It might not be fair. It was probably all shades of wrong to get involved before telling him everything, but her efforts to go to him with proof had to mean something.
Concern lined Tag’s face and he was up and out of his chair as fast as his legs could carry him. He pulled her from her chair, his muscled arms around her in an instant. “Are you sick? Jesus. You’d tell me if you’re sick, wouldn’t you?”
She stood on tiptoe and gave him a kiss, running her fingers over the creases in his brow, loving that he was so protectively worried about her. “I’m not sick, Tag. Promise. I just need...” She took a deep breath. “I just need some time to work something out. Is that okay with you or do you want to stop seeing each other altogether until I work things out?” As much as she hoped he didn’t, it was only fair to offer him an out. Even if there was deception behind the out and he didn’t know how big the deception was.
“As long as you’re not sick, you work out whatever you need to. Unless it’s another boyfriend. That won’t work.”
Tag wasn’t often serious, but when he was, you knew it. Something had happened to him in a relationship somewhere along the way, and it involved cheating. She pressed her lips to his harder. “Never.”
He leaned back and stared down at her, his teasing tone back. “So you’re my girlfriend? I can tell people? No more hiding—skulking around like I’ve done a bad, bad thing?”
“No more hidin’. Tell whoever you want. Just prepare for the backlash.” Prepare for everyone to gossip about you and that naughty Marybell Lyman, dirty, phone-sex-operating freak.
Tag tipped her chin up so their eyes met. “You do know I don’t give a rat’s ass about that, right? I don’t want you giving one, either.”
“People talk. They talk a lot about me. They’ll talk a lot about you. I don’t want you or your family hurt. Especially Maizy.”
“Maizy’s a smart kid. Look at how she handled that business with Clifton Junior and all the teasing he was taking for his father’s cross-dressing.”
That had been hard to watch. As the subject of much mockery herself, she had been pained to see Em’s boys suffer. Thank goodness, it had all died down. Jax demanded respect, and he’d stepped in and demanded some for Em, who’d then begun to demand her own.
“My job—”
“I’ll admit, it was a little hot before this happened between us. But now I close my ears when I have to walk past your office. I definitely don’t love hearing you talk to strange men like that. I get that it means nothing to you, but I wouldn’t be human or a possessive knuckle dragger if it didn’t make me want to punch something. So I’ll stay out of it and not ask questions. Fair?”
She understood. Completely. She left all dirty talk out of the bedroom for that exact reason. That and because she liked the silence between them. The ease of it. She took more pleasure in the sounds their bodies made, the sighs, the low, husky moans. They meant more than words. “Very fair. More than fair. The fairest.”
“Then I guess you have a boyfriend.”
“Then I guess you have a girlfriend,” she said on a grin. A silly, unfettered, incredibly happy grin.
Tag whooped and grabbed her up, throwing her over his shoulder and heading straight for the bedroom. He dropped her on the bed as though she weighed nothing and sank down on top of her, the hard ridge of his cock pressing against her thigh.
She sighed when his hands began pushing her clothes aside, when he found her nipple and stroked it through her bra. “You didn’t let me finish my lunch, heathen,” she whispered in his ear.
“Later. We have some celebrating to do,” he whispered back against her lips.
Later was just fine by her.
* * *
“Did y’all hear?” Dixie asked, pointing to her computer as they all sat around the office on Wear Your Pajamas to Work Day.
“Are they takin’ your favorite shoes off the market again, Dixie? Lawd, ha’ mercy on us all. Never heard such weepin’ and wailin’ as when they stopped selling those wedges,” LaDawn teased, ruffling her boss’s hair.
Dixie made a face at LaDawn. “No. That scumbag Leon Kazinski’s been spotted. Heavens, you’d think he was Elvis reincarnated for all the press he’s getting.” She turned her head from the left to the right. “The picture’s a little blurry, so I’m not buyin’ it totally, but if I had to compare it with a clearer image, it sure looks like him.”
