The Good Girl's Guide to Bad Men (27 page)

I Stood motionless for a full minute, my eyes trying to absorb everything that they were seeing while my brain tried desperately to compute it. Neither one seemed to be keeping up with the other. I stared down at the black-and-white photo that sat on top of the pile in front of me. I hadn't dared touch it.

No matter how many times I tried to come up with an alternative explanation for what was being represented, my mind kept coming back to the same conclusion. The only conclusion. That the woman in this photograph was Katie Morgan. My associate. And the man she was kissing outside of a hotel room door marked with the number 812 was Dean Stanton. I had recognized him not only from the picture in his case file, but from the pictures I had seen multiple times in
Variety
magazine as I was researching his case.

When my hand was finally able to move, I reached out and flipped over the photograph to reveal the one underneath. A similar shot, still black and white, still taken from somewhat of a distance using some type of zoom feature, but still the same two subjects: Katie and Dean outside room 812. This time they weren't kissing. Instead, he had his face buried in the side of her neck and she was laughing.

I squeezed my eyes shut and tried to think back to the details Katie had given me last week about the Stanton assignment. I could almost swear she'd said that Melissa Stanton caught them making out on the couch and then she packed up her things and left. Yes, that's definitely what she said. Although why did the Chateau Marmont sound so familiar? I opened my eyes and reached for the yellow legal pad on my desk, flipping back through a dozen pages until I landed on the right one. My eyes scanned the scribbles until I came face-to-face with the words
Chateau Marmont.
That's where Dean said he was staying after Melissa kicked him out. Katie had said something about how he'd whispered it into her ear as he was leaving, hoping she would stop by later, not knowing that this whole thing had been a setup.

Oh God.

I leafed through five more photographs. More of the same.

My head popped up. "John, where did you get these?"

"I took them," he said proudly. As if the artistic value of the photos were the primary concern here.

"When?"

He walked around the edge of my desk, tracing it with his fingertip as he walked and finally plopped down in my chair. "Yesterday morning."

"Yesterday morning?" I repeated, my voice strained.

"I
tried
to call you," John countered defensively. "But someone wasn't answering their phone."

My head was spinning. And now I felt as though I really
might
faint again. I fell into a guest chair behind me and gripped the armrests. "But how did you know . . . why were you even there?"

"Well," he began, leaning back in the chair and folding his hands over his stomach, "I was at the Chateau Marmont for a party two Fridays ago—"

"Two Fridays ago?" I interrupted. "You knew about this for more than a week and you didn't tell me?"

John sighed. "If you'll just let me finish, I can explain."

I slouched in my chair. "Fine. Go. Finish."

"So I was at the Chateau for a party with this smoking hot new guy that I met named Chad. I've been trying to hook up with him for the past
month,
but he keeps blabbing something about having a boyfriend in London or someplace like that. I mean, really, that's ten thousand miles away and I'm
here.
Hello?"

"John!" I screeched. "Get on with it."

"Right. So we were just leaving the party, which was in this amazing suite in the Chateau, and we passed by this couple that was walking to their room. A late-forty-something guy with silvery hair and a little blond girl." His head nodded toward the photos in front of me, and my stomach flipped.

John continued, "I remember thinking, Okay, total Hollywood stereotype. Older guy, younger girl, Chateau Marmont. Can we get any more cliché? But then after they had disappeared into a suite, room 812"—he nodded again toward the photographs—"Chad whispers to me, 'Do you know who that is?' and I don't, so I go, 'No,' and then he tells me it's Dean Stanton, the head of New Edge Cinema. And then of course I feel really dumb because I know I
should
know who that is, given that my boss has totally met with him on more than one occasion. But whatever, I was drunk and that's beside the point."

He stopped talking, and for a moment, it appeared as though he had concluded his story. I waved my hand. "And?"

John looked confused. "And what?"

"And that's it?" I cried, exasperated. "How did you get these fucking pictures?"

