Secrets and Seductions

by Francine Pascal

  Think of something! She silently screamed at herself. She glanced up at her reflection in the mirror, a pale, wan version of her face glaring back. She looked a little green, and she felt worse. She had that panicky, clammy feeling that she hated so much. Being caught red-handed made her want to throw up. Her heart pounded in her rib cage. When Ken found out…She felt sick just thinking about it. But maybe she could tell him it was all a mistake! He’s not a neurosurgeon, he’s a quarterback, Lila told herself. You can fool him. He’ll believe anything you say.

  In the mirror, her dark, normally shrewd eyes looked back at her with fear in them. Even she couldn’t convince herself she’d get off that easily.

  Maybe she could tell the cameras to go. The idea of facing them made the room spin. She already knew she wouldn’t be able to convince the producers to leave. They were like sharks, and they’d smell blood in the water.

  God, what a mess! Lila dropped her head in her hands.

  “Lila!”

  She heard Ken’s roar right before she heard the front door slam so hard it rattled the windows. Fear shook her. She wanted to hide in the bathroom forever, but she also knew she had to face him. There was still hope she could turn this all around. Wasn’t there?

  “Deny everything,” Lila told her reflection in the mirror. She nodded at herself, but the pale face with too much makeup blinked back at her, unconvinced.

  “Lila! Get down here or I swear to God…” Ken shouted up the staircase. TV cameramen scrambled to get mobile cameras on their shoulders for the impromptu shot. Two cameras hovered around Ken, but he was too furious even to notice.

  Lila appeared on the stairs looking pale, but she held her chin high. Haughty had always been her best look.

  “What’s wrong?” she asked, playing dumb.

  “You damn well know what’s wrong!” Ken held up a printout of the TMZ report. “You played me again!”

  “Ken…it’s not true. It’s just not true! You can’t believe TMZ over me!”

  Lila flew down the stairs and got close enough to Ken to try to hug him. He shrugged her away. The cameras around them pivoted and turned, but Lila didn’t even care that they were there. For once, she forgot completely about the story she was trying to play, about the angles of her face that looked best on television. She just desperately wanted Ken to understand he had to stay with her. He was the only one who would!

  “Please, baby…”

  “Don’t ‘baby’ me!” He ground out the words between clenched teeth. His face turned beet red splotched with white. He stomped right up to Lila and grabbed her arm—hard. “You are a liar, Lila.”

  “I’m not. You can’t believe TMZ!”

  “If you’re not lying, then prove it. Let’s call Enid. She can confirm your pregnancy, right? And the miscarriage.”

  When Lila hesitated, Ken pulled out his cell phone. Lila saw Enid Rollins’s office number flash on the face of it.

  Oh, God. Her stomach roiled in protest; she felt bile in her throat. She knew the truth: There was no pregnancy test. She’d never gone to her OB-GYN for anything other than a routine exam.

  “What? Speechless?” Ken hit the “call” button. He put it on speaker, and Lila heard the phone ringing.

  “Hello, Dr. Rollins’s office,” a woman’s chirpy voice answered.

  Ken shoved the phone in Lila’s face, but she put up her hands, unable to hide the guilty panic in her eyes.

  Ken ended the call.

  “I knew it,” he said, disgust on his face, and something more heartbreaking—pain.

  “Ken—please. I can explain.” She’d had her reasons for doing it. She had to make him understand that all she ever wanted was to be loved. Why was that so wrong?

  “No, Lila. I know you think I’m stupid. But I’m not. Everyone always warned me to stay away from you, that you were a first-class bitch. I always told them they were wrong about you. But you know what? They were right!”

  His words rained down on Lila’s head like oversized chunks of hard, icy hail. Ken let her arm go as a look of disgust passed across his face.

  “I want you to look at me when I say this. I’m going to tell you this one time, in front of the whole world, Lila. Do not call me. Do not even look at me. I don’t want to hear about you. I don’t ever want to see you again, do you hear me? I am going to file for divorce, and this time I mean to see it through.”

