Exposed

by Tracy Wolff

  “My car’s in the parking lot.”

  “And it will still be there on Monday when you come back for it.”

  “Monday? What if I need to go somewhere over the weekend?”

  “Amazingly, I have a garage full of cars at home. Pick one.”

  “I like my car.”

  “You like being stubborn about your car, more likely. But fine, come get me after work and you can drive me home. Fair?”

  I nod begrudgingly. “Fair.”

  “Good.” One more kiss and then he’s moving around me. “See you then.”

  “What about lunch? I could meet you in your office.” I swear, I don’t deliberately set out to do it, but even I can hear the suggestive way my voice drops on the word office.

  Ethan’s eyes go from bright indigo to midnight in the space of one heartbeat to the next. “I have a meeting scheduled to run until one. But if you’d like to take a late lunch…”

  I’d love to, but legal department rules are that interns get lunch from twelve to one. Sometimes people stretch it a little bit in either direction if they’ve got something going on, but those people aren’t me. It’s my first week back. The last thing I want to do is fan rumors about me turning diva after marrying the boss. Any more than I want people to think Ethan and I have sex in his office. I mean, we have before, but no one needs to know that.

  “Rain check,” I tell him, pressing one last kiss to his mouth. “But I’ll be by to get you around six. Okay?”

  “More than okay. I kind of like the idea of my woman squiring me around.”

  I roll my eyes, but he’s already gone, making his way up the aisle with all the grace of a lithe, hungry jungle cat. Is it any wonder everyone in the department is on their best behavior? Ethan is a force to be reckoned with even when he’s exhausted and playing nice.

  The rest of the morning passes uneventfully. I mean, the same old stares and whispers follow me when I walk to the fax machine, the copier, the bathroom. But if they’re talking about me—about Ethan—they’re doing it where I can’t hear them. It’s all that I can ask, and, frankly, more than I expected. After all, I went from brand-new intern to wife of the founder and CEO in less than a summer. And not just any CEO, but one who is universally adored by his employees.

  By the time twelve o’clock rolls around, I’m famished. I never did eat the apple I picked up from the break room and the few bites of toast I’d managed to choke down this morning had long since worn off. In fact, I’m so hungry that I end up beating my friends to the cafeteria—something that almost never happens. They’re twenty-one- and twenty-two-year-old guys. They can pretty much eat their weight in food and, since it’s free for all Frost Industries employees, like to spend every lunch hour trying to do just that.

  I grab a salad and a cup of vegetable soup from the deli line, but the moment I take my first bite of vegetable soup, my stomach rebels, cramping and rolling like I’m suffering from a bad case of seasickness—or food poisoning. Which is ridiculous, considering I haven’t eaten anything but three bites of toast all day.

  I push the soup aside, but the fact that it’s still there on my plate—that I can smell it—is more than enough to kill my appetite. It’s ridiculous, but in the end I have to actually get up and throw the soup away before I can take even a bite of my salad. I really hope I’m not coming down with something. With everything else going on, it’s pretty much the last thing I need.

  By then, Austin and Zayn have found me. Trays loaded high with everything from Indian food to ice cream, they park themselves across from me and start prattling on about the recent professional football drafts and why Austin thinks most of them are “shite.”

  “So you don’t think he’s going to be a good quarterback?” I question, tongue firmly in cheek, after Austin spends five minutes railing about some guy with the last name of Camberley.

  He and Zayn both turn to stare at me with open mouths.

  “What?” I ask, my latest bite of salad halfway to my mouth. “I can talk football. I know what a quarterback is. I know what a wide receiver does.”

  “You’re fucking with me again, right?” Austin demands.

  “Is Camberley not a quarterback?” I ask as innocently as I can muster.

  “He’s a goalie,” Ro tells me gently. “You know, right, that we’re not talking about American football?”

  “Bloody Yanks,” Austin mutters in his very British accent. “Think they’re better than everybody else. Spell words incorrectly, drive on the wrong side of the road, think football is about a bunch of fat guys chasing a pigskin down a field. It’s bloody monstrous, is what it is.”

