“There’s a picture of you…going down on me. It’s been manipulated to look like it happened at the campfire the other night. In front of students.”
“Oh, God!” she whispered. “How in the hell did she get that? We were in my living room.”
“Damned if I know.”
She lurched to her feet and stood next to him in one stride. Gripping his bicep, her fingers dug through the thick fleece of his jacket. The horror in her eyes nearly undid him.
“Sam, the other night we heard the cat out here on the porch. What if it wasn’t the cat? What if someone watched the whole time?”
Anger flared, ringing sharply in his ears. It took a moment to identify that it was her cell phone. She glanced in through the thin, single-paned front window, but returned her attention to him, ignoring the call. The normal warm chocolate color of her eyes was muddy when she met his gaze. Her mouth opened, as if she was going to speak, but she pressed her lips together, holding back whatever words she had.
She fell backward against the column on the porch and clutched her mid-section, like she was going to be ill. The blood that had stained her cheeks just seconds ago leached away, leaving her face pale, cold ivory, like the angel statue that stood guard at the back of his parents yard. Lovely, but frozen. Mired in his own shock, Sam could do no more than reach out and lace his fingers through hers and tug her into his arms. He cradled her against his chest, anguished by the tremors wracking her frame.
“No one will print that picture. No reputable media outlet anyway. Right?” If she was trying to comfort either of them, her comments fell way short of the mark. Her voice clanked with doubt.
Smoothing his hands up and down her back, he tried to warm both of them. “Jesus, Rikki. I wish I had an answer for that.”
“Do you think I should get an attorney?”
“Edwards called the School District lawyer before I left. We’re meeting tomorrow morning. I’ve been placed on administrative leave until we can get this resolved.”
“What does that mean?”
Disgust and anger threatened to choke him. He snorted. “It means I’m guilty until proven innocent.”
She lifted her head and looked at him. Outrage made her eyes snap and sparkle in waning sunlight. “That’s bullshit! How can they do that? Should I be there? I can vouch for everything that happened, or didn’t happen.”
The enormity of her willingness to have his back, to go to bat for him, lightened the shadows that had settled on him when Sherry pulled out her damning pictures.
“I…God, I hate to ask it of you. The picture of us is pretty graphic. But it would really help. I’m sure Legal will be happy to have any support on this they can get. I know I am.” He brushed his thumb across the cool, satiny skin of her cheek, the gesture soothing him while, he hoped, reassuring her. “I’ll let you know first thing in the morning what they want from you. I appreciate the support.”
“We know the truth. Together, we can stop Sherry from ruining our lives.” Rikki laid her hand over his and smiled at him.
Something huge bloomed in his chest when her gentle smile reached her eyes, glowing with confidence. His breath shortened. This woman’s opinion mattered more to him than anyone else’s. Her acceptance of the situation, her determination to stand by his side to correct any wrongdoing, lifted his somber mood, exposing an unconscious thought to his rational mind.
His desire for Rikki went far beyond anything he’d known. No woman had captured his fancy or sent him soaring toward cloud nine the way Rikki did. When he was with her, he glimpsed heights of attraction and affection he’d never imagined with any of the other women he’d dated.
Maybe that’s because I’ve only dated in the past. I’ve never been involved with a woman the way I am with Rikki. The two of us are far past just dating.
Sure, in the past, there’d always been fun and sex. But conversation had been lacking. And sharing his feelings with another human had been unheard of. A frisson of awareness chased up his spine, lodging at the base of his skull, tickling and tingling…making itself known.
He’d opened up to Rikki about his trouble in high school. The only other people in the world who knew how that experience had molded him were his parents. His siblings, if they had any inkling of what happened, had never questioned him about it. But when he’s shared the information with Rikki, she accepted his trust and soothed his pain. Not only that, with her typically positive attitude, she’d told him she’d have his back, regardless of what Sherry Hillman threw at him.
