Next to You

by Julia Gabriel

  Phlox tightened her embrace even as Jared’s shoulders began to shake beneath her.

  “I don’t want Emma and Aidan growing up with a murderer for a grandfather.” Jared’s voice cracked again and Phlox felt a tremendous shudder roll down his spine. “I love those kids,” he choked out. “He ruined my life. I won’t have him ruin theirs, too.”

  Chapter 28

  The next morning Jared awoke alone in Phlox’s bed, her yellow and red quilt bunched around him. She was gone but her perfume lingered. He rolled over and buried his face in her pillow, inhaling the flowery sweet scent. His muscles ached a bit from last night but he felt different. Better. Lighter. Phlox knew who he was and he had still gotten to spend the night in her arms.

  God, she was tough. Beautiful, but tough. She had forgiven him. He wasn’t used to people handing out forgiveness like it was Halloween candy. No, that wasn’t a fair analogy, he realized. Her absolution had been a lot more valuable than that.

  He rolled out of bed and pulled on his jeans and shirt. The smell of coffee was beckoning him downstairs, not to mention the promise of a good morning kiss. Maybe more, even.

  Phlox was sitting at the kitchen island in a rumpled nightshirt, frowning at her laptop. She slapped it closed when he approached. He swooped in and kissed her, licking the taste of smoky coffee from her lips.

  “Good morning, beautiful.”

  She moaned beneath him, and he gathered her soft and pliable body into his. He kissed her senseless, then reached over and flipped the laptop open again.

  The screen lit up with the home page of the New York Post and a bold-faced, screaming headline: BEAUTY AND THE BEAST! Billionaire recluse steps out with beauty mogul! Beneath were side-by-side photos of Jared and Phlox.

  Phlox reached for the computer but he spun it away and scrolled down through the article.

  “Jared,” she said.

  “Fuck. I knew this was going to happen.”

  “It’s no big deal.”

  “It’s a very big deal.” Her phone was vibrating furiously on the island’s granite top. “The last thing you need is to have me associated with your company. Especially right now.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because I’m fucking hideous and your company sells beauty!”

  “You are not fucking hideous.” She tried to slip her arms around him, but Jared pushed her gently away. “And it’s my company. I can have anyone I want associated with it.”

  “My father murdered his wife. How will that play with your customers? I don’t want that on my conscience, Phlox. I can’t do it. I’m sorry.” He grabbed his keys from the table and charged out of the house, leaving her swearing a blue streak behind him.

  * * *

  He pulled into a gas station miles away, bought one of those extra-caffeinated sodas and checked the news coverage on his phone. It was in every newspaper style and business section in New York and San Francisco, plus every online gossip rag. Beauty and the beast … Just one day after the execution of his father, reclusive billionaire Jared Connor has re-emerged as the boyfriend of Phlox Beauty owner Phlox Miller … wonder if they’ve compared scars … a Mr. Harvey St. John says Mr. Connor worked as a caretaker at his Jackson Hole, Wyoming home … rumor has it that Connor and Miller were introduced by a plastic surgeon … Miller is the business partner of actress Ginger Moon’s daughter, Zelda … a source says Miller was also spotted with former flame David Cook at one of Cook’s new restaurants — is she cheating on Connor or Cook? … the Phlox Beauty CEO has been largely out of the public eye since an accident at her Connecticut home last year … she is virtually unrecognizable after her plastic surgery …

  This was exactly what he’d been afraid would happen. He would end up dragging her company down into the mud. He couldn’t do that to her. He cared about her too much. He leaned his head against the steering wheel of the Porsche. And he’d made an ass of himself last night, crying and blubbering like a stupid baby.

  It had felt good to do it, though. Cathartic. Phlox had acted as though it was the most natural thing in the world to do, holding him in her arms until he was finished. Then she’d let him carry her upstairs and make love to her for hours. He didn’t deserve such a woman—and she deserved a far better man than him.

