Legacy of Lies

by Tara Leigh

  He planted light kisses on my thighs, moving up the concave slope of my belly to dance around my breasts. “We should have had this reunion a long time ago,” he drawled.

  I stiffened, gave the tiniest of nods. Reunion. Tripp sounded so casual, so cavalier. Like he had nothing to do with our estrangement, nothing to do with ending us. Ending me.

  Easing off the couch, he cupped his palms around my face. “Be right back.” I assumed he was going to get a condom.

  I can’t do this.

  Clarity finally came. Tripp was no gentle rainstorm. He was a category five hurricane. A tsunami. The storm of the century. I might be dancing tonight but I’d be clinging to a tree tomorrow, cursing my own stupidity for not seeking shelter when I had the chance.

  I was on my feet the second Tripp disappeared down the hall, shoving my feet through the legs of my discarded jeans, shrugging into my sweater. My shoes and purse were already beside the door, although I had no idea where my coat was. Deciding I didn’t care, I opened the front door and darted through it.

  Before I could close it behind me, the knob was yanked from my hand. “Jolie—” Tripp stood naked in front of me, his body a perfectly sculpted collection of muscles and sinews that reminded me of Lance with an uneasy twinge. “You’re leaving?”

  I rushed into the stairwell in a confusing haze of sadness and relief. “I guess I’m not much for reunions, after all.”

  20

  Tripp

  What the fuck just happened?

  The answer was obvious, of course.

  Jolie Chapman was running out on me. Again.

  Fuck that. She was not getting the last word. Not this time.

  Racing back to my bedroom, I threw on sweats and the closest pair of shoes—my running sneakers. Grabbing Jolie’s coat from the hall closet, I sprinted for the elevator. As long as Jolie walked at least a few flights of stairs, I had a chance to catch her.

  The elevator came quickly, and I was downstairs in less than a minute. The lobby was empty. I made a quick request to the building attendant that served as an in-house concierge, and entered the stairwell just off the atrium. Jolie’s plodding footfalls echoing off the cement walls had me practically breathing fire by the time she came into sight, one hand gripping the railing, chin tucked into her collarbone.

  “You forgot something.” At my voice, her head shot up, wet eyes blinking in surprise.

  If I thought I knew what I was going to say, it was ground to dust at the naked hurt trekking across her exquisite features. My ribs closed like a vise around my lungs as a war raged in my body. One side wanting to soothe away the pain radiating from her expression, invisible scars that cut deep.

  But the other side, the one still aching from the scars she’d carved into me, had moved beyond fury. What the fuck did Jolie Chapman have to cry about?

  “There’s a cab waiting outside to take you home,” I said, settling Jolie’s coat on her shoulders and pulling the hair trapped beneath her collar. “But if you leave now, you’re admitting that what we had ten years ago, what we had ten fucking minutes ago, doesn’t mean a goddamn thing to you. Is that really the truth?”

  She didn’t look back at me. My last glimpse of Jolie was her drooping shoulders and bowed head, just before the quiet click of the stairwell door scissored through my eardrums.

  Rather than chase after her, again, I launched myself at the stairs, using the building’s twenty-seven stories as my own personal Stairmaster and not setting foot back into my apartment until I was drenched in sweat, my breaths coming in ragged gasps.

  Normally, a good workout cleared my head, allowed me to reframe problems and envision solutions I hadn’t considered. But even after a shower, my brain still felt thick and muddled.

  I pulled on a fresh set of clothes, walking back to my office and opening the door to the terrace. Every exhale produced a vapor cloud, immediately carried away by the cutting wind. The freezing air felt good on my overheated skin, the chill slowly erasing the lingering sting of Jolie’s touch.

  But I didn’t come outside to watch myself breathe, or enjoy the cold air.

  I came outside to see her. Jolie.

  Except that a billboard, beautiful though it was, didn’t do her justice. Not after spending time with the real thing. Before she took off. Before she ghosted me. Again.

  I closed my eyes, recalling how Jolie had looked an hour before, naked on my couch. Bare feet and pink-tipped toes, delicately shaped breasts with small, dusky nipples, damp blonde hair strewn over the cushions, a face so fucking perfect it could make the most cynical man believe in a higher power.

  And those legs—they deserved a monument. Long and lean and perfectly shaped, they had quivered against my cheeks as Jolie climaxed, her smooth skin pinkened after rubbing up against my two-day growth of stubble.

  I took a deep breath, smelling only the heady fragrance that belonged to Jolie herself, savoring the sweetness that still lingered on my tongue.

  Fuck.

  I was a Montgomery. A liar, a cheat, a fraud.

  I hadn’t escaped my legacy—I had continued it.

  I fucked up. Big time.

  Not by moving to New York. This city was a defeat I needed to erase, a territory I needed to conquer.

  I’d fucked up by not moving to a different apartment. By not ordering blinds. By answering Jolie’s email. By pretending to be Lance. By giving her my number. By taking her on as a client. By crashing her photo shoot. Bringing her back to my place. Kissing her sweet center, making her come apart beneath my mouth.

