Harlequin Desire January 2021--Box Set 1 of 2 by Maisey Yates (inspirational books .TXT) 📗

“Gotcha.” Valerie rose to her feet. The sound of water rushing through pipes made the town house hum. Valerie’s husband was likely getting ready for work. What was his name again? Oh, yes. Patrick. “The weighted blanket will help with that. It’s a comfort. Trust me.”

Nina wondered what Valerie would have to wallow about then stopped herself before she went down that route once again. She’d made that mistake with Grace. Everybody, no matter how rich, successful, stylish and attractive, had something to wallow about.

After Valerie left, Nina crawled under the blanket with the box of tissues, wholly determined to soak the pillows with tears.

* * *

Nina stayed through the weekend, which meant she spent two days in her blanket fort, wiping tears and blowing her nose into wads of tissue. It helped that in her haste to escape the hotel, she’d inadvertently grabbed one of Julian’s T-shirts. She clung to it like Linus to a blanket. Now and again, she raised it to her nose, inhaling his clean scent, and she was in his arms again. Everything she loved about him surrounding her, except his massive trust issues and his disloyal little heart.

She was caught in an infinity loop of heartache and humiliation. It was one thing to have her heart broken and yet another to be exposed to public ridicule at the same time. The one person who could possibly understand was the jerk who’d smashed her heart in the first place.

On Sunday, Nina had no choice but to crawl out of her cave. It was Patrick’s thirty-fifth birthday, and Valerie had organized a little gathering. Since Nina had been hiding out in the man’s home office for days, she figured she owed it to him to shower, dress, brush her hair and wish him a happy birthday. In the morning, she was flying back to New York.

At the moment, she had a few more solid hours of blanket-fort time ahead. She wiggled around and settled in. Just as she got comfortable, Valerie burst into her room, carrying a laptop.

“Julian made a statement. Check this out.”

Nina’s heart took off in wild gallop. He’d made a statement! What was there to say? She shoved off the blanket and joined Valerie at the desk. Her cousin was clicking around the web, trying to pull up a Miami Herald article without first having to subscribe to the paper, join an email list or take a survey.

“Okay. Here goes… Wait. Okay. Damn it! Buffering.”

A video was downloading at a snail’s pace. Nina watched the screen in terror. The slow Wi-Fi was criminal, but as much as she was eager for the video to load, she wasn’t prepared to see Julian again—not even on a computer screen.

“Has he tried to reach out to you?” Valerie asked while they waited.

That was anyone’s guess. “I haven’t checked my phone.”

She’d left it on airplane mode and buried it in the bottom of a bag. Nina had needed to go dark. She could not handle the onslaught of messages that had flooded her inboxes. Her social media mentions had exploded. Last she’d checked her phone, #1HOTKNIGHT and #1KNIGHTSTAND were trending and every troll in the world agreed that she stood to gain the most from the scandal. After her agent had called with an offer from an editor to buy the rights to the “hot Knight story,” she’d had no choice but to go dark.

“Okay. Here we go!” Valerie said.

A brief intro and there he was, standing in the hotel’s courtyard. The fountain splashed and gurgled just a few feet away. He wore his usual T-shirt and tailored jacket combo, eyes hidden behind sunglasses.

Nina yearned for him. She couldn’t help it. The sight of him would always move her this way.

“We’re here today in Miami Beach with actor JL Knight,” the reporter said. “Mr. Knight, you are certainly no stranger to scandal. Let’s get to the heart of it. Who is Nina Taylor? Did you know her long?”

Julian looked straight to camera to deliver his answer. “Nina Taylor is an acquaintance, someone that I met and worked with here in Miami. The publication of her diary was a violation of privacy. We will pursue legal action.”

“Thank you, Mr. Knight.”

End of video.

Nina edged Valerie aside and refreshed the web page. “Is that it? That can’t be it.”

“That’s it,” Valerie said.

“An acquaintance?” Nina uttered. “Did he just call me an acquaintance?”

Valerie dismissed this. “His publicist probably drafted that statement. A lot of celebrities have their publicists handle their breakups. It’s less complicated that way.”

The room expanded and contracted around Nina. Julian’s statement was factually accurate. They were acquaintances. They’d met and worked together in Miami. They’d kissed in the moonlight, napped in the sun, swum naked in the bay and made love through the night, but that didn’t change the facts. If she’d been anything more than an acquaintance, he would have known that she could have never betrayed him for professional advancement.

“Here’s my take,” Valerie said. “This was damage control. Nothing more.”

Nina left the room and stumbled down the hall to the bathroom. Julian would have called her on this—she did have a habit of hiding out in bathrooms—but she couldn’t count on Julian to save her from herself anymore. He was an acquaintance. Someone that she’d met and worked with in Miami. Nothing more.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

By four in the afternoon, the two-story town house was filled with the scent of fried onions, fried plantains and fried pork. Valerie’s mother-in-law and other close family members had arrived early to help out in the kitchen and set up for the party. Nina’s bedroom window overlooked the back patio. Patrick and his friends gathered there, nursing glasses of amber liquor or bottles of beer. Laughter, chatter and riotous kompa music drifted to the second floor.

Nina looked longingly down at the tableau. This was everything that she had been deprived of growing up. She had long wished to