Chapter Eight
Eden
“Think it’s her?”
Candice nudged me and nodded towards Anya, who was sunning herself by the pool with some of the other contestants. The rest were splashing about in the water, playing up their taut, tanned bodies for the cameras in colorful bikinis. Troy was out here as well, and he lay shirtless on a sun lounge with a bottle of water lazily dangling from one hand. His muscular chest and arms were twined with even more tattoos than he’d had when we were teenagers, and in the bright sun, he reminded me of a big bronze sculpture, something strong and wonderful carved by someone like Michelangelo himself. Every inch of him was so hard and defined that I wanted to run over to him and touch him just to see if he was really here or if I was having some long, wonderful dream.
I hadn’t had a chance to interact with him all that much over the last few days, but since he’d stood up for me against Glenn the other week, we’d reached a sort of wordless truce. I was grateful to him and now willing to believe that he’d changed somewhat in the last few years, and any words exchanged between us were now friendly and professional, sweeping anything from our past well under the rug, so to speak.
“I don’t know. Maybe,” I replied, taking my eyes off him and turning my attention back to Candice.
We were discussing who the possible saboteur contestant could be, because we needed to find out soon. After the food poisoning incident the other night, one of the girls had ended up needing to go to the hospital for fluids after becoming severely dehydrated due to vomiting and having diarrhea all night, and lab tests had shown that she had some sort of laxative in her system, along with an emetic. I’d hired someone to come and test all the food that had come out of the kitchen for the dinner party, and it turned out that the hummus dip was filled with a mixture of laxative and emetic fluid. Seeing as hummus was a fairly healthy food and a lot of the contestants were weight conscious, it made sense that eleven of them had eaten it.
We needed to find out which one of the contestants was responsible—if it was even a contestant who was behind all the bitchy sabotage going on—because like Glenn said to me the other night, this latest laxative thing was no harmless prank; it was a serious incident. If someone got seriously hurt this season, then not only would our jobs be on the line, we could be facing all kinds of legal trouble. However, we also needed direct evidence of who the person was, because if we sent home a suspected contestant without any proof that she was the saboteur, then she could probably try to sue us for some sort of breach of contract, causing even more legal troubles.
“She’s one of the only girls who didn’t get sick,” Candice said, still looking at Anya. “And she’s been nothing but a grade-A bitch since she arrived.”
I nodded. “True, but that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s her going around trying to sabotage everyone else.”
Candice sighed. “Yeah, I know. Then again….remember her introduction video in the first week? She said she’d do literally anything to get an edge over the other contestants so she could win.”
“Also true.”
“Maybe she thinks trashing the other girls’ things and making them sick will give her an edge. Kinda reminds me a bit of last season, when we had that psycho woman…god, what was her name again? The one who tried to sabotage another contestant’s thyroid medication so that she’d get really tired and sleep through the group dates.”
“Her name was Lina. And yeah, this does remind me a bit of that. What do you think we should do?”
Candice shrugged. “I dunno where to even start looking for this person…although I guess while they’re all busy in the pool, we could check out their rooms?”
I raised an eyebrow. “You mean go through their stuff?”
“Just hear me out. I don’t mean rifle through every single panty drawer like total assholes, just quickly scan their bathrooms and so on for anything that might seem suspicious. Like bleach, for instance.”
I shuddered, remembering the awful hair ‘prank’ done to Blair during the first week. “Do you think whoever it is would be stupid enough to leave stuff lying around like that?” I asked.
Candice shrugged again. “Who knows? May as well give it a shot, right? And it’s part of all the contestants’ contracts that they aren’t actually entitled to any privacy as long as they’re on the premises. So we wouldn’t get in trouble if we were caught checking out their rooms.”
I let out a long sigh. I didn’t want to do this, but it didn’t seem like we had many other options. What else could we do? Question each contestant and hope one of them owned up to being the sabotage queen?
“Okay,” I said. “But only a quick scan of each room. No rifling through everything.”
