She nodded.
“How? Where?”
Zoe got to her feet and grabbed her cell. She manipulated the phone for a few seconds and then handed it to him.
The video was shot at night and from a distance, but there was no question it was Jefferson Kirby and Patty Joyce and they were romantically involved. The segment was no longer than twenty seconds, but it was more than enough to damn Jeff’s actions. Ryan badly wanted to punch something long before the hotel room door shut behind the couple.
“Did you follow them?” He slashed a glance in Zoe’s direction and discovered she’d taken the moments of his distraction to put her clothes back on.
Part of his brain mourned that she’d covered up all her beautiful skin, but he recognized that the last thing he needed right now was to be distracted by her nakedness.
“No,” Zoe said, retreating to one of the chairs in his living room. “Someone sent the video to me.”
“Someone?” he snapped, frustrated by her vagueness. “You mean Abernathy?”
Overwhelmed by fury at Zoe’s betrayal, Ryan kicked himself for all the times he’d let lust override common sense when it came to her. From the first he’d suspected something was off about Zoe, but he’d let his hunger for her lead him to stop questioning her abrupt appearance in Susannah’s campaign.
“No.” Zoe shook her head. “Not Abernathy. He doesn’t have anything to do with this.”
Not yet.
The unspoken words hung in his thoughts like a deadly virus. There was no doubt that the video would end up in Abernathy’s hands eventually. No matter how many assurances Zoe made, the fact that it existed at all meant it would be leaked.
“Who else knows?”
Her gaze pleaded with him for mercy. “I don’t know.”
“Help me to understand what’s going on,” Ryan said. “Why did such a damning video come to you?”
The distant rumble of a truck along King Street a few blocks away was the only sound in the room for a long minute until Zoe heaved a weary sigh.
“Because of something I came here to do,” she murmured, forcing Ryan to strain to hear her.
“And what is that exactly?”
She wrapped her arms around her waist. If her slumped posture and forlorn expression was supposed to invoke his sympathy, it wasn’t working. His blood turned to ice in his veins as he waited for her to speak.
“To mess up your sister’s campaign as a way of getting revenge on you.”
Ten
Ryan’s expression went cold at her words, but Zoe experienced none of the gut-wrenching panic that used to besiege her whenever she’d done something to upset Tristan. No matter how angry he became at her, Zoe trusted Ryan would fight fair.
“Revenge?” Gravel filled his deep voice. “On me? Why? What did I ever do to you?”
“Nothing. It’s not me who wants revenge,” she explained. “It’s Everly Briggs. Because of what happened to her sister Kelly.”
“Why would you get involved? Who is Everly to you?”
Ryan pushed to his feet and retrieved his clothes. After slipping back into his boxer briefs and jeans, he thrust his arms into his white button-down shirt and came to stand over her, hands planted on his narrow hips, irritation pulling his brows together.
Although her chest ached, tears hadn’t yet made an appearance. For that she should be grateful. Her story would be much harder to tell if she was blubbering incoherently.
“Earlier this fall I went to a networking event and met two women. Everly Briggs and London McCaffrey. I was near the end of my divorce and feeling bitter and helpless. Out of money, beaten up by Tristan’s lawyers, I wasn’t in my right mind. We were all in a similar state. London was angry at being dumped by Linc Thurston and Everly was devastated that Kelly was in jail. We were all feeling wronged and helpless and vindictive.” She stared at her hands, trying to avoid the outrage blazing in Ryan’s gray eyes.
“So you decided to get back at us?” Ryan demanded.
Zoe nodded. “We started talking about how great it would be to make you all pay, but knew anything we did would only come back to bite us.”