  A sob broke from her throat and tears streamed down Lila’s cheeks before she could stop them. She didn’t even have to pretend, like she usually did. These were real tears—she was slobbering and blubbering in a way that would look terrible on camera. She knew it but she couldn’t stop. Even the thought of Ashley Morgan triumphantly watching this show when it aired didn’t stop the flow.

  “Ken, please don’t! Please don’t do this!” She swiped furiously at her nose with her sleeve, but it was no good. She couldn’t control herself—tears and snot went everywhere.

  Ken shook his head, a horrible sadness clouding his features.

  “Do you know how cruel it is? What you’ve done?” His voice sounded small as he shook his head, his heartbreak heavy in the room. “I loved that baby. He was real to me. When I found out we were going to start a family, I was on top of the world, Lila. I really couldn’t have been happier.”

  “Ken…” Lila felt an ache in her chest. His pain was so real, so heartfelt. He really had loved that baby. She realized in that moment how she had completely miscalculated, how terrible her mistake was. “Ken, we could try for a real baby. We could try. We can be a family!”

  Ken’s head snapped up and his eyes turned cold. “Get away from me,” he growled, shrugging off her touch. “You think you can fake a pregnancy and then make it all okay? Are you insane?”

  “Let me try. I’ll do anything.”

  “No.” Ken shook his head. “This is actually a blessing, Lila, because now I see that I don’t want you. You’re not worth having. Not now. Not ever. You’re pathetic, Lila, a sad scheming bitch, and God help anybody who thinks you’re worth a damn. They’ll soon know all you have is on the outside—money, nice things, whatever—but inside, Lila, at your core, you’re not worth a goddamn cent.”

  With that, Ken turned and stormed off, slamming the door behind him. The sobs racked Lila, and all she could think was that now the whole world knew what she had always feared: She wasn’t worth loving.

  In mid-sob, her whole body convulsed, her stomach rebelled, and then it was all over. She only just made it to a potted plant before she retched, throwing up what was left of her breakfast.

  She swiped at her mouth and ran up the stairs to her bedroom, mortified and heartbroken. She wasn’t ever going to come out; she would stay there long after the last camera had left. She retched two more times, hanging over the toilet, wondering what was wrong as she cried and cried and cried. She was heartbroken, yes, but it was more than that. Something was wrong with her body. It didn’t just act like this.

  She felt like a woman who’d lost control of everything. Like her hormones had taken over and…

  Hormones.

  Crying.

  Sickness.

  Oh, God.

  Quickly, Lila did a calculation. Oh, no, no, no. She’d been so busy faking a pregnancy she hadn’t even bothered to notice that she’d missed her last period. She was more than a month late.

  Her mind instantly went back to all those nights of celebratory sex, all those times Ken couldn’t keep his hands off her. And the fact that with all the cameras around and everything, maybe she’d missed a pill or two. Or three. She hadn’t even bothered to worry about it at the time. She had other things on her mind. But now…Oh, God, now…!

  Lila scrambled on her knees to the cabinet next to the sink. She threw it open and tossed out boxes of Q-tips and Kleenex and reached far, far into the back. She had a pregnancy test back there, she knew, one of a two-pack she’d used the year before when she’d been a couple of days late. It had turned up negative at the ti
me. She grabbed the box and tore open what was left of the package. Lila scrambled to take the test and then waited the painstaking three minutes.

  One line means I’m not pregnant, and two blue lines means I am.

  One line. Please, God, I will do anything. Just let there be one line!

  Lila stared at the stick, watching as the blue line materialized.

  Yes! One line!

  Relief flooded through her. Food poisoning then. Must be, right?

  But, no. As she watched, horrified, the second line came into view. She blinked, speechless, as she stared at the two unmistakably clear blue lines.

  This time, there wasn’t anything fake about it. No matter how long she stared at the stick, the result never changed: Lila Fowler, who had just faked a miscarriage, was eight weeks pregnant.

