The Dirty Series 2(116)

“Let’s get out of here.”

My heart flips over, and I give her my most charming smile. “Are you sure that’s a good idea?”

Carolyn’s eyes are huge and dark, and her mouth is set. “Yes.”

She spins around, putting her arm through mine, and takes us directly back through the dance floor, leading me through the crowd with precision and focus. Halfway to the stage, she takes a hard right, sliding between couples that are so into the music they barely notice us. I can’t wipe the damn smile off my face. We’re ghosting out of this party, and I fucking love it.

I reach for my phone and almost drop it when Carolyn picks up speed as we leave the dance floor. The text I send Noah is a garbled mess, but I’m sure as hell not going to stop her right now so that I can send a perfect message to my driver.

Carolyn takes another turn into a narrower hallway, me close behind, nearly blinded by the sight of her ass swaying underneath that dress, and then she’s pushing a door open with all the force she can muster. We burst out onto the sidewalk right as Noah pulls up in the Bentley. Nobody’s lurking out here, and it’s a clear path to my car.

We’re almost home free.





Chapter Nineteen





Carolyn



We’re outside my building—our building, now—when my phone starts buzzing and won’t stop.

Ace has been kissing slowly down my neck the entire time we’ve been driving and his lips on my skin are so hot and sensual that it makes my entire body hum with electricity, trembling even though his arms are wrapped relatively chastely around my waist. I’m soaked anyway and my knees keep inching apart, subtly begging for him to fuck me.

“Somebody wants you,” he murmurs into the hollow of my shoulder.

I give a sultry laugh. “Then let me out so we can go inside.”

“No—somebody really wants your attention,” he says, and I realize that my phone is vibrating nonstop in my purse.

I want to reach inside and silence it without even looking at it, but something pricks at the back of my neck. When Ace leans over to open the door and step outside, I take my phone out.

The screen is crowded with notifications, and they’re all from Rainflower Blue.

I normally don’t have updates sent to my phone. It’s too much of a risk—what if other people saw it? It’s best if nobody knows I have any connection to the website at all, although I know many of my friends are on it. Not one of them has hinted about its existence to me so far, which is something I wonder about when I’m trying to sleep at night. Do they think I’m too naive to enjoy a website like that? Too nice? Being an excellent friend is a top priority of mine—it’s half the reason I have the website in the first place—but maybe I’ve been too sweet.

My first thought is to dismiss the notifications completely. There’s something called a Magnolia Alert on the site for urgent business, rumors that can’t wait, that people want confirmed immediately, and it looks like someone has tagged a lot of posts with it, and it’s probably by accident. I’ll have to make an admin post reminding people not to abuse that tag unless it’s really urgent.

Then my brain makes sense of the text snippets. The alert function on my phone doesn’t display the entire post, but one of them stands out.

DID ACE KINGSLEY MURDER…

The rest of the notices are more of the same, and more pop up onto the screen while I watch.

My heart races in my chest, and my mind plunges directly into crisis management mode.

First, I highly doubt that this rumor is true. Ace Kingsley doesn’t seem like the type to kill a woman and then return to New York like nothing has happened. I also haven’t heard him make mention of having a wife in—well, wherever he was before he came back to the city. That’s never been part of any of the discussions I’ve heard swirling around the Swan, or on Rainflower Blue, for that matter. It’s as if he vanished off the face of the earth and then, not long ago, resurfaced in the city, having done nothing in the intervening time period.

Of course, that ‘nothing’ has been the cause of much speculation—it’s just that I’ve never heard a location confirmed.

And anyway, how would a rumor like this get started anyway, unless someone wants to smear his reputation? Murder isn’t sexy. The vast majority of the rumors I deal with on Rainflower Blue have to do with whereabouts, with cheating, with who was seen with whom, not real crimes.

No wonder traffic is spiking.

The doubts come hard on the heels of my mental dismissal of this ridiculous rumor. He did brush me off hard last Saturday morning. He was a different person when I came out of the bathroom, brusque and rude and dismissive.