Indecent Proposal (18 page)

“Isn’t it rude to talk about someone when they’re not in the room?” she asked.

He was on his feet and Wallace, next to him, was, too.

It wasn’t that her beauty had altered. The rawness of her looks, the sexuality that could so easily blind a person from seeing anything else about her, was muted. Secondary. This woman in front of him with the perfect makeup and hair and sharp suit—she looked smart and focused. She glowed with a sly light. A warmth and an intelligence.

“Holy shit,” Wallace said.

“You look beautiful,” Harrison said, and her eyes sliced through him.

“What did you say once?” she asked, stepping farther into the room, made of confidence and swagger. She was a flame—all of them, with the exception of Mother, helpless moths. “This is the least of what I can do?”

He tipped his head, caught in the edges of her bewitching smile.

“A suit is easy,” Mother said, picking up a cup of coffee from the edge of the television table. “Let’s talk about what we’re going to do with your background.”

Ryan sat down on the arm of the sofa, close to Harrison but still somehow very far away, in a perfect imitation of Mother’s posture. Her distance.

“What would you like to know?” she asked, and even her voice was different. Slower, the consonants rounder. Not quite Atlanta proper, but not quite Queens anymore, either.

Mother leaned forward and as he watched, Ryan cataloged all of his mother’s nuances, what she did with her hands, how she cocked her head. The position of her feet. Ryan made dozens of minute changes, but the effect was huge.

She transformed herself.

Harrison allowed himself to feel just the smallest amount of hope that maybe they could pull this off.

But Mother’s smile was cruel. “Let’s talk about your first marriage.”

Either they’d pull this off or Ryan and Mother would get into a fight on the coffee table. At this point it could go either way.

Ryan had met more than her fair share of mean girls. Bitches, who thought that because they had money, or bigger tits, or lived on the other side of town, or had
fucked her boyfriend at one time or another, had one up on her.

Patty Montgomery was just another mean girl.

And Ryan was here to prove that she could do this. She could dress up and play the part of Mrs. Harrison Montgomery, despite being wildly unprepared for the role.

But it was a pretty good bet that Mrs. Harrison Montgomery shouldn’t hit her mother-in-law with her teacup, so she swallowed the urge and renewed her promise to play nice.

Though flashing the scars left by her marriage in a room full of strangers made her feel painfully exposed. Harrison’s staffers, she could feel them all watching her. So, she adopted some of her mother-in-law’s icy distance. Those hooded eyes, the clenched jaw.

And the chill felt good. Like insulation a foot thick between herself and the past and everyone in this room.

Except Harrison.

She wasn’t sure there was enough insulation in the world to make her forget he was there.

“His name was Paul,” she said. “We got married when I was twenty and it lasted for four years.”

“How did you meet?”

“Paul was dating my sister.”

“Your sister? And you—”

“Stole him? I guess you could say that, though he wasn’t much of a prize. My sister was in nursing school and when I got the contract for Lip Girl, he became very interested in me. I thought we were in love, but he was far more interested in the money I was making.”

“How charming.” Patty’s sarcasm was a sharp blade and Ryan was not totally impervious. She shifted in her seat, trying not to lose her temper. This was part of it, wasn’t it? Part of what she’d signed on for. The tea
drinking and waving and getting browbeaten by her mother-in-law.

“I hardly see how this is relevant?” Wallace asked, but Patty held up a hand, silencing him. Ryan realized that Patty wasn’t going to stop this little interview until she was chewing on Ryan’s bones.

Just another mean girl
, she told herself when she felt herself wobble.
And not even the worst you’ve ever seen
.

“How did this fairy tale end?” Patty asked.

“Mother—” Harrison tried to step in and Ryan appreciated it. She did. But this was her fight.

“No, it’s okay.” Ryan looked over at him, standing with his arms crossed over his chest, the city through the window behind him. If she had her choice, he’d never know this. She’d never talk about it. “Things with Paul were fine for two years, rough for another. Terrible … really, really terrible for one more.”

She thought of her hospital record, the clinical description of broken bones and black eyes. Scrapes and cuts. A woman thrown down stairs and punched in the face.

