“Hey,” Quinn said, drawing her attention away from the direction of the safe and alerting her to his arrival at once.
Before she could say anything the smile dropped from his handsome face. “What happened?”
Lots. Sort of.
“I need you to talk me through something,” she said haltingly, because she’d just sat there when she should’ve been coming up with the best, most calm, rational way to start this conversation. Yet more proof she was losing her mind.
Quinn approached slowly; she must look as skittish as she felt. “Okay… What?”
“Your plans. Like ‘Break in Case of Emergency’ plans for the whole… Wayne comes back and shows his copies to everyone—including the King, who only just began accepting the idea of you marrying me a few days ago.”
“Four days,” Quinn said instead, settling carefully beside her. “You just have to make it four more days. Then things will calm down.”
“That’s not a plan.” She laughed, too high and fast to sound like anything but panic. “You don’t have an emergency plan, do you?”
“My plan is to keep tabs on him so he can’t do anything like that, and it’s working just fine.”
“That’s not a plan. That’s hoping. Vigorous hoping maybe, but I’m talking about an evacuation plan for when the building catches on fire, and you’re counting on the presence of a smoke detector to prevent fires from starting.”
“What happened?” he asked again, his voice so calm it increased her alarm.
“I know you think you’ve taken care of Wayne.” She felt her voice rising and tried to calm it, tried to speak more slowly. “It’s been happening since the park. I know, or I think, and try to tell myself it’s never him. How could it be him when I see him everywhere? That’s not logical, and I remind myself of that, but I don’t know that for sure. One of them could actually be him, but instead I convince myself ten times a day that I’m just losing my mind, which isn’t helping either.”
Not level. Not calm. One moment her voice was in the rafters, the next the bottom of the ocean…because she kept babbling. She hadn’t meant to just subject him to a panic attack.
“Ten times a day?”
“I don’t know, exactly. I don’t keep count. I just see him. He might be in another country, but you can’t be sure of that. He could still surface. He could have copies. He could wait years, wait until he runs out of money, then come back at us. How can we live with this and not have an emergency plan? What would you tell the King?”
As soon as it was out of her mouth, Anais knew she’d chosen the wrong example. The King wouldn’t be here in years.
The grim line his mouth became confirmed the misstep.
“I’m sorry. I wasn’t thinking.” She tried to undo it before he got too upset about that to be logical about this. “It’s just when I saw King Thomas, he made me feel like family for the first time. If just for a few minutes, it made me afraid to lose that. And, now that I say it out loud, I see it’s not even about everyone else. It’s you too. I’m going crazy because I’m afraid of losing you once you’ve seen them.”
He scrubbed at his forehead. Didn’t work, but his frustration with her couldn’t be worse than the frustration she felt for herself.
“I’m not going to leave you over dirty pictures I already know exist.”
“Knowing and seeing are different things. You can’t know it won’t change the way you see me.” She felt her temperature rising and stood up; maybe moving would help. “It was over a decade ago and it still affects the way I see myself!”
“How much more than a decade?”
The slow tilt of his head with the lowering of his brows set off alarms in her chest.
When she didn’t say anything, he tried again, and this time he did stand up. “How old were you, Anais?”
“Old enough to know better,” she muttered. “Does it matter?”
“You’re twenty-seven. Over a decade ago? Yeah, that damn well matters.”
Not the point she was getting at. Anais wasn’t even sure what her point had been before, but this conversation was doing nothing for that fear she’d been trying to ignore. “What matters is that I’m afraid all the time. It’s not just my paranoid hallucinations… I’m getting calls. He calls, waits for me to answer, hangs up. Happens on my cell, at home too.”
“That could be anyone. People just wanting to hear your voice.”
“Or it could be him.” Unraveling—the whole thing was unraveling, harder and faster, the more they talked. And it felt exactly like she’d imagined the Wayne blackmail conversation going seven years ago.
“Just listen,” he said, making a clear effort to modulate his voice, even taking her hand, which usually helped. “I can come up with a plan, but it’s not necessary right now. I didn’t just remove him from the country under controlled custody. First, I had our cyber force search of his Internet footprint. Emails. Cloud storage. Everything. We did new passwords, wiped everything clean. Found nothing online, just what he’d stashed at his mother’s place, and I took both of those cameras.”
He said some other things… Anais could see Quinn’s mouth moving, but a loud, persistent ringing in her ears covered the sounds coming out of his mouth.
Both cameras?
Two cameras.
Why would the cameras that took the pictures matter? Camera. It was one camera.
“It was just photos,” she said, or tried to say. Her voice didn’t even sound over the ringing in her ears. “What does the camera…? What do you mean?”
Still ringing. And her fingers went so cold they felt stiff. Stress was causing her to have a freaking stroke.
But her vision was crystal-clear. She must’ve managed the words, because she saw Quinn’s face lose the angry color he’d built up, and his mouth stopped moving too.
