Morgan grinned and waved for my camera. Fucker never was a shy one.
“What the fuck is this?” Tillie practically screeched. “I thought we were supposed to be hooking up for some fun?”
“I don’t know what sort of kinky shit you’re into, bringing him with you.” I nodded toward the photographer. “Or maybe you just thought that you could catch a few photos of me in action if you got here early enough. Isn’t that right, T?”
Talia’s lip curled upward in disgust. If I’d been paying more attention to her face in the club rather than her boobs and her body, I might have seen just how similar her eyes were to Paige’s. They were a different colour, a slate grey rather than blue, but the same shape.
“I guess you might have got a scoop, even if it wasn’t the one you wanted. Sorry guys.” I winked at Morgan and Eden. “It really was time you two came out into the open with your relationship. Although, I didn’t expect you to get quite so . . . carried away.”
Morgan grinned at me. He was enjoying himself way too much—not that I could blame him because I was feeling pretty damn jubilant myself. Especially knowing that Alyssa was downstairs, unaware of what was happening. Hopefully that meant it wouldn’t make her madder at me. She’d come around about the Darcy thing before too long, I was sure of it.
“What can I say?” Morgan said. “This woman makes me insane.”
He wrapped his arm around Eden’s shoulders as she shot me a death stare that told me she hadn’t entirely been expecting visitors so early. I shrugged, but I didn’t think Morgan and I would be in too much trouble. We were still alive, for one thing.
“But the texts,” Tillie said, as if she genuinely believed she had something over me because of half a dozen completely innocent texts between us.
“What about them?”
“You promised me a good time.”
“What is this? A fucking men’s bathroom? ‘For a good time, call.’ Plus, I offered nothing. All I gave in my text was a time and a place. How was I supposed to know you meant you wanted to meet up for sex? All you asked is for some fun. For all I knew from your texts, you just wanted a game of checkers.”
Morgan sniggered into his hand before Eden—who’d slipped her dress back on—slapped his bare chest with the back of her hand to silence him.
“You’ll pay for embarrassing us like this.” Talia looped her hand through Tillie’s arm and started to pull her back toward the door.
“How? Another article in Gossip Weekly? Is that supposed to scare me? At this point, you’d just be flogging a dead horse. It’s not like the public gives a shit about me.”
Tillie started to argue, but I held up my hand to silence her.
“However, they might be interested in a scandal involving a team owner running a smear campaign against an opposition driver just to get him to change teams. And about how she used nepotism and family favours to pull the strings to do it.”
Talia’s eyes widened a little. I could see the genuine fear flash across them for a fraction of a second. Her business probably meant the world to her; I wondered what her mother had on her that she’d agreed despite it all. Although looking at the way she looked at Tillie, I wondered whether maybe Paige had less influence than someone else.
“You can’t prove that,” Tillie said.
“Just like I can’t prove that it was you who drugged me at the benefit in November.”
Her smile was victorious.
“But,” I added before she could celebrate too much. “Gossip magazines don’t really need proof, do they? They just need enough evidence to make it not be libel. Say a recording of a trio of people entering a private hotel room looking for a scandal.”
“You can’t prove that’s what we were doing.”
“Maybe you’re right. Maybe we should let the public decide? I’ve got people ready to send the feed to the Internet.” I was bluffing, but it wouldn’t take long to upload the footage. “All it will take is a one-word signal from me and it’s up for the world to judge. What do you think?”
Talia grabbed Tillie’s hand again. “Can we just go, please?”
“You should listen to your girlfriend, Tillie. Or should I say, Miss M?”
She snarled at me.
“I know all about your little scam that you’ve been running. Chasing me all over town with your tits out and your tongue hanging from your head, pretending to be interested in me just so you could implicate me in scandal after scandal. And yeah, I probably did a pretty damn good job of helping you out, considering the shit that’s been going on in my life lately, but you crossed some pretty big lines.”