The Hillman bitch was slinging mud at Rikki, too. She’d tainted a beautiful sensual interlude between two consenting adults, captured in the light of heat and passion. And Rikki had turned Sherry’s ugliness upside down, putting her Pollyanna spin on it, and had restored the glow of what they had together.
He’d known after the first time they’d danced in the sheets they had something special. Then, when she’d calmly dealt with a broken condom, an accident with potential lifelong repercussions, she’d cemented the feeling. Staring into her eyes now, he had a blinding flash of insight—an image of her belly, round with his child. Of her suckling their baby. And the pictures didn’t terrify him. Rather, it was…perfect.
He sucked a startled breath in and held it. The rise of his chest with the inhalation, and the involuntary tightening of his arms around her, rubbed his chest against hers. A sense of homecoming settled over him, safe, serene. Friction built as he released air, seating the feeling deeper in his soul. He opened his mouth to confess his thoughts—his love—to her, but the shrill ringing of her house phone interrupted him.
Rikki remained motionless in his arms as the ringing died away. Her recorded voice was audible threw the thin glass of the bay window, telling the caller to leave a message. After a beep, the person on the other end of the phone followed directions.
“Hey, it’s your long suffering assistant, Jenni. I’ve been trying to reach you. Where the hell are you? We have a gigantic problem. Call me pronto when you get this message. All hell is about to break loose. We won’t be able to keep this from Silas. Call me.” She paused. “Seriously, Rikki. You need to call me.”
The handset clattered on the recorder an instant before Rikki’s cell phone rang again.
“Jesus Christ! They just can’t leave me alone.”
“It must be important if they keep trying.” The ringing stopped and the moment for Sam’s admission passed. “I have to go talk to my parents. Granite Pointe isn’t huge and I’m sure they’ll learn I’ve been suspended by bedtime tonight.”
“Will you come back? I don’t want to be alone tonight, and I don’t think you should be, either.”
Hell, yes, he’d come back to the safe harbor, to the warm picture of hearth and home she represented. Maybe by the time he returned, he’d have figured out a way to put into words the depth of his love for her.
He nodded and lowered his mouth to hers, putting the words he couldn’t say into his actions, letting his emotion build and develop, the way a picture etched itself onto paper when bathed in a chemical solution, steadily emerging in glorious detail.
Too bad he couldn’t destroy the negative effects of Sherry Hillman’s actions as easily.
Chapter 19
As soon as Sam left, Rikki picked up her phone to return Jenni’s call. Typically, her assistant wasn’t an alarmist. But the woman’s voice had bordered on panic in the voice mail she’d left. As she was about to punch in Jenni’s number, a text message from Gunnar popped up.
Marguerite, you are in such trouble. Holy shit! What were you thinking?
What the hell happened? She ignored the message from her brother in favor of returning her assistant’s calls.
Jenni answered on the first ring. “Oh, thank God, Rikki. Have you looked at the foundation’s Facebook page or website? I’ve got tech working on taking them down, but they’re having trouble.”
“What are you talking about, Jenni?” Rikki swiped her fingers across the mo
use pad on her laptop, waking it up. Momentarily distracted by the windows Katie had left open on the machine, she paused to scan the tabs. Oh, no!
Jenni’s screeching in her ear pulled Rikki back to the task at hand. “Just open the Sims webpage. Oh, my God, he better have been worth it. I can’t even begin to describe…”
Rikki opened a new tab, navigating to the company website. Shock weakened her knees, forcing her to grab the desk chair behind her and drop onto it like a ton of bricks. Where pictures of Silas’s work normally resided, there were photos of Rikki and Sam. The same ones Sam had told her Sherry Hillman had presented as evidence against him. “Aw, shit. Christ, Jenni. How did this happen?”
“The fuck I know—hang on, I’m on the other line with IT.”
Rikki heard Jenni’s side of the conversation with Tony Ralston, the boy genius they’d hired six months ago to run their website and other social media sites. It was clear from Jenni’s repeated obscenities that Tony had met his match in hackers with this fiasco. While she waited for her friend to come back on the line, Rikki scrolled through the foundation’s webpage. Her heart dropped to the base of her spine, then rocketed back to her throat as she discovered each new picture.
