The Price of Scandal

by Score, Lucy

  “She was in that lab with me. We came up with the name together.”

  “And it’s your name on the office,” he pointed out.

  “I had the capital. She didn’t. And we’ve already had this conversation,” I pointed out.

  “You protected what was rightfully yours,” he said, perching on the corner of my desk. “It was a smart move. You’re a smart woman. Don’t get defensive about it.”

  “I wouldn’t be here without Lita,” I insisted.

  “You would. But she wouldn’t be here without you.”

  “We used to be best friends.” I was exhausted. That’s why the truth that I’d never spoken before escaped.

  “People change, Emily.”

  “I don’t need you coming in here and trying to cast doubt on one of the only people I know I can trust.” Exhaustion made my fuse microscopically short.

  “I’m agreeing with you, and you’re getting defensive. I think you’re the one with the issue.”

  I pushed my chair back from the desk, making him step out of the way in the process. Annoyed. Frustrated. Hungry. “Look. I need to get back to this,” I said, gesturing at the stack of folders on my desk. As if to emphasize my point, my email inbox autoloaded what looked like twenty new messages.

  Damn it. I was never going to catch up. I was never going to win.

  I stood quickly.

  The spots were back. But they weren’t white twinkles now. They were big, black blobs that were bleeding together.

  “Emily.”

  Derek said my name, but he was so very far away.

  21

  Derek

  “I’m fine.” Emily’s voice was weak but pissed off from my passenger seat.

  Good. Fine. I was pissed off, too.

  “When is the last time you ate a proper meal?” I asked, turning onto the causeway, leaving downtown Miami behind us. The back door to the white contractor van in front of us flew open, and a stack of empty paint-splattered cans fell out. I swerved around it and rolled the passenger window down.

  “Back door,” I yelled to the other driver.

  “Sorry, buddy. I’m not into that,” he shouted back.

  “Freaking Miami.” Emily sighed, sitting up straighter. “Where are we going? Also, what exactly happened?”

  “You fainted in your office because you’re a stubborn idiot,” I explained. “I’m taking you home.”

  She’d gone ghostly pale and glassy-eyed before slumping gracefully into a dead faint. It had taken five years off my life.

  “The reports,” she said, looking down in her lap and then craning her neck to see into the back seat. “The social media team needs my input tomorrow morning. I have to reschedule the new chemist’s onboarding tour. I didn’t call her back. And there should be an end-of-day report from legal.”

  She was working herself into a righteous lather. How dare I drag her away from her work.

  “Everything that can be handed off has been. Anything left can wait until tomorrow,” I snapped.

  “You don’t get to call the shots, Price. You have no idea what it takes to hold a corporation this size together,” she shot back, crossing her arms over her chest and scowling through the windshield.

  “You don’t get to scare the life out of me by rolling your eyes back in your head and passing out on your feet because you’re too fucking stubborn to offload tasks you should have handed off years ago.”

  There was probably a rule somewhere about shouting at a woman who had recently regained consciousness. But I was a rule-breaker at heart. “This is your fault entirely. You know that you can tell me when you need a break. When you need a moment. A fucking meal. Yet you martyr your way through a packed schedule because you can’t bear to be honest about your own limits.”

  She opened her mouth on a righteous gasp of indignation.

  “Everyone has limits, Emily. You don’t get bonus points for pretending you’re exempt.”

  We rode in hard, angry silence for several minutes until my phone rang through the SUV’s speakers.

  “Jane,” I said, by way of a greeting.

  “Is the boss okay? Do you want me to babysit tonight?”

  “The boss is right here, and since when do you do what Derek asks you?” Emily snipped, grumpily.

  “Hi, boss,” Jane said, remarkably unconcerned.

  “I pulled babysitting duty tonight,” I told Jane. “Rest up. I’m sure she’ll be a nightmare to deal with tomorrow.”

  “Copy that.”

  “You both are fired,” Emily said.

