Blaine opened his eyes, but the world stayed black. If Stephanie decided to get nasty, things would get bad, quick, for his brother. Her family didn’t mess about when it came to carrying out their threats of taking off fingers one by one.
“How in the name of all that is holy did you let this happen?”
“I had no idea. Seriously. She told me she worked at the reptile zoo and at her pop’s tractor shop. She never even mentioned a blog.”
His agent paused. “I believe you, but the rest of the world doesn’t give a monkey’s ass. You’re the one who wanted me to help massage your image into something more serious. To start getting bigger parts in bigger projects and making some proper money. And then you hit me with this thing with Stephanie and your brother. I can’t make miracles happen. You either want to mop up your brother’s mess for the rest of your life, or you want to work. Either way, finish with the girl, pronto, and get the hell out of there.”
“I can’t just…” Blaine started but realized was talking to a dial tone as his agent had rung off. If he hadn’t already been sitting, he would have slumped to the sand. Finish with the girl, pronto. The words echoed in his head. Only a few of hours ago he’d been picturing a life with Janie. Okay, perhaps not a forever-after life, but one where he saw more of her than leaving tomorrow would entail.
“What a clusterfuck.” Swearing out loud focused his emotions, made him take a step back. This had been a holiday fling, nothing more. Time to get real.
Yet for a moment he was lost, a feeling he had forgotten about. He always knew where he was going, with whom, how, and why. His life was about living in other people’s skin, inhabiting their thoughts, feeling their heartbreak and triumph. It’s what made him a good actor, and it had made him excellent at reading people. And yet… Naked pictures. Online. And a blog. Had he gotten it all terribly wrong?
Blaine stood. There was something else going on here. If Janie was the attention-shy small-town girl she said she was, there would be no naked snake pictures. But if his agent said he’d seen them, they existed. No question. Hell in a haggis. Was everything she’d fed him a line?
His mind started whirring through everything that had happened the past couple days. The note on her door. Her having the phone in her hand in their privacy-guaranteed suite—right before the photographer turned up to snap her. Chris had said the piece was written by someone called Tina. Blaine’s mind flashed back to the pool, Janie and Tina sitting together. Had Janie really just “bumped” into him, or was this all some well-planned media setup?
He rubbed at his chin. “If you’ve been taken for a ride, it’s a damn good one, man.” A ride that had gotten closer to his heart than anything else in a long time. He pushed the thought away. He was not in love with Janie Milan; that was the romance of the place talking, the romance of the role he’d been playing. He stopped a moment, because even if she had pulled an act on him, he’d been playing a role, too; a Highland hero who was every inch as romantic and, quite frankly, unbelievable as the one he played onscreen. Fool.
His cell pinged to life again and he flicked open the email from his agent. Hell in a haggis wasn’t a big enough expression to cover the mess he’d found himself in. This was more like the dark angel himself on wheels, wearing a kilt, playing the bagpipes badly, and dancing on his grave sort of material. The message on his phone was a series of photos that were definitely Janie, and definitely naked. She and her buddy Tina had gotten him, and good. He only hoped he’d be able to back Stephanie down before anything happened to his brother.
Time to find out what the heck was going on. He picked up the remains of the snack Janie had left him along with her note. Sunset dinner, was it?
More like a sunset disaster.
Chapter Twelve
Moving the fork a little to the left, Janie took a step back and looked at the setup on the dinner table. The sun burst through a line of palm trees and swathed the table in gold. If she had paid a lighting engineer to get the right tone, it couldn’t have been more perfect. Gulping in a huge breath of air, she tried to quell the tropical butterflies the size of cats that were inhabiting her stomach. This needed to be perfect. She was going to show Blaine what he meant to her, what he could mean to her in the future.
