Private Scandal

by Jenna Bayley-Burke

  Pain flickered behind her baby blue eyes. It was the only thing that kept him from walking out of the room. If she was hurting, then she cared.

  “I don’t understand why you didn’t go with her. Unless you’ve tired of her already. Maybe she wasn’t as good as you’d heard she’d be.”

  “I wonder if your nastiness is in direct proportion to how bad you hurt right now.”

  “Don’t try and psychoanalyze me. I don’t care what you do with your life, as long as you let me and my dog out of it.”

  “You wish you didn’t care, Megan. If you didn’t care then you couldn’t hurt. But you do.”

  She rose from the table. “Like usual, you don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  He caught her wrist as she turned to go. “I’ll make you a deal.”

  “Said the spider to the fly.”

  “Maybe.” He grinned. “I want to tell you what happened. I want to explain whether you care to hear it or not. You sit down and listen for as long as it takes you to finish the ice cream. Then you can go and lock yourself in the spare room, and I’ll leave you alone for the rest of the night.”

  She shook off his hold and grabbed the ice cream. “Do your worst.”

  He waited until she’d settled herself on the leather couch before he sat on the upholstered ottoman opposite her. “I think I should start at the beginning.”

  “You mean you’re not going to start with your tongue down Gemma Ryan’s throat? And I thought this was going to be a naughty story.”

  “My tongue wasn’t in any part of her.”

  “Oh, what a tangled web we weave…” Megan slid the spoon into her mouth, her eyes never leaving his.

  Chapter Ten

  Brandon stared at her like he had all the time in the world to convince her to believe his stories. His confidence mocked her and she tried to get her bearings. Hope bloomed in her chest that maybe, just maybe there was an explanation that could glue the shattered pieces of their lives back together.

  Looking at him now, so close and so comforting, she wanted to believe he could fix this, fix them. His French blue dress shirt had long ago been open at the collar, but he slowly unbuttoned the cuffs and rolled them back to his elbows. His black slacks bunched around his narrow hips as he sat in front of her, staring at her as if sizing up an opponent.

  His dark gaze held her in place, fixed on her as if he knew just how close she was to throwing in the towel. He seemed to see right through her bravado, like he could sense all her weaknesses and wouldn’t stop until he’d exploited every single one.

  Funny, how simply staring at someone’s eyes could make your stomach pitch and roll, your heart skitter around your chest and make you doubt everything you’d built your anger upon.

  “I think I’ve changed my mind.” Megan silently praised herself that the panic didn’t break her even tone.

  “No, you’re just realizing you’re wrong about me.” He shrugged and spread his hands out. “You’ve been asking me for answers for weeks. I’m going to give them to you.”

  But he wasn’t. He was trying to convince her to see things his way. Since it was far rosier than her version, she was tempted.

  Being tempted around Brandon was a bad idea. She forced herself to think about her mother and wonder if this was why she never tried to break free. Had she let the shadow of doubt excuse obvious indiscretions? Megan couldn’t let herself be fooled the same way.

  He leaned forward, resting his forearms on his thighs. The scent of his cologne swirled around her, and she took in a deep breath on instinct, which only served to intoxicate her more. Why did he have to be so handsome and smell so good? It made keeping her perspective darned near impossible.

  He gave her a slow smile that lit naughty lights in his eyes. He was so close that their knees were nearly touching. All he had to do was shift a certain way and that familiar spark would spiral through her body. She sat still in quiet anticipation, wondering how to keep her composure.

  “I’ve been buying stock in Carlton International for years.”

  Megan blinked, her dirty mind getting whiplash from his businesslike words. “Why?”

  “Because I figured your dad would divide everything equally when he retired. I wanted you to have the option of majority.”

  “But it’s not as if…” She pulled her bottom lip between her teeth and tried to find the right words. She wanted to ask so many things, but didn’t have the courage to say them outright. “Our relationship wasn’t public knowledge, so why were you concerned about the future of my family’s business? We were fun and clandestine. There wasn’t a future for us, just a present.”

  “We were fun, but you’re rewriting history if you think our relationship was some fly-by-night affair. No, we didn’t share everything with the world, but we’ve been together for a very long time. We weren’t talking marriage until last year, but we never once talked about ending things.”

  Megan leaned back onto the cushions, needing to get a little more space from the truth. She’d always tried not to think about the future of her relationship with Brandon. Things worked as they were, and she couldn’t wrap her head around a life without him, so she’d always maintained the status quo. They’d outlasted all of her friends’ relationships, but she always thought it was because the element of secrecy kept things hot between them.

  “I collected the stock over the years, but a few months ago a large offering came out. I snagged it, and then started wondering why it was available in the first place. We investigated, and things at Carlton started to look shady. Some of the subsidiaries weren’t doing well, but instead of consolidating, the company was looking to expand with an express hotel chain.”

  Megan pulled the spoon through the ice cream and lifted a scoop to her mouth. She let the flavors melt and blend, keeping her mouth full so she wouldn’t be tempted to tell Brandon she didn’t care one iota about why he took over Carlton International. She cared why he didn’t tell her he was doing it.