Whoever had eavesdropped on her intimate moments with Sam on Friday night hadn’t confined their spying to the view through her living room window. There were images from her bedroom, her bathroom, even the dining room floor, where she and Sam had—oh, God—after she insisted on starting to develop her film in the portable darkroom. He’d helped her move the tent-like structure from the spare room and one thing had led to another and she’d never made it inside to process the film.
And there was the awful tabloid photo from when she was nineteen. Where the hell had they found that? By comparison to everything else on public display, that picture was tame.
Bad memories churned like a cauldron at the bottom of a waterfall. Oh, God, she was going to be sick. She choked back the bile rising in her throat, exerting willpower to hold onto the contents of her stomach.
“Bloody hell!” Jenni’s strident tone pulled her out of the abject horror she’d sunk into after looking at the pictures. “Tony said whoever hijacked the site built some pretty impenetrable roadblocks on it. He’s got a call in to the hosting site’s security department to request immediate removal from the public domain.”
“Can’t he fix it himself? He’s pulled it down before.”
“Yeah, but the password has been changed. He doesn’t have access.”
“Shit! When did this go live?”
“Tony thinks about an hour ago. He did have some back-end security set up and got a notification email that something hinky was going on. He was on it almost immediately.”
“Do we know how many hits the site has gotten?”
“Won’t know that until he can get back in. He says since it’s after five, it might be tougher to get someone to help. He’s called his techie friends, too. To see if they’ve ever run across this type of code.” Jenni swore softly. “Rikki, this isn’t confined to the website. The pictures are posted on Facebook and they’ve hacked our Twitter feed, too. I’d say we’ve gone global by now.”
Now she understood her brother’s urgent text. “I know Gunnar has seen it. What about Silas?”
“I don’t think so. He has some swanky charity dinner tonight, so maybe we can fix it before he sees it.”
“God, I hope that isn’t wishful thinking.”
Embarrassed heat flooded her cheeks. God forbid her grandfather see the pictures. Or her parents. She dropped her head into her hands.
“Christ, Rikki. I’m so sorry to have to tell you this. I think I’m responsible for this mess.”
“Of course you’re not. You wouldn’t—”
Jenni interrupted her. “Hear me out. This morning, Bianca asked me if we had a password list. I was distracted dealing with Silas on a contribution he wanted made today and I emailed her a link to where we keep the list. I didn’t think about it until Tony called to alert me that we’d been hacked.”
“Bianca gave someone the password? That girl has shit for brains.”
“Well, that’s captioning the obvious.” Jenni’s disgusted snort filled Rikki’s ear. “I’ve called her, but she isn’t picking up. Which is par for the course with her. We get the hours between nine and five and not a second more. Honestly, she doesn’t even listen to voice mails if she knows they’re from me.”
“It’s water under the bridge at this point anyway. We’ll deal with her later.”
“Damn straight we will. Can I fire her?”
“Silas insisted we hire her, maybe we should fire him.”
Jenni’s laugh echoed on the tinny cell phone connection, a satisfied, but oddly hysterical sound. “Rikki, I do like the way you think. Unfortunately, our jobs are probably on the line because of her craptastically bad judgment. Look, I’m going to go take a bellows to the fire I lit under Tony’s ass and see if we can’t nip this one in the bud pronto. I’ll call you later with an update.”
The line went dead when Jenni hung up without saying goodbye. Rikki tossed the phone on the desk, barely curbing the urge to hurl it across the room.
Her assistant hit the nail on the head when she’d said they might both be hitting the unemployment lines soon. She laid her forehead on the desk and squeezed her eyes shut. That Silas wouldn’t be pleased was an understatement. He was going to be uber-pissed.