  I told Jake this would happen.

  Jake.

  Jake. Jake. Jake.

  Jared closed the browser on his phone and tapped his brother’s name in the contact list.

  “You fucking did this, didn’t you?” he said when Jake answered. He pressed his fingers hard against his temple, trying to maintain what little control he had left.

  “Hello, Jared.”

  “Don’t ‘hello Jared’ me. You leaked this. You fucking told them about her and now it’s everywhere!”

  “I just ripped off the bandage, Jared. He’s gone. It’s time to move on.”

  “It’s not my life I care about! It’s going to ruin her business.”

  Jake let out a long sigh on the other end. “You know, I don’t think you give her enough credit. Or people, generally.”

  “You know what ‘people generally’ are saying? ‘I wonder if they’ve compared scars.’ That’s why I don’t give ‘people generally’ any credit, Jake. I can’t believe you did this to her. I thought you guys liked her.”

  Jared hung up and tossed the phone onto the seat beside him. Immediately it buzzed with a text. He picked it up again and saw Phlox’s name.

  I love you.

  And a moment later, And I don’t care if the entire world knows it. He waited to see if anything else came through, but the phone was silent after that.

  I love you. No woman had ever told him she loved him. Not that Jared had ever expected any to. They loved his money. They loved his cars. His vacation homes. The parties he could take them to. But him? No, they had never loved him.

  And that had been fine. He liked to think he was an eminently realistic man. It wasn’t realistic to expect a woman to choose his ugly, scarred mug when there were millions of men with perfect handsome faces. He was realistic enough, too, to know that Phlox Miller would get over it soon enough. There would be plenty of other men to help her through it. That guy in the restaurant, for starters. He wouldn’t be an embarrassment to her company the way Jared would.

  He didn’t reply to her message. Instead he put the car back in gear and pulled out onto the highway. He had never expected a woman to love him. He had never expected to love a woman, either. He loved Phlox. He wouldn’t deny that. But he also loved her too much to ruin her business, to ruin everything she had worked so hard to accomplish. He couldn’t do that to her—and he would be man enough to ignore the slashing knife of pain that was right now shredding what was left of his heart.

  He was good at that anyway, ignoring pain.

  Chapter 29

  Photographers were loitering in the lobby of the office building when Phlox arrived back at the office later that afternoon. It had been tempting to stay in Connecticut and wallow, but there was too much to be done in New York. No time for wallowing today.

  “Ms. Miller! How did you meet Jared Connor? No one has seen the guy in years.”

  Phlox smiled into the bright white of the flash. “He wasn’t that hard to find, actually. Maybe people haven’t been looking hard enough.”

  Another camera appeared before her face. “Is it true he was working as your caretaker?”

  “He was doing some consulting work at my house, yes. He was quite good at it.”

  Up ahead, Zee was holding the elevator but Phlox was strangely in no hurry. She had always hated dealing with the press before. Zee was much better at it. But she didn’t mind today, for some reason.

  “Ms. Miller! You’ve been out of the public eye for awhile too.”

  “And your question is?” She smiled at the guy’s dumbfounded expression, then took pity on him. “Yes, I underwent many rounds of surgery after my accident.”

  As soon as she stepped onto the elevator, Zee
released the door and they were alone.

  “Thank god for media training,” Phlox said.

  Zee gave her a curious look. “You were holding your own out there. You used to hate that before.”

  Phlox shrugged as the floors zipped by. “I’m suffering from emotional whiplash. I’m not myself.”

  “Uh oh. How did things go with him?”

  “Okay last night. Lousy this morning. He’s very upset that our relationship—if you can call it that—got out. He’s not answering my texts today.”

  “Why would he be upset?”

  The elevator stopped at their floor.

  “He thinks his appearance will harm the company.”

  Zee scrunched up her face “That’s probably the least of our worries at the moment. Honestly, I’m more pissed that they’re calling me Zelda in the press.”

