Page 98 of Bad Reputation

Secretly, Maggie hoped Cole and Tasha would only be a small part of whatever Libby had found. Vincent might be on the way out, butfrom the little Maggie had seen of him, she knew he could still do a lot of damage.

Had Libby sent her story to him for comment by now? Probably, if it was dropping soon. Maggie scanned the sky, as if she were expecting to see a funnel cloud forming above Vincent’s head, wherever he was.

Nope, no spontaneous tornadoes in sight.

“I know you want to prepare, but you gotta wait for him to make the first move,” Cole was saying. “Maybe he won’t get personal.”

Tasha poured another glass of tea for Maggie. “The fuck he won’t. The whispers are already starting.”

Well, that was hard to deny.

“Drew found out somehow,” Cole admitted. “Maybe from the fact-checking? I dunno, but he wasn’t happy.”

Maggie had been livid when Cole had explained how his agent had reacted to the news. She hadn’t met Drew yet, but she already hated him.

From the look on Tasha’s face, it was clear the other woman felt the same way. “He never did like risk.”

“Me talking to Libby wasn’t about taking a risk,” Cole said dismissively. “It was about doing the right thing.”

Maggie loved that Cole saw the world in the same approximate way as a Boy Scout did. To him, things were right or they were wrong, and there was no excuse for not intervening on the side of right. That was lovely. It was admirable. But she worried the complexities of life might catch Cole in the teeth if he wasn’t careful.

“I’m so anxious that this is going to go badly,” Maggie said.

“And you missed your chance to stop us?” Tasha rolled her eyes. “Maggie, I haven’t done a goddamned thing I didn’t want to do since I went to the Oscars with Vincent Minna. Every step after that one, it’s been one hundred percent me.”

It didn’t make Maggie feelbetter, but it did help. A little.

“This is a game Cole and I have been playing for a long time. So whatever happens, it’s on us. If we nuke the bastard, that’s ours. And ifwe whiff, that’s ours too. Come on.” Tasha gestured to the platter at the center of the table. “This cheese plate won’t eat itself.”

One of the things that was definitely true about California was that the produce was out of this world. This spread could easily have been on a food blog. There were three kinds of cheese, plus artisan meats, multiple types of crackers, a dip, and several kinds of fruit and veg. It was all perfect and unblemished and intensely colored; it was basically model food.

Because Tasha was Tasha, she launched into a lengthy explanation about where everything had been grown and how long the cheeses she’d picked had been aged. As she monologued on, Cole went to dive in, only to pull himself back. At some point, Maggie became convinced that Tasha kept making it longer to torture him.

“And then, because Stiltons are back,” she was saying, “I got—”

“I didn’t realize Stiltons had left,” Cole stage-whispered to Maggie.

Tasha pelted him with a grape, which he caught and ate with a smug smile.

“You are a peasant,” Tasha told Cole, falling into her chair.

“So am I,” Ryan put in.

“Butyouhave so many other qualities,” she replied.

That had Maggie blushing into her iced tea again. Were she and Cole that obvious?

Cole caught her eyes, and from how her body immediately reacted—every bit of her perking up simply because he was watching her in that bedroom way—she knew the answer was yes.

“Arg, you’re all hopeless,” Tasha said. “Eat. It’s cheese, and figs, and grapes, and moutabbal—”

“Which we will never confuse with baba ghanoush again.”

“Thank fucking God.” Cole dragged a slice of pita through the roasted-eggplant dip and ate it with a satisfied moan.

With the aquamarine water lapping next to them—seriously, was it dyed? Maggie had never seen a pool that color outside of a movie—and the pink-and-gold sky and the actual movie stars, it was hard to believethat Maggie belonged in this scene. But when Cole squeezed her fingertips, just to check in, it was harder to believe she didn’t.

Somehow, she’d fallen into this life. And she loved it here.

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