Yasmin had started to use her own truck to get to and from work. It was much older than anything in Ilya’s fleet and more dog-friendly. He hadn’t argued when she’d suggested she transport Blaze in the old Ford, but also hadn’t suggested he accompany them in it, either. The last two nights, Ilya had worked late into the night, sliding into bed after she’d finally given in and fallen asleep. The honeymoon was very definitely over.
* * *
Ilya arrived at his grandmother’s on Thursday morning. As he got out of the Tesla, his eye caught on the damage wrought by Blaze, and he made yet another mental note to book an appointment to get it repaired.
He straightened his suit and walked toward the imposing front door of the house his grandfather had ordered built for his bride when he’d made his first million dollars. Old Eduard’s love for Alice showed in every line and curlicue of the building; it represented nothing less than a small Hungarian palace. It should have looked incongruous here in California, but with the landscaping and plantings that had been done, it fit into the surroundings as if it had been there for centuries.
The front doors swung open and Alice stood there waiting for him.
“Nagy,” he murmured, leaning down to kiss her crepe-soft cheek.
A whisper of her fragrance swirled around him, the floral, powdery scent one he always associated with her, no matter who he encountered wearing it.
“My boy,” she patted his cheek. “What brings you here today?”
“We need to talk.”
Her smile faded and a serious look crept into her eyes. “Well, then. You’d better come through to my sitting room. Can I offer you anything to eat or drink?”
“This isn’t really a social call.”
She sniffed in response and straightened her already ramrod-stiff posture even further before leading the way to her private sitting room. Ilya preferred it to the larger room she used when she entertained the extended family or large groups of friends. This room was more intimate and definitely more her.
“What is it?” she demanded.
Alice was nothing if not direct, and Ilya had inherited that from her. But now that he was here, the words that hovered on the edge of his tongue sounded churlish. He knew his grandmother took her matches very seriously. Questioning her about Yasmin was questioning Alice’s integrity at the same time. But his grandmother also had a great respect for honesty so he decided to come straight out and ask her the question that had been plaguing him since the dinner with the Hardacres.
“Did Yasmin marry me to secure her new client?”
His grandmother blinked at him. “I beg your pardon?”
Ilya quickly explained the situation with the Hardacres. To her credit, Alice didn’t immediately shoot him down for being an idiot. Instead, she sat back in her armchair and studied him carefully.
“And how does that make you feel? To think she might have used you?”
He gave her a sharp look. “Angry, exploited.”
“Have you asked her about it?”
“Of course not.”
“You’re husband and wife, aren’t you? Shouldn’t you bring your concerns to each other before you seek outside counsel?”
He snorted. “Nagy, you’re hardly outside counsel.”
“That’s true,” she acknowledged with a small smile. “But if your marriage is to work, and your reaction to your suspicions makes me believe that you’re already well invested in this coupling, you need to learn to work through issues like this together.”
She was right, and it irritated the hell out of him to have to admit it. It didn’t stop him asking his next question, though.
“You investigated her, didn’t you?”
“As my people investigated you also. You agreed to that, if you remember, and it’s a prerequisite for being accepted as a client with Match Made in Marriage. No exceptions.”
He waved his hand in acknowledgement but then he froze and looked her directly in the eyes. “Just how far back did your investigation go, Nagy?”
Alice’s lips formed a straight line. “As far as was necessary, my boy.”
“You know about her hazing, don’t you,” he said with sudden clarity.
The barest inclination of her head gave him the answer he sought.
“How long?” he demanded through clenched teeth.
“Since you finally saw Jennifer Morton for the person she truly is. You hardly think I wouldn’t have made discreet inquiries into what led you to break your engagement, do you? You arrived home a broken man. I had to know why.”
She’d seen him at his worst—not once, not twice, but three times as he’d lost the three people in his life he’d thought were most important to him. Those losses, the scars they’d left deep inside him, had held him back. And, as much as he hated the reminder, when it came to Yasmin he was still holding back.
Alice drew in a breath, and he saw her fingers tremble slightly as she began to speak again. “Ilya, the only way for a relationship to thrive is with love and honesty. I believe the two of you are likely on the path to love. You both need to work on honesty. I cannot tell you anything that you can’t find out for yourself simply by speaking to your wife. Settle this between you. Don’t let your pride, or what happened with Jennifer, ruin what could be the best thing to happen to both you and Yasmin.”
“But what about her reasons—?”
Alice put up a hand to stop him. “No buts. You each had your reasons for entering your marriage. What you do with it is now up to you. You didn’t expect to find love, and I imagine that Yasmin didn’t either, but you belong together, I cannot stress that enough. Work this out, Ilya. Talk to your wife.”
She rose from her seat and Ilya did also, knowing he was being dismissed.
