Seven Books for Seven Lovers

by Molly Harper, Stephanie Haefner, Liora Blake, Gabra Zackman, Andrea Laurence, Colette Auclair

  Ivy squeezed her eyes shut and turned to face forward. Wiping the tears from her face, she leaned in toward the driver. “Take me to the cabin,” she told him. “And radio the pilot of Kevin’s jet not to leave without both of us. I want to pack my things and get back to LA tonight.”

  Blake’s entire leg was on fire, but it was nothing, nothing compared to the ache in his chest. As the taillights of Ivy’s car disappeared into the night, he realized he’d good and truly lost her this time. There would be no third chance. There would be no trust rebuilt between them.

  And it was all Lydia’s fault. The first time he and Ivy had broken up, he’d been guilty. This time, he was innocent. He should’ve left the moment he saw Lydia in his office, but he’d wanted to figure out what her angle was. He didn’t really think she was going to the cops to confess, but if not that, then what? The next thing he knew, her dress had pooled to the floor and she was standing there in nothing but lingerie.

  That. That was what she had planned. Every time he tried to step around her to get out of his office, she’d step in his path. Then she started to close in on him. He’d put his hands on Lydia to push her away and in that moment, of course, Ivy had come in and seen them. The most evil smile had broken out across Lydia’s face and he knew she’d deliberately set him up to get caught.

  She had to be stopped. Somehow, her twisted little brain was just certain that once Ivy was gone, Lydia would have him all to herself. In her dreams.

  “Hey, Blake!” Clark Newton, the owner of the Rosewood newspaper, shouted at him from down the street. “Was that Ivy leaving just now?”

  He swallowed hard and nodded. “Yes, it was.”

  “Do you think she’ll be around town for a while or is she headed back to California right away?”

  “My guess is she’ll be in the air by midnight.” Never to return. Because he was an idiot.

  Clark nodded. “I suppose she has to go promote that new song she debuted tonight. It was fantastic.”

  Blake hadn’t heard a new song. He’d missed the last part of her set because of Lydia. “Sure was,” he lied, heading back into the building. And then a thought stopped him and he turned around. “Hey Clark? I’ve got some pictures I think you’d be interested in running in the Sunday paper. A big headline grabber.”

  “Really?” he said. “I don’t get many big headlines around here. I was thankful for the concert so I’d have something for the front page tomorrow.”

  Blake nodded. The concert and how much money it raised would undoubtedly be front and center, but the scandal he was about to hand over was front page material as well, just beneath the fold. “I’ve got them in my office. If you’ll meet me out front in about twenty minutes, I’ll get them to you.”

  “Sure thing. Say, Blake, what are they pictures of?” Clark asked.

  Blake thought for a moment before he answered. “Last week’s parade.” That was true enough.

  Clark frowned. “I already did a story on the parade in last Sunday’s edition.”

  Blake smiled and shook his head. “I guarantee you didn’t do a story on this aspect of the parade!”

  “Wait a second,” Clark said. “Are you talking about the same picture from the slideshow?”

  “What slideshow?” It seemed like he’d missed more than just a few of Ivy’s songs.

  “The one during the encore; didn’t you see it? They were flashing through pictures of you and Ivy together. Some were back in high school and college, and some were more recent, including one from the parade. It went by kinda quickly, but it looked like . . .”

  Blake was intrigued. “It looked like what?”

  “It looked like Lydia Whittaker was throwing something in the street. I was thinking maybe that was what spooked the horse. A streak of luck that someone would have taken a shot at that exact moment. I wish I could get my hands on it to see if I really saw what I think I saw.”

  That was an interesting development for certain. “I can probably help you with that. I didn’t see the slideshow, but I’m pretty sure they’re the same picture.”

  “Great!” Clark beamed. “Say, you don’t know who slipped that picture into the slideshow, do you?”

  Blake shook his head. He sure didn’t. But he would be damn interested in finding out. “I’ll meet you out front in a little bit. I’ve got to take care of a few things first.”

