“Kilcannon! I’m coming in!”
It was.
Slowly, as if in a dream, he pushed all the way off her, still holding her gaze, not understanding anything, but knowing…this couldn’t be good. This couldn’t be.
“Garrett? Who is it?”
He stared at her. “Why?” he whispered.
“That’s my question.”
Why would he be here? There was only one reason. One possible explanation. No, it couldn’t be. She wouldn’t have lied to him. Look at her. The image of…love.
“Kilcannon!”
Wordlessly, Garrett got off the bed, blindly aware of grabbing his jeans and stepping into them. His breath was still tight and ragged, but not from sex now.
From fear. From disbelief. From betrayal.
The relentless pounding stopped as the latch clicked, and he opened the door slowly, squinting at the silhouette outlined by the last rays of the setting sun. He barely had time to take a breath when a fist came at him like a bullet, cracking his jaw with so much force he stumbled backward and nearly fell.
And all he could think was… I deserved that.
For being stupid and trusting another woman. For loving another woman. Who, come to think of it in his rattled brain, had never said she loved him back.
* * *
Still scrambling to put her jeans on and pull her head through her tank top, Jessie stumbled through the hall, making it to the living room just as Garrett opened the front door.
And got sucker-punched in the face.
She gasped and froze in shock at the sight of a mountain of a man, a good six-four and muscular, with a craggy face and platinum-blond hair pulled into a long ponytail.
“I flew my jet three thousand miles to do that, you asswipe,” he said to Garrett, an Australian accent evident in every word. “You slept with my wife.”
“Actually, I didn’t.” He rubbed his jaw, straightening. “So get your facts straight before you swing, Jake.”
“You were married to her before I was! You expect me to believe you didn’t sleep with her.”
“Just like you help her by sending some sleaze-bucket website to smear my wife’s name all over the world?”
“What?” The word came out of Jessie’s mouth as barely more than a whisper, but both men whipped around to look at her, one with curiosity in his eyes, the other with agony. Disbelief. Disappointment. Nothing like the love she’d just seen.
“A website?” Garrett asked, still staring at her, though the question was directed at the other man. “Was it ITAL, by any chance?” There was enough sarcasm slicing through his voice to cut her.
“You know it was. You’re part of the whole thing. What are you trying to do? Wreck our marriage and get her back? Claim the kid is yours? What the hell is your endgame with this kind of publicity?”
Jessie felt lightheaded and lost. ITAL didn’t do this. She would know. She would—
“I don’t have an end game,” Garrett said, clearly getting his bearings now. “I gave my word to Claudia. And I kept my word.”
“You word is crap,” he spat. “Collaborating with some supermarket-rag tabloid to ambush my wife and—”
“He’s not collaborating!” she fired back. “No one is. ITAL isn’t covering that story!”
“Who are you?” Jake demanded.
She swayed for a moment. “My name is Jessie Curtis and—”
“Oh, the famous Jessica Jane Curtis. The one on the ‘East Coast angle’ of the story. The one who got him to admit everything.”
East Coast angle? What the hell was he talking about?
He snorted loudly, giving her a disgusted once-over. “Mercedes said you have legendary interview techniques. I’d say they’re pretty damn old school.”
Jessie actually had to put her hand on the wall to steady herself. Mercedes had talked to him?
“I don’t know how you could be any better than Mercedes, though,” he continued. “Tells us we’re some feature profile, drags in a video crew, gets us all set up and cozy on the couch, and wham! How did you feel when you learned your wife married another man in Vegas while she was pregnant?”
Jessie pressed her hand against her chest as white lights of disbelief exploded behind her eyes. “No. That’s impossible.”
“Want to see the film clip of that bitch joking about a chapel that was good enough for Mickey Rooney?”
“No!” Jessie groaned. “That’s not…no.” It couldn’t be possible. “I didn’t tell anybody anything.”