Harrison had seen those hospital records. Understood that she’d been beaten up and still went back to the guy, and she was as aware as anybody else that blaming the victim was ludicrous, but it didn’t quite stop her from hating herself.

Her skin prickled with heat, all along the side of her face and down her neck.

She cleared her throat. “I had told Paul, stupidly, that my father had saved scrupulously over the years five thousand dollars for each of his kids. Which was hard, miraculous really, considering his salary. He gave it to us when we turned eighteen to use however we wanted. Nora, Wes, and I all got our money, but he still had Olivia’s. Kept it in a safe in the attic.” She ran a thumb
over the hem of her skirt. Over and over again. As if the past were a smudge there and she could just rub it off. “Paul had expensive habits, and the money I made with Lip Girl was gone. All of it, everything we had was gone, and one night, Paul … Paul got a gun from some friend of his and he drove us home to my father’s house, where he forced … he forced my father to give us all of his money, including my youngest sister’s five thousand dollars.”

“And you were an accomplice to this?”

“You could say that.”

“And what would you say?”

“I thought …” Again the thumb over the edge of her skirt. A nervous tic. A tell.
Stop it, Ryan. Stop
. But she couldn’t. She could sit here and talk about this, but she couldn’t totally pretend it was easy. Harrison was watching her, and she wanted to look at him, gauge how he felt about the woman he’d married. But she knew that if she looked, she’d never be able to tell. And that was in so many ways more devastating than his mother’s outright disdain. “I thought if I wasn’t there someone would get killed. Either Paul or my father. Nora, if she decided to be brave.”

“You were protecting your family?” Patty asked, clearly not believing her.

“That’s something you understand, isn’t it?” she snapped, because yes, that was what she’d thought, and how dare this woman who had done her own damage to her family judge her? “Our methods might be different, but our goals are the same.”

“You and I are not at all alike,” Harrison’s mother spat.

“Let’s talk about education,” Wallace jumped in as if to rescue her.

“What education?” Patty put out her claws. “She’s a high school dropout!”

It stung. It shouldn’t, it was somehow the least of her sins, but it still stung. “Well, I had at the time gotten a fairly substantial modeling contract.”

“And that worked out so well for you, didn’t it? The horrid Lip Girl thing.”

“Enough,” Harrison snapped, sounding almost exactly the way Patty had sounded last night talking to her drunk husband.

Are we all just doomed to step in our parents’ footprints?

“It’s fine,” Ryan said. Her pride couldn’t change the facts. “She’s right. My modeling career failed. My marriage failed. Not much has worked out the way it was supposed to.”

“Except for seducing my son, you mean?” Patty asked. “That has worked out perfectly for you.”

“She didn’t seduce me, Mother.”

Oh, but I did seduce you. I just thought you were seducing me right back
.

“You honestly believe she didn’t know who you were?”

“It doesn’t matter!” he snapped and Ryan jumped, strung so tight she felt she might crack like ice.

“Harrison,” Ryan murmured. “Don’t get mad. It’s okay.”

“No. It’s not!” Harrison surged forward into her line of sight so she turned away slightly, so she couldn’t see him again. For some reason, all of this was possible only if she wasn’t looking at him. “Mother, you can leave.”

Ryan gaped at him.

Patty gaped at him.

“I’m not joking. We’ve got to work together, and all you’re interested in is tearing her apart. It’s not going to work if you’re here.”

The room pounded with silence.

“What happened to your fine speech?” his mother
asked, coming slowly to her feet. “About needing my help to make everyone believe you’re in love.”

“If this is your ‘help,’ we can manage without it.”

Patty gathered her purse, the air thick and awful.

As much as Ryan would love having Patty gone, it had been made pretty clear to her that she needed Patty. That of everyone in this room, Patty was the most likely to make them convincing.

Ryan reached for Harrison, touching, just barely, the edge of his coat jacket. As if that was all she could bear.

“It’s okay,” she breathed. “You don’t have to—”

“I do,” Harrison said, glancing at her and away.
God
. He was really angry.

“But what if we do need her help? It’s kind of an all-hands-on-deck sort of situation.”

