Disciplined by the Dom (25 page)

That didn’t change the fact that she should still do the right thing. And it didn’t change the fact that she knew she should think better of Jake. Jake, of all people—Jake, who could find a way to be there for Eileen Corrigan—Jake deserved better. If she was ever going to put her faith in anyone, now was the time. Jake was the man.

Catie wiped her eyes, and made a decision.

chapter
30

“Forgive my rudeness, Roman,” Jake said as soon as he closed the door, “but please, spit it out. You have no idea the day I’ve already had.”

Roman had taken his arm almost as soon as Jake had entered the building, leaving Eileen to find Catie on her own. Jake had protested; Roman had said there was something important they needed to talk about. That was about the last thing Jake had wanted to hear. The previous night with Catie and then dinner with Eileen had used up his important talk quota for a long, long time. Didn’t everyone know he wasn’t any good at this? Only now, because of Catie, was he getting slightly better.

He felt like a prizefighter on the wrong end of twelve rounds.

But Roman never looked worried, and now…well, Roman looked worried. So Jake had followed him to what was, apparently, a coatroom.

“Don’t keep me in suspense, Roman,” he said.

“Are you nervous?” Roman asked him.

“What? Why should I be nervous? When have you ever known me to be nervous?”

Jake himself could name a few instances in recent memory, but he decided not to mention recent events. Roman, however, absolutely looked…distressed. His old friend took a deep breath and frowned.

“Where is Catie?” Roman said.

“I don’t know, Roman, we arrived separately. I had another engagement for dinner.”

“Did she tell you anything? Anything important?”

Jake threw up his hands. “Roman, for the last time—what the hell are you talking about?”

Roman himself looked like he was in unfamiliar territory. Jake had a hard time puzzling it out, but eventually it hit him: Roman looked like a man who was dealing with failure.

Finally Roman looked up, his face a mask of sorrow. “I was so sure,” he said.

Before Jake could throttle his friend in frustration, there was a knock at the door. This in and of itself was odd—it was a coat room, not an office—but they didn’t have to wait long. The door opened, and Vincent Duran slipped in and closed the door behind him.

“This is a farce, isn’t it?” Jake said. He sat down on a pile of coats, and decided to wait, as patiently as possible, until everyone else regained their minds. Or until he had to go bid on Catie. He had planned to surface just long enough to claim his woman—he smiled at the thought—then get them both out of there and back to his bedroom as soon as possible. He was determined that nothing would interfere with that part of his plan.

“Lola told me you were in here,” Vincent said. “Sorry, man, but this could
not
wait—trust me.”

Vincent looked uncomfortably at Jake.

“Uh, Roman, it’s about the…situation.”

Jake looked up at the ceiling. “Is someone going to tell me what the hell is going on?”

“He should hear it now, too,” Roman said quietly.

Vincent wasted no time. “She’s been working for fucking
Sizzle
,” he spat. “They’re doing a big, glossy feature! Somehow they got photos! A goddamn
photo spread
.”

“Based on her reporting?” Roman asked quickly. “How do you know?”

“Wait a minute,” Jake said.

Vincent ran his hand through his hair, agitated. “I went out with a girl in their finance department a few times in L.A., called in a favor after Lola got me her real name—which, by the way, bro, Lola is fucking
pissed
at you,” he gave Roman a pitying look. “Anyway, had my girl check the tax records. BAM. Paid in small dippy amounts for probably little stories, but she’s on the rolls, man. There’s no way she’s not his source.”

“Not necessarily,” Roman said. “In fact, not even probably, if the focus is on the glossy spread. At least it is not
only
her.”

While Jake listened to this, he had begun to feel very strange. He felt slightly queasy, like he had once as a teenager the morning after he’d first tried tequila, and there was a pins and needles sensation racing up his back, increasing in intensity. It was not at all pleasant. He got up to pace, just for the movement, his eyes darting about for some target, he didn’t know for what purpose.

He wanted to demand an explanation again, but his mouth felt very dry, and he was already dreading what the answer would be.

“What are you talking about?” Vincent asked Roman.

