Hitman's Hookup: A Bad Boy Romance (50 page)

Hailey smiled. “I can travel light when I need to,” she said, leaning back in her chair. “I only brought one of my assistants. Took my jet to get here. I won’t be taking a lot of your time, I promise.”

I laughed and rubbed my hands through my hair. “That would be a first,” I spat out.

She cleared her throat. “I need you to break up with your co-star,” she said.

I felt like a frog had jumped into my esophagus. “Excuse me? How do you know-“

Hailey held up a hand. “I paid the entire hotel staff to keep an eye on you. The gym guy took the pic. He took better photos than the one I leaked to the press, by the way. I knew it was her. That’s why I left.”

I took several calming breaths as I stared at her. I had no idea what to say.

“I didn’t make a scene, though, and you’re probably wondering why that is? I mean, you
did
break my blackmail agreement after all.”

I nodded slowly.

Then she did the most terrifying thing that Hailey
could
do.

She laughed.

“Oh, Wilde, you really thought I was going away quietly? Taking the publicity and the royalties from the songs I’ll write about you and just shut up? You thought I would allow your little film project to be the beneficiary of
my
actions?” She laughed again. “I expected more from you.”

My stomach was sinking into my feet. “I
knew
you had to be up to something else. I knew it. I fucking knew it.” I slammed my hand onto the table, a primal yell escaping my lips.

A cloud of birds erupted from a nearby tree, startled by the sound I’d made.

Hailey twirled the end of one of her braids. “I wasn’t back here sooner because I wanted to wait until the movie was done filming. And I didn’t want to interrupt shooting any more than this clusterfuck of a film already
has been
interrupted.” She giggled at that. “So I took my time. But I had what I needed a while ago.”

She tapped her fingers on the black cast-iron table. Her nails weren’t their usual red, but instead a pale, sheer pink. They’d also been taken from their normal, pointy-tipped shape down into soft ovals.

That scared me more than any of the other physical changes.

She’d used her talons to threaten to scratch me before. She knew that four fingernail marks across my famous, constantly photographed cheek would lead to questions of me abusing Hailey and her retaliating in self-defense.

They were always her defense mechanism. And now that those were gone, I wondered what held their place.

I knew there had to be
something
. Because Hailey was always three steps ahead of me.

“When I heard you and your side bitch broke up last week, I almost didn’t fly out. But then I just had this feeling last night that I should come out here anyway.” She laughed again. “You know, you should always trust a woman’s intuition, Wilde. I’m willing to be the sex scene you shot today rekindled the spark.”

She glared at me. I felt like her eyes were slicing through my skull; it felt like she was reading my mind. She pulled out her iPhone and tapped the screen. Then she handed it to me.

“Press play,” she said quietly.

I looked at the images that were flashing in front of me and felt like I was going to black out from sheer panic. A four poster bed. A white duvet.

Olivia taking off her white sundress.

Olivia standing there, naked. Olivia crawling into the bed, her ass in full view of the apparently hidden camera. Then grainy, green night vision. Olivia climbing on top of me.

I felt Hailey’s eyes on my face.

“You can fast forward to the good stuff. I recommend the thirty-two minute and fifty-five second mark, personally.” She tilted her head and leaned her forearms on the table. “How come you never offered
me
anal sex, Wilde?”

I threw the phone at her. My heart was pounding so loudly I couldn’t hear anything. I felt like upturning the table. The mini bar was beckoning to me from the room. I remembered Olivia’s face and it kept me from unscrewing the bottle of vodka that was sitting there so temptingly.

“So you’re blackmailing both of us now?” I asked her.

I could feel Hailey smiling even without turning around to look at her.

“I like to think of it as
leverage
. I know your new piece of ass has a severe aversion to the press. I’m guessing she’s not the kind of person who would be happy about a sex tape even if it
would
help her career.”

I couldn’t bear to turn around and look at her. If I did, I would want to assault her. I tried breathing through my nose. That wasn’t helping much.

