Strange Secrets Read online

“I have a few ideas,” I offered, and she nodded.

  “I’m glad to hear it,” she replied. “But first, I want you on regular beat. News, NIBs, stuff like that. Get a feel for your style and where you’ll be best suited.”

  “Of course,” I agreed at once. “Anything you want—”

  “Talk to Gerard in the tech department, he’ll get you set up with a profile on the computers,” she continued. “I send out a list of articles each morning, and people claim them throughout the day for either the website or the print release. It’s quite self-explanatory; I’m sure you don’t need me to go into it much more than that.”

  “Yeah, I’m sure I’ll be able to work it out!” I replied. My voice still sounded a little tense. How was I meant to stop that? I wasn’t sure how I was supposed to keep myself under control right now, not when everything felt as though it was piling on at once. I knew that I was going to have to work hard to handle myself right now—everything could grow too much way too quickly if I wasn’t careful, and I didn’t want to fuck up what I had just walked into.

  “I’m glad to hear it,” she replied. “I won’t always be around the office, but if you have questions, most of the other staff will probably be equipped to help you with them. Right now, we need someone to cover a town meeting last night—we have the notes from another one of our reporters, but you’ll need to transcribe and come up with an angle. You think you can manage that?”

  “Yeah, for sure,” I replied at once. I got the feeling that this wasn’t a woman who took too well to being told that what she was asking for wasn’t possible.

  “Glad to hear it,” she replied. “Check your company email. They’ll be waiting for you.”

  She glanced at her watch. “Anyway, I have a meeting to go to,” she finished up. “Good to meet you. I look forward to seeing your work soon.”

  And with that, she had chased me back out of the office and into the bustling workroom so that she could get back down to business. Nathan waved at me, and I smiled back, scanning the space in front of me as I tried to place some of the faces that I had met in the interview process, and some that I had snooped on through the website. I knew that not everyone was going to be friendly, but I could handle that—I just had to keep my head down and get to work. All they wanted from me was someone who could do their job, and I intended to prove to them that I was the best new hire they’d ever had. Nobody was going to have a chance to doubt me—not even me, and that was saying something, given the insecurity that I could be prone to—the insecurity that I tried my best to paper over with all the cockiness that I could muster.

  I glanced around to find the one empty desk that I assumed was mine and sank down into the slightly hard chair in front of me. I couldn’t keep the smile off my face. Today was going to be tough, no doubt about it, and I was sure that it wouldn’t be the only hard day that I had working in a place like this. But right now, all that I cared about was having finally gotten my foot through the door. I was in. And nobody was ever going to be able to take that away from me.

  Next up? I had to find a story that was worthy of a paper like Kingston Press. Something scandalous, something intriguing, something that would flip the way people in this town thought of themselves and the people around them upside down. And I was sure that I already had the most perfect place to start.

  Chapter Three

  Jesse

  AS I STROLLED INTO the Rosewater, I felt all eyes turn to greet me. Just the same way they always did.

  I took my usual spot at the bar—right at the end, farthest from the door, so I could see who was coming in and out. Force of habit, I supposed, after so long having to watch my back. I ordered a drink from the barmaid, Julie, and she fluttered her lashes at me and tried to chat as she served me.

  “Good to see you back here again,” she remarked, tucking a strand of hair behind her ear. “I feel like it’s been way too long since we saw you...”

  “I’m sure you’ll survive,” I replied as politely as I could as she pushed the drink across the table towards me. I grabbed it and took a long sip—scotch on the rocks, with a drop of water to help it bloom, just the way I liked it. Damn, that made everything a little easier to handle.

  As soon as Julie had backed off, I paused for a moment to look around the room and take in everyone who had turned out this evening—Kingston was a small enough place that I recognized the majority of the people here, even if I might not have known all of their names. And I knew for sure that they all knew who I was.

  In the six years since I had moved here, I had made quite a name for myself. Most of the people who lived here had families that went back generations upon generations, but I was new, rolling into town with my teenage brother at my side and more money than I knew what to do with. I’d invested some of it, and it just continued to grow, until I had more than I would ever need to live on for the rest of my life.

  Which was just the way I liked it. I didn’t want to have to work for anyone else ever again. I was my own man now, and nothing was going to change that—I ran my life, and nobody else got a say in what I chose to do with it. Long may it remain that way.

  I could sense a few of the husbands out with their wives glaring at me as I sat there at the bar, sipping on my drink. I had to contain a small smirk at the thought of it—I didn’t exactly blame them, that was for sure. I knew better than to pretend that I wasn’t a source of attention for the ladies that they had married, even if I would never have done anything about it. That was way too much like trouble for my liking, and I had better things to do than waste my time with that right now.

  I caught the eye of one of the housewives out for her weekly dinner date with her husband—an older woman with a mane of raven-black hair and bright blue eyes. She fluttered her lashes at me pointedly, and her husband turned to look over his shoulder and see what had caught her attention. I glanced away at once, lifting the drink to my lips so that I could disguise my smirk. I knew that I shouldn’t have enjoyed it as much as I did, but it was hard not to feel a little cocky that I was the source of so much flirtation from women who should have known better.

