Scandal: The Lies We Tell (Volume 1) (3 page)

   “You sound surprised.” Nick’s arm brushed against mine and neither of us moved away. “I’ll try not to be insulted.”

   “You shouldn’t take it personally. I’m a tough woman to please.”

   “I’ve noticed.”

   We were in front of my place now but I wasn’t ready to leave Nick yet. “If you wanted to do this again sometime, I’d probably say yes.”

   “That’s good news for me because I need a favor.”

   “I never agreed to a favor.”

   “I promise, it’s not that bad.” Nick grimaced. “Okay, it’s a little bad. But I will owe you one.”

   “Out with it.” I crossed my arms and tapped my foot.

   “I have a wedding to attend this weekend and I need a date.” Nick actually looked embarrassed. “If I don’t bring someone, I’ll spend the entire wedding answering questions about Heidi. I’d rather have a root canal on every tooth than do that.”

   I had to admit, that did sound pretty torturous. “Who’s getting married?”

   “An old friend. Craig.” Nick gave me a hopeful look. “So what do you say? You in?”

   He didn’t know it yet but I didn’t have the willpower to say no to Nick. “Okay. I’m in.”

   “Great. I’ll pick you up Friday night at 8:00. Pack a bag.”

  
“A bag? For a wedding?”

   Nick’s smile was half-sheepish, half-charming. “Did I forget to mention that the wedding is in Virginia?”

   “It must’ve slipped your mind.” I rolled my eyes. “A weekend away together after one date? Do you really think that is a good idea?”

  “Charley, I have been on a dozen first dates in the last month. Friends of friends, blind dates,
women I met in coffee shops.”

   “You think this is helping your cause?” I asked with the raise of a skeptical eyebrow.

   Nick held up a halting hand. “Let me finish. I’ve been on a dozen first dates, but not a single second date. Those women were beautiful, sweet, smart... and completely boring. None of them challenged me- not like you. So you can be confident that I’m not taking this lightly.”

   “I don’t know if that makes me feel better.” In fact, I could feel panic building in my chest. Nick was one of the most direct people I had ever met.

   “You trusted me earlier and we had a wonderful evening,” Nick reminded me. “I’m just asking you to trust me again. I promise you won’t regret it.”

   If I was a slightly more interesting person, I would’ve
already had plans for the weekend. But I was a boring person who spent nearly all her time at work or at work-related events. I had no life, but now Nick Cooper was offering me one. A weekend in Virginia with a handsome, powerful man that had no problem holding my interest and claimed to be equally enamored with me. I would be a complete idiot if I said no.

   “Okay,” I agreed. “Let’s do it.”

Friday, October 9
th

The Daily Scandal– Washington’s #1 Source for Breaking Political News and Politicians Making News

Washington’s mayor, Brad Hutchinson, spoke out again today against the legalization of gay marriage. Hutchinson has long been known for his conservative approach to social issues despite being a registered Democrat. More interestingly, the distinguished mayor has also been the victim of the D.C. rumormill alleging that he is a closeted homosexual, despite being married to a woman.

In other news, Senator Cooper was spotted at a bar dazzling the same mystery woman that he entertained earlier this week at a downtown hotel. This is the first time the Senator has been spotted with the same women on two separate occasions since he announced the end of his engagement. Could things be heating up between these two?

CHAPTER THREE

    “You rented a beach house for the weekend?” I gave the house a slow once-over while Nick got our bags out of the trunk of his car. After nearly three hours of driving, the night sky had settled in and it was hard to see much of anything.

   “I don’t really like hotels,” Nick explained. “Besides, why be locked up in a stuffy hotel all weekend when we can have our very own slice of paradise.”

  
“Paradise? In Nowhereville, Virginia?” The town was so small I hadn’t even been able to find it on my phone’s navigation system.

   “Scoff now but you’ll be eating those words in the light of day.” Nick hefted the bags and led the way to the front door.
“And it’s Collinsburg, Virginia.”

  In a matter of seconds, he had unlocked the door, dropped our bags in the hallway and turned on the lights. Nick moved around the house confidently, giving me a quick tour before carrying our bags toward the bedrooms.

   “You sure seem to know your way around,” I commented.

   “I know the owner,” he replied. “You can take the master bedroom. It has a nice bathroom and a balcony facing the beach. Make yourself at home and let me know if you need anything.”

   I hesitated at the threshold of my assigned room. “Thank you, Nick.”

   He sensed my reluctance to step inside. “What’s wrong?”

