Her Secret Read online

  Her Secret

  Penelope Bloom

  Contents

  1. Violet

  2. Peter

  3. Violet

  4. Peter

  5. Violet

  6. Peter

  7. Violet

  8. Peter

  9. Violet

  10. Peter

  11. Violet

  12. Peter

  13. Violet

  14. Peter

  15. Violet

  16. Peter

  17. Violet

  18. Peter

  19. Violet

  20. Peter

  21. Violet

  Epilogue

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  Also By Penelope Bloom

  1

  Violet

  I liked to think life was a series of defining moments. There were the good kind of defining moments, like the first time I cracked open Harry Potter and The Sorcerer’s Stone or when I found out I was going to be having a little girl. There were the bad ones, too, but I’d developed a highly sophisticated system for dealing with those: I bottled them up. When it felt like the bottle was getting shaken and threatening to explode, I screwed the cap on a little tighter.

  The jury was still out on whether today was going to be the good kind of defining moment or if it’d end up in its own little bottle, tucked away in a dark corner of my mind.

  Today was the day of the New York Book Convention, and it was going to be packed with hundreds of authors. As much as I would’ve loved to come to a convention like this to creepily stare at and stalk my favorite authors, this weekend was all about business. Authors needed to advertise their books, and advertising was how I paid the bills. Sort of, at least. I had the college degree, the knowledge, and the willingness to work hard, but I didn’t exactly have a bustling list of clients. If this weekend went according to plan, that was about to change.

  I’d marked this weekend on my calendar with a big, fat, red heart. Well, it actually looked a little more like an apple because I was a terrible artist, but I knew what it was supposed to be. If I had been the type of person to have important appointments and plans, I would’ve spent the last month moving them all just to make sure I had the whole weekend free. Conventions like this happened all over the country, but I didn’t have the money or time to travel, so I needed to make this one count.

  As usual, fate had decided to kick me in the shins and spit in my coffee.

  My mom had come down with what she was calling “the plague.” As was typical of my mom, she gave me way more information about it than I could’ve ever wanted. She was “having trouble keeping anything down from either end,” and she’d “hacked up something this morning that might’ve had a pulse.”

  I couldn’t afford to miss the convention, so I did my best to give my daughter, Zoey, a pep talk and explain how important this was. Her little four-year-old eyes had looked glassy and unfocused until I got to the part where I mentioned bookmarks. For whatever reason, bookmarks were like crack to her little brain. She would do anything to collect them and add them to her tin lunch box at home. She even slept with them in her bed.

  Just like me, she had a tendency to latch onto hobbies and interest with an almost frightening kind of intensity. First, it had been bookmarks, and about six months ago, she'd decided she was also going to be the next tennis star.

  I gave Zoey’s hand a little squeeze. She was turning five in a couple months, which felt insane. One minute, I’d still see my chubby little baby who made the best animal sounds you’d ever hear. The next, I’d realize she was growing up. She was getting taller, and her hand was big enough for her fingers to interlock with mine, instead of being something so small I could hold it all in my palm.

  I could still see a little of Dawson when I looked at Zoey, but it never made me sad like I thought I would. Maybe the resemblance didn’t make me sad because Dawson had an entire six-pack of bottled-up, repressed memories with his name on them—memories that I never intended to revisit. Zoey had his dark, curly hair. She had my eyes and my facial expressions, and then everything else was uniquely her. I’d spent so long worrying that I would resent her for being partly his, but as soon as I held her the first time, I knew none of it mattered. Zoey was Zoey. The fact that it was just the two of us against the world only made me love her more. She was my little girl, and we collectively kicked ass.

  Sort of, at least. Objectively speaking, money was tight and the future didn’t always feel like it held promise. But I did what I could. I tried to keep myself thinking positive, because she’d already seen one of her parents walk away, and she needed to know that I would never give up on her.

  “I want a rainbow one,” Zoey said suddenly.

  “A rainbow bookmark?” I asked.

  “And a pink one. And a cat one.”

  I grinned. “I bet they have all kinds. We’ll just have to wait and see what you get.”

  Zoey's eyes lit up. I felt a little guilty at how excited she looked. It was just a reminder of how tight money had been. When you couldn't afford to buy new toys for your kids, you had to get creative. She'd come up with the bookmarks thing on her own, but I'd convinced her to be excited about characters we'd cut out from her cereal boxes, reinforce with glue and popsicle sticks, and then use like little action figures. I laid awake most nights dreaming about the things I wished I could give her, like tennis lessons, real toys, dollhouses, and new clothes, instead of the hand-me-downs and scraps I could find at garage sales for under a dollar. I wanted to give her a better house where she'd have her own room. I wanted to give her the world and knowing I couldn't tore at me.

  Thankfully, she was still so young that none of it registered with her. Not yet, at least. She didn’t know any different, and she didn’t know we were struggling. In her little world, I’d just said there might be bookmarks inside the big building, and that was enough to keep her quiet and excited for the rest of our walk to the convention center.

