by Linda Verji
“I talked to her-”
“Are you crazy?” Eve cut him off. Her voice rising, she demanded, “Why would you do something like that?”
Carter was so used to her being indifferent and cold to him, that seeing her angry was startling and he didn’t even know how to respond to her question.
Eve scolded, “That was a private conversation between you and me. How could you tell your mother?”
“I just thought-” He paused.
“You just thought what?”
“I don’t know.” He rubbed the back of his neck as he avoided her eyes. “I was just trying to protect you.”
“Protect me from what?” Before he could answer, she added, “I can protect myself.”
“It’s my job to protect you, Eve.” He reminded her, “I’m your husband.”
She snorted. “Barely.”
“Barely?” Now he was the one who was angry. “What does that mean?”
Instead of answering his question, she asked, “You can walk yourself out from here, right?”
Then without even waiting for his answer, she marched away from him. Still confused, Carter watched her go. He was only trying to make her life easier. Why was she acting like he’d committed an unforgivable sin?
CHAPTER 4
Of course Eve knew that Carter was trying to help her. But despite his good intentions, he was just making the situation harder for her. His psycho-mom always wore her ‘loving’ mask in front of him so he had no idea what she was really like. Any minute now she’d call Eve to her office so she could give her an earful.
Why doesn’t she seem angrier? Eve wondered as she watched Sharon through her tablet.
Though the older woman was still in her office, she wasn’t showing any signs of anger. Usually when she was angry with Eve, there was a lot of banging of files, kissing of teeth then the dreaded phone call. But today Sharon seemed calm. There was no agitation in the strokes of her pen as she signed the documents on her desk.
Eve sighed in relief. Obviously, the conversation with Carter hadn’t sparked Sharon’s anger.
A few years ago, Eve had set up her first camera in her mother-in-law’s office. At that time, it was just a nanny-cam camouflaged as a book within the numerous tomes on Sharon’s bookcase. Eve had expected the camera to get discovered immediately so she’d taken precautions to make sure that it couldn’t be traced to her. However, several months later, the nanny-cam was still undiscovered and going strong.
So Eve had gotten braver.
She’d added a few more spy gadgets. A microphone in the pencil holder that she’d given Sharon for her birthday, cameras in two of the lighting fixtures, another camera for the wall-clock…. Eve now had a three-sixty view of Sharon’s office.
Those cameras had proved to be worth every penny spent on them and more. Eve now knew more about Sharon than she’d ever expected; all her secrets, all her underhanded deals, all her plans. As long as it had been discussed in that office, Eve knew it.
Sharon reached for her phone, and Eve’s heart immediately bumped in her chest. This was it. She was about to be called in for a dressing down. Eve’s gaze shifted to her phone as she waited for it to ring. Only it didn’t.
Sharon wasn’t calling her. On screen, the older woman was now speaking on the phone. “Benisio, come into my office for a minute.”
Sharon put the phone down and seconds later, Benisio walked into the office.
Benisio stopped in front of Sharon’s desk. “You wanted to see me?”
“Yes.” Sharon met his eyes. “I need you to set up lunch with the police chief.”
“Peralta?” Benisio’s eyes widened. “Did something happen?”
“No.” Sharon shook her head. “We just need to keep him buttered up and in our pockets. You can call it keeping the garden tended.”
“Oh. Okay.” Benisio said, “I’ll do that.”
“How are those tickets to the Paris Fashion week coming along?”
“I got them and sent them to the senator’s daughter.”
“Really?” Sharon frowned. “Then how come they haven’t called to thank me.”
“I’m not sure.” Benisio asked, “Should I call and confirm that they got the tickets?”
“No, don’t bother.” Sharon snorted. “The senator’s probably sulking because I made him propose that amendment for the NRA. He’ll come around soon though.”
“If he’s sulking, won’t he send the tickets back?” Benisio asked.
“No. If we’d sent him something else, he would’ve sent it back. But the tickets were for his daughter.” Sharon laughed. “She’s his Achilles heel.”