  “Since we had the stock, we could look at the financials. There was really only three days between when I was cautiously curious, until I knew he’d made some bad choices, and embezzlement was one of them. A lot of shareholders were involved, and I didn’t alert you to my suspicions because I couldn’t risk him being tipped off.”

  “You didn’t trust me.” A problem ice cream and excuses couldn’t fix, nothing could.

  “He’s your father.” Brandon shrugged. “I would have protected mine.”

  She pointed the spoon at him, sugar-fueled confidence making her brave. “But if you were really as serious about a future with me as you are pretending to be, you would have trusted me with that decision rather than making it for me. You would have tried to protect me rather than your investment.”

  He winced and rubbed his hand along the dark stubble forming along his jaw. “I thought I had, Meg. I checked to make sure the trust funds were completely free of the business and they were. I had no way of knowing that he’d bled those dry too.”

  “And I didn’t know to check because you never said a thing about it.” She dug a pistachio from its ice-cream prison. “If you’d warned me I could have saved so many things, things they auctioned off that meant much more than money. If you would have trusted me, things would be different. You’re asking me to trust you more than I trust myself, and yet you never offered me the same kind of respect.”

  “I know. I’m sorry.” He placed his hand on her bare knee and a shock of something hot and reckless bolted through her.

  He was firmly in the wrong here, and yet, strangely enough, it didn’t diminish the attraction she felt when looking into his soulful brown gaze. He opened his mouth to speak again, but a rapid knock on the door stole their attention.

  Brandon stood and pointed at her. “I’m putting both this conversation and your ice-cream eating on pause.”

  As he made his way to the entry Megan stared down at the softening spumoni and swirled her spoon through the colo
rs. Growing up, her favorite Italian restaurant ended every meal with a dish of spumoni ice cream. It usually comforted her, brought back memories of her grandfather’s fourth wife, Maria, who introduced them to the best Bolognese in Beverly Hills. Maria had loved being a grandmother, and they’d all loved her for the five years she put up with Grandfather’s penchant for the cleaning staff.

  Megan took a bite, letting the chocolate and cherry melt against her tongue as she tried to make out the muffled conversation. She was four bites in before he returned with a plain white box.

  “Do you ever listen?” He smiled down at her, the smile he used whenever she’d been waiting for him in nothing but his sheets after he’d worked late.

  She shored up her defenses, determined not to fall victim to believing lies to better her life. “What’s that? The ashes of another company you’ve raided?”

  “I reallocate resources, Megan. I’m not some pirate.” He lifted the lid off the box before carrying it to the ottoman and placing it beside him as he sat. “It’s what was left from the apartment.”

  The ice cream curdled in her stomach and she set the carton on the end table. “What do you mean, what was left?”

  “I had them save anything that wasn’t damaged.”

  “The police?” Her hands were shaking so she folded them together in her lap.

  “No, the cleaning service.”

  “You hired someone to clean up the mess?”

  “I wasn’t about to let you do it, and your esteemed property management company had a twenty-four-hour eviction notice on your apartment door this morning.”

  “They threw me out?” She blinked slowly, trying to wrap her head around why they would do such a thing. She’d been a model tenant. For them to toss her out on the street after she’d been victimized was beyond anything she could imagine. Her stomach churned and her eyes grew heavy as she registered another experience of how people preyed on the powerless.

  “They’re slum lords. Scruples aren’t their thing.” He reached into the box.

  Megan tried to put aside her disappointment and despair and furrowed her brow, trying to connect the dots but coming up short. “How do you know what was on my door?”

  She watched as Brandon’s expression changed from cool confidence to indecision. She’d rarely seen him lose his sheen of certainty, and the change alarmed her.

  “Did you have the apartment under surveillance?”

  “Yes, but—”

  “Let me guess, you can explain.” She snatched the box away from him, troubled by how light it was.

  “You weren’t safe there. Obviously.”

  “So you had me watched?” She swallowed hard, afraid she might throw up. Maybe all this manipulation and emotional warfare was just a means to an end for him. Maybe she was just a pawn in a game he was playing, necessary for now, but easily cast aside once she’d served her purpose. “Do you actually care what happens to me or are you just looking for my father? Are you trying to use me as bait to lure him out?”

  “You weren’t under surveillance, just protection. They never stopped you from doing anything, but they would have stopped anyone else from hurting you.”

  Megan didn’t fail to notice how he skirted her other two questions. He had the wrong daughter if he wanted to catch her father’s attention.

  “Are they watching me now?”

  “No.”

  “Is that why you say I can’t leave the hotel?”

  “If you go, will you come back?”

  She peered into the box, not able to answer his question. It depended on so many things, like how this conversation ended.

  He pushed his hands through his hair, the tousled chaos achingly familiar to what it looked like after she’d been running her hands through it during sex. Which was not good. She needed to keep her anger burning higher than her attraction to him so she wouldn’t be taken in by whatever excuse he had for making out with Gemma Ryan in the hallway.

  “Do you understand that I didn’t steal your family’s business?”

