by Karina Bliss
“I didn’t recognize your face,” he interrupted. “I recognized your laugh.”
Her panic subsided. “That’s okay, then. I can’t see myself laughing anytime soon.”
He took a seat opposite. “You didn’t say hello.”
“Neither did you.”
“No.” He didn’t explain it. He didn’t have to. People who’d grown up hard recognized each other. When she’d been trying to project a persona that was sophisticated and permissive, his unspoken knowledge had made her uneasy. Some part of her had always worried that he’d expose her as a fraud.
She sipped the bourbon, weary to the bone, waiting for its fiery heat to warm her. But you don’t sit among the rubble of your life and worry about your roots showing. Caring what Moss thought of her was the least of her problems.
“What are your plans?”
The bourbon made her eyes water but the sugary cola steadied her nerves, so she took another gulp. “Find a waitressing job in a small town with poor internet connections, within the driving capabilities of a cheap car.” And she’d be right back where she began, all those years ago. Ruthlessly, she shot down self-pity. Enough that she still had a shot at anonymity. “The only problem is that all my waitressing references are for Stormy Hagen.”
“Phone your old bosses and let them know your new name. Anyone looking to hire you can phone them for a verbal reference.”
“That could work.”
Frowning, Moss pulled at a loose thread in his towel. “Can you trust them to keep your name and location secret?”
“Probably not,” she admitted. “They have talked to the press before, when I started dating Zander.”
It was odd holding this conversation with a half-naked man. His dark hair was sleek against his head and water droplets kept falling onto his wide shoulders and chest. She followed the progress of one as it ran across a pec and jumped to an ab.
“Can’t you stick with childcare?”
Jolted out of her trance, Lily took another gulp of bourbon before answering. “Not enough degrees of separation between my recent employers and Stormy Hagen. And any early childhood education applicant is subject to a background check.” She put the glass down. That was her greatest fear, that this would affect her dream career forever.
“Background checks look for a criminal record, not how you spend your leisure,” he said dryly. “There’s no reason to mention it at an interview.”
She shook her head. “If I’m working with their kids, I’m telling the truth.”
“You’re not giving up?” he asked sharply.
“No.” No matter how hopeless a future as an early childhood educator looked, she would maintain her online study. She changed the subject. “How did you get work when you were on the run as a teenager?”
“There are always people who will exploit cheap labor.” He started to say something, stopped. “And I did a lot of busking. Everyone thinks a teen with a guitar must be raising money for a school project. The toughest part was looking clean enough to pass as a regular kid. If I got really stuck, I’d pawn my dad’s guitar. Stole it back once or twice.” He looked at her thoughtfully. “I can probably get you fake references. Fake ID…if it comes to that. I still have contacts.”
“I don’t want to do anything dishonest.”
“If you’re qualified for the work, then the only lie you’re telling is your name. Don’t get soft. Needs must when the devil driv—” His expression arrested, then he groaned. “Sweet mother of God, I forgot to phone Dimity.”
He rose and went to the pantry, where he unplugged a cell from a charger. “Dimity…it’s me. I’m at home. Yeah, I should have called sooner, I’m sorry.”
“Tell her it’s my fault for distracting you,” Lily called.
He walked away. “I do appreciate that your time is valuable. Leaving my cell on the charger caused just as much hassle for me… Uh huh.” His expression hardened. “Hang on.” He looked at Lily. “I’m going to get dressed.” He disappeared down the hall, his voice growing fainter. “I don’t enjoy being beholden to you and Seth anymore than you enjoy playing taxi driver. Yeah, I made a stupid mistake letting my license expire. Can we not replay that lecture?”
A door slammed and she was alone.
She downed the last of her drink and stood. Outside, the horizon sucked the last heat from the setting sun like a kid with a lollipop, tinting the white walls delicate shades of pink and orange.
She should choose a spare bedroom and unpack, but instead she stepped outside to catch the last of the day’s warmth, sitting on the pool’s edge and dipping her feet in the water.
Moss had been…himself, which enabled her to secure a foothold on sanity after watching that disgusting tape. She shuddered, tempted to slide into the pool and let it wash her clean. Maybe the tape wouldn’t get picked up by mainstream media. And maybe you’re delusional on one strong bourbon. Her last meal had been breakfast. She hadn’t eaten at lunch.
Her cell rang and she dug it out of the pocket of her linen shorts. Glancing at the display she grimaced, but she’d known this call was coming. “Hey.”
“Why haven’t you phoned me for help?”
She wiggled her toes in the water. “Sorry, who is this?”
“Very funny,” said Zander Freedman. “My place has better security than Moss and Seth’s.”
So I can be a princess in the tower? Never again. “Zee, you can’t keep bringing stray exes home.”
“You know damn well Elizabeth considers you a good friend.”
And the feeling was reciprocated threefold. If Elizabeth Winston hadn’t rescued her and forced Zander’s conscience into life, Lily would be shooting porn for real, or working in her hometown’s diner and accepting her mother’s judgment that she’d been too dumb to make even her looks work for her.
“Staying at your place will only attract more attention.”