Instinctively, Eve sneered. Over the last couple of years, she’d realized that La Belle was just Sharon’s side-hustle. Her real business was collecting damaging information on people so she could exploit it to get what she wanted.
Eve wasn’t the only one who was being forced to do things for Sharon just to protect the people she loved. There were many victims; the senator, the police commissioner, cops and ex-cops like Benisio, executives in competitor companies, higher-ups in regulatory bodies. She had her nasty, crusty fingers on every pie in the city. Naïve people thought that Sharon had gotten where she was because of her hard work, and they were right in a way. Blackmailing people was hard work too.
The phone on Sharon’s desk suddenly rang. When she reached over and pressed a button, her assistant, Ryan’s voice came through. “Mrs. Welling, Charlie Mitchell is here to see you.”
“Send him in,” Sharon said into the phone.
A second later, Charlie, La Belle’s head of marketing, walked into the room. Looking agitated, he asked, “Sharon, have you heard what Ulta are up to?”
“No, I haven’t yet.”
“My contact there tells me that they’re planning to release a vegan hair-dye line to compete with ours.”
“What?” Sharon’s furious eyes turned to Benisio. “Why haven’t I heard of this?”
“I’ll find out,” Benisio said before walking out of the office. If Eve’s guess was right, then he was going to call the mole they had at Ulta.
“Have a seat,” Sharon said to Charlie once they were alone. She reached for her phone and dialed.
Eve wasn’t surprised at all when her phone rang at the moment too.
She muted the sound on the tablet then picked up her phone. “Hello?”
“Eve.” Sharon’s voice echoed over the line. “Come to my office.”
“I’ll be right there,” Eve answered right before the phone went dead in her ear.
On screen, Sharon put the phone down again before rising from her seat to join Charlie at the sitting area. Eve unmuted the tablet’s volume just in time to hear the older woman ask, “Charlie, how did you hear about this?”
“One of the lab guys there is a friend of a friend.” Still sounding panicked, Charlie said, “But that isn’t important. What’s important is that they’re planning to release at a lower price point so that they can cut into our market share.”
“That’s what I’d do too if I was coming in second.” Sharon asked, “Have you and your team come up with a plan to deal with them?”
“No, not yet.” Charlie shook his head. “I just heard it too.”
After setting up her tablet so that it could continue recording even when she wasn’t in the office, Eve tucked it into her desk’s lowest drawer. She locked the drawer then pushed her seat back and stood. Getting to Sharon’s office took less than five minutes and when she got there, she found Sharon and Charlie waiting for her eagerly.
“Eve, we have a problem,” Sharon said as soon as she walked in. To Charlie, she said, “Explain it to her.”
Charlie obeyed. “Ulta is releasing a vegan hair-dye line that is almost like ours.”
“What?” Eve exclaimed, sounding as surprised as someone who’d just heard this information for the first time. “Are you sure?”
“We’re sure,” Sharon said. “We’re trying to fig
ure out what to do about it. Any ideas?”
Charlie cut in. “We should try to stop its release.”
“No. There’s no point in doing that because it won’t work and it’s a waste of our energy.” Eve pointed out, “All we’ll be doing is giving them free publicity for their launch day.”
“Oh!” Deflated, Roy sat back.
Her keen eyes on Eve, Sharon asked, “What’s your proposal?”
“We should be thinking of ways to dull their launch.” Eve thought over it then said, “Let’s let them launch then sue them immediately.”
“Sue?” Sharon’s eyebrows gathered into a frown. “Sue them for what? They haven’t stolen our formula.”
“That’s true. But the judge and the consumers don’t know that.” Eve smiled. “Besides a lawsuit is just our attempt at stealing their limelight and drawing eyes back to our dyes. Once our lawsuit is thrown out, which could take months, we’ll jump into comparative ads. We need to drum it into people’s heads that Ulta are copycats and that their product is inferior to ours.”