   “Nothing is wrong.” Things were actually right for a change. “I’m not really tired yet. Any chance there’s something to drink in this place?”

   Nick grinned. “It’s like you read my mind. Let’s see what we can find.”

   What we found was scotch, and plenty of it. We took a bottle and two glasses outside and made ourselves comfortable on the deck chairs. Water lapped gently on the shoreline somewhere in the distance and the moon was full as it began its journey through the sky.

   “My family used to go to the beach every summer.” Nick twirled the scotch in his glass as he spoke. “My dad was a lawyer in a big firm and he worked way too many hours. But without fail, every August we headed to the beach, all six of us piled into the blue
station wagon.”

   “Six?”

   “My parents and four kids- two boys and two girls.”

   “You’re the oldest?”

   “Is it that obvious?” Nick laughed softly. “That’s how I learned to be so bossy and arrogant.”

   “That explains
it.” The scotch burned as it coated my throat but I didn’t mind.

   “What about you?” he asked hesitantly.
“Any siblings?”

  
“One.”

   “Brother?
Sister? Older? Younger?” Nick probed.

   “Brother. Younger.”

   Nick sensed my reluctance to discuss it further but that didn’t stop him. “These are pretty basic questions, Charley. It shouldn’t be this much of a struggle to get answers out of you.”

   “I know.” He wasn’t the first person to find my secretiveness unsettling. Usually I didn’t care, but with Nick it was different. I wanted to tell him about my past, but I was having a hard time finding where to start. I finished my drin
k and held out my glass. “I’m going to need more if we’re going to continue down this path.”

   Nick joined me in another drink, remaining quiet while I stayed lost in my head. He didn’t seem to mind the silence. He wasn’t one of those people that squirmed and fussed to fill the time; he just sipped his scotch and stared up at the sky.

   “Tim was exactly one year younger than me, down to the day. Some kids would’ve hated sharing a birthday with their sibling, but I loved it. I always felt like no matter what, we would have this one day that was just ours and no one else’s. Maybe that’s why we were so close growing up, I don’t know. But our close age also meant that we were in high school at the same time, and we ran in the same social circles. Tim was the life of every party, always clowning around. Everyone loved him.”

  A dog barked loudly down the street and I was glad to have the distraction. It helped pull me from my revere. The problem with talking about Tim wasn’t that I didn’t want to talk about him- it was the opposite. I could talk about him for hours.

   “Anyway, my senior year of high school was when everything changed. You know about the Morville Massacre, or at least you think you do. Everyone in the country was glued to their televisions that day. I was inside, watching my friends die.”

   Nick reacted for the first time, the smallest of flinches. “Charley, you don’t have to talk about it if you don’t want to.”

   “I want to,” I said a little too urgently. “I’ve never been able to talk about it in the past, but now that I’ve started I need to finish.”

   Nick wisely topped off my glass and sat back again.

   “It was a Monday, the Monday before prom and one month before graduation.” Just saying those words took me all the way back to that day. “People were excited. About prom and about the weather. It was the first really warm day of the year. Tim was wearing his baseball jersey because his team had a game that day.

   “We were both in the lunchroom but we weren’t sitting at the same table. Tim was a couple of tables away, but close enough that I could hear him laughing. I barely noticed the first shot. It was loud in there with kids laughing and yelling and lunch trays clanging. It wasn’t until the secon
d shot when someone screamed that I realized something was wrong.”

   No
w that I was in the middle of it, I couldn’t stop even if I wanted to. The words were coming out without any thought and the story told itself. The shooter, Ben Talbot, marching through the room weighed down with guns and ammunition. People bleeding and crying and screaming. Tim running over and shielding me, pushing me toward the exit when Ben’s back was turned.

 
“I was halfway down the hall before I realized Tim wasn’t behind me. I stopped for just a second, wanting to run back for him but my body wouldn’t let me. I froze- completely locked-up by fear. The next thing I knew, a SWAT guy had thrown me over his shoulder and rushed me out of the building.”

   I was about to reach for the bottle again but noticed that we had drained it, which was probably for the best. I had already developed a decent buzz.

   “Tim was dead- shot in the back while he got me out of the room. Twenty-four other kids died that day. I was the only one that made it out of the lunchroom alive.” It had been years since I thought about any of them. Remembering Tim was emotional enough. “So that’s my story. Can we talk about something else now?”

   Nick had been looking at me with that all-too-familiar look of pity that I hated. I knew that when people heard my story, they immediately saw me as a victim, someone that had been damaged by a terrible event. I never thought of myself as a victim but rather as someone who had been witness to a tragedy. Tim and those twenty-four other kids had been victims, not me.