  “Be a good girl for the nice man,” Jane told her. “Good luck, Tea and Crumpets.”

  “Thanks,” I said dryly. I clicked off and made the turn into Bluewater. The guard waved us through, and we returned to our stony silence. She was putting on a good show of anger, but I knew she was shaken, too.

  “Stay,” I told her when I pulled up to the front of her house.

  I got out and came around to her side of the SUV. She opened her own door, uselessly proving that she was capable of it. But I had the last laugh when her knees buckled. “Not so tough now, are you, love?”

  “Shut up, Tea and Crumpets.”

  I made a move to scoop her up, but she stopped me.

  “Don’t. You. Dare. I will accept a steadying arm, but that is it,” she insisted firmly.

  Rolling my eyes, I slid my arm around her waist and offered her my free hand. She took it in a death grip, and together we made our way to her front door.

  I keyed in the code while she complained about needing to change it again and how I needed to stop hacking into her security system.

  “Where are we going?” she demanded when I steered her past the kitchen.

  “To bed.”

  “Derek, I’m starving.” I heard the raw need in her voice and softened ever so slightly.

  “And I will see to that in a minute. For once in your life, just do what you’re told.” I pushed her not very gently down onto the bed and then made my way into her closet. I pawed through a few drawers before I found her blasted other man’s boxers and a soft tank.

  “Here,” I said, returning and tossing them at her. “Change. And do not leave this room.”

  “Bossy,” she muttered under her breath as I left.

  I made my way back to the kitchen. It was pristine without being stark. White-washed cabinets were complemented by glossy blue marble counters. The ceiling was done in a driftwood gray that suited the space. Like most of the rest of the house, glass doors opened up to the view of Biscayne Bay.

  I moved to the pantry. One could learn all one needed to know about someone with a peek in their medicine cabinet or their pantry.

  Emily’s pantry, disguised by two doors matching the rest of the cabinetry, revealed that she was obsessively organized and had absolutely zero imagination when it came to food.

  It was roughly the size of my own master bedroom. But there were no convenience foods or treats. No bags of chips. No microwavable popcorn or Red Dye No. 52 marshmallow cereal. No secret stashes of chocolate. There were shelves with meticulously lined glass jars filled with oats, flour, and chia seeds. Smaller kitchen appliances and larger pots and pans lived behind closed glass doors, all so spotless I wasn’t sure if they’d ever been used.

  Finding nothing useful, I ventured back into the kitchen and opened the refrigerator. Aha! Portioned prepared meals were neatly packed and stacked in glass containers. I opened one, sniffed, and deemed it acceptable. Some kind of Thai chicken dish with vegetables and rice. I helped myself to a second container of the same and popped them both into the microwave.

  Minutes later, I returned to Emily’s room with a tray, food, and my briefcase.

  She eyed the food hungrily from the bed. “Thank God, you picked these. Cristoff gets unbearably annoyed when I don’t eat every last morsel he leaves me.”

  I settled the tray over her lap and kicked my shoes off. “Cristoff? Is he another three-legged alligator in your care?
”

  She snorted inelegantly. “He’s worse than an alligator. More cantankerous, too. Daisy and I share him.”

  I arched an eyebrow in jest. “How very nouveau.”

  “He’s a chef, not a gigolo. Which, by the way, is what Luna thought you were. Cristoff is a crabby, loud, terrifying chef who makes divine creations and throws violent temper tantrums.”

  “He sounds delightful.”

  She dug into her chicken. “Mmm.” She rolled her eyes back in her head. “Delicious.”

  I rounded the bed and slid onto the mattress on the opposite side.

  “What are you doing?” she asked with her mouth full.

  Fluffing the pillows behind my head—why did women insist on having a phalanx of pillows on their beds—I reached for the second dish of chicken.

  “I’m babysitting you.”

  “I’m fed. I’m in bed. Your job is done,” she said.

