Daddy's Fake Bride (A Fake Marriage Romance)

by Caitlin Daire

  I gritted my teeth. “I can’t believe it either. I really, really can’t.”

  “Those chefs should be fired. They knew about her allergies!”

  “I don’t think it was the chefs,” I said. “I think someone spiked the food with peanuts tonight.”

  She widened her eyes. “Who would do such a thing? That’s crazy.”

  “Yes, yes it is,” I said with a nod. “Luckily, I have proof of the crazy culprit right here on this USB.”

  I held up the USB stick, and I saw a brief flicker of surprise and fear flash in Blair’s eyes. She regained her composure immediately, though, and she raised her brows. “Really? What proof?” she said, choosing to call my bluff.

  “We can quit playing this silly little game, Blair. I know it’s been you this whole time, trying to sabotage everyone else to either upset or hurt them badly enough so that they’d leave the show. All so you’d have more of a chance to win,” I said. “And I guess it’s working. Emily left yesterday, as you know, and I bet Cailin will too after this.”

  “What? You think it’s me?” she replied, casting a horrified look at me. “How could you think that?”

  “Because I have a video of you crushing peanuts in your room, right here on this USB,” I hissed. “The same peanuts I assume you slipped into the curry tonight after sneaking into the kitchen, much like you did a couple of months ago with those laxatives.”

  Blair scoffed. “You don’t have a video of me. There’s no cameras in the bedrooms,” she said. “Did you hit your head or something? Maybe you should’ve gone to the hospital too. There’s clearly something wrong with you.”

  My hands curled into little fists by my side. “Don’t try and turn this around on me to make me sound crazy. That teddy bear I had Troy give you was a nanny cam bear. So yes, I do have video evidence of you,” I replied. “But before I turn you in, I want to know how you could do this. And why. I just don’t understand.”

  Blair finally dropped all pretenses of innocence and rolled her eyes. “Oh, of course you wouldn’t understand. You’re absolutely fucking clueless about needing to do anything to get ahead. You’ve always had everything handed to you!”

  “What on earth are you talking about?” I said.

  She leaned forward and jabbed me in the chest. “You had a perfect family, perfect childhood, always got perfect grades all through school and college, got chased by great guys like Troy, and then you got this awesome TV job given to you straight after graduation. Meanwhile all I’ve ever had is shitty luck and assholes hitting on me while I’ve had to slave away at dead-end jobs for the last few years. I’ve never had a chance to win at life like you have, until now. This was my chance. Of course I’d do anything to keep it!”

  “Are you serious?” I said. “That’s all such crap! I’ve worked my ass off to get where I am! Do you have any idea how many unpaid internships I had to do to score this job?”

  “I’ve worked my ass off too, and look what I have to show for it,” she said, narrowing her eyes.

  “So you decided to get ahead by sabotaging everyone on the show and nearly killing someone so you could win and get some attention?” I asked, barely able to process the crazy mental hoops she had to have been jumping through to decide on her recent path of action. “Did you really think that would be the magical cure to all of your issues?”

  She sneered at me, and I took a step back as a sudden realization dawned on me. “Oh my god. The letter you hid from me all those years ago…that was the same kinda thing, wasn’t it? You didn’t care about me like you told me in that big sob story the other month, when I found out you’d hidden it. You just couldn’t stand seeing me happy with Troy, and you couldn’t stand seeing me making new friends apart from you. You wanted me to stay miserable forever, just so you could feel good about yourself and keep me on your level. Even back then, you were just as jealous and spiteful as you are now.”

  “Doesn’t seem to have stopped you from picking up where you left off with him now that you’re both here,” she said, a smug smile crossing her face now. “I bet your boss would love to know what you’ve been doing. Ooh, and he’s standing right over there. Why don’t I call him over?”

  I narrowed my eyes. “Don’t try to blackmail me, Blair. I’m showing this footage to everyone, whether you tell anyone about me and Troy or not. I don’t care if I lose my job. It’s better than letting you get away with this crap.”