  Chapter Six

  Jessica kept trying Lila’s number, but it always went straight to voice mail. Lila had hidden in her house for more than a week since the news had broken about her fake pregnancy. Jessica felt bad for her friend, but she’d seen this coming from miles away. She was beginning to think this scheming stuff never got you anything but heartbreak.

  Ironic sentiment, she realized, coming from Jessica Wakefield. But nonetheless true. She put down her phone and leaned back in her office chair, glancing at her desk. It felt strange being back at VertPlus.net, especially since it hadn’t exactly been the homecoming she’d hoped for.

  It wasn’t the same job—or the same office—that she’d left. Since her departure, Tracy Courtright had swooped in and taken her place, moving right into the director of marketing role and her coveted corner office. Tracy had fifteen years of experience. She also hated Jessica with a passion.

  “We had to do it,” Michael Wilson, the VP of the Sweet Valley office, had told her almost apologetically. “But I promise you that if you work the magic you did before, you’ll be in that office again in no time.”

  Until then, Jessica had the humiliation of sitting in a cubicle in the middle of the office space with the interns and the low-level sales staff, and basically, the nobodies. She sat right outside Tracy’s office, so that Tracy could shout her name without even getting out of her chair, which she did often and for no good reason. Tracy seemed to be under the mistaken impression Jessica was her own personal indentured servant.

  The old Jessica would have schemed and manipulated and beaten Tracy at her own game. It would’ve taken her less than a week to wiggle back into her old office. The old Jessica didn’t bring anybody coffee.

  But these days, Jessica couldn’t quite muster enough energy to care. Ever since she’d come face-to-face with Sarah wearing next to nothing at Todd’s door, she’d known it was truly, finally, over between them.

  She shut her eyes, remembering the humiliation of standing there on Todd’s doorstep, ready to beg him to come back to her. Sarah had opened the door barefoot, clad only in a clingy, nearly transparent teddy. She’d lounged against the door like she was holding the house up and given Jessica a lazy, triumphant smile.

  “Can I help you?” she’d said, a tiny smile tickling the corner of her mouth.

  The sight of Sarah was so knockout unexpected that Jessica was struck dumb. Had she not been speechless, her first question would have been “What are you doing here?” But that would have been dumb because the answer was obvious and wouldn’t have left any room for second questions.

  If she’d had any confidence about herself before, it was gone. Big news. Jessica Wakefield, at thirty, was no longer invincible. She wasn’t even Jessica Wakefield, the girl who with one word could change the entire class elections. The girl who could get any guy she wanted and anything else she wanted. But this wasn’t high school anymore. This was the real world, and here it didn’t matter if she’d been the captain of the cheerleading squad. How had she not noticed?

  “Never mind,” Jessica had said to Sarah, her voice barely a whisper. You win.

  Jessica was turning to walk back to her car when she heard Todd’s voice calling. “Sarah? Who is it?”

  “Nobody,” Sarah had said, and the word had echoed inside Jessica’s head ever since.

  Nobody. That’s what she’d felt like every day since Todd had left. Nobody. And the most shocking part was realizing how easily the fight had gone out of her even though her competition was an ordinary-looking, no-talent plagiarist. She, the once invincible Jessica Wakefield, was scared to put herself next to Sarah and demand Todd choose.

  Because, deep down, she feared he would not pick her. That she wasn’t worth wanting.

  Finally, after all these years, all those buried insecurities she’d tried so hard to hide had bubbled to the surface and now everyone could see them.

  That same day, she’d taken Michael up on his offer to come back to VertPlus.net. Part of her was desperate to regain a feeling that she could do something right. And part of her just had to face the truth: If she was going to be a single mom long-term, she had bills to pay.

  She carried the knowledge that Todd could never be hers again like an albatross around her neck. No matter what she did, she simply couldn’t shake her feelings of doom and gloom.

  “Jessica!” Tracy shouted from the office that had once been hers. “In here, now!”

  Reluctantly, Jessica pulled herself up and trudged over. “Yes?” She popped her head in the door.

  “You call this your idea list for Smashbox? You should just scratch them all off and just put down ‘gala’ because it seems like that’s the extent of your creativity.”