“Who?” LaDawn asked.
Oh, God. Fear gripped Marybell. No. No, no, no. Not now.
“The guy who bilked all those seniors and investors out of millions of dollars with that Ponzi scheme,” Em responded, straightening her favorite adult onsie, a look of disgust on her face. “Oh, that was awful. All those poor people, puttin’ their life savings in that vulture’s hands only to be left with nothing in their retirement funds. I’d bet my britches he has a big fat account somewhere nobody knows about, and he’s off sittin’ on some beach, livin’ like a king. I don’t know how he sleeps at night.”
“Oh, yeah. You mean the one with the cute blond intern who got off scot-free because she played the ‘I’m pretty but stupid’ card and no one’s heard from or seen her since?” LaDawn crowed.
That would be the one. Marybell gripped the arms of her chair until her knuckles ached. Breathe. Breathe often.
Em nodded, her ponytail bobbing in time. “That’s the one. I’ll never believe she had nothing to do with it. She was his intern, for heaven’s sake! All interns know everythin’. Not to mention, she was his concubine. Did you see that picture of her with him? What was her name again?”
Marybell forced her sheer terror to calm.
Em jumped up from her chair, her white fuzzy slippers clapping against the tile. “Chapman something, I think! Where’d she go, anyway? There was a time when you couldn’t look at the cover of a rag-mag without seein’ her face. She was gorgeous and blond. A petite little thing with a killer body. Could never figure out what she saw in that Leon. He was much too old for her. But I guess the slimy are just naturally drawn to each other. Bet she has all that money stowed away somewhere, just waitin’ on a day like this. You do know he was the one who left Tag bankrupt, right, Marybell?”
Marybell said nothing, merely moved her head. Words were impossible right now. Breathing was impossible. She was frozen in place, helpless to do anything but listen to them talk about her while she sat right in the room with them.
Their words hurt. They slashed at her heart. Would they be the same words if she just came clean? Or were they really her friends—the kind of friends Landon once claimed existed? Would they believe her when she said she knew nothing without having any proof she knew nothing?
No. No one had believed her before. She wasn’t ready for this yet. Not yet. Everything was going so well. And she was happy. This was what she got for having the audacity to be happy.
Em winced, putting a hand on Marybell’s arm and rubbing it. “Maybe I shouldn’t have said as much. Tag lay pretty low during the whole mess in order to stay out of the limelight because that whole thing was some circus. But seein’ as you two are gettin’ so close, I’d imagine he’s already told you.”
Marybell froze. What could she say? Neither of them had talked about it. But Tag’s confession was something you took slowly. Something you revealed a little at a time. Hers? Hers should have been revealed from the moment he’d asked her out the first time. “We haven’t talked about it.”
Em went back to smiling. “Well, I’m guessin’ it won’t be long before he does. It was a bad time for him. A really bad time. Right now you two are smack-dab in the middle of the good. When the honeymoon evens out, I’m sure he’ll tell you all about it. Sometimes it just takes men longer to talk about their hurts than it does us yappy women.”
Sometimes.
Em passed her one of the cookies Nella made, a frosty pink confection with gumdrops. “He’s pretty smitten with you, Miss MB. Have I mentioned how nice it is to see you two strollin’ the square?
”
“Hoo, Lawd. The two of you canoodlin’ makes me green with the jealous, MB. But the way he looks at you. Hmm-hmm,” LaDawn hummed her approval, hiking up the thin straps of her lavender negligee. “I’m happy for you.”
Marybell forced herself to smile. Forced herself to nod and listen to their chatter about Leon Kazinski sightings.
Leon Kazinski was a pig. A filthy, lying, cheating pig.
And someone had spotted him? Was Leon really back from wherever he’d scurried off to?
Panic set her feet in motion, moving toward her office as fast as she could in her black bootie slippers. She hit her browser, prepared to search for the picture, but she didn’t have to. It was the trending topic.