  Once we'd collected our tickets, we made our way inside the entrance. The building was like a big doughnut connected to smaller and smaller doughnuts. Authors were already set up behind tables displaying their books and random goodies while crowds of fans milled about.

  I breathed in the moment for a few seconds. It felt like my shot. The author who would hire me to market their books was somewhere in this building. I had to believe that, because the alternative was continuing to slip downward. It wasn’t a fast slide, but I knew we were always inching closer and closer to real poverty. Not just the kind of poor people joke about—-the kind that takes some positive thinking to overcome. It was going to be the dark, dirty kind where you can’t keep the lights or gas on. I wasn’t going to let that happen to us. Not to Zoey.

  I let Zoey drag me to almost every table so we could see if anyone had bookmarks included with their free gear. I also took the opportunity to pitch my services to anyone who would listen.

  “So if you’re interested,” I said after my brief spiel. “You can take my card and contact me. Remember, you can try my ads for free before you decide.”

  The author, a young guy who had written a handful of fantasy novels, nodded in a way that told me he wasn’t interested. “Thanks. Maybe I’ll send an email.”

  Over the next hour, I received dozens of variations of the same response. Some authors were polite and explained that marketing wasn’t really something they had a big enough budget for to hire a consultant. Others were dismissive. Some poorly faked interest. The best I got was someone asking if I’d work free for a few months so they could figure out if I was worth the cost.

  Zoey and I took a break once we’d worked our way through the majority of the small and mid-list authors in the main entrance area. There were other w
ings of the convention center where authors of particular genres and niches had their tables set up, but my real target was the center ring. It was where the big names were going to be setting up tables. I would need a handful of smaller authors to sign on with me for any serious dent in our financial troubles. But just one big fish would be like winning the lottery. Currently, my only sources of income were from five independent businesses I’d managed to pitch my services to. I charged them a flat fee per month to manage their advertising campaigns. They paid for the ads themselves, and the fee covered my time and knowledge.

  It was just enough to barely keep floating with our bills, but I was always losing clients and having to scramble to find new ones. Once a business reached a certain size, they typically went to an official ad agency. And finding a small business that was willing to invest money in advertising through an independent consultant like me was difficult, to say the least. I knew I spent the majority of my time trying to find new clients and the minority managing the accounts I actually had.

  So I’d come here. I always secretly dreamed of working in the publishing world. As a lifelong, avid reader, nothing seemed more romantic than the idea of working in the world of books every day. And if I could land the attention of one of the big name authors, I’d be able to stop hustling around the city every day, begging for work.

  Zoey was very carefully examining each bookmark she’d collected before shifting it to the back of her stack. Her eyes flicked up toward a commotion near the entrance of the building. I followed her stare and saw a small entourage of people coming toward us. A growing crowd of fans was trailing in their wake with more joining by the second.

  I barely pulled Zoey back and avoided her getting swept up in the mob at the last second. With the swell of fans surrounding the newcomer, I couldn’t even see who it was. I only caught a glimpse of a man in a suit with dark hair moving near the center. He was tall. The good kind of tall, too. Well-proportioned, broad, and big. I decided I must’ve glimpsed some kind of security guard, because he hadn’t looked like an author.

  Once they had passed, I tapped a nearby woman on the shoulder.

  “Hey, who was that?” I asked.

  “Peter Barnidge.”

  “The Peter Barnidge?”

  The woman nodded. She was still looking after the group a little wistfully. “What I wouldn’t give to—-” she noticed Zoey for the first time and caught herself. “Frost his cupcakes,” she said haltingly, like she was just throwing out the first words that came to mind. From the look that had been in her eyes, I knew she had been about to drop some seriously dirty fantasy on me.

  Zoey giggled. “Cupcakes? Whaaat?”

  I grinned. If I was distracted, I had a bad habit of saying “what” exactly like Zoey just had. It was a kind of, monotone, sarcastic sound, and every time I heard it come from my four-year-old, it made me want to giggle. One of the underappreciated joys of being a parent was subtly training your kids to say innocent but odd things.

  “Sorry,” the woman mouthed to me.

  We found Peter Barnidge’s staff setting up an entire area for him, complete with a table, a display of his recent books, some swag, and even a kind of foldable backdrop that would let him have an easy, private escape path to the back door behind his set up.

  I held Zoey’s hand while I formulated a mental plan of attack. I scouted the weak areas of his fortification. One door, security in front. There was probably a way in through the back of the room behind the dividing walls they’d set up, too.

  One of the workers accidentally knocked over a little grab-bag of swag from the edge of Peter’s table. It caught my eye as it fell. The whole thing looked like it happened more slowly than it should have. The bag gracefully drifted down toward the ground, tipping slightly as it sank through the air. Just before the bag hit the ground, a bookmark flew free of the bag, did a graceful little loop, and slid perfectly under the door in the foldable backdrop to vanish out of sight.

  Zoey had already broken away from my grip and was rushing to get it before I knew what was happening.

