Out of Her League (2 page)

“Callum, I think Rupert needs you,” she
said, nodding to where Callum’s smiling groom was paying absolutely zero
attention to them.

“What?” Callum’s head whipped around, homing
in on Rupert instantly. “Excuse me.”

Callum ran off. Which had been her plan
exactly, except the idiot flew across the room to his husband’s side and
didn’t
take her with him.

Honestly, what was the matter with these
men?

She smiled kindly at Lachlan, whose mouth was
still just sort of hanging open. She’d had a lot of people react to meeting her
a lot of different ways over the years, but this was definitely a first. The
longer the silence stretched, the more nauseated he appeared.

“Well, it was very nice to meet you. I
guess I’ll see you soon,” Michaela said, taking a slow step back.

“What?”

“In Cambridge,” she reminded him. “Perhaps
we’ll run into each other on campus. Though I’ll be at the law school. I don’t
think that’s on the same campus as your office and classes.”

“No.”

Right.
No
. Well, maybe that was for
the best.

Lachlan watched Michaela’s retreating back,
his stomach a jumble of knots that had been twisting tighter and tighter for
the past five minutes. That had gone even worse than he’d expected.
Awesome
.

He briefly considered pulling his sgian-dubh—the ceremonial knife in his right sock—and stabbing himself
in the eye with it.

“So, that looked painful.”

Lachlan jumped, then turned to see Rhian smiling
at him with some combination of sympathy and amusement. “
That
was excruciating.”

“Nice. But just think, now that you’ve gotten
one of the most famous and famously beautiful women in the world out of the
way, maybe everyone else will be easier?”

Lachlan let out a bark of laughter, wincing at
how bitter it sounded. “I doubt it.”

“Come on,” Rhian said, tipping his head toward
the bar. “I see a glass of scotch with your name on it.”

“Funny, I see the whole bottle.”

He didn’t, in the end, drink the whole bottle.
Getting loaded just because he’d humiliated himself wasn’t really his style. Also,
he’d be drunk all the damn time if it were. No, becoming even more introverted
and tucking himself further and further into the shadows at the corners of the
tent was more his speed.

Rhian didn’t let him get away with it as much
as he might have unchecked, but no one really gave him a hard time. His family
didn’t understand him, but they loved him and accepted that he would always be
the odd duck in these situations. Rhian, sadly, accepted nothing of the sort.
Lachlan was oddly grateful
and
resentful about that. At least with Rhian
prodding him along, all of Lachlan’s aunts got another spin around the dance
floor.

Whenever Rhian allowed it or was sufficiently
distracted, Lachlan ducked into a quiet spot to watch the party rage around
him. He did enjoy seeing his family so happy, the kids running around and the
older guests huddle up with their tea and coffee to catch up on years of life. Most
of the very few people on earth he felt completely comfortable sitting and
talking to were there. It made it bearable.

A flash of color and a bright laugh drew his
eyes, again, to Michaela.

He didn’t think he was imagining the way that,
if she stood still long enough, everyone near her seemed to shift, slowly
turning to revolve around her. Or that she was, at some level, aware of that,
given the way she rarely stopped moving long enough to let it happen, and if
she did, it was to deflect attention back to where it belonged—on Rupert and
Callum.

She obviously adored them both, and their
children, whose hands were often found clasped in hers. She danced with them,
or other members of Lachlan’s family, all night. And no one else.

His parents clearly liked her, too, their
smiles wide and genuine when they spoke, his father’s cheeks pink the one time
he spun her across the floor. She had that bizarre ability to flirt outrageously
with his father and only leave his mother beaming at them with approval.

How the fuck did anyone even do that?

And she was moving to Cambridge.

Fuck his life.

Moving sucked. Moving to a new apartment,
in a new city, in the depths of August when the humidity was so thick the air
tasted heavy, and with no help other than the movers, sucked
a lot.

