Wicked Beautiful

by J. T. Geissinger

  I turn back to the glass. “There’s a possibility I might be a mark.”

  Silence. A moment later, Connor stands beside me at the glass, gazing at the view. “Money?”

  I shake my head. “Doubtful. She’s got her own. Maybe more than I do.”

  He slides me a look. “Blackmail?”

  I shrug and take another swallow of scotch.

  “This skank got a name?”

  “Victoria Price.” I turn my head and stare into his eyes. “And if you ever call her a skank again, I’ll rip out your fucking throat.”

  Not even mildly intimidated by my threat as almost every other man would be, Connor looks amused. “Wow. She must have a gold-lined pussy to get you so up in arms.”

  I mutter, “You have no idea.”

  Connor’s dark brows pull together. “Wait. Victoria Price? How do I know that name?”

  I chug the final few swallows of scotch. It burns all the way down. “Bitches Do Better. Sound familiar?”

  After a beat, Connor says, “You’re fuckin’ kidding me, brother.”

  I run a hand through my hair. “No, brother, I am not.”

  He stares at my profile, and then—in his deep, hearty baritone—starts to laugh.

  I growl, “Shut up, asshole.”

  “You? The guy who goes through more tail in a week than he does underwear? You’re in love with the woman who makes a velociraptor look like a family pet?”

  “I never said I was in love with her!”

  Connor stops laughing. “Uh-huh. And denial isn’t just a river in Egypt.”

  I curse under my breath and pour myself another two fingers of scotch.

  After watching me carefully for another few seconds, Connor turns back to the view. “All right. Tell me what you got.”

  I start at the beginning, from the moment Victoria walked into Xengu and sent me a death glare the likes of which I’d never seen, up to this morning and the crooked painting. Connor doesn’t think it adds up to much and tells me so.

  “Don’t get your panties in a wad when I say this about your girlfriend, brother, but she’s a professional bitch. Famous for it. Made a career out of it. Acting batshit crazy is like the golden rule for bitches.”

  “She also lies. About everything.”

  He shrugs. “She’s a fuckin’ broad. Show me a broad who doesn’t lie to a man and I’ll show you another man. What else you got?”

  I shake my head. “That’s it.”

  “That’s it? Seriously? You called me up here for that?”

  I close my eyes, exhaling. “There is something else. But you’ll think I’m crazy.”

  “I highly doubt it. Try me.”

  It takes me a moment to gather my thoughts. Then I open my eyes and look at my old friend. “I think I know her somehow. I think I might have met her somewhere before, but I have no idea where, or when. She just feels so…familiar.”

  He stares at me. “What, like in a past life?”

  “Jesus. Forget it. Forget I said anything. Maybe you’re right. Maybe I am in love with her and I’m trying to come up with any excuse to fuck it up, because that’s what I always do with women. Fuck things up.”

  Connor clasps a hand on my shoulder. His voice drops. “Easy, brother. Don’t start with that guilt shit again. What’s past is just that: past.”

  I shrug off his hand. He always tells me not to feel guilt over what’s in the past, but he doesn’t know the whole story. I never told him what happened that night, the real reason I wanted to die.

  If he knew the whole story, he definitely wouldn’t be telling me not to feel guilty.

  Unable to stand still any longer, I turn away and walk to the opposite side of the room. Connor watches me with that stillness he has, not a muscle moving but his entire body giving off a sense of coiled readiness, of aggressive action held in check. He’s watched me like this so many times I’ve lost count.

  It took a long time after we met for him to trust that I wasn’t going to do anything stupid to try to hurt myself.

  He doesn’t know this, but one day I just decided it would be much better punishment for me if I lived.

  “So I’ll look into her then, yeah?” says Connor, still watching me from across the room. “See what I come up with. You need eyes and ears in her house?”

  “No. Just see if…see if there’s anything strange in her background. Any connection between us…I don’t know. I’m not sure what we’re looking for.” I think of my office door, cracked open a few inches. “And put a lock on my office door, same type you’ve got on the safe.”

