Notorious

by Leanne Davis

  “Like what?”

  “Like the kind of girl to sleep with you because you were drunk and missing your wife.”

  “Oh,” Luke said, nearly struck mute by Cassie’s glare. He opened his mouth but nothing came out.

  Cassie continued, “And second, this is between us, but you need to hear it because I know what you think of Kelly, and everything you think about her is wrong. Kelly would never sleep with you. Not like that. She doesn’t have one-night stands. She doesn’t have casual sex. Contrary to what she portrays. Whatever she makes you think she is, the real her is the opposite.”

  Luke didn’t believe her, but Cassie looked so intense he didn’t dare argue.

  “You don’t know her at all. What you don’t notice is she’s the one who waited around to get you home safely last night. She is not the kind of woman to take advantage of you or seduce you.”

  “But all those stories. The way she talks. Her shoes were in my room.”

  “All those stories are just that.”

  “She lives a thousand miles from you, how do you know?”

  “I just know.”

  Cassie stared into his eyes. He crossed his arms. What? What had he missed about Kelly? Kelly didn’t do casual sex? Why? Had there been something in her past? Kelly was an open book, an obnoxious one at that. But suddenly, he was wrong about her?

  “You’re not the only one who has been hurt in the past.”

  He frowned. “What do you mean?”

  “She was raped by my mother’s boyfriend when she was thirteen.”

  Luke flinched. No. There was no deep-seated past to Kelly Reeves, Supermodel. There was Kelly, annoying and stupid acting. There was Kelly on magazines and tabloids with nasty rumors and stories, there was not Kelly Reeves, suddenly the wounded, hurt woman.

  “It’s a strange situation. In fact, it’s the only sticky issue between my sister and me. She refuses to talk about it or listen to anything I have to say.”

  “Why?”

  “Because she denies it happened. But I know it did because I walked in on the man doing it. I remember it clearly. I told our mother, but she refused to believe me because she claims she didn’t have anyone over that night. But she did, I saw him. I saw what was done to my sister. And that’s why I know my sister doesn’t sleep around, and everything you’ve ever thought or heard about her is wrong.”

  Luke swallowed. “I had no idea.”

  “Of course not. That’s what Kelly wants. No one can hurt her. And the only reason you are hearing this is because I trust you. And you both are now in Tim’s life as his aunt and uncle, and you will inevitably be together throughout the years to come. So for my sake and Tim’s, please make some kind of peace with her.”

  “I didn’t know.”

  “She’s still a little girl inside, playing dress-up, hiding who she is so she’ll be accepted. People judge her now on things that aren’t real, so it doesn’t hurt her. Just give some thought to what I’ve said.”

  “You can trust me.”

  “I know, that’s the only reason you know any of this.”

  ****

  Cassie and John hugged and kissed their goodbyes to Tim. They finally got out the door to John’s SUV and their waiting honeymoon. Staying behind, Luke, Kelly, and Tim stood on the porch and watched them leave.

  Tim leaned against Kelly and she absently ran her hand in his hair. Kelly was affectionate with Tim. Her attention toward him was genuine. Tim adored Kelly and talked about her all the time. Luke didn’t give Tim that much credence, truly thinking his little nephew was seriously misguided about his aunt. But suddenly, he had a lot to consider. Had he been a little too judgmental of Kelly?

  The first time he met Kelly face-to-face, she’d come barreling into the house in the middle of Cassie’s stalking mess. Her arrival in town had put Cassie’s safety at risk because it gave Cassie’s ex-husband the chance to follow Kelly’s trail to Seaclusion. Which he did do. Luke was convinced ever since then that Kelly did what was best for Kelly. That, and the fact she was a famous model who took racy pictures, lived a fast-paced, party lifestyle, and was the center of several scandals over the last few years made it pretty easy to guess what she was about. So how was he, a small town, math teacher, living a very quiet, very ordinary life, supposed to relate to someone like her?

  Well, they had all week to see if maybe Cassie was right, and he’d been too quick in his judgment. He did, however, need to address last night, because his memory wasn’t wrong that he’d asked her to stay in his room with him.

