Dirty Rumor: A Bad Boy Billionaire Romance(5)

But she’s never going to do that. She’s dead.

The thought is still so sharp, so harsh, that it’s hard for me to breathe.

My phone buzzes on the cushion next to me and I snatch it up, all the tension going out of my shoulders. A distraction. Any distraction.

The text message reads, Ace Kingsley???

I don’t recognize the number. I pause with my thumbs over the keyboard on the screen. I should just ignore it. It’s probably someone from the press. But I’m so damn bored, so damn frustrated with feeling like this, that I type out a reply and hit send before I can change my mind.

Yeah. Who’s this?

Elijah Pierce.

Who could forget Eli Pierce? He and his brother Christian threw the best parties at boarding school. How the hell did he get my number?

I remember you. Are you in the city?

I’m always in the city. Come out with us on Friday.

He hasn’t changed much.

I start to toss the phone back to the cushion, to ignore Eli Pierce and his pushy invitation, but I don’t.

What’s the worst that can happen if I go out?

Another text comes in.

We go to a club called The Purple Swan. Heard of it?

Elisa and I were going to get a membership to the Swan when we came back to the city one day, but we never got the chance.

Yeah. Who’s we?

You remember Jess Reeves? Carolyn Banks?

Dark hair, both of them, and they were always in orbit around the Pierce boys. Married now, I think. Safe. Out of the picture.

Another message.

Jess is married to an actual prince—king now, I guess. They’re in town, and there are parties. Come out with us.

I don’t know why the hell Eli Pierce would text me out of the blue, years after we last talked—was it college? I can’t remember—and invite me to a party, but maybe I don’t care.

With the movie paused, the silence of the penthouse is so deafening that it presses against my eardrums. My jaw tightens just thinking of how much more life there would be here if Elisa was with me. If she was still in the world. If the rest of my life wasn’t going to be consumed with vicious lies and speculations about what happened between us in Italy.

Damn it, Ace, you cannot let that take over the rest of your life.

I have to face the outside world someday, or else—or else what’s the alternative? That I rot in this penthouse? That I finally go back to the penthouse on the Upper East Side and rot there instead, a billionaire hermit who reduces all those years of working out in the gym turn to flab?

What the f*ck is the point of my life then?

Does it even really matter if Eli Pierce has some kind of agenda? I doubt that he does, although my last impression of him is probably 10 years old at this point. And the Swan—an exclusive place like that, with membership fees so high they’d make a normal man’s eyes bleed, isn’t going to be swarming with paparazzi. Whispers, maybe. Photographers, no. They’ll have security to keep them on the outside.

The elevator door opens, admitting the butler, who’s wheeling in another tray. I stare at him for a second. Right. Dessert.

My life cannot be reduced to room service, even if it’s the best, most lavish room service New York City has to offer.

At the same time, I don’t want to seem like I’m f*cking desperate. Even if it’s the truth.

I could probably make it.

Be there at 9.

My escape from this gold-lined prison is set in motion.





Chapter 5

Carolyn





The minute I step into the lobby of the Swan on Friday night—after another week at the boutique, surreptitiously checking in on Rainflower Blue in between choosing some new winter items and chatting with Natalie—Jess comes flying up to me, hooking her arm through mine and chatting a mile a minute as she leads me to the same table we were seated at last week.

“You’re finally here! I’ve been waiting for you to get here—Alec got here before me, so he’s already at the table….”

I nod at all the right times, but my focus is really on the room—on the rumors circulating about.

There’s been a little buzz on the site about Ace Kingsley, but everybody’s being pretty cagey about the reason for all the excitement. It can’t be that he’s rich. Every site member is ultra-wealthy or wealthy by association—I know, because I leak information about it very, very carefully. You have to separate the wheat from the chaff on sites like these.

I checked my ad revenue before I left to come to the Swan, and not for the first time my stomach tightened. Most days, I don’t have any qualms about profiting off of my acquaintances’ gossip. In fact, it’s practically a public service. I do my best to prove or disprove the heaviest and juiciest rumors using my admin account, username Magnolia.

I do it so other women don’t have to suffer, wondering, like I did—and I only touch the rumors that matter.

It’s a fine line, obviously. There’s almost never 100 percent proof of someone’s guilt or innocence when it comes to cheating or other harmful activities, which is the kind of rumor that sets my alarm bells off…and brings in visitors to the site faster than you can say boo.

There’s a strange intensity to the energy in the Swan’s main dining room tonight, even more vocal, more pronounced than last Friday. Heads are turning, trying to be discreet and failing, and I follow their eyes….