Charlie immediately lit up. “That sounds like a great idea.”
“It does.” Sharon nodded approvingly.
Eve’s official title in the company was ‘Advisor to the CEO’, which was just a fancy way of saying that she was a janitor. She had no teams underneath her and no authority to run any projects. They only called her in to clean their messes.
When Eve had come into the company, Sharon had told her that the advisor position was temporary. As soon as she gave Sharon a grandchild, she’d get on the fast-track to be La Belle’s CEO. However, the CEO position was temporary too. She was only holding down the fort for Sharon and the Welling heir. As soon as Eve’s child was old enough, he or she would take over the CEO position and Eve could ‘rest’.
To other women, this might have seemed like a great deal. Eve would run a great company and her child would eventually inherit it. But it wasn’t what Eve wanted and the way she’d been dragged into it left a bitter taste in her mouth and a hankering for revenge.
Frankly, Eve had wondered why Sharon hadn’t picked a more willing woman. But the more she watched the older woman, the better she understood her. Eve had fit several criteria that Sharon needed. One; it had to be a woman who was capable of running the company for their family. Two; it had to be someone who Sharon could control. Three; it had to be a woman who Carter already liked and would agree to marry. Why would Sharon waste time raking the city for another woman when a ripe pawn was standing right in front of her?
Sharon had set Eve’s old life on fire just so that she could have her way. First, she’d paid off Eve’s fiancé, Daniel, so he would break off their engagement. In Sharon’s long line of sins, this counted as the least to Eve. If Daniel was a punk enough to trade her in for a paycheck, then he didn’t need to be in her life. Good riddance to bad rubbish.
Sharon should’ve stopped at Daniel. But she didn’t. She’d used all her contacts to destroy Eve’s company and even paid people to file frivolous suits against her. In the end, Eve had gone bankrupt. When that still wasn’t enough to get Eve to bow down to her demands, she turned her rifle towards the senior Linyards.
Mark was a mayor. Toni was a college professor. They were both fantastic targets. Sharon was so close to the Linyards that she knew many secrets about them; secrets that she could use to destroy not just their careers but their personal lives too. She’d kindly shared all these secrets with Eve.
Eve was okay with being destroyed, but not her parents. To protect them, she’d put down her sword. But even as she did, she’d promised herself that the next time she went against Sharon, she’d bring machine guns to the fight.
“CAREFUL WITH YOUR ice-cream, Jackson,” Eve said hours later as she drove him home from school. “Don’t get any on the seat, okay?”
“You don’t have to remind me,” Jackson said in between licks. “I’m not a baby.”
“You are to me,” she teased, reaching across the seat to ruffle his hair.
“Stoooop!” he whined but didn’t move away from her touch.
Grinning, Eve turned her attention back to the road. The only times she felt like she was her old self was when she was with Jackson. When she was with him, she could laugh freely and be openly affectionate.
Jackson was a great kid and easy to like. However, what made her connect with him even more was that they were in the same shoes. Though Sharon generally gave the boy her ‘nice’ face, she wasn’t as affectionate to him as most grandmothers were. Why? Because she didn’t consider him her grandson. Of course no one in the family, not even Jackson, knew this. The only reason Eve knew it was because she’d overheard a conversation between Sharon and Benisio through her bugs.
Jackson was legally a Welling, but he wasn’t Arthur’s biological son. His mother, Billie, was a single mother before she and Arthur met. After marriage, Arthur had adopted Jackson. Though the couple had planned to have more children, their deaths had halted that plan. And thus Jackson was left with Wellings.
To Sharon, he was just an unwanted ward; someone she had to look after because society would frown on her throwing him out. The fact that he had no Welling blood meant that he wasn’t qualified to run their business.
La Belle was founded in 1936 by Sharon’s grandmother. It had been passed down to her father then to her, and she was obsessed with keeping it in the family. Jackson’s presence and Carter’s disinterest in the business had fueled Sharon’s obsession with getting an heir out of Eve. Sharon needed a ‘real’ heir so that people would stop thinking of Jackson as next in line at La Belle.
