Grump’s City Girl (Boots and Heels #2)

26. Cassie

Chapter 26

Cassie

T he last thing a child ever wants to hear are the skeletons their parents have shoved in the back of their closet.

Never in my life would I have expected to hear that my dad, a monogamous man for all my life—I had never even seen him look at another woman for more than ten seconds—had an outside child or that my mother had once turned tricks to survive.

Me and my sex tape were the least of the evils, but it still made me shudder to think of what would have happened if Vigo had managed to sell that recording.

We were all in the family house now, a house on a sprawling fifty-four-acre plot of meticulously maintained lawns. The 4,700 sq ft home had vaulted ceilings that once looked so regal and classic; now they felt like a whitewashed tomb of secrets.

Beau was upstairs in my room, showering, while my parents and I began to hash this issue out, and a security team was sweeping Dad’s office for bugs—because how could Sam call us the moment we were talking about secrets?

“Mom,” I began, “Is what he said true?”

She still looked ready to faint but sipped the tea in her hand. “It's true,” she whispered. “It was a part of my life I never expected to revisit anymore.” She looked up. “I am sorry you had to find out this way, Cassie. Everything he said is true. I was sixteen, and my parents were ultra-conservative Catholics. They caught me kissing a boy once and told me if I did it again before marriage, they would throw me out.”

“Six months later, they walked in on me having sex with my secret boyfriend, and they made good on their word. Ethan tried to help as much as he could, but when he was eighteen, he went off to the army, and I was left alone. I ended up on the streets.”

“The man Sam was talking about was named Ronald Wellington, and he was a foul man now that I think about it. Back then, I was so desperate to get help I would take it from a dead man. Ronald was a fat pig with a body odor that made me hurl when he was near me. And the thought of him over me… inside me… I-I could not?—”

“It’s all right, Mom,” I said. “You don’t need to tell me anymore, and neither do you, Dad. Suffice to say, we all have dirt on us, and if it gets out…”

“I can see the shareholders dropping by the hundreds,” Dad muttered.

Mom huffed. “That’s all you, see? Money? You don’t see the complete shame and degradation our family will suffer?”

“What do you want me to say, woman?” Dad snapped, launching from his seat and began pacing. “I built this company with my sweat, long hours, and nights of heartache. Do you want a part of me to die? Is that it? What do you think pays for your champagne and jewels and fancy clothes?”

Mom looked pissed. “Your damned company, Charles, that’s all you lived for day in and day out. I can count the many times you missed the days at kindergarten, birthdays, and graduations, all for your thrice-damned company.”

“There you go again…” Dad shook his head. “I couldn’t be in two places at the same time. What did you want from me? I had to take care of you and my family some way or another. It was either attending sports day and supporting our family or finding a multi-million deal and supporting our family. It was damned if I did or damned if I didn’t.”

“Mom! Dad!” I called out, “We’re getting off track again! Working or not working is not the issue here; the issue is how we are going to save our skin. What are we going to do about Sam?”

That seemed to snap them back into reality, and both their faces turned grim. I finally got their attention, and when Mom sunk to her chair again, Dad, who was across the room, gripped the back of another.

“Sam seems to have a knack with computers,” I said logically. “We need to get someone to look into his setup.”

“I don’t think he would stay online long enough to get a trace,” Dad replied. “And when someone checked into it, the call bounced around the country before it landed somewhere in the Dominican Republic. I don’t think he has set up base there.”

I bit my lip and began to think of this strategically. “If he is so fixed on hitting us where it hurts, we need to do the same. Where is his mother? We need to get her in on this.”

Mom’s face tightened, and I could only imagine what she was feeling, knowing the man she loved had betrayed her so profoundly. I turned to Dad. “Do you know where to find her?”

His knuckles popped white. “I lost her somewhere in Michigan. But I will find her.”

“If we can get to her, we can get to him,” I said, feeling completely exhausted, mentally and physically. “That’s all I can figure out for now. I’ve been on the road for almost two days, and I am beyond tired, and I need to sleep.”

“It's all right, darling,” Mom said, “Go get some sleep. We’ll talk at breakfast tomorrow.”

If we have all that time.

After hugging them both, I headed up to my room, my feet feeling like they were lugging lead.

I stepped into the room just as Beau came out, towel-drying his hair while clad in a pair of tight boxer briefs. Jesus, the man was sexy as fuck with his tanned olive skin and muscles for days, and my thoughts changed route so suddenly that it was like I’d never even been thinking about Sam and Vigo.

All I could think about was Beau: his dark hair and twinkling blue eyes, the way his skin creased when he smiled, the weathered-to-perfection look to him. He just might be the most handsome man I’d ever seen, but that didn’t even come close to touching the best parts of him.

I just went right into his arms. “Christ, I am tired,” I murmured on his hair-splattered chest. “I feel stretched into a hundred directions.”

“It’ll be okay, baby,” he murmured, arms tight around me. “We’ll figure it out. What do you want to do?”

“Sleep,” I said, pressing my face into his chest. “Hold me?”

“You don’t have to ask,” he said, towing me to the king-sized bed and pulling down the covers. “Let’s get some shuteye.”

I had been running on adrenaline, hope, and fear for twenty-two hours now; the best I could get was a night's sleep with a man I was in love with.

Two am, and my cell was blaring like a siren, and I reached for it blindly, hating that I had to part from Beau’s warmth. “‘llo?”