John's face suddenly lit up with recognition. "Oh, right. Sorry." Then he shot me a disapproving glance. "Testy, testy. So anyway, when I first saw the girl he was with, I thought she looked kinda familiar, but I couldn't really place her. And when Chad told me who
he
was, I just assumed she was some D-list actress I had seen on TV somewhere. But then that night at Sophie's when you told me that your associate Katie had tested Dean Stanton and I remembered those PI photos you showed me last year before you hired her . . . well, I realized why she looked so familiar."

"Then why didn't you say something?" I blurted out.

"Because I couldn't be sure. I mean, I was so wasted when I left that hotel. As was Chad. That guy we saw could have been anyone. I needed to make sure before I told you. So I decided to go back and stake it out. I went by the hotel every night after work, but I didn't see anything for an entire week. Room 812 was dead silent, and I thought maybe he had already checked out. But then finally, on Saturday around midnight, I saw Dean and Katie in the lobby. I couldn't get a clear shot of them without being noticed, so I came back early in the morning and staked out the hallway until she finally came out around seven and I got these shots."

"Did they see you take them?"

John shook his head, again, extremely proud of himself. "Nope. I'm just stealthy like that." He got up from his chair, walked around the desk, and thumbed through his handiwork. "I thought the black and white was a nice touch, don't you? Very early forties detective movie."

There was a tightness in my chest, and suddenly I felt as though I couldn't catch my breath. John noticed and immediately came over and put his arm around my shoulders. "Jen, breathe. Take a deep breath."

"What does this mean?" I cried, feeling defeated, betrayed, saddened, and infuriated all at once.

John cracked a smile. "What do you mean, what does it mean? It means she broke the cardinal rule. She slept with him."

I ran my fingers through my dirty, tangled hair. "I know
that,
but it just doesn't make sense. When she told me what happened at the staff meeting, she said she made out with Dean on the couch and then his wife walked in and kicked him out and he went to the hotel. Why would she just
go
with him? Just like that? No one's that good a kisser!"

"Easy." John shrugged. "That wasn't the first time they kissed."

My eyes widened, and a strangled gasp escaped my lips. I hadn't even thought of that option. "What?"

John shook his head and laughed at me. "You know, Jen, for someone who makes a living off of other people's relationships, you certainly aren't very good at figuring them out."

My thoughts were a blur. Details from the past few weeks were whizzing through my head as I tried desperately to sort them all out and rearrange them into a conclusion that didn't make me want to throw up right there in my trash can.

"You're saying she was having a
relationship
with Dean Stanton?"

"Um, yeah," John stated, as if it were obvious. And maybe it should have been. Maybe if I hadn't been so preoccupied with my own personal dramas, I would have actually noticed the clues. Because there had to be clues, right?

Suddenly my mind flashed back to that conversation I'd had with Katie nearly three weeks into her assignment. When I told her I wanted to pull her out of there and mark the whole thing down as a pass. She was so quick to dissuade me. Too quick, actually. She'd insisted that she needed more time.

Was it possible that she was
sleeping
with him that whole time? And that's why she didn't want to leave? Because she was actually
enjoying
herself? And all that time, Melissa Stanton was
paying
for her to be there?

Oh God, the nausea was here. I couldn't hold it back any longer. I leaned forward, grabbed the trash can from under my desk, and vomited into it.

John instinctively took a few steps back from me and turned his head, either to give me privacy or to avoid puking right alongside me.

The intercom on my desk buzzed just then, startling both of us. "Ashlyn?" Hadley's voice came through. "Your ten o'clock is here."

Horrified, I looked at the phone on my desk. There was no way I could meet a client now, looking like this. Then I turned to John. He seemed to understand and spoke into the speaker. "Uh . . . Jen's not feeling very well. I think you should probably reschedule it."

"Okay," Hadley replied, sounding wary of his response. After all, to her, John was just some strange guy who had barged in unannounced, claiming to be a new employee, and was now answering my intercom for me. "Should I reschedule all of her appointments today?"

John looked to me, and I nodded. He relayed the message to Hadley and then clicked off the phone.

I fell back into my seat and closed my eyes. This was all starting to feel like a bad dream. Everything was wrong. Every decision I had ever made in my entire life was
wrong.

