Kiss Me Now: A Romantic Comedy

by Melanie Jacobson

  Had I been wrong?

  I went over the evidence in my mind. Her narrative could fit all of it except for one gaping hole: Gran’s wanting to leave her home to Brooke. That had all the markings of a skilled scammer, and skilled scammers always had innocent explanations for their windfalls.

  I studied the tablecloth without seeing anything. The waiter approached with two plates and a look of complete confusion.

  “Sir, will your friend be rejoining you?”

  Friend. Ha. “No, just box those up.” I’d bring them home to Gran.

  “Very good.”

  The waiter slipped away as quietly as he had come. He could have escorted himself off with a brass band and I still might not have paid him any attention. I was too distracted trying to parse Brooke’s words, picking them apart to find the truth.

  Well, I wasn’t going to find it here in Caps. When the waiter returned with a fancy bag, our dinners packaged inside, I accepted it and left with a word of thanks and a large tip. The guy deserved hazard pay after surviving the drama we’d served up.

  I needed to think before going back to Gran’s. I took one of the country roads leading out of Creekville, the car quiet, my mind racing faster than the wheels. It all came back to the same thing: I could believe Brooke if Gran weren’t changing her will. But that was irrefutable proof that Brooke was a schemer.

  It made sense, really. The fresh-faced gardener didn’t fit the profile for someone who would pull off the kind of scams I’d uncovered. But the sophisticated woman I’d picked up for dinner was a different story. She’d answered the door looking so beautiful and polished that it had startled me into silence. Cute had become sexy. But her warmth had also turned chilly. The woman who had answered the door was one I could easily imagine seducing a senator and walking away with a payoff.

  I’d have to dig deeper to uncover proof beyond the circumstantial evidence.

  Good thing that was my specialty.

  I turned the car toward Gran’s, and by the time I pulled into her driveway, the porch light burned, but the rest of the house was dark. I’d have to talk to her in the morning and break her heart with the truth about Brooke, but I’d do it a hundred times if it kept Gran safe.

  “Ian Davis Greene, you come down here right now.”

  I swam up from sleep to the sound of Gran’s voice calling from the bottom of the stairs. Even with my door shut, I could hear her clearly.

  “Now,” she repeated, and thirty-three years old or not, I knew better than to make her say it one more time.

  I grabbed the UVA shirt from the chair beside me and pulled it on even as I stumbled out to face angry Gran. “Good morning, Gran.”

  “It most certainly is not,” she snapped. “What did you do to my poor Brooke?”

  I reached the bottom of the stairs and blinked down at her, still fuzzy from sleep. I hadn’t yet marshalled the arguments I’d meant to make to Gran about why Brooke was bad news. “Can I get some coffee before we do this?”

  “No. You may not.”

  I nodded and sank down on the bottom step so I wasn’t towering over her.

  “She was supposed to meet me in the garden this morning, but she wasn’t there.” Gran glared at me. “That’s very unlike her, Ian. Very. So after fifteen minutes I popped over to check on her. She says she won’t set foot in the garden until you go back to DC.”

  “Probably for the best.”

  “Proba—” She broke off and glared at me, her hands going to her hips. Uh-oh. “What is wrong with you, child? Brooke Spencer is constant sunshine and now she’s afraid to come play in my garden because of you. I repeat: what did you do?”

  “I know you like her, Gran, but she’s not who she says she is.”

  Gran’s eyes narrowed. “That young woman living next door isn’t Brooke Spencer?”

  “No, I mean, that’s her name, but she’s not the innocent, helpful neighbor she pretends to be.”

  “Are you trying to tell me I’m a bad judge of character?”

  “I have proof.”

  “This I have to hear.” Gran didn’t look like she was predisposed to believe a word that came out of my mouth.

  “Coffee.”

  “Come on.”

  I trailed her into the kitchen but waved her into a chair when she headed for the coffee pot. “I’ve got it, Gran.” I poured hers just like she liked it, two sugars and a healthy dollop of cream. “I’ve been looking into Brooke this week.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I think she’s taking advantage of you.”

