by Ava Claire
Jacob had enough. “You psychotic--”
“Jacob, let it go,” I hissed, standing between them, knowing a straight line from him to her could be disastrous. From our run-in with his mother, I knew it wouldn't take much to rocket him from simmer to full-on boil. And as much as I just wanted to shake Rachel until her teeth rattled, tough words being exchanged wouldn’t make her see anything. If nothing else, it would just ensure that we just got hoarse yelling back and forth, teeth bared, dangerously close to doing something that would land someone in jail for assault. That wouldn’t solve our problem; it would just create a new mess of them.
So I gave her the audience she obviously needed, despite the tiny voice that reminded me that the last time I attempted to listen to Rachel, it didn’t fix a damn thing. “What do you mean you’re the only one telling the truth?”
She didn’t waste a single moment wondering why I didn’t want to throw her out on her ass. “First off, you’re lying to yourself thinking that he’s not going to get tired of you. That your novelty won’t wear off. You’re not the first spunky chick that’s caught his eye and I would bet every cent I possess that you won’t be his last.”
I was already regretting letting her run off at the mouth. Not because I feared she’d uncovered some deep, dark fear but because it was just the same old song on a different day.
I’d spent precious time wondering if Jacob and I had an expiration date, worrying that at some terrible moment he’d wake up and realize that somewhere out there his perfect match was waiting; someone who rivaled him in the looks department, setting fire to every magazine page or blog that held images of them.
But I didn’t entertain those thoughts anymore because I knew that every time he looked at me it was like he was seeing me for the first time. In his eyes I saw that he couldn't believe how lucky he was. Like he was falling in love all over again. My faults, his faults, and other people’s expectations didn’t stand a chance when face to face with the way he loved me. I’d always have moments when I wondered how the hell I got so lucky--but so did he.
Her truth wasn’t some sagely observation--it was the demented ramblings of a desperate woman. “You were right, Jacob.” I faced him with a sigh. “We never should have seen her.”
Jacob pressed his lips against my forehead and reached for the phone on Claudia’s desk. “I’ll have security escort her to the parking deck.”
I was so frustrated that I’d given her what she wanted yet again. She obviously wouldn’t know the truth if it smacked her upside the head and if I thought she’d be straight up about talking to Alicia or offer some insight as to why she was fixated on us, or one better, apologize, then I was as deluded as she was. I just wanted her gone. I didn’t want one more second wasted on her or her lies.
“I did talk to Alicia, okay?” she blurted out.
Jacob and I exchanged a look of surprise. I was the first to turn back to her, pivoting slowly, warily, like I was waiting for the other shoe to drop. If Rachel Laraby was being honest, there had to be some catch.
“We’re listening,” I said softly.
“I’ve had Alicia Whitmore’s contact information for a long time,” she continued, looking back and forth between me and Jacob like she was afraid that if she lingered on one of us for too long the jig was up. “Back when Jacob and I were together, he talked about how difficult their relationship was. How rough things were when he was a child--and how they were trying to start over after his dad passed away.”
I sucked in my breath, hoping the gasp was only audible to me, but I could tell that Jacob caught it from the way his grip tightened.
His voice was low and adamant. “Leila--”
“Let her finish,” I said hollowly, feeling the familiar ache of worry settle back in the pit of my stomach.
He said they were over before they began. If that was true and they hadn’t been close and opened up to one another, how the hell did Rachel know about his relationship with his mother? Why was she wielding knowledge that I had to pull teeth to retrieve and left me nowhere near prepared for the shitstorm that descended just this morning?
I never thought I’d say the words ‘truth’ and ‘Rachel Laraby’ in the same breath, but it was obvious that there was a grain of truth to what she was saying.
And that Jacob hadn’t been completely honest about their past.
But for someone that was a chatterbox seconds earlier she shut her mouth up tight.
“I thought you had things to share?” I grilled. “Lies to reveal? People to villainize?”
She put a hand on her hip, emboldened by the fact that I was giving her the mic at all. “I’m not saying another word while he’s still in the room.”
“That’s rich,” Jacob said incredulously. “You call my office everyday with some emergency or life or death interview that requires my assistance and now you want me out of here? Why? So you can lie without me there to refute it?”
“I don’t have to explain myself to you,” she said, dropping every word like acid. She pointed at me. “It’s up to you. I’m not saying a single word more with Jacob staring like one look from you and he’ll throw me through the window.”
I peered at Jacob and his cerulean eyes nearly bulged from his head. “You’re not being serious. You’re not going to listen to anything she has to say, are you?”
“I just want this done,” I said, my voice practically a whisper. “I want everything out in the open.”
“And you think she’s the one that will give you that? That she wants to end this? Rachel is the very reason we’re in this situation at all!”
“And now that we’re here, what harm comes from letting her speak?”
“How about the fact that she’s certifiable and every word that comes out of her mouth is toxic?” He looked at me like I was the one that was crazy. “After the stunt she pulled at the hotel, how can you believe anything that she has to say?”
“Because I know that look she has in her eyes every time she stares at you!” I said, emotion flooding my screech. It was the same one I had when I thought I’d lost him. It wasn’t the look of someone pining over something they never had. It was the look of someone who knew exactly what they’d lost.
