Back to the place where it all began.
Arlie stood in the gleaming chrome elevator, a lump in her throat and Kassidy at her side.
“I really appreciate you coming with me,” Arlie said, doing her best to sound grateful and calm rather than gutted and terrified. In her sweaty palm, she clutched the heavy key card Charlotte had been kind enough to add after-hours access to.
“As if I would have let you face this alone.” Kassidy huffed, blowing hot air from her nostrils as the muscles in her elegant jaw tightened. “After what Samuel did to you, he better hope we don’t run into him.”
Arlie was comforted by Kassidy’s fury on her behalf. And if her best friend only knew how she had omitted key portions of the events she’d relayed to her. Like the fact that Samuel had fessed up to hiring her as part of a plot to oust Mason from the company only after they’d slept together a second time.
Arlie had returned to the moment she’d left again and again. The sorrowful expression on his face had been scorched into the backs of her eyelids, hanging in the dark when she couldn’t sleep. Which had been often over the last few days.
When the initial onslaught of anger at Samuel’s revelation had burned out of her system, all Arlie felt was tired. Tired, and sad. A bone-deep, abiding ache that rolled through her like a gray fog, relieving her of all thought and reason.
Taegan hadn’t waited long.
The morning after Arlie had failed to show for their rendezvous, she’d received a text letting her know Parker Kane would be receiving a special surprise in the coming days.
Between this development and Samuel’s admission, her resigning had seemed like the only logical option. She’d given two copies of her formal letter to Charlotte and asked her to give them to Mason and Samuel after she had a chance to clear out of her office.
The elevator slowed to a stop, the familiar bing announcing their arrival on the fifteenth floor.
The doors opened on the gleaming, marbled corridor. In the dim, after-hours light, it almost looked romantic.
“This way,” Arlie said, adjusting the empty cardboard box in her arms.
“How much you want to bet that Parker Kane has a 24K gold plunger?” Kassidy said, taking in the opulence of their surroundings. She elbowed her as they walked side by side the last few feet to Arlie’s soon-to-be-former office.
Flipping on the light, Arlie set the box down on her desk, pierced by the realization that this beautiful space would soon belong to someone else. Someone who didn’t have mistakes like hers trailing behind them like acrid smoke.
“Deep breath.” Kassidy gave Arlie’s upper arm a gentle squeeze. “You left Gastronomie and you survived. You’ll survive Kane Foods too.”
“I didn’t just leave Gastronomie. I was fired.” The words tumbled from her lips, surprising her. She hadn’t had any intention of telling her friend that now.
Kassidy’s dark brows jerked up toward the neatly knotted rows of her braids. “Come again?”
Arlie felt a strange sense of relief. There was no going back now. This last artifice would be ripped away, and she would be raw, and tender, but real.
“I was being courted by a different magazine. Over dinner one night, Hugh—the marketing executive I’d been talking to—asked me about my role in tracking food aesthetic trends for a new social media feature we’d been working on. As it happened, it wasn’t me he was courting at all—he wanted to steal our idea. The other magazine went live with their social media feature first and when the features editor traced the leak back to me, she accused me of corporate spying.”
Kassidy’s mouth dropped open in shock. “Oh, shit.”
“Yeah,” Arlie agreed. “But I swear to God, Kassidy, the way Hugh was talking about it, I didn’t think I was telling him anything he didn’t already know.”
Kassidy nodded encouragingly.
“Anyway, they hired lawyers who found a clause in my confidentiality agreement they could tee off. They tee’d hard and sued me.”
“I mean, I can understand firing you, but a lawsuit? That just seems...vindictive. Especially if it was an inadvertent disclosure.”
“Well, vindictive isn’t exactly an inaccurate description where my former CMO is concerned. Or other colleagues at Gastronomie, for that matter.” Opening her filing cabinet, Arlie began removing the stacks of glossy portfolios she’d brought with her in more optimistic days.
“Jesus.” Kassidy shook her head, looking almost as tired as Arlie felt.
“We settled out of court, but it took most of what I had.” Arlie dropped the portfolios in the box and set to work pulling the few files she’d begun to assemble. “All of it, really.”
Kassidy blinked at her, eyes glossing over with tears. Arlie could count on one hand the times she’d seen her best friend cry and still have leftover fingers. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
Arlie had asked herself this same question at least a hundred times. She didn’t like the answer any more than she knew it was absolutely true.