  “Sorry about that. I’ll make it up to you.”

  Cherise rushed them the instant they stepped off the elevator, waving a sheet of paper filled with names and phone numbers. She thrust it at Phlox. “The phone is ringing off the hook with reporters. And Vanity Fair wants you tomorrow for a special web-only interview.”

  “Photo shoot too?” Phlox’s eyes widened.

  “Yup.”

  “You don’t have to do it,” Zee said gently as they walked down the hall toward their adjacent offices. She turned back to Cherise. “Will they take me instead?”

  Cherise shook her head with a grimace. “Sorry.”

  “It’s media coverage that’s not about the A2Z Cream,” Phlox pointed out as she opened the door to her office. The late afternoon sun was bright and hot through the windows.

  “True. Everyone loves a plastic surgery story. It’ll get ugly online, though. All the trolls will be out.”

  “If it draws attention away from the product, I’ll take one for the team.”

  Zee was right, of course. Say the words “plastic” and “surgery” and the internet erupted into a feeding frenzy. Was she going to get added to the “best celebrity plastic surgery” list or the ones for “botched celebrity faces?”

  “It’s not like I had a choice about having plastic surgery.” Phlox dropped her purse onto the floor behind her desk and let her body sink into her big leather executive chair. “I can talk about the new burn care line. I can spin the Jared thing, saying he’s just a new investor. No one has any pictures of us on a date. We went to a matinee showing of a movie one afternoon in Connecticut, went hot tub shopping, and had pizza at a dive pizza joint. That’s it for public appearances together.”

  “So are we taking the money?” Zee sat on the edge of her desk. “Rye thinks we should but he doesn’t want to get in between you and Jared.”

  “We might as well. He only wants one percent of the company in exchange. We could use the money to fund the burn care launch.”

  “We could. Might give you an excuse to see him occasionally, too.”

  Phlox shrugged “I’m guessing his brother manages the Maria Group. When I was at his house, he said he was a financial manager. But if Jared wants to invest in the company, I’m not letting him do it in secret.” She smiled, then picked up the phone to call Jess. “We’re going to paper the planet with press releases and I’m going to tell everyone who will listen, starting with Vanity Fair tomorrow.”

  * * *

  Phlox wore a sleek pencil skirt the color of bittersweet chocolate and her all-time favorite article of clothing, the vintage Dior New Look jacket she had purchased the day after her bank balance topped one million. The jacket was a lovely rich shade of caramel, fitted and nipped in at the waist. To be honest, it fit her much better now that her boobs were smaller. A sparkling diamond pendant lay against her sternum. She had pulled her hair back into a neat ballet bun.

  “Oh chic!” the photographer, a tiny man with an Italian accent, cried out when he saw her. He immediately began fussing with the jacket and tugging at her skirt.

  Colin, the writer, was there as well, continuing the interview they’d begun over breakfast that morning.

  “Your smile is the same,” Colin said as the photographer’s camera clicked around her, taking shot after shot. She’d met Colin at a party two years earlier but when she walked into the restaurant that morning for their interview, he hadn’t recognized her. He had apologized profusely then, but was obviously still feeling bad about it.

  “Hmm?” Phlox was concentrating on maintaining a human expression on her face and worrying whether the makeup covering her facial scars was holding up under the hot lights.

  “Your smile is the same as I remember it. People are saying it’s odd that you and Jared Connor both stepped back into the public eye at the same time.”

  “Total coincidence, that.” The photographer was pulling a few strands of hair free from her bun and arranging them artfully around her face. “I wasn’t hiding though. Just recovering.”

  “But Jared Conner, he’s been hiding.”

  “Yes. Because of his father, more so than his face. He doesn’t want his—” she caught herself just in time. She couldn’t mention Emma and Aidan. “He just got tired of everything he did being connected to his father.”

  An unexpected flash from the camera momentarily blinded Phlox and she scrunched her eyes shut.