She glared at me.
“Sending anyone after Alyssa was the biggest. I can deal with anything anyone wants to say about me, I’ll take it all day every day, but bring her into it, and you can bet your bottom fucking dollar I will burn down every motherfucker who tries to hurt her.”
“You’ve only got yourself to blame there. She’s a two-bit nobody. No one would even give a shit about her if you hadn’t been involved.”
“Til, let’s just go,” Talia said, tugging at her arm.
I ignored her pleading and focused on Tillie. “She’s worth ten thousand of you.”
“You wouldn’t even know a good thing if it hit you.”
“And you’re a good thing are you? ’Cause from what I’ve seen, you’re just desperate for a story—any story—and if you get laid along the way it’s just a bonus. Admit it, it was all a set-up. Even when you were at the airport on your knees wanting to suck me off, it was all part of this game wasn’t it?”
Talia flinched away as I said the words. “What?”
I glanced between the girls and saw that there were secrets between them. “Oh! She didn’t tell you? How she got under the table at the fucking airport cafe, on her knees, begging me to let her suck my cock. How she kissed me in the cloakroom at the benefit, and probably would have done so much more if I’d let her? How she told me that she needs a bit of dick from time to time. Don’t tell me you’re keeping secrets from each other?” Each statement I said drew a new reaction out of Talia. Tillie looked like she was about ready to launch at me, claws bared.
“It was supposed to be together or not at all.” I didn’t know if Talia actually realised she was talking aloud. Her voice was quiet, almost pathetic, and her words were laced with agony. In the space of less than a minute, her face had paled to the point where I was surprised she was still upright. The sight was almost enough to make me feel guilty, but then a quick glance at Tillie wiped the guilt away.
Her face grew redder and redder, until I could almost see the blood vessels swelling beneath her skin. “How dare you!”
I scoffed. “How dare I? God, you’re pathetic. Just admit defeat and move on.”
“I’ll make your life a living hell.”
“No, you won’t.” It was Talia who’d spoken. “I won’t have you and Mum using my reputation this way anymore. Let’s go, Brad.”
The pap snapped to attention at her words.
Tillie snarled at me before moving to stop Talia. “But, baby, it was all for the story, I promise.”
“For the story,” Talia scoffed. “Then why wasn’t it on the list of things to include?”
I grinned at the fact that I’d just captured her admission on camera. It wasn’t enough to do anything legally, but I didn’t give a shit about legal. I just wanted them to back the fuck off and stay away. If I did something newsworthy, I deserved to be in the papers, but the muckraking had to stop.
“It didn’t feel like it was ‘for the story’ when you were clamouring to get under the table,” I said, to dig the knife in a little deeper. I couldn’t deny I was enjoying myself immensely.
Talia left the room, with Tillie close behind.
“Or when you were clutching at my cock through my pants,” I added as I rounded the corner to follow them with my taunts.
I practically collided with Alyssa. The hurt, the pain, and the heartbreak t
hat shone in her eyes stopped me dead in my tracks. Fuck. How long had she been standing there?
How much had she heard?
“What the fuck is going on?” Her tone was deadly.
I was fucked.
“Lys, I can explain,” I said as I led her back into our hotel room. The last thing I needed was Tillie coming back and witnessing the fight.
“You just can’t leave it, can you?” she asked as soon as we were through the door.
“Don’t you get it, Lys? We won,” I said.
“Won?”
“They’re going to back off. They’re not going to keep trying to dig up shit about me to get me kicked out of Sinclair again.”
“You could have done that yourself by not having anything for them to report on. There’s been nothing new despite the photographer being back.”
“They were just waiting for an opportunity because they thought I was actually going to change to Wood Racing. Now I’ve got something on them in return. Something that could threaten W. T. Entertainment’s reputation.”
Her frown deepened. “What about your reputation?”
“It was fucked anyway.”
“And mine?”
