Page 32 of Give Me What I Want

That was another thing that had pissed me off this morning. Garth should have been here to deal with this. I should not have had to rope Juno into helping us. She didn’t have contacts or money. Garth did. Well, he had the contacts. We had the money. But I knew my little sister would do anything for me if I really needed her to. Just like I would for her.

“Okay. Leave those two with me, and I’ll give them a call. Want me to call you back after?”

Mav ended the call after agreeing to call Juno back, and I looked up at him to ask him what was going on. He was dropping my phone and dialling a number on his own device before I could ask though, so I inhaled slowly and put all of my trust in him to fix everything.

He spent what felt like forever arguing with someone on the phone. I presumed it was someone from one of the gossip sites that had shared the picture. He negotiated and it took every ounce of willpower to not argue with him over what he was offering to them to make it all go away.

Meanwhile, out of habit, I attempted to call Sab. I almost hung up after the first ring, still feeling the sting of her lie to Garth. We hadn’t spoken since leaving London. It wasn’t strange for us to go long periods not speaking, both of us getting caught up with life and work commitments, but when one of us called, we always answered.

No matter what went on between us, no matter how mad we got with each other, we’d always be there for the big stuff. So I stayed on the line and tried to forget about my anger.

Only now, Sab wasn’t answering. I called three times, hanging up each time that I was met with her voicemail. Growing irritated, I sent her a short text, asking her to call me back. I needed a friend to vent to, agirlfriend.

Tossing my phone onto the bed with a loud huff, I glanced up at Mav. Another call to another site had him offering up even more money, and then he was snatching up my phone to call my sister again. Between them, they had managed to remove the leaked image from six different sites, and Juno was on hold via her office landline to another.

I still didn’t understand how it had spread so far. Unless Ronan had sent that private picture to every site he had ever heard of. I took my phone once Mav had thanked my sister and I thanked her myself, making sure to tell her how much I loved her before I hung up and pulled up the number of a reporter who it seemed hadn’t received and shared the tasteful—it really was—picture of my tits all over the internet.

“Margaret,” I said, sitting up as she answered, her cheery Irish accent making me smile no matter how pissed I still was. The picture might have gone away, but it had been sent in the first place, and I wanted to know more.

“Beatrix, how are you? How’s the tour going?”

“Either you’re very good at playing dumb, or you genuinely don’t know shit,” I said, cutting to the chase.

Margaret Bellows, one of the senior editors over at True magazine, made a clicking noise with her tongue. “I’m great at playing dumb when I need to. Yes, that picture fell into my inbox yesterday, and no, I don’t intend on publishing it, ever. I deleted it. So if you’re calling to make sure I don’t join the vulgar vultures, then save your energy.”

“I didn’t doubt you for a moment,” I said with a smile. “You’re one of the good ones. With that being said, would you be a peach and retrieve the email so that you can tell me who sent it to you?”

“I’ll have to call someone from I.T. to make that happen,” she said with a regretful sigh. “When I deleted it, Ireallydeleted it, and I didn’t take note of who the sender was. The whole email was very blunt, just saying whose breasts they were, and that the picture had been sent to her boyfriend. I don’t want to get in the middle of anything, but if he’s the one who sent it, then you really need to dump his ass, girl. I know that I’m way happier now that I have a man who actually respects me.”

“If he’s the one who sent it, I won’t just dump his ass, I’ll beat it until—”

Mav snatched my phone from my hand and quickly hung up, glaring at me. “Maybe it’s not such a good idea to tell reporters what you plan on doing to him.”

“I trust her though,” I complained, my bottom lip jutting out.

“Doesn’t matter if you trust her. You hold your tongue. Anyway, we haven’t heard his side yet.” Maverick looked so calm, so different from how he had looked when I had screamed for him to get his ass in the bedroom when I had woken to a whole load of google alerts, opening articles plastered with the image that I had sent only to Ronan. His face had turned purple, bypassed red altogether, and I had heard a crack, I had no idea where from, a finger maybe, or a tooth, either way, Mav had felt the same way that I had. Yet now he was calm.

His smile was weak, but it was there. He got up off of the bed and held a hand out to me, all cool and collected, as though he hadn’t just been burying a whole load of articles and we weren’t just about to go and confront my fake boyfriend about the whole drama.

“He has five minutes to explain, that’s all he gets,” I grumbled.

We made our way down the bus, Mav stopping to flick the kettle on as we passed it. Once I was sat down on the sofa and he had given me his scariest dad glare, the one that very loudly told me to sit and behave, he went back to the kitchen and made us both drinks. For me, a cuppa, for him, just plain ice-cold water.

“Ronan,” he called out when we were settled. “Get your ass out here.”

“Nice to see you made me something too,” Ro complained as he strolled towards us, eyeing up our drinks. He retreated to the fridge, grabbed a can of coke, then continued on into the lounge area, glancing between me and Mav with a cautious, but not concerned, look on his face. “What’s all the explosive shit about today then?”

“You leaked that picture,” I blurted, not bothering to ease in.

“I did what?” he asked, frowning and dropping down on the other end of the sofa. He crossed his ankle over his knee and spread his arms along the back of the sofa, taking up too much space.

“You know what you did,” I growled slamming my mug down onto the side table and splashing hot tea over my hand. “Mav and my sister have just had to make a load of calls and pay people off to make it go away. Why did you do it? Did you think it would be funny to humiliate me like that? You know what you did is actually illegal.” I wasn’t entirely sure how true that was, but I had heard of cases of revenge porn, and reckoned that this probably fell into that category. Maybe Mav should have threatened the sites with lawsuits instead of paying them off now that I thought about it, but hey, it was done now, so I needed to tell myself that that was all that really mattered.

Wiping my hand off, ignoring the sting from the hot liquid, I glared at Ronan, who simply tilted his head and raised a brow. “I still have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“Oh really?” I asked sarcastically, leaning forward, readying myself to pounce.

“Really,” he deadpanned, his other brow lifting too, eyes bugging as he shook his head. “You gonna elaborate?”

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