I had given up so much for this job. This agency. This life. And it had betrayed me. My own employee had deceived me. And if Katie was capable of that kind of betrayal, who's to say the others weren't, too? Who's to say they weren't already betraying me?

With Jamie, I'd had something real. Something wonderful. And I'd traded it all in for this. A corrupted world full of dishonesty, lies, and most of all . . . infidelity. When you boil it down—strip off the layers and fancy titles and designer clothing—that's all this job was. A business of cheaters. Nothing more.

And I had lost the only thing that could have saved me from it. The only person who had ever represented everything that this world was not.

And now it was too late.

"It's
not
too late," Sophie insisted from behind her iced vanilla soy latte.

After I had entered a comatose state in my office where I pretty much mumbled incoherently for ten minutes while staring into space, John had to practically carry me from the building. Not knowing what to do, he'd plopped me down in the front seat of his car and driven me to the Starbucks near Sophie's work, where the three of us now sat.

Although my location had changed, my current state hadn't improved much. The incoherent mumbling had stopped, but I was still just staring into space like a psych ward patient who had been injected with too many brain-numbing drugs.

"Drink your tea," John instructed me.

I looked down at the cup of hot liquid sitting on the table in front of me, but I didn't touch it. I just fidgeted with the string on the end of the teabag. John looked anxiously to Sophie. "She's been like that for almost an hour now."

"Well, I don't blame her after what you did to her. Why are you always the one to bring her the bad news?" Sophie reached out and poked him in the ribs with her index finger.

"Ow!" he yelped, rubbing his side. "What are you talking about?"

Sophie nudged her head subtly toward me. "The website," she whispered. "Remember? You're the one who told her about that stupid website with her picture on it last year. That nearly ruined her. And now this!"

"I don't know," John shot back defensively. "I'm just observant, that's all. Are you saying I
shouldn't
have told her that her own associate was lying to her?"

"Will you guys stop talking about me like I'm not even here?" I grumbled.

Sophie put on a cheerful face and smiled brightly at me. "You know," she began, quickly changing the subject, "you can still try to get him back. It's amazing how far a simple 'I'm sorry, I was wrong, please forgive me' can go."

"It's too late," I repeated again, my voice empty and lifeless. I'm pretty sure this was the statement I had been babbling over and over again while John was dragging me from my office.

Sophie reached out and rubbed my arm. "You don't know that. What if Jamie is sitting alone at home right now, just
praying
that the phone will ring and it'll be you calling to apologize?"

"He's at work," I stated matter-of-factly.

Sophie rolled her eyes. "Or at work! Whatever."

I attempted to shake my head, but the movement was so slight, I doubt the meaning of the gesture came across. So I verbalized it with a blank, "No."

Sophie frowned. "You have to at least
try]
You have nothing more to lose. You've already lost everything!"

John shot her a look. "Sophie!"

"Sorry," she mumbled as she lowered her head to take a sip from her straw. "But she has."

I looked at her incredulously. "I'm not going to call him."

She considered my statement for a second and then responded, "No, you're right. That wouldn't be appropriate. It has to be a drop-by."

I sighed. "A what?"

"You have to drop by his house," John translated. "Calling would be a complete cop-out. If you're going to beg for him back, it has to be in person."

For the next fifteen minutes, John and Sophie proceeded to plot out a full-fledged strategy for getting Jamie back, complete with scripts with multiple scenario variations depending on Jamie's reactions to each of the statements they had planned out for me to say. It was starting to sound like they were writing one of those
Choose Your Own Adventure
books. I suppose it failed to dawn on them that I hadn't agreed to any of this. Either that, or they didn't really care whether I agreed to it or not.

"So there you go," Sophie said, turning the cocktail napkin she had been scribbling on so that I could read it. "Your guide to reconciliation."

But I didn't even bother to look. "No," I said again.

Sophie banged her fist on the table. "Come on, Jen. What else are you going to do? Sit around your house and mope until you're eighty?"

I feigned consideration. "Yep. Pretty much."

She groaned. "No, you're not. We're going to fix this. We are going to get him back."

"We?" I asked with skepticism.

She nodded resolutely. "Yep. I'm going with you. We'll stake out his place in Century City and wait for him to come home from work."