  “I don’t know, Austin. Celsius is awfully confusing.”

  “Fahrenheit is confusing!” he tells me, slamming a hand down on the table. “I mean, who ever heard of water boiling at two hundred twelve degrees? It makes so much more sense for it to boil at one hundred degrees. And to freeze at zero degrees! You people just have to make everything so bloody complicated, have to screw everything up!”

  Ro comes up in the middle of his diatribe, sets his tray down on the table next to mine. “Is this about soccer again?” he mock whispers to me loud enough for half the cafeteria to hear.

  “It’s not bloody soccer. It’s football. You use your feet to kick the ball. Hence the term. Football.”

  “To be fair, you kick the ball in regular football, too,” I tell him, somehow managing to keep a straight face as smoke all but comes out of his ears.

  “Once per possession! To get it down the field. The rest of the time they use their hands! It should be handball or pigskin ball or something—anything—else but football. Do you know how long football has been around? Do you know how many nations play it? And call it football? Do you know what a physically intense and mentally taxing game it is? You have to constantly stay one step ahead of your opponent. You have to run the ball across the whole field in one play. You have to—”

  “You know, Austin, if you didn’t jump at the bait every freaking time, Chloe wouldn’t insist on messing with you.”

  “I’m not messing with him,” I say, all wide-eyed innocence. “I think soccer is a great game. And the wide receivers have really nice legs.”

  “Damn it, Chloe!” Austin finally cracks up. “You have to stop fucking with me like that. I’m going to end up having a stroke one day and it’s going to be all your fault.”

  “Actually, it’s probably going to be Zayn’s fault. He messes with you a hundred times more than I do.”

  Zayn nods thoughtfully. “She’s probably right. But in my defense, you’re really easy to rile up.” He reaches onto Ro’s plate and takes a French fry off it. “Here, have a crisp,” he says, right before flinging it—loaded with ketchup—on top of Austin’s pile of white rice.

  “Chip,” he says, chomping on the potato thoughtfully. “It’s called a chip.”

  “And here I thought I ordered fries,” Ro tells him.

  We’re all laughing now—from the first day I met them, the three of them took messing with each other to an art form. The fact that they let me get away with joining in—and the fact that they give as good as they get, no matter who I’m married to—means everything to me. Like with Tori, it’s friendship first with these guys. Everything else comes second. Just the way it’s supposed to.

  The bickering continues, as we move from picking at Austin’s Englishisms to making fun of Ro’s extreme enthusiasm for his latest project. Then it’s my turn as the guys rib me about the articles popping up in everything from the San Diego Union-Tribune to People magazine commenting on “Ethan Frost’s mystery bride.”

  I join in, mentioning the most ridiculous articles I’ve seen, too. It takes a few minutes—there’ve been a lot of articles—but just as we’re about to move on to Zayn, one of the large screen TVs set up against the back wall of the cafeteria catches my eye. It’s tuned to a local gossip show, and right now they’ve got a picture of Ethan and Brandon plastered across the screen.
Both are smiling, and not for the first time I see the familial resemblance. But that’s not what I’m focusing on right now. Because all I can see—all I’m sure anyone can see—is the huge, jagged line running between them down the length of the photo. The graphic is much more commonly used between couples, and is meant to mimic a split. And it more than gets the job done here.

  Panic runs through me at the sight of it. Ethan was supposed to talk to Brandon quietly—the last thing he was supposed to do was to make such a big deal of the situation that it was covered on a major news organization’s lunch show, for God’s sake.

  The volume is turned off—like at the gym, the frequency to turn to hear the show was posted at the bottom of the TV. But I don’t have my earbuds with me—and don’t want to just turn the volume up on my phone and announce what’s going on to the entire cafeteria. If the way people’s heads are turning toward me is any indication, more than enough people are seeing it already.

