Chapter Seventeen

 

 

 

“Though this engagement may be sudden, it’s most definitely welcomed by all who know the happy couple.”

“I’m going to fucking kill her!” Kelly had gone back to the Meadowlark suite to change clothes for breakfast, having been told that she would find something that fit her in the closet. The closet was full of lovely possibilities, the closet was great. The news when she turned it on, not so much.

She had just shoved her way into a brand new pair of black jeans that fit like a glove when suddenly she found herself watching Dillon Mathews on the big screen, announcing her engagement to Alexander Valentine to a cheering crowd. She stumbled back against the bedstead and grabbed for the remote to turn up the volume. “I’m gonna kill him,” she’d growled. “What the hell was he thinking?” Then it hit her, surely he wouldn’t make such a statement without Lex’s consent? A chill ran down her spine. Was she trapped? Was Lex Valentine a haphephobic madman who had stalked his prey and when the moment was right reeled her, completely unaware of what was happening, into his lair? Jesus! Surely not! Surely he wouldn’t do that. She was a good judge of character. She always had been. She couldn’t possibly make such a stupid mistake. But then there were the free tickets that came with the great Alexander Valentine’s complements, and there was the limo he’d sent to pick them up.

She was about to begin plotting her escape when who should mount the stage right next to Dillon ‘the liar’ Matthews but her best friend, Myrna ‘the traitor’ fucking Kieran! “How could you? How could you do this to me, Judas! Brutus! Benedict Arnold!” she growled at the image of her friend, then lobbed the half drank bottle of water at the enormous television, using every expletive she knew and some she’d only just made up. Then she grabbed her cell phone and punched up Myrna’s number so hard that she broke two nails.

“What the hell have you done?” she yelled into the phone the second Myrna picked up, not giving her a chance to respond. “Dillon fucking Matthews said that it was a good idea to tell the press that I was Lex’s girlfriend, for spin purposes, since he couldn’t tell them what I really do. He didn’t say anything about telling them I was his bloody fiancée! How could you do this? What the hell were you thinking?”

“I was thinking that the two of you are good together,” came the mousy little voice that was so not Myrna Kieran.

“Good together? Good together! I’ve seen the man a whopping three times. Once he ran out, once I ran out and the third we both fucking ran out.”

“Dillon said—”

“I know what Dillon said. The whole goddamned world knows what Dillon said, and what you said! The engagement is off! Spin that. Now get your ass out here, and pick me up,” then she added as an afterthought, “and bring me some clothes. I’ll send you the address. Oh, fuck! I don’t even know the address! Do you have any idea the position you’ve put me in?”

“I have the address,” her friend said softly. “Dillon gave it to me when he called me last night. I’ll be there as soon as I can.”

 

* * * *

 

“I’m going to fucking kill you,” Lex shouted at Dillon. “Jesus, do you have any idea what Kelly’s going to think now? I already look enough like a stalker as it is. I was just beginning to get her to trust me, just beginning to make her consider that just possibly I wasn’t quite the nutter that I appear to be, then you go and pull a stupid-assed stunt like this and remove all doubt.”

Dillon took the ass-chewing he had completely expected to get and waited quietly until Lex stopped ranting to take a breath, then he said, “She doesn’t think you’re a nutter. She never thought that, and she won’t blame you. I’ll make sure of it. That’s part of the reason I involved her secretary.”

“So you’ve put their friendship at risk with your little scheme too, have you? Did it ever occur that Myrna Kieran is more than just Kelly’s secretary, and you’ve convinced her to betray that trust between them? Dillon, how could you do this? What the hell were you thinking?”

Dillon looked down at his hands folded on his desk as though he were about to say a prayer, and he certainly would have if he’d thought it might help. True, he had expected this, but that didn’t make it any easier. “What I was thinking,” he replied, taking in a shaky breath, “is that you risked a helluva lot to be with this woman, to see her again. What I was thinking is that she didn’t hesitate for a moment in coming to your rescue, not one moment. What I was thinking is that she’s good for you, you’re good for each other.”

Lex brought the flat of his hand down hard on the desktop, and the papers and other detritus rustled around it. “That’s not your decision to make. It’s hers…Kelly’s and mine. And now you two, Mr. and Mrs. Fix-it, have taken whatever might have happened naturally out of our hands.” He turned and left the office, slamming the door hard enough behind him to make Dillon jump.

