Sebastian appeared in the doorway and either the youngest Barnes was too tired or too senseless to realize the stupidity of it, because he stood there for a long moment, just staring at Ressa, gaze roaming over her with a little too much leisure.
Travis smacked him across the head.
“Fu . . .” He rubbed his head and then looked down the hall with a grimace. “Ah, sorry. Sorry. Ah, Ressa? Your phone has been vibrating non-stop for the past ten minutes. Clayton almost answered it, too. The kids are getting restless downstairs, too.”
“The kids?”
“Yeah.” Sebastian gave them both a look. “Angeline brought Neeci over not that long ago.”
Sebastian’s gaze drifted once more to Ressa, his eyes lingering on legs left bare by the robe she’d tied around her waist. Trey bared his teeth at his younger brother. Sebastian held out her phone and when she accepted, Sebastian gave Trey an unabashed grin.
“Trey, damn it, son, are you even awake?” an irate voice bellowed from the phone.
He lowered the phone he still held to his ear, glanced at it. Then sighed an answered, “I’m here, Reuben.”
“Who is this Bliss woman? Did you pick up some crazed stalker?”
Trey managed to keep his voice neutral through sheer will. “No, Reuben. She’s my girlfriend.”
There was a faint pause and then Reuben said, “Part of me is glad to hear that. The other part is wondering what the hell?”
“Stick with the first part. Somebody is messing with me.”
Then he hung up.
He tossed the cordless to his brother and turned to find Ressa staring at her phone, ashen. Her hands were shaking and he reached out to the electronic device. She clung to it but he persisted and finally, she let go.
She sagged back onto the bed and lifted her eyes to his. “I didn’t do this,” she said, her voice a low rasp.
He held her gaze for just a moment. “That was never even a question for me.”
Then he started to read. It was a different blog, one geared more for readers and the blogger had taken a different slant; the post was filled with more than a little speculative doubt. The comments, though, they ran the gamut from scathing to outright cruel, and most of the condemnation was directed at Ressa.
His vision went red because a few had already dug up information about her cousin’s trial. In that moment, more than ever, he was glad he hadn’t decided to take any kind of legal action for what happened that night.
Right there, in the comments, people were already laying her cousin’s crimes at her feet—testified against her own blood . . . what kind of woman does that?
He did see more than a few snide comments about how naturally he’d hidden behind a name because he was too embarrassed to claim the romances.
Bite me, he thought. He scrolled down to read more but before he could, a text popped up.
Girl, I am not kidding. You need to call me and now. Thompkins is on my ass and they are talking about firing you over this. Call me. Now.
He stared at the name, frowned. Farrah. Tapping on it took him to the contact and he found himself staring at a woman that was vaguely familiar. He’d seen her a time or two at the library where Ressa used to work, he thought.
Sliding Ressa a look from under his lashes, he asked, “Who is Thompkins?”
“What?” She stared at him. Her eyes looked too dark, almost stunned.
“Who is Thompkins?”
She blinked and then rubbed the back of her hand over her mouth. “Technically, my boss. Or one of them. He’s in administration, but I never really see him.”
* * *
Staring at the phone Trey still held, Ressa rose.
At some point, Sebastian and Travis had left the room, but she didn’t know when.
She couldn’t think.
Every time she tried to get a concrete thought in her head, her mind spun right back to that headline.
The secret side to one of America’s most popular authors.
She didn’t even have to read the article to get it. The L. Forrester book was side by side with Trey’s latest, the two covers so completely at odds with each other.
“Hello . . . would this be Farrah?”
The sound of Trey’s voice, hard and flat, dragged her attention back to the present and she jumped up, gaping at him.
He stared at her.
She made a grab for the phone.
He moved out of her reach, evading her with an ease that was almost pathetic. Steaming, she tried again while listening to one side of the conversation. “I understand somebody wants to talk with Ressa. . . . yes, I assume it’s about the article that went live earlier today . . . ? Yeah, thought so. So, there’s a problem . . . , no. No. That’s not the problem. Here’s the thing—you’re talking to Trey Barnes and there’s no way Ressa did that interview.”
She gaped at him. “Give me my damn phone. This is my problem.”
“No.” He lifted his phone away from his ear for a minute. “You got pulled into something because of me. I don’t know why but that makes it my problem, too.”
“This is not how people make relationships work.” She glared at him, chin raised. She wanted to punch him.
He caught her chin in his hand and then, while she continued to glare at him, he kissed her.
“Okay, so we are in a relationship? Good.” He broke away long enough to ask that question and then he kissed her again—hard and fast.
She was balling up her hand to punch him when he moved away. “We also don’t make relationships work while letting one person handle a problem that the other person somehow caused. You’re not getting fired because of me, Ressa, and I’m not going to watch somebody drag you through the dirt, either. Deal with it.”
Then he turned his back on her.
“Arrrghhh!” She grabbed a pillow from the bed and swung it at his head.
He caught it halfway through the next swing, approaching her with a glint sparking in his eyes.
“Yes, I’m aware of what the article says, but there’s a problem with all of that, because Ressa has spent pretty much every second of the past thirty-six hours either with me or traveling. She hasn’t had time to do any sort of interview on this.”
