I should have never listened to Sara.
I should have never put on that maid’s outfit.
I should have never listened to him.
Chapter Twelve
Belle
I stormed into the house like a bull on stampede. If the door had busted off its hinges, I wouldn’t have even cared.
Sara just about jumped out of her skin as I stormed in. She’d been sleeping on the couch and leapt up with both fists in the air like it was a home invasion.
“Belle! What the hell?”
“Got any more of that wine?” I asked as stomped into the kitchen and grabbed a bottle.
“Yeah, help yourself…”
But I already was. I had the cork out and my lips around the bottle before she could finish her sentence. Then I was over at her side and slumping down in a chair wiping tears off my face.
“Well, this doesn’t look good,” Sara said. I gulped down way more wine than I should have, made a face, coughed and started crying again.
“He has a wife!” I blabbered. “A wife! And she slapped me!”
“Oh, god, babe…” Sara said as she slid closer to me and wrapped an arm around me. “Tell me everything.”
“I—I went over to his house and took the job,” I groaned. “I can’t even tell you how much he is paying me. And then he told me he wanted me to go upstairs and change into my outfit.”
“Wow, that sounds…”
“It was a French maid’s outfit!” I blurted out. “And it was…it was so over the top and so not me, and I loved that, you know?”
“Uh huh,” Sara nodded commiseratively.
“And I—I put it on and…and…and…”
My voice trailed off as I thought back to that incredible moment in the walk-in that had now been sullied forever.
“And we did it!” I cried out, slapping my lips around the bottle again. Sara didn’t reply immediately, and I knew that under normal circumstances she’d be cheering for me.
“Tell me what happened, Belle. His wife showed up?”
I nodded and groaned again, feeling like I’d volunteered to be a knife-thrower’s assistant thinking, naïvely, that I would be fine, but instead ended up with a blade buried in my heart.
“He got a call from someone…one of his guys, saying that there was an emergency,” I told her. “So I went to the shower to wash up and the next thing I know this crazy woman is screaming at me and trying to kill me.”
“Jesus…”
“She slapped me. She called me a whore—”
“You’re not a whore, Belle,” she said firmly.
“Yeah, well, it seems like a lot of people are calling me that lately!” I cried, thinking back to the smear campaign Melissa had launched on me. First that—now this. I’d thought somehow things would be different with Alden and that this wasn’t just an arrangement or something secretive, but it turned out I’d walked right into the reputation Melissa had created for me.
And once this got out…
“Oh, god…” I cried. “Everyone’s going to hear about this.”