  “That’s insulting to my intelligence and judgment. I think the only time I have ever been wrong about a person’s character in my life is right this second, where I’m calling into question whether you have the common sense God gave a goat.”

  “She puts up a good front. I think it’s why she’s been so effective in fleecing her string of victims without ever drawing the notice of the authorities.”

  “A ‘string of victims’? Maybe you better lay out that evidence.” Spoken like a law dean’s wife.

  I started with the way the nursing home residents had given her five thousand dollars then moved to the strange gaps in her resume, her departure from Senator Rink’s office with a financial settlement that reeked of hush money, and ended with the inheritance of her distant uncle’s estate.

  “Estate,” Gran repeated with a snort. “Hardly. He left her a house with good bones that he didn’t update once in forty years. Headache is more like it. But that girl has grit, and she’ll polish it to a shine yet.”

  I couldn’t believe it. I’d laid out compelling evidence and she was still singing Brooke’s praises. This was worse than I thought.

  I clenched my jaw. No matter. I’d get through to Gran because I had to. And if it meant calling in reinforcements, I’d do that too, but I really hoped I’d be able to find a way to make Gran see reason.

  “Gran, doesn’t any of that smell at all fishy to you?”

  “The only thing that stinks around here is your judgment,” she said. “You are dead wrong about that girl.”

  “But—” I broke off as my phone buzzed in my pocket. I fumbled it out to silence it but then I saw the number. “I’m sorry, Gran, I need to take this.”

  “Ian Davis Greene, you better not—”

  “I’ll be quick. I promise. Hello?” I said as I stepped onto Gran’s back patio.

  “Is this Graham Norton? Or perhaps I should say Ian Greene?”

  I remembered Ellen Brown’s voice well. Brooke’s former boss had sounded cool when I last spoke to her, but now she sounded downright frosty.

  “This is Ian.” I kept my voice neutral, waiting to see what had prompted her call.

  “I received a most concerning call from Brooke Spencer last night,” she said. “It seems you aren’t at all who you pretended to be when we last spoke.”

  “With all due respect, neither is Brooke.”

  “If Brooke is behaving as a circumspect young woman with a maturity beyond her years and a kindness you rarely find in people anymore, then she’s showing you exactly who she is.”

  “If you say so.” I would bet very little got past Ellen Brown. How had she too been taken in?

  “I do say so,” Ellen Brown snapped, “and do not get glib with me. Brooke called me last night because one of her worst nightmares came true: her past caught up to her, but apparently not in the way you think. She will not thank me for making this phone call, but I’m not bound by the same non-disclosure agreement she is, and I won’t stand for that morally bankrupt senator causing her more misery than he already has. Now you listen and you listen good.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” I said, the first tickle of discomfort whispering through my chest. “I’m listening.”

  “You thought it was odd that Brooke majored in political science and biology. She only ever intended to major in biology, maybe go into research, but during her sophomore year, her roommate developed a serious lung infection from vap
ing and died. Brooke was heartbroken. She took a semester off school to grieve. But she’s incredibly resilient, and when she went back, she was determined to make a difference. She added poly-sci to her major and began lobbying Delegate Leeds to sponsor the bill banning the sale of the flavored vape products that tobacco companies are using to hook young people. Her advocacy caught my eye, and I recruited her to our staff when she graduated.”

  The discomfort grew to something more like a prickle. “None of this is in her professional profile. Why wouldn’t she include that?”

  “Modesty, honestly,” Ellen Brown said. “She felt it was a team effort, but it was her passion that was the impetus for all of it. But she was also deeply loyal to her roommate and doesn’t like her name dragged up in connection with tragedy. Brooke doesn’t feel people should be defined by them.”

  “Did you verify all of this?” I asked.

  “You mean did I have that dead roommate’s parents sit in my office and weep when they recounted the pain of the week their daughter spent dying? Yes.”

