Page 48 of The Player

The publishing business had been the one constant in his life, the one thing he could depend on.

Now, courtesy of Liza’s lies, he could lose that too.

It had taken a full hour of checking with his legal team and exploring all possible scenarios for him to calm down. Even if Liza’s biography wasn’t one-hundred-per-cent accurate, according to the contract the readers would have no recourse if the truth of Cindy’s existence came out.

He’d assumed it wouldn’t be a problem but needed to know for sure. After all, how many celebrities invented backgrounds and touted it as truth?

In the heat of the moment, when he’d realised she’d kept something as important as her sister from him, he’d snapped and said he could lose everything. He’d thrown it out there to shame her; to intimidate her into telling him the truth—why she’d done it—when in reality the eight hundred grand from his own pocket wouldn’t make or break him.

Now that he’d calmed down enough to rationally evaluate the situation, he might not have lost his dad’s company but he had lost something equally important.

The woman he loved.

How ironic that the first time he let a woman get closer than dinner and a date, the first time he’d learned what it meant to truly desire someone beyond the physical, had turned into the last time he’d ever be so foolish again.

And a scarier thought: was he like his dad after all? Had Liza played him as Babs had played his dad?

He wouldn’t have thought so; the times they’d been intimate had been so revealing, so soul-reaching, he could’ve sworn she’d been on the same wavelength.

But she’d sought him out at the very beginning. She’d blackmailed her way into a job. Had that been her end game from the start?

Was their relationship a way of keeping him onside while she milked the situation for all it was worth?

After all, she’d done it before. According to her biography—if any of it was true—she’d been thrust into the WAG limelight by default when her high-school sweetheart became pro, but with the basketball star she later dated she implied they’d had an understanding based on a solid friendship and mutual regard.

Yet when he’d studied the pictures of her and Henri Jaillet, her body language spoke volumes. If the cameras were trained on her, Liza stood tall and smiled, while subtly leaning away from Henri’s arm draped across her shoulders or waist. In the candid shots, she stood behind Henri, arms folded, shoulders slumped, lips compressed.

Those photos implied she hadn’t enjoyed a moment of their relationship yet she’d done it regardless, enduring it for a year.

What had she told him at the start? ‘We all do things we don’t want to?’

If so, why? Had it been to support her sister? Had she deliberately thrust herself into the limelight? Had it been for the adulation or was there more behind it?

That was what gutted him most, that he felt closer to her while reading her biography, as if she’d let him into her life a little, when she hadn’t let him in at all.

He swirled the whiskey he nursed before downing the amber spirit in two gulps. The burn in his gullet didn’t ease the burn in his heart and the warmth as it hit his stomach didn’t spread to the rest of him. He’d been icy cold since he left Liza’s, unable to equate the woman he’d fallen in love with to the woman who’d hide her disabled sister out of shame.

His door creaked open and he frowned, ready to blast anyone who dared enter. Damn publishing business, one of the few work environments where it wasn’t unusual to find employees chained to their desk to meet deadlines at all hours.

‘Go away,’ he barked, slamming the glass on the side table when the door swung open all the way.

‘I said—’

‘I heard what you said.’ Liza stood in the doorway, framed by the backlight, looking like a person who’d been through an emotional ordeal. He knew the feeling. ‘But I’m not going anywhere.’

He swiped a hand over his face. ‘I’m not in the mood.’

She ignored his semi-growl, entered the office, and closed the door.

He watched her walk across the office, soft grey yoga pants clinging to her legs, outlining their shape, and desire mingled with his anger. She sat next to him on the leather sofa, too close for comfort, not close enough considering he preferred her on his lap.

Her fingers plucked at the string of her red hoodie, twisting it around and around until he couldn’t stand it anymore. He reached out and stilled her hand, watching her eyes widen at the contact before she clasped her hands in her lap.

Great. His touch had become as repugnant as him.

‘We need to get a few things straight,’ she said, shoulders squared in defiance. ‘Firstly, Cindy is the most important person in my life and I’d never be ashamed of her.’

He waited and she glared at him, daring him to disagree.

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