Hailey cleared her throat. “If you go to anyone with this; call the police or the press - I’ve got my finger on a text message to my assistant. He sends it to TMZ in an email. There are copies of it in multiple places; on three different computers, a handful of jump drives, and on six different cloud accounts.”

I actually laughed and finally turned around. “You really think that I thought you only had one copy? Come on, Hailey. Give me more credit than that.”

She smiled. “Don’t you want to know what it is that I want from you?”

I turned around finally to face her. “What
do
you want, Hailey? What the fuck could it
possibly
be this time?”

She tilted her head and smiled. “I want you to stop talking to Olivia. Full-stop. No explanation. Stop answering the door, stop answering her calls. And don’t use someone else to do it, either. Harrison isn’t allowed- “

Suddenly a thought came into my head so clearly and strongly I couldn’t believe it had taken me this long to put two and two together.

“Harrison. Harrison. The villa. The rescheduling. He had to find a place that would allow him to send someone into it. To place the camera,” I muttered.

I looked up at the perfect day unfolding around me. Thick, fluffy white clouds were drifting slowly across a brilliant blue background of sky. It was surreal to me that all of this was happening with the incredible contrast of nearly perfect weather.

“He fucked me over.”

Hailey smiled. “Yeah, he really, really did.” She tapped her nails again on the tabletop. “It was shockingly easy to get him to go along with it. I can’t believe how little you pay your assistant. He practically
lives
with you, Wilde.”

“Money. That’s all it took?”

Hailey smiled. “You should know this by now, Wilde. Stop playing coy. A million dollars will go a long way once he moves back to Portland. He won’t have to work for a few years, at least.”

I gnawed on the inside of my cheek. “What else is it, then?”

She tilted her head in an innocent smile. “What else?”

“Stop fucking with me, Hailey. You didn’t shit out a million-dollar bribe just so I’d stop fucking my girlfriend. You must want something else.”

Hailey put her hand over her stomach and her smile grew bigger. “I figured me carrying your baby wouldn’t be enough on its own to make you stay. I needed leverage. So I planned ahead with the sex tape.”

All I remember after hearing that was total blackness.

CHAPTER FORTY-NINE

OLIVIA

The worst part was having to see Gina’s story in the press.

The story broke the same day that Wilder stood me up at the hotel restaurant. Suddenly there was proof in the form of testimony from a seventy-something-year-old woman that Wilder had left Hailey for me and that we’d posed as newlyweds for a sex romp weekend in the Italian countryside.

So while I was crying in my five-star hotel room because my boyfriend wouldn’t call me back, the entire world was either celebrating or judging our budding relationship.

Okay, that wasn’t the worst part.

The worst was probably the seventeen desperate messages I’d left on the hotel room machine that night when I’d waited for two hours at the restaurant alone and Wilder hadn’t shown up.

Okay, no, that wasn’t it.

The worst part was having to fly home on a commercial jet with everyone on the airplane and in the terminals on my four different layovers recognizing me as the bitch who had broken darling Hailey Holliday’s heart by stealing her man.

No, actually. That wasn’t it either.

The worst part was falling into a week-long Netflix coma at my aunt’s apartment while I stuffed myself with microwave macaroni and cheese and cans of unheated ravioli while I heard the whispering of the paparazzi surrounding my home.

Wait. Still not the worst part.

That week was followed by two months of only leaving the apartment to do laundry and go grocery shopping with my hair pulled up into a baseball hat and sunglasses on my face. The paparazzi had mostly cleared out by then.

The cashier still recognized me, though. She told me that Hailey Holliday’s second album had kept her from killing herself when she was nineteen, and who the hell did I think I was anyway? That same cashier kept telling me in loud voices that my credit card had been declined.

I’d left the store empty-handed with everyone staring at me and snapping pictures.

But still the worst part hadn’t come.

The worst part was actually the next day.

Lydia had come by with a pizza, a bottle of two-hundred-dollar wine, and the news that Wilder and Hailey were having a baby.

That was rock bottom.

It didn’t get any worse than that.

The next few months passed by in a total blur. Then one day, it was time to go to New York for the premiere. I could do this.