  But then, it wasn’t like coming to the Rosewater was exactly low-key. My brother, Luke, had managed this place for a couple of years now, and he had elevated it from this kitschy, old-school place into the main thoroughfare for diners in the entire town. There had been a major re-decoration last year, the place shimmering with a deep gold light that warmed the deep brown of the wood of the bar and the tables. It looked great, and I knew that my brother had every right to be proud of what he had achieved here.

  Though I knew just as clearly that he had a hard time admitting that he should be proud of it, too. Even though he had worked his ass off to prove himself here, he always put himself down, talked about himself like he was nothing more than a lucky guy who happened to come from a rich family, and that was the end of it. No matter how many times I reminded him just how hard he had worked for this, he would always brush it off, find some excuse to explain it away.

  Sometimes, I wondered if I had given him a complex, bringing him out here so that the two of us could hide from the life I’d had before. He had always been a neurotic kid, though he had grown out of the worst of it as he’d gotten into his twenties—was this just a hangover from that? This sureness that he was going to lose everything that he had worked so hard to achieve in the first place? I wanted to tell him that he had nothing to worry about, but that would have been a lie—he knew as well as I did that there was always a chance that this shit could catch up with me, no matter how much space I tried to put between myself and it.

  Six years. More than half a decade. That was what I had to keep reminding myself. Enough time had passed now that I didn’t need to connect with the person I had been back then. He felt different than the man I was now, as though he couldn’t possibly link with who I had become. That man was as far removed from me as it was possible to be. Nobody else recalled him, so why should I spend my time wor
rying about him coming back to bite me in the ass?

  I sipped on my drink and took in the quiet ambience of the place, trying to ignore Julie as she attempted to flirt with me across the bar. She was cute, in a way, but she had only started this routine once she had found out the amount of cash that I was packing, and I didn’t have much interest in engaging with someone who was that materialistic.

  Besides, it wasn’t like I had been looking for people to date since I had arrived here. When I moved to Kingston, I had been too nervous to let anyone get close to me, and I supposed that it had become habit more than anything else—people saw me as distant, and that worked just fine for me. Let them keep their distance. I wasn’t sure if I could handle letting someone into my life, not after everything that I had been through.

  Finally, Luke emerged from the kitchen—a perfectionist at the best of times, he had likely spent the last half-hour trying to make sure that a dish went out looking perfect, even though he knew what really mattered was the taste of the thing. Pushing his glasses up his nose, he made his way toward me, and I got up to give my little brother a hug. He was a head shorter than me, wiry with muscle from running around here all the time, and just by the look on his face, I could tell that he needed a drink.

  I ordered a vodka-soda for him, and he joined me at the bar, letting out a sigh as he rested his head against the wood paneling behind him.

  “Sorry I’m late,” he replied.

  “No reason to be,” I replied. “I should have known you would be, anyway.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” he asked as he grabbed his drink and took a long sip.

  “You know that you can never drag yourself away from the kitchen,” I reminded him.

  “I guess you have a point.” He grinned and shrugged. “So what about you? How are things going with you?”

  “Same old,” I replied. “I have that interview with the Kingston Press tomorrow, though. That should be interesting.”

  “You’re sure that’s a good idea?” he replied, furrowing his brow.

  “They’ve been asking me for months now,” I pointed out. “I think it would draw more attention if I tried to keep avoiding it than if I just went ahead and did it.”

  “I guess so,” he sighed. “But...you’re not worried what they might find out?”

  I finished my drink and gestured to Julie for another before I replied.

  “They’re only going to know what I choose to tell them,” I pointed out. “Nothing to worry about there. It’s just a puff piece, anyway. I’m not worried about it.”

  “And I guess you’re telling me that I shouldn’t be, either?”

  I nodded. “Yeah, you have nothing to worry about,” I replied. “I’ll send you the article as soon as it comes out, and you can see for yourself. It’s not going to be a big deal at all.”

  “Yeah, I hope not,” he agreed, and he eyed me for a moment. He didn’t know too much about my past, apart from the bare minimum, and sometimes I was sure that it made him even more paranoid about what was going to come out. But I was sure as hell not going to go bending over backwards to share the truth with my brother. There was a reason that I had kept all of that away from him, and I intended to stick with that as long as he would let me.

  “Good,” I replied. “So tell me, how have things been going with the restaurant?”

  “Oh, same old,” he replied with a shrug. “A bunch of the wait staff have gone back to college, so we’re a little behind.”

  “And I bet you’ve been picking up all the slack,” I told him. “You need to rest too, you know...”

  “So I hear,” he replied wryly, flashing me a grin. “Not sure that I believe it, though...”

  “Yeah, you never did,” I agreed. And just like that, we had settled into our normal conversation. Luke was the only family that I had left, and I was the only family that he had left, and sometimes it was easy to lose sight of that—we had been through so much since we came here that I forgot how young he was, how little of the world he had seen outside Kingston. How much pain he was still carrying from the loss of our mother all those years ago.