“Got it. We should check Anya’s room first, seeing as she’s the most likely suspect.”
I nodded and followed Candice into the mansion, and we trudged up the spiral staircase to the second floor and stopped at the first door on the right, which was Anya’s room. “Sure you’re okay with this?” Candice asked, obviously still sensing my hesitation.
“Yeah. Let’s do it.”
She unlocked the door with her master keycard—all producers had one—and we stepped into the room and glanced around. It was neat and smelled of Anya’s violet-scented perfume, and I headed over to the bedside table to have a look at some of the bottles which sat there.
“This is all just perfume and moisturizer,” I said. “No bleach or laxatives, let alone anything else.”
“Okay. I’ll check the bathroom,” Candice replied.
I had a brief look around the rest of the room, and a moment later I heard a triumphant cry from the bathroom. Candice emerged with a gleam in her eye, holding up a little bottle of hydrogen peroxide.
“Look at this!” she said. “I found it in the cupboard. It could’ve been used to try and wreck Blair’s hair. And why else would Anya have bleach? She’s a natural redhead; she doesn’t bleach her hair.”
I nodded slowly. “True, but we shouldn’t immediately jump to conclusions. I remember the makeup artists saying that she has a pretty hairy upper lip. Maybe she got self-conscious about it and they gave the bleach to her to help lighten it a bit and make it less visible. A lot of women do that. I’ll ask the hair and makeup crew if they know anything about it.”
I quickly radioed the hair and makeup team, and they confirmed that they’d given Anya the bleach to deal with some dark hairs she didn’t like on her abdomen and upper lip. I thanked them and turned back to Candice, and she sighed. “Okay, I guess that explains it, but she still could’ve used some of the bleach on Blair, although we have no way of proving that. So we should keep a serious eye on her from now on.”
“Yeah.”
“Anyway, we should also do a quick scan of the other rooms before the date later on today.”
“All right. Let’s do it,” I said, following her out. “Are you glad one of your girls got picked for the date?”
“Yeah. You?” she replied.
I nodded. This afternoon’s filmed date with Troy was a plane ride over the scenic land and ocean out here, and only two lucky contestants were able to go. Troy had picked Cailin, one of my girls, and also Emily, who was one of Candice’s girls, so that meant we got to go with them on the plane as well, to make sure we got some good footage of them talking to Troy and admiring the view.
After quickly checking the other bedrooms and finding nothing which might lead us to suspect any of the contestants aside from Anya, we headed downstairs and back out to the pool, just in time to hear Glenn ordering Troy, Cailin and Emily around.
“Go and get dried and dressed. It’s almost time for the date. And where the hell are your producers? Oh, there they are,” he said, addressing them and then looking at me and Candice. “You two ready?”
We both nodded and stepped closer to fill Glenn in on what we’d found in Anya’s room, and he agreed that while it was suspicious, it didn’t necessarily prove anything.
“Just keep an eye on her from now on, but don’t forget to watch the others,” he said. “If we have any more incidents, I swear to god…”
He didn’t finish that sentence; he simply strode away, and fear began to gnaw at my guts. I didn’t love this job, but I didn’t hate it either, and it was great experience for my future. I really didn’t want to lose it, and I hoped we could figure out who the saboteur was sooner rather than later.
An hour later, all thoughts of losing my job were gone from my mind—I was too busy actually doing my job. Candice and I were up in the small tourist plane we’d hired with the pilot, Troy, Cailin, Emily, and the filming crew, and we were struggling to get them to talk as much as we wanted them to for the date footage. Emily kept squealing and looking down at her feet, because she was apparently scared of heights, and Cailin seemed more interested in talking to the pilot than Troy; apparently her brother was a pilot, and the two knew each other.
“Okay, listen up, everyone!” I finally called out, clapping my hands together to attract their attention. “Cailin, let the pilot do his job, please. And Emily, I know you’re scared, but I promise, this is totally safe, and nothing will happen to you.”
