The Singles (33 page)

I looked back at the door again, but Margaret’s soft warning eradicated any notion I had of making a run for it. “I promise I’ll shoot you, Gemma.” She jabbed the gun to the chair a couple feet from where she stood, indicating she wanted me to use it. When I didn’t rush to do her bidding, she seethed. “Sit down.”

Dizzy, I complied, and the moment my butt touched the seat, she grabbed her bag from the middle of the desk and headed toward the door. As she moved, I felt the harsh glare of the gun positioned on my back. I clutched the armrests with clammy hands. 

If she ran, how far would she get before they found her? Would she win again?

Hell, would I even live to find out?

“Are you going to shoot me?” I breathed. At the sound of her throat hitching, I worked up the nerve to turn slightly and look at her. She stood just a few inches from the door with tears streaming down her cheeks. “Or are you going to figure out a way to give me a heart attack too?”

“I don’t want to hurt you.” She sniffed loudly and slumped her shoulders. “I didn’t want to hurt him, but he couldn’t—” She lowered one of her hands from the gun. “Your father was a horrible man. He couldn’t keep it in his pants to save his life and that’s what killed him. Not me.”

“That’s not true.” At her silence, I marched on tentatively. “How’d you do it?”

“Your father loved his coke just as much as he loved his whores. I just helped him along.”

It hurt. I wasn’t even going to deny that processing those words through my brain hurt so much I nearly crumpled in my seat, but I stiffened my posture and completely let go of those childish fantasies that my dad had been a hero.

He’d been human, just the same as Margaret and myself.

“And you laced it with something and watched him die?” I guessed. She didn’t respond, and the silence was a greater weapon than her words—her silence broke me down another notch. “And then you confided in Michael Scott because he was your lover. He turned on you.” I took another nervous glance at the door behind her. “He turned on you, and you’ve been paying him off all these years.”

Where are you, Linc? Where the fuck are you?

“You don’t know a thing,” my stepmother sneered, but she palmed her eyes with her empty hand. “I’ve never let that man touch me. I can’t even stand him for what he did to me.”

Keep her talking
, I told myself.
Keep her talking and get all the answers
. “What do you mean?”

She squeezed her eyes together to subdue her tears. “I’m not some whore like his—”

“Like his ex-wife?” I asked, offering Pen’s theory of Finley Scott being my sister. When Margaret’s eyes remained shut, I eased out of my seat, inching quietly in her direction.

“Like his daughter.” Her lashes parting, she looked at me hard. “Like that cunt Finley. That whore whose been living in
my
house, making claims to
my
son.”

I froze as she lifted the pistol to me again. “What?” I gasped, struggling to wrap my head around her words. “But you tried to
force
her on Oliver.”

“I like my freedom more than I despise that woman.” Studying my expression, Margaret raked her hand over her face, and I could see she was breaking. Why else would she still be here with me instead of running? Unless of course, she had no plans to run at all.

Another jolt of panic pierced my chest.

“Finley Scott screwed my husband. She was screwing my son, and she fucked my husband, and then I had to support her and your dad’s
bastard
for the last fourteen years. All because she and her father had the power to bring my world crashing down.”

Holy. Fucking. Shit.

A wave of nausea swept through me, and my legs threatened to give out—not from the fact a gun was pointed directly at my chest, but at what Margaret had just told me. Finley Scott wasn’t my sister. She’d been involved with my father when she was a teenager.

And she’d given birth to his child.

An image of a lanky teenage boy with dark blue eyes shoved into my thoughts, and I shook my head wildly. “Mason Scott?” I wheezed, and an equally harsh noise erupted from Margaret’s throat. 

“Her father promised to help me clean up the mess, and in the end, he cleaned me out.” At last, she pulled the door open. “You want your money? Start with her.” As she exited the office, her parting words sent a chill down my spine. “If you follow me, I’ll shoot you.”

Frozen in place, I heard the sound of the elevator opening and footsteps rushing closer to the office. I was about to let her go—there was nothing I could do with a damn gun pointed on me—and hope like hell Linc was about to take her down. Then, I heard a familiar voice that tightened a vise around my heart.