While Blaine had slept, she’d found the couple who lived on the island and effectively ran the über-exclusive resort. Tiny was an understatement; they were the only ones there. At first the old woman had shooed her away from her cooking fire where she was stirring the fragrant mix of coriander, kaffir lime, and lemongrass sauce with freshly caught fish and homemade noodles, but eventually the old woman relaxed as Janie added the right proportions of the fragrant herbs and handled the noodles with a gentle touch. Soon the difference between delicious and ordinary started becoming clearer for Janie; it was all about balance—even cutting an herb wrong lent a different flavor to a dish. This was it, Janie realized—the thing she would do to show Blaine what he meant to her. How he’d taken her life from ordinary to utterly delicious.
A sunset dinner was a bit too clichéd for her liking, especially after the luxuries Blaine had shown her, but it was all she had. She’d gone to town dressing the table trying to make it special, and being let loose in a fabric box bursting with Thai silk had made the settings go from experimental to exquisite. “It will be perfect,” she whispered as she straightened a spoon. It had to be, because she planned on laying her heart on the table too.
She wanted to tell him how she felt, how every part of her was so thankful she’d taken this trip now, right now, and had bumped into him with her clumsy cocktail hands. Janie lifted the lid of the ice-filled chest and checked that the piña colada mix she’d made with fresh coconut milk hadn’t separated.
Everything was ready, she reassured herself. As soon as he got here, she’d put the fish on the hot coals like she’d been instructed, and when they were seared, put the fillets into the sauce mixture that was already bubbling and making the world smell spectacular. Tip the lot on top of noodles and, boom, instant impressiveness. She bit her lip. So long as she didn’t burn anything and he got here soon.
“Janie.” His voice conducted the shivers down her spine and sent her bevy of tropical butterflies into a flapping overdrive. Swallowing hard, she turned, but didn’t look him in the eye, not yet.
“My mom always said you should shower a person with food to show your love, so, here you go. Dinner. The fish is fresh, the coconuts too. Here, let me get you a drink.” Babble much? Janie wished she could put her foot in her mouth, literally, to stop herself talking, but without looking like more of an idiot than she probably did. Pouring out two piña coladas, she picked them up and finally let herself look up into his eyes.
Damn. Not the look she was hoping for.
Where this afternoon there had been warmth and love blossoming in his gaze, now there was only hard calculation. A searching look that left her feeling stripped, like he was looking for the secrets in the very center of her bone marrow.
“I know it’s not a helicopter ride, but…”
His hand waved to dismiss her half apology and he put his drink on the table before even tasting it. “I’m trying to work out how you pulled it off. All-American girl? I should have known it was too good to be true.”
Janie frowned. “What do you mean? What’s happened?”
He tipped his head to the side. “See, if I hadn’t seen them with my own eyes I wouldn’t believe it. But no one posts pictures of that online, and gets her friend to post a link to her blog, without meaning to. And the timing? Perfect. Maximum damage to me, maximum exposure for you.”
“What are you talking about?” Janie’s head reeled. “Exposure? Of what? And what pictures? You mean of us at that hotel? Oh no. Stephanie. Is your brother okay?”
“Yes at the hotel, and the rest. And no, no one is okay.”
Janie hardly heard him, her mind flashing through the possible implications of photos of her wrapped in a towel popping up halfway across the world. “T
hey can’t have been that bad, can they? If you explain to Stephanie what’s really happening. How we feel about each other…”
He laughed but without mirth, and without any of the warmth she’d come to expect from him. “I have to give it to you, you’re a fantastic actor. You should probably give my agent a call.”
“I don’t know what you think you know, but I’m no actor. What you see is what you get. Surely you know that about me by now. And why would anyone bother pretending to be from Little Acre?”
The muscle in his jaw flickered into life and she wished she could smooth it away with her hand, but from the set of his shoulders she was scared that he’d bite her rather than thank her at the moment.
“So you don’t have a blog?” He looked at his phone. “The World Now. Snappy name.”
Janie flinched. “Okay, I have a blog, but I’ve only had forty-two hits, total. No one reads it. No one except my dad and a couple guys who bring their tractors in, and that’s ’cause they’ve taken pity on me. There was nothing to say about it, not really.” That was pretty much the truth.