“Oh, really?” Jake said. “’Cause she was reading tender, heartfelt quotes from your interview about how he fed her saltines and love when she had morning sickness with my kid.”
She hadn’t written a word of that. Not one syllable of his story was on the page, she didn’t transcribe even one word. She looked at Garrett, whose jaw was clenched as tight as his fists, his eyes cast down to the ground.
Please don’t believe him, Garrett.
“How do you think it felt to be told another man was willing to take my kid as his?” Jake continued. “What was it? Legally, morally, and spiritually? Are you shitting me, Kilcannon?”
Garrett’s shoulders slumped and Jessie swallowed her next denial.
Sensing he’d won, Jake flattened Garrett with one last steely look. “If this story doesn’t get killed, I’ll weather the storm. But you and your family and all the PetPic employees who got shares will lose every one, along with whatever shreds of respectability they have for you.” He backed out the door that was still open behind him, shaking his head. “I hope you’re happy. I hope you can live with yourself now that you lost her. I know why you did this. To ruin what Claudia and I have. You can’t. But I can ruin you and your family and your name. And I will.”
Chamberlain turned around and walked away, leaving them in stone-cold silence.
Jessie’s nails dug into her palms as she stepped forward. “Garrett, I did not tell anyone anything.”
“No.” He shut her down with one low, slow, harsh syllable. “No lies. No explanations. No excuses. You did this, and you’ll fix it.”
“I did not! How can you stand there and call me a liar? Fifteen minutes ago you said you loved me.”
“Fifteen minutes ago I trusted you.” He finally looked at her, his expression a perfect reflection of the agony in her heart. “He quoted me, Jessie.”
“I don’t know how that happened. I’ll find out. I’ll get to the bottom of this, I promise.”
“You don’t know how? How about ‘nothing is off the record’? That’s as far to the bottom as I want to go with you.”
She inched back, his words as powerful as Jake Chamberlain’s fist. “You have to believe me.”
He exhaled, stabbing his hands through his hair. “What I have to do is talk to Shane.”
“You have to talk to me.”
“Like hell I do,” he fired back. “We’ve talked enough. I’ve said enough. You’ve broken enough walls, damn it! Now, go, Jessie. Just go and fix this.” He walked back into the living room, looking around for a moment, then finding his phone. “Goodbye, Jessie.”
For a moment, she stood there, jaw open, heartbroken, soul crushed.
He loved her? He wouldn’t even give her the slightest benefit of the doubt.
As he tapped his phone, she slipped back into his bedroom, scooped her bra off the bed, and then went back out to get her purse.
He was leaning against the kitchen counter, dragging his hand through his hair, the other holding his cell pressed to his ear. “Hey, Claudia? It’s me.”
She closed her eyes as the impact hit, actually jerking back. Without looking at him, she opened the front door and closed it silently behind her.
“What do you know?” she whispered to herself. “I’m number two again.”
Chapter Twenty-two
Mac never answered her calls and Jessie couldn’t get a flight to New York until early the next morning. Dragging her suitcase along with more questions than
answers, Jessie marched into the ITAL offices itching for a fight.
“Oh, look who it is, the golden girl of ITAL On Air.”
She turned to see Mercedes coming down the hall, her old smug expression gone for the moment.
“How?” Jessie demanded. “How did you find out?”
Mercedes brows drew together in a frown, then relaxed. “Mac told me. But as far as I’m concerned, you won by default. My interview blew up in my face, thank you very much. My guess is you knew it would and set me up for a fall. And who knew the Prince of England would refuse to talk about his mum? Or his love life. Just a tour of some castle, which is not ITAL On Air worthy.”
Jessie shook her head, not caring about any of what she was rattling about. “How did you find out about Garrett’s marriage?”
She shrugged. “Mac sent me the transcript of your interview with that stupid plan to do something bicoastal and have both of us on the air. You knew it wouldn’t work, didn’t you?”
