In Too Deep

by Stella Rhys

  IN TOO DEEP

  Stella Rhys

  Copyright © 2015 by Stella Rhys

  All Rights Reserved

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or people, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Contents

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Prologue

  First and foremost, his parents love me. But on top of that, his colleagues love me. The wives and girlfriends love me. I “keep them young.” At their galas, I dress like Jackie O but dance like J. Lo. I don’t tell any of them that the dinners I host are inspired by the Pinterest board of some girl named Maggie in Wisconsin.

  I keep all of his secrets. I dig for dirt when he asks for it. I cook, I massage, I dress like I live in the pages of Elle. Like he so desperately needs me to, I make all of his friends jealous. Because I, after years of his styling and molding, am the perfect little Stepford girlfriend. I am as much a part of his good image as he is.

  And so he’ll never let me go.

  No matter how hard I scream and claw and kick and fight, he won’t ever let me go. He cheated on me. After four years – and three living together in his Chelsea duplex – he cheated on me with his hedge fund colleague’s nineteen-year-old daughter. He spent four months sleeping with her. He recorded video of their trysts, which carried on in a suite at the downtown W. In one of the shaky, breathy clips, she told him that she loved him. Hugging a white sheet to her chest, her blue eyes gazing into the camera, she blew a kiss with her pink lips and said, “Jackson Kinsley, I love you to pieces.” Gabrielle Winter was her name.

  No. Not was – is.

  Gabrielle Winter is her name. After all, you can’t really call a girl dead when her body has yet to be found.

  Chapter One

  It’s been three weeks since the Gabrielle incident and I’m not yet ready to let Jackson touch me. I hate sleeping in the same bed as a man whose hands caressed another woman’s breasts just five weeks ago. I hate feeling his lips graze my shoulder in the night because I know from the videos that those lips have trailed every last inch of her skin. I hate that I have to act like everything is utterly normal in front of his friends.

  But worst of all, I hate that he thinks I killed her.

  I hate that he has evidence that makes it look quite clear that I’m in fact a murderer. More than any of it, I hate that I gave Gabrielle a reason to leave him that panicked, breathless voicemail on the night of her disappearance.

  “She’s here, Jax! It’s Lara – she was pounding on my door and she – Jax! Oh my God – no! Get out of my apartment, you crazy bitch! Jax! Help me, get here now!”

  There are a hundred things I’ve done in my life that I’ve wished to take back but God, does that visit to Gabrielle’s apartment take the cake. It was the kind of rash decision that I’d never made even once before in my twenty-six years. But several life-shattering discoveries had led up to the moment, the time line of which went some something like this:

  On Sunday, I’d returned from my trip with Sloane to Easthampton. I’d slipped quietly into my apartment hoping to surprise Jackson but instead, I found him sitting on our leather sectional, watching a video of himself on our fifty-inch flat screen. A video of himself and a girl I recognized from the charity circuit. Lyle Winter’s daughter, Gabrielle. Wasn’t she just a freshman at NYU? Didn’t she normally dress in wild prints and feather headbands? Why in God’s name then was I watching her peel off a sophisticated set of black lingerie? More pressing than that, why was my boyfriend recording video as she did so?

  Somehow, for several seconds, I toyed with denial. This is not what it looks like, I told himself. That isn’t Gabrielle. Maybe that isn’t Jackson either.

  But then I saw a close-up of his promise ring – an identical match to the one I wore on my own right hand, that he bought for me two years ago, when I said I wasn’t ready to be engaged. I heard his voice. The one that said “goodnight” to me for the past four years straight. My stomach dropped and my body went cold. I stood motionless behind Jackson, who was jacking off to it all, too lost in his own pleasure to realize that I was standing right there in the same room. Too busy reliving some sordid night to notice me standing just two yards behind him, shattering into a million little pieces as the camera set on a tabletop to catch him groaning as he entered her.

  It sounds insane but I stood there for another fifteen minutes or however long it was for me to get through the rest of their recorded romp. I was paralyzed. In disbelief.

  Just the week prior, Jackson and I had been in Connecticut visiting his family. His mom had pouted at me for having no answer regarding when I wanted to have kids since she certainly couldn’t rely on his jet-setting brother, Jacob, to ever settle down. Jackson laughed and said that whenever I thought of a time for kids, he’d clean out my gift-wrapping room and get to work on building a nursery. We bantered about why my “ribbon storage” should be converted instead of his “brandy room,” where he brought the boys for cigars after dinner. He laughed and said that it would be cruel to subject our infant child to a room in which the walls had spent years absorbing smoke. I said, “Fine, you’re right,” and his mom took it as my tacit agreement to soon give her grandchildren.

  During the car ride back to Manhattan, Jackson ran his hand through my hair. “You know I would never pressure you to have kids before you were ready, right?” he asked. “Same goes for the engagement. I know you’re mine, I know you love me. I’m happy to wait for everything. They’re worth the wait if they’re with you. But only you.”

  “You’ll survive your mom’s nagging till then?” I teased.

  “As long as you’re taking it with me.”