It took him a while to start talking again, which was fine considering the state of her stroke.
Some deep breathing slowed her heart down enough for the ringing to decrease.
He’d started talking again. Something, something…watched enough to confirm…something.
Watched?
Watched.
“Video?” she asked, finally hearing her own voice over the ringing.
His slow, short nod came before more words, words of increasing clarity. “After the wedding. You can do whatever you want with it.”
There was a video.
She scrambled to remember. How much had she drank?
A lot. More than she could handle, but Quinn had said he’d confirmed it was her…
“There wasn’t a video. That’s not me—it’s someone else.”
“It’s you.”
His quiet voice did more to convince her than anything in her memory could, but still her head kept shaking. No. Just no. Air was becoming an issue…she breathed faster, now through her mouth as her nose couldn’t keep up with the demands her lungs made.
“You need to sit down before you faint,” he said, and she couldn’t argue with the diagnosis. She did feel faint, but she needed air.
Only after she got the balcony door open and the cool evening air blew in did she turn back to him, still panting.
In her wildest imaginings she’d always had that argument in the back of her mind. She’d thought she could say: That’s not me. Just some excellent photo editing… It was done all the time for a reason, but video? Could video be edited like that?
Didn’t seem like it.
“I can’t do this.” The words came out and she bent forward to brace her hands on her knees.
“You can. I have it. It’s secure. No one will see it. But, even if someone did, it’s not great, but it’s not the end of the world. Everyone has sex. You may have picked horribly, but everyone will get over it. Including me.�
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“You’re not listening.” She went ahead and put her head between her knees, going silent as she focused on trying to control that part of her brain that shrieked: Run!
He was saying something but she couldn’t listen and think, and she had to think. There had to be options. Some option that let her stay with him.
“Let’s not get married!” she cried, standing up, feeling the panic again in eyes she could hardly even blink they were opened so wide. “Let’s just finish the divorce and then…just stay together. I could live with that. It’s unconventional but, as a princess, as a wife, they wouldn’t ever let it go. But as a mistress? They’d practically expect me to have a sex tape or…whatever it is. I could live with just being together.”
“I couldn’t.” He sprang from the sofa, but didn’t chase after her. “I hate that this hurts you, hate that it scares you, but you’re going to have to accept a minimal amount of risk in this. You have more chance of catastrophe by car than catastrophe by Ratliffe at this point. You’re my wife. Even if you refuse the wedding. You were right; it’s just a display—you’re my wife already and that’s not changing. All this will be easier once the ceremony is over.”
“I’ll never have another moment’s peace if we go through with this.”
“Do you think you will if you leave me again at this point? How will the media react to that? If he had copies—which I would bet the crown against—when would be a better time to come forward with them than when my threats could no longer be counted on?”
She shook so hard it even felt as if her eyes trembled. Why didn’t he see it? And then she got angry, and it was so much better than the panic. “Why stop there? If you’re going to threaten me, go on and threaten to give them the video yourself.”
Quinn’s head jerked back and, in that instant, she knew his threats had been empty this whole time. Funny, it didn’t come as any sort of relief. The damage was done.
He wouldn’t meet her in the middle still. He couldn’t love her all that much. This wasn’t killing him.
Twisting off her ring, she gingerly placed it onto the new coffee table.
Before he could lob another empty threat, she grabbed her handbag and hurried to the door.
She really hated his penthouse. Every time she came there, it felt more and more like a mausoleum.
CHAPTER TWELVE
THE DOOR CLOSED quietly behind Anais, and Quinn couldn’t do anything but stand there and stare—first at the door, then at the engagement ring he’d so carefully picked out for her all those years ago, like another target on his new metal and stone coffee table.
Muscles across his shoulders and down his arms twitched with readiness, tempting him to attack it as she had the last one, but before he could cross the room for the weapon that burst of violent energy left him and he dropped to sit on the thing instead.
When he’d come into the room, he’d known it was about to go up in flames, but it had been his own frustration that had lit the spark. His mouth. Four more days and he could’ve handled this entirely differently. Everything would’ve been okay because he wouldn’t have had to look for ways to relieve her fear and get her to the altar too. But tonight…he hadn’t known which one to focus on. Looked like he’d picked wrong.
He needed solutions.
She loved him. She’d all but admitted it and, even if it would’ve been nice for her to say it once this whole time, he knew it without the words.
Rosalie had been the weapon to use on Ben, because he loved her.
His pain had worked on Grandfather, also based on love.
But not Anais. Why not her?
She’d been upset when she’d rung him earlier, asking to meet him, but, like a big dumb ostrich, he’d decided to assume she was just having another harmless Ratliffe episode and wanted to see him for comfort. He didn’t even think breaking up had been on her mind until he’d let the video slip…after he’d failed once again to present solutions when she’d reached out to him.
When was he going to stop doing that?
