Web of Lies

by Elizabeth Knox

  “Wow, this is a nice truck,” she said as she looked around at her surroundings. “What kind is it?”

  “Oh, it’s a Range Rover. Do you know a lot about cars?”

  “Um, no, but I do know the newer versions of these trucks come closer to a hundred thousand than most. Jeez, you must be living the good life.” She gave a small laugh and looked out the window.

  If she only knew.

  The Lie

  Me- I’m done.

  The Job- What? What are you talking about? No, you’re not!

  Me- I am, this isn’t what I thought it was going to be.

  The Job- Bullshit! I told you what the problem was. I explained everything just like you asked!

  Me- Your ex is nothing like what you said. In fact, I feel like everything you told me was false.

  The Job- I don’t care what you think or feel, I paid you for a job.

  Me- You can have your money back. It isn’t worth this.

  The job- You know what fine; I should have known better than to trust you. Meet me outside the diner tonight. I want all my money back in cash.

  Me- I’ll be there.

  Chapter Ten

  Lance

  I pulled into the parking lot of the diner and turned off the truck. I had a long day at work and there were so many things on my mind. One, in particular, was Amber. I tried to keep myself from getting too close, but somehow the woman managed to worm her way into my heart. There was no denying it now. I was two steps from being fully in love with her. It was time to face up to it.

  I got out of the car and looked up. A smile curled my lips as I saw Megan standing in the parking lot. I could talk to her about Amber. We might have had a short relationship ourselves, but she had been nothing but a friend since we split.

  The smile faded from my lips and confusion settled in its place. What was Amber doing here?

  Chapter Eleven

  Catching A Liar

  Amber dropped her head down as Lance walked up to the two of them. The smile on Megan’s face was evil, to say the least.

  “Did you think I would just let you get away with it scot-free?”

  “Megan? Amber? What is this?” Lance asked as he walked up on the two of us.

  “Lance, I am so sorry. It shouldn’t have gone down like this.”

  Lance stood in front of the two of them. “What are you talking about, love?”

  Megan laughed ugly and loudly. “Love? Are you kidding me? I paid her to fuck with your mind. There is no love here.”

  Lance -

  I looked between the two women standing in front of me and no one denied it. “What the fuck are you talking about?”

  Megan was the one to answer. “You come in all the time, hungover or drunk, even when you’re sober, and you smell of the women you run through on a nightly basis, and you sit in my area and wait for me to serve you.” She stepped right in my face, tears streaming down her cheeks. “I loved you, Lance! I was so deeply in love with you. You promised me a chance. Then before we could really get anything started, you broke it off! How could you do that to me? Why would you do that to me then call me a friend? What was wrong with me?” She was irate. I had never known she felt like this. She always said she was good with the break-up. Hell, we had only been in a relationship for three months.

  “Megan, you weren't looking for a relationship. You wanted someone to pay your way. I'm all for helping out when I see that my woman needs it, but I wasn't going to sit back and just let you bleed me dry because you knew you could.”

  “Lance, I have no idea what you're talking about! All I wanted to do was be with you and it seemed like you were more focused on that damn bar of yours or the little models that strolled in than me. I was supposed to be the center of your world," Megan said with tears running down her face

  “This is one of the reasons we broke up. You assume that just because I'm with you, I can't have a life outside of you. We’re supposed to be each other's world.” I threw my hands in the air. Why was I even entertaining this? “In fact, I don't even really give a fuck. This bullshit you pulled right here lets me know I made the right decision breaking up with you. You’re selfish, conniving, and I dodged a fucking bullet when I left you.”

  I tried to walk back to my car but Megan pulled on my arm. "Lance, just wait a minute! Please let me explain."

  I ripped my arm from her grasp. "Fuck you, Megan, don't touch me. Don't talk to me again. In fact, don't even look in my direction."

  I could see on her face that she was surprised I was saying these things to her, the gentleman she had known for so long completely disappeared.

  I got back into my car and started it up. I closed my eyes just for one second. When I opened them up again, the passenger side door was open and Amber was sitting down. She hurriedly clicked the locks.

  "Lance, I know you don't want to talk to me. I know what I did is beyond fucked up. I'm not here to make excuses. I'm only here to tell you the absolute truth right now. You may not believe me, you may not even want to know, but I feel you're at least owed this much."

  “Amber, get the fuck out of my car. I don't want anything to do with you. I don't even know who the hell you are." I waited for her to get out. I didn't want to forcibly push her out of the car, but I was getting close. After a few seconds of her not moving, I slammed my hands down on the steering wheel. "Fuck! Fuck! Fine, say what the hell you have to say and get the fuck out of my car."

  She started immediately. "This isn't the first time I have done something like this. I actually do this from time to time and it usually is women reaching out to me about ex-boyfriends or ex-husbands who have done them wrong. I go around and I date these men and get them to fall in love with me, then either I blackmail them or I just leave them broken-hearted and wondering why. I have never fallen in love with any of my marks, except for you." She looked out the window, back towards the diner.