  I gave her a long, steely look. “Clearly, it’s not. I’m staying right here and making sure you get at least nine hours of sleep and a hearty breakfast. You running yourself into the ground is not part of my plan.”

  “You can’t be serious,” Emily said, neatly scooping up a bite of rice.

  “Deadly, darling.”

  “Fine. But we’re not having sex,” she insisted.

  “Right now, I’m more inclined to strangle you than have sex with you.” I found the remote on the side table and turned the TV on. “Now, let’s see what the lovely Emily Stanton watches when she’s in bed.”

  I scrolled through her recently watched shows and grinned.

  “I refuse to be embarrassed by my viewing habits,” she sniffed as I clicked on a tiny home builder reality show.

  “You can’t expect me to not comment on the irony,” I said dryly. “I had to drop breadcrumbs just to find my way from your kitchen to your bedroom.”

  “Shut up, Price.”

  “It’s nice to see it’s not all documentaries and biopics,” I mused.

  “You make me sound so boring,” she complained.

  But there was nothing boring about the woman in bed next to me.

  “Well, this is cozy. And confusing.”

  Cameron Whitbury, aerospace billionaire and next-door neighbor, poked her head in the open bedroom doors.

  “Cam!” Emily said in surprise. “What are you doing here?”

  “I saw Captain Chivalry here half dragging you into the house. You looked sick or something. Are you feeling okay?”

  “She is not,” I said at the same time Emily said, “I’m fine.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Emily decided to run herself into the ground on no food for who knows how long,” I informed her.

  “I can report that she also hasn’t been sleeping. Her home office lights aren’t going out until three the past several nights,” Cam said.

  “Here’s an idea, how about you all butt your pretty little noses out of my life?” Emily grumbled.

  I glared at her.

  “Stop looking at me like that,” Emily complained. “I’m trying to run my business and appease the board and make nice with the media and win over the public. I am trying to do everything.”

  “Maybe you should stop,” Cam suggested. Clearly, at home here, she crossed to the bed and flopped down at Emily’s feet. She was wearing a tailored pantsuit and flip-flops, which I assumed she’d donned after shedding some spectacular pair of stilettos.

  “I would expect you of all people to support me here, Cam,” she said.

  “Hey, I’m not the one passing out at work. When I do, you can come over and rub my face in it.”

  “Jane has a big, fat mouth.”

  “Ladies, ladies. Let’s not fight while we’re all in bed together,” I said, helping myself to more chicken. I wanted to meet this Cristoff. He was excellent with poultry.

  Cam sniffed the air and stuck her face in Emily’s dinner. “That smells divine.”

  “There’s another one in the fridge,” I told her.

  “I shall return,” Cam said, sliding off the bed and strolling out of the room.

  “Cristoff will be very happy,” Emily sighed.

  When Cam returned with her own dinner, I opened my laptop to tackle some work while the girls watched a couple from Seattle construct a six-hundred square foot shed in a forest.

  “Digging the reading glasses,” Cam said approvingly.

  “Right? It gives him this nerdy sex god vibe, doesn’t it?” Emily yawned.

  I ignored them.

  I had my own game of catch up to play. My business was small but full-service. When we had a client such as Emily, my team worked around the clock doing whatever was necessary to achieve the desired outcome. Rowena was digging into Merritt Van Winston’s background as well as that of his immediate family.

  Lance was ghost-writing glowing posts and articles about Emily, Flawless, and Bluewater and spreading them far and wide within our network of friendly media. My other clients were being “fixed” by my small team of junior associates. We had a B-list sex tape scandal that was proving to be a bit tricky and a messy divorce that needed decluttering.

  But Emily Stanton’s situation was currently my firm’s main priority.

  I had the email from Flawless’s publicist who forwarded the daily list of media requests. Most of which were tabloids and gossip blogs hoping to nail our lovely leader to the cross in the name of clicks and advertising. But today, there was an interesting request. I forwarded it to Rowena and requested an in-depth dig.