  She looked up at him. “Do you understand that your business dealings were not altogether altruistic? You want to play the Robin Hood here, and I’m the wrong audience.”

  “I wanted to help you.”

  “No, you wanted to play the hero and give me controlling interest the first time my sisters and I disagreed about something. But that wouldn’t have happened. I don’t want to run a hotel empire, Briana does. Ava and I would have supported whatever decisions she made because this is what she’s studied, what she’d done internships to learn. If you would have asked me, I would have told you not to bother.”

  “Wow.” He sat back, his shoulders drooping slightly.

  “I don’t care about making money the way you do. Until I didn’t have any, I never really thought about money at all. I’ve cared about this.” She pulled out her great-grandmother’s Bible which she’d kept under the air mattress. She’d never been religious, but turning the thin pages and seeing the family tree written inside had calmed her. “My great-grandmother had nothing when she started taking in boarders so that she could keep her son fed.”

  “That’s why I thought you would want the company, because of how proud you’ve always been of what she accomplished.”

  Megan shook her head and pulled another book from the box. “What she accomplished was having a very enterprising son who turned a collection of small hotels into a conglomerate. Have you ever read my grandfather’s autobiography?”

  Brandon took the paperback from her. “I can’t say that I have.”

  “Neither had I. The book is in every nightstand of our hotels, right there with the Bible and the phone book. That copy is technically yours. I stole it from the Hollywood Carlton. I figured I knew him, so I knew the story. It turns out this—” Megan swirled her hand around the room, “—this was never part of my great-grandmother’s dream. She just wanted to be an example of how a woman can be in a bad situation and make something good come of it. He was the one who wanted to live in Beverly Hills and have all the things he dreamed about as a child.”

  Brandon nodded, staring down at the book in his hands.

  “If you had only invested in Carlton International for me, you would have told me from the start. You would have told me things looked shady. You would have told me to watch my back. Instead, I’m trying to stay upright in the middle of a hurricane and you’ll barely admit it’s raining. This wasn’t for me, Brandon. This was for you to play a hero. I don’t need you to save me. I can take care of myself. Maybe not to your standards, but I’ll be okay.” For the first time in a very long while, she knew she would be.

  “You talk about yourself in the singular, as if you’re alone in this world, and you’re not. What you do affects me too.”

  “But I am single, Brandon.”

  “Like hell you are.”

  Megan closed her eyes and tried to draw on strength from somewhere, anywhere, because this was the part that mattered, the part that had her wondering if a soul could bleed to death.

  Her eyes felt heavy and her throat ached. A part of her wanted to run far and fast before he said something that would send a pain so sharp and scything through her that she might never recover. She took a long, cool breath and opened her eyes.

  “Seeing you with Gemma shattered every expectation I had of you.” She swallowed over the lump in her throat, fighting to stay above the tears threatening to rain down. “I still have a hard time thinking that my Brand—” she brought her hand to her chest and fisted her sweater in her hand, “—the man I run to when everything comes undone, that he is you.”

  “I’m still me.” He reached for her, but she jumped back as if his touch burned.

  “I don’t think so. But go ahead and explain to me how what I saw wasn’t what it looked like. Tell me Gemma didn’t really kiss you, that she didn’t come here to have sex with you.” She lifted her chin and prayed there was an answer she could live with.

  “I can�
��t.”

  His words hit her like a sucker punch to the gut. If she’d been standing, she would have fallen over. There had been a thin thread of doubt holding her up for all these months, and he’d just cut it, leaving her to tumble like a marionette without her strings.

  Brandon cringed as her face fell. He wished he could rewind their lives and look up that day with Gemma and see Megan. If he would have explained right then, maybe she’d believe him.

  “We’re done here.” Megan stood and smoothed her hands along the skirt of her dress. “Are you really going to try and keep my dog?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then don’t bring that whore back here again. The world would end up talking about all the things your crazy ex-girlfriend did to you both.”

  “I told you nothing happened.” Her jealousy shouldn’t be a turn-on. It was adolescent and crazy, but it also meant she wasn’t as ready to write them off as over and done as she claimed.

  “I watched something happen, so you need to change your tune.”

  “Megan, you know how I feel about you. What do you want me to say? It was an awkward kiss. There wasn’t any passion behind it, so I didn’t feel the need to be dramatic in telling her nothing would happen. We talked about it, she left, end of story.”

  “You’re lying to my face.” She shook her head slowly. “You know, your mother asked me today if there was any explanation you could give that I could live with. This isn’t it.”

  “You told my mother? God, Megan, you’re like a tiger caught in a trap, lashing out at everyone who gets close enough to help you. What am I supposed to say to her?”

  “Maybe you’ll trust her with the truth.” Megan spun on her heel, and stalked to the spare room. Both dogs followed her inside.

  Megan stepped back from the mirror and wished that she had sluttier clothes. She’d always veered towards tailored and classic because the cuts tended to hide figure flaws. Now that she needed a good hoochie dress, all she had were choices fit for charity functions, which was probably where she’d worn them last.