  "What the fuck? Is that supposed to make me pity you? Am I supposed to believe that you did all this and you actually love me? You must think I'm an asshole, a ripe fucking idiot if you think I'm gonna believe that.” I shook my head. I tried not to care, but the questions that I had were starting to get away from me. “What about your job, your house, meeting me at the diner. How the fuck did you pull all that off?”

  “The diner was easy. Megan told me when you would be there and I just showed up. The job is real. I just got fired from where I used to work and although being a conniving bitch is lucrative, it tends to play on my morality. I don’t do this often enough to make a living. The apartment I rented after I got the gig from Megan. I knew I needed to stay close and have somewhere you could come to visit. It’s a short-term lease.” Amber turned in her seat and looked me straight in the eyes. “I swear to you, she made it seem like she was a victim. That you were some womanizing bastard who did so much wrong by her. That you constantly paraded women in front of her just to torment her. I didn’t dig into any of the information, I didn’t care. That was until I started dating you, until I started to really see who you were, and by then, it was too late. I tried to break it off with Megan and tell her I didn’t want to do this to you, but she wasn’t having any of it. I brought her back the money and I guess she arranged for a time that she knew you would be here. That is what you saw when you first pulled up.”

  She pulled out a rubber band-wrapped stack of cash and placed it on my dashboard.

  “This is the ten thousand dollars that she paid me. I was giving it back.”

  I stared at the large amount of cash. I didn’t want to sympathize, but I knew what some people would do for cash in a bad time. I guess playing a horrible trick on someone isn’t the worst thing she could have done.

  “Was it all fake?” I asked, finally accepting the fact that the woman I admitted to loving was just a con artist.

  “None of it was fake.” She turned back to look at me. “I usually am able to fake it from the very first day, but somehow you cut straight through the bulls
hit and who I really am came tumbling out. It’s either the guy is arrogant or egotistical or has some other ridiculous character flaw that I have to cater to. You have none of that. Then it’s the sex that I have to fake. Did I fake that?” she asked, looking pointedly at me.

  I thought back to the times we had sex. I knew a woman’s body and there was no way. “No, I don’t think you faked that.”

  “Exactly. It was actually the moment that you stood up for me at my job that I knew she had used me. She lied to me. She tried to get me to destroy a good man. That is what you are, Lance. You are a good man.”

  “I like to think so.”

  “Don’t doubt it. Ever.” She gave me a tentative smile and then opened the door to leave. “I know it doesn’t mean much, I screwed up, but I meant what I said.”

  “Yeah? What’s that?”

  “I am in love with you, Lance. All of me. Even the parts you don’t know.”

  I shook my head. I couldn’t deal with this right now. “Amber, I need some time and some space. I won’t say that I don’t care for you because I do, but this is some next-level shit that I need to wrap my head around. I don’t know if I can recover from something like this. How could I ever trust you again?”

  “I understand. Take whatever time you need.” She leaned over and gave me a kiss on the cheek before she hopped out of the car and walked out of the parking lot.

  Chapter Twelve

  Amber

  I cried all the way home.

  Never in all the time I had been lying to these men have I ever become this invested in any of them.

  I cried for days. I went to work like I was supposed to and surprisingly, Lana had become easier to work with than before. It didn’t feel like she had it out for me all the time. Still, even on my lunch breaks and my trips to the bathroom, I cried. I was a mess. I was depressed. I was missing my baby. I knew what I did was wrong and I deserved this.

  When I was home, I took to eating in and watching movies. I had no motivation to go outside or even hang out with Lee. She knew from the beginning that it was all a trick and was worried when I told her that I had actually fallen in love with this one. She wanted to comfort me, but I wouldn’t let her. I deserved to suffer.

  It was three in the morning when I heard someone lightly knocking at my door. Lee never gave up. She would come over at all different times of the day and night and try to cheer me up. I cracked the door to tell her to go home and go to sleep. If she actually saw what I looked like, she would barge in and force me to do something happy.

  “Lee, go h . . .”

  Lance was standing outside my door.

  What . . . the . . . fuck!

  “Oh my God!” I slammed the door in his face and tried desperately to comb my hair with my fingers into something, a ponytail, a bun, anything. I don’t think I had washed it in at least a week, combed it in like three days. I had been crying all day and had huge bags under my eyes from lack of sleep. My clothes had holes in them and I was pretty sure I had dropped some chocolate ice cream on my top.

  “Um, does that mean go away?”

  “No!” I screamed through the door. “Hold on, I’m coming!” I ran to the living room and tried to throw all the Chinese food and pizza boxes away. I ended up stubbing my toe on the corner of the couch. “Ow! Motherfuck!” I hopped with a box of four-day old lo mein in one hand and my throbbing foot in the other. The oil from the pizza boxes must have dripped on the floor because after one hop too many, I found myself slipping backward, the box of lo mein flying up in the air and me landing with a loud thud on my back and ass, lo mein noodles raining on me from the air.

  “I quit!” I screamed out as I laid on the floor, too exhausted to move.

  “Well, that was entertaining to say the least. Are you okay?” Lance said from the open door, a smirk masking the concern on his face. I never locked the door.

  “Nope. No, sir. No! I am not okay.”