As Ilya drove back home, his mind was whirling. Nothing Nagy did should surprise him and yet today she’d trumped everything with her revelation. Her conviction that he and Yasmin belonged together was unshakeable. And he had to admit yet again, on the face of things, everything appeared to support that conviction. The time he and Yasmin had spent together so far had underlined their deep compatibility on so many levels. So why did it bother him so much that Yasmin might have used their marriage to leverage her chance to win the Hardacre contract? As his grandmother had so rightly pointed out, he’d entered into their match with his own agenda of companionship and children. He’d never expected love...
He wasn’t being entirely fair to Yasmin. Carter Air had to be struggling. It was a tough industry and, up until his death, Jim Carter had been holding on by the threads that bound his overalls. Ilya knew Yasmin was proud and stubborn and determined. They were characteristics he was intimately acquainted with himself. Would he have turned to marriage as a solution if their business circumstances were reversed? If he was totally honest with himself, he knew he’d do whatever it took, which was exactly what Yasmin had done.
All that self-talk about commitment had been a crock. At the first hurdle, he’d fallen. He needed to do better and make it up to her. Nagy had impressed honesty upon him. That meant he had to quit putting off telling Yasmin about his part in her hazing. He had to open up the lines of communication between them and approach her about this like a reasonable and rational human being and, if not entirely rational, then like a husband who had truly begun to care for his wife.
Thirteen
Yasmin looked up from her flight plan for the next day as a message notification pinged on her laptop screen. She opened her email program. One unread message. Her skin crawled when she saw who it was from—hisgirl. There’d been nothing since the night of the dinner with the Hardacres and Yasmin had been hoping that the person had given up. Apparently not.
Her eyes scanned the subject header: I warned you.
She clicked on the message but there was no content. Nothing. Just that header. What the heck did that mea
n? They’d warned her. So what?
The phone on her desk started to ring, dragging her attention away from the computer.
“It’s Esme Hardacre for you,” her receptionist informed her before switching the call through.
“Esme, how lovely to hear from you. I’m just finalizing the flight plan for tomo—”
“You can forget it. In fact, you can forget everything. We’re canceling our contract with you.” The woman’s voice was cold and hard, as if every word spoken was carved from ice.
“What? Why?” Yasmin blurted out.
“I thought you were better than that. Was my husband to be the next feather in your cap? Seriously, you need help.”
“Esme, please. Can you explain?”
But she was talking to dead air. Yasmin quickly punched in the number for Hardacre Industries, her fingers trembling. What the heck had just happened?
“This is Mrs. Hardacre’s assistant,” came a disembodied voice in her ear when she identified herself and asked to be put through to Esme.
“I need to speak with Mrs. Hardacre, please.”
“Mrs. Hardacre is not taking calls.”
“Look, she just called me. I really need to talk to her. I’d like some explanation.”
“Explanation?” the tone of the man’s voice just about shriveled her ear. “The photos were bad enough but I think the video is all the explanation the Hardacres needed.”
“What video?” Yasmin demanded, but she felt an icy finger of inevitability drag through her. Was this what hisgirl had meant about being warned?
“I just sent you an email,” came the assistant’s succinct reply before the call was abruptly disconnected.
On cue, her computer pinged again. Yasmin shifted her mouse, the cursor on the screen hovering over the new message. It had been forwarded, and she immediately saw that the original message was from her nemesis. As usual, it was succinct.
Be careful who you trust. Yasmin Carter is not as squeaky clean as she seems.
There were four attachments. Three photo files and one movie file.
Yasmin swallowed against the bile that rose in her throat as she opened the first photo. Her blood ran cold as she recognized it immediately as the one sent to her two weeks ago. She flicked through to the next photo and the next, feeling sicker with each one, but the video was by far the worst. It had been taken just before she had her last vodka shot and entered the water for her final challenge.
While so much of that night remained a blur, parts of it she could recall. They’d blindfolded her and spun her around. She’d dropped to her knees. She could still remember the sensation of the gritty sand embedding in her skin, remembered the vertigo and the nausea that had assailed her. In the video she’d been told to strip down to her underwear, to the shouts and catcalls of the young women surrounding her. She’d tried to stand, she remembered that, and lost her balance, sprawling on her back in the sand. A sex toy had landed on the ground next to her and a disembodied voice could be heard coaxing her to use it or forfeit.
Yasmin closed the window before she saw the rest. Her stomach heaved and she shot to her feet and raced for the bathroom. Riya looked up from her desk as Yasmin ran down the hall.
“Yasmin? Are you okay?”
She couldn’t speak. She made it to the bathroom just in time, only just managing to lock the door behind her before her stomach erupted. Even though she couldn’t remember all the details of that night, it had been her worst nightmare. It had been something she’d done her best to get over, to forget, to rise above. And now it had been broadcast to her client. Whoever was behind this must hate her very much. Sending those files to the Hardacres was vindictive and cruel. And it had lost her everything.
Her stomach heaved again, but there was nothing left. How symbolic, she thought bitterly. There really was nothing left.