Right now the boy was blissfully unaware of his grandmother’s disdain for him. But Eve had a hunch that once he grew up, Sharon would show him her true face and he’d be hurt just like Eve had been hurt. Knowing that made Eve feel protective of him. She wanted to keep him from being hurt.
“Coach said that we’re playing the Cyclones on Saturday,” Jackson cut into her thoughts. “Will you come and watch?”
The Cyclones were the city’s top Little League baseball team. Jackson’s team, the Hellions, were second and struggling to shove the Cyclones from the top spot.
Eve smiled. “Of course I’ll come.”
“What about Uncle Carter?” His gaze hopeful, he asked, “Will he come? He hasn’t come to one of my games in a long time.”
Eve hesitated. Frankly, she wanted to keep her distance from Carter. But this was about Jackson. His needs came before hers. So she said, “I’ll ask him.”
It was almost as if Carter knew that they were talking about him because right then Eve’s phone rang. She glanced at the phone, saw his name, but didn’t pick it up.
“Uncle Carter’s calling,” Jackson informed her.
“I know. But I can’t pick it up.” Grabbing the most easily available excuse to ignore her husband, Eve added, “I’m driving.”
Jackson offered, “Should I pick it up for you?”
“No.” To ease the curtness of her answer, she smiled. “Thank you though.”
The phone rang thrice then quieted. A few minutes later, it beeped indicating the arrival of a message. Eve waited until they stopped at a red light before picking up the phone and checking the message.
‘I might be home a little late,’ Carter’s text said. ‘I’m meeting a few friends’.
‘Have a great time’, Eve texted at first, but she quickly erased it. That text sounded too cordial. The text that she actually sent simply read, ‘Okay’.
He sent another message. ‘Where are you?’
She answered curtly, ‘Driving.’
‘From work?’ he asked.
She didn’t answer because the lights changed right then. A few minutes later she got another message from him but didn’t check it until she and Jackson were back home. The text read, ‘If you want to join us, I’d love it.’
Eve snorted. Yeah, like that was going to happen.
She had no idea what was going on with Carter.
Ever since he’d come from Colombia, he’d been behaving oddly. First there was the announcement that he wanted her. Where had that come from? In the five years that they’d been together, he had never been that bold.
Of course, she was aware that he was attracted to her. She would’ve been blind not to see how he sometimes stared at her like she was a happy meal and he was a starving man. However, she hadn’t taken his attraction seriously, and he’d never crossed any lines so she’d assumed that it was just a passing feeling.
But now things seemed to have changed.
Had he finally decided to do something about that attraction? God, she hoped not.
AS EXPECTED CARTER wasn’t there for dinner, which meant that dinner was a quiet affair. Now that there was no one to fool at the table, Sharon ate quietly, speaking up only to scold Jackson for his table-manners. When she was done, she immediately disappeared to her office. Eve and Jackson retired to the den to watch TV. At nine, Jackson headed to bed. Eve moved to hers and Carter’s suite.
Eve took a shower then settled on the couch. Once the TV was tuned in to her favorite show, she turned on her tablet so she could watch Sharon. Yes, even Sharon’s home office was bugged. Tonight, Sharon didn’t have much to do. Apart from ordering Benisio to find dirt on the local department store’s CEO, the older woman’s evening was pretty tame. At around ten-thirty, the older woman went to bed and Eve turned off the tablet.
Eve was about to call it a night when the door opened and Carter walked in.
Startled by his arrival, she blurted out, “I thought you said you were coming home late.”
Carter smiled. “I was planning to… but I missed you.”
His words were enough to quicken her breath, and it was a struggle to keep her voice even as she retorted, “I see.”
“Do you now?” He crossed the room to settle on the couch next to her. Instinctively, she stood. But he stopped her from leaving with a hand on her wrist. “Don’t go.” When she still didn’t sit down, he added, “Please.”