The picture of Leon with his slimy intern second only to the alleged picture of him.
If not for the fear eating her from the inside out, she’d laugh at being a mere first runner-up.
Her fingers went to the screen, tracing the outline of the picture that had ruined her entire life. They trembled along with everything else on her body.
A Leon Kazinski sighting meant the nightmare would return, in full force.
But you have the people shield, Marybell. It protects you.
I don’t want the people shield anymore! I want out. I want to tell Tag the truth. I want to tell my friends the truth. I want to stop pretending I’m someone I’ve long outgrown.
But the picture of her, lying on top of Leon Kazinski on the floor of his office, clear as day, glared back at her in all its ugly truth and wasn’t going to let her do that.
Fear seeped into her bones, and her stomach gurgled as she read report after report speculating about her whereabouts. Her mouth went dry as she scrolled through rehashed picture after picture of herself.
Her trying to get a cup of coffee while flashbulbs popped in her face, blinding her. Her leaving her apartment, her expression of surprise misconstrued as smug and condescending.
Her, in the last stages of her old life just before she’d disappeared, leaning up against the side of a Dumpster after she’d riffled through it to find leftover food.
She gagged, her hands cold and clammy, her cheeks hot with embarrassment.
And finally a freshly written report with a picture of her in the cafeteria at school with the headline “Where in the world is Carson Chapman?”
Marybell gulped hard, her throat so tight it hurt.
She’s here.
Right here in Plum Orchard, Georgia.
Fourteen
Marybell squinted at the laptop, her eyes grainy, her head sporting a dull ache. Proving her innocence wasn’t going to be easy. In fact, it was looking like it was virtually impossible. Now that her fear had quieted, and she’d forced all the painful words the girls had said at the office from her mind, she was focused. Focused and fighting for her life.
How could she possibly prove that picture of her and Leon was an accident? How could she prove that she hadn’t been smiling down at him while she was atop his bloated body, smelling the stench of scotch on his breath, but actually sneering at him and his last feeble attempt to get her into bed before her internship was complete?
She’d been his intern and nothing more. She wasn’t privy to the inner workings of the Kazinski fortune. She took notes at meetings. She listened to him give speeches at charity functions. She’d ended up being nothing more than his gofer, but a recommendation from the kind of prestige someone like Leon once had was golden in the world of finance. So she’d stuck it out.
She’d fought off his crude advances, his drunken rants, his endless come-ons in order to make something of her life. Growing up in the manner she had, with no one to count on but herself, she’d learned what complaining got you.
Nothing. But sucking it up for the greater good almost always left you a winner. There was no one to turn to, anyway. It had always been just her. The very little information she had about her birth parents was so vague it was almost nonexistent.
Born in Carson City, Nevada, and somehow, dropped at the doors of Child Protective Services in a small town in Georgia when she was three months old with a note attached to her blanket reading Carson. She didn’t even know where her last name had come from or if the people at Child Protective Services had made it up so she’d have one. In all her research, she’d never found her biological parents for confirmation one way or the other.
What she did know was an endless string of social workers and foster parents. None of them bad, per se. Yet none of them in the business of keeping her. She’d worked hard to find her way out of the system. Despite the jumble of endless homes and towns and schools she’d ended up in, she’d managed to keep her grades high enough to earn a full scholarship to college and then funding for graduate school.
She’d worked several part-time jobs while studying for her degree, saving every spare penny she could get her hands on for the day when she’d go out into the world and finally have something to call her own.
When she’d nabbed an elite internship with Leon Kazinski, she thought she had the world by the tail. Interning for him was a huge coup, and all that was left was to graduate.
Then it was gone. All of it gone. The very little money she’d saved went to hiding from the paparazzi until she ran out and then she was homeless.
After six years of working her fingers to the bone in school, almost on the cusp of having it all, it all just evaporated.
