Playing It Close (9 page)

Shoving himself upright, he hung up and took another look around the room. A folded piece of paper on the desk caught his eye. He kicked the sheet off, unmindful of the fact he was naked and walking in front of the open balcony door, and picked up the note. A woman’s writing stared up at him before his vision went blurry with disbelief.

I
have to go back to London.
It was a pleasure getting to know you
,
Liam Jones.
I’ll remember our time here always.
—T

What the fuck? She’d
left
him?
Really
left him, not just gone back to her room for a shower and a change of clothes? His jaw went slack with shock.

Maybe he could still catch her. He bolted across the room to the phone and waited impatiently for the receptionist to pick up. “Can you tell me if Tess Crawley has checked out?”

There was a pause and the light clack of computer keys before the receptionist said, “I’m sorry,
señor
, but we don’t have a guest named Tess Crawley.”

An empty place opened in his chest, the same bleak powerlessness he’d been punched with when he’d realized how badly his mum had lied to him. Tess had lied too? About something as simple as her name? Why?

Unable to take time to examine his own hypocrisy in feeling angry over that, he asked the receptionist, “Are you sure? The guest in Room 317?”

More clacking keys. “Oh, yes. Countess Chambers. Yes, she checked out very early this morning, and Tony drove her to the airport.”

He hung up and collapsed onto the bed, countless questions attacking him at once. Had she known about this all day yesterday? She’d had to—she’d been with him all day and night and couldn’t have rebooked her flight without him knowing it. She’d lied about her name? Why? He understood his own reasons, of course, but why would a woman who wasn’t in the public eye take on a new identity?

Jesus—had she recognized him? Had she known who he was all along? She’d written
Liam Jones
on her Dear John letter. Was that a joke? Was she laughing at him? Using him the way other women had but, worse, pretending she wasn’t?

Then her name hit him. She was a bloody
countess?

Chapter Five

Tonight I was at my desk, getting my things together to go home, when P. perched his scrawny arse on the edge of my desk and smirked down at me. “So, you fucked the boss, huh?”

I felt sick—with myself, with him, with M. for blabbing about it. I thought I could ignore P. and leave, but he touched my neck with his clammy fingers. I jerked away from him, and my bag fell to the floor. When I bent over to pick it up, he said in this smarmy voice, “While you’re down there, love...”

“Fuck off,” I snapped, but it just made him laugh.

“I like feisty women. Rawr!” He clawed the air. “Do something for me, though. I heard you’re bushy. Make sure you shave it for me. Women with pubes...” He shuddered with revulsion. “Revolting.”

—Sexists in the City
blog

“Ms. Chambers, please read your email dated the first of the third last year.”

Tess shuffled through the sheaf of papers stacked on the desk in front of her until she found the email she’d sent on March first. A humiliated heat swept over her neck and face as she reacquainted herself with its content. It was worse than she’d remembered.

The courtroom was silent, and she sat alone at a desk facing Lord Justice Tarrington and the team of experts and ministers he’d assembled. Nine against one. Somehow the odds didn’t seem fair.

“Ms. Chambers, I assume your hearing hasn’t been affected by your new hairstyle?”

Arsehole.
She’d quite liked Tarrington when her former employers had been the targets of his caustic wit. She’d planned to dye her hair back to its original brown before appearing in court, but a flight delay in Caracas meant she missed her connection in Miami, and that meant Aunt Jean had had to meet her at Heathrow with a gray pantsuit and spring for them to take a black cab straight to the Royal Courts of Justice. If only she’d checked her damn email earlier.

But then you wouldn’t have had waterfall time.

She cleared her throat. “No, it hasn’t been. All right, my email dated March first last year.”

“Read aloud, please, whom the email is addressed to, as you don’t use his proper name in the salutation.”

Tess’s jaw hardened. “It’s addressed to Michael Mulligan at Dartford Bank.”

“Thank you. Now read the content of the email.”

Tess faced the inquiry panel, but she felt the stares of her parents and sister boring into her back. They probably thought they were propping her up, but she wished like hell they’d skipped coming today. “‘You fucking bastard.’” She glanced up at Tarrington. “That’s how I start my email, sir.”

