CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
“What are you doing here?” he asked.
“Working. What are you doing here? Did Vella tell you where I was?” Had he come looking for me? Because he couldn’t wait another sixteen hours to see me again? That was sweet.
But his body language and panicked expression told me that he hadn’t been searching for me. He was surprised that I was here.
“Your company is not in charge of this party.” He made it sound like he had specifically checked.
“No, the ambassador used Melissa Morgan Events as the planner. And Melissa Morgan is a friend of Claudia’s and asked us to help out because it had so many moving parts that needed to be taken care of. You met Claudia, remember?”
The panic on his face got worse.
“What is going on with you?” I asked. Hadn’t he just told me yesterday that he wanted us to be better about communicating, not shutting down when something happened?
“We need to go somewhere so that we can talk,” he said, and the urgency in his voice made me want to dig my heels in and stay put. He was hiding something from me and I didn’t like it.
Before I could say as much, Sunny was there hugging me hello, and somehow Max appeared even more freaked out.
“What are you doing here?” she asked, sounding delighted to see me.
“I’m working this event.”
“Well, what a coincidence! Max didn’t mention that you were hired to work his dad’s party.”
It was like a giant gong had sounded right next to my head and drowned out all other noise, pinpointing all of my focus to a single white noise roaring inside my head.
His dad’s party?
What?
“Everly, I can explain,” he said.
“What is wrong with your voice?” Sunny said, looking at her cousin. “Why do you sound like that?”
“He always sounds like that,” I said. My heart was pounding like a raging animal trapped in a cage, desperate to be set free, roaring and throwing itself against the bars.
He said, “Sunny, can I talk to you for a minute?” but she ignored him, all of her attention focused on me.
“He doesn’t have an accent. I don’t know why you’re doing one,” she said, just as confused as I was. He tried again to get her to step aside with him, but I put my hand on her arm. She might have been his cousin, but she was my friend, too.
“Because he’s from Monterra,” I said.
She replied, “He’s American. His dad was the ambassador to Monterra, but Max is not Monterran.”
There it was. The secret he’d been hiding from me. I had told him the first night we met that it was important to me that people not lie.
And he had been lying to me from the beginning. Every conversation, every text, every kiss—all of it had been one giant lie.
I was in love with a man who didn’t exist.
“Everly, I can explain,” he said, reaching for my hand, but I physically jerked myself away from his touch.
“Your father is Preston Wainscott?”
His face was clouded, dark. “Yes.”
“And you’re not from Monterra?”
“No.”
Sunny finally seemed to realize that she had said something Max didn’t want her to reveal. She excused herself but neither Max nor I said anything to her as she made a hasty exit.
She wasn’t here because her in-laws knew the Wainscotts. She was here because it was her uncle’s anniversary party and her cousin had invited her.
I couldn’t believe this was happening. He had hidden this from me for weeks.
I felt so humiliated.
“This is not how I wanted you to find out,” he said.
I let out a laugh of disbelief. “I’m sure you didn’t intend for me to ever find out. Did you enjoy pulling one over on me? You must have thought I was so stupid to fall for your act.”
I began to walk away. I couldn’t deal with this right now. I was supposed to be working, not watching my whole world crumble and fall apart.
“No, Everly, I was going to tell you. Tomorrow. I’ve been trying to tell you for so long.”
“Oh, yeah, I know just how hard you’ve tried to tell me. You had so many opportunities and you never did!” I got as far as the edge of the dance floor before I whirled around to face him again. “What is your actual name?”
“Max Wainscott. My mom and dad call me Maximilian.”
His mom ... Colby ... I knew that name. “Is your mother Serena Colby?”
From his expression I already knew the answer. “Yes.”
Serena Colby was the socialite who ran New York City. She was the tastemaker everyone followed, and anything she touched turned to gold. Gossip columnists called her “the queen of New York.” She came from extremely old money and was currently married to one of the wealthiest men in the world.
I had once thought Adrian Stone was a prince of the New York City social scene.
But Max was the one who actually deserved that title.
“You’re rich, too. This whole time I thought you were poor like me and you let me believe it and make a fool of myself.”
He put his hands in his pockets. “You didn’t make a fool of yourself.”
“Yes, I did.”
“I liked how you saw me. I wanted to be that person.”
“So for the sake of your ego, you lied to me? Because it made you feel good?” I asked.
“No, I’m not expressing myself well right now.”
“Oh, is that because English is your second language?” I asked with a surprising amount of sarcasm. Like I was channeling Vella.
He looked wounded. “I thought you always tried to see the best in people.”
“I did. And look where it got me. You lying to me and using me.”
“When did I use you?”
“To plan the baby shower for your cousin last minute.”
“Everly, I wasn’t trying to use you.”
It didn’t really matter what he had been trying to do. “That’s how I feel about it.”
