Chapter 3 – Beau
BEAU
T he rope whips around my head as loud rock music pounds in my headphones.
My eyes sting a bit as sweat drips down into them, making me squint at my blurred reflection in the gym mirror.
My quads burn with threatening, acid heat.
I know I’m pushing harder than I should, and it’s making the critical little voice in my head shut the fuck up for a minute. So I keep fucking pushing.
Every time my sneakers touch the ground, I launch myself up again, as high as I can go. Little girls around the world have it right—jumping rope is no fucking joke. It’s elite level cardio, and the best way to burn out the last of your energy at the end of a workout.
The song on my headphones ends, leading into another one with an even faster tempo. I speed up my jumps to match it, the rope whirling around me. And for some reason, that little voice starts talking again.
You’re not going fast enough.
Not high enough.
Not good enough.
Shut up, shut up, shut up.
My calf muscles bunch tightly. My chest heaves, dragging in oxygen slower than my pounding heart demands. I’m going to cramp up any second.
I force myself to keep going to the end of the song. My eyes squeeze shut, and I tunnel down deep. I count the seconds, one by one, until the last chord fades out and I finally drop the rope to the floor.
I march in place while my heartbeat lowers, circling my shoulders to stretch them.
When I wipe the sweat from my eyes with the bottom of my soaked shirt, my reflection comes back into focus.
I look like shit. My face turns tomato-red when I do cardio, and there’s nothing sexy about the sweat dripping from every pore.
Grabbing my water bottle, I pound down water until my stomach aches from it.
Now that I’m finally still, my body takes the time to remind itself of all its complaints.
My too-sore quads from a brutal run yesterday.
My tennis elbow, twinging from all the chopping I did for prep last night.
My left knee, which is always fucking pissed at me, ever since I took a bad spill at twenty and swore off motorcycles.
One of these days, my body is going to force a rest day on me. Right now, though, I need to keep pushing. The wedding last weekend—that thrilling ten minutes in the coat closet with Brinley—it fucked me up. It got me thinking way too much about everything I want but can’t have.
Maybe there’s a world where Luke will find out I’ve been secretly screwing his sister for five years that won’t end with me in the hospital with my jaw wired shut. One thing’s for sure: I don’t live in that world.
I yank off my shirt to send a sweaty selfie to Brinley anyway. She reacts with a gif of a drooling wolf, making me chuckle. I switch over to the group chat, expecting to have a few missed messages. The guys and I shoot the shit all day, and it’s easy to miss a few messages now and then.
Luke
This is such fucking bullshit. I’m going to lose my fucking mind.
My brows shoot up. Luke is normally easygoing. What the hell’s got him so rattled?
Nate
They can’t just drop out of the deal this late in the contract, can they?
Luke
They pulled a fucking morality clause. Said I was a danger to their brand. Fuckers.
Ryan
Not sure the language is helping, Luke. You’re abusing the F-word.
Nate
I’m not sure now’s the time to tease Luke. He’s pissed.
Ryan
Correction, he’s FUCKING pissed.
Luke
Can you blame me? This is the last fucking straw.
I scroll back up through the conversation, trying to figure out what I missed. When I catch a link to the Toronto Tea, I freeze.
Luke Windsor’s Kinky Bedroom Sins: Exclusive Insider Interview .
Oh, no.
Fuck, fuck, fuck.
As I scroll up further, the pieces become horribly clear.
The Toronto Tea, the city’s premiere gossip blog, loves to publish shit about me and the guys. The worst of them is codenamed Peppermint, a writer who has an uncanny ability to find out all our secrets and spread them online at the worst possible times.
This time, Peppermint didn’t even need to publish at the right time. The “exclusive insider interview” went online almost two years ago, and it didn’t make much of a splash at the time.
Until today.
When Luke’s whiskey company, Twisted Devil, sent out a press release announcing that they would be exclusively supplying whiskey for Air Canada’s VIP lounges.