What on earth was hisgirl’s agenda? And how on earth was she going to hold her company together, let alone repay her loan? She had to take this to the police now. The damage that had been wrought by hisgirl was criminal, surely. But the thought of showing the files to the police, of reliving it all again and again had her dry retching once more.
“Yasmin?” Riya was at the door, gently knocking.
“I’m okay,” Yasmin croaked. “Be out in a minute.”
She hauled herself up to her feet and flushed the toilet, then went to the basin, rinsed her mouth and splashed her face with cold water. She eyed her reflection in the mirror. A pale face with stricken eyes stared back at her—her features a far cry from those of the girl in the video. But they were one and the same person and, it seemed, tarred with the same brush.
Ilya had said what had happened to her that night hadn’t been her fault but she knew how others would see it because she saw it that way herself. She could have walked away before it got to the point where she was no longer able to make decisions for herself. She could have called a halt to the increasingly degrading activities the queen bee of the sorority demanded of her.
Yes, she understood that others were also to blame, that essentially she’d been in their care, but deep down inside she still felt she was ultimately the one who’d made the choice to sacrifice her dignity just to fit in. And with what she’d chosen to do that night, she’d sacrificed everything her grandfather had worked so hard to build—everything she herself had worked so hard to hold on to. She’d failed. Again.
Riya was still on the other side of the door when Yasmin came out of the bathroom.
“Something I ate,” she said in explanation as she brushed off Riya’s concern and moved past her friend to head back to her office.
Changing her mind partway there, she went through the door that led to the hangar. She stood in the high-ceilinged building that her grandfather had built from the ground up nearly seventy years ago. The building that had consumed him, that had been his sole source of satisfaction his whole working life. The building she’d put up as security for her wedding loan. She looked at the Beechcraft she’d added to the small fleet, at the mechanics doing the final check for the flight plan that would no longer be executed tomorrow.
That would be the first plane she’d have to let go. She’d opted to buy rather than lease—a business tenet she’d inherited from her grandfather. It had left Carter Air with no financial buffers. She loved flying the twin, but without the demand for it, she’d have to sell it—and hopefully for enough to cover the short-term loan she’d taken out to get married.
She wandered through the hangar, feeling as though her heart was breaking, and let her eyes drift over the smaller craft. There was a chance she might be able to pass them to the flying school that operated out of the airfield and recover something of her losses there if she was lucky. Despair and helplessness threatened to drive her to her knees. Bit by bit her fleet and her team would have to go. She had no avenues left open to her anymore. She drifted into her private hangar next door, to her Ryan. It would have to go, too. Her plane, the hangar, her apartment. She couldn’t afford to hold on to any of it if Carter Air crumbled. She was numb with grief and all the while questions kept echoing in her head. Why? Who? What next?
She breathed in the air redolent with fuel. A smell that was as much a part of her as her DNA. Maybe she’d get a job working for someone else, but would her staff? They were her responsibility and she’d let them down.
Yasmin sensed a movement behind her, caught a familiar hint of pine and sandalwood. Ilya. She turned to face him.
“Riya called me. She said you weren’t well.”
“She didn’t need to do that. As you can see, I’m quite fine.”
He looked at her. Really looked, and she felt as if he was probing beneath the surface, seeing the rot that lay beneath.
“You don’t look fine. Maybe you should let me take you home.”
“Really, I’m okay. Besides, I have to pick
up Blaze from puppy day care,” she hedged.
She couldn’t go home yet. Not when she had to explain to her team that things had taken a turn for the worse. That there was no Hardacre contract anymore. Ilya reached out one finger, touched her cheek and then held his finger, moist from the tears she hadn’t even realized she was crying, up for her perusal.
“That doesn’t say fine to me.”
She closed her eyes for a moment, her hands forming tight fists at her sides. Then she forced herself to open her eyes. She had to tell someone about losing the Hardacre business. She might as well start with him.
“The Hardacres changed their minds. They no longer wish to use Carter Air as their carrier.”
“What? They can’t do that. You have a contract.”
She swallowed and looked away for a moment. “Had a contract. There was a morality clause that they insisted on, that I agreed to.”
“Okay, but I still don’t see why they ditched you.”
Yasmin dragged in a breath. “Do you remember what I told you about my hazing?”
He nodded, his face taking on a serious cast that gave her a glimpse into the hard-nosed businessman she’d always understood him to be.
“I don’t see what that has to do with anything.”
“It seems that conduct unbecoming has no expiry date. Someone sent them photos and video of that night. As a result, they no longer require my services.”
* * *
Ilya couldn’t believe the words that came from Yasmin’s mouth. No wonder she looked so haggard. He reached for Yasmin, pulled her to him. She came willingly, her slender form fitting against him, her arms sliding around his waist. The front of his shirt grew damp with her tears and he felt his heart shatter with the knowledge that she was in so much pain.
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