  The criticism stung and, Jessica thought, wasn’t exactly unwarranted. There really were two gala ideas on a list and the rest of it wasn’t her best. She couldn’t quite seem to conjure the magic genius she’d had before. That, like Todd, had deserted her.

  “But…”

  Tracy waved her hand and softened her tone. “Look, I know you’re going through some personal problems, but I have to give this list to Michael, and it’s in no shape to present. I like the first two the best, but I really need at least five more.”

  Jessica bit back the caustic comment she was about to make about how since Tracy was the director, she could come up with a few of her own original ideas. The sad fact was that Tracy was one of her bosses, and she needed this job.

  She sighed. “Sure, Tracy,” she said, and trudged back to her desk, feeling defeated already.

  “Hey, Jessica!” piped up Emily, her part-time assistant. It had been a concession from Michael: Jessica might be lower on the totem pole, but she could keep a piece of an assistant.

  Emily sported a red-tinged strawberry blond bob and freckles across her slightly turned-up nose. She was hopelessly plain, Jessica thought. She had youth and overly dramatic makeup on her side, but Jessica could tell that Emily was one of those people who would age badly. She glanced up at Emily and instantly wished Katy were here. Katy had been her no-fail assistant, her savior, but Katy had gotten an offer at another company she couldn’t pass up. With Jessica gone, there had been no reason for her to stay.

  Now Jessica was adrift and alone, except for too-bubbly Emily. Emily, who was straight out of college, wasn’t as much interested in work as she was in telling Jessica about her sexcapades from the weekend before. The girl shared too much for Jessica’s taste, and she wasn’t in the mood to hear about her Jersey Shore–like adventures. Honestly, Jessica was surprised Emily had any, given her lackluster looks.

  “You won’t believe what happened Saturday night,” Emily gushed, launching into one of her stories. Jessica tried very hard not to listen. She hated to hear about all the great sex Emily was having and how fun it was being single when Jessica felt there was literally nothing at all good about her own single life, not even the movie star she was dating.

  She glanced over her tiny, crammed desk and saw the small color picture of Jake, her beautiful baby boy, and smiled. These days, he was about the only one who ever made her smile, and even then, not always.

  “…can you believe
that?” Emily finished her latest tale.

  “Wow, no. I can’t,” Jessica said, even though she had no idea what Emily had just said.

  “Actually, Emily, if you could do a little bit more research on Maybelline for me that would be great. I’d like to know more about their fall line.”

  “Oh, uh…sure.” Emily nodded. “Big meeting with Tracy and Michael tomorrow where Tracy will probably take all the credit for the work we do.”

  “Right.” Jessica said, barely listening.

  Jessica’s phone dinged with a text from Liam.

  HI, BABY.

  Nonchalantly, Jessica flipped her phone facedown.

  “Are you going to answer him?” Emily asked, surprised. “If I was dating one of Hollywood’s sexiest men alive, I would certainly answer his texts.”

  “That’s a little personal, Emily.” Jessica was surprised that the girl had read her phone and copped to it.

  “I’m just stating the obvious.” Emily rolled her eyes.

  “Excuse me?” God, Emily was mouthy, Jessica thought.

  “Whatever.” Emily shrugged and walked away before Jessica could put her in her place. The old Jessica would’ve stridden over to her desk and dressed down Emily right there, but the new Jessica…she just couldn’t quite muster the energy. Emily is just jealous, Jessica thought. Nobody who looked like her could date someone like Liam.

  Jessica’s phone dinged again, and she flipped it faceup. BABY? YOU THERE? Liam again. Jessica’s phone dinged two more times with more incoming texts. She sighed and put the phone on mute.

  Jessica really thought sometimes that Liam used texting as a kind of GPS tracking system, trying to get her current position at all times. But that probably wasn’t fair. Liam loved her. And he was so kind to her.

  Just the other day, Jessica had been the one defending him to Elizabeth.

  “Why does he want to know what you are doing every minute of the day?”

  “I know it sounds annoying…”