  That night, while I showered, I overheard him on the phone with his mother. “I know you want her to have Grandma’s ring but I want her to have her own. Lara’s different, Mom. She’s special. And we’ve been through too much. Whatever I get her will be the start of our own story. And we’ll pass it down only if she wants to.”

  The speech had me. Coming out of the shower, I had stared at my promise ring and finally considered trading it in for one more permanent. It was the first time in our four years together that I felt finally ready. So for a week, I wondered how I would break the news to Jackson. After all, telling him I was ready was as good as proposing to him myself. It was a big deal for me. So I decided to do what I always did when in need of advice: go on a weekend trip with my best friend. While in the Hamptons with Sloane, we brainstormed over cocktails, giggling like we were thirteen again.

  “Remember in eighth grade when you broke up with Josh Twersky because he stole eight dollars from your wallet?” I asked. “And then you said we had to grow up to have millionaire boyfriends so this never happened again?

  Sloane laughed so hard she may or may not have dribbled champagne onto the front of her Pucci dress. “Millionaire boyfriends who had to be best friends too,” she reminded me with a snort. “We were such idiots.”

  “Well.�
��

  “We were prophetic idiots,” Sloane corrected herself. And then we laughed, downed the rest of our drinks and decided to cut our trip short to return home to our boyfriends, Jackson Kinsley and Caleb Weiss, founders of Kinsley Weiss Capital Management, and the billionaire friends who proved our teen selves to have been less silly and unrealistic than everyone thought.

  It had been too good. The perfect kind of girls’ weekend that reminded me how truly blessed I was and how I couldn’t possibly be luckier. On the ride back home, I decided that Sloane was right: the best way to tell Jackson was just to tell him – to just surprise him in our apartment, plant a kiss on his lips and tell him that I was finally ready to be his wife.

  But of course, I went home that day and instead of realizing the happy moment I’d fantasized about for a weekend, I discovered that the charmed life I had loved so deeply, so fiercely had been nothing more than a sick and twisted lie.

  Chapter Two

  I fought a teenage girl.

  I, a twenty-six-year-old woman with a thirty-three-year-old fiancé, scratched and clawed and screeched with a nineteen-year-old college student. What would the wives say if they saw me? I was their favorite new thing – the fascination of their social circle. I’d landed Jackson Kinsley, the tallest, sexiest, hardest-to-tame prize in the elite boys club their husbands and fiancés all ran in – a boys club that essentially ran the city. I could’ve been easy to hate but instead, they loved me for being wide-eyed but savvy – fascinated by their lives of luxury yet surprisingly adept at adjusting to society. I had the “natural grace and small-town charm” that Sofie Winter, silver-haired queen of the charity ball circuit, found just adorable.

  Jackson told me never to lose that, as it was the only thing keeping the other wives from ripping my throat out. “Their husbands all jerk off to you every morning in the shower,” he liked to tell me with smug pride. “But if Sofie loves you, they have to love you too.”

  So they did. But how Sofie would hate me if she knew what I’d done to her daughter.

  After watching Gabrielle’s breathy sex tapes with my fiancé, I had decided to confront her in person. I knew Lyle and Sofie had bought her an apartment in Gramercy Park last year. I didn’t know exactly where it was but after a short search through Jackson’s phone, I found the address shamelessly saved with the rest of her contact information. I texted it to myself. Then, as Jackson was toweling off, I left.

  “She’s here, Jax! It’s Lara – she’s pounding on my door and she – Jax!”

  Gabrielle, in a white silk robe, was on the phone with Jackson by the time I pushed my way into her apartment. Wild, unhinged. On repeat were a million profanity-laced versions of “how dare you” as I charged at her like an angry bull. It was an idiot move but I was blinded by rage. This girl knew me. She linked arms with me when I came to her house for dinner, traipsing me into her bedroom to show me videos of her dance recitals. She and her friends pouted at me during the charity balls, pleading for me to join them since I was “too young” to sit at their parents’ table. This was a girl who treated me like her favorite cousin – all the while filming herself in the throes with my fiancé. That was quite possibly the definition of audacity.

  Either that or the fact that she tried to break a wine glass on my face.

  When I knocked her phone out of her hands that night, Gabrielle had shrieked “bitch,” grabbed her empty glass of white and then swung it at my left eye. I don’t remember exactly what happened next. I’m not sure if the dots in my vision were from sheer rage or impact with glass. It was at that point that I began to claw back. I swung and swiped, landing one solid punch before feeling Gabrielle tackle me to the ground.

  We then rolled on the glass-covered floor, two idiots who had never fought once before in our privileged lives. It wasn’t long before we were both crying, tired and defeated. Her blood on my shirt, my hair in her nails, we crawled onto our hands and knees, coughing and sobbing like fools.

  “He said you guys were just for show,” she defended herself between tearful l hiccups. “I didn’t think you actually loved him. He said you didn’t.”

  What the fuck? “We couldn’t have loved each other more.” The words tore with hatred from my throat. But at that point, the hatred was for Jackson. I put an emphasis on the word “loved.” It wasn’t quite past tense for me yet considering our long history together, but I was well on my way down that path. Jackson had cheated on me with a foolish young girl he’d essentially tricked. My body still loved him out of instinct but soon enough, my mind would convince it to stop. I knew it.