“We’re in New Zealand for three months.”
“Which won’t stop the press asking Elizabeth why your porn star ex is living in your LA mansion.”
He swore. “This is all my fault.”
Lily straightened her shoulders. “This has nothing to do with you.”
“If I hadn’t been such a douche after our breakup, you wouldn’t have gone loco with Travis.”
“As a grown woman, I could have done any number of things that weren’t so self-destructive after our relationship ended. Trained for a triathlon, eaten chocolate…burned your effigy.”
He laughed reluctantly.
“Besides, you’ve already made amends,” she added. “Taking me in after Travis stranded me in Vegas, engineering my first nanny job with Jared and Kayla.”
“Let’s give credit where it’s due,” he suggested.
She smiled. “Fine. Elizabeth helped you help me.” They’d saved her at a time when she couldn’t save herself. But she was stronger now. A different person. And she wasn’t going to let Stormy Hagen sabotage her future. Even if she had to dig as deep as China to rebury her.
“There must be something I can do to help. I care about you.”
“I know that.” When she was in love with him, she would have killed to hear those words; today she simply felt the same irritated affection she imagined he’d felt for her when they’d dated. It had taken her months to forgive him for breaking her heart, not least because it was easier blaming him than admitting she was an idiot to expect different from a man who’d insisted on an open relationship.
She could still conjure the horror on his face when she told him she wanted marriage. He’d dumped her so fast she’d gotten whiplash. Months later, he’d admitted it was because she’d had him thinking about commitment for two seconds. Zander had his own hang-ups. He’d ended up falling for a woman who employed no wiles, demanded fidelity, and didn’t take any of his shit. Lily wanted to be Elizabeth when she grew up.
“How about if I give you Luther for a couple of weeks.” His bodyguard.
“No.” For twe
lve months she’d accepted responsibility for her happiness, set her own goals, and was achieving them. Ceding control would be a step backward. “I plan on leaving town in a couple of days anyway.”
“Where will you go?”
“I haven’t decided.” Removing her feet from the water, she paced the flagstones, crossing and recrossing her wet footprints. Tonight she’d do an online search of towns within three hours drive of LA.
“Stormy—”
“I’m using my real name.”
“Irene?” he said, startled.
“God no. My middle name, Lily.” On the birth certificate Dee Dee had listed Lily’s surname as Stuart to chase child support, which her father had immediately avoided by moving abroad.
“Another layer of anonymity. Good. But—”
She cut him off. “Zander, I have to find a way to hold onto my self-respect. And that means leaving you and Elizabeth out of it. Thanks for your concern, I’ll keep you posted but…goodbye.” She ended the call.
Her pride, her goddamn pride. It was all she had left. Thank God for it.
Chapter Seven
Through the bathroom’s open louver windows, Moss heard Lily reject Zander’s offer of help.
Fuck. He leaned his forehead against the shower wall, tempted to whack it against the marble tiles until it bruised.
He’d been relying on Zander and Elizabeth to ride to the rescue. They’d done it before. His tenuous grip on neutrality slipped further.
When Lily had cried he hadn’t known what to do, and the helplessness, the impotence of that, irked. He didn’t often waste energy regretting his lack of social skills, but he’d suffered then.
“Do you need ignoring or alcohol, right now?”
Idiot. He did bang his forehead against the tiles this time. But inadvertently he’d done the right thing. She’d needed him to remind her of the strength she’d always had trouble believing in.
Until she’d called on that strength to politely tell Zander to go to hell.
“I have to find a way to keep my self-respect.”
Never mind that Moss would have done the same in her situation. Destitute and desperate was one situation he did have skills for. And she didn’t. Asking him for tips, as though running away was something you could tick a checklist for. And she’d be starting where he’d started. An easy target for the users and losers who saw wounded, bruised, and vulnerable as an opportunity.
He got out of the shower, dried off and phoned Dimity again. “What are you doing for Lily?”
“As much as she’ll let me, which is provide a bed for a couple of nights.” One of the best things about his acerbic manager was that she didn’t do small talk either. “She won’t accept a loan or let me pay for another lawyer. She intends leaving once she buys a car, and maybe it is safer to disappear.”
“It’s not,” he said shortly.
“She’ll only be a phone call away, Moss, and since when are you hovering? You haven’t hit on her, have you?”
“Yeah, we just had wild monkey sex in your bed.”
“Sorry,” she said. “That was a shitty thing to say.”
He waited for her usual qualifier. It didn’t come.
“Something’s come up and I have to put out a couple of fires. Feed her, will you?”
“I’ll do better than that,” he said. “I’ll look out for her.”
“Thanks.” She sounded exhausted. But she was working two jobs, juggling work for Zander and Elizabeth, and T-Minus 6. And she’d lost a couple of hours picking up Lily. Not to mention the hour trying to find him.
“I’m sorry for messing you around today. The phone thing. I’ll try harder to stay connected.”
“Thank you.”
“You’re a shit-hot manager.”
“I know. Which is how I’ve negotiated an ad deal for you. A one-day photo shoot promoting a new male cologne called Brood. Very high end. Very sexy.”