“You’ll be fine. Better than if she’s here constantly rattling your cage.” He lifted his hand to touch her shoulder, but she flinched away from him before he could. It had been instinctive. Uncontrollable. A safety measure.

Well, that’s a problem
.

In the doorway, Patty saw how she’d flinched, and paused. “You have to touch him,” she said. Her eyes were bright, and if Patty were a different kind of woman, Ryan might think she had tears in her eyes. “If you want people to believe you love him, then you have to touch him. You have to smile and hold his hand no matter how you feel about him. Or what he’s done.” She swallowed, her hand at her stomach. A strange moment of weakness. “Or how he’s hurt you.”

The words cracked through the air and Ryan came to her feet as if she might say something, but then Patty was gone, Noelle behind her, and the door closed. The moment over.

Harrison stared at the door. Ryan stared at Harrison.

“Well,” Wallace said, into the uncomfortable silence that followed. “Let’s get back to work.”

Slowly, everyone sat back down. Dave filled up everyone’s coffee cups.

“Would you like some?” Dave asked her, and because she was giddy with stress and would gladly kill someone for a cup of coffee, Ryan laughed. She laughed so hard she slipped sideways off the arm of the chair right up against Harrison.

The laughter clogged her throat and stopped.

The feel of him warm and alive filled her with a painful want. A shocking need. Not for sex, but for comfort. For him to put that arm around her and tell her they would be okay.

She would be okay.

But that wasn’t in the agreement.

And so she couldn’t have it.

She got to her feet and crossed the room, sitting in Patty’s chair by the television. With great care and effort, she pulled her arms and legs back into the position she’d copied from Patty.

She lifted her chin, folded her hands over her knee, and smiled at the room as if just a little bit interested in whatever they had to say.

“It’s eerie,” Wallace whispered, watching her.

Harrison turned away, as if what she’d transformed herself into held no more interest for him than what she’d been before.

Chapter 14

Ryan was back in that damn car, sitting beside her husband, who wore a handsome summer-weight suit that fit him like a dream. The safety pin holding up her skirt bit into her back and she shifted to try to get away from it. Outside the world was hot and bright, the concrete city just coming to life. Commuters in bus shelters, pedestrians waiting on corners for the lights to change.

It could have been New York in some ways. The trees were different. The street signs. But it could have been a corner in Brooklyn, or Queens. Manhattan.

Cities were cities, she thought.

She looked down at this suit she wore, the shoes, the sleek black bag.

Women are women
, she reminded herself.
This is just a costume. You are still you
.

Though suddenly on the edge of this press conference she wondered, bleakly, which woman she was beneath this dress. Which version of herself. The world-weary and judgmental bartender? The brash and angry model? The selfish girl? The terrible sister? The worse daughter?

The terrified mother, going to extreme measures for her child?

She pressed a hand to her nervous stomach.

“Are you all right?”

“You keep asking that,” she said, trying to find the right kind of distance between them. She was thrown
off by him tossing his mother out of the house. No one had jumped to her defense in many long years. And she’d thought herself well past the point of wanting some man to step in.

And she hated that he’d done it.

And she kind of loved it, too.

He touched her hand, his fingertips warm over her knuckles. She bit back the gasp that rose in her throat. Of surprise. Of pleasure. Of a sort of dismay at her own weakness.

Nora would be laughing right now. Sitting back with a cigarette and that knowing look on her face. Boydesperate, her sister had always called her. As if crazy was never enough. Not for Ryan.

The minute Ryan got boobs, she’d fallen in love with the effect they had on men. She’d loved the way men looked at her, the way they fell so frantically in lust with her. Like getting up her shirt and into her pants was the most important thing they’d ever do in their sad lives. She’d let her boobs and the men they’d brought around her door become paramount in her life. Sacrificing her family. Her career. Her well-being.

Boy-
stupid
was really more like it.

And then she’d found Paul, or Nora had, actually; Ryan just plucked him out of her sister’s hands and then let him run right over her. Let him run all over her whole family. All because she’d been so crazy for him. So hot-headed and lusty.