  “All right. Lock’ll be on by tonight. I’ll get you some paper on her by Friday. Can do a quick scan today, call you if anything interesting pops up, but the other stuff’ll take a few days.”

  “Thanks.”

  Connor crosses the room, stops in front of me and holds out his hand. We shake.

  Holding my gaze, he says, “It’s probably nothing.”

  I nod.

  His black eyes grow piercing. “But if not, you should decide now what you want to do about it. Get your head straight, yeah? Because if you got feelings for this girl and she’s gunnin’ for you—”

  “I know.” I cut him off, my voice curt. He doesn’t have to say more, and frankly I don’t want to hear it. Because if Victoria Price is gunning for me, I’m going to have to make a choice between the two of us.

  After last night, I’m not entirely sure I wouldn’t let her win.

  Connor says good-bye and lets himself out, while I go back to staring out the windows, nursing my scotch and brooding.

  Victoria. Who the hell are you?

  TWENTY-SIX

  ~ Victoria ~

  The moment the elevator doors slide open to reveal the private entrance of my penthouse, I shout, “Where are you!”

  Tabby’s faint response comes from my office. “In here!”

  I hustle in there so fast I don’t even stop to take my heels off, though my feet are killing me. My new Louboutin platforms are over six inches high, and my arches hate me right now. I burst through the door, see Tabitha sitting at my desk, peering intently at the computer screen, and yell, “What the hell happened?”

  Without looking at me, she calmly replies, “I told you; I was in the emergency room with food poisoning.”

  I glare at her, huffing. “I just spent a hundred bucks bribing a valet guy to get my phone out of Parker’s car, the last fifteen minutes in a cab hyperventilating because you didn’t pick up your phone and only responded to my frantic texts with a VERY unhelpful ‘Chill, dude, it’s all good’—and now you’re sitting at my desk like the Queen of Sheba, surfing eBay for your next Hello Kitty handbag obsession while I’m suffering a heart attack about what leaked online? Tabitha, this is unacceptable!”

  She looks over at me, blows her bangs from her eyes, and smiles. “Did you just stomp your foot? That was cute.”

  “Arrrghhh!”

  “All right, calm down! Take a load off and I’ll give you the 411.” She waves to one of the chairs in front of my desk—my desk—and turns back to the computer.

  “You’re so fired!”

  She says nonchalantly, “I know. Sit.”

  I make a growly noise, stomp over to the chair, sit, and toss my handbag on the desk. “Start talking, girl genius. What happened?”

  She leans back in my chair, turning her attention to me. “The Drudge Report is what happened.”

  The noise that escapes my mouth sounds like air escaping a balloon.

  Tabby rushes to add, “But it was only a tiny mention, a few sentences, no pictures, only one eyewitness who claims he saw you at the Laredo airport exiting a private jet. It’s a total nothing story, Victoria. It wasn’t even picked up by any of the other major entertainment outlets.”

  My eyes are in danger of popping out of my skull. “Nothing story? It mentions Laredo.”

  She shrugs. “There’s nothing that ties you to that city, so…so what?”

 
I stand and lean over the desk with my hands braced against the desktop. “Parker Maxwell is so what!” I collapse back into the chair. “Oh my God. He’s going to figure out the whole thing. I’ll have zero credibility left. He’s going to ruin me. Everything I’ve built, everything I’ve worked for…”

  I end with a helpless groan.

  I can tell Tabby is resisting the urge to roll her eyes by the way her lashes are fluttering.

  “Victoria. Think about it. Even if he did think it was a strange coincidence you were in Laredo, there’s nothing to tie you to it. Everything created by me and my predecessor, the late, great Mr. Dooney, says you’re from California. School records. DMV records. Voting records. Everything. And everything tying you to Laredo has been wiped out. Anyone looking for traces of you in Texas will hit nothing but dead ends. You’re a ghost there.”

  When I don’t answer because my face is buried in my palms, she asks, “So how’d you explain it to him?”

  I whip my head up and snap, “I had to make up a cover story on the fly about stopping to see my dearly departed old boyfriend’s grave on my way to see my sick mother in California, because my number one henchman—henchwoman—got sick and went AWOL!”

