Authors: Tara Pammi
Before she could reply that she had no wish to leave, Kim hung up. Olivia sat up and only then did the small noises filter through to her brain. Footsteps shuffling outside her door, a low hum of whispers creeping in through the window... Pushing her hair out of the way, she went to it.
And jumped back as though someone had stuck a hot poker through the window.
Swarms of sleazy tabloid reporters, and more than one local network news crew were parked in front of her building. Sweat beaded on her lip, her leg muscles cramped up. It felt as if her worst nightmare had opened up shop in front of her building, ready to swallow her up.
This couldn’t be happening again, not to her... She had done nothing to deserve it this time, nothing but fall in love....
She bent over and forced herself to breathe, tears streaming down her face. Now she understood why Kim had sounded concerned. She knew it in the back of her mind, she had known it was bad that she had been photographed with Alexander, kissing him, in his arms.
But until now, the reality of what it meant hadn’t sunk in. How could it when all she could think of, all she could see was Alexander’s face, anger and disgust vying on it, all she felt was the crushing pain that he could walk away? Her stomach fell as the haze of grief cleared and more and more things scrambled into her head.
Scandal...Emily, Isabella.
She couldn’t let Emily pay the price for her mistake. Not because she hadn’t been strong enough to say no to Alexander. Not because he refused to take a chance on them.
She stood up and scrubbed her face. Every instinct in her screamed at her to lie low, to curl up in her bed and not step outside the apartment.
Fear was a tight knot in her stomach. The more it clawed at her, the faster she moved. She dressed quickly, grabbed her handbag, put her sunglasses on and closed the door behind her.
Within minutes, she was pushing through the rusty metal door in the foyer and stepping onto the pavement.
The uproar of the small crowd, the stench of their curiosity knocked her in the gut, and she almost slipped.
Taking even a breath felt like work, but she did it. She faltered before catching the newspaper thrown at her with the image of Alexander and her kissing on the front page. They looked lost in each other, lost to the world.
Olivia Stanton’s Latest Conquest: Her Twin’s Husband.
The headline ripped through her, and she gasped for breath, as though a knife had been plunged into her heart.
Cameras clicked, microphones were thrust in her face, but she kept moving, not focusing on any of them, letting all their images shift and blur, struggling to let their invasive, soul-crushing questions slide by her.
“Does your sister know what you did, Olivia?”
“Is he sleeping with both of you?”
“What is about another woman’s man that draws you so much?”
She held it together, she walked past them and miraculously, almost made it to a waiting cab. Until someone shouted the worst question at her, the one that tore through her, the one that almost knuckled her down right there.
“Do you think he’s in love with you?”
* * *
A few of the worst hours of her life later, Olivia reached Kim’s apartment complex in an upscale neighborhood of Manhattan. Thankfully, there were no reporters hovering on the street. But she knew it was only a matter of time before they descended on Kim. With hurried steps, she walked through the door held open by the uniformed doorman, his prying gaze eating her up.
All she wanted to do was to jump in the shower, get into bed and not emerge for a few days. She pressed the up arrow for the elevator and the doors opened with a smooth swish.
And her father stepped out.
She froze. Her gut clenched tight into a painful, unforgiving knot. The muscles in her legs tightened. The urge to flee pummeled her blood. She threw a quick look behind her, trying to see past the foyer into the street, weighing the chance of leaving without someone from the press trailing her again.
“Yes, run away again. It’s not like you’re capable of anything else. You were always like your mother.”
The words landed on her like the sharp points of countless needles, flaying her. And still, all she wanted was to do exactly as he said.
Run away.
Her hands hung by her sides, she turned around and forced herself to meet his gaze.
Silver hair cut short, he was immaculately dressed in a gray suit, his favorite pair of platinum cuff links gleaming at the cuffs, the pair that she had always wanted to pound to dust with a hammer. “Hello, Dad,” she said, the words incredibly hard to form. She swallowed past the fear scratching her throat. She didn’t want to explain, but this time, she needed to. She knew how bad it looked. She shouldn’t care, but she couldn’t let him go on believing the absolute worst about her. “I know how it looks, but —”
“Have you no shame, Olivia?” His words boomed around the empty corridor, echoing around her, until all she could hear was the derision etched into each of them. Her skin crawled. “I knew it. You’re nothing better than a slut who would betray her own twin. Have you fallen so low that only a married man would do?”