  So many fuck-ups.

  But the worst one of all . . . Letting myself think—for even a minute—that a Montgomery and a Chapman could be together.

  For a card-carrying Mensa member, I was a fucking idiot.

  I sucked in a deep lungful of New York’s atmosphere, laden with a distinctive mix of exhaust, doughy pretzels, and high-octane energy. Glaring down at my tented jeans, I pushed it back out again with a rough groan. Dick didn’t know when to stand down. “She’s gone, dude,” I grumbled. He gave an angry pulse, and I sighed. “Guess she’s just not that into you.”

  But that was just another lie. That combustive chemistry Jolie and I had? It couldn’t be faked. It was all too real. Painfully so.

  If I’d been willing to give her another chance, why couldn’t she?

  Fuck it. I walked back inside, picked up my phone.

  Lance: How was the shoot?

  21

  Jolie

  I shouldn't have checked my messages. How could I respond to Lance when I still carried Tripp's scent on my skin, felt the ghost of his tongue between my thighs?

  Remington Owen Montgomery III.

  Tripp.

  But still, a Montgomery.

  There was no hope for us. No future. The wounds ran too deep.

  Still reeling from our encounter, I sucked in a quick breath. It stabbed my lungs and I wrapped my arms around my chest, pitching forward. A well of emotions rose up from the deepest part of me, multiplying until I thought I would explode from the pressure. Not knowing what else to do, I hit reply and stared at the blinking cursor. I needed to confide in someone.

  Nina and Romy were out of the question, of course. And Eva had already made her opinion clear. But just because Tripp didn’t look like a villain didn’t mean he was a hero.

  Jolie: Have you ever been in love? The kind that makes every cliché you’ve ever heard about love actually make sense? Fireworks exploding, walking on air, so happy you want to scream from rooftops? I had that once. Had. Past tense. I saw him again tonight, after ten years, and I swear it all came rushing back. Until reality hit, and I remembered the kind of man he’d turned out to be, and what I’d done to keep him out of my life—

  What was I doing?

  Delete.

  Delete.

  Delete. Delete. Delete.

  I liked Lance, damn it. Enough to want to pursue something with him. Dating 101: Thou shalt not gush over an ex.
/>
  Jolie: Actually, I bumped into an old friend just as we were wrapping up. I’m exhausted. It felt like we spent our entire walk down memory lane dodging land mines.

  Lance: I’ve had my share of awkward reunions. Not sure any of them required a flak jacket though.

  There was that word again. Reunion. I thought for a while, idly tapping at the keys before erasing them and starting over.

  Jolie: Unfortunately, I didn’t have one of those on hand.

  Lance: But you emerged unscathed?

  I made a weird snuffling sound, glad that I’d told Lance about my father in a previous text exchange. It saved me the trouble of having to give him more background tonight.

  Jolie: Not exactly. I found out that my father was innocent. He didn’t commit the crimes he was accused of.

  Lance: And that’s a bad thing?

  Jolie: No, of course not. It just makes some of the things I said to him pretty awful.

  Lance: That’s what teenagers do, right? That, and fall in love with the wrong people.

  Jolie: Guilty of both.

  Lance: Me, too. I actually ran into her not long ago. She’s not married. No kids. We live in the same city. I thought maybe we could give it another shot. See if we’d get it right. But she wasn’t interested.

  Jolie: Oh. Did things end badly between you two the first time?

  Lance: You could say that. We both had a lot going on back then, and she broke up with me. There's more to it, of course, but that's the basic outline.

  Jolie: That's practically the mirror image of what happened with me. There was a lot of family drama at the time, and even though we could have supported each other through it, he ended things. I guess I just can't forgive him for that.

  22

  Tripp

  What—what?

  He ended things.

  I fucking did not!

  Was Jolie only saying that so she wouldn't remind Lance of his ex? I started to write back, typing and deleting, typing and deleting. As Lance, I couldn't exactly call her out on it.

  Lance: Even though it was so long ago?

  Jolie: There were consequences that would take a novel to explain.

  Lance: It sounds like things still aren’t finished with you.

  Jolie: I’ve made enough bad decisions to last a lifetime. Believe me. I’m done.

  Lance: Are you sure he is?

  Jolie: Tonight . . . I’m not sure of much.

  Consequences? Frustration pitched and rolled in my gut, a sense that I was missing a crucial piece of data necessary to figuring out what the hell had gone wrong between us—and not just today. Jolie had reversed course so quickly I had whiplash from trying to keep up. Earlier, in my apartment. And now, over email.

  After all these years, I deserved to know why she'd ended things between us so abruptly. Why she cut me out of her life with a goddamn ax.

  23

  Jolie

  “Where have you been? You never called me back.” Nina’s words tumbled through the speaker of my phone almost too fast to match the movements of her mouth.

  I slid my key into the lock and turned it, shouldering my way through as if I was pushing open a thousand pound vault instead of the thin door of my Manhattan apartment, keeping the phone as far away from my face as possible.