Another pause and Ressa held out her hand. He cocked a brow. “No . . . but I’ll find out,” he said. “You can pass that on to whoever wants to talk to her. She didn’t do shit so don’t try to pass this off on her.”
Then he ended the call and tossed it on the bed.
“You still wanna fight?”
She grab another pillow and threw it at him. “I would have handled it!”
As she reached for another pillow, he tackled her and took her to the bed.
Breathless, trapped under one hundred eighty pounds of hard, lean male, she tried to hold onto the anger. Tried not to think about the fact that a robe, her panties, the shirt he’d all but tucked her into earlier and his jeans were the only things separating them.
“What was I supposed to do . . . let you get raked over the coals because somebody was screwing with me?” he asked. He dipped his head and pressed a kiss to the skin bared by the open vee of his robe. “Let somebody try to fire you? I don’t think so.”
“I don’t believe in having a guy fight my battles.”
“But this wasn’t your battle—it involves both of us so that makes it ours,” he said, dragging his lips up. “Also . . . you said relationship. Ressa, does that mean we still have one?”
She froze.
She had said that.
He stared down at her.
Neither of them spoke and he sighed, lowered his head back to hers, rubbed his lips over her cheek. “Ressa, have I ever told you how much I love the way you smell?” He went to kiss her and she bit his lip. “Ouch!”
Jerking his head back, he glared at her and touched his throbbing lip with his tongue.
“Stop trying to distract me.”
“You’re distracting me.” He gave her a quick ki
ss and then rolled off. Drawing his knees up, he hooked his elbows around them. “It’s not just your fight. It’s about both of us and I figure there were two ways to handle that and you wouldn’t like either of them. I could either tell whoever that was that you didn’t have shit to do with that so-called interview, or I could go with you when you leave. You’d bellow at me about either one.”
“Damn straight.”
He shrugged and looked away. “So you’re mad either way. But I’m not going to say I’m sorry. If you had been involved, this would be a different discussion, but you weren’t. That means it has to do with me. Why should you bear the brunt of it?”
She opened her mouth, then snapped it shut with an audible click of her jaw. “I don’t much like the fact that you’re being logical about this.”
“Yeah. It always pissed my brothers off, too.”
With a withering stare, she climbed off the bed and started to get dressed.
He was moderately mollified by the fact that she pulled the black button-down back on over her bra. Watching her fingers dance over the buttons, covering up all that lovely skin seemed to be a crime. “What are you going to do?” he asked, dragging his gaze up to meet hers.
She narrowed her eyes. “Men,” she muttered.
He grinned at her. “Yeah. Well.” Then he shrugged and repeated the question.
“I don’t even know how to answer that.” She sighed and caught her hair, dragged it out of the collar of the shirt, then looked for her jeans.
He snagged them from the floor by the bed and tossed them to her, watched as she shimmied into them.
“Trey!”
The sound of Travis shouting his name up the steps had him flopping back on the bed and throwing his elbow over his eyes.
“What?” he bellowed back, the habit of shouting back and forth across a house something he’d never really forgotten.
There wasn’t an immediate answer and he shook his head. “You know, it’s a beautiful morning. I’ve got a beautiful woman with me. I’d really like to be in my bed making love to her . . . but nooooo. . . .”
Travis appeared in the doorway. “Your neighbor is at the door,” he said, his voice curiously flat.
Trey stared at him, puzzled. “I don’t have time for this,” he said, shaking his head.
“Make time,” Travis suggested.
Trey headed out the door, muttering under his breath.
But when Ressa went to follow, Travis caught her elbow and held her back.
* * *
“Trey . . .”
He opened the door and wasn’t surprised when Nadine slid inside, moving past him as though he’d flung it opened and welcomed her with open arms.
The sight behind her was a little more disturbing—and it had him gritting his teeth. Two news vans. One reporter was all set up, the other still fumbling with her equipment, but the second they saw him, they both started shouting questions.
He slammed the door shut and put his back to it.
Not again. He’d never been as good at this as his brothers. He could handle it, yeah. But he hated it.
“I’m so sorry,” Nadine said, her voice soft. Sympathy filled her voice and she twisted the pearls at her neck.
“Sorry . . . ?” he asked. “For what?”
She waved a hand. “This. That . . . this woman you’re dating. Whoever she is. What she’s done. We never really met, but it’s awful what she did to you. I can’t imagine how you feel.”
“Hmm.”
Her gaze skipped to his, then away.
“Yeah, I bet you can’t.” He folded his arms over his chest, chewed on the inside of his lip for a second. There was an odd look in her eyes. It wasn’t guilt—not exactly. But it was something.
Going with his gut, he asked, “How long were you listening to us the other night?”
Blood rushed to her face. “I was—” A nervous laugh escaped. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“You.”
Ressa’s voice came from the top of the steps.
Nadine jerked her head around, her jaw dropping at the sight of Ressa there, descending slowly.
“What . . . Trey, why is she here?” Nadine demanded.
He didn’t even have a chance to respond before Ressa came between them and none too subtly pushed him back. “Not what you need to be worrying about,” Ressa said, her voice sharp enough to cut. “Worry about me.”