Emily huffed, and Candice looked at me before leaning closer to her. “If you want, we can always land and let one of the other girls take your place,” she said in a sweet, airy voice. “It’s no problem.”
There was no way Emily would say yes to that; she wouldn’t want to miss out on the chance to have this date with Troy. It meant that she’d get the most airtime on this episode, and thus the most attention given to her by viewers. As an up-and-coming makeup artist, she wanted as much attention as possible, and Candice’s manipulative words were clearly working on her.
“I’m fine,” she said. “We don’t need to land. I just needed a minute to get used to it, that’s all.”
I nodded. “That’s good to hear. Anyway, what we want to do for this episode is tug on the viewer’s heartstrings a bit. We want to hear about things that might’ve hurt you in the past in terms of romantic relationships, and how you managed to move on from that and give love a shot here on The Stud.”
Cailin and Emily both nodded at that, and Cailin quickly launched into a story about an ex-boyfriend who had cheated on her with her cousin. Troy listened intently and seemed to know all the right things to say to her, and I wondered if maybe he’d been some sort of therapist in a past life. Either that or a very skilled actor.
Soon it was his turn to speak, and he flashed a rueful smile at the girls before sighing and looking down. “All right, something that hurt me. Well, this is a long story.”
He paused for a moment before looking back up. “Back when I was in high school, I met this perfect girl. Let’s call her E. Anyway, back then, E was the one for me. I honestly thought I’d end up spending my whole life with her…you know how it is when you’re eighteen.”
I knew he was talking about me, and I squirmed in my seat. It was too bad we were several thousand feet up in the air, because I couldn’t exactly walk out and avoid the awkwardness. Emily and Cailin fluttered their eyelashes and made sympathetic sounds at Troy, and an unwelcome tinge of jealousy gnawed at my insides as one of them slid a hand onto his thigh.
“Anyway, I got a last-minute football scholarship to college. I had less than two days to pack, and I didn’t want to leave E, but it was a chance to turn my life around, and she would’ve made me go anyway. But I didn’t think it had to be over just because we’d be apart for a while. I still wanted to be with her. But she didn’t feel the same way.”
He stared right at me as he spoke, and an angry heat crept up my neck as I narrowed my eyes at him. Why was he making this up? It wasn’t true—he was the one who’d left me without a word. He was the one who hadn’t felt the same way about me, not the other way around.
“What happened?” Emily asked, her eyes wide with anticipation.
“Well, she always loved romance. So I wrote her this big soppy romantic letter, practically begging her to stay with me in a long-distance relationship while I was gone, and also hinting that I wanted her to join me in San Francisco once she’d finished school. Anyway, there’s more to the story of the letter and everything that was in it, but to cut a long story short, I had the letter delivered to her—didn’t want to pressure her by being there when she read it—and ended it by asking her to meet me at the bus station before I left, if she felt the same way. But she never showed up, and I never heard from her again.”
I shook my head, wondering what on earth he was talking about. A letter? What letter? He’d never had anything delivered to me. Perhaps he was just embellishing the story of our failed relationship to the cameras because it made him sound all wounded and brooding, which would surely give him even more appeal to our viewers. Yes, that had to be it.
“What a bitch!” Emily declared. “I bet she regrets doing that now that you’re a big NFL champion.”
Troy looked right at me again, and I could’ve sworn that a sort of hardness had entered his usually-sparkling blue eyes. He shook his head.
“No,” he said. “I don’t think she regrets it at all.”
He kept staring at me, and my stomach dropped.
Was there a chance that everything he’d just said was true? Was there a letter, and I just never got it? Shit, if that was the case, then that meant I’d been a total bitch to him when he arrived for absolutely no reason. It would mean that it was essentially my fault that he never contacted me after he left town….all because he thought I didn’t want to be contacted.
I broke eye contact with him and looked down at my feet, my heart pounding as I figured out my next move. I needed to get to the bottom of this before it was too late. Or maybe it already was too late.
There was only one way to find out.