  Her voice was a slap, and I deserved it. “I’m sorry,” I said quietly. “Continue.”

  “Brooke’s work was tireless and impeccable. She drew a lot of notice for her passionate advocacy, and it wasn’t very long before other offices began to sniff around, hoping to recruit her. She fielded interest from several commonwealth administrations, all the way up to the governor’s office. But she’s loyal, remember? It wasn’t until Senator Rink’s chief of staff requested that she come meet with them about passing federal vaping standards that she considered what impact she could have beyond Virginia. She’d seen that with the right people, change really can happen, and God forgive me, I encouraged her to pursue the opportunity with Rink.” Her voice trembled a tiny bit.

  Regret? Anger? I wasn’t sure. “Why do you think you need forgiveness for that?”

  “Because I sent a lamb to the slaughter. Brooke is genuinely good. I knew DC waters were sometimes murky, but I had no idea how truly deep the swamp could go. We’d talk a couple of times a month or get lunch sometimes. And the stories she told me about the way even her own colleagues would connive and backstab turned my stomach. I could literally feel my blood pressure rising. And that didn’t even turn out to be the worst of it.”

  “The senator was.” It was clear where this story was going.

  “Yes,” she confirmed. “I knew about his womanizer reputation. But the rumors were years in the past. And Brooke may be young, but at twenty-six, she wasn’t naïve. She could handle herself. And she did,” she said, a bitter note creeping into her voice. “But she couldn’t handle the senator. I’m not sure anyone could. He’s a skilled predator, and Brooke didn’t see it coming until it was too late.”

  “What happened?” A complicated shift in my emotions was taking place, one I wasn’t sure I could fully describe. My contempt for Brooke wasn’t dissipating so much as it was transferring to the senator as Ellen’s story unfolded.

  “He groomed her. Brooke is about action, so pretty words have never done it for her. But when the senator began to hand her plum assignments on top of the compliments he regularly paid her work, she was thrilled. She felt like she was ‘in the room where it happened,’ as the saying goes. He began to defer to her opinions and include her in his inner circle of aides. It caused a lot of friction with the other staff, and it bothered her, but she pushed on, excited about getting a chance to work on her ideas on a bigger stage. And then the tone slowly began to change.”

  “Let me guess,” I said. I’d sat through too many depositions not to know what came next. “The compliments went from professional to personal. The meetings went from small to just the two of them.”

  “Bingo,” Ellen said. “One night when they were on a fact-finding trip in Chicago, he called her to his room to give her a copy of a report.”

  I winced, knowing what was coming next.

  “He came onto her strong, but it wasn’t Weinstein-level. She called me, shaken up, but decided it was because he was drunk, and they were on the verge of getting the bill co-sponsored, so she decided she would give him another chance. I told her she needed to resign immediately, that she would have no problem finding another job, but she said she wanted to wait until the bill made it to a vote and then she would quit.

  “But a couple of weeks later, the chief of staff called her to the office one night, said they wanted to go over the senator’s speech introducing the bill the next day. When she got there, it was only the senator. And he did not believe that she didn’t want a chance to sleep with one of the most powerful men in the country.”

  “Did he...” I couldn’t even force myself to ask the words.

  “He tried,” Ellen confirmed, voice grim. “Brooke left with a ripped skirt, some missing buttons, and some red marks. She called her mother in tears. Her mother made sure they had pictures of the physical marks. That was her lawyer training, I expect. But she also advised Brooke against going to the police. Said she’d only be dragged through every newspaper and TV broadcast as a trashy headline with no guarantee of justice.”

  I wished I could say that I didn’t understand her mother’s cynicism, but I did. Many good people worked in the criminal justice system, but it was a crapshoot to get a sexual assault conviction. Those odds grew far worse when someone as powerful as the senator was involved.

  “Instead, her mother hired Jansen Davies.”

  I gave a low whistle. Jansen was the toothiest shark in East Coast private practice.