  “You’re the girlfriend of the billionaire recluse?” the photographer asked. He stopped to inspect Phlox’s face. “I thought you had … too.”

  She held her breath while he rubbed at the makeup along the edge of her face, turning her toward the light so he could see better.

  “Can we take some shots without the makeup?” he asked.

  Colin looked at her with worried eyes. “If you do, my editor will use them,” he warned.

  Phlox thought about it. Why not? Why not open this Pandora’s box? Let all the ugliness out but also—the last thing to escape the mythical Pandora’s box—the spirit of hope. People were saying she was unrecognizable now. That was a fair statement. Someone was bound to point out—if it didn’t end up being Colin himself—that the old Phlox Miller would never have been photographed for Vanity Fair. Not as an editorial spread. She hadn’t been the best advertisement for a cosmetics company before, and no magic mascara or secret serum could have changed that. But a horrible accident borne of her own hubris and stupidity had.

  That’s what made her uncomfortable with her new face. Not that people treated her differently, treated her in a manner they never would have before. But that the price she had paid for her new beauty was so high. If she could go back in time a year, to that afternoon in Connecticut, she would shout at her old self not to fuck around with formulas outside the safety of a lab. She would grab herself by the shoulders and drag that idiot woman away from the range. She would prevent a long year’s worth of surgeries … a long year’s worth of pain.

  Because it hadn’t been worth it. All that pain for what? To fall in love with a man who refused to be seen in public with her anyway?

  Of course, if it weren’t for the accident, she never would have hired a caretaker. Never would have met Jared. Her stubborn, sexy, tender, infuriating caretaker. Lover. Investor. How had he become so many things to her in such a short period of time?

  The photographer was looking at her, his expression a mask of worry that he had gone too far.

  “Let’s do it,” she said to him and left for the ladies room to wash off all the makeup she had painstakingly applied that morning.

  Colin and the photographer were talking when she returned, but they fell silent as they took in the white arc of skin, like a scythe, that adorned her face now.

  “Ready?” she said.

  While the photographer buzzed around her like a bee, she had another idea. If she was going to do this—to expose her scars this publicly—she might as well push it all the way. Fixing her face had left her with scars elsewhere on her body. The new pretty face had not come without trade-offs.

  When the photographer finished taking shots of her face, Phlox unbuttoned
her jacket. She had on nothing but her bra beneath. She slid her arms out of the jacket and handed it to the photographer to hold. She unclasped her bra and handed that to a wide-eyed Colin. Then she put the jacket back on, leaving it unbuttoned.

  The photographer’s eyes raked over his model, finally settling on the map of scars on her stomach. His eyes lit up as he realized what Phlox was offering, what she was asking.

  “Yes,” he said, lifting his camera again. Immediately, he lowered it. “The hair.” He gestured at his own head with its rapidly receding hairline. “The hair should be down, I think.”

  He glanced at Colin for confirmation. Colin merely shrugged, holding the bra like it were a live snake.

  “Sexier, you know?” the photographer added. He squinted his eyes at her, considering. “What do you have on under the skirt?”

  Phlox’s heart skipped a beat at the question. She hadn’t envisioned going quite that far. But the visual popped up in her head. Why not? She unzipped her skirt and stepped out of it.

  Colin’s eyes were bugging out of his head and he shifted uncomfortably on the chair. She bet he wouldn’t forget what she looked like after this.

  “Bellissima,” the photographer said. “Perfect.”

  Zee is going to die when she sees this.

  The photographer began clicking away and Phlox allowed herself to be immortalized wearing nothing but thigh high stockings, tiny lace panties, stiletto heels and a vintage Dior New Look jacket. And a map of scars.

  Chapter 30

  “Out with it,” Phlox said to Cherise.

  It was two days after the Vanity Fair shoot and Phlox had dragged Cherise out for a lunch hour of gown shopping for Ginger Moon’s movie premiere. Actually, it was Cherise who had dragged Phlox out, on Zee’s insistence.