A transcript of the interview? A slow burn crept up her back. “No.” She shook her head, not able to even handle this news. “Never happened. No. No. I never wrote down a single word.”
“I should have known when he told me you were a hundred percent on board with sharing the first show with me and letting the viewers decide.” She snorted. “As if they’d rather look at you.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Jessie looked past her to the empty cubes and halls toward Mac’s office.
Mercedes reached into her pocket, and pulled out her phone, tapping the screen. “Here’s the email all about how we’d co-anchor and that was the only way to get it done, and that’s the attached transcript.”
With unsteady hands, she took Mercedes’s phone and skimmed Mac’s lies, then tapped the document at the bottom, her heart hammering as it opened.
The notes were stream-of-consciousness shorthand, but almost every word was taken directly from a private, intimate conversation. Not word for word, but close.
She was scared…terrified at the whole idea of being a single mother…thought I loved her…had to look at that man every single day and know he was the father of a child I was completely prepared to treat and raise as my own…such an arrogant prick, I honestly didn’t think that thing had been serious…
And she had not written one word of that.
Her vision blurred as the words actually made her dizzy. “It was like he was in the room.”
Mercedes rolled her eyes, not buying it.
“He would have had to have been in that room or…” Was it possible? Could he have listened in on the conversation? “He bugged my room?”
“You can sing that song all you like, Jessie. It doesn’t matter. You won. You got the job. Your story is the feature lead on Wednesday night. Hardly a fair win, but that’s the name of the game in this business.”
“No, it’s not,” she said. “I don’t care what it takes, I don’t care what I have to do, I don’t care about anything except that story is going to be killed. They can’t use a word on Garrett Kilcannon. Not one mention of his name.”
“What about your story? Mac said the raw footage is amazing.”
“They can’t use it. I won’t allow it. I won’t let them have anything that was shot. They can’t use it without my implied and express permission.”
Mercedes leaned forward. “Only if you’re not an employee, hon. You’d have to quit. Don’t you want the job?”
Not like this. “But how could he have done that? How could he know where I was staying? How…”
She closed her eyes, visualizing the room that night. The fire. The wine on the night stand. The laptop Garrett had set on the dresser. The laptop…the laptop. Open on the dresser.
She slammed both hands over her mouth, sucking in a breath.
“What?” Mercedes asked.
“He watched. Through the camera. On my laptop!” She whirled around to grab the case, her hands shaking so hard she could barely unzip it.
“That is so creepy.”
“Beyond creepy. It can’t be legal.” She pulled the computer out and whipped up the slim screen, willing the thing to give up its secrets.
“I think you have to tape over the camera,” Mercedes said. “Did you?”
“No.” Because who would do that? She ran her finger over the tiny camera lens. “Do you have tape over yours?”
“No, but I will now.” Mercedes bent over and squinted at the lens. “Is it on now?”
But Jessie was replaying another conversation and Mac’s words came floating back to her. I’ll help you. I can watch out for you and help move things along on this end.
By spying on her?
“Mac is going to get what he deserves for his unethical, disgusting, manipulative behavior.”
“You think so?” The words came from behind her, accompanied by the not-so-subtle stench of Aqua Velva. “Jessie, get in my office, and we’ll go over the production schedule for Wednesday night’s show.”
Fury bubbled up as she whipped around, eye to eye with him. “We’ll go into your office and bring the lawyers in, Mac, because I am going to see you go so down for this.” She held the computer up. “You spying bastard.”
He gave a soft laugh that only made her angrier. “Jess, how many times do I have to tell you to do your homework? That’s a company-issued laptop, and you signed a piece of paper that said you would use it exclusively for company business, which you do, I notice. But it’s legal for this company to put any software we want on it, and…well, we do.”
Beads of sweat formed on her neck. “Software to spy on private conversations?”