Shame.
She was ashamed that she had let herself be so charmed. So deceived. And beyond that, as the unwealthy girl raised with very wealthy people, the idea of asking anyone in general and her best friend in particular for help pulling her ass out of a self-made fire made her want to crawl into a very deep hole.
Which was essentially what she had done after all.
“I could have helped you.” Kassidy reached out and placed her hand over the files Arlie was sifting through, forcing her to pay attention.
“You hated being a lawyer, remember? You said that you would sooner have your fingernails removed than use your considerable mental gifts litigating someone’s mistakes.”
“We’re not talking about someone,” Kassidy said, taking the files from Arlie and adding them to the box. “We’re talking about you. I’m still licensed in the state of Pennsylvania and I have contacts.”
Arlie didn’t doubt it. She’d seen firsthand how the best and brightest in every field were drawn like moths to the flame of Kassidy’s charisma and intelligence.
“As much as I appreciate the offer, what’s done is done. In any case,” Arlie sighed, feeling both heavier and lighter all at the same time, “that’s why I haven’t invited you over to my apartment lately, if you want to know the truth. Because I’m not living there anymore. I moved into a smaller place in Hunting Park. And now that this job is ending, I’ll probably lose that too.”
Kassidy wrapped an arm around her shoulders. “You’ll move in with me.”
Arlie shook her head. “I couldn’t ask that.”
“You’re not,” Kassidy said. “I’m telling you. No way my friend is living in some little shack overlooking a dumpster.”
Sliding out of Kassidy’s side embrace, Arlie picked up the oversized photography books she’d set up on the small coffee table, needing to be busy. Needing to get this done. “I don’t know, Kassidy.”
“Come on.” Her friend broke into a mock whine. “It will be just like the old days. Only we’ll be able to drink wine and watch all the naked men we want.”
Arlie laughed, remembering the time Kassidy’s famously strict father had caught them with a bottle of Boone’s Farm Strawberry Hill and a bootleg Blu-ray of Blue Lagoon. They’d both ended up grounded for a month of summer break.
“I’ll think about it.”
A knock on her office door sent Arlie’s heart racing. She turned around slowly, hoping to God she didn’t see Parker, or worse—Samuel—standing there.
Thankfully, it was neither.
Mason slouched in the doorframe, handsome and carefree, if a bit rumpled. “Say it ain’t so.”
So much for Charlotte waiting to give Mason her letter.
“It’s so.” Arlie cushioned a mug full of pens in her office sweater and nestled the bundle into the box. “All of it.”
Crossing the office, Mason dropped into a chair opposite the desk. “Look, what happened between you and Samuel doesn’t need to end your employment at Kane Foods.”
“I thought my sleeping with your brother was a pretty clear violation of your father’s one and only inviolable rule.”
“Wait.” Mason’s tawny brows gathered in the center of his smooth, tanned forehead. “What?”
Arlie’s cheeks flamed scarlet. “I... You... What were you referring to?”
“After the conversation we had in the convention hall and what happened at the sand dunes, I just assumed—”
“Sand dunes?” Kassidy stopped short, a print of Ansel Adams’ Half Dome clutched in her hands. “What happened at the sand dunes?”
Mason leaned forward in his chair. “You’re saying, you and Samuel—?”
“Try to keep up, Kane,” Kassidy interrupted. “There was mutual groping on the yacht and they hooked up at your family’s winery. Accurate?” Kassidy cut her eyes to Arlie.
“Yes, but—”
“What we all seem to be unclear about is what went down after the sand dunes. Perhaps Arlie could enlighten us?” Seating herself in the chair next to Mason, Kassidy propped one long, legging-clad ankle on the opposite knee.
So, she did. Describing the ambulance ride, the hospital, her escorting Samuel up to the hotel room afterward. And, at last, coming to the part she really wasn’t looking forward to.
She paused, looking Mason in the eye. “I’m afraid this next part might be upsetting. And if you’d rather ask Samuel yourself—”
“I’m a big boy,” he said in a flirty tone that might have been for Kassidy’s benefit. “I can take it.”
Taking a deep breath, she plunged ahead. “That night, at the Fairmont, Samuel told me the real reason he’d hired me.”