  Blair suddenly lunged forward and grabbed the USB stick out of my hand, and she threw it to the ground and stomped on it with her black and silver stilettos, crushing it to smithereens. “Good luck showing anyone that footage now,” she said with a smirk.

  I sighed at how utterly stupid and deluded she was being. “I’ve got another copy on my computer. I can just—”

  Before I could finish my sentence, she cut me off. “Don’t bother. Before you even have a chance to get to your computer, I’ll have already pinned the blame on you. You must think I’m stupid if you didn’t think I’d set someone up just in case something like this happened, and you just happened to be the perfect target, seeing as you’re always letting me into your trailer and all, not to mention leaving your spare key out in the same spot every day.”

  “Go on, then. You won’t get away with it,” I said.

  “Watch me,” she replied, taking a step closer so that I was almost pinned against the wall.

  I could scarcely believe this was happening; it all felt so surreal, like a bad late-night thriller movie. How could I have never seen Blair’s true colors? I knew we’d grown apart a bit since we moved apart, but I’d still always thought we were friends, and I’d never had any idea that she was so resentful of me. Why had she even bothered speaking to me and catching up with me every so often if she disliked me so much? Why fake an entire friendship?

  Even as I wondered why, I already knew the answer. Blair had never been all that good at making friends, especially long-term ones, and I was one of the only people who’d stuck around. She’d probably kept me as a ‘friend’ in order to have someone to bitch and moan to about how much her life sucked—which was exactly what she’d been doing over the last few years—and also kept me around in case I proved to be ‘useful’ to her in some way. Like the opportunity I’d scored for her on The Stud, for instance.

  I guess we’d never been real friends, at least not in the way I’d considered us to be, and all the help and support I’d tried to offer her over the years had been a colossal waste of time. Even the forgiveness I’d extended to her after finding out about the letter incident had been a waste.

  I just wished I hadn’t been so damn blind.

  Before I could say anything else, Blair turned her head and raised her voice. “Oh my god, it’s her! She’s the one who’s been messing with everything, and she put peanuts in the food tonight!”

  Everyone who was still in the room turned their heads in shock, and Blair pointed her index finger at me and kept going. “She’s secretly in love with Troy! She dated him back in high school, which she asked me not to tell anyone here, and she’s been trying to get him back by sabotaging everyone on the show so she can try to have him all to herself. I suspected something before now, but I never actually thought it could be her, because we’re friends. But I saw a bag of peanuts in her trailer earlier, and she just threatened me when I asked her about it! She’s crazy!”

  Glenn’s face was aghast now, as was everyone else’s in the room, and Blair managed to conjure up some crocodile tears as she shrank back from me. “I really can’t believe it,” she said, in her most convincing fearful voice. “You….this whole time…I thought we were friends!”

  Holy crap, she was a good actress. No wonder she’d fooled me for so long.

  “Wait, come on, it’s not true,” I said, rolling my eyes and holding my hands up as everyone cast glances at me which ranged from suspicious to horrified. “This is ridiculous. It’s not me, it’s—”

  “Come to think of it, you did see
m to know Cailin was having an allergic reaction before anyone else. Even before she did, in fact. How could you have known that unless you knew there were peanuts in the food?” Glenn asked sharply, cutting me off midsentence.

  “I…”

  “And wait…did you really date Troy back in high school?” he added, not even giving me a chance to answer his first question.

  I felt my cheeks color a little. “Well, yes, but that’s got nothing to do with—”

  He cut me off again by barking an order at some interns to go and search my trailer for any incriminating evidence.

  “Are you freaking serious?” I shouted, my eyes wide with incredulity. “You really think I would do this? For god’s sake, listen to me! It’s her, not me! And turn those damn cameras off! This doesn’t need to be filmed!”

  “Just stay where you are, Eden. Try to calm down,” Glenn said, slowly approaching me. He was using a slow, soothing tone of voice now; the sort of tone people usually reserved for grumpy young children and mentally unstable people. “We can talk about this, okay?”