That press release had a particularly handsome headshot of Luke, which prompted a few viral TikTok videos about him, which turned into horny netizens scouring the internet to find out his dating status.
They found a whole lot more than that.
Peppermint’s interview went viral, and Air Canada pulled the plug.
I switch back to the group chat.
Beau
Fuck, Luke, I’m sorry.
Luke
Don’t be sorry. Be mad. We’re going to catch this Peppermint asshole and make them wish they’d never been born.
James
Let’s not overreact.
Nate
James is right. Damage control first, revenge second.
I’m emailing you to loop you in with the UPS PR team. They can help draft a statement denying the article and plant some industry chatter that ending the deal was a mutual decision.
Ryan
Luke, are you home?
Luke
Seething and plotting on my sofa as we speak.
Ryan
I officially call a team meeting at Luke’s place. If we’re going to find Peppermint, we need a plan of attack.
Luke
FUCK YES. Get over here. Let’s fucking go.
Shit. This is bad. Really, really fucking bad.
Or maybe it’s not as bad as I think. Maybe the interview Peppermint published isn’t that bad, and everyone’s overreacting. Air Canada might see this blow over and start up the deal again. Luke might decide Peppermint isn’t worth chasing.
With that pleasant delusion in my mind, I open the link to the interview.
Which is even worse than I feared.
Peppermint: As regular readers know, I don’t usually publish interviews.
But in this case, I think you’ll want to hear the news straight from the horse’s mouth.
Today, I’m chatting with Jenna, which is of course not her real name.
Jenna posted on Reddit about a bad experience dating the Twisted Devil himself, Luke Windsor.
Turns out, he’s even more twisted than we thought.
I reached out, and Jenna agreed to speak with me and answer all our burning questions. Jenna, thanks for chatting with me.
Jenna: Of course. I can’t wait for the world to hear just how messed up and nasty Luke is. I just want to make sure this never happens to another woman.
Peppermint: How long were you with Luke?
Jenna: Almost four months.
Peppermint: Really? Wow, I never heard of him having a girlfriend for that long before. He never found a woman he respected enough to spend more than five minutes with.
Jenna: It was an on-and-off thing. Like, he did take me out, but only like when it was convenient for him. He loved to play hot and cold with me. First he’d swear he didn’t want anything serious with me, but then we’d have the most insane sex. You can’t just separate stuff like that.
Peppermint: Does that mean your relationship was mostly built around sex?
Jenna: It wasn’t just any sex. It got rough. You don’t even want to know the kind of shit he was into. Trust me, I have the marks to prove it.
Peppermint: Hold on. Are you telling me that Luke hurt you?
Jenna: Yes. With his hand, and some other stuff. He’s got a whole drawer full of toys. Paddles, floggers, one time a belt. It hurt like fuck when I sat down after. I doubt he even cared about that, though. He had these ropes, too. They were so scratchy, I had red marks on my wrists for days.
I stop reading because I know what comes next. Anyone can see this interview for exactly what it is; some girl pissed off because she wanted more than occasional kinky sex and Luke wasn’t interested in commitment.
She even implied herself later in the interview that she gave enthusiastic consent to everything.
And how upset she was that it never became a relationship bleeds through every sentence she spoke.
Cringing, I close the window. The interview is brutal, even more than Peppermint’s usual anti-Luke screeds, because the fact that it’s an interview gives it the illusion of truth. Only someone who actually knows Luke would see what bullshit it was.
Yes, he’s into some kinky shit, and yes, he tends to keep his relationships casual and physical, but he never misleads anyone. He’s very up front about wanting no strings.
Whoever “Jenna” is obviously had a bone to pick with Luke, and she found a friendly ear in Peppermint. The blogger has written shit about all of us, but they’ve always reserved a particular venom for Luke. Just like a certain woman I know.
I’ve suspected for a while. Hell, maybe I’ve more than suspected, but I never confronted Brinley. Because if I’m right, if she’s really Peppermint, that could blow up both of our lives.
