Chapter Eleven
Chapter Eleven
Why, why would Spencer do this to her? Why embarrass her like this, so publicly, at his own wedding? She’d done her best to move on, to stuff the humiliation down deep where it could fester into a tumor. Did he want to punish her? Was this because she hadn’t brought the chapters like she’d promised? Hadn’t she been through enough already?
Kate got lost in less than two turns of the hallways, finding herself either in a dry sauna or a portal to the hellmouth. She stumbled back out, taking a slug from the bottle of wine with relish and wincing as it hit her tastebuds. Richie and Marla were right, this really was the bargain basement stuff. Still, it drank as good as any other wine, and she took a hearty swallow as she tried to find her way back to more familiar territory.
All she found were the darker, weirder depths of Hempstead Manor. There was the room that looked suspiciously like a medieval torture chamber, complete with a man-size iron coffin and a giant birdcage with spikes on the inside. Then there was the library that looked cozy at first glance, until she realized there was a gargoyle leering at her from his perch over the fireplace, and all the books seemed to be about witch trials and the science of black magic. By the time she made it to the room labeled DOLL SUITE with hundreds of Victorian-era dolls piled on the massive four-poster bed, their heads turned toward the door with unblinking black eyes, she gave up on finding a safe space to polish off her wine in peace.
Figures , she thought as she came upon a set of stained-glass double doors. The wind practically blew them open as she tried the handles, shoving her back as gusts of rain blanketed the carpet and soaked her dress. She’d almost forgotten about the storm outside, considering the one raging within her, and she was more than a little surprised to realize the balcony was all the way up on the third floor. She hadn’t even remembered climbing any stairs.
“This fucking house is cursed,” she muttered, fighting the wind to close the door. At least she hadn’t had to make the crossing in this weather; she couldn’t imagine any poor souls stuck out on the Bay now, fighting the elements to get to safe harbor.
She located a set of stairs, tromping down to the second floor for a refill since all the wine in her bottle had mysteriously disappeared. Must have spilled on the balcony. She hummed to herself, no clue of the time or location, the alcohol doing its job to make all her problems seem inconsequential. Somewhere in the distance, much like thunder, a hangover loomed. But that was a problem for later Kate. Now Kate was feeling much, much better.
Until she reached the second-floor landing and was greeted by the rather titillating image of Juliette Winters’s rear end pointed at her. Juliette herself hadn’t seemed to notice Kate hovering on the bottom step, as she was bent over a door with something in her hand. A key, maybe? Kate pressed her lips closed and worked her way up the stairs until she wasn’t in Juliette’s direct line of sight, but she could still see what the other woman was doing.
Which looked, the more Kate studied her, an awful lot like she was trying to pick the lock. Which meant, if Kate wasn’t too drunk to be mistaken, it wasn’t Juliette’s room she was trying to access. Curious. Someone came up the stairs from below, the dark brown shaved head of their marketing intern, Veeta, appearing beside Juliette.
“I found it,” said Veeta, holding up something that looked like one of those tools dentists use to scrape your teeth. Just the thought of it made Kate shiver. “You think you can get it open?”
“These locks are a hundred years old, most of them go swinging open by themselves,” Juliette said, crouching before the door. “Watch the stairs. The last thing I need is to get caught.”
“Should we really be doing this now?” Veeta said in a loud whisper, looking anxiously down the stairs to the first floor. It never occurred to them to look up, where Kate watched with wide eyes. “This weekend, of all weekends?”
“It has to be this weekend,” Juliette whispered back, annoyed. “I’m running out of time. If I don’t give Simon something , the whole deal will go bust. I’m not fucking losing out again .”
Veeta fidgeted with the collar on their pantsuit. “Maybe if you tell Simon—”
“No way,” Juliette said, cutting them off. “Nobody can be trusted right now, not even Simon. I’m on the verge of getting everything I’ve worked so hard for. All that’s standing in my way is one little idiot who thinks they’re clever. And I’m going to take care of them for good this weekend. Yes , that’s it.”
The door clicked open and the two of them slipped inside, leaving the hallway empty. Kate had the overwhelming urge to follow them, to find out what Juliette was on the verge of getting, and who the idiot was, and what she meant by taking care of them for good. She couldn’t possibly mean Kate, could she? Kennedy had been named head of marketing less than a month after the book-three-tour-cancellation fiasco, the one Juliette had taken so personally. Juliette had every reason to hate Kate and Kennedy. If Juliette was planning revenge, Kate really didn’t want to know what the woman had in store for either one of them.
Plus, Kate realized as soon as she descended the few stairs back down to the second floor, she was possibly too drunk to go snooping around without detection. She had a gut-rumbling feeling that something was going on this weekend, something bad and possibly dangerous, and potentially involving more than just Juliette and her secret snooping. There was the fight between Cassidy and her aunt in the garden, Serena’s cryptic remarks about the lion roaring at midnight, and that tense conversation she casually overheard between Richie and Steven. Her Loretta senses were tingling, telling her that somebody had something more than a wedding planned this weekend, but she couldn’t figure out how they were all connected or how far any of it might go any more than she could walk a straight line just then. Her head was beginning to ache, the stairs tilting at precarious angles.