  Great, he was treating me like I was actually insane. He probably thought that I was about to throw some sort of psychotic fit now that I’d been ‘caught’, and that’s why he was talking to me like this and trying to get me to stay calm. God, Troy, please get back here quickly, I silently prayed. Aside from Candice, who was at the hospital with him, he was the only other person who knew the truth, and I needed him here to corroborate my story.

  “Look,” I said, gritting my teeth. “It’s not me. I have proof. Look on my computer. There’s a video.”

  Before anyone could reply, one of the interns raced back into the room, his eyes wide.

  “We found this in her bathroom,” he said, holding up an Epi-Pen and looking at me. “It has Cailin’s name on it. There was also a bag of peanuts in a cupboard.”

  “Oh, for god’s sake, I didn’t put that Epi-Pen there, or the peanuts,” I said as everyone turned to glare at me again. “Can you not see what’s happening here? Blair obviously planted them in my trailer! Just check my computer!”

  Glenn finally relented and told the intern to run back and get my laptop, and the next few minutes practically crawled by at a snail’s pace. Blair was now sobbing in the arms of Hayley and Anya, sniffling and moaning about how she ‘couldn’t believe her best friend could be so awful’. I had no idea why she was still putting up this pretense, because as soon as my laptop was here, I’d be able to find the incriminating footage and show everyone.

  I guess she really was crazy, and she was going to keep up with her story until the bitter end.

  The intern finally returned, and I breathed a sigh of relief as I realized I was only seconds from being vindicated. “Got it!” he said, holding up my laptop in one hand. “It was…oh, shit.”

  The laptop slipped out of his hand as he dashed over to Glenn, and my heart plummeted as it went crashing to the floor.

  Shit, shit, shit.

  That computer was the only thing that had the evidence on it now that the USB stick had been smashed under Blair’s shoe just moments ago… and now it was smashed into several pieces as well.

  Even if Troy and Candice returned from the hospital and backed up my story right now, we had no hard evidence against Blair anymore, and it would be our word against hers. On top of that, all of the evidence that everyone else had—like the Epi-Pen and peanuts in my trailer, the fact that I’d dated Troy years ago, and the fact that I’d known Cailin was having an allergic reaction before anyone else—currently pointed to me as the prime suspect, whether or not Candice and Troy were here to back me up.

  I was well and truly screwed.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Troy

  By the time we arrived at the hospital, Cailin had gone to sleep on the gurney in the ambulance.

  “Probably from all the shock,” Candice muttered. “Don’t worry about getting a shot of you in her hospital room. We’ll come back and do it tomorrow when she’s actually awake again. Fucking Glenn and his bullshit…”

  We checked Cailin in with the help of the EMTs, and Candice filled out the appropriate paperwork. Once we were done, we met up with the small team of film crew guys that Glenn had sent after us, and we headed back to the ranch with them.

  “I can’t believe after all this time, the chefs managed to screw up like that,” one of the film crew guys said from the front of the car.

  “No shit,” Candice replied. “But at least she’s gonna be okay.”

  As they chatted, I thought back to the awful events of the last hour or so. Something had been bothering me; playing on the back of my mind, and I finally realized what it was. The peanuts in the curry hadn’t been an accident at all. Why else would Eden have burst in like she did? She must’ve seen Blair doing something on the footage earlier, and she’d come to warn us about the food.

  I’d been so caught up in all the panic earlier that none of this had occurred to me before now, and I couldn’t wait to get back and see what was going on. Hopefully, Eden had told everyone what Blair had done, and the situation was finally under control.

  I soon found out that quite the opposite was true.

  We pulled up outside the mansion at the ranch ten minutes later, and we saw a Marin County cop car sitting outside. I initially assumed they’d come to arrest Blair for her attempt at harming Cailin, but when we stepped inside, we realized an entirely different scenario had played out.

  “Oh my god, you guys!” a petite blonde intern with a snub nose said as she approached us on our way in. “You won’t believe what happened in there.” She jerked a thumb towards the main dining room and went on. “That junior producer Eden basically tried to kill Cailin. Turns out she put peanuts in the food and stole her Epi-Pen. They found it in her trailer.”