But the two years she’d spent on the streets until Landon came along and rescued her had taught her how to survive. Looking at her life now, she realized she didn’t just want to survive—hide—lie.
She wanted everything back, damn it. She wanted her reputation back. She wanted to go to Tag and beg him to forgive her for not telling him sooner, but she wanted to do it with proof that she was innocent.
Marybell stared at the picture again. Who’d taken it? It had shown up under the guise of anonymous at a rag-mag, two days after the story about Leon filching all that investment money, and it had turned her into the biggest scandal in the past five years.
She’d been compared to infamous presidential interns. They’d run polls on who was hotter, more devious, they’d Photoshopped her, said horrible things about her. Speculated about her lack of family, made things up about her until she’d almost burst at the seams from keeping her mouth shut.
It had been a long time since she’d looked the image up on the internet. For almost a year, it was the lead story on Yahoo!. She couldn’t walk past a newsstand without seeing it. She couldn’t surf the web without it cropping up in her news feed, couldn’t stand in a grocery store line when she wasn’t on the front page for months.
It was what had driven her into hiding. That and the paparazzi, chasing her down everywhere she went. Some of the less reputable journalists had actually posed as patients at her dentist’s office just to get pictures of her. In her efforts to get away, another patient had almost been hurt.
People whispered about her even when she was right in the room, making Plum Orchard’s idea of gossip child’s play in comparison.
They’d pointed, they’d insulted, they’d thrown things at her until she was on the verge of having a nervous breakdown. And then came the day, shortly after the story broke, when the dean informed her she’d lost her funding because of her scandalous behavior.
She’d packed her things and skulked away without even saying goodbye to her roommate. Not that it mattered. Tara-Anne didn’t talk to her anymore, anyway, and her classes had become unbearable. Walking the campus was a living nightmare of cold stares and lots of backs to her face.
After that, her life spiraled out of control. Employer after employer had turned her down, and what little money she’d managed to save tutoring while she was in school was gone within the first week spent at a grungy hotel.
She’d never forget handing over that key to the hotel room for the last time, knowing she had nowhere to sleep, no food. That was when the idea struck her to start using the goth sc
ene as a way to hide, and in an hour of desperation and with a pointless interview at an underground goth club, she’d made a choice.
Goth had been her thing in college. She and her old roommate used to frequent the clubs often, spiking their hair, doing each other’s makeup. So when she saw the sign for help wanted in one of her old haunts, she’d applied, goth-scene makeup and all, and the club owner never even recognized her. She’d found her escape.
Unfortunately, she didn’t get the job—or any job after that, but her outlandish makeup and hair brought her peace. If not the kind involving three square meals and a warm bed, then the kind that left her minus the hateful glares and the heat of the press on her back. She’d worn it almost day and night, only occasionally washing it off in a dirty gas station bathroom at night, hiding in the shadows until she had to put it back on again.
Fear of exposure threatened to swallow her whole once more and forced her to focus on the fact that in this very moment, she was okay. She had the things she’d worked hard for and the money she’d been saving on the chance her entire life could fall apart all over.
Landon knew all about who Carson Chapman was. It took him a few months before he finally got it out of her, but he knew, and he believed.
The most important part in all of it was he’d believed. He’d been convinced if she shared with Cat and the others, they’d believe, too. But she hadn’t been so convinced, and even though Dixie and the girls didn’t know the entire story, their words today had cut her to the quick.
She couldn’t face losing them. She couldn’t face them looking at her the way the rest of the world had. As if Carson Chapman was the dirty thing you scraped from the bottom of your shoe on the sidewalk.
Her doorbell rang, making her slam the laptop shut in guilt. Her eyes flew to the clock on the DVR. Tag—it was Tag. She gave a quick glance in the mirror to ensure that everything was in place, took a deep breath and opened the door.
He smiled at her from under the porch light. “Did you add another earring to your ear just for me, girlfriend?” he teased, pulling her into a kiss.
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