Deadly Little Scandals Read online

  “This mess isn’t mine,” I countered. “It’s me.”

  I fully expected Lillian to take issue with that statement, but instead, she raised an eyebrow. “You are rather perpetually disheveled.” She produced a hair clip seemingly out of nowhere and “suggested” that I make use of it. “You have such a pretty face,” she added. “Lord knows why you’re so intent on hiding it under those bangs.”

  She said bangs like a curse word. Before she could lament the fact that I’d had her hairdresser chop off a great deal of my hair, I preempted the complaint. “I needed a change.”

  I’d needed something. I’d spent years wondering who my father was. Now I was living under the same roof with the man, and neither one of us had acknowledged that fact. It would have been easier if I’d thought he was ignorant, but he knew I was his daughter. My mom had said as much, and on that, I was certain she was telling the truth.

  The whole situation was a mess. My entire life, my mom had never once made me feel like a mistake, but somehow, discovering that she’d conceived me on purpose made me feel like one.

  If my mom hadn’t still been grieving her father’s death…

  If she hadn’t felt like a stranger in her own family and desperately wanted someone or something to call her own…

  If her “friend” Greer hadn’t seen that vulnerability and sold her on a ridiculous, happy vision of becoming a teen mom…

  Then I wouldn’t exist.

  “Sawyer.” Lillian said my name gently. “Bangs are for blondes and toddlers, and you, my dear, are neither.”

  If she wanted to pretend that my hair was the real issue between us—and in this family—I was okay with that. For now.

  “If you brought me here to check up on me,” I told her, “I’m fine.” I averted my gaze, and it landed on my grandfather’s tombstone. “I’m a liar, but I’m fine.”

  I couldn’t forgive my mom for deceiving me, but every day, I got up and let Aunt Olivia and Lily and John David go about life like normal. It was hard not to feel like the apple hadn’t fallen far from the tree.

  “Your mama was a daddy’s girl, Sawyer.” Lillian looked back at the tombstone. “Your aunt, too. Growing up the way they did, they never had to be fighters. But you? You’ve got a healthy dose of me in you, and where I come from, a person has to fight to survive.”

  That was the second time she’d referenced her origins. “Why did you bring me here?” I asked, unable to shake the feeling that nothing about this conversation—including the location—was an accident.

  Lillian was quiet for a stretch, long enough that I wasn’t sure she was going to reply. “You asked me weeks ago if I could find out what happened to your mama’s friend Ana.”

  The breath stilled in my chest. Ana, Ellie, and Greer, I thought, forcing myself to keep breathing. Three teenage girls, one pact. Greer had lost her baby, and that meant that Ana’s—if she’d had it—was the only other person on this planet with an origin story the exact same flavor of screwed-up as mine.

  Her kid would be my age now, almost exactly.

  “What did you find out?” I asked Lillian, my mouth dry.

  “Ana was a quiet little thing. My recollection of her was fuzzy. She was new in town. I’d heard of her people but didn’t know them. From what I’ve pieced together, she and her family picked up and moved back home around the time I found out about your mama’s delicate condition.”

  By that time, I thought, Ana was pregnant, too.

  “Where were they from?” I asked. “Where did they move back to?”

  There was a long pause as my grandmother made an intense study of me. “Why do you want to find this woman?”

  Lillian knew that Uncle J.D. was my father, but as far as I’d been able to tell, she had no knowledge of the pact. There was no real reason for me to keep it from her, but it wasn’t the easiest thing in the world to come right out and say.

  “Sawyer?” my grandmother prompted.

  “Ana was pregnant, too,” I said, clipping the words. “They planned it that way. I don’t know if she had the baby, but if she did…”

  Lillian weathered the blow I’d just dealt her. “If she had the baby, then what?”

  I tried to find words, but they all seemed shallow and insufficient. How could I adequately explain that the same reason I’d wanted to find out who my father was, the same reason I’d longed to meet the family my mom despised, the reason I’d stayed here even after I’d discovered the truth—that was exactly why I wanted to know what happened to Ana’s baby, too.