“Just that one, I promise. You keep that laptop closed unless you’re writing, I noticed, so I didn’t see anything, you know, really private if that’s what you’re worried about.”
Mercedes backed away, her lip curling. “I’m pretty grossed out by this.”
Mac looked sideways at Mercedes. “I’m grossed out by how you mismanaged the biggest bombshell interview anyone ever gave you. Get comfortable in print, Mercedes, because you don’t have the chops for TV.”
“Screw you.” She pivoted and walked away, holding up her middle finger.
He stared after her. “That’s a fine way to say thank you for the biggest break in your career!”
“Mac.” Jessie’s voice was barely a whisper. “What is wrong with you?”
“What’s wrong with you?” he fired back. “Do you want to be in this business or not, Jessie? It isn’t for the faint of heart, that’s for sure. But you do have the chops and they agree in broadcast. Swallow your pride, get with the program, and meet me in my office. I’ll bring you coffee.” He put one of his fat little hands on her shoulder. “And, I have more great news. I’m accepting the job as executive producer of ITAL On Air. We’re going to be a great team.”
She jerked out of his touch. “No, we are not going to be anything.” She poked his chest, stabbing hard. “You are going up to broadcast to tell them that I’ve resigned and every single word about Jake Chamberlain, Claudia Chamberlain, and Garrett Kilcannon is off the table. Unreleased, unsourced, unauthorized, and cannot be used.”
“You can’t do that.”
“Watch me. If one syllable about Garrett Kilcannon runs on ITAL On Air or appears on the website, I will go public with the fact that this company spies on its employees. You will not like the publicity, Mac. You will not enjoy job hunting.”
From behind his glasses, light brown eyes flickered with fear. “I don’t have a story for Wednesday. I worked like a dog for this promotion.”
She snorted. “Don’t insult dogs like that.” She pivoted and scanned her desk, trying to decide what to take, her gaze landing on her favorite quote.
Success isn’t the key to happiness; happiness is the key to success.
Right now she wasn’t either one. Unless…she changed that.
“Get real, Jessie. You don’t have anything else. This place is your whole life. Your job de
fines you.”
“Not anymore.”
She reached for the framed quote and lifted it off the hook, and handed it to Mac. “Here, you need this more than I do.”
“What are you going to do?” he demanded.
She took the Paris picture, and the butterfly, and left everything else. Including her damned computer.
“I don’t know.” She closed her fingers over the handle of her suitcase and gave him a tight smile. “Maybe I’ll get a dog and write some books.”
Chapter Twenty-three
Wednesday night dinner had a distinctive and uncharacteristically heavy atmosphere. The usual banter, teasing, and conversation had come to a screeching halt about halfway through when Garrett checked his watch and knew he had about ten minutes left to come clean.
He put down his fork and looked at Shane, who shrugged. “It’s all you, dude.”
It was all him. All alone. It had been five days since he’d last seen Jessie, and the most surprising thing of all was how badly he missed her. And how many times he’d read that one text.
Garrett, please call me so I can explain what happened. It’s not pretty, but I’ve done everything I can to protect you. I’m so sorry.
But he didn’t call. What good would it do? To hear her lies and excuses? To wonder why he’d been taken in again? To ache for everything to be different because, damn it, he did love her. And she stomped all over that.
He and Shane talked it over and decided to wait until the show aired before going into full crisis-control mode. Right now, there was nothing to do but wait and see how bad the damage was.
The damage to his reputation, the legacy of his company, and his family’s finances could be repaired. To his heart? Those scars would never go away.
But he had to tell his family before they found out the hard way.
All around the table, every gaze was on him as he slowly walked through his tale, explaining to them the other life-changing event that had happened in the same month Mom died.
Molly’s eyes filled as he spoke and told them everything, from the relationship with Claudia straight through to how and why Jessie left. Liam listened, expressionless. Gramma rubbed her hands over each other like she did when something worried her, and Pru looked a little confused by it all. And Dad.
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