Chapter 20
The media shitstorm that ensued made sure Sarah went home early.
More than one businessman had been outed as a pervert in the video, but that wasn’t the point, was it? Not when most of the faces had been blurred out. Everyone’s but Sarah’s, which was always front and center, regardless of what that face was doing.
Oh, she watched it. As soon as she got home, Lucas right behind her, she sat on the edge of her bed and played that atrocity on her laptop from beginning to end. She needed to know how bad it was.
It wasn’t the whole night. Just snippets from the guy’s phone that had been edited together with amateurish transitions. A total of ten minutes of Sarah Clayborn wearing a blond wig and engaging in the kind of shit that ruined careers.
The viewer count was already in the thousands. Every free porn site on the internet had featured it on their own servers. The news danced around the contents while reporting on this CEO or that VP being embroiled in a “sex scandal.” At first, nobody except those who recognized her face knew that the woman was Sarah Clayborn.
Then the gossip blogs started talking.
All it took was one bitch saying “Isn’t that Sarah Clayborn? The executive assistant to billionaire Damon Monroe?” While that in itself wasn’t newsworthy, the photos of her and Lucas on their weekend getaway some pap got a hold of was.
“Don’t watch it,” Lucas implored her. His phone blew up with messages from his PR manager and predatory “journalists” who dug up his number. He ignored it, choosing to kneel before Sarah and yanking her laptop out of her grasp. “Don’t watch that trash.”
“That’s trash I’m in, Luke.” She snorted, defeated. “If it’s trash, then I’m trash too.”
“Damnit, Sarah, don’t…”
“Don’t what? Face reality? You’re kidding me, right? Half the world knows we’re together now.” She leaned away from him. “It’s not a coincidence that it came out the same day as that video.”
“You’re right.” At least he didn’t fight her about that. “Someone deliberately outed us.”
Sarah peeked at her laptop screen. There she was with her fake O face.
It certainly wasn’t flattering. Luckily, Sarah was detached enough from her life as Angel that she could look at this situation (somewhat) objectively. The male faces had been blurred to one degree or another while hers was left completely recognizable. The video was leaked early in the morning when the world was waking up and checking their phones and laptops for gossip. The scandal regarding the two businessmen people were able to identify – blurred faces or no – was allowed to fester before the pictures of Sarah and Lucas on their romantic getaway were leaked by the same supposed sources. The connections were immediately made in the headlines. “EURO-AMERICAN BILLIONAIRE HEIR DATING SEX TAPE FLOOZY?”
“Someone’s targeting us,” Sarah said. Lucas gently closed the laptop lid. “They’re trying to humiliate you.”
“Me?”
“Yes. You.” Sarah told him exactly what she would have told her boss had he been in this situation instead. In fact, he practically was a year ago, when he met his wife and nearly threw his image away to have her. “This was carefully released to reflect on you. This isn’t about shaming the businessmen in that tape, or even me. It’s about you, Luke.”
“I don’t believe it.”
“It’s the only explanation. Because someone followed us all weekend and took pictures of us together, so they could leak them with this tape. They wanted the connection made. Someone wants the world to know that you date a degenerate like me.”
“I don’t think you’re…”
“For fuck’s sake, Luke!” Sarah leaped up, pushing past him and hitting her hand against her bedroom door. “That’s a video of me blowing and fucking four guys! At once!”
“I don’t care about that.”
“Like hell you don’t.”
Lucas bit his lip before turning away, hands flying above his head. “All right! I care! But I care more about how this affects you than the actual contents of the video. You think it surprises me? You think I’m disgusted with you, Sarah? You think I hold the fact that you’ve had a sex life before me against you?”
Sarah slowly shook her head. “You know it’s not a ‘sex life’ on my part. I’m fucked up, Luke. Anything the media says about me – and I took a peek – isn’t wrong. Let’s be…”
She cut herself off. Because Nigel was in her doorway, fresh from work and with a look only she could read.
“Is it fucking true?”
“You need to go,” Sarah quietly said to her boyfriend. “We need privacy.”
Lucas opened his mouth to speak, but thought better of it. “All right. I’ll be in the living room making a few calls to see how we can smooth this over. I promise you, Sarah, by the end of the week everyone will have forgotten about this.”
Not when that tape is on porn sites for the rest of time, dumbass. Sarah had never done professional sex work before, yet she would soon have her own porn star profile on so many of those sites. I wonder how long it will take for more videos I didn’t know about to surface. Angel was a fucking idiot when it came to her privacy once the fun started.
No… I am. I need to take responsibility for this.
But how could she, when she looked into those eyes identical to her own?
It was the heartbreak and disbelief all over again. It was the same face Nigel made when he found out that his sister was pregnant with their boss’s father’s child. The same look when he found out about the miscarriage. Later, she realized it was the same face he must have made when he found out the truth about her miscarriage.
That look that said he feared for his sister’s safety. And her honor.
“I’m sorry, Nigel.” Her strength left her. She sank onto her bed, arms drooping between her legs and head hanging in the sudden influx of shame consuming her. Until that moment, until she saw Nigel rush into her room, she hadn’t felt a true ounce of shame.
Now it was all she could feel.
“What the fuck have you been doing?”
“Going out. Doing whatever.”
“Those trips to New York… I thought you were seeing a sugar daddy or something.”
“No. I was going to that sex club.” She didn’t have to specify which one.
“Why?”
“Because…” Why? Why did she do it? Why did she dress up as someone else and go seduce the first man who would have her? Oftentimes it didn’t matter if they were hot or not. It didn’t matter if they were actually rich or there by some stroke of luck. Didn’t even matter if they lied to her about anything. “Because I’m fucked up.”
He sat down next to her, but did not touch her.
“Did you watch the video?”
“No! Bad enough knowing that it exists… seeing stills on the internet… fuck.”
“I was gangbanged by four businessmen. Guess not a lot of women can say that.”
‘Why are you telling me that?”
“Because I can’t help myself now.”
“Does Lucas know about that shit?”
“It’s how we met, Nigel.” Sarah almost couldn’t believe it, really. “We met at that club.”
“Where you…”
“Yup. We had no idea who the other person was. Quite the shock when he showed up at work the following Monday.”
“Jesus.”
If Sarah closed her eyes, she could hear Lucas out in the living room barking orders to his publicist. Both of them, the American one and the Danish one. I so rarely get to hear him speak Danish. She couldn’t enjoy it now. He sounded so angry, so on the warpath that she couldn’t bear to listen to whatever he snarled into his phone.
On her behalf. Yes, this was clearly a target against him, but he was doing this for her.
Nigel took her hand on top of the bed. “You gonna be the one to call Mum back first, or do I have those honors?”
“What do you mean call her back?”
That’s when Sarah checked her phone again. Sure enough, five missed calls within the last hour from Elizabeth Brown-Clayborn. Sarah didn’t bother to listen to the voicemails. Like she could sense her brother’s thoughts and feelings, she could clearly hear her mother’s exasperated ire from hundreds of miles away.