In Flight (43 page)

I didn’t bother to read the dozen unread messages above the one I had sent him, but I got a response almost immediately, and I did read that.
 

James:
 
Please don’t believe that tabloid garbage.
 
I’ll admit I never discouraged the rumors about Jules being my girlfriend, but they were only rumors.
 
She has never been my girlfriend.
 
She’s my best buddy’s sister.
 
I promise I will never escort her to another event for the rest of my life, but last night was not a date with her.
 
It was a long standing social obligation.
 
If I had tried to put myself in your shoes, I would have seen how hurtful it could look to you.
 
I apologize for that.
 
I would give anything if I could do it differently.
 
But please, just try to give me the benefit of the doubt, and stop looking at tabloids.
 
I’m still in New York working, since you won’t see me, but it’s killing me that I hurt you and that I can’t make it right.
 
I could be on a flight within the hour.
 
Just say the word, love.

I turned my phone off after that.
 
His one message almost had me softening towards him, and I just wasn’t going to let that happen.
 
Fool me once…

I went back to my own personal torture of sifting through gossip about James Archibald Basil Cavendish, The Third.
 
I hadn’t even known his middle names, or that he had two of them.
 
A random gossip site had had to tell me.
 
Of course, he didn’t know mine, either.
 

I found articles about his parents, and even a few pictures.
 
They were a stunning couple.
 
His mother was a dark-haired, dark-eyed, ravishing beauty with James’s golden skin and pretty mouth.
 
His father was devastatingly handsome and blond, with beautiful turquoise eyes that made my gut clench with recognition.
 
I could see how such a combination of people could create a masterpiece like James.
 

An article I found about them wrote about how they had died in a car accident.
 
Their tragedy, and a beautiful young James, a billionaire before he was even fourteen, had quickly been propelled into the spotlight and romanticized.
 

I caught little snippets and even a picture of his infamous deceased guardian, and the full details of that scandal.
 
The man was in his early thirties in the first picture.
 
He was handsome, with light brownish-blond hair, like James, but a paler complexion.
 
And he was slender to the point of frail, with creepy, pale green eyes.
 
Spencer Charles Douglas Cavendish had been a predator in the skin of a lamb.
 
I felt a hate for him that made bile rise in my throat.
 

I read the article about his death.
 
Spencer Cavendish had been killed by an enraged lover.
 
One Lowell Blankenship had been drugged and handcuffed by the frail Spencer.
 
Lowell had commented that he had consented to have sex with Spencer, but that he hadn’t agreed to any of the other ‘sick shit’ the man had forced upon him.
 
Spencer had been strangled to death when he had unlocked the handcuffs of the much larger Lowell.
 
I personally thought he deserved a far more painful death.
 

There were countless other articles about James’s numerous business ventures.
 
I just skimmed over these.
 
I did learn that he was into much more than just the hotel industry, and I wasn’t surprised.
 

I read through a three page article about his two month affair with a platinum hit singer.
 
She was barely nineteen, and it had been less than six months since their split.
 

Dammit, I have some of her songs on my mp3 player
, I thought in disgust.
 
He had his hand on her nape in one of the pictures.
 
I wanted to throw something.
 

There were a few articles that hinted briefly about him being a kinky sex partner, but that was all that I found that was even close to touching on his BDSM lifestyle.
 
I wondered how he’d kept it so well under wraps.

I turned off my computer, striding into my bedroom and tearing the painting of him from the wall.
 
I tried to make myself tear it up, but I just couldn’t do it.
 
Instead, I put it into my chest of old watercolors.
 

I turned my phone on again.
 
I ignored all of the new missed calls and texts from James.
 
I texted Stephan, asking if I could come over.
 
He answered instantly with a yes.
 

I went over, and we watched TV and ate too much ice cream.
 
It helped, but as soon as we stopped watching, I started thinking again.
 
That’s how we ended up catching up on my TV until nearly two a.m on a work night.
 
We had an early morning, but Stephan didn’t complain.
 

“I spoke at length to James today,” Stephan told me after we’d been watching TV for hours.

I just nodded.
 

“Want me to tell you about it?”
 

I shook my head.
 

“Okay.
 
Let me know if you do.”
 

“I need some time.
 
I read up on him online.
 
I’m feeling less inclined than ever to even speak to him again.”
 

Stephan took a deep breath.
 
“That’s something I wanted to talk about, actually, if you’re willing to hear what I think about the whole thing right now.”

I just studied him for a minute.
 
He looked nervous, which meant I wouldn’t like what he was going to say.
 
“Not right now,” I said.
 

“I think I can at least understand now why he wanted to keep his relationship with you private.”
 

I held a hand up.
 
“No more.
 
It sounds a lot like you’re taking his side right now.
 
I just can’t handle that at the moment.”
 
Unwilling tears welled up as I spoke.

He pulled me against his chest, kissing the top of my head.
 
“Never, Buttercup.
 
I’m always on your side.
 
Always
.
 
We’ll talk about it when you’re ready.”

CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

Mr. Cavendish

I was grateful for busy flights at work the following day.
 
We had full planes going both ways on our turn.
 