  “Zoey!” I whisper-yelled in the universally recognized mom-tone where you don’t want to be judged for being a bad parent but your kid is absolutely making you look like a bad parent.

  She couldn’t hear me over the murmur of excited fans who were waiting for Peter to come sit at his table. I rushed after her, but her short, skinny little legs were fast, and she had the advantage of being able to weave between people’s legs while I had to run around them, tossing apologies over my shoulder.

  A worker opened the door at exactly the wrong time—-though I guessed Zoey would’ve disagreed with that assessment—-and Zoey slipped right past him in pursuit of her coveted bookmark. Thankfully, the man saw me chasing her and let me through with a sympathetic smile.

  I found a sectioned off area no bigger than a living room behind the door. There was another plain wooden door leading somewhere else in the convention center and a handful of boxes still being unloaded by Peter’s crew. Zoey was already holding the rogue bookmark with a huge, adorable smile that made it impossible to stay mad.

  “Sorry,” I muttered to everyone. I rushed across the room toward Zoey, but the interior door swung open and I crashed into someone big and sturdy before I knew what was happening.

  The man had been carrying a folder full of laminated pages that all spilled to the ground and slid apart. I knelt to help him gather everything and handed him a stack of the pages that were marked up with red sharpie. They looked like parts of a manuscript that was being edited, as far as I could tell.

  I was about to stand when I saw a single post-it note stuck to the ground beneath the papers I’d picked up. I tried to hand it to him, but he was already looking past me to one of his staff members. I folded it over once and stuck it in my purse without thinking.

  “What is a fan doing back here?” the man barked. His voice was deep and so rich that I could practically feel it in my chest.

  That was when I got my first real look at him. The man I’d bumped into was Peter Barnidge.

  I’d never followed non-fiction authors like I followed the fiction authors, but I’d known he was an attractive man by reputation alone. Authors who looked like models weren’t that common, and he had his share of admirers, even among people who had never read a single word of his books. I hadn’t realized he was stunning, or so tall. It wasn’t just his obviously well-crafted features. Yes, he had the hard, scrutinizing brows, piercing eyes, and the stubble-lined chin to make any woman weak in the knees. It was more than that. He had an air about him. He was the master of his world. You didn’t need to see the team of scurrying assistants working beneath him to know it.

  It only took a glance at those eyes and the hard set of his mouth to be sure. He was not a man who was easily pleased, and he was used to making that fact known. I didn’t think I’d ever seen a man who looked so unattainable before—-at least not in person. He might as well have been surrounded by bulletproof glass and barbed wire. Even then, I guessed scores of women had been happy to throw themselves uselessly against those walls of his.

  Do not touch. Do not admire. Do not even think about it, Violet, because he's so far out of your league you couldn't even get nosebleed tickets to his fan club.

  Even his clothes seemed so intimidated by him that they didn't dare hold a wrinkle or crease in the wrong place. His button-down shirt, tie, jacket, and pants were all perfectly complementing shades of navy blue and gray, and they fit his body in ways that made it hard to peel my eyes away.

  “I’m sorry, I was just—-” I looked around for Zoey, but saw she had slipped a few feet away from me to sweet-talk a young girl into letting her look at a freshly opened box of bookmarks.

  "Do I need to throw her out myself?" he asked. He didn't shout the question, but there was a fine edge of warning in his words that might as well have been a bullwhip. Every syllable was loaded with utter disdain for anyone who could hear it.

&nbs
p; Four men and a woman immediately started ushering me back out of the small makeshift room.

  “Wait,” I said quickly. “I’ll see myself out. But can I just give you this?” I pulled out a business card with shaking fingers and extended it toward him. “I’m Violet. I do marketing for all kinds of businesses, and—-”

  Peter looked at the card like I’d just handed him a used tissue. Without caring to see if it landed safely, he tossed it on a nearby chair. “If my career ever spirals so far down that I have to consider hiring a marketing consultant who ambushed me at a book fair, you’ll be the first on my mind. Until then, if you’ll excuse me.” Peter walked right past me without so much as another glance.

  He even had the nerve to leave a trail of whatever cologne he wore drifting behind him. Asshole. He may have smelled like a passionate, uninhibited sexual encounter between silken sheets, but he was an asshole of the highest order. Who cared if those perfectly crafted white teeth of his conjured up images of our naked bodies tangled together while he bit my shoulder and made me gasp with mingled pain and pleasure. I certainly didn’t care about any of that.

  Once he was gone from the small room, my brain was able to clear, at least somewhat.

  Jesus Christ. It had admittedly been a while since I’d gotten any action, but the way my body was reacting to him was completely out of character. I had never been the lustful type, not even when I was with Dawson.

  Unfortunately, I was stubborn. I always had been. So if Peter Barnidge had really wanted me to give up, he should’ve politely said no. Insulting me and dismissing me had lit a fire I could already feel was going to grow into an out of control blaze. I was going to prove him wrong, no matter what it took, and it probably had nothing to do with the way he looked. Probably.