36. Adrian

Chapter 36

Adrian

T he moment the forwarded email landed in my inbox, all I could see was red.

It was forwarded from David's email address, but the note in the text body made it absolutely clear that he wasn't the one who decided to show me them.

Told you it wasn't me.

—Ava

I'd fucked up. I well and truly understood that. And although I wanted to grovel at her feet and apologize, I needed to focus on finding the person who had done this. Every image was too personal, too close to home, too sneaky to have been someone I knew trailing me.

And they went back to the first night.

This had to have been going on for longer than I'd had this secret.

With Michael's help, I hired a private investigator. Michael handled the majority of the communication except when it came to the email specifically—I couldn't stomach him seeing them, nor would I want another person violating our privacy like that. I didn't even want to imagine how she felt knowing these had been sent to her father.

In the week that passed, I kept myself from reaching out to her and kept my head down at work. I managed to focus for once, only because I had to, only because I knew that if I didn't, more questions would be raised sooner than later.

I spent more time with Lucas. I took him to the park, took him to the museum, took him anywhere he wanted to go. I let him skip school on the day I decided to work from home. I watched his basketball practice, I picked him up from school—and although it was likely far too hopeful on my end, I hadn't expected him to ask about her.

He asked me why Ava hadn't been around lately. He asked where she was and if she was okay. He asked if she could come over for dinner soon. He asked if we were still dating.

I didn't know how to answer a single one of his questions.

Lying was against our code, and yet I found myself lying every way I knew how to get him to stop bringing her up. Every time, it hurt me twice over—once for having to speak about her, and once for breaking a promise I had with Lucas. I'd tried navigating the conversation away from her, but his curiosity about her was too intense, too headstrong.

It only made me miss her more.

But as I sat there with him on the sofa, his exhausted little frame leaned up against me with a blanket over him, half asleep as we watched our favorite show, my cell phone rang.

As quickly as I could without jostling Lucas, I slipped it from the pocket of my pajama bottoms. Lucas stirred slightly, but his little snore cut through a second later as I read the name on my screen.

The private investigator.

"Hey," I said quietly into the phone. "Can you call me back in ten minutes? My son's zonked out on my lap."

"I know who sent the photos," Shaun said.

"Fuck," I breathed. "Okay."

"Dad, that's a bad word," Lucas grumbled sleepily, turning over in my lap. "You're not supposed to say that."

"I'm sorry, give me one moment," I said into the phone, being met with an exaggerated huff in response. I tucked the phone into my neck and spoke directly to Luc as I slowly slid out from under him. "I have to take a call, bud. I'll be right back."

"But our show," he groaned, his half-lidded, sleepy eyes looking directly up at me. He wasn't even watching it, but it broke my heart regardless.

"I know," I sighed. Leaning down over him, I pressed a kiss to his forehead. "It's really important. I'll be back before you know it."

I didn't wait for his protest. I took the stairs two at a time as I sprinted up to the studio, my heart pounding far too quickly, far too erratically. I shut the door behind me, locking it for good measure, and stared down the piano as I raised the phone to my ear again.

"Okay, go."

Shaun cleared his throat. "Right, as I was saying, Mr. Stone," he started, attitude thick in his voice. "The PI who was hired to trail you and take these is fuckin' sloppy. I won't bore you with the details, but once I was able to get into his files, it was fairly obvious."

"Is that…legal?" I asked.

I could hear the shrug in his voice. "His files weren't protected."

"That's not an answer…"

"The man who hired him is someone named Andrew O'Shaughnessy. I looked him up and it seems he's a member of the board at Stone & Co Global. I assume you know who he is."

A chill ran down my spine as my breath caught.

Andrew.

Of fucking course it was Andrew.

"I'll take your silence as a yes," Shaun continued. "From what I could gather, it looks like he was trying to dig up some kind of scandal he could present to the rest of the board. That's just from the emails he sent to this guy. I'll forward it all on to you."

Thank God I hadn't stayed on the couch with Lucas.

The temptation to smash my fist into the wall was so strong I had to physically hold my arm back by cupping it in my elbow, and although I hadn't consciously decided to move, I found myself in front of the sliding glass door that led out onto the pool deck.