She moved her hands to her ears, trembling, each word sinking its claws into her skin. “Stop it, Dad. Give me a chance to—”
“No wonder you were successful with that advertising contract.”
She tried to breathe through the crushing pain in her chest. It shouldn’t come as a surprise, his words shouldn’t have this much power to hurt her, yet they did. “That’s not true. I worked hard for—”
“Do you expect me to believe that? That you achieved anything through hard work and talent? The only thing you were ever good at was making a shameless spectacle of yourself with any man who would look at you twice.”
“How could I be good at anything? You constantly pushed me into things I didn’t want to do, criticized anything I did enjoy. You leeched away every ounce of joy from my life, you belittled me until...”
Alexander’s words came back to her. Wrong careers, wrong men, she had pursued all the wrong things just because she hadn’t thought any better of herself. Because inside where it mattered, she hadn’t thought herself worthy of anything, that she would never be good enough for someone nice and decent.
Like Alexander.
Familiar pain scratched her insides, but something else fueled her, too. She
was
better than she thought, she did deserve better and she had already proved it to herself.
It had hurt like a part of her was being wrenched away, but she had walked away from Alexander, she had stood up for what she was worth. Her heart might never recover from it, she would never stop loving him, but she had nothing to prove to anyone, either, least of all her father.
She took a couple of steps toward him. She hadn’t stood this close to him in a while, the smell of the cigars he enjoyed swathed her, bittersweet in the memories it evoked. “Kim—” she didn’t want to betray her sister’s news “—she knows about us and she doesn’t care. And Alexander, he...cares about me—”
“Don’t add delusion to your already long list of weaknesses. The truth is, a man like Alexander will kick you to the curb the minute his fancy wears off, and he has, hasn’t he?”
It was the worst she had believed about herself, and hearing the words from her father’s mouth ate into her newfound beliefs. It was so easy, too easy to stop fighting his words, to let the old fears creep back in, to think that Alexander had walked away so easily because it had been
her.
That she hadn’t been enough, her love hadn’t been enough.
No.
She took a deep breath. She wasn’t going to do this to herself anymore.
The wall of hurt she had nursed since childhood splintered, the wall she had cowered behind, a fierce rush of anger breaking through. “The truth? The truth is that you’re a bully, and nothing more.” She breathed hard, feeling as though her lungs would collapse, as though the pain tightening her stomach would never ease. “You drove Mom away with your constant degrading, you made me think so little of myself and Kim,
God
, you made her believe she was worth nothing if she didn’t excel at everything. You’re a vile man who draws satisfaction from belittling everyone around you. And I hope I never see you again.”
Her shoulders stiff, her head held high, she walked into the elevator and hit the up arrow. Every muscle in her body trembled, every nerve stretched so tight that she felt as if she would break if she even took a breath. Tears streamed down her face. She slid to a heap on the floor as the elevator moved up. But she didn’t care.
She hadn’t cowered in front of her father.
She hoped she never saw him again in this lifetime. Like walking away from Alexander, she didn’t have it in her to do it twice.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
A
LEXANDER
SWITCHED
ON
the flat-screen monitor in his office, and halted. Olivia’s smiling face filled the forty-two inch monitor. His heart jumped into his throat. It was a shot from when she had starred in the reality dating show, which hadn’t ended well for her.
Her head thrown back, she was laughing at something her date said. Her eyes shone with brilliance, the wide curve of her mouth sent his heart pulsing. The screen flicked back to the anchor and he muted it, his stomach churning viciously. He’d heard the sensational story for three days and had no wish to hear it again.
But Olivia was a survivor. Any other woman would have long ago given up, her life a combination of impulses, bad luck and all the wrong people. But she hadn’t. Every time something had brought her down, she had dusted herself off and fought back. And she had finally found success in advertising. Except he had ruined it all. Now, even the contract she had won was tainted, reduced into something cheap and tawdry because of him.
It had been three of the worst days of his life. Everything he had known, everything he had built, had unraveled around him as the scandal hit the media Friday afternoon. By that time, he had taken all the measures he could, made sure Emily was in sight. Except the one thing he should have done.