“They’re not going to come after us, Lys. We’ve got them by the balls now.”
“God, you’re nothing more than a man-child who’s so obsessed with revenge and proving something that he doesn’t give a shit about anyone else’s feelings in the matter.”
“Whose feelings? Darcy’s? Talia’s? Tillie’s? Paige’s? As if any of them don’t deserve a bit of heartache after everything they’ve done to me. To us.”
“No. Mine, Dec. You didn’t give a shit about me. Or Phoebe. I asked you to leave it, because it was finally settling. Because I’m supposed to be starting work at a professional law firm, one of the biggest in the world—a firm that could give me access to so much if I work hard enough—and just days before I’m supposed to start, you drag me back into these games. Do you think any of them are going to leave it be now?”
“Lys, I’m—”
“Don’t ‘Lys’ me, Declan. I can’t believe you’d do this. Worse, is the fact that you’d deliberately sneak around behind my back to set it all up. If you’re capable of lying to me about that, what else are you capable of lying about?”
A quiver raced through my body and my blood pounded in my ears as what I’d thought would be my moment of victory quickly became a disaster greater than any I’d faced. Even when I’d thought she’d left after the article, I didn’t have to face her anger or her obvious hurt. “I—I didn’t lie to you, Lys, I—”
“God help me, Declan, if you finish that sentence with ‘I just didn’t tell you,’ I won’t be held responsible for what I say next. Even Phoebe knows that lying by omission is still lying, and she’s three!”
Shit. Shit. Shit! I could see her pulling away, closing off. The blank mask that had slipped back over her eyes, covering the hurt and the agony, was more effective at blocking her off to me than the one she wore over her face. I’d thought I’d lost her after the magazine, but that had been because I didn’t understand how deep her love actually ran. Love that had been stitched back together with trust as the thread—a thread I’d picked at, until now the whole thing threatened to unravel. “Tell me how to fix this.”
“Just leave.”
My heart hammered and my breathing sped. “No. I can’t, Lys. I can’t leave it like this.”
“I have nothing to say to you right now. I need some space.”
I reached for her, grabbing her wrist. “Please, let me fix this. You have to let me try.”
She tugged her wrist free of my hold. “No. I can’t do this. Not now. Go!”
“No.”
A growl of frustration tore from her lips. “Fine. Then I will.”
Unwilling to touch her against her will, even though every part of me screamed to just pull her into my arms and kiss her until the pain went away, I stood by and watched as she walked past me and out of the room. Just before the door swung closed, my vision blurred and my eyes burned. She hadn’t even looked back once.
“Wait, Lys!” I pulled open the door. Memories of the day after the formal flooded through my mind, threatening to send me to my knees.
Even though barely a second had passed, by the time I reached the hallway, she was gone. I had no idea whether she’d disappeared into one of the bathrooms on the level, into the elevator, or where. I raced up to the end of the corridor, watching for any sign of her. Too many bad memories flooded me. She couldn’t walk out on me again. I had to find her.
“Fuck!” Twisting around, I sat on the steps and buried my head in my hands. How could I be so stupid? I’d ignored everyone who’d warned me that she might not understand. Dr. Henrikson. Eden. Even Danny had been cryptically cautious.
I’d thought I knew better than all of them, though. I’d thought I knew Alyssa better than they did. What a fucking joke. It was clear I didn’t know her at all. Not enough. In my need for revenge, I’d lost the second-most important thing in my world. Thankfully, I was sure that no matter how badly I’d screwed up, she wouldn’t take Phoebe from my life unless she thought there was some danger. Even though that was a relief, it wasn’t enough. I didn’t just want Phoebe part-time. I wanted our family. Together.
Needing to speak to her, to apologise and explain, I turned around and headed back to the room, intending to carry on past the hotel room to search down the other end of the hallway, but stopped when I saw the turquoise-and-gold mask she’d picked for the night. The one she’d picked because it matched my eyes.