Rikki’s future played out in freeze-frame action behind her closed eyelids. Silas’s shocking white hair would bob erratically over his brow as he chastised her for flagrant indiscretion, his face florid with anger. He’d dredge up past grievances, especially since the old tabloid picture had been included in the shit storm going on now. The worst part would be when he shook his crooked index finger at her and lapsed into Swedish because he couldn’t form the words fast enough in English. The churn in her stomach sped up to a sports photographer’s shutter speed, rapid and insistent.
Without raising her head, Rikki slammed the laptop closed to avoid looking at the offending pictures any longer. This was bad—really bad. And she wasn’t the only person affected by it. Sam’s face was as easily identifiable in the pictures as hers. With everything else he faced because of the raunchy pictures Sherry Hillman had, this was beginning to look more and more like a nail in a coffin.
She had to tell him. She was going to have to show him. Maybe he could help her figure out who was responsible. He’d only been gone thirty minutes, and she didn’t expect him back for at least another hour. Time enough for her anxiety to flare and erupt like Mount Etna.
Hoping for a distraction, she reopened the laptop and navigated through the tabs Katie had left open. She hadn’t wanted to believe her eyes when she first scanned them, but there they were. Katie had left her personal Facebook page open and Rikki’s horror mounted as she read through the items and pictures other people had posted on the teen’s page today. Frightening images of headstones and open graves. Taunting comments on Katie’s status updates, horrible things like why don’t u kill yourself and UR too ugly and awkward to live. The most recent, just an hour ago, UR parents deserve a better kid. U should die.
In addition to the girl’s Facebook page, there were three different searches, each more terrifying than the last. The seething in her stomach roiled to a new level, convulsing into a hard painful knot. The first window contained results for how to combat cyber-bullying. Good for Katie for taking time to research how to help herself.
Rikki clicked on another tab, a suicide prevention forum on the effect a child’s death had on a parent. When she opened the next page, her heart turned to stone, the heavy sensation making it hard to breathe. By far, most chilling, was Katie’s search on easy, painless ways to kill yourself.
Tears prickled the back of her eyes and fire raced under her skin, stretching and burning through her like lava. She’d believed Katie when the girl had talked about how her life was getting better. Why the heck wou
ld she give in now?
The phone rang again, but Rikki ignored it. Katie’s life was more important than any negative publicity from the pornographic pictures on the Sims Foundation website. It took priority over Sam’s unjust suspension from a job he truly loved. Her mortification over the highly embarrassing nature of the pictures that any Tom, Dick or Harry could view came in a distant third to Katie’s dire circumstances.
She’d dealt with bullying as a teen, but no one had ever encouraged her to take her own life. The thought had never crossed her mind. She opened another window and launched her own search on how to help a suicidal child.
* * * *
A car door slamming in front of her house jarred Rikki from her Internet reading. Time had passed swiftly while conducting her research. She tossed the mechanical pencil onto the desk and stretched backward in the chair, rubbing her eyes. She was calmer now that she’d had a chance to explore options on how to help Katie.
When the knock sounded on the front door, she pushed her chair away from the desk to answer it. Peering out the sidelight windows, she glimpsed Sam, his head bowed and rubbing the back of his neck, as if to relieve excess tension. Trepidation rolled down her spine, an icy teardrop of anxiety. Her fingers slipped on the doorknob. She grasped it more firmly and pulled it open.
Stepping to the side, she gave Sam room to move into the house. His hesitation puzzled her. With his head still bowed, he raised his eyes to her face. The normal bright blue of his gaze had turned smoky with…fear?
Rikki reached over and grasped his hand, lacing her fingers through his, and pulled him inside. She wrapped her arms around his shoulders as the door banged shut. His breath shuddered in, and he exhaled hard and returned the hug. Burying his face in the crook of her neck, he held on as if Rikki were a life preserver tossed to a drowning man. They stood silently, holding each other fast, an island in a turbulent sea.
Sam drew a breath so deep, the movement pressed against her thighs.
“Jesus, this is such a fucking mess,” he said. He lifted his head and pulled away enough to look into her eyes.
Exposed to Passion (Five Senses series Book 3) Page 18