“There you are,” came Jake’s voice. “I’ve been looking all over.”
Kate made the unfortunate mistake of turning her head too fast in response, the room doing a full 360 even as she was positive her head had stopped moving. She gripped the railing, terrified that Juliette might hear and enact her revenge right there and then.
“Shhhh!” Kate said harshly, far louder than Jake had spoken. She felt her way down the banister toward him, her shoes catching on the deep pile of the carpet. She wrenched them off her feet. “They’ll hear you.”
“Who will hear me?” Jake asked in confusion.
Kate jerked a thumb over her shoulder. “ Them .”
“Kate, are you… drunk?”
“So drunk,” Kate whispered, almost gleeful to admit it. “I don’t even know where I am right now. Do you know where I am?”
“Oh boy, you smell like you fell into a wine barrel,” Jake said, putting one arm around her waist and wrapping her other arm around his shoulder. “Let’s get you to bed.”
“Are you trying to seduce me, Jake Hawkins?” Kate laughed, ending in a hiccup.
“Not right now, I’m not,” Jake muttered, looking around. “These aren’t the same stairs we took earlier. We’ll have to go to the ground floor and find our way up from there. This house is too fucking enormous.”
“I know, right?!” Kate said, tripping down the stairs beside him. With Jake guiding her, it was suddenly a lot easier to manage walking. She leaned into him, looking up at his profile in a bliss that only her drunken state would allow. “You have such a pretty face, do you know that? Pretty, pretty face. Makes me want to sit on it.”
Jake made a strained, choking sound. “Excuse me?”
“You know, I’m not actually sure what that means,” Kate said with a frown. “Serena’s characters use it a lot. I think it has something to do with oral sex, but the mechanics don’t really make sense to me. Anyway, you and me, we should figure it out together.”
“Kate,” Jake said, his voice wary. “You’re very drunk right now.”
“No,” Kate said, drawing out the vowel. Her limbs had gone soft and pliant from the alcohol and the warmth radiating off Jake. “I’m just the right amount of drunk to hit on you.”
“You only hit on me when you’re drunk,” Jake said. “Why is that?”
Kate gave him a blissful smile, her eyes drifting closed. “Because that’s when I make all my best bad decisions.”
Jake went still beneath her arm, his back muscles rigid where her hand trailed along them. She opened her eyes in confusion, wondering why they had stopped. Jake’s expression was as still as the rest of him, though a small muscle in his jaw ticked in time to her heartbeat.
He was so close, if he turned to look at her, she might be tempted to kiss him. And she already knew where that would go. She’d tried it once, drunk on margaritas and panicked at the thought of Jake leaving the country to join this new extreme adventure tourism business his friend had started. He’d rejected her then, as he was probably going to reject her now.
“Why would it be such a bad decision, Kate?” Jake asked, his voice quiet.
“What? You and me?” Kate snorted. “Are you kidding? Kate Valentine and Mr. Jake of All Trades?”
Jake frowned. “Jake of All Trades?”
“That’s what the bridge club at the retirement community calls you, you know, but don’t tell your aunt. No, I’m breaking the Valentine curse. Or I was, but I guess I didn’t, did I? Spencer still left me for a younger, richer thrill.”
“What is the Valentine curse?” Jake asked.
“You know how my grandfather died? Treasure diving Florida’s Gold Coast. Something went wrong with his regulator, a strong current came up, and poof ! Never even found his body. He would have liked that, though, belonging to the sea. Grandma always said the sea was his wife, and she was only his mistress. And my dad died in an offshore oil rig explosion, seeking his fortune on a different sea. Same water, though, I guess, so it still counts. We were never good enough to keep them around, the Valentine women. Never enough of a thrill. Spencer was supposed to fix that, but I guess even book editors get antsy.”
“Is that what you think?” Jake asked. “That you’re not enough of a thrill for me?”
Kate snorted again, a thoroughly undignified sound. “You forget I wrote the book on you. Literally. I’ve seen the photographic evidence. Running all over the world, seeking your next adventure, leaving a trail of beach bunnies behind? Always chasing something to fill that hole in your chest.”
Jake took a deep breath. “All right, I think we’d better get you up to the room now.”
Kate reached for him then, putting a hand on his cheek to turn his face toward her, to indulge the fantasy she’d carried for so long. But he took her wrist in his hand and sat her down on the stairs. “I’m not doing this with you when you’re drunk.”
Kate looked up at him, eyes big and pleading, too drunk to properly mount her defenses. “Please, Jake? Just for tonight? No strings, I promise. It’s not like we’re working together anymore. We don’t have to keep up a professional whatever. We can just… get it out of our systems.”
Jake looked at her for a long time, his fingers pressing into her wrist, his expression heavy. “Is that what you want, Kate? To get me out of your system? Would it make you feel better about your choices if I proved to be everything you’ve always told yourself I am?”
