by Vivian Ward
Slowly, she shakes her head no but the corners of her mouth remain in a downward slope and her brown eyes remain stripped of their usual shine. Instead, they’re dull and lifeless. If someone hurt her, I will make them pay.
“Then what is it?” I demand.
Looking up at me, her eyes water as buckets of tears threaten to streak her beautiful cheeks. Cupping her beautiful face in my hand, her plump lips begin to quiver, and I know this is something serious. Sucking in a deep breath of air, I watch her chest puff out as it expands before she finally exhales the gulp of air.
“Please don’t be mad at me,” she starts.
“Ally, I could never—,” she interrupts me.
“No, don’t say that. Please, just listen, okay?” I nod, giving her my silence so I can find out what’s causing her so much pain. “When I logged into my work email this morning, I thought it was going to be an ordinary day. I’d see what crappy article Gretta wants me to write next, and then I’d do my crappy research over the weekend to start fresh on Monday, but that’s not what happened.”
“Did they fire you? If they fired you, we can get you your own damn newspaper! Or better yet, you don’t have to work. You can just sit at—,”.
“No, Colton. You don’t understand. They’ve combined job tasks and have given Darcy my work space, including my computer.”
She pauses, but I’m afraid to interrupt her again so I remain quiet. After what feels like an eternity, my eyeballs are about to bulge out of my head when I start making circle motions with my hand for her to continue.
Closing her eyes, she says, “She also has access to my old computer and all of the files on it.” It’s when she opens her eyes that I become scared. Her pupils are so large that they resemble dollar pieces. “I wrote the story, Colton. I wrote the story about you, but I never got to publish it because you took me and then you watched my—,”.
“Wait a minute! You wrote the damned story? What the hell is wrong with you, Ally? Why would you do that?”
She breaks down crying and I hate seeing her crying, but she can’t pull that card right now. I won’t allow it. “Because I saw you with that other girl in the club; Brooke. I was angry and hurt and confused, so I wrote the story about you because I wanted to get my ultimate fuck-you for your betrayal and advance my career. If I would’ve known—,”.
“Fuck, Ally! What are we going to do now? How can we get the story back from her?”
“I’m not sure,” she says, biting her bottom lip. Nervously chewing it, she tries to think of various ways that we can get the story off of the desktop but she’s had access to the computer all day. She could’ve made dozens of copies by now, and there’s not telling who owns a copy right now. “But I don’t think there’s a way we can.”
Hanging my head in defeat, various thoughts swim through my mind as I imagine my picture all over every magazine and news outlet across the Midwest.
“We have to try, Ally. We have to! Everything is at stake here! My family, my business, my money. Everything.”
It’s clear that she hasn’t realized the full scope of things just yet. She hasn’t even wrapped her pretty little head around the full capacity in which this will attach itself to my bank account like a starving leach.
“I’m sorry, Colton. I’m so sorry.”
Pissed off that she’d keep this from me, I ask her why. “Why didn’t you tell me about this sooner?” I demand.
“I just found out this morning,” she says, her eyes and mouth popped open in shock. “I’ve spent the whole day trying to figure out a way to tell you.”
“No, Ally, that’s not what I meant! Why didn’t you tell me about this little piece that you wrote when you first got here? Do you know how many people I have? I could’ve had it completely wiped from the hard drive in a matter of seconds to prevent this from ever happening.”
Moving closer to me, she sits on my lap, resting her head on my shoulder as she runs her fingers through my hair in a fruitless effort to calm me down. “We have to figure all of this out, together. With Tyler wanting to buy you out and with the threat of my article being leaked, it feels like the universe is working against us,” she sighs.
I want to say that none of this is her fault but it’s completely her fault. If she would’ve never written that damn article in the first place, we wouldn’t be in this mess but I know she feels bad and I don’t want to make her feel worse so I just nod.
As she continues tousling my hair, an idea comes over me. “What is Darcy’s last name?” I ask.
She thinks for a minute, “Kipplinger. Her name is Darcy Kippliner, why?”
“Do you have any dirt on her? Anything at all? Just a tiny smudge will do,” I say.
Ally grins from ear to ear. “Oh, I have some dirt. She’s been fucking Gretta’s boss, Greg, since we started working as interns at The Gateway Times. She’s as slutty as they come. Why?”
“I want you to write down any other dirt you can think of about those in charge, along with Darcy. I’ll get my guy on it and we’ll put a plan in place that’ll prevent them from ever printing my name on anything other than a charity article.”
“I can do that!” She hops down from my lap and begins to scamper away whens he stops and says, “But what if they have dirt on me?”
“Do they have dirt on you, Ally? I mean real dirt and can they afford a guy as good as mine?”
She considers this for a second before quickly laughing at the idea as she dismisses it. “No, I suppose not. What’s the worst they can say? That I was tending bar at an underground sex club? Nobody will ever believe that,” she winks.
“That’s my girl. Now you’re catching on.” She stands up from my lap. “Now be my good Princess and go make me that list. We’ve got a whole lot of cleaning up to do.”
The End!
Stay tuned for the final book, Risky Love coming out May 2018!
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About the Author
Vivian Ward is a romance author from St. Louis, Missouri. She pens dark and dirty stories about alpha heroes and strong heroines with emotional HEAs. Vivian is happily married to her real-life Prince Charming who is also her best friend. One of her guilty pleasures is reading and writing smut while indulging in chocolate caramel candies.
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