By the time he’d recovered from the shock of what he’d brought on himself, hours had passed. He’d dispatched Carlos to pick up Olivia, to take her to a safe place, but he’d been too late.
Olivia, being Olivia, had stepped out into the horde of overzealous reporters lined up along her street. The shot zeroed in on her face as she ventured past the microphones and cameras. The invasive questions, the allegations of their affair, they had pecked at her like a pack of hungry vultures.
Why? Why hadn’t she just stayed at her apartment? He knew how much she feared them. And yet she had walked into the throng.
A hand fisted his heart, making it hard to breathe as pictures of him and Olivia filled the screen. They looked lost in each other, his hands on her waist, their bodies glued to each other.
Nausea rose inside him and he turned it off, unable to stand it any longer. It wasn’t enough that Alexander himself was castigated, his background, the story of his parents, everything brought into the foreground to illuminate the scandal, to portray that he was finally, a man who made mistakes like everyone else.
No, Olivia was paying the highest price of them all.
If he was attacked, it was nothing compared to what the media called her—the woman who’d been having an affair with her twin’s husband. As if he had no part in the whole thing, as if it was all her fault. They’d shredded her to pieces and the unfairness of it burned a path of fury through him.
While in reality, she wasn’t at fault at all. She had never lied to him, never shied away from what she was, what she felt. And everything she’d given him had been reduced to a tawdry affair because of him. He had become one of the numerous people who had hurt her.
Emotions roiled through him like lava, anger at himself, frustration and the worst of all, guilt. It clawed up his insides. He had not only brought the worst to her, but he had left her alone to deal with it. He had been so intent on running from what she made him feel, he had become a man with no honor, a man who would leave the woman who had done nothing but stand by him, to the wolves.
And it hurt. Whatever he did, however he thought about it, the pain wouldn’t go away. He wanted to make it go away. He wanted to shut off everything and go back. It was as though everything he’d always been able to control was rebelling, drowning him in it.
He had everything under control. He had a team of the best lawyers in the country to take on anything his mother threw at him. Yes, his company had lost some of its share value thanks to the scandal, but he had enough money that nothing was unrecoverable.
Then why did he feel so empty and weighed down? He’d restored his world to normality, but that sense of control that had always been his strength couldn’t shake off the void.
He grabbed the paperweight from his table and chucked it with all the force he could muster. An action he would have laughed at as juvenile, something he would’ve never done a month ago. The wall caved slightly under the impact, and he turned away to the French windows that revealed an uncommonly gray New York. He stood looking into the city, letting the cold creep into his skin.
Had she finally washed her hands off him, given up on him? Had she finally realized what a coward he was?
He stared at his image in the glass. Outwardly, nothing was different. But everything had changed inside. He let the truth he’d been fighting in, let it seep into his blood, sink into his cells.
He had thrown away the best thing that had happened to him because he was a damn coward, too scared to feel, too scared to take what he had wanted all his life.
He missed Olivia with a longing he had never felt before. It was a constant ache in his gut, a fist in his chest. He missed her mischievous laugh, he missed the way she challenged everything he said, he missed the way she didn’t let him get away with anything.
After everything he’d gone through the past few days, after everything he’d felt, he’d thought he was done. Only a tendril of fear curled itself around his heart now, stealing his breath, drenching him in a chill that had nothing to do with the temperature.
He, Alexander King, the man who had made millions through sheer will, the man who’d arranged everything in his life to suit him was scared that he was too late, that he’d lost the one woman who’d looked beyond the surface, the one woman who’d smashed through his barriers and made him feel something.
And this time, he didn’t even have the hope of picking himself up from this, because Olivia had gouged a hole in him, had wrenched a part of him away.
He was that seventeen-year-old boy again, hurting like hell, drowning in pain, mired in guilt.
He turned as the door opened. Carlos walked in, his expression revealing nothing. Before Alex could question him, the door opened a little more and in walked his mother. He had known this was coming, he’d been prepared for it. Yet it pulled at something inside him and he had no strength or control left to push it away.
“Hello, Isabella,” he murmured, tucking his hands into the pockets of his trousers. His mother looked stunning as ever. “Wise choice, not to bring Nick along. At least you will get a civil conversation out of me.”