  “Yes,” Ellen confirmed. “And he made Rink pay. Dearly.” She fell quiet, then added, “I’m ambivalent about the NDA. I think speaking out—even if some didn’t believe her—would do a lot to warn women in the future that the senator’s predation is ongoing.”

  “Yeah. I get that.” I’d often had the same thought when our firm had tied up women in NDAs to protect the reputations of powerful men. Did it just enable more of the same? “It sounds like a sizable settlement.”

  “Over a million,” Ellen confirmed. “Brooke never cared about the money, but she knew that no matter what she did, rumors about the settlement would make the rounds. She wanted to ensure that the amount was painful enough to force Rink to make sure he never preyed on anyone again for fear of future lawsuits. She’s still angry that all this cost him only money, while her reputation took the shot. Some days, she feels like it only underlines her mother’s wisdom in not pursuing a criminal case. Some days, I think she wishes she had burned it all to the ground, no matter what the consequences. But most days, I think she tries very hard to forget. And still, the rumors pop up that the gorgeous young aide seduced the senator.”

  I cleared my throat, knowing I was going to do something I had rarely had to do in my career. “I was wrong about Brooke.”

  “You were,” Ellen confirmed. “Do you know what she did for the first several months after she quit? She went to stay with her uncle to pull herself together and to get off Rink’s radar. Then she moved in with her mom and volunteered as a tutor every day in one of DC’s underperforming high schools.”

  More and more pieces of the puzzle fell into place. “That turned her on to teaching.”

  “It did. Brooke is a woman who needs a purpose, and she felt like she made a real difference there. When she discovered she’d partially inherited her uncle’s house around the time she completed her teaching credential, she took it as an opportunity to escape all of the lingering capital gossip.”

  “And then I showed up.”

  “And then you showed up.”

  I thought about Gran in the next room, ready to finish tearing me up over my misjudgment of Brooke. It was time to listen to the wisdom of these two women. “I’ll apologize to her.”

  “I think if you just left her alone, that would be enough.”

  But I wasn’t so sure I could. I really did owe her at least the apology. And Ellen Brown too, I realized. “I’m sorry about the false pretenses of the first call. I thought I was pr
otecting my grandmother from a scammer, and there isn’t much I wouldn’t do for her.”

  “It’s partially my fault,” Ellen said. “I knew Brooke had a teaching job. I should have called and asked her about this supposed reference check myself, but she often comes to see me when she visits her parents, and I guess I figured we’d catch up then. And it’s good you keep an eye on your grandmother.”

  “I’m not sure she thinks so right now,” I said, and Ellen laughed at my tone. “She likes Brooke and I’ve scared her into hiding, so I’m in the doghouse.”

  “You definitely deserve it,” Ellen answered. “But I suspect she won’t stay mad at you for long.”

  I apologized again and thanked her for her time, then hung up, took a deep breath, and tried to figure out how I was going to face Gran.

  Chapter Ten

  Brooke

  I straightened and stretched my back, glaring down at the kitchen floor with all the contempt I normally reserved for Brussel sprouts or spiders. Uncle Fred or his wife had laid down a faux-tile linoleum over the wood floors, and I’d been at work for two hours with a scraper trying to peel it up and chip the glue away. It had to be at least forty years old, but it clung like it was newly cemented, and my shoulders and back ached.

  I’d much rather get these sore muscles from working in the garden with Miss Lily, but Ian had ruined that for me.

  Ian. What a jerk.

  The sickly feeling I got anytime I thought about Senator Rink or my time on his staff crept up on me. Prickly palms. Overwarm cheeks. A touch of nausea. I wished I could simply step outside and take in some fresh air, but I didn’t want to risk it if it meant running into Ian.

  I walked to the front of the house, rolling my shoulders and neck to rid them of tightness. It didn’t help. I stopped at the large picture window and peered through the curtains. I could barely see the front fender of Ian’s car, but the grill was distinctive. It was his.