“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” Oliver shouted, and the clacking of Margaret’s pumps heading toward him hammered in my ears.

“Get out the way, Oliver.”

My legs shakily moved me toward the door, and when I tripped into the hallway, the wide blue eyes I’d fallen for shifted over her shoulder to take me in. He jerked his head back toward the office all the while creeping closer to his mother.

“Mom ... put down the gun, okay?”

She darted her gaze between us and realized she was caged in. “Move out the way, Oliver.” When she gave him a pleading look, he responded with a stony expression.

“Give me the gun.”

In the distance I could hear the elevator opening yet again and footsteps—multiple footsteps. My body sagged in relief against the doorway, and I watched Oliver’s face relax too. 

Linc was here, and it was all over now.

No matter what my stepmother would be found guilty of, I had all my answers. Everything I’d come to Los Angeles for.

Spinning toward me, Margaret’s blue eyes stabbed into me as she angled her body and lifted her hands. Everything that happened next felt like slow motion.

The gun pointed at my head.

Oliver yelled out something, but his voice was inaudible over the deafening rush of adrenaline pumping through me.

And then, the shot echoed everywhere.

––––––––

U
ncover. Expose. And get the hell out of there.

I’d successfully accomplished two of the objectives Pen and I had come up with, but I found it impossible to do the third. And even though I’d convinced myself I’d be able to sleep at night once I discovered
everything
there was to know, for the first couple nights after what Pen had referred to as the “Showdown at the House of Emerson & Taylor,” rest wasn’t an option.

There was still too much negativity haunting my thoughts.

“Are you going to stay here?” Linc asked me three days later, gesturing around the small apartment that had been my base the past couple months. “Or do you plan on moving to your
old
... house?”

He was referring to my father’s house. The house he’d shared with both my mother and Margaret. Although I’d known it belonged to me for a while now, the idea of moving in still felt foreign to me.

Running my tongue over my dry lips, I moved my head in a motion that was neither a shake nor a nod. To be honest, I hadn’t even considered taking possession of that house yet—I was too busy reeling over my stepmother’s confessions and my near death experience that had immediately followed.

I shuddered to think where I might be right now if Linc hadn’t shown up, lodging a bullet in Margaret’s shoulder.

“Maybe one day.” I combed my fingers through my unbrushed hair and brought my knees to my chest, scuffing my festive socks along the warm leather of the chair beneath me. “Will it take a long time for Margaret to heal?”

“Not nearly as long as you’d think.”

The vindictive part of me wished that weren’t true, but I shoved it back down. “And Oliver?” I lifted my face so I could stare into Linc’s green eyes. I’d asked this question more than once over the last couple days, and like before, the man I’d once looked up to as a brother gave me the same answer.

“Your stepbrother—” he began, but I shook my head.

“
Oliver
.” Saying his name constricted my ribs. I hadn’t heard from him since the night he came to Emerson & Taylor. Pen assured me he was giving me space, but I was doubtful.

I was sending his mother to prison.

And yet I still wanted him so much it hurt.

“
Oliver
will be fine.” Linc rubbed his scruffy chin thoughtfully. “He was grazed, but he’s fine. Remember, I told you he gave us his statement yesterday.”

I remembered. And I remembered him telling me how Oliver—beautiful Oliver with his smooth words and demanding hands—had helped me implicate Margaret for everything she’d admitted inside her office.

“He had his ‘Pen’ set up a camera in her office a couple weeks ago,”
Linc had informed me, unable to hold back the expression of relief.
“We’ve got everything she said to you on tape, Gemma.”

“Easton,”
I’d said simply, picturing the boyishly handsome charm of the IT guy who’d hacked into Margaret’s email time and time again.
“So, she’ll go away for a long time, huh?”

“And Michael, too. Finley is cooperating in hopes that she can strike up a deal.”

Now, as Linc and I sat across from each other in silence, my thoughts wandered to the woman—no, the teenager—my father once had an affair with. A brutal pain clenched my stomach when I thought of the boy she and her father had passed off as her brother for nearly fourteen years.

