The Face of Scandal (7 page)

To Sadie and Dylan
. Hazel groaned.

“I’m sorry,” Ward said, buckling his belt. “I don’t know what I was thinking—”

“Spare me.” Even with eyes closed, Hazel could feel his gaze on her. “Don’t apologize for giving me exactly what I wanted.”

“You wanted to be charged with indecent exposure?”

“That didn’t happen.”

“Could have.”

“And that red Buick at the intersection twenty minutes ago could’ve rear-ended us all the way into an early grave…” Hazel sighed and reluctantly met his gaze. Her voice was raw from snarling insults and biting off pleas. “You’ve got to get a grip. It’s messing with my head when you’re not…you.”

“What?” Ward mocked, fluttering his lashes. “My usual sunny self?”

“When you’re not sure. Of Dylan.”
Of me.
On a whim, Hazel reached over the gearshift and palmed Ward’s cheek. “Hey. I’ll try for him if you do?” There was no other way this could work but with the three of them aligned, on the same page.

“Fighting talk.”

Hazel shrugged. It wasn’t a part she’d played before, but if she was the one who had to take point on this, she would. She had begun to drop her hand when Ward snatched it in his.

Her heart fluttered in her chest.

“Let’s go home,” he said, quiet and subdued.

Hazel retrieved her hand and put the BMW into gear. A flutter of dark wings drifted over the hood of the car as the startled crow took to the air.

* * * *

Dylan jolted up from the couch as soon as they set foot through the door. His clothes, as far as Hazel could tell, were very much still in place, his raven hair neatly combed.
Of course, he could’ve fixed himself up
.

She silenced that small, doubting voice at the back of her mind.

“You didn’t need to stay up,” Ward said to Dylan as he brushed past her on his way into the apartment.

In his haste, he might have missed the way Dylan’s eyes narrowed. Hazel did not.

“What? Sure I… Sadie went to bed.”

Neither Hazel nor Ward replied to that. The drive home had been quiet, but Ward hadn’t shaken off her grip when she took his hand. Whatever happened between them in that barren parking lot wasn’t a swan song.

“You forgot dessert,” Dylan pointed out, squeezing his hands into the front pockets of his skinny slacks. “Or…did you find something sweeter?” He seemed to include Ward in the question, but when he spoke, he addressed Hazel alone.

In this fragile, limping triad, the two of them always seemed to assume she’d be the first one to crumble.

Hazel shot Ward a glance and sucked her bottom lip between her teeth. “You were so busy with Sadie that we had to make our own entertainment.”

With one foot already on the first stair, Ward whipped his head around. Surprise was etched into his expression.

Hazel met his gaze unflinchingly.
Did you forget
I
made
us
happen?

“I see.” Dylan rocked back on his heels. “Maybe I can make it up to—”

“Not tonight,” Hazel said, shamming a smile. “Actually, I think I’ll bunk with Sadie, if that’s okay?” They had done it before, on those nights when Sadie’s break-ups could still be mitigated with a tub of Ben & Jerry’s and a sappy rom-com. “You don’t mind, right, Ward?”

The glare he flung her way was tempered by the flicker of a proud, guarded smile. “More leg room for me.”

He wanted her to fight? She would, but with her weapons, on her terms. She rose up on tiptoes to press a kiss to Dylan’s clean-shaven cheek. “Sleep tight, babe.”

Hazel didn’t turn to check if he followed her with her gaze.
Careful what you wish for.

Chapter Five

Between one coffee refill and wiping down a booth, Hazel made sure to keep an eye on Sadie. The diner was quiet. Eleven a.m. was too late for the morning rush, too early for the lunch time crowds. A couple of patrons were dozing over their cups to the tune of some Dusty Springfield ballad warbling from the speakers overhead. Otherwise, Marco’s seemed almost dead.

“Anything?” Hazel asked as she joined Sadie by the bar. It was just the two of them on the morning shift. Travis had worked until six and Emmalee would be in to take over from Sadie and Hazel in the evening.

Sadie shook her head. “Just asked how I was feeling. Didn’t even wanna know what I had.”

“Maybe he’s squeamish?” Hazel guessed.

“Marco ‘let me tell you all of my mother’s infirmities’?
That
Marco?”