  With that, he disappeared back into the high school, his sights set on tracking down Lydia. He had been too concerned with chasing Ivy to give Lydia a piece of his mind before, but now his calendar was wide open. He rounded the corner to his office. He moved aggressively down the hallway despite the fact that every step echoed pain as surely as the tile hall echoed each sound.

  He threw open the door to his office. Blake wasn’t surprised to find Lydia, still in a state of undress, sitting on his desk. Bending down, he picked up her pink dress from the floor and threw it at her. No wonder she’d been all dressed up tonight. She was on the hunt.

  “Put on some damn clothes before someone else sees you in here.”

  With a pout, Lydia slid from the desk and pulled the dress over her head. “Blake—” she started, but he wasn’t about to listen to anything she had to say.

  “Can it, Lydia. This is done. No apologies, no excuses. Get out of my office.”

  “But Blake,” she cried, fat crocodile tears gathering in her eyes, “you have to understand—I had to do this to protect you. She would just embarrass you again! I couldn’t bear to see you go through all that a second time.”

  Blake chuckled bitterly. “So kind of you to have only my welfare in mind. It couldn’t possibly be because your greedy, social-climbing ass was determined to catch a Chamberlain, right?”

  Lydia flinched at his coarse words. “How could you say that?”

  He could only shake his head. “Are you so delusional, Lydia, that you would think just because Ivy was gone you would have your opportunity back?”

  “No,” she said, crossing her arms and tilting her pert little nose in the air. “I’m over you, Blake Chamberlain.”

  He took a few steps toward her, narrowing his eyes with suspicion. “I find that very hard to believe, Lydia. You’ve been chasing after me since junior high.”

  “I know, but we really aren’t meant for each other. Seeing you and Ivy together at the game last night made me realize that we want different things. I want a handsome, successful husband who treats me like a goddess. You want to slum with the poor girl that made a career out of humiliating you and half the male population of California. How could I love a man with such poor judgment?”

  She shrugged, pursing her pink lips as she considered her next words. “We’re not meant to be. I know that now.”

  “Then what was tonight about? Why set this trap and ruin everything for me?”

  “I wasn’t trying to ruin things, I was trying to save you from yourself. It’s like I said before, I did this for you. Date anyone, Blake. Anyone but Ivy. You might think you had something special, but when it fell apart, she’d write another awful song about you. She can’t be trusted, so I had to send Ivy back to California for good.”

  Blake squeezed his eyes tightly shut as he tried to wrap his mind around her logic. “This has nothing to do with me,” he said at last. “You can throw all your altruistic motivations out the window, because I’m not swallowing that crap. You did this to hurt Ivy. What happened between you two that you would waste so much of your energy trying to wound her?”

  “She took everything that was supposed to be mine!” A red flush of rage mottled Lydia’s flawless complexion. “And she did it on purpose. She went out of her way to take away everything I wanted because she was jealous of my life. I was the head cheerleader. I was popular and pretty and had the envy of everyone in school. I was supposed to be the prom queen. I was supposed to date the captain of the football team and live this charmed life.”

  Blake tried to process everything she was throwing at him. She appare
ntly had years of built-up aggression over her competition with Ivy. What he couldn’t understand was why she thought Ivy did it on purpose. Ivy never wanted to be prom queen, but she tolerated it for his sake. Blake had asked out Ivy, not the other way around, so it wasn’t as though she had stolen him away from Lydia.

  “You need some therapy.”

  Lydia laughed. “I’m not disturbed, Blake. I see everything very clearly. Ivy took it all away just to spite me. I’ll be damned if I’m going to let her have you, too.”

  Blake shifted nervously on his feet. “Are you threatening me, Lydia?”

  “No.” She shook her head. “I wouldn’t hurt you just to get back at her. I’ve cared about you for too long to ever do something like that. I just want to see Ivy broken, defeated, and back in California, where she belongs.”