  Tabby leans back in the chair, puts her feet up on my desk, crosses them at the ankle and says sarcastically, “Why, yes, I am feeling much better, Victoria. Thank you so much for asking.”

  I collapse back into the chair. After engaging her in a staring contest for a few seconds, I finally grumble, “I’m glad you’re feeling better. What was it?”

  “Sushi, I think.”

  “I keep telling you not to eat that disgusting sea urchin.”

  “If someone told you filthy Grey Goose martinis were disgusting, would you stop drinking them?”

  I wrinkle my nose. “Martinis can’t give me food poisoning.”

  “They can give you cirrhosis.”

  Tabby doesn’t drink. Normally I consider that a character flaw in a person, but she has other redeeming qualities, so I let it go.

  “Can we please get back to the subject at hand? Namely, what can you do to prevent something like this from happening in the future?”

  She swings her legs off the desk. “Nothing’s foolproof, Victoria. I told you that when I was hired. I’m one of the best, but I’m only human—and there’s only one of me. I’ve got programs in place that alert me to any mention of your name, but if I’m out of commission, that intel is useless. And once a story’s out there, trying to contain it is like trying to cut off a hydra’s head.” She casually inspects her fingernails. “Maybe we should consider staffing up.”

  I stare at her with narrowed eyes. She’s been at me for at least a year to hire her an assistant. I’ve always given her an unequivocal no. There are only so many people I want knowing my business. As in, one: her.

  Watching her so nonchalantly inspect her manicure, I’m hit with a terrible thought. I gasp, bolting upright in the chair. “Tell me you didn’t do this on purpose so I’d hire you an assistant!”

  She sighs. “You think I’d risk my job—my extremely well-paid job—to try to teach you a lesson? Besides, if you go down, I go down. I highly doubt the trustees of Stanford University, the Secretary of State of California, the IRS, or a dozen other public and private institutions will appreciate all my extracurricular activities associated with keeping the Queen Bitch on her throne.”

  Her logic, as always, is impeccable, but I’m still not convinced. “Why couldn’t you just go in and crash Drudge’s servers like you did with that story from TMZ?”

  She explains slowly, with exaggerated patience, as if speaking to a child. “Number one: if I had to crash every server of every company that ran a story on you, half the servers in the United States would go down. Number two: there are people who track that stuff. People who work for government agencies with three initials, like FBI. CIA. Too much weird activity like that and it would eventually point a big red arrow at your head. At my head. Number three: I once met the guy who owns TMZ, and he told me I looked like the love child of Pippi Longstocking and Marilyn Manson. So any chance I get, I fuck with that dude. Number four: the story in Drudge had already been published, and it was a dud. It wasn’t worth the risk of drawing attention to it by taking it down. That would’ve made it more conspicuous, not less.”

  “According to you!”

  She looks at me from under her fringe of red bangs. “Yes. According to me. Who’s the expert here. And by the way, the best way to keep this kind of thing from happening again is to stay the hell away from Laredo, Texas.”

  Game, set, and match: Tabby. Defeated, I sag back into the chair again and rub my fingers into my pounding temples.

  Unlike me, Tabby isn’t one to wallow in a victory. She moves right on to the next topic. “Any luck with his safe this time?”

  “His desk drawers were all locked. Locked! For a man who lives alone, he’s definitely paranoid about someone getting into his stuff. So I took another look at his safe, and I realized why there wasn’t a dial.” I give Tabby a meaningful look. “The round silver thingy that I first thought was where you insert a key is actually where you insert your finger.”

  Her brows lift. Now I’ve got her full attention. She looks at me with eager eyes. “Biometrics? Sweet!”

  “No—not sweet! Extremely unsweet! How the hell am I supposed to get past that? Chop off his thumb?”

  She purses her lips as if she’s considering it. When I groan in frustration, she relents. “I’m kidding. No chopping. Now, listen, this is important. Since I didn’t find anything incriminating about him in the usual places, I dug deeper, like you asked. I hit both his business and home computers.”

  Instantly I’m all ears. “And?”

  One corner of her mouth curls up, as it always does when she finds something delicious. “And he’s got defenses on both systems that are so sophisticated it made my panties moist.”