Michaela’s brothers had offered to come up,
but they had lives and jobs in New York, and she’d wanted to move in on a
weekday when there were fewer people around to witness it. She’d make a point
of introducing herself to her neighbors in the coming week, but for now she was
careful to stay out of sight while the movers lugged all her belongings into
the elevator.

Her new doorman, Mike, seemed surprised
when she came up to introduce herself and then stood by his desk chatting, keeping
an eye on the flow of men and stuff. She hung out there for a while, until he
was joking with her about the sheer number of boxes labeled “clothes” and she’d
discovered that his niece was also due to start law school in a week.

By the time she went upstairs to supervise
the placement of the big pieces of furniture, she thought she had a good sense
of who Mike was. His quick humor and big smile were hard not to like. And she even
felt a small ray of hope that she could trust him. It was probably foolish.
She’d liked her doormen in New York a lot, too—but that hadn’t stopped them
from selling reporters and photographers information about her comings and
goings, and letting them paw through her mail.

She was, as had been proven time and again,
a terrible judge of character. But hey, maybe this time she’d get lucky. There
was, after all, a first time for everything.

Clinging to that optimism, she looked
around her new home and smiled. She’d liked this apartment when she’d seen the
listing online, and had made an offer as soon as she’d seen it in person. It
wasn’t huge, but it was more than big enough for her, including a spare bedroom
for her exercise equipment if it turned out the gym in the basement wasn’t a
good place for her. She was used to people taking her picture, but she’d defy
anyone to look good after a hard slog on the elliptical machine. Those were
always the shots at the checkout line, announcing her descent into drug
addiction or the latest in a series of mental breakdowns. If the
Weekly
Inquisition
was to be believed, she was up to number forty-seven. Or was it
forty-eight, now? She’d have to check with her brother Damon. He liked to keep
track of these things.

He was such a help.

So, yeah, spare bedroom. Check.

The best part about the apartment, though, was
the light. She was used to the high rises in New York, but for all that her
last place had been twenty floors higher up, the windows had looked out at the
buildings across the street. This place was on the top floor of the tallest
building for blocks, and the windows and skylights were huge, bathing the open
floor plan in unobstructed sunlight. Even better, off the kitchen there was a large
rooftop terrace, which begged for a potted herb garden. She was trying to learn
to cook, which wasn’t really going very well, but she had a refined enough
palate to know fresh herbs were better.

And she probably couldn’t poison anyone
with an herb. Which was more than could be said about her first attempt at
chicken piccata. Damon had sworn he’d never sit at her table again.

Shaking off that memory, she ran down to
the underground garage, grimacing when she heard the high-pitched barks echoing
against the cold cement walls. She cast an apologetic look at the man striding past
her car, ignoring his startled recognition. She focused instead on Fang, who had
apparently been working on his best Rottweiler impersonation for anyone who
dared to walk nearby.

She sent him a supremely unimpressed look through
the back window and popped the door open.

“Are you done?”

Liquid brown eyes stared up at her, his
whole body quivering with joy.

Michaela rolled her eyes, but her heart
melted, as always, when five pounds of mutt flung himself against her chest. She
could only hope her new neighbor found his ridiculousness as endearing as she
did, and wouldn’t tell anyone about the stream of baby talk falling from her
lips.

Tucking her little monster under her arm,
she bypassed the elevator—preferring the eight flights of stairs to the company
of her unknown neighbor—and ran back up to the apartment. She set Fang down to
explore and went to work dragging boxes and smaller furniture to different
places to see what she thought, and, once decided, putting stuff away. Her
mother had suggested she hire someone to do this, but she didn’t like the idea
of strangers going through her stuff. She’d been nervous enough about the
moving company, wondering if her shit would end up for sale on the internet
rather than in Cambridge.

Callum’s sister, Savannah, had offered to
come help her get settled, which was really sweet. Michaela hoped they’d get to
know each other better over the coming months, but as of now, she didn’t know
her that much better than the complete strangers her mother had proposed.