"Uh-huh," I indulged her sarcastically. "And then are you going to come inside with me and chaperone?"

"No," she replied, frustrated by my antics. "I'm going to wait in the car."

"Well," I said flippantly, nodding to her ink-covered napkin, "since you seem to already have the conversation all figured out, maybe
you
should just go up there and
I'll
wait in the car. Or better yet, why don't I just stay home and you can go all by yourself. Then you can text me and tell me how it went!"

Sophie exhaled a defeated sigh. "We just want you to be happy, Jen."

I looked to John, and he nodded his agreement. Then my face softened. "I know you guys do. And I love you for that. But I'm not going to Jamie's house. End of story.

Although apparently it
wasn't
the end of the story, because six hours later I found myself sitting in the passenger seat of Sophie's car, staring at the front of Jamie's building. I'm not sure how she was even able to talk me into this in the first place, but sometime between Starbucks and now, I caved. It probably had a lot to do with a full day of listening to Sophie's incessant whining and pleading and listing her million and a half reasons why she was right and I was crazy. I swear the girl should work for the government. I bet she could crack suspected terrorists in under ten minutes with that nagging voice of hers.

The "plan" was to wait for Jamie's car to turn the corner and pull into the underground garage before using the key that I had yet to return to him to get through the street-level entrance. Then I would take the stairs to the second floor and wait in the stairwell for him to get off the elevator and enter his loft. Then I would knock on his front door.

I glanced at the clock on the dashboard. It was already almost eight. "What if he's working late?" I asked Sophie.

She shrugged. "I have nowhere to be. Do you?"

I shifted in my seat. My butt was starting to fall asleep. "Well, what if he's on a business trip? We could be here for several days."

"He's not," Sophie stated confidently.

"How do you know?" I countered.

She pointed through the front windshield at the second floor of the building. "That's his loft, right there."

I leaned forward to look up. "Yeah, so?"

She pointed again. "His bathroom light is on. People don't accidentally leave lights on when they know they're going away for several days."

I turned and stared at her. "Do you do this often?"

She simply shrugged. "Let's just say it's not my first stakeout."

I had to crack a smile at this. My first one all day. "Why does that not surprise me?"

A silence fell between us, and Sophie turned on the radio. She flipped through a dozen or so stations on her satellite radio until she found one called Sirius XM Chill. The station stayed true to its titular promise as a soothing female voice filled the air, backed by a sultry African-inspired drumbeat. I felt my body start to relax.

I leaned back against the headrest and took in a heavy breath. "You haven't said anything about Zoë," I pointed out.

Sophie was quiet for a moment, seemingly contemplative before she said, "I know. I figured we'd deal with one thing at a time."

I nodded my understanding. "Yeah."

"Plus, friendships are more resilient than romantic relationships. I know that you and Zoë will work things out on your own. But
this
—" She motioned to the car and our immediate surroundings. "This you need help with."

I had to laugh. It was a weak laugh, but it felt good nonetheless. "You're probably right about that."

"But if you want to know what I think . . ." Her voice trailed off. It wasn't a question, but she was still waiting for my permission to continue.

"I do," I confirmed.

"I think you're both wrong."

"So she told you?"

Sophie nodded. "She called yesterday. Obviously I don't condone her sleeping with a married man. But I also don't condone you taking on the assignment or telling his wife. It's one thing if someone comes to you asking for that information, it's quite another for you to deliver it unsolicited."

"I know," I agreed softly. "I learned that the hard way."

Sophie looked at me, surprised by my concurrence. "Are you going to tell Zoë that?"

"Eventually. Like you said, one thing at a time. Besides, I don't think she'd even answer the phone right now. I figured I'd give her some time to cool down. We didn't exactly part ways amicably."

Sophie laughed. "Well, we could always do another stakeout at her place after this one."

I flashed a faint smile. "Maybe."

We spent the next hour and a half talking and listening to the radio. Sophie told me more stories about her honeymoon in Greece and recounted details from the wedding that I'd missed because I was stuck with my head in an MRI machine. I could tell she was trying to distract me from the fact that it was almost eleven at night and Jamie still hadn't shown. It was only partially working.

