CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
Tabby
It seemed like I hadn’t talked to Owen in months, and when I heard his slightly digitized voice through the earpiece an abundance of emotions crashed into me. All at once, I realized how much I’d missed him, how hurt I felt over the whole Pippa thing, and how worried I was about The Club being made public. Tears actually rose in my eyes, the result of tamping everything down into a tiny pocket of my soul since that awful morning when Owen received the phone call.
“Are you okay?” The concern in his voice was so tangible I felt as if I could’ve reached through the phone and touched it as it came out of his mouth.
“Yeah,” I murmured. “I’m fine.”
It wasn’t the truth. I wasn’t fine at all. Truthfully, I was a wreck. Exhaustion from tossing and turning night after night had left indigo bags beneath my eyes, I’d postponed several gigs because I couldn’t bring myself to leave my apartment, and I was currently recovering from a hangover after attempting to drink away my unhappiness for an evening. Worse, the hollowness I’d felt after learning Pippa had gone to Owen’s house and he’d hid it from me hadn’t gone away in the slightest. It had actually expanded since his leaving, just a giant balloon of nothingness filling me up and leaving no room for anything of substance, anything I could grab onto and stabilize myself with.
I was upset Pippa had gone to Owen’s house, but I wasn’t at all upset with him for that. He hadn’t asked her to do that, and my brief meeting with the wench had been enough to tell me she was absolutely the kind of woman who would ambush someone at their own private residence with the intentions of a whore. What upset me about him was that he’d failed to tell me. We were talking on the phone every night. There was no reason in the world he couldn’t have mentioned it, especially if nothing had happened as he claimed. I came from the school of thought that dictated people who have nothing to hide, hide nothing. Maybe he had genuinely forgotten about it because it was so forgettable, but maybe he hadn’t. My doubts were too prevalent to wave it all off.
To make matters worse, though, I hadn’t been given the opportunity to wave it off. Owen had presented the opportunity, of course, but he wasn’t the only one I was contending with anymore. Emails had started popping up in my inbox from unknown addresses, and they were so unsettling I became physically ill after receiving the first. Most were wordless, just pictures, but the pixelized images were crushing.
Owen kneeling on his bed, Pippa bent over in front of him.
Pippa with her legs spread wide and Owen’s hand buried inside her.
The two of them tangled together, her face twisted with pleasure.
At first, I’d closed the emails as soon as I was able to process what I was seeing. As I started to grow numb to them, however, I began studying them. They seemed to all have been taken the same night, and they appeared to be freeze-frames from a video that was likely filmed from a tripod in the middle of the room. Every angle was the same, the lighting didn’t differ from one picture to the next, and though they were naked, there were no unique features like fresh scratches or a variance in Pippa’s earring choice to distinguish a change in date. Strangely, that offered me some measure of comfort. Furthermore, and I might have been stretching out of hope, Owen’s hair looked noticeably shorter than it had been when he came to Chicago, though that simply could have been due to the combination of angle and lighting together.
In any case, I needed him to know.
“Do you happen to have Pippa’s email?” I asked.
A beat of silence crossed the line. “Why?” he asked reluctantly.
“I’ve been getting emails from an address I don’t recognize.” I tried to sound as nonchalant as I could, not because I wanted to hide my feelings entirely but because I was more interested in getting to the bottom of things than pursuing an emotional breakdown. “They’re pictures of you with her. In bed. Having sex.”
Again, there was silence on his end, but I could hear anger. It sounded impossible, but I could definitely hear his temper rising despite his not saying a word. Then, in a tone of deadly calm, he commanded, “Forward them.”
I clicked into my account and sent the offending mail zooming through cyberspace. Dinging on his end of the line told me he’d received them. I didn’t speak as he presumably opened them up and looked at the pictures, but my stomach was rolling back and forth with nerves. His reaction carried a lot of weight, and I was waiting on tenterhooks to hear it.
“Would you think less of me if I hired a hitman?”
I laughed. I didn’t mean to, but it burst out of me. Once it did, I couldn’t stop. I hadn’t laughed in so long, and I’d been suffering endorphin withdrawal. I laughed until I couldn’t breathe, and then I surrendered to the silent, shoulder-shaking giggles.
“No,” I gasped, tears streaming down my face. “I’ve been contemplating it myself.”
“You need to know these are from a long time ago,” he told me. He was stern, but I could hear his smile. “Seriously, sweetheart, we’re talking years here. She’s doing everything she can to take me down, and that includes ostracizing you.”
I choked on the final giggles before composing myself enough to return to the somber topic at hand. “Isn’t there an easy solution to that, though? Just tell The Club she was the rat. Getting you back is definitely a motive, and these emails kind of prove she’s looking for some sort of vengeance, don’t they?”
“The Club is too focused on you to believe Pippa would jeopardize the whole organization for the sake of hurting me,” he explained. “They’ll just think I’m trying to get you off the hook.”
“But I shouldn’t even be on the hook,” I argued.
“I know that. You know that. Howie even knows that.” I could picture him shrugging in helpless frustration. “Unfortunately, these are men who are looking at their entire post-college lives going up in smoke if this situation doesn’t get resolved swiftly and sufficiently, and they need a scapegoat.”
Like a light switch flipping on, I was struck with an idea. “Is The Club shutting down until all this blows over?”
“No. Shutting down is like admitting wrong doing. The show, as they say, will go on, with some tweaks.”
“What tweaks?” I asked, curious now.
“No sex following the auction. The men and women will go on public dates just as any normal charity event auction would.”
I was practically rubbing my hands together. My idea could actually work. “Would participating in an auction prove my innocence?”
He didn’t answer immediately, and I grinned to myself. I was partially kidding. I didn’t have a desire to be bedded by anyone at The Club besides Owen. On the other hand, if it cleared my name and got Owen out of the line of fire for supposedly bringing a mole into their secret walls, there might be some benefits.
When he did respond, I could hear the beast lingering in the background. “If I ever see you on that stage, I will make certain you don’t stand for a week,” he growled.
My pussy twitched, but the urgency in his voice acted more as an urging to go through with the idea than reject it. Aside from proving my innocence, it also would provide me the opportunity to see Pippa face-to-face and put my wonderings about what happened the night she visited Owen to bed once and for all. I knew doing the auction meant there was a very good chance I would be won by someone other than my dark-haired prince, but the scale was tipping heavily on one side and it wasn’t the one that left me with more sleepless nights and horrible, vivid images in my mind. Besides, from what Owen said, I wouldn’t have to sleep with the man who bought me. Unless the man forced it after our date. The thought made me shiver.
I took a deep breath, steeling my resolve. “How soon can you get me to New Orleans?”