 

* * * *

 

Kelly struggled her way back into the red dress and grabbed up what few belongings she had. The anger had given way to sadness. Lex, Alexander Valentine had been her hero. She really, really liked the man. How could he possibly pull a stunt like this? She forced herself not to think of last night’s intimacy. Surely that couldn’t have been a lie. Then she moved into the study and began searching through the Internet news. Alexander Valentine a Nut Case and His Fiancée a Hooligan. That was the headline for the Talk About Town podcast. Well, that came as no surprise. The local stations, though, were all filled with joyous felicitations for the happy couples’ imminent nuptials. Apparently some marketing savvy person had already set up a fund to which people could donate to the women and children’s hospital as an engagement gift. Damn it! How was she ever going to undo this tangle? In the midst of all the hoopla was an interview with a prominent psychologist who was an expert on haphephobia, which he said was clearly the condition from which the unfortunate Alexander Valentine suffered. To prove his point, the network ran slow mos and replays of Lex at different times in the evening—usually the times when he was the most vulnerable. The whole damn thing made her chest ache. Surely it couldn’t have all been some ploy for publicity.

She shut off the computer, shoved her cell phone into her clutch and walked to the door like the room behind her was on fire. She stomped down the stairs in the worse-for-wear red dress, barefoot and carrying the suicide heels. She planned just to wait in the entryway next to the door for Myrna the Traitor, but then she heard raised voices in the kitchen and decided there was a better use for her time.

As she rounded the corner, Dillon was just coming out of his office right behind Lex. “Lex, wait, listen to me,” he was saying. Cookie had just stepped in from the kitchen, spatula in hand, and V came to the door of her office to see what all the commotion was about. All eyes were suddenly on Kelly.

“Shit!” Both men said in unison.

“You!” Kelly said in a voice that was loud enough to raise the dead. “You!” She approached Dillon Matthews at speed, stopped dead in front of him and slapped him as hard as she could, nearly knocking the unsuspecting man off his feet. When he’d steadied himself, eyes watering and cheek bearing a bright red likeness of her handprint, she spoke. “That was for you, you sonovabitch. And this—” She slapped his other cheek just as hard, doing her best to hide the fact that it hurt her damn near as much as it hurt him. “Well, you’re Alexander Valentine’s PA, so you see to it that he gets whatever the hands-off equivalent of that is. And you!” She turned her fury on Lex.” You, I would kill if I could touch you!”

“Kelly, Lex—”

“You shut up! I’m not talking to you,” she cut Dillon off at the pass. “You’re the PA, not the brains behind the operation. How could I have been so stupid? How could I have not seen this? Why?”

“Kelly, I—” She turned on Dillon and slapped him again. “Fucking hell,” he grunted.

“I told you I wasn’t talking to you. I’m talking to your slime bag, rat bastard sleaze bucket of a boss who…” She turned her attention to back to Lex. “What was it you wanted from me? An apology for walking out on you the last time we were together? Well, you already had that. But you had to go and complicate things further by…” She gave a couple of fish gasps in an effort to find words. “I trusted you, Lex. I fucking trusted you. Here I thought we had connected, and all this is just a goddamned publicity stunt?”

Lex, who had stood silently through her whole rant exploded. “A publicity stunt? Seriously? You think I need to use someone no one has ever heard of for publicity? What about you? It was your secretary who made sure everyone knew that you were a writer and exactly what you wrote.”

“You bastard, you, you, you, you!” This time when words failed her, she grabbed an apple out of the fruit bowl on the breakfast table and lobbed it at him. Her aim was true and it hit him in the chest with a hard ka-thunk, then rolled across the floor to stop at V’s feet.

“You hit me! You fucking hit me!” Lex said, hand resting against his chest as though he’d been shot. He looked around the room wide-eyed and fierce then grabbed the half-eaten pineapple muffin from V’s hand and tossed it like a pitcher for the pros, hitting her right between the eyes.

Cookie uttered a little cry and crossed herself. V shot Dillon a concerned glance, but the man only shook his head before Kelly grabbed up a glass of cranberry juice from the table and tossed it in Lex’s face. V didn’t snigger, but Dillon did, so she lobbed a shoe at him, which hit him on the temple and bounced off. “Bloody hell, woman, you’ve got an arm on you,” he said.

“Shut up, Dillon!” Lex had grabbed a kitchen towel to wipe his face. Then he turned it on Kelly, flicking it at her with a loud snap that nabbed her in the middle of the stomach.