"Thank you," I said as calmly as I could muster.

I hung up.

I stepped out onto the heated balcony flooring, shutting the door behind me, the below-freezing winds battering me from all angles at this height. But I didn't care.

I took a long, deep breath in.

And I screamed.

————

Surprising everyone but me, Andrew himself called for a board meeting the following morning.

Having signed over the authority for the private investigator to search Stone & Co's data, I'd been dropped with more information overnight. I'd spent the three hours I'd had between waking and arriving in my office putting everything together into a perfect package, combing through each email Shaun had found, and compiling it.

I waited until the scheduled start time to leave my desk and make my way down the hall. There wasn't a single part of me that wanted to be the first in the room—in fact, I was hoping to be the last, and as I pushed the door open, I found everyone had taken their seat around the table except Andrew. He stood at the front of the room. His laptop sat atop the podium, a cable poised to be plugged in.

"You're late," he said. "Fitting."

"Is it?" I plucked a mint from the bowl in the center of the table and popped it into my mouth. "Why?"

His desktop screen projected onto the wall behind him as he plugged the laptop in. "Because you might want to just keep standing for this. I have a feeling you'll walk out," he chuckled. I laughed right alongside him, and he leveled his gaze at me, his brows furrowing in slight confusion.

"Ah," I said around a mouthful of mint. "You going to show them all the photos your PI took of me fucking my girlfriend?"

His pale, freckled face turned ghostly white in an instant, his glasses just slightly too far down his nose.

"You know that's illegal, right?" I continued, shoving my hands into my pockets to keep from punching him square in the center of his jaw. "Especially the one on the boat. You pull that up right now and I can hit you with a revenge porn charge."

I could feel eyes on me from around the table, but I didn't care enough to look.

"So greedy," I chuckled. "Just couldn't keep yourself from sending them to her father the moment you had them, huh? If you'd have just waited…"

"Adrian, …"

"No, no, me first." I grinned at him wide enough to show him the mint between my teeth. "That was disgusting, you know that? Her dad had to look at that. Had to see his kid like that. Did I mention she's pregnant? That was a lovely bit of stress to put on a goddamn pregnant woman."

His throat worked as he ground his teeth. "I didn't know that."

"Unsurprising."

"Andrew, you had photos taken of Adrian's girlfriend? What on earth possessed you…"

"Shut the fuck up, Vicky," he snapped, ripping the cable out of his laptop so hard that the podium shook beneath it.

"Aw, no." I offered him a fake pout. "I thought you'd at least show us your emails to the ticketing agency telling them to rebook the same tickets for that conference upstate. What was it you said? We've reached out privately and given refunds to those affected, please open those tickets up for purchase again."

Silence. Utter, ringing silence descended over everyone, the only sound that of Andrew's breaths as he tried to steady them. "I have no idea what you're talking about."

I clicked my tongue as I set my laptop bag on the table. "I've got them all on my computer if you'd like me to show you."

"Is that true?" Vince, one of the quieter board members who really only spoke up if someone directly acknowledged him, asked.

"No," Andrew scoffed.

"Yep," I said. Slipping my laptop out and propping it open on the table, I pulled up the emails Shaun had forwarded me under Andrew's glare. A soft squeaking sounded out as I slid the computer along the table toward Vince, the little rubber bits scratching on the wood surface. "See for yourself."

I looked across the room at Andrew, watching as the paleness of his face turned rapidly to blotchy red spotting across his cheeks. I winked at him.

"If you really want to dig in deep," I added, leaning down toward Vince but keeping my gaze locked on Andrew, "I can tell you that he's had PIs trailing all of you, not just me. I'm a good enough person that I haven't looked at those images, but I'll bet he…"

"I resign." Andrew shut his laptop with a resounding clack.

I snorted. "Just like that?"

"Don't talk to me, Adrian," he snapped, shoving the cable into his back.

"Oh, come on," I goaded. "You can't be that easy to break."

Before I could get another word out, he stepped through the door, slamming it behind him.