  People who’d always had a family to count on and a place to belong couldn’t truly understand the draw of that little whisper that said There’s someone like you.

  Someone who wouldn’t hold my origins against me.

  “I just want to know,” I told Lillian, my voice low.

  There was another silence, more measured than her last. Then she reached into her purse and handed me a newspaper, folded open to the business section.

  I scanned the headlines but had no idea what I was supposed to be looking for.

  “The article about the attempted corporate takeover,” Lillian told me. “You’ll notice that one of the companies is an international telecommunications conglomerate whose CEO is a man named Victor Gutierrez. The other company is owned by Davis Ames.”

  Davis was the Ames family patriarch, grandfather to Walker and Campbell, father to the man I’d once thought was my father—the man who really was the father of Ana’s baby.

  “Why are you showing me this?” I asked.

  Lillian sighed. “Your mama’s friend Ana? Her full name was Ana Sofía Gutierrez.”

  man who shared Ana’s last name—her father? brother? a more distant relation?—had made a move against the Ames family’s corporation.

  Two hours of highway and back-road driving later, I was still mulling that over. As Lillian’s Porsche SUV wound its way past a guard gate, a golf course, volleyball and tennis courts, and a pool, I couldn’t help thinking that Davis Ames had once told me he’d handled the situation with the girl his son had impregnated. There was no telling exactly what that meant, but I had to wonder if business was just business for this Victor Gutierrez—or if it was personal.

  Is this about Ana somehow? Revenge? For what, exactly? And why now?

  “Here we are,” Lillian declared, pulling into a circle drive. “Home, sweet lake home.”

  I had to compartmentalize. I couldn’t be thinking about Ana or the pact or any of this around Lily and Aunt Olivia, not if I wanted to keep pretending that I was fine, and we were fine, and there was nothing for them to worry about or know. So instead, I focused on the sights at hand. When I’d heard the rest of the family refer to the “lake house,” I’d pictured a cabin. Something small and rustic.

  I really should have known better.

  “This is your lake house.” I fell back on stating the obvious as I stared up at an enormous stone residence. I stepped out of Lillian’s Cayenne, and the front door to the home flew open.

  “Sawyer.” Lily was smiling. Not her polite, default smile, not her pained “you can’t hurt me” smile—an honest-to-God, cheek-to-cheek grin. “You won’t believe—”

  Our grandmother stepped out of the car, and Lily cut herself off midsentence. “I hope traffic wasn’t too horrible, Mim.” That sounded more like the Lily I knew, but her dark brown eyes were still dancing. She waited a beat, then turned to me. “Come on. I’ll show you our room.”

  Somehow, I doubted the energy I could hear buzzing in her voice was a reflection of her excitement at the idea of the two of us sharing a bedroom.

  “What’s going on?” I asked as we made our way to the front door and into the foyer.

  Lily shushed me. Deciding that I didn’t want to know what had gotten into her badly enough to be shushed twice, I focused on the house instead. The staircase winding its way upstairs I’d expected. The stairs going down I had not.

  “Three stories?” I asked Lily. �
��Or is the basement just a basement?”

  “It’s just a basement.” Lily paused. “With one bedroom. And a game room.” She paused again, slightly embarrassed, because properly bred young ladies were always slightly embarrassed by the size of their vacation homes and the overall privilege to which they’d been born. “And a media room. A pool table. Ping-Pong…”

  Deciding she’d said enough, Lily took to the stairs—the ones going up, not down. I followed, and together, we arrived at a small landing. Compared to the scale of the house, the second story was cozy: one bedroom with two twin beds, a bathroom, a closet. Aside from what I suspected was antique furniture, the room looked like it belonged in the cabin I’d imagined.

  “I know it’s a little small,” Lily said softly, “but I’ve always loved it up here.”

  I walked over to the window and stared out at the lake below. “Who doesn’t love a turret room?”