  I blink, nonplussed. “Honestly, Tabby. The things you find arousing.”

  “One thing’s for sure: whoever Parker Maxwell employed to secure his shit is good. Like, National Security Agency good. Like, World of Warcraft level 100 good. Like, Star Trek Deep Space Nine good—”

  “Oh, for God’s sake, I’ve got it, he’s good! But that’s bad for us, right?”

  She tilts her head, smiling like a cat that’s just gorged itself on a nice fat mouse. “I’ve already mounted a brute-force attack with administrator obfuscation and a custom fifty-GPU cluster to get the encryption key.”

  I stare at her. “Any time you’d like to revert back to English, it would be appreciated. The natives here don’t speak computer geek.”

  “Forget it. The bottom line is, I’ll have access soon. And then we’ll see what dirty little secrets Mr. Maxwell is hiding in cyberspace. They might be even better than what he’s hiding in his safe.”

  For the first time since Parker asked me about Texas last night, the knots in my stomach begin to unfurl. Tabby has relieved some of my concerns about the Drudge Report story and given me renewed hope about finding something compromising in Parker’s background that I can use to screw him over. I take a deep breath, close my eyes, and rest my head on the back of the chair.

  After several moments, Tabby’s hesitant voice breaks the silence. “So…how was Laredo, anyway?”

  I know what she’s really asking: how was Eva?

  Without opening my eyes, I admit, “About as fun as having all my skin peeled off with a potato peeler and then being thrown into a saltwater bath.”

  Another span of silence follows. This time when Tabby speaks, her voice is deadly serious. “You know the real reason I do this job isn’t for the money, Victoria. You know that, right?”

  I tilt up my head and look at her. Today her outfit of choice is a pair of black men’s suspenders attached to black skinny jeans, a tiny white T-shirt with the Batman logo in electric blue stretched taut across her boobs so it’s pulled all out of proportion, and Chucks with no la
ces that, judging by the look of them, she’s owned since junior high school. The jewel in her belly-button ring matches the blue of the Batman logo, and so does her nail polish.

  I ask, “Are you about to confess that you’re in love with me?”

  She doesn’t even bat an eyelash. “I’ve had a major girl crush on you since before we even met, superstar, but that’s not the reason, either.”

  My brows lift. This is getting interesting.

  She says, “I work for you because I believe in what you’re doing.”

  “Which is?”

  “Empowering the powerless.”

  She says it with deep respect and reverence, as if it’s Gandhi or Nelson Mandela she’s speaking about. I’m a little taken aback by the quiet passion in her voice. I’ve never heard her talk like this before.

  I joke, “Maybe we should make that the company slogan.”

  She retorts, “Kid all you want, but it’s true. You’re the only one out there telling women that the source of our own power is within ourselves. That we don’t have to rely on anyone else for our happiness. That what’s in our best interest isn’t having babies and playing house, but stretching ourselves and finding our true potential, because that’s also in the best interest of the rest of humanity. We had the sexual revolution and the big feminist movement in the sixties and seventies, made all kinds of strides forward for women’s equality and rights, and almost fifty years later we’re still only making seventy-seven cents on the dollar compared with what a man makes. And we’re supposed to be content with that. Well, I’m not.”

  “Believe me, sweetheart, you’re making a hell of a lot more than any other man in your position.”

  She says vehemently, “Yes, I am. Because I have a badass boss who cares only about the quality of the job, not what’s between my legs. And if every other employer in this country were like you, we’d have true equality. Women wouldn’t be afraid to leave their shitty marriages, because they’d be able to support themselves and their children alone. Women wouldn’t have to put up with all the crap they put up with from men, and compete against one another, and freak out about getting older, and deform themselves with Botox and fake tits and lip injections, because men have more money, and therefore more power, and ultimately more worth than women do. You’re the only loud, proud, unapologetic voice left telling women to stop being so fucking passive and take control of their lives. And that’s why I work for you. Because you’re not afraid of anything, you don’t take shit from anyone, and you’ve got a pair of balls on you bigger than any man’s.”