plants, a new toy for Sonny, and a stack of flat, square packages wrapped in brown paper.

  Her mother was nearly vibrating with excitement when she handed them over.

  “What are these?” Piper asked, surprised by how heavy they were. She laid them on the kitchen table and began to unwrap one.

  “I dried and pressed cuttings from Grandma and Grandpa’s yard,” her mom said proudly. “Dad made the frames himself, from that old oak tree they trimmed in the side yard last year.”

  Piper placed them side by side, impressed with the beauty of the set—but even more with her mother’s uncharacteristically fitting thoughtfulness.

  “There’s one more,” her dad said. “Open it.”

  It was her grandfather’s own painting of the house he’d built, amateurish and unskilled, the bright, primary colors giving it a folk-art look.

  “Guys, you love this painting! I can’t take this!”

  “We’ve downsized,” her mom claimed. “Besides, no one loved that old place more than you. We thought you should have it.”

  Piper blinked back a sudden wash of tears. “Thanks. I really appreciate all this.”

  Her dad jammed his hands in his pockets and rocked on his heels. “Who knows, kid. You’re going to turn this setback around soon. Maybe you’ll be able to get the house back someday.”

  “Maybe.” But did Piper really want it back? Now that she’d given it up and grieved it, could she really return there?

  The truth was, little by little, she was beginning to look forward. As much as she’d adored her grandparents’ home, not having the burden of it hanging over her all the time felt…liberating. Piper could go anywhere she wanted now. Do anything. If not for Fredo, she might
even allow herself to be happy.

  Wondering if the poor cat was suffering somewhere made her tear up again. Sonny was so mopey without his buddy. Piper missed him, too. But only him.

  Her dad broke into her gloomy thoughts. “You’ll know what to do, Piper Mae.”

  She wrenched herself out of her funk.

  “Hey, guys? I’ve been wondering.” Piper ran a finger along the frame of the painting and turned to them. “Why’d you name me that, anyway? It’s completely different from anyone else in the family.”

  “What do you mean? I thought it sounded pretty,” her mother said.

  “I sound like a hillbilly!”

  “No, you don’t.” Piper’s dad frowned. “It’s a good, strong name. Pipers were the ones who led their clans into battle. And Mae—that’s like that lady astronaut. Jameson, wasn’t it?”

  “It’s Jemison, dad. Mae Jemison.”

  He brushed off the minor difference. “Regardless. With a name like yours, you could be fearless. Accomplish anything. And you have, kid. You really have.”

  “But…that’s not true.”

  “Yes, it is. Your whole life, you’ve marched right at every new thing we threw at you, and you never once flinched. You’ve been a trooper from day one, Piper. Your brother wouldn’t have had it half so easy without you.”

  “Dad!” Piper cried, unsettled and confused by his unexpected flash of support, “What are you talking about? Mom, what is he saying?”

  Her father didn’t wait for his wife to weigh in. He said, “I’ll tell you something else, too. You never tried to cram yourself into anyone else’s mold, even when it would’ve been easier for you. You didn’t do it for me when I tried to get you to pick a different career than the one you wanted. And you didn’t do it for that little pansy you were going to marry, either. What was his name?”

  “Kyle?”