“They already had information for what you would call a drive-by piece, and they already had my name,” Roman said. He sounded tired. “So I did what you would have told me to do, Vincent. I took charge of the story. How would you put it? I gave it a spin, to protect the rest of the club. I am the source for
Sizzle
. As part of the agreement, no one else is to be named, so long as they don’t have another source. And so long as Brazzer honors it.”

“And you
knew
what she was doing?”

“Yes, for the most part,” Roman said. As he spoke, he looked steadily at Jake. “I ran the background check, and I found the name of an old friend. Irina had been her acting coach for a time, and Irina loved her. She is a good judge of character, Irina. She told me all about her. I thought we could help her here. I thought Jake would help her. I thought she would make the right choice.”

Jake whispered, but his voice was very clear, in the silence that followed.

“Who?” he said, but he already knew.

Roman looked at him very sadly. “Catie.”

chapter
31

Snow had begun to fall slowly around the heated tent in the middle of the Frick Gardens, hidden by a high fence from the traffic on Fifth Avenue. The champagne flowed, various red and white lights sparkled in the early February night, the auction was underway, and Catie still hadn’t found Jake. She stood like a despairing island amidst a sea of joyous, drunken, slightly debauched fun, shivering even though she wasn’t cold. She was certainly running out of time. Nearly out, in fact. As the minutes ticked by, Catie had made contingency plan after contingency plan, but as the auctioneer raced through the catalog, she was down to one: her confession would have to be public.

Catie shivered again.

Worse, she realized that this was probably how it should have been all along. She didn’t owe just Jake an apology, though she owed him most of all; she owed every single person she’d met under false pretenses an apology. She owed everyone who’d shown her kindness while she’d lied to them an apology. She had been dreading this, but it was undeniably right. And she simply couldn’t go up there and allow Jake to bid on her.

She’d just have to be creative with her phrasing.

Catie thought about her grandmother and winced. She didn’t actually have a back up plan. She had some money put away, and she thought she would be able to beg and plead for a little bit of time, but she would have to think of something soon. Something she could live with this time. It was another leap of faith.

“Next up, we have a spa package at Renopo,” Gwen said into the microphone. Catie recognized that item—it was a Volare lot, for sure, one of the subs being auctioned off for a weekend. Nobody had told Catie how the bidding worked; she assumed some of it was prearranged, like her lot was supposed to be, but if the look on a nearby woman’s face was any indication, not all of them were. The woman kept biting her lip to keep from smiling, but it wasn’t working.

But Catie wasn’t overly concerned with that. She was concerned that she was up next.

Her attention wandered to the crowd, trying, one last time, to find Jake. If he were to bid, he’d be out there, surely? But she couldn’t find him. The auction had begun to descend into a kind of well-heeled chaos, with various paid performers circulating amongst the party goers, juggling and doing things that required a kind of flexibility that would be highly valued at Volare itself, and society fixtures making drunken passes at models who spoke no English, or pretended not to. Someone she recognized from Volare was drinking vodka as it poured off a delicately carved ice statue. The sub to her right was auctioned off to enthusiastic cheers, and Catie wondered, again, whether any of these people really didn’t know what was up. If she had to guess, she’d say they were all in on it; it was just one of those traditions that morphed over the years and became something else entirely.

But she was only wondering about things like that to keep her mind off of what she was about to do, and the inevitable consequences.

She was out of time.

“Next, we have a gourmet dinner of one,” Gwen read, and laughed. It was getting to be that part of the evening. “Sorry,
for
one. For two?”

That was Catie’s cue. In fact, that was
Catie
, but it was her chance to make it right. Right-ish. Now or never, basically. She stepped up and tapped Gwen on the shoulder.

“Hey, I have something I need to say,” she whispered.

Gwen started and turned around wildly, her hand covering the mic.

“Are you canceling the lot?” Gwen asked, wide-eyed. “I can do that for you if you need me to—don’t worry. Are you ok?”

Oh man. Another person being nice to her. As if the universe wanted to make absolutely sure she knew what an asshole she’d been.

Catie took a deep breath. “I’m fine. It’s not that. Just…give me the mic.”

