Owning Beauty (Taking Beauty Trilogy 3)

As much as I wanted to refute her, Tessa had a point—just how well did I know Liz? I mean, aside from a drunken night in Vegas together—one that neither of us remembered—we’d been together for all of a week; and while it had been the best week of my life, did that really mean that I knew the first thing about her? Liz could have been anyone in the world. There was no way I’d even scratched the surface of who she was in such a short amount of time, no matter what I felt to the contrary.

I glanced down at the papers despite my better judgment, squinting at the small black type. I’d been expecting photos, but this appeared to be a series of e-mails Tessa had printed out.

“What’s this?” I asked, resisting as best I could the urge to actually read one. The truth was I wanted so badly for Tessa to be wrong—to be so completely and totally off-base about this entire thing… but unless I knew all the facts, then I was just as much of a chump as she’d said I was.

“E-mails… and a few text messages,” she said. “All of them between Elizabeth and her friend Jennifer. All of them about you.”

“Why is that so shocking?” I snorted and looked away from the stack, trying to affect an air of confidence I didn’t really feel. “Of course she talks to Jen about me. They are friends. I’m not going to sit here reading her private email!”

Tessa looked at me like I was a particularly slow child. “These e-mails aren’t recent, Julian.” She tapped her finger against a line on the top sheet, indicating a date of some months before I’d even been to Vegas. That was right around the time I’d made the announcement about the show. “They’ve been planning this for months.”

“What in the hell are you talking about?”

“You want me to read you the damn things?” Tessa shouted, lifting the emails back up. “You’ve been drinking a long time Julian. Do you ever black out and forget a whole damn night?”

“I must have hit things a bit hard…”

“Rohypnol, Julian. It’s all right here,” Tessa said, slapping at the paper. “The date rape drug! They drugged you!”

My heart sank. Over the past hour, I’d been doing my best to dismiss the intrusive thoughts I’d had about Liz’s fidelity, about whether or not she was who she’d said she was. I’d been calling myself a paranoid fool for even entertaining the notion she’d betray me—sure, we’d had a fight, but not one big enough for her to throw everything we had away.

What did we have, though, really? An accidental marriage, an inconvenient pregnancy, and a few good lays? No, it had to be more than that. We’d shared things with each other. Hadn’t we? Or at least, I had. The koi fish tattooed along my ribs throbbed suddenly and I touched it through my shirt, wincing.

“These can’t be real,” I said, giving in to my morbid curiosity and beginning to read through the papers. “You’re lying…”

More softly than I’d expected, Tessa said, “It’s all real, Julian. The marriage, the baby—it was all just an elaborate scheme, meticulously planned and elegantly executed. You fell right into their trap.”

“None of this makes any sense,” I said, running a hand through my hair as I grabbed the papers from Tessa. I read over one e-mail after another, each one detailing the various stages of an intricate plan, from discovery of which hotel I was staying at, to getting me drunk at the bar, right down to making sure I wasn’t wearing any protection when we had sex.

Sweat clung to my temples. I covered my mouth with the tips of my fingers. My stomach clenched and threatened to lurch. This couldn’t be true.

“Doesn’t it?” Tessa asked incredulously. “She just wanted to take you for a damn child support payment, Julian—and the alimony that would have gone alone with the divorce! This was her plan all along!”

“But she didn’t remember what happened, either,” I said, my voice growing weaker as my gaze returned to the pages in front of me, each of them more damning than the last.

Tessa threw up her hands. Now there was an expression on her face I understood—exasperation. “For Christ’s sakes, Jules—she lied! It’s that simple. People like her will always lie. It’s because of who you are. Because of what you represent to them. You will never be anything but a potential payout… except to me.” Her gaze softened. “I keep telling you, Julian. In this line of work… I’m the only person you can trust.”

I couldn’t stop myself from staring at the e-mails. I was so transfixed by just how foolish I had to be to put myself in a situation like this. Tessa was right—I had played right into their hands, and now I would have to find a way to somehow dig myself back out of the grave I’d dug. I felt like I was falling, like I’d jumped out of a plane with no parachute, or even a hope of landing on anything soft as the ground rose up to meet me.

