Discipline (29 page)

In Too Deep

‘
The week he was set to propose, I found
out that Jackson was cheating.

With his friend’s nineteen-year-old
daughter.

I wasn’t thinking – I forced my way into her
apartment the night I saw their sex tape.

But now she’s gone missing and Jackson has
me trapped in our relationship.

To even the score, he’s told me to have my
own affair.’

“
It’s complicated” doesn’t even begin to
describe twenty-six-year-old Lara Pierce’s engagement to Jackson
Kinsley, the gorgeous man at the top of the rich, mysterious boys
club that runs Manhattan society. Tangled in a world of luxe galas,
shiny penthouses and handsome men who can literally get away with
murder, Lara’s sure that accepting Jackson’s offer will somehow
make her wild life a little simpler.

But when she unknowingly sleeps with
Jackson’s irresistibly tall, dark and sexy brother, Jake, the
floodgates open – to the darkest truths and deepest lies that
shatter her perfect world a million times over.

Prologue

First and foremost, his parents love me. But
on top of that, his colleagues love me. The wives and girlfriends
love me. I “keep them young.” At their galas, I dress like Jackie O
but dance like J. Lo. I don’t tell any of them that the dinners I
host are inspired by the Pinterest board of some girl named Maggie
in Wisconsin.

I keep all of his secrets. I dig for dirt
when he asks for it. I cook, I massage, I dress like I live in the
pages of Elle. Like he so desperately needs me to, I make all of
his friends desperately jealous. Because I, after years of his
styling and molding, am the perfect little Stepford girlfriend. I
am as much a part of his good image as he is.

And so he’ll never let me go.

No matter how hard I scream and claw and
kick and fight, he won’t ever let me go. He cheated on me. After
four years – and three living together in his Flatiron duplex – he
cheated on me with his hedge fund colleague’s nineteen-year-old
daughter. He spent five months sleeping with her. He recorded video
of their trysts, which carried on every Tuesday and Thursday night
in a suite at the downtown W. In one of the shaky, breathy clips,
she told him that she loved him. Hugging a white sheet to her
chest, her blue eyes gazing into the camera, she blew a kiss with
her pink lips and said, “Jackson Kinsley, I love you to pieces.”
Gabrielle Winter was her name.

No. Not was –
is.

Gabrielle Winter
is
her name. After
all, you can’t really call a girl dead when her body has yet to be
found.

Chapter One

It’s been three weeks since the Gabrielle
incident and I’m not yet ready to let Jackson touch me. I hate
sleeping in the same bed as a man whose hands caressed another
woman’s breasts just five weeks ago. I hate feeling his lips graze
my shoulder in the night because I know from the videos that those
lips have trailed every last inch of her skin. I hate that I have
to act like everything is utterly normal in front of his
friends.

But worst of all, I hate that he thinks I
killed her.

I hate that he has evidence that makes it
look quite clear that I’m in fact a murderer. More than any of it,
I hate that I gave Gabrielle a reason to leave him that panicked,
breathless voicemail on the night of her disappearance.

“She’s here, Jax! It’s Lara – she’s pounding
on my door and she –
Jax!
Oh my God, she has your key! Why
the fuck does she have your –
no!
Get out of my apartment,
you crazy bitch! Jax! Help me, get here
now!
”

There are a hundred things I’ve done in my
life that I’ve wished to take back but God, does that visit to
Gabrielle’s apartment take the cake. It was the kind of rash
decision that I’d never made even once before in my twenty-six
years. But several life-shattering discoveries had led up to the
moment, the time line of which went some something like this:

On Sunday, I’d returned from my trip with
Sloane to Easthampton. I’d slipped quietly into my apartment hoping
to surprise Jackson but instead, I found him sitting on our leather
sectional, watching a video of himself on our fifty-inch flat
screen. A video of himself and a girl I recognized from the charity
circuit. Lyle Winter’s daughter, Gabrielle. Wasn’t she just a
freshman at NYU? Didn’t she normally dress in wild prints and
feather headbands? Why in God’s name then was I watching her peel
off a sophisticated set of black lingerie? More pressing than that,
why was my boyfriend recording video as she did so?