  “What?” Candice said, her eyebrows shooting up. “No way. Eden wouldn’t do that.”

  The intern nodded vehemently. “She did! Crazy, right? Apparently she’s in love with Troy or something,” she said before turning to me. “She’s been the one sabotaging all the girls from the start. I guess she wanted you all to herself, huh?”

  She winked at me, and I frowned and strode into the dining room without bothering to reply. Blair was in tears on one side of the room, being comforted by Hayley, and Eden was being held by one of the police officers attending the scene.

  “I’m telling you, this is all a mistake!” she was saying. “You can’t arrest me!”

  “Hey! What the hell is going on?” I asked in an acid tone, my hands balling into fists by my side as I stepped close to them. Glenn hurried over to me and started to explain his version of events, and I held up my hand. “No! I know what you think happened, but it’s total bullshit! Blair is fucking insane! There’s video evidence.”

  One of the officers looked at me. “Mr. Ballard, please step back. There’s no video evidence. Ms. Zamora claimed there was, but…well…it’s all conveniently gone now.”

  She gestured towards the floor, and I followed her line of sight to see Eden’s laptop, smashed into pieces. Great.

  “Convenient for Blair, yeah. What about the CCTV stuff in the network archives?” I asked. “It shows Blair going into the kitchen on the night of the laxative incident. If she did that, then you have to admit there’s a chance she did this too.”

  “Ms. Zamora said the same thing when we first got here, and we’ve just watched that video to check her story,” the other officer said. “It doesn’t prove anything. All it shows is Ms. Gilbert going into the kitchen that night.”

  “I was just looking for someone to ask about the carb content of the food that night!” Blair called out, wiping a stray tear from her face. I gave her a filthy look, and she burst into a new stream of faux tears.

  “Yes, and on the other hand, we have the stolen Epi-Pen and a bag of peanuts in Ms. Zamora’s trailer, not to mention the fact that she knew you and apparently dated you many years ago in high school, Mr. Ballard,” the officer
continued. “It seems she never got over that and subsequently developed a bit of an obsession with you.”

  I narrowed my eyes and shook my head. “This is ridiculous,” I said. “Sure, Eden and I dated, but that was a high school romance. It was years ago. She’s been nothing but a consummate professional towards me since the show started.”

  I saw Eden exhale slightly with relief as I spoke. She must’ve been worried that I was going to try and save her by admitting to our current relationship, but I wasn’t going to risk that—I didn’t see how it would even help all that much, and there had to be another way of solving this problem without getting her fired for sleeping with me.

  Candice put her hand on my shoulder. “Troy, let it go. Eden fooled me too, but I guess it all adds up,” she murmured. “I can hardly believe it.”

  I couldn’t believe it either. Blair had spun an absurd web of lies that everyone actually seemed to believe, and even Candice was falling for her bullshit. I couldn’t stand this; couldn’t stand seeing Eden looking so sad that no one believed her. All I wanted to do was whisk her far, far away from this shitty situation and make her happy again. There was nothing better than seeing her smile—whenever she beamed with happiness, she brought so much light into the surrounding area that she could probably bring the sun out from behind a cloud, and there was truly nothing I loved more.

  Wait…a cloud….

  I suddenly had the flash of inspiration I needed, and I knew exactly how to help Eden. Under the stress of the situation, she had likely panicked and forgotten about it, just like me. “Hold on,” I said, holding my hands up. “I know how to sort this out. I was in the media room the other day, when it was raining, and Eden was in there with her laptop.”

  “That’s true,” Candice interjected with a nod. “I was in there with them for a while.”

  Glenn waved his hand. “All right, go on, Troy. What’s your point?”

  I nodded. “Well, we got chatting about computers, and at one point she mentioned that her laptop automatically backs up every bit of her data to the iCloud. So even though her computer is broken, she can still log in and access her data online from any other functional device. Right?”