His mouth quirked upward. “Yes, thank you for clarifying to our friends in the press that you were addressing your former colleague—not me—that way. Continue.”

“‘You have some nerve calling me Titless Tess when you’re the owner of the stubbiest, most flaccid dick I’ve ever had the misfortune to encounter.’”
Oh
,
God.
“‘If I’d wanted to eat a mushroom, I would’ve gone truffling.’”
Jesus
,
please strike my dad deaf.
“‘The only good thing I can say of our night together is that you lasted no more than three seconds. Bravo, you arse-faced lying bastard.’”

The worst part was that she hadn’t even been clever. The second worst part was that her mother’s horrified gasp echoed in the otherwise silent courtroom.

Tess laid the paper down before she strangled it. Fucking hell, Sunday lunch was going to be excruciating.

Tarrington let her words settle for several long seconds before responding. “And please tell us the email address you sent it from.”

“T dot Chambers at Dartford Bank dot com.”

“Your work email address, correct?”

“Yes.”

“And the device you sent it from was...?”

“My work BlackBerry.”

He raised his brows. “Yet you publicly accused several of your colleagues of sexual harassment on your blog, correct?”

“Yes, that’s correct.” If someone would only give her a shovel, she’d happily dig her own grave right here. “I was sexually harassed at work, and I snapped and wrote an email I’m not at all proud of. In fact, I’m horrified by it.”

“Are you horrified only because it’s become public?”

Tess’s memory transported her back to that day, just a few hours after she’d done the walk—or, cycle—of shame to work after drinking too much and going home with one of the senior managers. She’d prayed no one had noticed that she wore the same clothes, but apparently the dead giveaway had been when Michael blatantly told their colleagues he’d fucked her. He’d said a few other things, too, and by lunchtime she’d discovered her new nickname was Titless Tess. She’d fumed, had a few drinks after work and fired off this appalling email without stopping to think, feeling instantly relieved of the burning bile that had choked her all day.

Was she only horrified because she’d been found out and was now being whipped for being a hypocrite?
You better believe it.
“I do regret that this email has been released. It wasn’t my intention at the time to publicly shame anyone, the way I was publicly shamed. I had intended that my thoughts would only be expressed privately, but since my former employer’s legal team decided to share my email, then I will confirm that I meant every word. I swore to be honest here today, so I have to admit that I have never had such a disappointing sexual encounter in all my life.”

Suck that
,
Michael Mulligan.

There were a few snorts of amusement from the observers crowding the seats behind her. She’d lay money that none of the laughter came from anyone with the surname Chambers.

Tarrington and his crew couldn’t ask her much after that. They’d probably scheduled several hours of grilling in order to get her to the all-time low she’d taken them to directly, but why prolong her own torture?

After a shocked pause, Lord Justice Tarrington twisted the knife a little deeper. “Let me confirm that you feel no remorse over writing this email.”

“Oh, I’m remorseful all right. I’m full of remorse—and quite a bit of shame and humiliation.” She propped her elbows on the table and leaned forward. “Look, I have never intended to portray myself as a cowering victim here. In fact, if you read my blog carefully, you will see that my biggest regret comes from not having the courage to stand up and say ‘This is wrong’ until I became the target.
That
is what I regret most.” She paused. “That, and sleeping with Michael Mulligan in the first place. Huge mistake.”

Several people chuckled behind her, but a choking sound in the row directly behind her made her even more aware of what she was doing to her parents. As she kamikazed her remaining self-respect and her chances of any career that didn’t involve doing a price check on tampons, she realized that she actually
had
lied to the Tarrington inquiry. Her biggest shame wasn’t her own cowardly behavior at work or sleeping with Michael. It was the fact that she’d just publicly humiliated her family with her behavior.