I couldn’t focus on that and the hurt on his face, so I looked at Rachel, focusing on getting this over with. “We can talk in the lounge area behind you. Jacob will stay here.”
“I don’t want him--”
“We can talk over there--” I interrupted fiercely. “--or you can leave.”
She frowned stubbornly, but spun on her heels and sashayed to the leather couch on the wall. She lowered herself onto the cushion and crossed her legs, gesturing beside her. “You might want to sit down for this.”
“I’ll stand.”
“Suit yourself,” she said with an eye roll. She drew a breath and began. “I told you about talking to Alicia and I have another truth.”
She paused dramatically and I crossed my arms, so over this cat and mouse BS. “I’m listening, Rachel.”
“I’m not over Jacob.”
I scrunched my face in annoyance. That couldn’t be her revelation. I mean…duh? It was pretty obvious she still had feelings for him. “If that’s all you have to say, we’re done here.”
“I’m not over him because he’s the first guy that I ever said I love you too,” she continued, biting her lip. “He was the first guy I ever saw myself being with, well, forever.” When she looked me dead on, I knew she was about to say something I didn’t want to hear. “And when he told me he loved me back, it was the first time a guy ever really meant it.”
****
“What do you mean you just walked out?” Megan said, peering at me like she must have missed something.
I took the bottle of water she offered, even though I could go for something a lot stronger.
“I didn’t say a single word to either of them. I just got up, marched to the exit, took the elevator down to the garage and drove here.”
>
“Huh.”
One word and just from the inflection in her voice, I knew she wasn’t stumped as much as disappointed. It was the sound she made when I went through a hipster stage, wearing vintage dresses that did me no favors. It was the single syllable she’d released when I swooned over guys that we both knew would be a disappointment. She’d even grunted the exact same ‘huh’ when I told her I was going to Venice with Jacob Whitmore.
“The thing is, when she said that he told her he loved her, I got this feeling.” I unscrewed the cap slowly, staring off in space. “I felt like I was back in the hotel restaurant, barely over the fact that this mega actress was sitting beside me, totally ignoring my existence and picking up her not-so-subtle clues that she cared about Jacob. And he couldn’t possibly not return those feelings because she was Rachel Laraby.” I chewed on my bottom lip. “How could he not fall for her?”
“I know you’re not going down that rabbit hole, thinking that you can’t hold a candle to her,” Megan scoffed. “I swear if you start drinking that crazy chick’s kool aid-”
“It wasn’t that,” I said, only 90% convincingly. I took a swig before I amended, “Well of course at first I thought I was a rookie playing in the big leagues. Rachel is gorgeous and successful and I...I was still trying to get Jacob to open up to me. But back then, I immediately had this feeling that what they had was more than physical. And now I’m frustrated all over again because I had to collect scraps of how he felt about me, demanding more, having him add brick after brick to the wall around his heart until he finally let me in--and someone had already gotten past his defenses.” Knowing that he’d said those three words to her--it was more than infuriating.
It hurt.
I’d said the word before, generally out of obligation, because I figured that was the next step in the relationship. You meet someone, they end up being cool, then special, and then someone you don’t wanna be without. So when ‘I love you’ was exchanged, it was just the natural progression of things.
But my relationship with Jacob was different. There was no courtship--it was just seduction, angst, and a desire I’d never experienced before. Before him, love had always been an afterthought, a checkbox to tick on a lackluster journey to nowhere. But with him, love possessed me and wouldn’t let go.
It was dangerous because for the first time, I fell hard and worried I was the only one--that I’d say it and be met with hollowing silence. I was terrified because now that I knew what true love was, the idea of losing it was unbearable.
And Jacob, this stony faced man that I’d fought to let me see beyond the mask hadn’t always been that way, like I’d been led to believe. He’d been capable of letting someone in. He’d been capable of love.
Meg came over and dropped onto the futon beside me, snapping her fingers to shake me from my trance. “I can tell you’re jumping to unhealthy conclusions.”
“Oh there’s no jumping required. The conclusion is within stepping distance. Jacob loved Rachel.”
“So what?” she said, throwing up her hands. “That was then, Lay. He’s with you now. He loves you. You’re the one he wants to marry.”
I heard what she was saying and it made sense, but there was a cacophony of questions that kept rearing their ugly head. If his feelings for her were in the past and irrelevant, why wasn’t he honest? Why did he lie about their relationship and make it seem like it was just a fling? You don’t tell flings you love them.
I turned to her, biting my lip when I felt the tears rise in my throat. “I’m not trying to be combative, I swear. I want to believe that this is all in my head. That it doesn’t matter. That it was just an oversight and not proof of something sketchy. But this feels like something more. Why didn’t he tell me that they were serious?”
Meg’s eyes shifted downward for a moment before she raised them back to mine. “I wish I had an answer for you, but I think I’m the last person you should be talking to right now.”
“I should be talking to Jacob?” I snorted. “That’s clearly genius since he’s been so forthcoming.”