  So instead, I do a quick Google search, as the sound of my friends’ voices blurs into the background beside me. It only takes a second for thousands of hits to show up—and all of them say the same thing. That Ethan had railed against Brandon at his fund-raiser last night, pulling all support from his brother’s campaign and urging others to do the same thing. Since then, Brandon has lost several other major donors.

  Not to mention the fact that the press is now on a mission to find out exactly what happened between the two brothers. A few articles are even asking if Ethan’s new bride had anything to do with it. My stomach, which had finally settled with the arrival of my friends, begins churning all over again. It doesn’t take a lot of brains to figure out that with that many people looking for an answer, it won’t take long before one of them finds it.

  Won’t take long before every moment of my very painful past is splashed across every gossip rag in the country in sensational, salacious headlines.

  Slapping a hand over my mouth, I make a mad dash for the restrooms at the left of the cafeteria while half of Frost Industries looks on. At least no one can say I don’t know how to make an exit.

  Chapter 18

  “I’m sorry, but the networks have picked up the story, Ethan. It’s already made its way onto social media, where you’re being hailed as everything from exceptionally brave to a douche who threw his younger brother under a bus. The gossip columnists have dug their teeth in and even the political reporters are mentioning the story. Not just in local Massachusetts news, but on CNN’s state wrap-up reports. It’s only a matter of time before they ferret out the truth, whatever that truth is. And if you don’t share it with me, I won’t be able to spin it. I won’t be able to protect you.”

  Stu looks more upset than I’ve ever seen him. I know it’s hard for him to do his job when I’m not giving him all the information, but I already broke Chloe’s confidence once when I spoke with Sebastian. I’m not ready to do it again—especially not when it’s only as a way put as positive a light on Frost Industries, on me, as it possibly can.

  Right now, I don’t give a shit about what I look like. I don’t give a shit about anything but protecting Chloe in the best way I can. Which—I’m afraid—isn’t going to be any significant way at all. It’s not the reporters I’m worried about. I knew what I was doing the moment I opened my mouth in that ballroom.

  But my mother’s threat hangs heavy on my shoulders. My original plan called for bringing the gambling debts and drug use to national attention. Add in the ties to the Vegas mob families and the press would crucify Brandon. After all, no one likes knocking someone off their pedestal more than the American press—except maybe the American public. Along with the documentation my PI had managed to dig up on Brandon’s assorted and sundry crimes, it should have been more than enough to put him in jail without Chloe’s past—or the pasts of any of the other women he’d raped—ever coming to light.

  Chloe would have been safe.

  Now, though, with my mother threatening to put her own libelous and poisonous spin on the situation, everything is up in the air. I can still release the information, still try to get ahead of the mess and spin it the way I need it to be spun. But if she gets there first, then everything is going to ramp up a million percent. Chloe’s past will be fodder for everything from breakfast table conversation in Middle America to political punditry on the conservative/liberal talk show circuits. And I won’t be able to do anything to stop it.

  The question is, do I strike first? Do I release the information and let the chips fall where they may? Or do I keep and hope my mother is bluffing? It’s the one contingency I didn’t account for—the fact that my mother would go public with Brandon’s rape of Chloe. My mother and stepfather worked so hard to cover it up when it happened, it never occurred to me that they’d be willing to bring it back up in an effort to paint my wife as the seductress in the whole scenario. Or worse, the spurned lover crying rape to get back at the boy who dumped her. With Gone Girl still very much in the consciousness of the American public, it’s not as big a stretch as it should be.

  I can’t let that happen. Chloe is healing—a little bit more every day—but she’s still fragile. The last thing I want is for my family to find a way to hurt her again. They’ve already victimized her once. I’ll be damned if they do it again.

  Which means I have to find a way to stop my mother’s plan, to neutralize the information she has so that even if she does try to use it, no one will bite. The question is how do I do that without bringing her wrath straight down on Chloe’s head?

  Stu is still talking, still prattling on about how he needs to know what he’s protecting me from if he’s actually going to protect me. And since he looks like he’s about to launch into yet another long-winded spiel, I hold a hand up to get his attention. He stops in midsentence.

