1. Chapter One #2
She was afraid of hurting me, I could tell. “Babygirl, I can handle it.”
“It’s full of lonely guys,” she whispered. “Lonely, older guys, with lots of money and lots of shame. They’ll pretty much talk to anybody who matches with them, especially if they’re younger and have really sexy pictures.”
“You didn’t have any pictures, though,” I remembered.
“That’s right, I didn’t,” Bailey said, giving more credence to her claim she hadn’t actually used the app before matching with me.
“The scam is simple: you talk to the guys, you string them along. You never actually deliver—you just ask for stuff. Help with tuition, with getting a plane ticket, with anything you can think of. The fact that they want you gets them to pay, and the fact that they’re ashamed of the whole thing keeps them from ever telling anyone about it. ”
Jesus. I remembered Mark’s attempts at warning me about scams on the Sweetheart App. I guess I had no idea how deep the rabbit hole could go.
“You said Debbie has been doing this?” I asked.
Bailey’s face told me I’d hit a bullseye. “She coerced me. She blackmailed me, Daddy. She pressured me for weeks, told me she’d help me set up a profile, that she’d walk me through it. Told me I could make so much money doing it, and I wouldn’t even have to work very hard.”
“Obviously, she didn’t do it,” McKenna said.
Bailey shook her head. “I sand-bagged her. I couldn’t go through with it. I didn’t want to be her good little goddamned pawn, the way I’d been my whole life. The good influence on Savannah.” She scoffed. “What a fucking joke.”
It clicked. “Then the barbecue happened. And you heard Mark talk me into signing up for the app. That’s when you found out I was going to be on Sweetheart.”
Bailey bit her lip. “And I finally made a profile. Partially so I could tell Debbie I’d done something and get her off my back for a while. And…”
Spots of color rose to her cheeks. Her nails (chartreuse, Debbie-shaded, so much like hers but so much better the way everything about Bailey was better than my ex-wife) dug into my palm so hard it hurt.
“I… I hoped for you,” she admitted, a weight lifting off her shoulders. “That you’d find me. I wasn’t lying. I’m fucked up. I wanted this.”
I was pretty fucked up, too. I’d learned that about myself over the last couple of weeks.
“You wanted to exploit a lonely middle-aged man for money?” I teased.
Bailey’s expression fell. “No! I told you I didn’t want your money.
I… I wanted you to rescue me, Tom. The way you always did when Savannah or me or McKenna were in serious trouble.
” Her eyes took on a faraway cast. “Like a knight in a storybook. You’ve always been there for me when I really needed you, Daddy.
I shouldn’t be surprised the universe put us together when I needed you the most.”
“You knew it was me from the beginning,” I said.
She smiled. “I was ninety-five percent sure as soon as I saw SecondChance82,” she said.
“It turned into one hundred percent when you said the thing about being cheated on. There was never any scam, Daddy—not with you. I was just a girl talking to the man I was in love with and hoped loved me back.” She leaned in, dropping her voice to a whisper.
“The guy I’d been fantasizing about giving my virginity to from about six weeks after my eighteenth birthday. ”
Jesus. My life was completely insane.
“I’m gonna pretend I didn’t hear that part,” McKenna snickered. But her smile told me she’d be thinking about it for a hell of a long time.
I was already thinking about the contours of Debbie’s scam. It was heartless and cruel—and probably pretty fucking efficient. But there was one big problem with it. It couldn’t help but collapse the second it touched something real.
I couldn’t help but hear Bailey’s words in my head, even though they’d been given to me as a text: You don’t have to give me a dime. I just want YOU.
Bailey was supposed to bleed me dry for my ex-wife.
Use shame and guilt to turn me into a blank check, a way to balance Debbie’s bank accounts.
I have no idea how many men Debbie had planned to ensnare and trap—but I could imagine the way she’d have crowed to realize that it was me.
And it made me shudder to think of the way the old Tom—the pre-Bailey Tom—would’ve fallen right into that trap.
Shame, guilt… yeah. Yeah, I’d had those things in spades.
Jesus. The app was called Sweetheart. And Bailey’s sweet heart was the only thing that saved me from becoming another sucker.
“Babygirl,” I said, my throat suddenly dry. “There’s something very important you haven’t told me. The main thing, I’m guessing.”
Bailey froze. Next to her, McKenna did the same. I think both of them knew this was the real hard part. The bit they were worried was going to change the way I saw my babygirl—and would damn sure change everything I thought I knew about Debbie.
I waited a heartbeat, then asked the question. “What does she have on you, babygirl?”