“I love you Leila, but you are in no position to be casting stones in the tight lipped category.” She arched a red brow pointedly. “It wasn’t that long ago that you were keeping things from Jacob for his own good.”
“But that was...” I trailed off, the ‘different’ unsaid and a pathetic excuse. It really wasn’t all that different. I’d delivered him on a silver platter to the Devil Herself because I thought I was saving him from public embarrassment. And I tried to keep the meeting with Cade hush hush because I knew how the very mention of his name made Jacob feel. Both times I was trying to spare him any undue hurt. Both times were betrayals and we worked through it. So why couldn’t I power on my phone and let him explain?
Megan gave me a small nod, her indication that she’d said her piece and would let me make up my own mind. “So you met his mom?”
Out of the frying pan and into the fire. “Yep.”
“Your ‘psycho woman’ bit on the phone told me that maybe things didn’t go so well?”
I picked at the label on the water bottle. “Things started off great--she was in the neighborhood and wanted to stop by and say hello, meet me and all that jazz.”
“Uh huh.”
“Jacob and I were about to have breakfast, so we made it a table for three.” I left out the allusions about the contract and me and Jacob’s sex life. “She ate a grape or two and got right down to business.”
Megan raked a hand through her hair, giving me an expectant look. “Which was?”
“Giving me a blank check if I left Jacob.”
“Huh.”
I peered over at her. Now I was the one that was sure I’d misheard. “Huh?”
“I’m not surprised.” I opened my mouth to rebut that but she added, “Let me finish. I was surprised when I found out that less than twenty-four hours into your promotion you were going to Italy. I was surprised when I read on TMZ that you were Jacob Whitmore’s girlfriend instead of hearing it from you first. I was surprised that marriage rumblings were happening and I hadn’t even met the guy. But an uber rich woman using her buckets of money to make a problem go away? That’s not shocking to me.”
“So I’m a ‘problem’?” I said, nostrils flaring.
She narrowed her eyes and for a moment, her glare reminded me of Rachel’s. “I know you and Jacob have been on Love Island, where chubby babies flit about and what not, but in the real world, billionaires don’t marry their personal assistants.”
“A problem and a personal assistant,” I seethed. “You think that’s all I am to him?”
“No, I think he loves you,” she clarified. “But his mother doesn’t know that. She probably just sees the help trying to marry above their station.”
I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. Was she really defending Alicia? “Jacob said that she was happy, that she wanted to meet me before someone started feeding her information about me.”
“And that’s another thing that doesn’t surprise me,” Megan said with a shrug. “A crazy woman acting crazy. Rachel didn’t do you any favors, but if you thought his mother was gonna throw a luncheon in your honor, you were being a little naive.”
“So you’re saying I should have what? Thanked her for playing her role so well? Told her that I totally understand why she insulted me because I’m ‘marrying above my station’?” I snapped upright, not really wanting to be anywhere near her. “This isn’t an episode of Downton Abbey, Megan. This is real life. This woman will be my mother-in-law someday. Grandmother to my children. Sure, it’s not surprising when in-laws are at each other’s throats, but she wanted to make me disappear. She thought so little of me, of my relationship, that she thought I could be bought.”
Megan stared at the floor, her nonverbal response her admission of guilt. No way was I letting her off that easy--not after she just tried to excuse the inexcusable.
She slowly raised her chin until she looked a
t me, her face flushed red with shame. “I’m sorry...I didn’t mean...” She cleared her throat. “You’re right. She’s sketch--and she had no right to treat you that way.”
I relaxed slightly, still a little miffed. “Thank you.”
She wiped her palms on her jeans. “So what now? You gonna give her exactly what she wants?”
I uncrossed my arms slowly. “Of course not.”
“Well, you’ve been eyeballing your cell for the past hour. He’s been calling?”
I nodded.
“And you don’t want to talk to him?”
“I do...I don’t...I mean...” I took the plunge and powered on my phone. When I saw the light flash and indicate that I had two new voicemails, I knew they were from him. I needed to let him explain. I wanted an explanation. But that would require either scrolling down my missed calls list or going back to the penthouse. Option B was too much too soon, but Option A seemed cowardly.
I knew we needed to have a conversation, but I felt like hearing his voice and seeing his face would make me forget how furious I was with him. He wouldn’t even get the ‘I’m sorry’ out before I started apologizing. I pried my eyes from my cell screen, expecting to see Megan’s eyes round with disappointment, but her attention was solidly locked on her phone. It was sitting on the coffee table and she was eyeing it warily like it was going to jump out and bite her.
“Is everything okay?” I asked, grateful to worry about something other than to call or not to call. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”
“What?” she said with a nervous laugh. “No idea what you’re talking about.” Her weird side eye showdown with her cell begged to differ.
“Somebody bothering you? Mark?” I lowered my voice, practically whispering the second name. “Brad?”
“It’s nothing,” she said firmly, finally loosening her grip on the phone--just long enough for me to lurch to the table and snatch it up. The number I saw on the screen-- “Is this…”
No. The number was just similar. Because she’d all but told him to go to hell when they met and I was stuck playing referee all night. She couldn’t stand him. She made it crystal clear.