  “So, I’ve got a couple questions for you,” I tell him, even as I continue to outline what it is I want to ask—what it is I want to do—in my own head.

  “Okay.” He looks cautiously optimistic, like he can’t quite decide if I’m going to help him or if I’m going to blow up his world. Which is fine, since I’m not yet sure how this is going to go, either.

  “So, if you’re a member of a well-respected, old money family from Boston—”

  “Like your half-brother’s family.”

  “Yes, Brandon’s family.”

  “Your family, too, Ethan,” he says, reminding me how it’s going to play in the media. How it’s already playing in the media.

  “Okay, my family by my mother’s marriage. So, you’re that family and you have access to some of the best spin doctors in the business. And there’s this story floating out there that, spun one way, will cast your best shot at a political dynasty as a dangerously spoiled rich boy who destroys women’s lives for his own sport. But if you control the narrative, if you get it out there first, you have the chance to spin it so that he looks like the victim of a woman and her greedy, grasping family. You’ll have him exonerated in the press before the other side even has the chance to fire an opening salvo.”

  “I don’t hear a question yet.”

  “How would you spin the story? Where would you place it to make sure the report was sympathetic to you, yet big enough that it would be widely disseminated?”

  “That’s going to depend on what the story is, Ethan. And who’s involved. Obviously, Brandon and his parents. But who is the girl they’re going to go after? What’s her story? What’s her damage? How believably will she play to the press? How easy will it be to assassinate her character? And, just so I’m clear, why is this important to you? How do you fit into the narrative?”

  “Because the woman they’re going to go after, the woman whose character they’re going to do their best to shred on America’s prime-time stage, is my wife. I want to cut them off at the knees before that happens.”

  Stu turns white, whiter than I’ve ever seen him. But his gaze stays steady on mine as he absorbs the news. “You need to tell me what we’re
dealing with here.”

  I start to shake my head, but he just overrides me. “This is going to all come down to nuance, to public perception. If I don’t know what they’re going to accuse Chloe of, I’m not going to be able to give a good guess as to how they’re going to go about doing it. I think I have a pretty good idea, but you need to spell it out for me if you want me to be accurate.”

  “I need you to be accurate.”

  “I know. Which is why you need to tell me the truth. Not the version you want to spin, but the truth.”

  “My version is the truth.”

  “Okay.”

  Fuck it. He’s right. It’s not like I don’t trust him—Stu’s had my back for pretty much as long as I’ve been in business. Holding back now, for Chloe’s sake, will only hurt her in the long run.

  But before I can do much more than open my mouth, my personal receptionist, Dorothy buzzes in. “Ethan, Mrs. Frost is here. She wants to know if you can see her.”

  “Send her in.” I turn to Stu. “Let me—”

  He’s already gathering his stuff. “I’ll start doing some research, see which press outlets your mother and Brandon usually use.”

  “Thank you. I’ll give you a call when Chloe and I are done. I’d like to get her take on this, see what she wants to do at this point.”

  “Of course.”

  I walk him to the door. Chloe beats us to it, pushing it open before I can even reach for the handle.

  “Oh, I’m sorry. I didn’t realize you were still in a meeting—”

  “It’s fine, baby. Come on in.”

  “Are you sure?” She looks between Stu and me.

  “Of course, Mrs. Frost. Ethan and I were just wrapping up.”

  “Please, call me Chloe. And you’re Stuart, right?”

  She gives him a warm smile, one that takes over her whole face. It’s a good cover, one that’s so effective that if I didn’t know her as well as I do, I wouldn’t even notice the strain behind the smile. But the strain is there, which means she’s seen or heard something about Brandon and me. Fuck. I knew I should have told her this morning. But I couldn’t do it in the middle of my intellectual property/legal department and she’s so concerned about following the rules—about not getting special treatment—that I didn’t want to pull rank and sweep her back here to my office.