   “Sure.” Nick was quick to snap out of the pity-party. “Something you should know about tomorrow’s wedding. The groomsmen will be wearing kilts.”

   “All of them?” I sat up in excitement.

   “All of them.”

   “What about the groom?”

   “I’m glad you asked. Craig will not be wearing a kilt.”

   I slapped Nick’s arm. “That isn’t fair!”

   Nick laughed. “I think the groomsmen would agree with you. Unfortunately, they lost the poker game and the kilts were their punishment. Craig actually was going to wear one, too, but his lovely bride, Carrie, found out and quickly forbade it. The groomsmen are getting their revenge by not wearing anything under the kilts.”

  “I’m just glad this isn’t an o
utdoor wedding. Though I suppose there could still be gusts of air in the chapel.” I shuddered at the thought of flapping kilts and exposed dangly bits.

   “And you thought this would just be another boring wedding.” Nick’s smile was
contagious. In a matter of seconds he had allowed me to leave my past and rejoin the present. “I haven’t even told you about the bride’s mother yet.”

   So I leaned back and let Nick take over the conversation. He had a soothing voice and an engaging manner that had me hanging on every word. I could’ve listened to him for hours. Only my excessive yawning betrayed how tired I felt.

   “We should turn in,” Nick said when he caught me stifling a yawn. “Plenty of time to chat tomorrow.”

   He picked up our glasses and empty bottle and I reluctantly followed him inside. Whenever I did finally let
myself remember what happened that day ten years ago, I had nightmares about for days. Tonight would be no exception.

   “I’m glad you agree
d to come with me this weekend,” Nick said as he walked me to my assigned bedroom. We stopped in front of the open door, each of us awkwardly waiting for the other to make the first move.

   “So far my only regret is that last glass of scotch.”

   Nick smirked in an adorably cute way. “I was just thinking my only regret was not encouraging you to have one more glass of scotch.”

   I narrowed my eyes at him. “You’re not trying to take advantage of me are you, Senator?”

   “Not yet.” Nick took a small step forward and that was all the encouragement I needed in my semi-drunk state.

   I grabbed the front of his shirt and twisted it in my hand, drawing him closer. His hand found the back of my neck and he guided my head toward his until our lips met in a drunken, searching kiss. He tasted like scotch and his lips were warm and inviting. Just as my body
began to melt against his, Nick sighed heavily and pulled away.

   “We shouldn’t do this tonight,” he said, slightly out of breath. “We’ve both had too much to drink.”

   I didn’t agree with him, but I nodded anyway. Protesting seemed futile at this point, not to mention that I’m not the type of girl that begs guys to sleep with her. “Good night then,” I said, backing away reluctantly.

   “Sweet dreams, Charley.”
Nick came close again, this time to kiss me on the cheek. He flashed me one last killer smile and then disappeared down the hall.

   An hour later I was snuggled deep beneath the covers of my temporary bed, trying in vain to fall asleep. The last few hours had dredged up a lot of feelings I hadn’t allowed to the surface in a long time- fear about what happened that day ten years ago, grief over losing Tim and guilt for being the one that survived. But what kept me awake long after I had pushed those other feelings away had nothing to do with my past and had everything to do with
Nick Cooper.

   My last serious relationship
ended two years ago, and had lasted just short of five months. Both of us had known it wasn’t  going to last forever and we had been more than okay with that. I had dated a few men off and on since then, none of them seriously and none of them for longer than a few dates. One thing they all had in common was that I had never opened up to any of them about my past. I had known Nick for less than a week and had let him see the darkest, most hidden parts of me. Even more concerning, I didn’t regret it.  I liked talking to Nick, liked being around him, and I really liked kissing him.

   Needless to say, I was a little disconcerted when I woke the next morning and found myself alone in the house. I did a quick check of every room but Nick was nowhere to be found. His car was still parked in front of the house so he probably hadn’t gone very far. After a long, hot shower, I made myself at home and got the coffee pot brewing. I was just pouring my first cup when the back door flew open and Nick appeared, sweaty and smiling.

   “You’re up!”

  
“As are you.” I tried not to stare as he lifted the bottom of his shirt to wipe sweat from his face. An undeniably fit torso taunted my wandering eyes. “Morning run?”

   “No better way to start the day.” He dropped his shirt back into place.

   “I beg to differ.” I lifted my coffee and took a long sip.