  “Hey, Tim, why don’t we go to the beach?” Luke said, distracting Tim from his mom’s departure.

  “Okay. Can we play catch?”

  “Sure, go grab the mitts out of the garage.”

  Luke glanced at Kelly. “You coming?”

  “Sure. Who could resist that invite?”

  He didn’t mean to sound so gruff, but he was nervous. He didn’t know what to do with the new information he had about Kelly.

  Luke followed Tim along the sand dunes behind the house and down to the beach. Long waves crashed into the miles and miles of clear brown sand. The June sun was warm and pleasant on their arms and faces.

  The fresh air woke Luke and cleared his hazy brain. He and Tim started playing catch, something they did nearly daily. They fell into an easy game of back and forth, which finally did the trick of getting Tim to smile. Especially when Luke started zig-zagging the throws, making Tim run about, while Luke pretended he couldn’t get the ball straight to him. It was a game Tim never ceased to enjoy, and one which hardly seemed to put a dent in Tim’s energy.

  “You’re good with him. He talks about you all the time.”

  Luke turned toward Kelly, who stood a few feet away, watching quietly.

  “He does? I never dreamed how much he’d grow on me when he and Cassie first came here.”

  “I’m glad he has you, and John, too. He’s been sorely lacking men in his life.”

  Kelly’s gaze was off toward the frothy ocean waves, a distant look in her eyes. She had eyes that could change a man’s mood. They were green and gold, with thick lashes and perfect eyebrows framing them. Her hair was red, but the kind of red that made one think of a sunset, rather than a carrot. Her face was so perfect, that Luke didn’t often look her in the eye. Her face was too symmetrical, too stunning. Anyone would react visibly to seeing her. She was like headlights coming at him in the dark. He didn't want to be affected by her, so he avoided looking directly at her.

  “We should talk about last night.” He averted his eyes from her.

  She stiffened her back and turned back to him. “About last night?”

  “I asked you to stay with me.”

  What if he had talked to Kelly before Cassie? A bigger fool he couldn’t have made of himself. And no surer way to make his already strained relationship with Kelly even worse.

  “You probably don’t remember much, do you?”

  “Meaning, I did ask you? I’m fuzzy on the details,” he said as he threw a long one for Tim to run into the sand dunes for. The ball spun against the pale blue sky. He pretended Tim’s catching it was the most interesting thing he’d ever seen.

  “I know how drunk you were. And believe me, I didn’t flatter myself that it was me you wanted.”

  It was Shelly he really wanted. She didn’t have to say it out loud, but the truth hung between them.

  “Still, I shouldn’t have said it.”

  “Forget it, no harm done. Just be relieved I didn’t take you up on it.”

  “My drunken offer didn’t tempt you, huh?”

  She turned toward him. Her mouth open, eyes wide. His usual response to her was either blatantly walking away or completely ignoring her. In the past, he’d taken anything she said to him as a come-on, so it was nearly unprecedented that he kidded around with her.

  “Tempted? No. Surprised? Yes.”

  “One time offer. You missed your chance.”

  She snorted, a
nd then grinned at him. He met her eyes for a moment, before turning away. God, why did Cassie’s sister have to be a God damn model of all things? Why couldn’t she be a librarian or kindergarten teacher, and look like the stereotype of those who were in such professions? No, Cassie’s damned annoying sister had to be one of the most truly beautiful women alive. It wasn’t like you could pretend she wasn’t there. She was five feet eleven, and as bright and shining as a piece of gold against the rest of the world’s ordinary sand.

  It was going to be a long week. He had summer school to teach, so Kelly was expected to watch Tim during the day. And on some level, Kelly was like Tim’s second mother. She’d help him not miss his mother so much. It was just hard to see Kelly Reeves as anything approaching motherly while she was living with him.

  Chapter Four

  Staying in the Tyler house was completely different for Kelly than it had been last year, when she came to town for the very first time. She originally came to warn Cassie that her ex-husband had found her hiding spot. Marcus Leary was finally dead, after Cassie killed him in self-defense, but the effects of his terrorizing haunted all of them.