Although Mason barely knew me, I couldn’t stand the idea of that kid being left alone in the world. I wouldn’t have wished that on anyone.

He was my brother, and that made him my responsibility.

“What will happen to Mason?” I heard myself say aloud. “Does he have anyone to live with?”

Linc leaned back on my couch and rubbed his hand diagonally over his exhausted face. “Finley Scott’s mother flew in from New York.”

The quietness resumed between us, but every few seconds, our eyes touched. I tried not to think of how Linc had betrayed me, starting this entire mess to benefit his own career. I tried to remind myself that, in the end, his call had helped me find answers—even if those shreds of reality were enough to break the composure of even the most solid person. 

“I have to leave soon,” he finally said, and I nodded briskly, watching him as he stood and walked toward me.

“I’m sure you have a lot of work to do since you just cracked a huge case.” When his face fell remorsefully, I shook my head to put a stop to his apology. There was only so many times I could listen to Linc tell me he was sorry without having a full-blown meltdown. “I’ll eventually figure out how to deal with what you did. I just need time.”

And I needed time to deal with the crushing fact I might not see Oliver again. The pessimistic side of me had already prepared myself for the inevitable—if he hadn’t contacted me so far, why would he change his mind?

Ducking his head, Linc did the walk of shame to my front door. “Take all the time you need. Tell Pen to give me a call when she gets up,” he said, his voice fraught with emotion.

Burying my face in my hands, I didn’t dare look at him as he silently let himself out.

*

T
he next evening, Pen and I were in the middle of dinner—and drinking the whiskey concoctions she swore would knock me right out the second my head hit my pillow—when the doorbell rang.

Taking note of my slumped shoulders, she hopped from the table and held her finger up. “If this is another reporter, I’m going to shank them,” she warned under her breath.

The media frenzy over Margaret Manning-Emerson getting arrested had been insane, and of course, I was in the middle of it all. So far I’d managed to avoid the cameras, but I knew they’d be in my face eventually.  

I tossed back the rest of the hot toddy Pen had made for me, cringing when the whiskey burned my throat. “You didn’t get lost on the way to the door, did you?” I yelled.

A moment later, I heard her soft exhale. “You should
so
come look at this.”

Alarmed, I pushed away from the table and padded around the corner, stopping short when I noticed the deliveryman pushing a cart full of blue and ivory flowers into my foyer.

My throat constricted.

“Gemma Emerson?” He turned to Pen, who immediately jabbed her finger at me, widening her eyes in excitement.

With every shuffle of my feet on the laminate floor, my heart beat a little faster, a little harder. “Yes?” I breathed.

“Can I get your signature on this?” He handed me a thick tablet, which I accepted. As I moved my shaky finger along the digital line—signing Gemma Emerson, not Lizzie Connelly this time—Pen started to unload the vases onto our coffee table. Dazed, I offered the tablet back to the delivery guy who gave me a smile before leaving.

Sliding onto the couch, I stared at the five vases lined up neatly in front of me.

“Mr. Sex-In-A-Business-Suit?” my best friend wondered aloud.

I shrugged, but who else would send me flowers like these?

I plucked the card from the arrangement closest to me, opening the envelope to find one word followed by his signature.

What.

One-by-one, I unsealed the rest of the cards, leaving them in a pile on the table.

Fix.

I.

Break.

I.

My pulse raced beneath my skin when I pieced the puzzle together. “I fix what I break,” I whispered out loud, causing Pen’s dark eyebrow to jerk up. “He ... it’s what he said to me the first day he met
Lizzie
. When he made me drop my phone, he told me he fixed what he broke,” I blurted, glancing between the flowers and Pen.

My best friend’s expression softened. “Oh,
wow
. Gemma, this is good.” She nodded slowly. “
This
is romantic.”

Arranging the cards into an ordered stack, I held them close to my chest, not wanting to let go. “I should call him,” I said at last. I should have called him when I started worrying about his lack of contact, but fear was a crazy bitch.

“Yes, you should,” she agreed. When I didn’t make an effort to move, she reached into her pocket and handed me her own phone. “Here, I’ll make it easy for you. Call him or I’ll be forced to do it for you.”