She stood up before the crowd and took one last look around for Jake. Nothing. The attention of the crowd was scattered, festive, happy. The lots had been auctioned off so far while people enjoyed themselves. All that was about to come to an end.

“Excuse me,” Catie said, and tapped the mic. “I have a confession to make.”

~  ~  ~

Jake ran through the uncovered part of the gardens, soft, heavy flakes of snow falling all around, lit up from below as they fell, and wished he had time to enjoy the spectacle. He’d spent too much time in the coatroom, thinking. He hadn’t even had to think that hard, but he’d been so surprised at how easy his decision was that he’d sort of been taken aback. Eventually he’d checked his watch, and opted for a shortcut through the snow rather than the long way around through the museum itself.

He elbowed his way through the edge of the crowd, looking for Catie. She didn’t know she’d been found out, and he didn’t want anyone else to be the one to tell her. Vincent was still angry, as was Lola, apparently, and he didn’t want them to be the first people she encountered. No one else would understand like he did.

He was almost happy to tell her. Not to tell her the part about her being discovered as a mole or a source or whatever it was you called what she’d planned to do, but the next part. The part about how he felt. The part about how he still loved her anyway.

That’s what he’d spent all that time doing in the coatroom. Musing. Marveling at the bare fact of it. He didn’t understand it, not in an intellectual sense. In fact, it didn’t fully make sense. He should be angry, and he was, but the anger was dwarfed by everything else. Jake finally understood what had happened with Catie the night before, finally understood what had made her cry, finally understood why she’d felt so terrible about herself. And in fact there might not be anyone more equipped to simply understand her plight than him. He, more than anyone else he knew, knew what it was to make a terrible mistake and have to live with it. He couldn’t condemn her for it, not when she’d already absolved him of his own inadequacies.

But most of all, even with how bad it looked to someone like Roman—and Jake knew, as Roman could not, that it wasn’t as bad as it looked, that Catie wasn’t cold and calculating, that she was in fact quite tortured about the whole thing, and the failing health of her grandmother must have weighed on her enormously—most of all, he found that his love for Catie simply just
was
. Perhaps that was a burden as well as a blessing, but for the moment, Jake could only revel in the fact that it was apparently possible for him. He’d said that to people for years, never realizing that he’d unconsciously refused to apply it to love. He’d always meant attraction, or sexuality, or any of the other things he felt he had an understanding of.

But this? This was a revelation. He could love someone
no matter what
. Or, perhaps importantly, he could love
her
no matter what. He couldn’t wait to tell her. He couldn’t wait to tell the whole world.

But first, he had to find her.

He was searching, in vain, near a melting nude ice sculpture, when instead of seeing her face, he heard her voice.

“Excuse me,” she said. “I have a confession to make.”

Jake whipped around. He’d never, ever heard her sound frightened like that. Catie stood up at the lectern, her face pale and drawn, waiting for the crowd to quiet down, waiting for all eyes to fall on her. And Jake knew what she was about to do.

“Oh, damn,” he said. And started to fight his way through the crowd.

~  ~  ~

Catie had originally pictured herself making a graceful admission of guilt, something eloquent, sincere, heartfelt. Now that the moment was here and she was starting to sweat, she lowered her expectations. Now she was just hoping to make it through without throwing up.

She looked up at the crowd, and then immediately thought better of it. Nope. That was not going to help.

Just put your head down and do it.

“Ok, so,” she started, already feeling like a dumb valley girl, “I’ll make this short and sweet. Um, not sweet. It’s actually the opposite of sweet. But I can’t let anyone…” She braved a look up, hoping to catch Jake. Nothing. “I can’t let anyone bid on my, uh, dinner, without first coming clean about what I’ve done. I have not told the truth. Um, actually, I just straight up lied. It’s not like I forgot to tell the truth, I just lied. Roberts isn’t my real last name. It’s Rose. And as I was…getting to know many of you,” she went on, totally at a loss for an appropriate euphemism, “you know, in the
organization
, I was also…oh, crap, there’s just no good way to say this. I was also looking for material. For a story.”