“You’re right,” Hazel nodded. “We’ll go with polite instead. Makes
so
much more sense.”

Maybe
, she mused,
he’s just lovesick
. Men had done far stupider things out of love than turn a blind eye to absenteeism in an otherwise diligent employee.

Hazel knew better than to bring that up.

She had driven Sadie straight from the loft to the diner, despite Dylan’s generous offer to have Sadie stick around and play house for yet another day. The whole business of hunkering down in a safe space and putting real life on pause only worked for a little while. Like Hazel, Sadie had bills to pay—or to help her mother pay.

The goose egg on her cheek had shrunk with the help of ice packs and Arnica ointment. The lingering shadow was nothing a little concealer wouldn’t fix. Even Hazel, who knew it was there, had a hard time seeing it beneath layers and layers of makeup.

“You call your mom yet?” she wondered as she folded crisp paper napkins around knives and forks still warm from the dishwasher. It would win her time in bussing tables later, once the crowds rolled in.

Sadie nodded. “Said I’ll be coming by tonight. And that we gotta talk. She seemed surprised… Asked how Frank was doing.”

The name was a record scratch in Hazel’s ear. “Ah, I take it he hasn’t been by the house.”

“Hasn’t called me, either.”

“Good,” Hazel bit out.

“Not really. It’s like I never existed. He asked me to marry him and now that we’ve broken up—”

“That he hit you,” Hazel corrected, mindful of being overheard.

“Yeah.” Sadie shrugged. “I’d just like to think I’m not so unmemorable, you know?”

Hazel had learned through trial and a lot of error that men who resorted to violence—or manipulation—were better left far behind in the rearview mirror, regardless of any talk about love. No one had ever proposed to her, but she figured the same rule applied to the engagement ring Sadie still wore on her finger.

Sadie went on before Hazel could figure out a way to say as much. “Dylan wanted to kick his ass for me. He’s a sweet guy.”

“He is.”

He had offered the same service to Hazel when she told him about her college boyfriend and the video he made of the two of them playing rough. Perhaps the knight in shining armor act was something he did when all other avenues were barred to him.

Perhaps he thought he couldn’t comfort the women in his life in any other way.

Means nothing
, Hazel told herself, rolling a paper napkin so tight around the cutlery that it tore.

“You’re lucky to have him, you know,” Sadie added, a wistful note in her voice. “Guy like that’ll be good to you…”

“You said the same thing about Malcolm, though.”
You weren’t the only one.

Sadie stiffened. “How long are you going to keep throwing that in my face?”

Baffled by the steel in her voice, Hazel glanced up. “I didn’t mean—”

“I have shit taste in men, Hazel. Do you think I don’t know that? Fuck, I’m gonna be thirty in a month and the one good guy I thought I found is gone.”

“Whoa, Sadie.” Hazel held up her hands. “I swear I wasn’t trying to imply anything…”

Had she? The past few days had been an exercise in restraint. She’d tried to walk the fine line between being a good friend and letting Sadie trample her underfoot with as much grace and fairness as she could muster.

For the most part, it had worked. Sadie was finally moving out and her relationship with Dylan would once again go back to being that of acquaintances who maybe saw each other once a month.
Hopefully
.

Hazel had been counting on Sadie recovering her blithe, sunny self at the same speed. She didn’t know how to tackle the prickly woman standing beside her at the bar.

The bell chime above the door seemed so much less important by contrast.

“I hope I’m not interrupting anything,” a female voice intoned unctuously from the other side of the counter.

Hazel knew who it belonged to before she spun around. Suspicion did nothing to stop her jaw from dropping. Familiar faces she associated with Missouri were supposed to stay in Missouri. Or, if not, somewhere in the eighth circle of hell.

“The fuck do you want?” Sadie snarled, slightly less than hospitable. Ten years was not enough to shroud an old friend’s features in anonymity.

Brunette and rail thin, Penelope Pryce pursed her rouged lips in feigned hurt, as generously made up now as she’d been then. “Since you both missed the reunion, I thought we’d have a nice little get together. Kind of an intimate thing, just the three of us…”

She glanced from Hazel to Sadie and back, letting her gaze slide down Hazel’s uniform meaningfully as she smiled. Contempt suited her so well.

“And,” she added, “Malcolm.”