“If you say so. What about these? You didn’t pose for these?” He pulled out his phone and pulled up an email with photographs of her splashed bold as brass across the screen.
“Oh my ever-lovin’— Where did you get these?” She grabbed the phone from his hand and scrolled down. Two pictures of her, naked as the day she was born, only with bigger boobs, her hands their only covering, and a look on her face that was anything but innocent. The second one especially made her whole body contract like she’d sucked down a whole bag of lemons.
“I’m gonna die.” And then she scrolled again; there was one with a snake. She at least she had a spaghetti-strap singlet on in that one if you looked closely, but it was flesh-colored and it wasn’t exactly covering much. But more than that, coming after the naked photos, the Janie of the snake photograph looked like she wanted to eat the snake. Or at least get some of it inside her, somehow. Either way, it didn’t look good.
“How long had you and Tina been scheming to do this? When you first spotted me? Did you toss a coin to decide who was going to throw their drink all over me?”
“Tina? What has Tina got to do—” It clicked. “She wrote an article.”
“Don’t pretend like you don’t know.”
“I didn’t. She was bugging me to write something. It was going to be the ticket to getting my blog going at long last. But I decided not to. Once I got to know you, I didn’t want to hurt you like that.”
“Right, and I’d believe that because…?”
“Because it’s true.” She looked at the photos again. “How did she get the photos? And why would she do that to me?”
“She didn’t. Someone else did. I guess she put enough detail in her piece for someone to find them.”
“But they were supposed to have been deleted—” The second click was worse. Two-Minute Tom. She closed her eyes a moment. Oh, but of course he had. Because he was a total and irreversible asshat. “The idiot. I bet Tom put them in the cloud or something. Tina knew everything about him, about me, about Little Acre. Did she put all that in her article? OhMiGod, I really am gonna die. What if Pop sees them or…” She wobbled, the world going fuzzy at the edges until she put the phone on the table and sat to stop herself falling down. But Blaine didn’t put out a hand to steady her. He stayed standing, watching, waiting for…for what?
Lost, she stammered out the only explanation that made sense. “My ex. He liked to take photos. And once we were, well, he took a couple of pictures, but I made him promise to delete them. He said that he had.”
“Clearly not.”
“Clearly,” she said. “And the one with the snake. That would have been when I was at work. He sometimes visited me. But that one only looks weird because it’s with the other ones. I mean I look a bit weird in it—I don’t remember ever looking at a snake like that—but he would have waited to get the angle right to make me look weird. He was always doing that. Trying to find the dirt in things—except he called it finding the adventure in them.”
“What a right twat,” he said with a bitterness that told her all she needed to know.
Janie nodded. “I have no idea what that means, but if it’s something about him being the biggest douche to walk the planet, you are quite correct. I can’t believe he didn’t delete those like he said he did. No wait, I totally can, because he is the biggest douche on the planet. I should never have left Little Acre, I should have stayed, gone to his damn wedding and thrown tractor fuel on him like I planned. The world would have been better off.”
The hint of a smirk turned the corner of one side of Blaine’s mouth, but he hid it quickly. “What about Tina? You can’t tell me that’s a coincidence.”
“What about her? I told you she was bugging me to write something up about this. But I couldn’t. She must have known I wouldn’t, and…man, that’s cold.”
“How am I supposed to believe that?”
“How can you not? You know me. I’ve shown you all that I am. Or is it because you’re used to pretending to be other people you assume everyone is at it? What next, Bevan MacGreggor, Blaine Galloway, I don’t know, is there a Brian McAsshat I should be worried about?” The sharp cold hand of hurt crept up her spine and she shivered despite the balmy temperature. “Should I be throwing tractor fuel on you too?”
“Lucky for me, tractors aren’t really a thing in Thailand.”
They stood in silence a moment, glaring at each other and Janie wasn’t sure her heart could get any more fractured. To have gone from bliss to…this.
“Not telling me you had a blog was out of line.”
