“So what happened?” he asked.
I eyed him. The rest of the story required me to reveal way more of myself than I felt comfortable with, but what the hell; this guy had already witnessed me at my most vulnerable. “I was wrong. He showed me zero respect, continually promoted men with less experience over me…Bitch of it was, he made me doubt myself so much that I didn’t think I could leave.”
His gaze was soft. “He sounds like a real asshole.”
“Oh, I haven’t even gotten to the good stuff.” I’d been reluctant to talk about it, but now that I’d started, I felt the weight I hadn’t realized I was carrying begin to lift, and it felt tantalizingly good. “Last year I made a mistake,” I admitted. “I had an affair with a coworker who’d told me he was getting divorced. Only he wasn’t.”
Rick tipped his beer. “Wow, another asshole.”
“Oh, my life is full of them.” Something about this honesty felt provocative, like some kind of perverse striptease where every secret I revealed was akin to peeling off a piece of clothing. “Anyway, shortly after I broke it off with Rory, my dad asked me to leak some compromising information on an actress he’d had a relationship with, which had ended badly. When I refused, he blackmailed me.”
He knit his brow. “With what?”
I leaned my head back against the cushioned chair, looking up at the glittering sky. Way up high, a tiny plane cut silently through a field of twinkling stars. “Rory and I had traveled together a lot for work the previous year, and I’d stupidly trusted him to submit our expense reports. Turned out he was doctoring the books, using our work trips to embezzle money from the studio and implicating me in the process.”
“How’d he get away with it?”
I shrugged. “He took advantage of how complicated the flow of money can be for financing the huge movies we were working on. There were multiple companies involved on each project, which allowed for a good deal of double-dipping—getting reimbursed from more than one company, that kind of thing.”
He let out a low whistle. “Impressive. And this guy was your boyfriend?”
Had he been? At first the relationship was casual, but as time passed I’d believed we were only keeping it under the radar because we worked with each other. When I learned he’d reconciled with his wife, I was more hurt than I cared to admit; when I discovered that he’d implicated me in a crime, I was furious. Unfortunately, I was also too mortified to ever confront him.
But I didn’t feel the need to share this information with Rick. I was exposed enough already. “I have terrible taste in men, obviously.”
“That’s too bad.” His gaze was steady. “So how did your dad find out about the embezzlement?”
“I don’t know, exactly. He always likes to have dirt on people and would go digging around sometimes. When he came to me, he’d already decided to fire Rory but offered to keep my name out of it if I’d do as he asked. I didn’t.”
“Good for you.” He held up his fist, and I half-heartedly bumped it with mine.
“I guess,” I said. “Hollywood is a hundred percent about optics, so after he fired me, I was screwed. As in, the only person that offered me a job before my savings ran out was Cole.”
He had no idea I was completely naked in front of him now, and disconcertingly, more turned on than if I’d actually performed a striptease. The mind is a powerful tool. Maybe I needed to spill my secrets more often.
“Aha,” he said. “I knew there must be a reason you were working for that particular asshole.”
I laughed, enjoying the pleasure of being seen, the luxury of having someone on my side for once. “So many assholes.” Emboldened, I met his eye. “Are you one?”
That slow smile. “I’m sure there are one or two people out there who would say so. I’m far from perfect.” He shook his head. “But no. I don’t think I am.”
I assessed him in the moonlight, and I had to agree. Despite his rippling muscles and tiger gaze, he wasn’t nearly brooding enough to be the romantic hero in one of my bodice rippers—which was a good thing, because despite my performance in the water the other day, I wasn’t nearly helpless enough to be a damsel in distress. But perhaps a fling with a handsome stranger wouldn’t be an entirely bad thing. It could never be serious since we lived in two different countries, but a distraction might do me some good. And he was definitely flirting with me, wasn’t he?
My phone buzzed, and Price’s number flashed on the screen. I knew he’d be wanting to go over the call sheet for tomorrow before sending it out. Rick noticed me glance at the phone with dismay and laughed. “You need to get that?”
I frowned. “It’s work. I have to go over—”
“No worries.” He stood. “I should be getting back to Saint Ann anyway. Thanks for the beer.”
“Anytime,” I said.
I walked him to the door, wondering whether he’d make any kind of move or say something about hanging out again, but he didn’t. He simply gave a friendly wave as he strode onto the pier. I closed the door behind him, feeling as though a million tiny lights had flickered to life beneath my skin.
Once I got off the phone with Price, I grabbed my laptop and hopped in bed to indulge in some light Google stalking. I wanted to hunt down Rick’s profile immediately, but decided to delay that pleasure in favor of exploring what there was to see about one Felicity Fox.
A search of her name on Facebook pulled up a list of Felicity Foxes all over the world,
