Playing Dirty(38)

The cabbie laughed. “Blimey…he didn’t feed you, did he?” He laughed uproariously at his own joke. “You modern lasses, all about the fun and games until it’s time for a good bowl of oatmeal, right?”

I blushed bright red. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I replied. The words came out more stiff than I meant for them to. “I’m just going on an errand.”

The cabbie stared at me the whole way home, and I couldn’t shake the feeling that something weird was going on. After all, Jay was famous for being a playboy. Did the cabbie know that I’d been in his apartment? Was I being watched?

Don’t be ridiculous, Kate, I thought. You’re getting paranoid.

The cabbie finally dropped me off at a grocer, and I picked up some fruit, then went next door to a bakery and grabbed some fresh croissants. When we were kids, Lizzy always used to tease me by eating all of the bread in sight. She knew I watched my weight, because I had the kind of metabolism that made me prone to gaining it easily, but since she played sports and had the metabolism of a jet engine, she could basically eat whatever she wanted. I grinned as I picked out an array of pastries. Today, diet be damned, I was going to eat exactly what I wanted.

I hated having to appease my showrunners by restricting all the things I enjoyed, and spending the last couple of weeks with a man who absolutely loved my body exactly how it was had been exactly what I needed to make me see the hypocrisy in my lifestyle. My show was all about issues facing women in today’s society and the unfairness of some of them, and one of those issues was the ridiculous beauty standards upheld by the media. I’d done an episode on body positivity and acceptance, and yet, there I was allowing the producers to tell me how much I was ‘allowed’ to weigh.

Well, no more.

I felt a little silly creeping up the stairs to Lizzy’s apartment half an hour later. The building was quiet, almost silent, and I felt almost like an intruder. I realized that it had been so long that I had trouble recognizing Lizzy’s door, but then I remembered that she’d had the lock changed to a different-looking one after the break-in.

“Hi, it’s me,” I called loudly as I let myself in. “I brought breakfast!”

There was no reply. Frowning, I kicked off my shoes and dropped the groceries on the kitchen counter. I heard soft voices coming from the other room and a guilty grin snuck on my face. So that’s why Lizzy doesn’t mind that I haven’t been home much, I thought. She has a boyfriend! And I caught them together!

But when I rounded the corner and walked into the living room, I stopped dead in my tracks. Lizzy wasn’t sitting with a boyfriend at all.

She was sitting with Josh.





Chapter Thirteen

Jay



By the time I’d climbed behind the wheel of my Mercedes and pointed it towards the police station, I was a wreck. All I could hear was Connor’s sister’s voice—Mary’s voice—in my head.

Closing my eyes, I remembered the phone call I’d had that morning.

“Connor’s had a bit of a scrape,” she’d said at first, obviously trying to stay cheerful. In the background, I heard a child wailing. “Now, you be quiet!” she said in a soothing tone, but the child kept wailing. “Aw, Christ, Jay, hold on a second.”

I’d waited a few heart-stopping seconds while Mary had set the phone down and fussed with her baby until he stopped crying, and when she picked up the receiver, I could hear the weariness in her voice.

“What happened?” I asked.

“Seems like Connor was picked up for narcotic possession,” Mary said drily. “You wouldn’t know anything about that, would you, Jay?”

What?

I blinked, totally and utterly shocked. “No,” I said honestly. “I had no idea. I mean, he used to take the odd thing at parties and the like when we were kids, but I didn’t know he was still using anything.”

“Apparently he’s been using a lot,” Mary said. She huffed and yelled at another child in the background. “I’d be coming down myself but as you know, I’ve got the three little ones and I can’t leave them at home. And I definitely can’t afford to be taking them all on a trip right now.” She sighed. “It’s been ages since I got myself out of Belfast, and I wish I could come help you. But you’re gonna have to see to him alone.”

I blinked again. “Is he okay? I mean, is he injured?”

Mary laughed thinly. “I don’t know, this time,” she said. “There’s been other times, you know.” When I didn’t answer, her voice took on a suspicious tone. “You do know, don’t you?”