  “Sorry, it’s just been a crazy day.” A meeting with my agent had run long, mostly because she couldn’t understand why I was turning down jobs that required me to hopscotch the globe. My business plan was cutting into her commission and she wasn’t happy about it.

  I probably should have postponed it for another day. My night with Tripp and my texts with Lance had me feeling like an overexposed photograph, all blurred lines and lost details.

  Thankfully, Nina didn’t pick up on my discomfort. “Tell me, how did the shoot go? The pictures looked gorgeous.”

  “I haven’t seen proofs yet, but Nick said I’m going to be happy with—” I paused, her question finally sinking in. “What pictures?”

  “The ones on your Instagram.”

  “Oh, right.” I rubbed my forehead. I’d completely forgotten about all of Eva’s social media posts.

  “Who’s the mystery man? Barely unpacked and already you’ve found yourself a man to keep you warm.”

  I practically choked. Eva had uploaded a picture of Tripp and me?

  Obviously Nina didn’t realize who he was. That would have been a disaster.

  She could never know that Tripp and I had reconnected. Ever.

  Ten years ago, he’d crushed me and left Nina to pick up the pieces. It was Nina who had followed up with the modeling agent who slipped me her business card on the street one day, taking me to Europe and convincing me to walk my first runway. It was Nina who supported me when I finally realized I was pregnant at nearly five months along, and coming up with a believable lie when my bump got too big for me to work. It was Nina who held my hand and told me everything would be okay when I went into labor eight weeks early, and made sure it was. And it was Nina who was trying to help me get my jewelry business off the ground now.

  Admitting I’d jumped back into Tripp’s arms the first chance I got would be like slapping Nina in the face. I couldn’t do it. “No one. He was just a model.”

  “Didn’t look like no one to me,” Nina insisted, her tone curt.

  “Well, I’m sure Eva made it look like more than what it actually was.”

  “So, there’s nothing going on between the two of you?”

  I pretended to drop the phone while I thought back to how I’d left Tripp earlier—like a hamster hotfooting it under the couch at the first sight of the vacuum.

  Taking a deep breath, I composed my features into an impassive mask and picked up the phone. “Sorry about that. And no, of course not. I barely know him.”

  “If you’re kissing men you barely know, it’s time you found a boyfriend.”

  Thinking to allay Nina’s matchmaking tendencies, I said, “There is someone I’ve been talking to. Kind of.”

  On cue, Nina perked up. “Wonderful. Tell me about this kind of person.”

  Mentally, I kicked myself. “There’s nothing to tell. He’s a guy I hired to do a risk assessment—” I paused. I didn’t want to tell Nina that I was having her friend investigated. Not after she spoke so highly of him. “—of the current market. We’ve become friendly, that’s all.”

  “A risk assessment?” Her voice rose several octaves, sounding a lot more interested in the business aspect of our relationship than I expected. “What does that mean?”

  “Well, after what happened with Dad, I just want to be sure I’m dotting every i and crossing every t.”

  “Francis would be happy to help you with that, I’m sure. You should send him an email. And while you’re at it, you should take him up on his proposition. He’s offering a lot of money, no strings attached, because I told him how much I believe in you. “

  “I just don’t want to rush into anything.” I’d done that enough already.

  “Rush? You’ve been talking about starting a jewelry line for two years now.”

  “I know.” I kicked off my shoes, dropped my purse on the floor, and practically dove into my unmade bed. “Any chance Romy is still up?” It was late, but maybe . . .

  “Don’t deflect, Jolie. It’s not an attractive habit.” Nina sighed, clearly unhappy. After a moment of tense silence, she answered. “And no, she went straight from soccer practice to a sleepover birthday party. Apparently that’s the only kind her friends have these days.”

  I smiled through my disappointment, imagining a room full of sleeping bags and a dozen pajama-clad fourth-graders clustered around a Ouija board. “That sounds adorable.”

  “Yes, it is. Until it’s my turn to host them for a night. Then it sounds like mayhem.”

  A pang of longing wedged itself between my ribs. “Nina, why don’t I host Romy’s next birthday sleepover party here, in New York? I can figure out something fun to do with the girls, mayb
e the Zoo, or Serendipity 3 for frozen hot chocolate and birthday cake. It would be—”

  “Jolie, how would that look? Me pawning off my own daughter’s birthday party on her older sister. I can only imagine what the other mothers would say.”

  “Oh.” Nina’s caustic tone was a sharp pin, bursting my shimmering happy bubble. “Of course. I—I hadn’t thought of it that way.”

  Her voice shifted, became lower, more soothing. “Well, why would you sweetheart? You lead a big, glamorous life—a life you worked so hard for. You’re a successful model, and now a business woman. You’ve traveled the world while I’ve been here, raising Romy.”

  Raising my daughter.

  Our roles had been cast a long time ago, but it felt as if I’d outgrown mine. “And I’m grateful to you, Nina. Romy has had an idyllic childhood, and it’s all because of you. I’d just like to help out, be more involved now that I’m so close.”