Nadine backed up a step.
“Ressa, hold up a min—”
She whirled on him, her hair flying around her shoulders. “Oh, no. I don’t think so. You remember that little chat upstairs? You’re not letting me fight this all on my own because it involves you? Well, guess what? She did this because she’s jealous. I’m with you and she’s not. So that means it’s every bit as much about me as it is about you.”
Trey studied her and then slowly, backed away. He tucked his hands into his pockets and settled back against the door.
“Trey.” His name was a tremulous plea on Nadine’s lips. It scraped over his nerves like steel wool on an open wound. “You can’t think I had anything to do with this. All the interviews say it was her . . . they talked about her and her blog and everything. She could be doing this for publicity. It makes sense.”
“In what world?” Ressa snapped. “This is not the kind of publicity I want. Ever.”
Nadine’s green gaze bounced away, not connecting with Ressa’s. “She could be doing it just to toy with you. Who knows?”
“I know,” Trey said. He shoved away from the door. He laid a hand on Ressa’s shoulder. “This isn’t the kind of thing she’d do—she cares about me too much.”
Ressa felt some of the knots inside her dissolve. It was like he’d never even had any doubts.
Nadine’s porcelain skin went even whiter, though, and her mouth drew tighter. “But there’s proof—”
“I wonder how the proof will hold up if Trey decides to pursue any kind of legal action,” Travis asked, jogging down the stairs. “Ressa, I’m good on computers. You willing to let me access your laptop? We can clear that up right here. Seeing as how you’ve been with either your aunt or here with Trey—and us—for the past thirty-six hours, shouldn’t take much to figure out if you really did do that interview—since naturally, it was requested that everything be done via e-mail.”
He smiled thinly at Nadine. “Might have been harder to pull off if you’d done a live interview, I’m thinking.” Planting himself at Trey’s side, Travis glanced over at Ressa. “So . . . laptop?”
Ressa frowned. “I didn’t bring my laptop. It’s back at my house.”
“Hmmm. Okay. That simplifies it.” Travis shrugged. “Trey, that means if she did that online interview, it was from here. They said it was an exclusive online interview, obtained early yesterday . . . although, damn . . .”
Travis tsked. “You and your aunt were on the road, right? Were you typing and driving or what? Those are some hellaciously long interview questions.”
“Trav.” Trey bared his teeth. “Please feel free to check my computers. Ressa, would you let him check your phone?”
“That doesn’t prove—” Nadine stopped, sucked in a breath.
“Come off it,” Ressa suggested. “We all know. Thanks for almost costing me my job, by the way. I really appreciate that.”
Nadine shot a look to the left, then the right, before looking at Trey. “You really think I could do this?” she whispered.
“I didn’t want to. But the answer is pretty clear. What I don’t know is why?”
Nadine sniffed and moved to the door. “I can’t believe you think I’d . . .” Abruptly, she froze and her voice went tight. Slowly, she turned and the uncertain, nervous female just . . . faded. “I did it because I waited. All this time. I waited for you to see me and you never did.”
Then she spun back around and jerked the door open, half falling out in her determination to leave.
Travis sighed and shook his head
. “I’ll make sure she gets home okay.”
“Behave,” Trey warned.
“I always do.” He shot them a wicked grin. “But for your sake, I’ll behave nicely.”
He slid out the door.
Trey went to shut it and the rush of voices caught his attention. Wincing, he glanced outside and saw that in the past few minutes, the two vans had multiplied to five.
“And here I was thinking I would be the one catching their attention,” Sebastian said from the living room, glancing around the arched doorway.
“Shut up or I’ll drag your scrawny ass out there.” Sighing, Trey reached down and caught Ressa’s hand. “You trust me?”
Her eyes flew wide.
“You aren’t serious.”
“I’m just going to address it, real quick,” he said. “They won’t go away until I give them something.”
She winced, look down at herself. “I’m a mess. I don’t have makeup on. My hair is probably a wreck. I’m wearing your shirt . . . I don’t have makeup on. I barely remembered to put a bra on!”
“You didn’t have to do that on my account,” Sebastian offered.
“I’m killing you when I’m done,” Trey warned. Then he reached up, smoothed her hair down. “They aren’t going to focus on any of that. You look beautiful.”
He pressed a kiss to her lips, remained there. “Trust me?”
“I might kill you for this,” she whispered against his mouth. “Fine.”
* * *
Ressa gulped at the sudden flash of cameras, the rush of questions. There were only a few people, she’d thought. Now it seemed like dozens.
Stunned into silence, she gripped Trey’s hand and held tight.
“Mr. Barnes! Mr. Barnes! Is it true that you’re also writing erotic sexy stories under another name? What does your family think about this?”
“They are romance books,” he said. How could he sound so calm. “And knowing my mom? She’s probably going to be mad I didn’t let her know already so she could read them. She loves romance.”
There was a faint pause and then the next rush of questions, most of them running over each other.
One finally distinguished itself from another. “Is this Ressa Bliss? Your former girlfriend? Why do you think she gave that interview?”
Busted (Barnes Brothers #3) Page 35