Because Bailey wouldn’t have done this out of the goodness of her heart. I knew that.
Both she and McKenna hated my ex-wife. For either of them to run interference on a scam like this for her wasn’t just beyond the pale, it was honestly insane. Whatever it was that Debbie knew to force Bailey to go along with this had to be bad. Very bad.
Neither girl spoke for a few moments. “She tried the family thing first,” Bailey muttered, glancing over at McKenna.
“You were a guest in my daughter’s home, we took you in when nobody else would, you OWE me.
All that shit.” She snickered without a trace of warmth.
“It’s funny: she’s been calling me ‘sweetheart’ in the texts she’s been sending me for ages.
But it’s never been a term of endearment. ”
I made a mental note: whatever happened between Debbie and Bailey, there were texts.
“Babygirl, I’m not asking what she tried to do. I’m asking what worked.”
“I know,” Bailey whispered. “I’m trying to work my way up to it.”
I waited.
Her mouth worked soundlessly for several moments. “It’s… it’s Dad,” she said at last, drumming the nails on her free hand across the table top. “It’s my father. My real father.”
Bailey’s Dad? I barely knew the man. He’d been in jail for a long time, for what I gathered were very good reasons.
Honestly, the little I’d heard about her home life before she started having week-long ‘sleepovers’ with Savannah left me convinced she’d been better off in the Cottrell Residence than she would’ve been at her own place.
I’d thought that at Debbie’s dinner, too, when Kevin’s brother mentioned his position on the state parole board. That girl’s better off with us, I’d told myself. With ME.
Yeah, the thought was a little possessive.
But so what? This was a young woman who’d explicitly told me she wanted me to tell her how to dress, what to eat, who to be.
We’d barely scratched the surface on Bailey’s kinks, and I couldn’t wait to find out how many of them turned out to also be my kinks.
Something else clicked. “Rick gave me his card,” I said, remembering. “He was talking about maybe letting you make a plea to the parole board on your Dad’s behalf.” Acid filled my gut. “And Kevin shut him down.”
Bailey’s tone was sepulchral. “Debbie’s known about the parole thing for months,” she explained. “She said she can make sure he gets out. If I do what she wants. And if I don’t…”
She didn’t need to finish it. “She can exert pressure the other way, through Kevin,” I muttered. “And make sure he never gets out.”
Honestly, I wouldn’t have been too upset about that. But Bailey clearly was.
“I know you don’t like him,” Bailey said. “Nobody likes him. But he’s my father.” Her lips compressed to a tight line. “If you were in jail and it was Savannah, wouldn’t you want her doing everything she could to get you out of that place?”
I thought about it. Honestly. “Not if it meant dancing to Debbie’s tune,” I said. “I wouldn’t do that to my daughter, babygirl. And I wouldn’t do it to you, either.”
“Or me?” McKenna asked, lightly teasing.
“You know I wouldn’t,” I told her. I still wasn’t used to McKenna flirting with me.
Even knowing the three of us were going to be in a hotel room together on Wednesday, that I was going to have my first threesome with two of the hottest women I’d ever met in my life, treating the coed like a potential sexual conquest was something I was still adjusting to.
Bailey didn’t look convinced. “You don’t understand,” she whispered, her face going the color of ash. “Dad, he… I was…”
Hmm?
What the hell? Bailey was trembling—full-body trembles, like someone had picked her up and tossed her out into the middle of a snowstorm. Her nervousness when she’d been talking about Debbie was nothing compared to this.
There’s something else, I realized. The parole thing is part of the story, but it’s not the whole thing. Debbie is holding something else over her head. Something worse.
I had no idea what could be worse.
And I wasn’t about to learn that morning.
Because McKenna chose that moment to lean over and drape her arm over her best friend’s shoulders, holding her close.
“It’s okay, Bailes,” she whispered, her tone telling me she both knew exactly what Bailey was about to say and knew just how much saying it was going to cost her.
“Tom is a good guy. He’s the best guy. You can tell him. ”
Bailey hesitated at the brink. “That’s it,” she blurted, shaking her head like she was a little girl trying to get out of tasting a new food. “Really, that’s all. Isn’t that enough?”
It was. And I could tell whatever was going on under the surface distressed my babygirl something fierce.
So I made a choice. I decided not to push her. Even if there was a locked door at the bottom of all of this, I wasn’t going to force it open. Not now. I’d just watched Bailey put her hand on the knob and flinch away like the thing was on fire. It could wait.
I couldn’t blame her for wanting to wait.