Somehow, for several seconds, I toyed with
denial. This is not what it looks like, I told himself. That isn’t
Gabrielle. Maybe that isn’t Jackson either.

But then I saw a close-up of his promise
ring – an identical match to the one I wore on my own right hand,
that he bought for me two years ago, when I said I wasn’t ready to
be engaged. I heard his voice. The one that said “goodnight” to me
for the past four years straight. My stomach dropped and my body
went cold. I stood motionless behind Jackson, who was jacking off
to it all, too lost in his own pleasure to realize that I was
standing right there in the same room. Too busy reliving some
sordid night to notice me standing just two yards behind him,
shattering into a million little pieces as the camera set on a
tabletop to catch him groaning as he entered her.

It sounds insane but I stood there for
another fifteen minutes or however long it was for me to get
through two more nights of their recorded romps. I was paralyzed.
In disbelief.

Just the week prior, Jackson and I had been
in Connecticut visiting his family. His mom had pouted at me for
having no answer regarding when I wanted to have kids, since she
certainly couldn’t rely on his brother, Jacob, for having anything
but dogs. Jackson laughed and said that whenever I thought of a
time for children, he’d clean out my gift-wrapping room and get to
work on building a nursery. We bantered about why my “ribbon
storage” should be converted instead of his “brandy room,” where he
brought the boys for cigars after dinner. He laughed and said that
it would be cruel to subject our infant child to a room in which
the walls had spent years absorbing smoke. I said, “Fine, you’re
right,” and his mom took it as my tacit agreement to soon give her
grandchildren.

During the car ride back to Manhattan,
Jackson ran his hand through my hair. “You know I would never
pressure you to have kids before you were ready, right?” he asked.
“Same goes for the engagement. I know you’re mine, I know you love
me. I’m happy to wait for everything. They’re worth the wait if
they’re with you. But only you.”

“You’ll survive your mom’s nagging till
then?” I teased.

“As long as you’re taking it with me.”

That night, while I showered, I overheard
him on the phone with his mother. “I know you want her to have
Grandma’s ring but I want her to have her own. Lara’s different,
Mom. She’s special. And we’ve been through too much. Whatever I get
her will be the start of our own story. And we’ll pass it down only
if she wants to.”

The speech had me. Coming out of the shower,
I had stared at my promise ring and finally considered trading it
in for one more permanent. It was the first time in our four years
together that I felt finally ready. So for a week, I wondered how I
would break the news to Jackson. After all, telling him I was ready
was as good as proposing to him myself. It was a big deal for me.
So I decided to do what I always did when in need of advice: go on
a weekend trip with my best friend. While in the Hamptons with
Sloane, we brainstormed over cocktails, giggling like we were
thirteen again.

“Remember in eighth grade when you broke up
with Josh Twersky because he stole eight dollars from your wallet?”
I asked. “And then you said we had to grow up to have millionaire
boyfriends so this never happened again?

Sloane laughed so hard she may or may not
have dribbled champagne onto the front of her Pucci dress.
“Millionaire boyfriends who had to be best friends too,” she
reminded me with a snort. “We were such idiots.”

“Well.”

“We were prophetic idiots,” Sloane corrected
herself. And then we laughed, downed the rest of our drinks and
decided to cut our trip short to return home to our boyfriends,
Jackson Kinsley and Caleb Weiss, owners of Kinsley Weiss Capital
Management, and the millionaire friends who proved our teen selves
to have been less silly and unrealistic than everyone thought.

It had been too good. The perfect kind of
girls’ weekend that reminded me how truly blessed I was and how I
couldn’t possibly be luckier. On the ride back home, I decided that
Sloane was right: the best way to tell Jackson was just to tell him
– to just surprise him in our apartment, plant a kiss on his lips
and tell him that I was finally ready to be his wife.

But of course, I went home that day and
instead of realizing the happy moment I’d fantasized about for a
weekend, I discovered that the charmed life I had loved so deeply,
so fiercely had been nothing more than a sick and twisted lie.

Chapter Two

I fought a teenage girl.