  He could feel his blood pressure start to rise. “Well, you’ve got your wish. She’s leaving Rosewood as we speak. At the moment, I wish you’d do the same.” Blake circumvented her to unlock his desk drawers and opened one to pull out the envelope with the pictures from Nash.

  “Wait,” she said. “What are those?”

  “Nothing to worry your little head over, since you’re going to turn yourself in to the police. Or was that just a big story to keep me in my office?”

  Her stoic expression proved him right.

  “What?” he asked. “I told you Nash kept copies, and I was right. I’m not the only one with them. Apparently while you were in here playing me, someone else was playing you. This picture,” he said, holding up the envelope. “On the jumbotron. Where the whole town could see it.”

  Lydia listened to him quietly, her hands tightly balled into fists at her sides. Her lips were pressed together into a thin line, and her gaze was icy as she regarded him. She didn’t like that she had been caught. It was ruining her glorious moment, splitting up him and Ivy at last.

  “What are you going to do with those pictures?”

  “Well, the funny thing is that I’d decided yesterday that I wasn’t going to do anything with them. No one got hurt, and Ivy and I were happy together. I didn’t want to embarrass your family. But tonight, you’ve gone way too far and I have no choice but to change my mind. I’m about to hand them over to Clark Newton. Look for your debut on the front page of the Rosewood Times tomorrow morning.”

  Lydia’s jaw dropped open, her eyes wide with panic. “Blake, please,” she pleaded, but it wasn’t going to make any difference. “What do you want? I’ll do anything.”

  “Anything?” He chuckled bitterly. “Well, then I want you to track down Ivy right now. Run out of my office and go straight to her cabin to tell her what you did.”

  She didn’t budge, not one inch. Instead, she just shook her head and dropped her guilty gaze to the floor of his office. Apparently, those pictures hitting the paper was the price she was willing to pay to run Ivy off once and for all. A fatal checkmate that made losers of both players.

  Blake would never understand women. “Fine, don’t help me save my relationship with Ivy. It’s just as well. People in this town need to know what kind of person you really are. Not even that beauty pageant smile and your family contacts will get you out of the hole you’ve dug for yourself. It didn’t have to come to this.”

  “I know,” she said quietly.

  “I don’t want to see you—any part of you—for a long time. I mean it. Not at the football games. Not at the bank. I don’t want to run into you at Woody’s or see you hanging around with my sister at the bakery or my parents’ house. I’m pretty sure no one else in town is going to be too keen on hanging out with you, either, so you’d do good to lay low for a few weeks. Do you understand me?”

  He waited for Lydia to nod, then he brushed past her into the hallway without another word.

  Chapter Twenty

  “You’ve got a lot of explaining to do, my boy.” Adelia Chamberlain stared her grandson down with a look that would make lesser men wet themselves.

  Blake should’ve known he was in trouble when he got a summons to the house Wednesday morning. When Winston had called and said his presence was requested by his grandmother, he’d gotten a sinking feeling in his stomach.

  He wasn’t sure exactly what he’d done to make his grandmother upset, although if he had to guess, he figured it had to do with those pictures of Lydia. Those photos and the accompanying article in the paper had caused quite a stir around town. Sheriff Todd even had Lydia arrested and charged with endangering public safety. She was probably looking at a hefty fine, probation, and a few weeks of unpleasant community service.

  It was a huge scandal for such a fine, upstanding family as the Whittakers. Things like that just didn’t happen around Rosewood very often, and when they did, they were never linked back to a family like theirs.

  Clark hadn’t credited Blake with the photos when he ran the story, but he had no doubt word had gotten around that he was responsible for them. He didn’t care. Lydia needed a little public shaming. If that caught him hell with his grandmother, so be it. There was still the question about the picture in the slideshow, though. He hadn’t done it. He hadn’t even known there was going to be a slideshow.

  “Sit,” his grandmother commanded, as if he were one of the little lapdogs she’d had when he was a child.