“You sonovabitch”—she threw several apricots and a plum in fast succession—“I don’t need your help to sell my books.” A banana hit him on the top of the head and bounced off as he snapped her again with the towel—this time on the ass. “I didn’t need it before—” For emphasis, she fast-pitched a nectarine and a rapid-fire barrage of Thompson seedless grapes, targeting everything from the man’s forehead to his crotch as he did a little dance to avoid them. “And I don’t need it now, and in case you’ve forgotten, you invited me to your goddamned exhibition!”

He grabbed a glass of water and gave her a drenching. She responded with more grapes.

“Lex didn’t know! Kelly, Lex had no idea!”

There was another barrage of grapes and Cookie yelped and barely saved the basket of muffins from Lex before he settled on three slices of bread and a poppy seed roll, the last hitting her on her left tit and bouncing off.

By that time Dillon fucking Matthews was flat-out laughing. She was just about to give him another good slapping when she froze. “What the hell did you say?”

“I said, that Lex had nothing to do with what Myrna and I told the press last night, and I instigated the whole thing. She would have never done it without my putting her in a very awkward situation.”

Kelly stood, with one hand in the depleted fruit basket and another suicide gripping her bag, suddenly feeling very silly. “Well why didn’t you tell me? Why the hell didn’t somebody tell me?”

“I was rather enjoying you and Lex’s version of angry sex.”

This time it was Lex who picked up a carafe of tomato juice from the table and up-ended the whole thing over the man’s head. But not before Kelly realized the obvious, Lex was hard and she was wet in places far removed from her dripping head. They stood at the center of the ransacked kitchen, both blushing hard, both making furtive glances for tell-tale signs of the heat they were each feeling. “I’m sorry, Lex,” she said. “As for you—” She glared at Dillon, who, dripping tomato juice, raised his hand to block just in case she slapped him again. “Your imminent, very bloody, death may no longer be a given, but you’d do well to remember that it’s still in the realm of serious possibilities.”

Into the chaos, Kelly’s phone rang. “What!” she said when she saw it was Myrna.

“Hi, hon.” She immediately recognized Myrna’s ‘things-not-going-to-plan’ voice. “I couldn’t get to your house without dealing with a mass of reporters, so I had a shower and made coffee. When I got finished the reporters were all gone. I went to your house to get you some clothes, just like you said, and… Well, maybe you’d better turn on the TV, because I don’t think I’m going to get to you without major problems.”

Just then there was a knock at the back door and the gardener let himself in, shifting from foot to foot and looking rather worse for the wear. “I’m sorry, Cookie, but I think Mr. Valentine needs to know that I had a terrible time getting through the gate this morning. Cameras and television vans everywhere. Best no one leaves if they don’t have to.”

V had just switched on the television, and Kelly recognized a good number of the same reporters from the exhibition standing outside the gates to Mountain View.

The reporter in the dark pencil skirt, looking less fresh than she had when she stood in front of Kelly’s house, but at least as excited, updated her enthralled audience. “If you live in a cave, you might have missed the unexpected twists and turns of Hendricks Gallery’s gala charity auction of renowned and reclusive sculptor, Alexander Valentine’s work, which he generously donated for the Cascadia Women and Children’s Hospital. Mr. Valentine surprised all in attendance by making his first ever public appearance. The evening very nearly ended in disaster, though, as the haphephobic artist was crowded by fans, only to be rescued by the mysterious woman in red, who is no longer a mystery. In fact, she’s quite familiar to Alexander Valentine, as novelist Kelly Blake, is soon to be the future Mrs. Valentine.”

“So we were being followed last night,” Kelly said.

The reporter continued. “The little adventure which was highlighted by Ms. Blake’s dramatic rescue of her fiancé from the crowd and their escape via Valentine’s limo, has created as many questions as it has answered. How did the couple meet? Does their work inspire each other? Where does Alexander Valentine stay? Is the future Mrs. Valentine able to touch her fiancé or are there…issues?”

“Fuck.” Lex, his face suddenly crimson, reached for the remote and switched the television off just as the woman was informing everyone that at least the mystery of Alexander Valentine’s lair had been solved and that the reporters had it on good authority that the happy couple were in residence at Mountain View. “Fuck,” he said again. He tossed the remote on the ruined breakfast table and shoved his way past the gardener and out of the house through the biggest veg patch Kelly had ever seen.

“Fuck,” she cursed her agreement. She lobbed her remaining shoe at the tomato juice-dripping Dillon Matthews. Then she turned to the gardener. “Can you dig a grave on the grounds somewhere for me?” She shot Dillon another glare then looked down at her phone, where Myrna was still on hold. “Make it a double.” Then she headed back upstairs to the Meadowlark suite for a much-needed shower.