I, a grown twenty-six-year-old woman with a
thirty-four-year-old fiancé, scratched and clawed and screeched
with a nineteen-year-old college student. What would the wives say
if they saw me? I was their favorite new thing – the fascination of
their social circle. I’d landed Jackson Kinsley, the tallest,
sexiest, hardest-to-tame prize in the elite boys club their
husbands and fiancés all ran in – a boys club that essentially ran
the city. I could’ve been easy to hate but instead, they loved me
for being wide-eyed but savvy – fascinated by their lives of luxury
yet surprisingly adept at adjusting to society. I had the “natural
grace and small-town charm” that Sofie Winter, silver-haired queen
of the charity ball circuit, found just
adorable
.

Jackson told me never to lose that, as it
was the only thing keeping the other wives from ripping my throat
out. “Their husbands all jerk off to you every morning in the
shower,” he liked to tell me with smug pride. “But if Sofie loves
you, they have to love you too.”

So they did. But how Sofie would hate me if
she knew what I’d done to her daughter.

After watching Gabrielle’s breathy sex tapes
with my fiancé, I had decided to confront her in person. Jackson
had been in the shower when I left in a haze of fury for “her”
apartment. Really, it was a townhouse that Jackson owned in
Gramercy Park. I recognized it as the backdrop of one of their more
raunchy scenes – one in which he bent her over a white desk and
with her wrists bound by his belt, pounded her mercilessly, till
every drawer rattled open.

Last year, the place was a bare one-bedroom
but in this video, it was suddenly furnished, the plush, pink
chaise in its bedroom draped in Sofie’s clothing. He had
essentially given the apartment to her. Made it their second love
den for when they wanted a different vibe for their fucking.

Every ounce of my blood boiled as I tore
apart Jackson’s study till I found the keys to the place. Then, as
he was toweling off, I left.

“
She’s here, Jax! It’s Lara – she’s
pounding on my door and she
–
Jax!
”

Gabrielle, in a white silk robe, was on the
phone with Jackson by the time I stormed into her apartment. Wild,
unhinged. On repeat were a million profanity-laced versions of
“
how dare you
” as I charged at her like an angry bull. It
was an idiot move but I was blinded by rage. This girl knew me. She
linked arms with me when I came to her house for dinner, traipsing
me into her bedroom to show me videos of her dance recitals. She
and her friends pouted at me during the charity balls, pleading for
me to join them since I was “too young” to sit at their parents’
table. This was a girl who treated me like her favorite cousin –
all the while filming herself in the throes with my fiancé. That
was quite possibly the definition of audacity.

Either that or the fact that she tried to
break a wine glass on my face.

When I knocked her phone out of her hands
that night, Gabrielle had shrieked “
bitch,
” grabbed her
empty glass of white and then swung it at my left eye. I don’t
remember exactly what happened next. I’m not sure if the dots in my
vision were from sheer rage or impact with glass. It was at that
point that I began to claw back. I swung and swiped, landing one
solid punch before feeling Gabrielle tackle me to the ground.

We then rolled on the glass-covered floor,
two idiots who had never fought once before in our privileged
lives. It wasn’t long before we were both crying, tired and
defeated. Her blood on my shirt, my hair in her nails, we crawled
onto our hands and knees, coughing and sobbing like fools.

“He said you guys were just for show,” she
defended herself between tearful l hiccups. “I didn’t think you
actually loved him. He
said
you didn’t.”

What the fuck?
“We couldn’t have
loved each other more.” The words tore with hatred from my throat.
But at that point, the hatred was for Jackson. I put an emphasis on
the word “loved.” It wasn’t quite past tense for me yet considering
our long history together, but I was well on my way down that path.
Jackson had cheated on me with a foolish young girl he’d
essentially tricked. My body still loved him out of instinct but
soon enough, my mind would convince it to stop. I knew it.

So with that, I left the apartment that
night – a scraped, tousled, bloody mess.

Back at the duplex, Jackson demanded to know
what had happened. He was angry, ashamed and shocked all at once.
Raking his fingers through his wet blonde hair, he followed me into
the bedroom, where I immediately shed my clothes. His voice was
normally low, velvety. Now, it was gravel. “Is that
your
blood?”