Genuine confusion etched a crease in Mason’s brow. “What do you mean the real reason?”
“He was hoping that, given a chance to bag the one conquest who had escaped you, you’d break your father’s cardinal rule and get yourself ejected from the company.” She glanced nervously at Mason. “Permanently.”
Mason huffed a breath, leaning back in his chair. Stripped of his usual cavalier, devil-may-care countenance, the younger Kane looked—dare she say it—thoughtful.
“Samuel went through all that trouble just to get rid of me?”
Arlie observed him carefully, looking for signs of reaction to this information, unsure what to expect.
A frown flickered at the corners of his mouth, but didn’t quite land. His eyes unfocused as he contemplated the space beyond Arlie’s shoulder.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I should have—”
“No.” Mason shook his head emphatically as he stood. “No, this is good.”
“Good?” Arlie asked incredulously. “How can this possibly be good?”
“Do you have any idea what it would take for Samuel to break not just a rule, but our father’s primary rule? Plot to overthrow me notwithstanding.”
“What do you mean?” Kassidy asked as if reading Arlie’s mind.
“I just mean that there may be hope for him yet.” Mason scratched his jaw, sandpapery with stubble. “This is the first time I can remember him willingly engaging in subterfuge for his own benefit. Except for that time he pretended to be me in order to get you in the closet the night of our graduation. But I don’t know if that technically counts.”
“You knew about that?” Arlie suddenly felt like someone had dialed the office thermostat up by about twenty degrees.
“Please,” Mason said. “You don’t think every pathetic preppie piece of shit in the school came up afterward to congratulate me for scoring seven minutes with Arlie Banks?”
She hadn’t exactly imagined that scenario.
“Of course,” he continued, “when you didn’t say a word about it to me, I suspected that you knew, too.”
“You suspected correctly,” she confirmed.
“The thing I find interesting,” Mason said, turning to face them, “is that both events have something in common. You.”
“I’m not sure what I’m supposed to do with that information,” Arlie said.
Strolling back toward the desk, Mason seated himself on the corner. “I probably seem like the least likely person to defend Samuel’s actions from the present vantage, but I would point out that having a father like ours can incline one to—” he paused, as if looking for the right words “—less than optimal behaviors.”
Arlie sensed the unspoken depths in that statement.
“Will you do me a favor?” Mason asked.
“What’s that?”
“Take a week and think about it.” He rose from the desk to stand next to her. “We can hold your resignation until you’ve had more time.”
“I appreciate you being willing to do that,” Arlie said. “But after everything that’s happened, I really think it’s best that I go.”
Mason nodded, looking uncharacteristically melancholy. “I understand.”
“Well.” Arlie retrieved her notebook and added it to the box before hefting it onto her hip. “I think that’s it.”
Kassidy picked up her Burberry trench coat and followed her toward the door. “Good seeing you, Kane.”
“Likewise, Kassidy the brain Nichols.”
“For future reference, I would vastly prefer you not call me that.”
Arlie liked to think she knew her best friend’s face at least half as well as Kassidy knew hers, and what she read there was not exactly displeasure at Mason.
“I look forward to the future occasion where I might prove my ability to honor that request.”
They turned to go.
“Arlie?” Mason called when they had almost reached the door.
She looked back at him. “Yes?”
Familiar mischief banished the gloom from his features. “How did you know?”
“How did I know what?” she asked.
“The closet. How did you know it wasn’t me?”
His question spun her backward in their shared past. A flickering montage of her life’s significant moments spooled by her mind’s eye until she arrived at the night in question. Through the vantage of her eighteen-year-old self, she watched Mason exiting through the backdoor only to reappear minutes later at the mouth of the hallway.
One of Mason’s regular posse had come up to him then, clapping him on the shoulder before pressing a red plastic cup of foamy beer into his hand. Which is when he had lifted his left hand and with the tip of his index finger, attempted to push a pair of nonexistent glasses up his nose.
She must have witnessed this precise gesture at least a thousand times.
Mason—the real Mason—had gotten contacts on his thirteenth birthday. Arlie remembered because he had beckoned her over to look at them, insisting she lean in close enough to see if she could detect their ethereal edges.
Of course, he had tried to kiss her when she was close enough.
The present Mason hung there, awaiting her answer.
“Research,” she said, sending him an enigmatic smile.