* * * *

Hands shaking, Hazel only released Penelope’s bony elbow when they were on the other side of the street. Traffic drowned out the whoosh of blood in her ears. The urge to give Penelope a slight shove into the path of a moving vehicle was almost more than Hazel could control.

She pictured it clearly—Penelope’s purple and gold scarf fluttering like a flag, one lonely, red-soled pump scattered by the curb.

And bloodstains, of course, like an oil slick stretching outward.

Another vision intruded, as vivid as the first, of herself between Penelope’s splayed thighs, gauging and adjusting her strokes according to the pitch of Penelope’s moans. The memory of Malcolm’s slap hauled her back into the present with a jolt.

Her voice quaked when she spoke, “You have some nerve coming here and threatening me.”

Penelope had the nerve to titter. “Oh, stop. No one’s watching. Sadie’s gone back inside. Your depressing clients are well out of earshot. You can drop the act.”

“And you can go to hell,” Hazel retorted, matching the saccharine sweetness of Penelope’s pitch as best she could. “What do you want?”

“I told you. A reunion.”

Hazel folded her arms across her chest. “I didn’t graduate.” That shameful feature of her early twenties came as a handy excuse from time to time. It did so now, when faced with her ex-boyfriend’s wife, a woman Hazel had known a little too well in college.

Penelope didn’t have the patience for lies. “Malcolm wants to see you,” she declared. “He’s in town.”

“How did he find out where I work?”

“
He
didn’t.”

Despite the swell of panic threatening to burst through her ribcage like something out
Aliens
, Hazel found herself snorting a guffaw. “Sorry, sorry… I just had this image of you in your nice little Chanel get-up going through every diner in LA to find me.”

“Don’t flatter yourself,” Penelope scoffed.

“So just everything east of Beverly Hills, huh?”

Penelope glowered. Hazel had always thought she had a pretty face—a little waspish, the point of her nose and the nadir of her chin giving her features a faintly angular slant. But she had almond-shaped eyes and a mouth made for kissing, so it wasn’t like Hazel could claim she wasn’t competition.

Malcolm had once called her his little songbird—not that Penelope had much of a voice for singing.

The memory stung, even after so many years.

“You can tell Malcolm that
I
don’t want to see him. And if he keeps following me around the country, I’ll have to get a restraining order.”

“He’ll love that.”

“I don’t
care,
” Hazel sighed. “Penelope, I’m done. I was done a whole fucking decade ago—”

“You said something to your father, didn’t you? Some lie?” Penelope pressed in close.

Hazel smothered the instinctive urge to step back.

“He reneged on his deal with Malcolm.”

“Good.”
Thank you, Dad.

“I don’t think you understand—your family
needs
Malcolm. All that money you grew up with? It’s running out. And let’s face it, Dunby isn’t exactly an up-and-coming town, is it?”

Tucked in the boot heel of the state, too far from any major city to count as a potential suburban haven for nature-loving commuters, Hazel’s hometown had been clinging to the good old days for the better part of the last forty years or so. Resilience was the first word in the town motto.

“There will be other investors,” Hazel said, injecting confidence into her voice.

Penelope’s sneer would have cleaved her certainty in half, had she felt any.

“Don’t come back here.”

“Or what?” Penelope smirked, folding her arms across her slim chest. “You’ll have your
boyfriends
evict me?”

“I’ll do something much worse. Tell Malcolm I have a copy of the movie.”

“Oh, would you stop acting as if I do
everything
he tells me! I know all about your little tape, remember?”

Years back, in college, Penelope and Hazel had been part of a group of young women disillusioned with the average male. A little awkward, a little sheltered, they had attracted the eye of a select clique—sons of politicians and businessmen who had a very specific idea of the kind of women they wanted.

Penelope had learned to embody that ideal, while Hazel had fallen off the wagon along the way.

It came as a shock to discover that she pitied her old friend.

“Whatever you need to tell yourself… I can still mess up his reputation,” Hazel pointed out, “make things bad for Mal and his folks. You two stay away from me and we won’t have to discover what the rest of your friends think about what he did.”

Before Penelope could dismiss the threat, Hazel spun on her heel and started down the street, back to the small, dingy diner where she had wound up after trudging through the dust tracks of Penelope’s great life.