I shook my hands once, like they were dripping in gross mud and I wanted to fling it off. Like his lies had covered me in some kind of invisible muck. I was not going to make a scene at this event. I wanted to yell and maybe throw a drink in Max’s lying face, but I would keep myself under control. A part of my brain kept reminding me that I was at work right now and it would reflect badly on my company if I behaved inappropriately, even if my personal life had been hit by a wrecking ball.
“Everly—”
“I thought you didn’t say things you don’t mean,” I interrupted him. “Does lying not count?”
Every line on his face reflected his desperation and I could see that he wanted to explain, to make me understand. “Remember how you said that when you get around people from the south, your accent comes back? The same thing happens to me when I get around Monterrans or Italians.”
“And? ‘Whoops, I had a bit of an accent when we met and you thought I was from Monterra and I let you keep thinking it’? Still a lie.”
“I didn’t think I’d see you past that first night and that it was a little white lie that didn’t matter. But the more time I spent with you, the more I wanted to be with you, and I didn’t know how to tell you what I’d done. I didn’t know what you would do if I told you the truth and I didn’t want to lose you.”
Part of my heart twinged. Even if he’d lied before, I wanted desperately to believe him now. I couldn’t let myself be swayed, though. “So that excuses it? You lied and lied and I don’t know how to get past that.”
He took a step closer to me and I knew he wanted to reach for me, but he refrained. “You do. You know me. You know the man that I am.”
“No, I don’t. That’s the entire point, Max.” And listening to his unaccented English, I realized that he seemed like a totally different person to me now. “You had to know that I was going to find out eventually. Did you ever think about that?”
“Yes! That was why I wanted us to meet tomorrow. I was going to tell you everything.”
Someone came up to my left and it took me a second to register that it was Adrian. I scanned the room quickly, wondering if I had accidentally raised my voice and my boss had come over to scold me.
“Everly, I need to speak with you for a minute,” Adrian said, apologetically.
“We’re in the middle of something right now,” Max said.
“Max! This is my boss.”
He looked guilty and immediately backed off. Adrian took me by the arm and led me a few feet away.
“Everly, I’m so sorry that I have to do this, but Topher Crawley told me that I have to fire you and have you escorted from the party.”
Adrenaline and shock spiked up my spine until it created a ball in my throat, and for a second I couldn’t speak. “What? Why?”
“You have a noncompete clause in the contract you signed when you started at Elevated. Apparently Topher spoke to a woman at this party who said you threw her a baby shower yesterday.”
I put a hand over my stomach, unable to believe that this was happening. Surely the universe wouldn’t hit me with two such horrific tragedies right in a row. “I didn’t know about the clause. I’m not even an official event planner. I did it in my free time.”
“Yes, but you met with the woman at Elevated’s offices. Which Topher knows because he recognized her from the meeting. He thinks you’re trying to poach potential clients for yourself, which also violates your contract.”
I knew I should have read that thing before I signed it.
“I’m not trying to steal clients,” I said, pleading. There had to be a way out of this. “Claudia specifically told me she wasn’t interested in doing showers and that’s what this was. A baby shower. I was just trying to do a favor for a friend.”
“Did you get paid for it?”
“I—yes. I did.”
“I’m really sorry,” Adrian said again, and I could see that he was. “You were the best assistant I ever had. I should have promoted you a long time ago. But Topher’s made this call and there’s nothing I can do.”
Correction—there was nothing he was going to do. With a sick feeling in my stomach, I realized that Adrian would never stick his neck out for me. Less than a week ago, he had been telling me that I was the second most important person in his life, and tonight he was firing me. I hysterically wondered if he could see the irony in that.
Two men approached, hotel security staff who were probably all too happy to throw me out.
Adrian leaned his head to the side, indicating that these were the people who had been sent as my escorts so that I wouldn’t make a scene. “Have a good night, Everly. Keep in touch.”
I should have let Vella light his hair on fire when she’d wanted to.
I had worn a side bag tonight that I currently had on, and so the only thing I needed to do was collect my coat from the coat check. I turned my head and caught Max’s gaze.
He looked stricken and I could tell that he’d overheard every word. “Everly, I’m so sorry.”
I nodded, telling myself not to cry. “So tonight you cost me my heart and my job. If you wanted to find a way to evict me from my apartment, you could go for the hat trick.”
When I tried to move past him, he started following me, saying my name again.
“Leave me alone,” I said. “I’ve already been embarrassed enough for one night. I don’t want to talk to you about this. I think we’ve both said everything we need to say, and whatever this was is very obviously over. Enjoy your father’s anniversary party.”
With my head held up, I walked across the ballroom to the coat check. I didn’t lose my security detail until I was out on the sidewalk, asking the valets to hail me a cab. It didn’t take long for one to arrive, and as I went to climb into the taxi, I looked back at the hotel lobby.
Max was standing beyond the entrance doors, watching me.
I closed the door hard.
This was over and it had barely even begun.