She said nothing, only stared at him, her brown gaze raking over him.
He poured himself a drink and settled into the leather sofa in the adjoining lounge. “Could you just not resist the temptation to see me at my lowest?” The bitterness in his voice surprised even him.
Isabella stared at him warily, as though she was afraid he would just lose it. And the way he was feeling, she wasn’t far from truth. “Are you at your lowest?”
He stared into his drink, uncaring of what he revealed. “Yes. So, whatever you’ve come to do, do it fast and get out.”
She sat down on the couch, her beautiful face level with his. “I’m not your enemy, Alexander.” Two weeks ago, he could have crushed the pang that ran through him, he wouldn’t even have registered the note of concern that crept into her voice. It was a measure of how much had changed in his perception because of Olivia and it staggered him.
He studied her, the anger, the resentment he had felt so long ago seeping into him unchecked. His hand trembled as he took a sip. “You want to take Emily from me.”
She shook her head. “No, I don’t. I know it’s hard for you to believe but your father and I are different people now.”
He snorted, Olivia’s claim that people could change running through his head.
“I don’t want to drag you through a court battle. All I want is to see Emily and...
you.
I was getting desperate, yes... But...Olivia convinced me not to do anything rash.”
He bolted from the couch and dropped his glass on the coffee table. The drink sloshed over it and onto the thick cream carpet. Hope fluttered through him. If she’d gone to see Isabella... “Where is she? What did you say to her?”
“Carlos—” she flicked her head toward him “—brought her to me.”
“What is she talking about? You said you never found Olivia.”
Carlos didn’t even flicker an eyelid. “I lied to you, for the first time in my life.”
The censure in his friend’s words burned through his gut. “Damn it, Carlos. This is not the time to—”
His mother’s voice broke through him. “Alexander—”
“If you said anything to hurt her—”
“I’m not the one who broke the poor girl’s heart.”
“You don’t get to advise me. You had a chance to be my mother, and you threw it away.”
“I did,” she said, nodding, even her acceptance of her failure regal, as if she was a queen surveying her mess. “I ruined your childhood, there’s no excuse for that. But you’re the one messing up your life now, all on your own. Without any help from me or Nick. You’re walking away from the one good thing in your life.”
He kept his mouth shut, refusing to admit that she was, for once in his life, right. He pulled his jacket on and turned toward Carlos. He pushed
Please
through gritted teeth.
Carlos looked over him, his expression blank. “After I took her to see Isabella, she went to her sister’s. And when she got there, Jeremiah Stanton was waiting.”
Alexander’s heart jumped into his throat, cutting off his air. “What did he say?”
His jaw clenched, Carlos shook his head. “I can’t repeat what he said to her, Alex. I had to use every bit of my expertise to stop the damn press van trailing behind us from hearing his terrible words to her.”
Alexander slid back against the wall, helplessness and fury pummeling through him. He would have given anything to be told that Jeremiah Stanton had given Liv the support, the love she deserved.
He sank into the couch, his head in his hands. He had done this to her. And even if he begged her forgiveness and by some miracle, she did forgive him, she would still never be able to leave this behind. Her career, her life, they would always be tainted. He had to make it right.
He shuddered at the thought of what he needed to do. He had spent over half his life keeping them out of his life. But, for Olivia, he had to face them, he had to give her back what he had taken from her. He clicked his cell phone and called Kim. Within minutes, he had instructions for Carlos.
He was about to walk out the door when his mother’s voice washed over him.
“May I see Emily, Alexander?”
Automatic refusal rose to his lips, but he stopped it. Isabella’s gaze was filled with hope, and fear. She hadn’t engaged him in battle because Olivia had convinced her otherwise. If he said no, all that Olivia had done would be for nothing. He had to take a chance on Isabella, for Emily’s sake. “Yes, you may, only in my presence.” A smile curved Isabella’s mouth, warmth shone in her eyes, transforming her face to breathtaking. It touched a part of him he wasn’t ready to embrace, might never be ready to embrace.
“Don’t screw it up,” he warned her.
It was a warning that echoed in his own mind. Uncertainty pricked him. He had taken a chance on Isabella. Would Olivia give him one? She had to forgive him, she had to let him make it up to her. If she didn’t, he had only a lifetime of pain and utter misery to look forward to.