And, of course, Lachlan hadn’t offered to
help at all. Which, really, was for the best all around.

The brief and evil fantasy of innocently
asking Lachlan to unpack her underwear drawer drifted through her mind, and she
smiled momentarily before scolding herself. She felt sorry for the guy, and as
much as a good prank could make her whole day, she didn’t have any smelling
salts.

Then she considered how bad it would be if
he found the box under her bed, unlocked. 911 worked the same everywhere,
right?

Grinning, she set up her speakers, chose a
playlist, and bopped her way into the kitchen to start working.

Lachlan thought it had to
suck
to be
Michaela Price.

Standing in Out of Town News, just a few
feet from his office and in the heart of Harvard Square, he frowned at the wall
of magazines before him. Normally he wouldn’t spare them a second glance, but
it was hard to ignore the glossy, full-color covers when they featured his own
brother.

America was currently obsessed with the
story of the Olympic-medal winning professional athlete who had left it all
behind to marry the man he loved and raise their two adopted children. Add in
that Rupert was an earl and it was the stuff of romance novels—or so Lachlan’s
mother had attempted to explain.

It all seemed like a lot of hooey to
Lachlan. It was just Callum and Rupert. They were good people, trying to raise
more good people well. Lachlan knew and loved them, and was one hundred percent
certain their lives didn’t really resemble the crap he was looking at on the
newsstand.

Michaela, on the other hand, he didn’t
know, but his bullshit meter was still stuck at full tilt. She was on more than
half of the covers, too. And in two cases, she got the big picture, and his
brother and Rupert had been relegated to the little box in the corner.

Scorned again!
declared one particularly busy headline.
Did she know?
asked
another.

She had known. She’d known Callum was gay
almost the entire time they’d been friends. And certainly for every minute they’d
pretended to date. Lachlan had never understood why either of them had thought
that
was a good idea, but he’d been able to
imagine
why his brother had believed
being an openly gay man and an NHL star hadn’t been possible. Lachlan absolutely
couldn’t fathom why Michaela had done it. Hell, she’d been the one to
suggest
it.

Lachlan didn’t know shit about society or
celebrities, but even he knew Michaela was both. He’d heard someone once call
her a celebutante. The daughter of a wealthy and powerful family, blessed with
a symmetrical facial structure and a lot of shiny hair, meeting the current
standards for beauty seemingly without much effort, thanks to genetics making
her tall and slim.

So what.

None of this explained why people wanted to
know so much about her. And why they didn’t seem to care if what they read was
the truth or not. Callum had been sick with worry about how his coming out and
marriage would affect Michaela. She’d insisted that he not worry about that,
about her, and make himself happy.

And he had. With her blessing and support,
even though she’d known full well that this crap would be the consequence.

To Lachlan, that was the story that readers
should care about, though mostly he thought people should just mind their own
damn business. She’d thrown herself to the media wolves so her friend could be
happy. That was interesting.
That
told him something about her. But
people didn’t care about that.

What they cared about appeared to be—Lachlan
leaned closer to the rack of magazines, embarrassed to even be looking at this
dreck—a sex tape.

Lachlan jerked upright.
A sex tape?

“Did you hear Michaela Price is enrolled
this semester? I read she’s working on her PhD in psychology.”

Lachlan glanced at the group of
undergraduates to his left. The one who’d spoken picked up one of the magazines
featuring Michaela, front and center, on the cover.

“Must be nice to be able to buy your way
into any school you want,” said another with a sneer. “Think we’ll recognize
her when she hasn’t had herself Photoshopped?”

Lachlan wondered if they actually thought
she’d
volunteered
to be on the cover of a magazine decrying her
inability to keep a man happy.

“She’s probably a bitch,” another
announced.

Lachlan’s hands curled into fists, his
lunch souring in his stomach. He fled the newsagent and walked briskly back to
campus, his shirt sticking to his skin in the humidity.

When he arrived back at his office, he
closed the door firmly and sat at his desk, staring at his computer for a long
time.