  From this vantage point, it was obvious that the house had been built into the side of a hill. There was a steep drop-off, then the land sloped gently toward the rocky shore. The view of the water was breathtaking.

  “Well?” Lily demanded.

  “Well, what?” I asked, unable to tear my eyes away from the whitecapped waves as they broke and rolled slowly toward what appeared to be a private dock. Our cove was as big as I’d expected the entire lake to be, and from where I stood, I could see past the cove’s entrance to the main body of Regal Lake.

  The name didn’t seem as ridiculous as it had on the drive up.

  “Well…” Lily prompted primly. “Ask me again.”

  “Ask you what?” I played dumb. She’d shushed me. This was the price of shushing.

  “Ask me what’s going on.” Lily came to stand beside me in the window and held up a long, flat box—too big for jewelry, but too narrow for almost anything else. “Ask me,” she instructed, “what this is.”

  I took the box from her outstretched hand. It was matte black, with a card stuck to the middle. The card was made of a thick off-white paper—the kind I associated with wedding invitations—and a single word had been embossed on it in raised black cursive.

  Lily’s name.

  I went to remove the top from the box, but Lily stopped me. “Don’t open mine.” She nodded toward one of the beds. “Open yours.”

  A second box—this one bearing my name—sat near the pillow. I crossed the room, picked it up, and opened it. Nestled inside, I found a single elbow-length white glove. Pinned to the glove, there was another note, this one written on thinner paper in blood-red ink.

  The Big Bang, 11 p.m., back room.

  “Lily,” I said calmly, “don’t take this the wrong way, but is this an invitation to an orgy?”

  “A what?” Lily Taft Easterling did not, as a rule, shriek, but this time, she came close.

  “The Big Bang,” I replied. “Doesn’t exactly sound PG to me.”

  Lily glared at me. I grinned. Sometimes getting a rise out of her was just too easy. A pang came after a brief delay, and the grin froze on my face.

  I could lose this. Lose her.

  Putting those emotions on lockdown, I examined the contents of the box more closely. The pin holding the note to the glove was made of silver. Carved into the end, there was a small rose, and wrapped around the rose’s stem, there was a snake.

  “An orgy,” I repeated, forcing a grin and trying to get the moment back. “With serpents.”

  Lily rolled her eyes. “When you’re done repeating that word ad nauseam, I’d be happy to inform you that The Big Bang is a local establishment.”

  “A brothel?”

  “They sell hot wings,” Lily said defensively. “And beer. And…other beverages.”

  “So you’re saying it’s a bar.” I’d grown up in a bar—almost literally. My mom and I had lived over The Holler until I was thirteen. “Someone wants to meet the two of us in the back room of a bar at eleven p.m.?”

  I was skeptical. The world Lily had grown up in—the world I’d reluctantly taken my place in this past year—was a place of charity galas and twin sets and pearls. A bar wasn’t exactly the natural habitat of an Easterling or a Taft.

  “Not just someone,” Lily told me, removing the contents of her box and cradling it reverently in one hand. “The White Gloves.”

  re you sure that’s how we ended up at the bottom of this hole, Sawyer?”

  “Trust me. You were unconscious, but I held on just long enough to see the person responsible.”

  “Maybe it was an accident?”

  “How do you accidentally drug someone, Sadie-Grace?”

  “Accidentally…on purpose?”

  ily refused to enlighten me as to who or what the White Gloves were until she could be certain that we wouldn’t be overheard. At the lake, that apparently meant hitting the water. Within five minutes, the two of us were swimsuit-clad and Jet Ski–bound. We made our way down to the dock.

  And Lily’s father.

  After more than a month of playing this game, seeing J.D. Easterling shouldn’t have hit me so hard. I shouldn’t have cared that he was in full-on Dad Mode, puttering around the dock and getting way too much pleasure out of power-washing everything in the near vicinity, including and especially the boats.

  “How are my favorite girls doing?” he called out. “Making your escape already?”

  Don’t say a word, I told myself. Don’t think about it. Think about the White Gloves. Think about the snake and rose on that pin. Don’t even look at him. Look at the boats.