  So with that, I left the apartment that night – a scraped, tousled, bloody mess.

  Back at the duplex, Jackson demanded to know what had happened. He was angry, ashamed and shocked all at once. Raking his fingers through his wet blonde hair, he followed me into the bedroom, where I immediately shed my clothes. His voice was normally low, velvety. Now, it was gravel. “Is that your blood?”

  “Hers,” I answered through my teeth.

  “What the fuck, Lara? What happened? What did you do?” He pulled on my bare arm as I tried to ignore him for the bathroom, my crawling skin desperate for a shower. “Baby. Babe. Jesus Christ, talk to me. I know I fucked the hell up, I know I did. But you know she meant nothing – she was just a stupid, needy little girl who went after me. I had a moment of weakness. I’m sorry. But I love you more than anything in this fucking world and I can explain it all to you if you just to talk to me first! We can’t figure this out if you don’t tell me what the hell happened between you and Gabby tonight!”

  Jerking out of his grip, I headed for the shower. “We’ll talk in the morning,” I said definitively, an eerie calm to my voice. It was just that I knew it at that point. I was going to end it. Us. Jackson and Lara, the perfect couple that no one could get enough of. I just didn’t have the energy to deal with his desperate pleading before I slept. I was exhausted. I needed rest to deal with a breakup that would no doubt be followed by Jackson at my feet, begging me not to go.

  But that wasn’t how it wound up happening. Just as I began my breakup speech the next day, we got a call. Gabrielle Winter was reported missing. Blood had been found in her apartment and from the way Jackson looked at me, it was clear that he had drawn a conclusion.

  “What is it that you think I did, Jackson?” I asked, the words dripping from my lips with revulsion.

  “I don’t want to know, Lara,” Jackson replied, his jaw tight, his words measured. “I don’t ever want to talk about this again because all I know is you went to find her and now she’s fucking gone.”

  “Jackson, do you hear what you’re accusing me of?” I hissed, in shock that he’d even believe me capable of such a thing. We had been together four years. He knew every part of me. He knew that I’d cried for three hours after he killed a cute albeit horrifying mouse that tormented his old TriBeCa loft. I hated the thing but still sobbed like a child when I saw it finally defeated, its tiny body limp and lifeless after Jackson brought a broom down upon it. After cleaning up, he had cupped my cheeks and kissed me, telling me we should go see a movie then get dessert to distract me and sooth my nerves. That was the Jackson I knew. But in the last few days, I’d become acquainted with a different Jackson – one who slept with other women and accused me of killing them. “Jesus fucking Christ, Jackson, I had absolutely nothing to do with this!” I protested, fighting angry tears as he closed the gap between us.

  “Well what do you think her blood on your shirt would look like to investigators, Lara?” he asked, his curled lips an inch from mine. “What do you think they would say about the voicemail Gabby left on my phone? When she was screaming that you were after her?”

  The blood drained from my face once I realized what it all looked like. It was a perfect picture of what didn’t actually happen. I had gone to find Gabrielle Winter and I had forced my way into the apartment. I’d screamed at her, called her every name under the sun. I remembered digging my na
ils into her skin and drawing blood.

  Still, I hadn’t killed her.

  But Jackson looked at me as if I did.

  “Now like I said.” He kept his blue eyes fixed on me as he whipped his shirt up over his head. “I don’t want to talk about this again, so get dressed while I shower. I have a lunch with the other investors at noon and they expect to see you there,” he said, ignoring what I’d said about moving out that afternoon. Leaning into me, he touched my waist, trailing his hand up until he cupped the swell of my breast. “And make sure you pick out something nice and tight.” His last demand came with a squeeze. “You know I like to give them something to look at.”

  Chapter Three

  Laying on my side, I stared at the antique clock on the nightstand. It was 8AM and I’d been awake for an hour, but the second I heard Jackson begin stirring behind me, I closed my eyes and pretended to be asleep.

  “Mmm, baby.” He rumbled something deep and content, wrapping his sleepy arms around me and trying for the thirtieth day in a row to act like this could be just another one of our pre-Gabrielle mornings. Kissing the back of my neck, he rubbed his hard cock against my back, sliding his hand from my side to my stomach, then slowly up to my breasts. “Good morning,” he murmured into my skin, kissing along my shoulders as his fingers tugged on the neckline of my cotton nightgown, pulling slowly down until my breasts popped out. “Mmm.” I could practically hear his mischievous grin. “Sawyer could barely take his eyes off of you last night,” he said, referring to his friend and one of the other investors of Monarch, a much-anticipated hotel in Chelsea. “Mila was sitting right next to him and all he could do was stare at these beautiful fuckin’ things all night,” he murmured, turning me onto my back and climbing on top of me. As he kissed my neck, I wondered if he was more turned on by me or the fact that his friends wanted me. Blankly, I stared at the ceiling, trying to find the hot, desperate need that once took over my body the second Jackson touched me.