  Kelly had visited Cassie a couple of times since then. Each time she came to Seaclusion, she was unsettled for the first few days. She had flashbacks of Marcus Leary beating her up. She had nightmares remembering the night Cassie disappeared and Kelly was sick with worry that she’d find her sister dead at Marcus’s hand, not the other way around. So coming to Seaclusion was hard for her. She needed to see Cassie and Tim, and she thrived on seeing them settle into a real home for the first time in any of their lives. Yet the flashbacks of her own private hell and what she suffered here came back to life whenever she visited.

  And then there was the town. Seaclusion was like a speck of dust in a living room. It sat on the very tip of Washington State. The only reason Kelly could find to make the small town even touch the level of tolerable was its location near the longest beach in the world.

  Kelly had to admit that the long smooth beach and miles of bare sand dunes were breathtaking, not to mention the proximity to the historic park set at the mouth of the Columbia River. The views from the two lighthouses there, on a clear day, rivaled any Kelly had ever witnessed. That is, if she blotted out the fact that Cassie had killed Marcus Leary at one of them. That was why she so hated the town; it held every truly horrifying memory of her life. Unfortunately, Cassie didn’t see it that way. To Cassie this town had liberated her from her jail of Marcus Leary, and earned her the love of John Tyler.

  The town was small. It was so small that Kelly could stand at one end of it and step to the other end. So small that everyone knew the Tylers, and now everyone knew Cassie and Tim. Not just knew their names or of them, but knew them, as in: talked to them, gossiped with them, and went out of their way to be neighborly to them. Cassie called it neighborly, but to Kelly, it was just being nosy.

  Cassie ran her own business here now and was met with surprising support. She started her business in Portland, a one-woman cleaning company, and moved it to Seaclusion with great success. She finally gave in to John’s suggestions to hire help. So nowadays, Kelly was glad to see Cassie did little physical cleaning for her business, focusing instead on the paper end of it. Kelly had tried for years to convince Cassie to take money from her. Cassie always refused, other than the loan she took to start her cleaning service.

  Kelly never missed how oddly people looked at them. She was a multi-million-dollar, famous supermodel, and her sister was a single parent who ran a cleaning company. A recipe for total sister hatred. Yet it never mattered to them. They were Cassie and Kelly first, before everything, and beyond everything. Even fame.

  Except now, Cassie was Cassie Tyler. Kelly was glad, so terribly glad her sister and Tim had a real life, and a real family. But sad too, for herself. It seemed as Cassie’s life got better, Kelly’s would stay as it always had been: a drama-filled mess of one kind or another. She wasn’t cut out for this small-town-slice-of-apple-pie America. Her life had and would always be one extreme or another. Either she was miserably poor and drama followed her because of that, or she was filthy rich and famous, and drama exploded around her because of that. She was and always had been extreme, her life never ordinary.

  This little town, in which she was about to spend a week as Tim’s primary caretaker, intimidated her more than any professional scandal or job she’d had. She’d be talked about, whispered about and judged, because the town was so small, and her name was so big. It had to cause that much of a sensation. Besides, John and Cassie were now prominent members of the community, so Kelly had to contend with the extra attention.

  It amazed Kelly that one of the Reeves sisters was actually part of a community. How ironic was it that one of them had finally succeeded in life? And it wasn’t the rich and famous one.

  ****

  For one full week, it was going to be Luke, Tim, and Kelly. Without John and Cassie to diffuse Luke’s animosity toward her, Kelly feared it would be a long week. Kelly nearly crossed her fingers, hoping that after last night, Luke and she had finally crossed the imaginary line between them that made them so antagonistic toward each other. Maybe now, Luke finally got that she wasn’t coming on to him. He was so convinced she was some kind of man-eater, that anything she said or did toward him set off his bad temper. Maybe, finally, he got she wasn’t trying to take off his pants when she asked him to pass the salt.

  Who could? When the man was so obviously in daily agony over his dead wife? She wished that Luke would just see that she liked him, and liked antagonizing him because he was so narrow-minded concerning her. If he could see that she had no interest in sleeping with him, then maybe they could be friends, something that they’d been unable to be so far.