“Miss Carrington,” a robotic voice came through on the other end, and it felt like lightning had zipped through me. “The budding pornstar. Do you feel stupid letting that idiot French addict take such an intimate thing from you?”

I dropped the cell, speaker mode on, to my lap while Beau stirred and sat up. He wrapped an arm around me and held me tight while Sam taunted me.

“I think it is time for me to turn my attention to you, because when the world sees your face across every screen, every newspaper, and every medium available, the twisted Carrington empire will start to crumble,” he said.

“Funny enough, do you want a part of the empire, or do you want to tear it down?” I asked coldly. “Dad told me you wanted half of my inheritance.”

“I can want both,” he said. “But your father is a fucking asshole who got my mother pregnant and shunted her half across the country to hide his shameful secret. He didn’t even give me the courtesy of having his name and paid us off to be quiet. Do you know how disgusting it was to see him on the news, to see his stock on the Dow go up every day while we lived under aliases in podunk towns?”

“You’re jealous.”

“I am pissed.” He snarled, and the robotic twist of his words made the tone sound like nails on a chalkboard. “Your mother is an almost murderer, your father is a narcissistic asshole, and you are a simpleton with a silver spoon shoved into your mouth.”

“See, I have a lovely video all lined up about your crimes and humiliation, and it will be sent to every news outlet in thirty-six hours unless you can solve the six-number PIN to stop it. I will give you the chance to see it first, but when you cannot stop it, everyone will know how seedy your cookie-cutter family is.”

I gripped the sheets but kept calm. “Tell me, Sam, how far did you go to prepare for our family’s destruction?”

“All the way to studying cryptology, cybersecurity, and a host of degrees, you, with your simple business degree, couldn’t comprehend or understand,” he said.

He’s a misogynist.

“I see,” I replied. “The army, the navy, the air force? Was it a public scholarship? Did you scrimp and scramble to get the funds for college? Private scholarship, perhaps? Did a teacher see something in you and send you to MIT? Yale? Berkeley, perhaps?”

He laughed and muttered something that sounded…. Chinese? Had he studied overseas then? It would explain how he had dropped off the map for years.

“None of those,” he said. “And stop trying to lure me into a trap with my words.”

“I wouldn’t,” I replied calmly. “I am only trying to understand you. Don’t you think it’s well overdue?”

“I have no intention of getting to know you,” he said. “Do not try to play up to me. Your family is only worth one thing to me, and that is to see you crash and burn.”

The line cut off, and I sat still with the phone in hand before it beeped with a message. I opened it. The video started with my mom, a younger version of my mom, thirty-five years younger and sporting a redhead bob. She was on the arm of a man with a heavy set, beady eyes, and a horrible combover, but she didn’t look happy about it.

Gazing at the reel, Beau didn’t say a word.

Then the picture shifted to a video of a man being wheeled into an emergency room with a knife embedded in his gut and blood pouring out from him like a river. Pictures next, official police evidence of a bloody knife on a carpet, blood smeared on a couch, droplets splattered on a broken coffee cup, and then… open drawers ransacked of all jewelry. A safe was open, too, and the cash was gone.

Mom had cleaned him out.

The medical reports came up: gastrointestinal perforation, 13 hours of exploratory laparotomy, sepsis, and intravenous antibiotics.

Police report: No suspect was named, and aggravated robbery was suspected.

Then, Dad, a younger version of him, sitting at a bar, his jacket thrown over the back of the chair, drinking something… scotch, I guessed. A dark-haired woman with pale skin in killer heels came to sit near him and slid another cup of scotch to him—that was bold.

The next clip had Dad in his office and the woman on his desk, peeling off her underwear and hiking her legs over his shoulders.

My teeth clenched, especially when the camera showed his gold wedding ring.

“Jesus,” Beau said, “If this was twenty years ago, how the hell did he get this footage? Wouldn’t it have been destroyed by now?”

“The dark secret to storing things on a hard drive, Beau, is that nothing is ever really destroyed,” I said, tensing with what was coming next. “He could have reconstructed this if he got his hands on the source material.”

The next clip came: a boy, dark-haired like his mom, blue eyes like my dad, opening a Christmas gift, a letter written in legal terms telling the lady never to disclose Dad’s name and a check with one point five million dollars—hush money.

My head was hurting, a dull throb behind my eyes.

Then—the video, the one of me, giggling like a blind fool at how Vigo was kissing down my neck and tickling my sides. We watched in grim silence until he had me on the bed, naked, and was brushing my hair from my face, showing me clearly while he kissed down my body. I was never ashamed of my body, but seeing my nipples so lurid and pink in the camera made me want to die of shame.

The video, all forty-three minutes, fifteen seconds of it, was there, and by the end, I was disgusted.

“If this gets out, our family is done,” I leaned back on Beau’s shoulder, seeing the headlines now: Carrington Family loses everything. “We have to stop him.”

“Yeah, but how? We can't trace him by phone or the Internet.”

“Yes, but he fucked up,” I said, rewinding the clip to a shot of his mother's face reflecting in a bottle on the bar above her. “We can use this to find her.”

“And when we find her, he’ll come a-runnin’.” Beau nodded. “Well, get him before he gets us.”

I was about to agree with him when my phone pinged again, with a countdown clock of 84 hours, then a message, “If you don’t solve the PIN, it will go live to every news outlet across the world, from Japan to Britain, Australia to Canada; you cannot stop it. Your family is DONE!”