Tarrington dismissed her and announced a short recess. Tess tried to leave the courtroom as quickly as she could, but she couldn’t rush past her parents and Gwen. Her dad stared at an invisible spot on the floor, probably thinking about how much easier his life would be if that speck of dirt was his eldest daughter. Her mum stood with her arms folded across her ample bosom, eyes narrowed and mouth firmly pressed into what Tess had always considered the ruler of her disappointment. The thinner her lips, the bigger trouble Tess would be in. Today, her mother had swallowed them.

And Gwen—sweet, supportive, optimistic Gwen—tried to keep an encouraging face, but even she was fighting a cringe.

“How’d I do?” Tess joked, trying to ease the tension.

Silence. If they hadn’t been in central London, she’d have heard crickets. Tess let out a deep sigh. “Yeah, that’s what I thought. I’m really sorry.”

Her father dropped his head back to contemplate the ceiling, his jaw working hard to contain his obvious anger. Her mum had less self-control. “Why did you do it, Tess? Why did you send such a reprehensible letter?”

Because I was drunk
didn’t seem like the kind of answer that would assuage her mother. “I wasn’t thinking straight.”

Mum’s nostrils flared. “I’d have thought you’d learned your lesson in the sixth form. Really, Tess, that kind of retribution never works out for you.”

Ah, yes, the sixth form. When she’d sought revenge against a boy who’d made Gwen cry, and her father had had to beg the headmaster not to throw her out of school. Humiliation swept over her. “I swear, Mum, I’ll never do anything like this again. I’ll walk the straight and narrow, stay off the internet and away from the public eye, and avoid getting entangled with colleagues.”
Should I ever get a job again.
“I never, ever want to put you through something like this again. I’m so sorry.”

Her mother’s lips eased slightly, and Gwen slipped her arm through Tess’s. “Why don’t we go celebrate the fact that you don’t have to give any more evidence? Who’s ready for lunch?”

When they stepped out the front door of the Royal Courts of Justice, several journalists shoved microphones in her face. “Ms. Chambers! Ms. Chambers! Did you ever have sex inside your office with Michael Mulligan? How many of your colleagues did you sleep with? Just how unimpressive
was
he in the sack?”

Tess bit down hard on her tongue. Her mother, however, had no such patience. She gave the reporters a bollocking until they backed away like a pack of beaten dogs, mumbling apologies for asking such impertinent questions. As her family acted like a human shield and swept her away, she swallowed the fear that always plagued her in the aftermath of her disasters. One day, they would finally get fed up and abandon her. One day, she would wake up and find herself all alone.

Chapter Six

Liam clutched a rugby ball and jogged down the center of the pitch, pretending to run at full tilt as a gaggle of eight-year-olds gave chase. Their high-pitched squeals of delight made him laugh. They were so young the boys and girls sounded exactly the same. When one of them got close enough to tag the back of his leg, he tumbled to the grass with an exaggerated cry.

Just as he would during a real match, he laid the ball behind him on the green grass, away from the opposition, so one of his teammates could grab it and keep running for the try line.

“Where’s my team? I need my team!” he yelled, trying not to eat too much dirt as the munchkins tackled him from all sides. Clearly they hadn’t yet been taught that they needed to stay on their feet in the ruck.

Finally someone came to his rescue. The ball was snatched from his hands, and he peeked through the tangle of skinny arms and legs to watch his most senior player, Ash Trenton, jog a couple of meters before lobbing it to Liam’s best mate, Spencer Bailey. More kids ran after Bailey Boy, but the weight of young bodies on Liam’s back didn’t change. A knobby knee jammed into the cartilage of his nose, making his eyes water as he pushed it gently aside.

“Hey. Kids.” He wriggled to get their attention, but that just made them giggle harder. Great, now he was a vibrating jungle gym. “Go after Bailey. He’s got the ball.”

A bit of the weight lifted and a couple kids ran away, but others clung on. There was nothing for it, so he did his Incredible Hulk impersonation. With a roar, he scrambled to his feet and kids tumbled off all around him, laughing hard as they landed on their arses. He raised his arms and a child clung to each of his biceps, hanging in the air and grinning at him. One was a pale, bespectacled ginger boy who seemed to be the runt of his class. The other was a dark-skinned girl in a sparkly headscarf with her two front teeth missing.