  There were two of them, one a speedboat and one that Lily would have insisted wasn’t a yacht.

  “Sawyer’s never ridden a Jet Ski.” Beside me, Lily was talking. “Think we could take out Thing One and Thing Two before the weekend traffic hits the water?”

  I took a step toward the boats, telling myself that it was only natural that I would be curious, natural that I would focus on reading the name on the back of the larger boat, rather than joining the conversation between Lily and her father.

  Our father.

  “I have noticed, Daughter, that when you preface a statement with ‘Sawyer has never…’ you’re usually up to something.”

  “You say that like it’s a bad thing, Daddy.”

  The back-and-forth between them was so easy, so natural. There was no ignoring that.

  “What say you, Niece?” J.D. turned toward me. “Ready to brave the ocean deep?”

  This wasn’t the ocean, and I wasn’t his niece.

  “I think I can handle it,” I said, spotting the Jet Skis on the far side of the dock. I started toward them in hopes of ending this conversation before Lily caught on to the fact that something was off. I’d done a good job of avoiding her dad for the past few weeks. He’d been pulling late nights at work and had made more than one trip up here to check on the boats.

  Think about that. Don’t think about…

  “Hate to tell you this, Lilypad, but Thing One is out of commission. Can you and Sawyer double up on Thing Two?”

  “Not a problem,” Lily responded.

  He pressed a kiss to her temple. “That’s my girl.”

  He didn’t seem like the type to sleep with his wife’s little sister. The type to sleep with someone our age when he was twenty-three. The type to call me Niece when he knew quite well that I was his daughter.

  Don’t think about it. Think about the White Gloves. Don’t look at him.

  “Earth to Sawyer.” Lily was suddenly standing beside me. I hadn’t even notice her approach. She held out a purple life vest.

  I took it and slipped it on.

  “Are you okay?” Lily asked.

  I could feel Uncle J.D. looking at the two of us. Watching us.

  “Right as rain,” I said, turning back to the duo of Jet Skis. “Which one is Thing Two?”

  ’d known for a while that Lily had a deep-seated need for perfection. I hadn’t realized that she also had a need for speed.

  “Boat incoming!” I yelled
in her ear, my voice nearly lost to the wind and the sound of the engine revving as Lily angled the Jet Ski into a major wave at forty-five degrees.

  “I see it,” she yelled back, her blond ponytail whipping in the wind—and at my face. “Hold on!”

  My arms were wound around her waist, my fingers clutching the straps on her life vest. She cut across the main channel going full throttle, then hung a left past three massive coves. A small island, boasting a scattering of trees and the remains of a house, came into view. We barreled past it and into a long and narrow cove on the far side. Lily eased off the gas, letting her hands fall from the handlebars as we cruised slowly to a stop near the back of the cove. Compared to the main channel, the water here was like glass. The world was quiet—remarkably so, given how loudly I’d had to yell to be heard a minute earlier.

  “Nice place,” I told Lily, letting loose of her life jacket and shaking out my hands. “I especially like the way I can no longer see my life flashing before my eyes.”

  As was her style, Lily remained utterly unruffled. “I have no idea what you could possibly be implying.”

  For pretty much the first time since I’d met her, her hair looked unkempt—windblown and free.

  Lily must have noticed the way I was looking at her, because she seemed compelled to offer an explanation. “The lake is my happy place. It always has been. Mama isn’t a fan of the heat. Or the water. Or the bugs. But Daddy and John David and I have always loved it up here.”

  I couldn’t afford to let that hurt. “I can see why,” I said instead, letting my head fall back and taking in the wide expanse of sky above.

  “That’s King’s Island.” Lily gestured to the small blot of land we’d passed on the way in. “No one’s lived there for years.”

  “King’s Island,” I repeated. “On Regal Lake.” You would have thought that this was the Hamptons, not a man-made body of water in a region of the state known for its red dirt and surplus of deer. “Looks to me like this is a place where we won’t be overheard.”