  But he had made something of himself, and I was proud of that. Even though he’d had to work against the odds to do it, he had proved himself, and he had proved that he could make it out the other side of anything that the universe threw at him. He might have still doubted himself more than he should—who knew how many times I’d tried to convince him to have more confidence in himself—but eventually he would start to believe that he was worth all the effort that I had put in to getting him out of there.

  As we drank, I felt at peace—maybe it was the couple of whiskeys in my system, or maybe it was something else entirely. But this place had long-since become my home, and I felt comfortable here——in Kingston, in the Rosewater. My old life was far behind me, and I planned to keep it that way. The past was in the past. Where it belonged. But me? I was right here in the present. And I intended to enjoy every second of it.

  Chapter Four

  Sarah

  I CURSED AS I SCUTTLED off down the street, checking my watch and wondering just how much leeway Allison was going to give me.

  I couldn’t fucking believe it—my third day on the job, and I was going to be late. And not just the kind of late that could be dismissed with a smile and an apologetic shrug—the kind of late that was going to land me in trouble with the woman who I wanted to impress right now.

  It wasn’t my fault, though. I wasn’t sure if she would believe me when I told her, but it truly hadn’t been my intention to roll up so late this morning. I had left my apartment on time, hopped in the elevator so I could take a quick look over some notes—and that’s when it creaked to a halt, and I realized that nobody was coming to get me out.

  It took a full twenty minutes of me slamming on the inside of the door and yelling at the top of my lungs for someone to notice that I was actually in there, and then another ten minutes for the mechanic to get the thing moving once more—and now I was a half-hour late to work, and I knew that I was going to get in a hell of a lot of trouble for this. I had wanted this first week to be perfect, but I was sure that Allison was going to have something to say about my excuse—that living in a ratty old apartment building that hadn’t had any major renovations since the eighties had gotten me trapped in an elevator. I should have gotten a note from the mechanic or something...

  “Oh, shit!” I exclaimed as I found myself slamming straight into someone else. Oh, great, just what I needed, something else to get in my way—I tried to find my feet again, but the heel of one of my boots had skidded out from under me, and my bag had fallen off my shoulder, and a second later, I watched helplessly as the papers that I had been carrying flew all over the damp street.

  “Fuck,” I muttered. “Fuck, fuck, fuck...”

  I dropped to my knees to gather the stuff that I had just lost, not even bothering to look up and see who had done this to me. I didn’t have time for that. Besides, if I did, I knew that I was going to flip my lid, and the last thing I needed was to have to find this person and apologize later once my temper had cooled off a little.

  “I’m so sorry,” a man’s voice announced from above me. “I should have seen you there. I wasn’t looking where I was going. Here, let me help...”

  Before I could say anything, he had knelt down in front of me to try and give me a hand with the papers that had gone flying everywhere. Honestly, I was still irritated enough that I was ready to give him a piece of my mind—but when I looked up and saw who I was dealing with, all of that just seemed to slip from my mind at once.

  Because the person who I had crashed into was about the last one on Earth that I had expected to see right now. Jesse. Jesse Miller. As, in yes, the Jesse Miller, Kingston’s infamous philanthropist and general town enigma. And he was smiling at me with an apologetic look in his eyes that made something in me soften, even though I knew that I had every right to come out swinging and be mad as hell at hi
m right now.

  “Oh, uh,” I burbled. I had seen him before, of course I had, mostly when I was out with my friends and they leaned over and lowered their voices and shared all the things that they had heard about him over the years—where he had come from, where he’d gotten his money from, just who might be sharing his bed for the time being. But getting a close-up view of him like this, when I had been least expecting it, was something of a shock, and I didn’t know what to do with it.

  He was handsome, for sure—his dark, slightly overgrown hair was slicked back from his face, showing off a pair of gray-blue eyes that seemed laced through with a kindness that caught me off-guard. His smile was broad and genuine, and, even under the heavy jacket that he was wearing, I could see the width of his chest and shoulders, the strength that was barely contained by the clothes he had on.

  I realized that I was just staring at him, having almost forgotten all the papers that he had sent scattering around us, and I busied myself with collecting them. I could feel a heat to my cheeks, and I didn’t know why—I was better than this, wasn’t I? He was just a guy. A handsome one, sure, more handsome than most of the men that lived in this little town, but that didn’t mean that I was going to get tongue-tied in front of him, did it?

  “Here, I think that’s the last of them,” he told me as he grabbed the now slightly-damp papers from the ground below us, straightened them, then handed them over to me. “I’m sorry for knocking into you.”

  “It’s okay,” I replied, and I meant it. Honestly, this was the closest I had ever gotten to him, and there was something a little exciting about being so close to someone who had such an air of mystery about them.

  “You work near here?” he asked me. I knew that I should have been getting out of there, to make up some more time so that I didn’t turn up too late to my job, but I was far too flattered that he seemed willing to share his company with someone like me for that right now. I nodded.