I barely had time to eat, and I was avoiding thinking at all costs.
 
I didn’t even have my phone.
 
It was still at home, by my bed, and turned off.
   

The Agents were present, and I felt a moment of unreasonable anger at them when I first spotted the one in my cabin.
 
I squelched the emotion, just serving them as they alternated cabins on the return flight.
 
I made myself brush off the implication that James still had a reason to keep an eye on me.
 
I would set him straight on Monday, and then this nonsense would be over for good.

I was, thankfully, exhausted by the time I got back home that night.
 
I only performed the minimum bedtime preparations before practically falling into bed.

I slept in late the next morning.
 
Even after I woke up, I moved slowly.
 
It took me nearly an hour to prepare and feed myself breakfast.
 

I felt like a zombie, too numb to even cry.
 
I thought it was an improvement.
 

Stephan and I had a monthly lunch date with several of the other members of our flight attendant class at eleven.
 
I was skipping out.
 
It was a boisterous, funny, close-knit group.
 
The lunches were always a great time.
 
There were twelve of us in total that went, and we usually caught up with each other over lunch.
 
We often caught a movie afterward or even headed to Stephan’s house, on occasion.
 
I wasn’t up for any of it.
 
Stephan had promised to make my excuses.
 
He had offered to skip out with me, but I wouldn’t hear of it.
 
I knew he was a social creature, and the lunches were always a highlight for him.

I tried to paint.
 
One look at my canvas of a nude James changed my mind .
 
I put the painting in my spare room with trembling hands.
 
I just didn’t have it in me to deal with it at that moment.
 

Finally, I went the masochistic route, turning on my computer again.
 
I set out to do more painful research on my famous ex-lover.
 

If I had been shocked by what my search had turned up the first time, I was utterly floored by what I found then.
 
What a difference a few days had made.
 

Now, typing James Cavendish into the search engine brought up an entirely new batch of photos that the first search hadn’t.
 
Pictures of
me
.
 
I had never thought of myself as a beauty.
 
My features were even and symmetrical and my coloring was a soft natural blond, but I had always just considered myself attractive, if I was in a kind mood.
 
I usually photographed well.
 
I even had a picture-ready smile.
 
If it wasn’t all that sincere, it was at least polished and convincing enough at a distance.
 
These weren’t those kinds of pictures.
 

They had obviously been snapped as I was stumbling out of James’s building.
 
I looked disheveled, and, well, horrible.
 
I was ghostly pale, my eyes red and bloodshot.
 
There was mascara running down my face in dark lines.
 
It made me look at least forty years old, instead of twenty-three.
 

My uniform was in shambles, the buttons of my blouse misaligned by at least three.
 
I hadn’t even noticed at the time.
 
My shirt was untucked, and the top was hanging low, showing an almost obscene amount of cleavage.
 
My hair was a tangled mess.
 

I looked like I was drunk and about to throw up in the street.
 
I was teetering on the edge of the sidewalk.
 
Apparently, I had looked as awful as I had felt that night.
 
And the pictures were everywhere.
 
One gossip site after another had scented the story of trouble in paradise.
 
Though they all seemed to have a slightly different slant on it.
 

One site named me a ‘Vegas floozy’ who had come between Jules and James, though the site claimed that their love would endure the scandal.
 
I saw that they were commonly referred to on the gossip sites as J&J.
 
It made me want to throw up.
 

One site called me a ‘Low Class Inflight’, who had broken the heart of a distraught Jules.
 
That one hurt, with side by side pictures of the two of us.
 
The picture of Jules showed her in the pale gray gown she’d been wearing that night, giving a stiff smile at the camera.
 
She looked strained, but at least she’d known she was being photographed.
 
I saw farther down on the same article that they had indeed still attended the charity event together, in spite of the obvious strain yet another of James’s affairs had caused on the beautiful couple.
 
The article concluded that their love would prevail over James’s weakness for cheap women.
 

I wouldn’t have been surprised if Jules had written the article herself, it was so biased towards her.
 
It made her out to be a long-suffering Saint.
 
I’d met the woman, if only briefly.
 
She was no Saint.
 

One site called me a ‘Blond Sky Slut,’ and claimed that I was trying to trap James with a baby.
 
I couldn’t believe all of the lies that could be concocted from a few short minutes worth of unsolicited photos, and all of a woman no one had ever heard of.
 
It was shocking, and infuriating, and sickening.
 

One site resorted to drawing giant penises all over my face, saying that I ‘gave the best head’, and that was the only reason James would risk his long-time lover’s wrath.
 
Supposedly several of the site’s sources knew it first-hand.
 
The lies made me feel ill.
 

One site claimed I was part of a high-priced flight attendant prostitution ring, and that James obviously needed to ask for his money back.
 

I was almost flattered for a moment as I read the headline of one article.
 
It claimed I was a ‘Swedish Bikini Model’.
 
That sounded complimentary.
 
Until I scrolled to the bottom of the article, which had a link it claimed went to a porno, starring me.
 
I didn’t bother to click on it.
 
I knew for a fact that it wasn’t me, and I didn’t want to see what it
actually
was.