  Kelly would like that because, for some reason, she was far lonelier here in Seaclusion than anywhere else in the world. It probably was because everywhere she looked there were relationships, healthy, good-for-you relationships: lovers, siblings, parents, and kids. The town was teeming with it, in ways Kelly didn’t witness anywhere else. Her stature as a loner became more glaring to her in Seaclusion.

  Maybe it was partly for this reason that she was so compelled to search out Sarah Langston, maybe make a friend, something she never did. Growing up, she had Cassie and felt no need for anyone else. As an adult, the only people in her world were work-related. Most were only dedicated to her for the money and fame she could make for them. She was smart enough to share nothing personal with any one in Los Angeles. It made for a lonely life sometimes.

  But Cassie was moving on, and Kelly wondered if maybe she wasn’t becoming a little too isolated. Obviously, Luke wasn’t going to be her friend, so why not Sarah?

  Tim was happy about going into town the next day. The Tyler’s house was so close to town, the car had barely accelerated before Kelly was parked in front of Sarah’s shop. Kelly was pretty sure that Sarah’s parents owned the shop, but Sarah ran it as if she did. Sarah’s Secrets was the only shop like it on the tourist strip of Seaclusion’s main street. Sarah sold clothing, accessories, and jewelry, and she did it with surprising class and taste. Kelly had browsed in it before and found herself secretly impressed with Sarah’s surprising flair for style, hidden away in this postage stamp town.

  “I was hoping you’d show.”

  “I have to eat,” Sarah said as she sat down in the booth Kelly had claimed. They were at a café, across the street from Sarah’s shop. It was noon, and to Kelly’s surprise, Sarah had actually shown up to lunch with her.

  “Hi, Tim. How’s your summer going?”

  Tim filled Sarah in on his daily goings on. It was obvious that Tim knew Sarah more than casually, and she seemed to genuinely care what he had to say. What did it feel like to be Cassie in this town? To be accepted and loved and cared about in such easygoing, non-malicious ways, as Sarah seemed to care for Tim.

  The lady whose name tag said “Claudia” and who made their sandwiches asked Tim ab
out his mother and John. Tim talked with abandon. There was nothing shy about him any longer, and nothing he had to hide any more. Tim talked openly with smiling, kid-like enthusiasm, something he was lacking six months ago.

  All this went on without Kelly. She was glad to see the changes in Tim, but sad too, to have missed it, and not knowing the daily goings on of her nephew. Even Sarah seemed to know them.

  Sarah was picking at her sandwich so bad that Kelly finally asked, “Is something wrong with it?”

  “It’s just, you know how it is, calories.”

  “Are you not eating because of me? You think I don’t eat?”

  “I don’t know, aren’t all models anorexic?”

  “No. That’s kind of a big stereotype.”

  Sarah paused. “Then how do you do it? How do you stay so thin?”

  Kelly shrugged. “I was born this way. I eat. I exercise. I look like this.”

  “Do you have any idea how lucky you are? How hard it is for the rest of us?”

  “What is hard?”

  “Looking at you, being around you, when you’re so nonchalant about what it takes to look how you look.”

  “So you can’t eat around me because of it?”

  “Well, no one could compete. That’s why they won’t talk to you.”

  “You mean all the women in town won’t talk to me because I’m pretty?”

  “You make it sound so trite. So easy. And you know pretty doesn’t begin to cover what you look like.”

  Kelly set her fork down, shaking her head. “Yeah, it is that trite. All I ever wanted was to get out of the trailer park that was my life. I barely finished high school, and I didn’t exactly have a lot of prospects. But I looked like this. So I did the obvious thing. I modeled. So no, I don’t think it’s a big deal that by accident of birth I look this way.”

  Just then, a couple came up to the table and asked Kelly if she was the Kelly Reeves. Then they proceeded to fawn over her and ask for her autograph. After they left, Kelly quirked an eyebrow at Sarah’s startled look. “Stupid, isn’t it? They act as if I’ve done something important. When it’s all just a face in a picture.”