I t takes me less than half an hour to shower and cook up some egg sandwiches for the guys. By the time I make it up to Luke’s apartment, everyone else is already there. Fury hangs over all four of them like dark campfire smoke.
“I brought sustenance,” I say, setting the sandwich plate down on the coffee table. Ryan grabs one and shoves it in his mouth. Normally, Luke would be halfway through his own sandwich. Instead, he glares down at his clasped hands.
“I’ll say it,” he mutters. “I’m pissed. This Peppermint person has gotten away with writing about us for too long. We’ve laughed it off or ignored it, even when they hit us below the belt. This time, though, it cost Twisted Devil real money. I want Peppermint found .”
“We all do,” Ryan says through a mouthful of egg.
“I want to know who has access to the kind of details Peppermint writes about,” Luke continues. “A lot of the stuff in these posts isn’t public knowledge.”
“Someone we dated?” Nate says thoughtfully. “If it ended badly, that would be a motive.”
Luke shakes his head. “Nobody ever had a significant relationship last long enough to know everything, and it’s not like we’d spill our private details to a one-night stand.”
“Maybe it’s someone who works for us?” I suggest optimistically. It would be great if that were true—if Peppermint was just someone we can just fire and move on from.
Or maybe you’re purposefully sending them in the wrong direction , the little voice in my head says. Bad friend.
“I cleared everyone who works in this building and at UPS, back when they wrote about Cat and me,” Nate says.
“Hundreds of people work at Sequel,” James says. “We’re a large company.”
“Maybe focus on the Toronto branches, then,” Ryan says. “James and Nate, you guys have PIs you’ve used before, right? We could put them on it.”
“I’ll send the name of my guy,” Nate promises.
“We should get a hacker or something,” Ryan says. “Someone on the dark web. Do you know any of those?”
“Don’t be insane,” Luke groans at the same time that James says, “Yes.”
“Any chance your hacker looks like Keanu Reeves and knows how to do Matrix moves?” I joke.
Everyone ignores my attempt to lighten the mood.
“We should start by making a list of anyone who sees us in our day-to-day lives,” Nate says. “Coworkers, house staff, anyone you went out with more than once. That way, we can have them ready for the PIs to review.”
“We can all work on that tonight and send it to Nate when we’re done. I’ll start cataloguing Peppermint’s articles about us and look for patterns,” Ryan says.
James checks the calendar on his phone. “Can we wrap this up, then? I have a call with a shareholder that I can’t miss, but text me if you need any information from me.”
“Fine.” Luke crosses his arms, scowling. “I’ll set up a meeting with your PI this week, Nate. We’ve dealt with enough bullshit from Peppermint. It’s time to make them pay for it.”
My stomach twists uncomfortably. Fuck, I hope I’m wrong. I hope all the hunches I’ve had about Peppermint over the years were dead wrong. That they’ll turn out to be someone’s disgruntled personal assistant instead of the woman I trust most in the world.
Eventually, the group breaks up. James heads off to take his call, and Ryan, Nate, and Luke head down to the gym to help Luke work off a bit of his anger with the punching bag.
I shrug off their invitation with a stock excuse about doing inventory at Terrace.
Nobody ever asks follow-up questions about inventory.
Really, it’s date night over at Brinley’s.
I always go to Brinley’s place. Obviously, we can’t meet at the House of Cards. Too many friends, too many eyes, too many elevators that might open at the wrong time. Brinley’s apartment is safe.
Or at least, it was. Now, Brinley has a friend staying with her.
Beau
Can I come over tonight? Is it okay with Eden there?
Brinley
Of course! Eden’s totally cool with it.
Beau
Great. I’ll be there in an hour.
She shoots me a heart emoji back, and I sigh. Eden might be Brinley’s friend, but her presence still adds a level of complication. Right now, I’m not sure how many more complications I can handle.