Was discarding it her way of telling me she was done with me for good? Had the “just in case” her dad had made her plan for eventuated already before we’d even left Brisbane? Reaching behind my head, I untied the ribbon on my own mask, and slipped it off. I held both of the masks in my hand as I looked around again with her name on my lips.
The door to room 607 cracked open. A second later, Morgan came out.
“Perfect plan, squirt! Couldn’t have gone better,” he said, holding his hand up for a high five. When I didn’t respond or slap my palm against his, he waved his fingers in my face. “Don’t leave me hanging.” He stared at me for a moment, no doubt trying to figure out why I wasn’t celebrating. “Shit, what is it?”
Not trusting myself to talk without sounding like a total wimp, I just shook my head and held up one finger to tell him to wait. I swallowed down on the ball of emotions in my chest and then uttered just one word. “Alyssa.”
“Oh, shit. Did she hear that?”
I nodded.
“I take it she didn’t appreciate the shove you gave karma’s arse?”
“Something like that. You didn’t see her, did you?”
“No. I haven’t seen anyone else up here.”
“I have to find her.”
“You go downstairs, I’ll look around up here.”
I headed back for the elevators and hit the call button. As soon as it came, I mashed the button marked for the ballroom. Instead of going into the party though, I headed into the quieter areas. Here and there couples were taking some quiet time together—some talking, some practically dry-humping in the low light.
Almost twenty minutes had passed since I’d last seen Alyssa, when the sound of soft sobs caught my ears. With my heart in my mouth, I followed them.
“Lys, look, I—” My words died on my tongue when I saw Darcy sitting on the floor with her arms wrapped around her legs, and her head resting against her knees.
She glanced up at the sound of my voice and her lips curled into a snarl. “I hope you’re fucking pleased with yourself. Blake’s going to leave me. It would have been okay if that tramp reporter Miss M. hadn’t come over and told him about your fucking do-over note.”
As much as I wanted to say that I was happy, seeing her in tears was a hollow fucking victory. Sure, she was a grade-A bitch, and had made Alyssa’s life more difficult than it had needed to be, but w
asn’t plotting her downfall just as bad? I’d fought fire with fire, and everyone had gotten burned. Maybe she deserved what had happened, but was it really my place to decide that?
“Actually, I’m not,” I said, kneeling in front of her and resting my hand on her knee. “In fact, there’s something I need to say to you. Something I should have said a long time ago. I’m sorry, Darcy.”
Her eyes widened as she recoiled from my touch. “What?”
“I’ve made a lot of mistakes over the years, and I know you’ll deny it, but at least a couple of them hurt you. So I just want you to know that I’m sorry.”
“You’re a freak.” She shoved at me, pushing me off balance.
“Whatever. I really don’t give a shit what you think about me, but I’m done thinking about you. I’m done letting you have any sway over me or Alyssa.”
“You shouldn’t have fucked with me. I’m going to call up Gossip Weekly and tell them all about this. They’ll know the truth.”
I shrugged. “You know what? Try it. I don’t even care anymore.”
Climbing back to my feet, I moved away. I’d said everything I needed to, and I hadn’t been lying. She wouldn’t even be a blip on my radar anymore. I had more important things to focus on. If it cost me Alyssa or Phoebe, revenge wasn’t worth the price.
I continued looking around the floor, asking everyone who wasn’t glued to another if they’d seen her. Each second that passed, I was more certain I’d lost her for good. My body shook, quivers to rival the worst tyre shake. My knees threatened to buckle. The last time she’d left that way, she’d gone straight home. Then Josh had been waiting for me.
Fuck.
Needing to see whether she’d perhaps returned to the room to pack up her things, I headed back for the elevator.
I slipped the key card into the door, fearing the worst—a room that contained only my bag. When I pushed open the door, I saw something that made me forget all about the key card and the lock—everything but her.
Declan Reede: The Untold Story (Complete Series) Page 104