Her hand went to her hip on instinct before she realized how ineffectual that was when she was sitting down and put her hands palms-down on the table instead, hoping to steady herself and look like she was taking charge. “That’s because my blog barely exists. I wasn’t lying when I said I’ve had forty-two hits on it in the whole history of time.”
“Uh-uh. Things are different now. My agent checked it out. It’s more like one hundred and forty-two thousand hits now.”
Janie’s jaw just about hit the table.
“Don’t give me that. Your traffic is through the roof. If you were looking for an advertising deal to monetize your blog, now’s your chance. You had the motive and the opportunity. You can’t tell me you didn’t.”
Janie gritted her teeth. “If that pot wasn’t bubbling full of deliciousness, I’d say I smelled a rat, a big, hairy, about-to-get-slapped-in-the-face rat. Say what you really think before that piece of raw fish ends up in your eye.”
His phone pinged and he grabbed for it before she did. The groan came from somewhere deep and old inside him.
“What? What now?” she asked, wondering how anything could be worse than finding naked pictures of herself online.
He shrugged and passed it to her.
Another email was open, and when she scrolled down… “Oh my ever-loving beet field of fucks.”
His snort lacked any mirth. “Pretty much sums it up.”
The email had a link to The London Times, and the headline read: Blaine Galloway, Snake Charmer. The picture of her, naked, her eyes and boobs looking huge, was splashed beneath it, closely followed by the shot of her with the snake and the ones of them in the hotel room. And in a boxed section was a photo of Blaine decked out in full kilt and sword and…a white horse?
She skimmed the article before she went back and read it again, her mouth still hanging open and the temperature of her blood rising with every sentence. Finding a paragraph that she thought might make her head explode, she read it out loud to make sure she was reading it right.
“‘Blaine Galloway has always had a reputation as a decidedly questionable ladies’ man, a far cry from his gentlemanly character from The Highlander’s Cure. It seemed like he might have settled down when he got engaged to Stephanie Johns, but now it looks like he might need a cure if he stays too long wi
th the woman set to break up his marriage before it’s even begun. Janie Milan likes snakes, a lot, and it looks like she’s been enjoying Galloway’s snake while on holiday in an exclusive Thailand resort. Galloway has been talking up his hopes of making it in the U.S. in the future, which might be why he was getting in some wooing practice with American Janie. But it looks like this snake charmer might be the one doing the wooing and nabbing one of Scotland’s most handsome rogues. Her blog has had record traffic since this story broke, and you can bet she’s after more than just somewhere to shed her skin for a couple of nights. Better watch out for poisonous bites.’” Janie took a long, shaky breath.
“Tina wrote that about me?” Janie scrolled back to the top. “It says it’s by Robert Jonas.”
“She didn’t write this. She will have syndicated her story. Everyone’s picked it up, but the big broadsheets will give it their own special spin.” Blaine rubbed at his face. “This is a disaster. The press is going to run with this forever. Stephanie is after blood. Yours and mine.” He rubbed his face. “Be glad you live on the other side of the world. Although the world is borderless when it comes to news media. I guess that’s what you were counting on.”
Janie lifted her chin off the table and forced her jaw to work as she fairly spat the words out. “So, just to clarify,” she managed. “You lied about…everything. And you don’t give a rat’s ass about what this is all going to do to me when I get home. I did not collude with Tina and I did not want naked pictures of myself on the internet for all of Little Acre to see.” She took a shaky breath. “I thought we knew each other. I bared my soul to you.” The tears started pricking at the back of her eyes unbidden, but she would not let them out. No chance. “I’m clearly an even worse judge of character than I thought. Read my lips, this was not me.”
He shrugged. “See it from my perspective. It looks bad when you put the pieces together, you have to admit. I meet you out of the blue and suddenly the press find me. In Thailand. And they follow me to a privacy-guaranteed haven. Just after you order room service. How long were on you the phone?”
Her Scottish Mistake (A Perfect Escape) Page 14