Garrett smoothed her hair away from her face and kissed her forehead. ‘For what?’ He asked. But before she could apologies for what a coward she was, for how weak she was, he continued, ‘What happened, Kendra?’ He nodded toward the door. ‘I know that email isn’t it.’
There was a time when she would have rather cut out her own heart than told any of her secrets to Garrett Thorne, than told any of her secrets to anyone. Now that time seemed very long ago, indeed.
She fumbled with her iPhone, flipped through it with fingers that were still none too steady until she came to the picture. Then she handed it to him. She could tell by the look on his face that he didn’t recognize her, and she waited until she saw the light dawn in his eyes.
‘It’s you,’ he said breathlessly. ‘I would have never guessed.’
She reached for the water glass and drank the rest of it back. ‘No one would have. That was the point. And I never thought of her as me. I never thought of any of them as me. Just like I didn’t think of myself as Tess Delaney at the Golden Kiss Awards.’
‘I don’t understand,’ he said. ‘This was a role you played for another client?’
‘No, Garrett. That –’ she nodded to the image on the iPhone ‘– that was a role I played for me. One of many.’ She took a deep shudder of a breath. ‘The Bird Woman, that’s what he called me, because of the fake tattoos. The Bird Woman was the one who cost me everything.’
She could tell by the drawing of his brows that he still didn’t get it. Of course he didn’t. How could he? She took a deep breath and continued.
‘I told you I don’t need much sleep. I never have. The Ryde Agency demanded a lot of time and energy from me but not nearly all of it, especially since I found the work so stimulating. And early on, once I figured out what I had to do to make it work, money was never a problem. The Ryde Agency was a cash cow long before my skill was anything other than dumb luck and a huge ego.
‘I figured out early on with everyone thinking K. Ryde was a hard-assed PR guru, a man surrounded by his stable of PR nymphs who could pull off miracles for a price, I could be whoever I wanted to be. I had the money, and I had, I don’t know, this way of emptying myself when I wanted to and reinventing myself as another person. At first, I did it only for work. I was K. Ryde’s PA. I was an actress K. Ryde hired to play someone’s secretary or someone’s mistress, someone’s sister. I was K. Ryde’s wife, even, at times. And if I could be anyone I wanted to be at work, why not at play? So I started dressing the part. I’d go out someplace far enough away from my own stomping ground, someplace I was unlikely to meet up with anyone I knew. I’d change my hair color, my cut, my make-up.’ She cupped her breasts. ‘My tit size. I even went out as a man a few times.’ She shrugged. ‘I wasn’t so good at that. I could never quite get the walk and the mannerisms right. But anyone else I could be for a night, for a week. If I met someone interesting I would keep the persona I had when I met them as for as long as it took me to get bored. That was never more than a couple of weeks. And since I was the Ryde Agency, the way I looked was never an issue at work. Even the people I did hire to assist me never saw the real me, and they never saw each other. No one knew anyone in the real world. So whenever I decided I wanted to get to know someone, spend some time with someone, it was easy.’
‘You mean with a man.’ Garrett struggled with the words. ‘Spend some time with a man.’
She nodded. ‘Yes, with a man. Well, at least most of the time. Occasionally it was just an interesting group of people that I wanted to know more about, that I wanted to get a feel for. But my sexual partners were always men. Not that I wouldn’t have considered a woman. It just never happened, that’s all.’
‘And you had sex with all these people? The people you met?’ The muscles along the top of his jaw clenched and his shoulders looked like they were made of iron.
‘Not all of them, and not always. It was more about the control I had, about the freedom I had as a nobody, as a person who didn’t really exist. Because I was good at my job, it was never hard to win people’s trust, and it was always easy to manipulate my way into the center of things. Garrett, I could have sex whenever I wanted it. That was never an issue. That’s not why I did it.’
‘Then why?’ he asked.
‘Don’t tell me you’ve never wanted to be someone else? I mean, you are someone else, and you’ve pulled it off at least as well as I have, you and Tess.’