Finally, at 11:25, I saw the familiar headlights of Jamie's Jaguar turn the corner and his car pull into the garage. My pulse instantly quickened.

Sophie reached out and clasped her hand around my wrist. "This is it," she said, excitement building in her voice.

I wasn't sure I could go through with this. I had agreed to come on the stakeout, but I hadn't necessarily agreed to go upstairs. What if he said no? What if he slammed the door in my face?

Then I thought of the alternative: driving home now, after we'd been sitting here for nearly four hours, without even trying. And I figured getting rejected at Jamie's door was far less lame.

"Okay," Sophie commanded as the garage door started to close, "it's showtime."

I took a deep breath and placed my hand on the doorknob. My throat was suddenly feeling scratchy and tight, and I wondered if I would even be able to get any words out if I did manage to get out of this car and follow the plan.

"Do you want the script?" Sophie asked, holding out the crumpled cocktail napkin.

I rolled my eyes. "I don't think so."

I stepped out of the car and closed the door behind me. With unsteady feet and uneven breath, I walked the few paces to the front door of the building. I removed the key from my pocket and placed it gingerly in the lock. For a moment, I hoped the door wouldn't open. That maybe for some reason the HOA had changed the locks. But the key turned smoothly, and I pressed forward.

I turned back to Sophie, and she gave me an enthusiastic thumbs-up through the front windshield. I waved back awkward before walking into the building and heading toward the stairwell. Jamie's unit was only three floors up from the garage, but he almost always took the elevator. Usually because he was carrying his heavy laptop bag with him, or a suitcase from his latest business trip, or, until recently, a bag full of stuff from an extended stay at my place.

I climbed the two flights to the second floor and waited in the stairwell, peering through the small window in the door for Jamie to pass by. My heartbeat was racing now, pumping out blood faster than my veins could keep up.

And that's when the panic started to set in.

What on earth was I doing here? Did I actually think this was going to work? That a simple apology was going to change things? But when I thought about the small, infinitesimal chance that Jamie might actually take me back, that he might actually forgive me, somehow it all seemed worth the risk.

I heard a faint beep indicating the elevator's arrival, and my breath caught in my chest. I had a feeling I wouldn't be able to take a real breath until all of this was over. And depending on the outcome, I knew there was a chance I might never feel the satisfaction of a true deep breath again.

The footsteps were audible now—coming from the direction of the elevator—and then I heard Jamie's voice. I figured he was probably on his phone, talking into his Bluetooth earpiece as he always does. I used to make fun of him. Because often when he was in need of a haircut, his thick, wavy brown hair would cover the earpiece completely and he looked as if he were talking to himself. Like a crazy person on Hollywood Boulevard.

The thought brought a nostalgic smile to my face. As did the sound of his voice.

God, I really did miss him.

As the footsteps and voice got closer, I could start to make out what he was saying. He was telling one of his really bad jokes. I remember he'd told it to me on one of our first dates. And then I had to listen to him repeat it over and over again at parties and group dinners and work functions for the past year. And every time, I had to pretend as if I hadn't heard it before.

But somehow now it was funny again. And I found myself laughing quietly to myself as he got to the punch line, remembering the way his face always looked when he delivered that last line. His eyebrows raised, his lips curled into an expectant smile. It was beyond adorable.

And then suddenly I realized that I wasn't the only one laughing. My body froze as I pressed my ear to the door. So hard that I thought I might push it open. But then I heard it again.

A second voice. A second set of footsteps. A second person.

And it was distinctly female.

I pulled my ear away from the door and smashed my face against the glass window. And that's when I saw them.

Both
of them. Jamie and a woman. I couldn't see her face, because by the time I pulled my ear away from the door, they had already passed by the stairwell and were on their way to Jamie's front door. But I could see her hair, and I could see the back of her dress. Both nauseatingly sexy.

I pressed my face harder against the glass as I strained to follow them with my eyes. But unfortunately, Jamie's unit was on the same wall as this door, limiting my field of vision. The last thing I was able to see was Jamie's hand as it touched the small of her back and led her inside.