I knew I could do this.

Could I do this?

I rolled over in bed, my window flung wide open to a mid-November Los Angeles day. The birds were singing and the heat had finally broken. I’d lugged the window AC unit down to my aunt’s storage unit a few days earlier. I was hoping against hope that there wouldn’t be a second freak heat wave.

For now, I was just happy to have the window open. My stuff was mostly in boxes, my room in utter disarray. I’d managed to find an apartment near Echo Park that was barely larger than my bedroom now but had a view of the valley. My advance for the movie had finally come through. If I was careful, I had three years’ worth of living expenses to draw from without looking for another job.

My phone had been mostly quiet. I had begun to wonder if Hailey had worked her copious connections and had me blacklisted by casting agents. At that point I wasn’t sure if I ever wanted to be onscreen again. But I certainly wouldn’t have minded a script supervising position.

I got on my hands and knees to make one final sweep underneath the mattress. Tucked into the corner by the wall and covered in a good inch of dust so thick it looked like felted wool was a shoebox. I held my breath and pulled it out. It was bright red. I sincerely could not remember what was in there.

Right as I pulled the lid off of it, there was a knock at the front door.

“I’ll get it!” I yelled, happy to have a break from packing up. I dusted my hands off on my jeans and walked into the living room. My aunt was in her walk-in bedroom closet that was her painting studio. I knew that she wouldn’t feel like walking all the way to the front door.

I looked through the peep hole and saw a bob of silver-hair. I beamed and opened the door. Lydia was holding a donut box.

“Thought you might need a break,” she said, flipping her enormous, dark sunglasses onto the top of her head.

I grabbed the donuts from her and set them on the kitchen counter.

“Hug,” I said to her.

She dropped her enormous black leather purse on the living room floor and threw her arms out. I squeezed her as hard as I could, finally withdrawing my embrace after a full two minutes. I turned around and opened up the donut box, selecting my absolute favorite: powdered and raspberry jelly-filled. I took a big bite and nearly choked on the powdered sugar.

“Do me a favor and don’t ever snort cocaine, alright?” Lydia said to me sardonically.

I picked up the donut box and followed her back into my bedroom. She perched on the edge of my bed, which was now only a bare mattress on a metal frame.

“So I bet your aunt is sad to see you go,” she said.

I shrugged. “I was kind of getting the feeling that she’s more nostalgically sad than
actually
sad,” I explained.

“Where is she?”

“In her Fortress of Solitude, painting,” I explained.

Lydia nodded sagely. “Are you almost done?”

I nodded. “Just a few more things to pack up,” I replied.

“And you’re ready to fly out tonight?”

I motioned over to my suitcase. It hadn’t seen much action since Italy aside from a few overnights at Lydia’s apartment. Brian had moved out shortly after she’d returned. She seemed happy about it and had spent the better part of the last six months happily single.

“You have my dress and coat and shoes, right?” I asked her.

She nodded. “Already on their way to the city, actually. I sent them ahead to your hotel.”

I polished off the rest of my donut.

“So the fairytale ends tomorrow night, I guess. No more custom, designed-by-Lydia dresses shipped to my five-star hotel,” I said with a hint of bitterness.

Lydia raised her eyebrows. “That’s only assuming you don’t take any other jobs,” she replied.

“Yeah, the offers have
really
been pouring in,” I said sarcastically.

“Come on, Liv. The movie doesn’t even premiere until tomorrow night. I hope you charged up your iPhone. It will be ringing off the hook.”

I looked over at my brand-new, gold iPhone six plus that I’d splurged on. It didn’t ring much, but it had seen several thousand rounds of Candy Crush and all eleven seasons of
Grey’s Anatomy
. Twice.

I had a bad habit of not remembering to charge it; my last, crappy flip phone kept a charge for a week at a time. Lydia was constantly having to remind me.

“It’s right there,” I indicated.

“So you’re moving into your new place when you get back, then?”

I nodded. “The new tenant is clearing out Monday. Tomorrow is the premiere, then the day after that is the wedding, then I fly back to L.A.”