He replayed the conversation in his mind, looking for something he might have missed. Tonight—he needed solutions tonight. Tomorrow she might speak to the press and the wedding really would be off.
His heart jerked and began to pound. With shaking hands, he grabbed the engagement ring off the table and slid it onto the upper segment of his left middle finger—the finger he’d intended to wear his wedding ring. It helped somehow. Not as much as her hand in his helped every other time he was upset, but…
She’d already been upset, but she must have thought there had to be a solution or she wouldn’t have started the conversation.
Or maybe she’d just been imagining how it could go down from any destructive angle she could, dreaming up new ways to terrify herself. She hadn’t yet had time to process the knowledge of the video. His chest squeezed as the ghostly image of her foundered around the living room. Even when she’d talked about his hand, she hadn’t been that…broken by it.
What was on that video?
His gaze slid across the miles of white that seemed to stretch between him and the bedroom.
Not watching it, not looking at the pictures, had seemed like the respectful thing to do. That was what he’d told himself. Now it seemed like another instance of him ignoring problems so he didn’t have to deal with them.
Even the thought of watching it made his skin crawl.
The video’s very existence had annoyed him since he’d learned about it, and it had taken three shots of rum to soothe his rage after he’d watched only enough to verify that it had been Anais on the film.
Ten years ago, she’d have been seventeen, and he’d assumed she’d been that or older then. Over a decade? Best case scenario was sixteen. Sixteen.
Sending Ratliffe too far away for him to drive over and beat him to death tonight might have been the best decision he’d made since coming home.
With a churning stomach, he forced himself into the bedroom, and through the deafening clicks of the safe dial. Portable hard drive in hand, he loaded it on his computer.
The yellow indoor light on the dingy white walls in the video did nothing to detract attention from the girl drinking and grimacing from the tumbler of dark liquid in her hand. He’d hoped maybe she’d only been so recognizable because he’d been looking for her, and hyper-alert to the situation the first time he’d turned it on, but she was unmistakable.
“Is this alcohol?” she asked.
Ratliffe confirmed, while taunting her in the same breath. Would she prefer a kiddie cocktail? Chocolate milk maybe?
Damn, that was slick…
The look on her face as she stared at the drink, first weighing her options and then determined. The way she looked at him said she was on to him, but she still went along with it, drinking it and asking for another.
Why?
If she’d been sixteen, he’d be surprised. It felt wrong and dirty to watch it now, knowing that the evening had at least gone as far as nudity. His skin squeezed too tight for his body, almost as viciously as his stomach squeezed.
What was teenage Anais getting out of any of this?
Pausing the video, he went ahead to the bar and poured himself a rum. Was this how she’d used the drink, to deaden herself to whatever she’d been going to do? Had she come to the apartment just to take pictures?
He didn’t want to watch it.
He took the bottle with him back to the desk, knowing it wouldn’t be his last for the night. When he’d downed the shot, he sat and started the video again.
She talked very little, but Wayne went on about exploits he obviously thought would impress her. Wrong. That wasn’t her impressed face.
The man refilled her glass when she asked, then trotted out a camera to show her.
Stil
l staying…for some reason he couldn’t understand. The more she drank, the less bored she looked, but she still didn’t look as if she liked him at all, but she did fake it. She twirled her hair around one finger. Anais wasn’t a hair-twirler.
Forced flirting. As if she’d read “twirl your hair” in a How to Flirt book.
Another surge of rage raised the hairs on the back of his neck and he took another drink of the rum, watching the scene unfold before him.
Over the next twenty minutes, she went from quiet kid with her first drink, to obviously drunk and desperate for Ratliffe’s approval.
By the time the man joined her on the bed and Anais’s clothes started coming off Quinn understood why it had happened. She’d said it to him a million times, but all those times it had sounded like such an inconsequential thing to him. Not something Anais, his strong, brilliant wife, could really be hurt by.
“I don’t fit.”
“They won’t accept me.”
“The only thing that’s ever been acceptable about me is my intelligence.”
“You can’t know that it won’t change the way you see me. It was over a decade ago and it still affects the way I see myself!”
That one hurt the most because she was right; it did change things. Just not the way she thought.
It took an hour to speed through the rest, through rum and tears he grew too bereft to fight.
She’d posed while entirely nude, but was so innocent Ratliffe had to tell her how to show her body. He even arranged her on the bed at times. Eventually put the camera down and kissed her.
And she threw up immediately, all over the man’s lap.
He almost smiled, but then she passed out and his gut returned to churning while he waited to see what Ratliffe would do. He wasn’t that much older than her, but at that age…a few years made a big difference. He was more worldly, obviously. Seedier…
Quinn sped through, not relaxing at all until the man went to sleep beside her, and when she finally stirred Quinn choked on his own relief and slowed the video again.
Midwife's Longed-for Baby & the Prince's Cinderella Bride & Bride for the Single Dad (9781488022142) Page 32