“Why didn’t she go public right away, then?” I wondered out loud, shuffling through the documents numbly. “Why did she wait almost a month…”

“That’s always bothered you, hasn’t it?” Tessa said, sighing as she rooted through the remainder of the stack. Finally, she pulled a sheet free. “Here. You won’t believe me if I tell you, so see for yourself.”

I read it over. Then I closed my eyes. “She was waiting on confirmation of the pregnancy.”

Tessa nodded. “Didn’t it strike you as one hell of a coincidence that her doctor called right as we showed up?”

No, I thought, though I dared not say it out loud for fear of looking even stupider. I’d had no idea that any of this was staged. From the very start, Liz had pulled at my heart strings. She was beautiful. She was a spitfire. She seemed the kind of girl who’d never had a day of fun in her whole life, and that made me want to take care of her, to show her how amazing life could be if she’d just let her guard down. She was a wildcat in bed, too, and I wondered if that was what had sealed the deal for me. Dear Lord, I hoped not. It was one thing to be a fool, but a fool as shallow and brain dead as all that? Hell, I might as well have applied for this year’s Darwin Award.

Well done, Liz, I thought, pushing the papers away. Bitterly, I recalled how the morning I’d woke up in that Vegas hotel room, she’d been gone—and how part of me had actually been impressed with that, impressed with the idea that she’d got me all turned around. You pulled one over on me. Right from the start.

“You’re right,” I said to Tessa at last, my voice tight as I fought back the emotion welling in my throat. Tessa had been there for me through thick and thin, seen me through to being the star I was today. If I couldn’t trust her, then what did I have? Years of her helping me rise to the top should have earned her enough respect to take her word at face value—even when it was something I didn’t want to hear. And yet I’d treated her as the enemy ever since Elizabeth Lawson walked into my life. A pang of guilt resonated in me. Tess deserved better. “I… I just don’t know what to say.”

“All you need to say,” Tessa said, gathering up the papers, “is that you were tricked, and that you have evidence that proves that Elizabeth Lawson planned your wedding and her pregnancy in order to extort money from you. Then you’ll say how betrayed you feel by all of this and we’ll go home back to London.”

I felt so tired suddenly, as though everything I’d had in me had been taken out through a straw. I felt like a husk of what I had been, a pale imitation of the man who had seen his baby’s ultrasound just a few h

ours beforehand. But now that memory had been sullied by what I’d just read in those e-mails. I’d been used—played like some schoolyard dolt for his lunch money, just because a woman batted her eyelashes at me and told me that she was going to have my child.

“Fuck makeup,” I said, rubbing my face as I stood up from the chair. “Let’s get this over with.” The last thing I wanted right now was to be touched, by anyone, but especially a woman.

I felt numb, almost directionless as I followed Tessa out of the room and down the hallway toward the sound of people milling about. I wasn’t even in the mood to hate those bastards with their cameras and incessant questions about nothing that even had any importance. I just wanted all of this to be over. I wanted to be back home, where I belonged. I never wanted to feel anything ever again.

If I had a choice, I would never even set foot in America again, and if that meant fading into obscurity, then I hardly gave a damn. Truth be told, drowning myself in an ocean of booze sounded like the best idea I’d had all bloody week, and the moment this stupid interview was over, I was going to start doing just that.

“Before I forget,” Tessa said, turning around and holding her hand out to me. “I need your phone.”

I stopped short. “Why?” I asked her, frowning even as I dutifully dug it out of my pocket and handed it over.

“Because I’m going to get you a new one,” she said with a smile. “She’s got your number, and since she’s been outed, I hardly think she’s going to keep that a secret. By now there have to be a hundred different news networks who know it.”

“Yeah, I guess you’re right,” I muttered. Great, now even my phone had been spoiled, corrupted by Liz’s scheming and my terrible decisions. I was glad Tessa was getting rid of it. Its absence would provide me with one less reminder that I’d been duped.

“There’s a good lad,” she said, stowing the phone in her purse as she laid her hand on my back, leading me out toward the bright lights of a conference room. The moment I stepped inside the cameras started flashing, a sea of phosphor dots dancing in front of me as Tessa guided me over to a podium where I would address the crowd.