Thursday evening, she stood in the grocery checkout line, tiredly waiting for her turn. It had been a long day, an even longer week. She’d missed Angelo more than she’d thought possible. How could someone become so necessary in such a short time? She’d lain awake every night wrestling with her inexplicable desire to acquiesce to his marriage proposal. It made no sense and yet, her heart told her she needed the man.
She didn’t trust that organ, but found its promptings impossible to ignore…thus her sleep deprived exhaustion.
She yawned behind her hand while the checkout clerk argued with the man in front of her over the sale price on a can of chili. Someone had to be sent to verify the price listed on the shelf.
Knowing that nothing was going to happen until the matter had been resolved, she let her gaze roam over the magazines and weeklies displayed at the check stand. Her eyes skimmed the headlines, noticing two Elvis sightings and one alien baby claim before she was arrested by a picture that looked like…no it couldn’t be.
But it was.
A full color image of Angelo kissing her in an obviously heated embrace in Danette’s pool filled the front of one of the weekly tabloids. The headline read, Tempting Tara Takes Another Rich Lover…
Would she never be rid of that awful nickname? Darn it, she wasn’t the one who had done the tempting in her relationship with Baron, or the one with Angelo for that matter.
The tag line under the photo was worse. Will going to bed with the boss put this former model on the fast track to success in corporate America?
She grabbed the tabloid with a jerk that almost tore its front cover and yanked it open. She flipped the pages with angry flicks until she found the article. It was a two page spread with more pictures. Lots of them. Every one insinuated sexual intimacy between her and Angelo.
One showed them coming out of their hotel room at the coast. Angelo’s arm was around her, his body language and expression possessive. The implication was unmistakable, but the editorial copy spelled it out anyway.
Like two years before, she was painted as a money-grubbing whore, only this time with her eye to the main chance at Primo Tech. An unnamed source in the management training department was quoted as saying it looked like Tara was hoping to gain her promotions via an avenue even older than hard work and perseverance.
It was all there…her affair with Baron, further speculation on her being the other woman when he courted his oil heiress. There was even some nonsense about how he’d been keeping her under surveillance since the breakup and innuendo that she might be at fault for the rumored possibility of imminent divorce.
Tara’s stomach somersaulted and it took a full minute of shallow breathing before she was sure she wouldn’t lose what little she’d eaten that day. She’d skipped lunch, trying to get ahead at work so she could take a half day off on Friday and keep her weekend free. Angelo was due in early the following afternoon.
Had he seen the article? She had no way of knowing. Surprisingly he had not called her all week. She had expected him to at least attempt to sway her decision with frequent phone calls, but he hadn’t. She only knew when he was due back because he’d told her before leaving when to expect him.
Her gaze re-focused on the article. How many people had seen it?
The weekly didn’t have the highest circulation in the country, but it was a national publication.
She couldn’t believe this was happening all over again and it made her furious. She hadn’t done anything wrong, but she was being painted as a scheming tramp who used her body to get ahead instead of relying on her brains. That made Tara angriest of all. She’d graduated at the top of her class and was darn good at her job. She didn’t need the company owner’s patronage to get a promotion.
She was perfectly capable of securing one on her own merits, thank you very much.
The whole situation would be ludicrous if it didn’t hurt like a knife to the gut. Twisting that knife was the knowledge that whoever had sold the picture and information to the tabloid had been at Danette’s party. And one of her co-workers had been willing to be quoted, if anonymously, saying something extremely nasty. Betrayal burned through her.
She didn’t know who she worked with that felt that way, but only one person had gone around taking picture after picture at the party. Ray…the budding journalist.
He’d told her he was a serious journalist and that photography was only his hobby. The weekly was hardly an impressive example of journalistic solemnity and those photos had been paid for, which made the little hobby a job.
An ugly, despicable job…but one that could not be denied. Her stomach cramped again as an even less palatable thought assailed her. Had Danette known about it?