  He walked over to me and held a hand out so I could get up off the floor. I hobbled over to the couch and sat down, still trying to fix my clothes and the area to be more suitable for him.

  He reached up and pulled a lo mein noodle out of my hair.

  “Rough night?”

  “Rough everything,” I said on a sigh.

  “I want the truth to every single thing I ask you,” he said, seriousness lacing his tone.

  I sat up straight, no longer caring about my surroundings. “Of course.”

  “I swear, if one lie comes out of your mouth, I am the fuck out of here.” He indicated the door with his thumb.

  “You have my word.”

  He shook his head. “That doesn’t mean anything to me.”

  “I know it.”

  “Were you planning on robbing me?”

  “No. I am too scared to go to jail, so I would never do anything that is even on a misdemeanor level. It was my job to just break your heart. No paternity cases, no theft, nothing that deep.”

  “You said you blackmailed people.”

  “Yeah, forced them to tell the truth to their significant others if they had been cheating or something like that.”

  “How many times have you done this?”

  “Seven.”

  “You didn’t have any feelings for any of them?”

  “No, not one. Well, Jonathan, he was my third mark. I pitied him. He really did seem to love both the women he was cheating on. Even while I got him to date me, all he could talk about was them.”

  “Why do you look like you have been in a dark cave for the past week?” He fingered one of the holes in my sweats.

  “I miss you. I’m depressed.” I shrugged and looked down. I knew I would start crying at any moment, but I didn’t want to guilt-trip him.

  “I miss you too,” he whispered and fell back on the couch. “I shouldn’t. You should be that bitch in my mind. You should be the enemy, but something about the time we spent together, the way we mesh, is just stuck in my head. I don’t know how to trust you. I don’t know how to have a relationship without trust. I don’t know how to do this. But I know I have to try.”

  “Are you serious?” I asked. I couldn’t be hearing what I thought I was hearing.

  He leaned in and kissed me deep and long. He took my very breath away.

  “I believe in energy and sparks.” He pecked me again. “There is no way for you to fake this.”

  “No, no way at all.” I tried to kiss him again, but he pulled away.

  “I want to get all the way back to the making-up, but,” he smiled and pulled another piece of lo mein out of my hair, “you smell like soy sauce.”

  I laughed hard. For the first time since all this mess came to light, Lance was man enough to see past my lies and straight to the real me.

  “One lie, Amber, one and I’m gone. Trust is going to take a long time to rebuild.”

  “I will do whatever you need me to do. Full disclosure on everything.”

  He sat back with a smile. “You’re going to be a fucking problem, aren’t you?”

  “I’d be lying if I said no.” I got up from the couch, stripping off all my clothes on my way to the bathroom. “How about we start on that making up?”

  Lance got up from the couch and followed me slowly to the shower, that low moan that drove me wild coming from his throat. I don’t know what I did right in my last life to deserve a second chance from this perfect man, but I would spend the rest of my time with him proving my love.

  THE END

  .

  Pretty Little Deceiver

  Jessica Ames

  To Sarah and Liv.

  You are the best friends I’ve never met. I love you both dearly.

  Chapter One

  Annabel

  I’m not a bad person, but I certainly do bad things. Case in point, my current mark, Dante Black. He’s standing near the bar, holding a tumbler of amber-coloured liquid— probably whiskey— and even I can admit the man looks delectable. Then again, he usually does. He’s
wearing a black suit, definitely tailor-made, with a white button-up shirt. He’s forgone a tie tonight, leaving the collar open at the neck and making the ensemble seem more relaxed, more casual. This reveals the edge of the tattoo that covers his left pectoral and partway down his left arm. His dark hair, which is long enough to run fingers through, is styled in a way that says he cares about his appearance, but he isn’t a man driven to manscape. I know this is true, because I was in the bathroom an hour longer than he was, preparing for this evening.

  He’s also an ignorant, trusting fool. He has no idea that he’s let a cuckoo into his nest. Then again, out of all the men I’ve tricked— and there have been many— no one ever realised until it was too late. Dante Black is no different. He can’t see beyond the pretty face and the woman willing to please him to the ugly truth beneath. That truth is that nothing about me is real, not even my name. Cara Ellsworth doesn’t exist anywhere but in this fictitious world I’m building with Dante.

  This is what I do. I trick men into believing my lies, and I’m incredibly talented at it. That’s not a brag, just a fact. I’ve scammed men out of more money than I can count over the years. I should be sitting on an island somewhere, sipping margaritas and working on my tan, but like all employees, the money I make goes in someone else’s pocket— one Sebastian Dayton, my boss and sometimes, I like to think, my friend. He might be the only one I have.

  I can’t complain, or I shouldn’t. I get paid well enough for my work, and the bigger the job, the more I receive. Dante Black is my most notorious target to date, though. He’s worth an eye-watering amount of money, and I’m a spit away from taking that from him— at least the assets I can get my hands on. Mr Black is smart when it comes to his business interests. A lot of his assets are tied up in property, businesses, or things I can’t get my hands on. It doesn’t matter. The attainable income he has lying around for the taking is more than I can even imagine, and by the end of the evening, it will be mine. I just have to continue to sell the lie for a few more hours.