Kate didn’t care for his accusatory tone, nor for the sharp twist of guilt in her gut at the idea that she might have misjudged anything about Jake. She’d heard his stories, met his disapproving father and his high-achieving brother, knew that Jake often pushed himself to the limit to prove he wasn’t afraid. That he was just as worthy. He was always bringing girls around, but never the same ones, and never anyone serious. He was allergic to responsibility, he’d told her once. Made him break out in hives. She knew plenty about Jake Hawkins, thank you, which was why her next words were so defensive.
“Would it make you feel better about your choices if you thought you actually were something more?”
Jake’s expression froze, but before Kate could rewind time or drop into a hole of self-loathing, a heavy set of boots interrupted them.
“Valentine, you sloppy slut, what the hell was that?” asked Marla, appearing from a nearby hallway with a huff. “I’ve been looking for you all over. You ran out of the rehearsal dinner like you were about to upchuck a frog or something. Are you okay?”
Oh, Kate was a lot of things, and okay had been torn from the bottom of the list. But she could hardly tell Marla all of that without those feelings—and all that wine—coming back up.
“I’m fine,” she gasped, like if she could just get the words out she might believe them herself. “This house is… really fucked up.”
Marla barked out a laugh. “So creepy, right? I stubbed my toe on a whisky barrel earlier and went face-first into a wild boar. I’ve never met anyone so obsessed with killing and stuffing things. Though I’d expect nothing less from Attila the Hunter.”
“Marla, can you get Kate back to the room?” Jake asked, straightening up. “I have something else I need to do.”
“Or someone else,” Kate muttered.
“Night, Kate,” Jake said curtly before disappearing.
Marla blew out a breath, making a face. “That was awkward. What the hell happened?”
“Nothing,” Kate said glumly. “Nothing at all. Same as always.”
“I meant what happened at the rehearsal dinner, but I see you’ve got a few things going on.” Marla plopped down on the stair beside her, pencil-thin brows crinkling in concern. “What can I do, babe?”
Kate groaned, dropping her face in her hands before realizing how much worse it made the dizziness. “I screwed everything up like I always do. I drove Jake away, I drove Spencer away, I even drove you away.”
“Me?” Marla said. “What do I have to do with any of this? I never boned you.”
Kate shook her head morosely. “I haven’t been a good friend, I know. Missing awards ceremonies, not answering texts, bailing on our weekends at Dive Bar. I just… I lost sight. Of everything. Of myself. Sometimes I wish we could just go back to the beginning, you know? Nights of the Round Table, talking craft, sharing our work. None of this… business bullshit.”
“Would you really do anything different, though?” Marla said. “You can’t tell me it’s not nice, the commercial fame and fortune. Shit, your writing pays your mortgage. That’s more than most of us can say.”
“I just miss it, that’s all,” Kate said, unable to put the intense feelings of nostalgia and regret into words. “I miss… I don’t know. I miss hanging out. I miss making fun of Jeremy’s terrible haircuts. I miss your dad’s weirdo friends bringing in their phallic pottery. I miss you.”
Marla twitched her lips in consideration before holding out a hand to Kate resolutely. “I can’t watch you mope all night. We need to do something mildly illegal and definitely fun.”
“How mildly are we talking?” Kate asked.
“I found out where they keep the Dom,” Marla said. “They’ve got a whole wine cave off the kitchen, used to be for whisky storage. Let’s do some casual burgling.”
Kate took Marla’s hand, leaning heavily into her as the alcohol hit so much harder without Jake to support her. They fumbled their way back to the main hallway, the corridors passing like a haunted nightmare. Kate would have gotten hopelessly lost, a ghost haunting the Manor, if it weren’t for Marla’s navigation. They reached the kitchen, several servants cleaning up dishes from the rehearsal dinner. They ducked behind a counter to avoid being spotted, and Marla pointed to a stone arch on the far side of the kitchen.
“That’s the wine cave,” Marla whispered. “I’ll grab some glasses and score us some of those crab things they had during the cocktail hour. You find the Dom and I’ll meet you down there.”
Marla crawled away and Kate headed for the wine cave. A puff of cool, dry air greeted her from the top of the stone steps. It certainly had the feel of a hidden distillery as Kate descended. Earthy and dark, the walls set in close as if they were meant to inspire claustrophobia. Or stop the G-men from gumming up the works while you made a quick escape.
There was something hauntingly familiar about the dark, rocky stairs, even though Kate had certainly never stayed anywhere posh enough to have an entire cave for storing wine. The nubbly feel of the stones beneath her hands, the faint trace of dry dirt in the air, the soft pad of her bare feet against the rough steps, it all felt like something she’d done before. A vivid memory from someone else’s life.
The cinematic feel was brought to an abrupt halt when her toes met with a soft, immovable object. She cried out in pain and surprise, falling over just as some demonic motion sensor turned the electric lights on full blast, illuminating Kennedy Hempstead’s lifeless face.