There was a right and wrong here, and he
wasn’t sure where the line lay. Michaela had a right to her privacy, regardless
of his curiosity and the fact that he could violate it, easily and thoroughly,
via the internet. But he also wanted to know more.

He decided it was safe enough to pull up
her Wikipedia page. Even someone as clueless as him knew that those were almost
always carefully managed by a publicist or someone else with an equally weird
job. His two more famous brothers’ pages certainly were, given how they were presented
as the perfect angels they only wished they could be.

Actually, scratch that. Neither of them
wanted to be angels. But their publicists sure wished they were.

Michaela’s too, apparently.

She was his age, more or less. Private
schools, Columbia, Summa Cum Laude. Pretty impressive stuff. His eyebrows didn’t
lift, though, until he saw that she was now the Chairwoman of the Price
Foundation. Given that both her parents were still healthy and relatively young,
and Michaela wasn’t the oldest child, it was interesting that she’d taken the
helm already.

Lachlan’s fingers hovered over the
keyboard, then finally gave up and entered
Michaela Price
as a search
term in Google.

The latest news was exactly the same drivel
he’d seen on the newsstand, and her Wikipedia page was greyed out as already
viewed. Then it got…a lot more interesting. And by interesting, Lachlan meant
alarming.

He closed the browser window and picked up his
phone. Maybe he could get a more truthful, edited-down version from his sister.
He wasn’t foolish enough to consider asking Callum. He strongly suspected his
brother would blow a gasket if he even brought it up.

“Hi, Lachlan,” Savannah said after two
short rings.

“Uh…” How did one go about asking their
sister if their brother’s best friend had a former career in the pornography
industry?
New plan needed
. “Is Rhian there?”

“Yeah, sure. He’s right here. You have his
number, though, don’t you?”

“Yeah, sorry. Can I just talk to him?”

There was a series of thumps, then Rhian
came on the line. “What’s up, Lach?” Rhian asked in his best—and yet, still
terrible—Bugs Bunny impersonation.

“Do you know anything about Michaela
Price’s sex tape?”

His question was met with long silence. “Pardon?”

Lachlan huffed and rubbed a hand over his
face. “I don’t even know why I’m asking, but I saw all the articles today and I
read something about a tape and I met her at the wedding and was surprised, I
guess, though really, who am I to judge one way or another, and I was just
curious what the deal was there. So I called Sav and then thought maybe I
should ask you instead. I guess.”

His uncharacteristic doubt of verbal
diarrhea was met with yet more silence. Then, “Hold on a sec.”

The sound of a door closing came through
the phone. “Okay, I’m in the office,” Rhian explained. “Just like you don’t
want to ask your sister about this, I
really
don’t want to talk about it
when she’s within earshot.”

Which seemed fair.

“So, was she a porn star?”

Rhian laughed, more of a surprised sound
than an amused one. “Uh, no. And let me start by saying that I don’t know much
about this, since it all happened when I was too young to be aware of this kind
of shit. But it’s sort of a big deal? Like, if I heard about it later, how the
hell do you
not
know about this stuff?”

Lachlan shrugged, even though Rhian
couldn’t see him. “Not really my area of interest.”

“Not really your area of…” Rhian trailed
off with an annoyingly fond huff. “Okay, well, I can tell you what I know. The
internet can probably tell you a lot more.”

“I don’t want to see it.”

“What? The video?”

“No. Yes—that, or all the bullshit. I’m
hoping you can distill it for me.”

“Um, let’s see. She was barely eighteen and
her boyfriend, Blake Whelton, taped them having what I’ve heard is
pretty…uh…gymnastic sex, then sold it a couple years later because she was
famous and she’d just dumped him. I’ve never seen it, but I think I’m pretty
unusual, to be honest. It got around, a lot, before her lawyers shut it down,
and by then it was too late. The internet is forever—and that was
before
Blake’s acting career took off and gave the tape new life.”