  Well trained, he complied, settling into the velvet wingback chair opposite her own. He looked down at the small table between them. There was no tea, no nibbles. Not even a plate of stale cookies. His grandmother almost always had something set out when people were over, even family. An empty tabletop did not bode well.

  “Where have you been, Blake?”

  He wasn’t expecting that. He’d been out of the public eye for a few days. He’d taken some vacation and spent his time fishing on his little pond and futzing around the house. Honestly, he hadn’t thought anyone would notice his absence, especially his grandmother, who rarely left her mansion.

  “I’ve been around,” he argued. “I took a few days off work after all the fund-raiser activities. I needed a break.” It was a legitimate response, though untrue. In reality he was trying to avoid the fallout of his breakup with Ivy. If word got out about it, he wanted to be unavailable for consultation. The last thing he needed was to see the news of his scandalous breakup plastered across the cover of a magazine at the grocery store. What confused him was why his grandmother cared what he was doing.

  “Needed a place to hide is more like it!”

  Blake’s eyes widened and he jerked back as though she’d reached out and slapped him. “Why are you so upset, Grandma? Is this about Lydia and the newspaper article?”

  His grandmother rolled her eyes. “No, it is most certainly not about that scheming, insipid Whittaker girl. She got what she deserved, if you ask me.”

  A sly smile curled her lips after a moment and Blake was hit with the sudden realization of who had been responsible for that photo getting projected at the concert. Clark had said the montage included old pictures, some of which had to come from his family. He didn’t know how his grandmother had gotten her hands on a copy of Nash’s photograph, but it would’ve been child’s play to slip that picture into the box with all the others they’d used for the show.

  “Grandma Dee?” he asked, the obvious question unasked.

  She didn’t respond. She just smiled and shrugged. “That’s not important. I’m more interested in discussing what is going on between you and Ivy.”

  He couldn’t help but wince at the mention of her name. “Nothing is going on,” he said. “Literally nothing.”

  Adelia Chamberlain eyed him with suspicion, reading into his cryptic words. “Something was going on between you two a few days ago. You’d become quite the hot item. Then she released that new song . . . I thought things were progressing nicely, but that doesn’t seem to be the case. She flew back to California the night of the concert without a word to anyone. Women in happy relationships don’t flee like they’re leaving the scene of the crime. So
, are you sticking to your story or are you going to tell me what the hell happened?”

  Hearing his genteel southern grandmother cuss was a little unnerving, but not as unnerving as having someone mention that song again. This was the third or fourth time someone had brought up Ivy’s new song, but he still hadn’t heard it. He didn’t want to hear it.

  He’d shoved Grant out the front door of his house when Grant tried to play it for him on his phone. People insisted it was a love song, not “Size Matters, Part Two,” but he still didn’t want to listen.

  In the end, it didn’t matter what the song was about or how great it was. Even if it was the sweetest love song ever written, listening to it would just amplify the fact that he’d ruined what they had together. It had been written and performed before she walked in on him and Lydia. It didn’t matter what she said before, because he was willing to bet good money she didn’t feel the same way now.

  Blake took a deep breath and tried to figure out how much he should say about it. The problem with his grandmother was that she had a keen sense for lies. If he held something back, she’d know it. He didn’t know how many times she’d busted him as a child for one thing or another. He might as well tell her everything at the start so she didn’t have to drag every detail out of him. He was certain she would torture him until she found out what she wanted to know.

  “Well,” he began, and before he knew it, he had dumped the entire story on her. Lydia’s scheming, the photos, her luring him to his office, Ivy walking in . . . the whole shebang. “She wouldn’t listen to me. She just ran off. After what happened in college, there’s no way I can convince her that it wasn’t what she thinks it was. I mean . . . I love Ivy.”

  Saying the words aloud for the first time felt strange, especially admitting it to his grandmother instead of the object of his affection. “I wanted to tell her how I felt after the concert. I certainly wouldn’t have ruined things twice by getting involved with someone else.”