He groaned.
“I know, right?” Her tone had lightened. “Personally, I would have called your resting face sullen, but the market seems to love it.”
“I’m a musician, not a model. Why would I do that shit?”
“Because that shit pays bills until the music does. See you soon.”
Moss rang off and swore. He used to find it easy to set limits in his interactions with other people—the closer they got into his personal space, the more he restricted access to his inner world. Rage’s disbandment had come as a shocking reminder that he’d relaxed his guard too much, gotten too comfortable. And not only in his career. He’d become too reliant on his bandmates.
He walked into the oversized wardrobe and scanned the clothes a stylist had chosen for him.
Fortunately Seth’s lovefest with Dimity had given him an opportunity to rebuild a buffer zone. His need for autonomy and his manager’s expectation that he be surgically attached to his phone—and by proxy to her—was why they butted heads so often. There had to be a time when he was off the grid.
Ignoring the rows of designer gear, he pulled out a pair of jeans that were faded the old-fashioned way–through wear—and dug out a T-shirt he’d owned for ten years.
His father had been a mechanic whose concept of honor could be summed up as a refusal to accept handouts of any kind. A real man stood on his own two feet, minded his own business, and suffered in stoic silence. Stoic silence was also Joseph McFadden’s preferred means of communication.
He’d played guitar—brilliantly—an accomplishment he shrugged off, as it revealed a poeticism that he was ashamed of. He’d met Moss’s mother playing at a bar and as far as Moss could remember they’d all been happy until her death when he was six. Then they’d moved state because his dad couldn’t stand the memories, not considering that his young son might require security. They’d never really settled after that, Joseph growing more and more restless and combative.
His death in a bar fight had left Moss an orphan two weeks before his sixteenth birthday, and without relatives who knew or wanted him, he’d gone into a foster home. That had lasted a month before he’d run away. Of all the things Joseph taught his son, it was ‘don’t trust strangers’ that had stood him in the greatest stead.
Suspicion, distrust, and the need for solitude had become part of his nature.
Sitting on his bed, he picked up his guitar as he always did when he was troubled, and strummed some chords.
In that, he and Lily were very different. She was soft and kind, leaving herself open to hurt in a way that both awed and infuriated him. And that was what made her a strange kind of miracle to him, once he’d learned her history.
Zander had let drop that her mother, Dee Dee, was a hard-living drunk who treated her kids as props in the ongoing drama of her life. “She hit on me, can you believe it?” Zander had complained after meeting her. “When I told Stormy later she apologized for leaving me alone with her mother. Not surprised, not angry…apologetic.”
Moss had looked at Stormy differently after that. Not a pampered princess. Not the most dazzling woman he’d ever seen. Someone who’d had to struggle to make something of herself because she didn’t have family she could rely on either. It explained why she tried so hard, why she put up with Zander’s open relationship policy, and why she watched Moss with wary eyes—she knew he was still feral and always hungry for what he couldn’t have.
When he’d been a runaway, it had been love, family, safety. Now he settled for sensation. Soft drugs, hard liquor, fast cars, faster women.
He struck his second bum note on the guitar. Frustrated, he put it aside.
He had no aptitude to play the white knight, and no desire to either. But if Lily had convinced everyone that she was equipped to disappear alone into Moss’s old world, then he’d have to stage an intervention. She’d be eaten alive.
Cursing under his breath, he headed to the door. When he was running the last mile home, he’d decided his requirements for a full-time driver. Someone who was used to night shifts and sp
oke little English so they wouldn’t require much in the way of conversation.
That was what he’d thought.
* * *
Lily picked up Moss’s trainers and placed them neatly beside the front door, then found the laundry room and dropped his discarded T-shirt into the hamper. Now what?
She was used to being busy, used to chatter, and it was so quiet here. What were the kids doing now? Checking the time on her cell, she saw it was six-thirty, dinnertime chaos. Her stomach rumbled. Nothing like defiantly throwing away your last offer of rescue to whet a girl’s appetite.
She was dumping her suitcase in a bedroom that had the same sterile decor as the rest of the house when Dimity texted that she’d be another hour. Her spirits rose at the thought of finally being useful. She’d repay her friends’ hospitality by cooking dinner. Except Dimity had mentioned that Consuela had filled the freezer, and not even Gordon Ramsay could compete with Consuela.
But I can make a salad, set the table, heat the food.
She returned to the kitchen, which had clearly been designed for form, not function. Everything—fridge, stove, countertop, and utensils—was hidden behind a floor-to-ceiling bank of glossy tangerine drawers and cupboards.
An inset handle concertinaed open to reveal a black marble countertop with kettle, coffeemaker, and toaster. The fridge-freezer hid behind one vertical orange door, the pantry behind another.
Exploring, she discovered all the cupboards and drawers were spring-loaded. You had to touch exactly the right spot to open them, and everything was self-closing, which meant when she turned from the island sink after washing the lettuce to grab a cucumber from the fridge she faced an impervious orange wall again.
At any other time she would have been entertained; today it felt like the whole world was out to get her.