  The latest numbers were showing a slow but significant upswing. If I could keep Emily on her feet and lovely for another few weeks, I was confident the entire thing would be behind her.

  I handled a number of emails, requests, and the drudgery that comes with running a business. The numbers and dollar signs didn’t excite me the way stats on a viral story did. But I recognized their value and did what I could with them. I relied on accountants and bookkeepers to handle the more boring details. But I knew where every penny came from and where it was going.

  Emily yawned again next to me. Her color was better, her body fueled. If I could just force a good night’s sleep on her, we would begin fresh in the morning. And I would monitor her more closely since she was apparently incapable of taking care of herself.

  Cam finished her meal and the show and got ready to head home. But not without first forcing a promise out of Emily to check in repeatedly tomorrow.

  “Take good care of her,” Cam ordered from the doorway.

  “I promise.”

  I took the tray of dirty dishes into the kitchen and loaded them into one of the two dishwashers. I reset the security alarm and took a quick tour of the first floor, making sure doors and windows were locked.

  Returning to the bedroom, I found Emily sound asleep beneath the duvet. The TV screen flashed, and I turned it off. I was sure there were motorized blinds of some sort to cover the French doors leading to the terrace, but I couldn’t figure out how they worked. There were worse things than waking with the sunrise, I decided.

  I stripped to my underwear and pulled back the covers on what I now considered my side of the bed. Finding a phone charger in my nightstand’s drawer, I wondered how many guests there had been to make use of it. Though it didn’t really matter since I planned to make sure I was the most memorable.

  Sliding between the silky linens, I settled back on the pillows.

  Next to me, Emily breathed slow, even breaths. I tucked my hands beneath my head and contemplated the hand-painted abstract mural in glowing shades of rose and blue on Emily’s bedroom ceiling.

  Yes, a number of things were going to change starting tomorrow.

  22

  Emily

  “Emily Stanton’s collapse: Drugs, pregnancy, or both?”

  “Female billionaire collapses under weight of scandal”

  “Stanton threatens Merritt Van Winston with defamation suit”

  I woke gradually and in decadent
stages. There was no alarm startling me to life. That was my first hint that something was very wrong. The second was the light. There was some. Natural and soft playing through the shears that hung framing the terrace doors.

  Every morning, I awoke before dawn to a shrill alarm and started my day without complaint.

  Yes, something was very, very wrong.

  And then I remembered.

  My eyes flew open. I slapped a hand to the pillows next to me. Derek. He was gone. Perhaps he’d never been? Had I hallucinated it all? The fainting—how humiliating—the argument in the car, dinner in bed with him and Cam?

  I sat up and scrubbed the sleep from my eyes. A pair of men’s shoes sat by the door. The pillows on the other side of the bed had a distinct head impression.

  There were voices, deep male voices, coming from the direction of my kitchen.

  Before I could decide whether to get out of bed and boot these kitchen dwellers from my house or swing by the bathroom first, Derek appeared in the doorway. He was dressed in yesterday’s clothes and carrying another tray.

  I’d spent the night with him.

  I’d spent the night with plenty of men before. But had never felt quite this awkward… or unfulfilled.

  “Ah, she’s awake,” he announced cheerfully. I pulled the sheets up to my chest, feeling uncomfortably vulnerable.

  “Why are you still here?” I croaked.

  Whatever it was he had on the tray smelled divine, and I wanted it.

  “Oh, we’ll get to that,” he said, the slightest hint of a warning in his tone. “But first, are you well enough to eat somewhere besides bed?”

  Pride chafed, I swung my legs over the side of the bed. “I’m not an invalid,” I sniffed haughtily.

  “Good. Then we’ll dine al fresco,” he decided. Juggling tray and door handles, Derek led the way onto the terrace.

  The morning heat was welcome on my skin. The waters, pool and ocean, sparkled under the sun that had already crested the horizon.

  “What time is it?” I asked, looking for my watch and finding my wrist bare.

  “Six-thirty.”