Page 10 of Deadly Little Scandals
Campbell had a flair for the dramatic and a gift for holding people at arm’s length, but I could hear the vulnerability buried in her couldn’t-care-less tone.
I gave her honesty, tit for tat. “I’m sick of keeping secrets, haven’t spoken to my mom in a month, and am getting really tired of people asking me if I’m going to college in the fall.”
“Are you going to college in the fall?” Campbell asked innocently.
“I don’t know,” I shot back. “Are you starting to regret what we did to your father?”
There was a beat of silence. “I don’t believe in regrets.” Campbell stretched lazily, like a cat, and then stood. “If you want to hear someone mope about the consequences of Daddy’s arrest and the journalistic feeding frenzy that followed, I suggest you get on Walker’s calendar.”
I studied her for a moment. “Was the attempted takeover of your grandfather’s company one of those consequences?”
“Do I look like someone who has the inside track on the family businesses?” Campbell asked me. She didn’t—and that was the point.
“Spoken like a girl who has a love-hate relationship with being underestimated,” I said.
That won me a small, slow, genuine smile—and an answer. “There’s blood in the water. The sharks are circling—socially, financially,whatever. They think we’re weak. But don’t worry your pretty little face about it, Sawyer. Our grandfather is tougher than that. He can handle the sharks.”
She’d saidour.
I swallowed. “Campbell?” I was going to regret this, but once I’d started the ball rolling down the hill, I couldn’t stop. “There’s something I have to tell you.”
Whatever reaction I’d been expecting, I didn’t get it. Campbell just tossed her damp auburn hair over one shoulder. “So Daddy impregnated adifferentteenager, and I can stop wondering how you and I could possibly share even a quarter of our DNA.”
“You can’t tell Walker,” I said. “He’ll tell Lily.”
“And why,” Campbell asked me coyly, “don’t you want dear Lily to know?”
I’d told her who my father wasn’t—not who he was and not about the pact.
“Please.”
Campbell let the seconds tick by. “I have to admit,” she said finally, “I am flattered that you chose to confide in me.”
That was as close to a promise to keep my secret as I was going to get. “Side note,” I told her, now that I could. “The company that just attempted a takeover of your grandfather’s? The man who runs it has the same last name as that teenage girl your dad knocked up.”
“Payback?” Campbell arched an eyebrow.
“I don’t know.” It was a relief to speak openly, no pretending. “But I’d like to find out. Find her.”
I expected Campbell to ask me whyIwanted to find Ana, but instead, she assented. “Yes,” she said, “I suppose there’s nothing left to do at this point besides attempting to identify and locate my actual half-sibling and doingsomethingabout that hair.”
“What hair?” I said.“Ouch!”
I batted Campbell’s hand away from my face in an attempt to keep her from trying to detangle my hair a second time. “There’s nothing wrong with my hair.”
“Keep telling yourself that.” Campbell turned her back on the water and pushed past me, striding toward the ramp that connected the dock to the shore. “And keep up.”
If there was one thing I’d had in plentiful supply in recent months, it was makeovers. I’d been poked, prodded, plucked, waxed, exfoliated, moisturized, buffed, highlighted, and conditioned within an inch of my life. Not to mention the makeup and the clothes.
But, as Campbell had just so pleasantly informed me, I didn’t have a choice. She knew my secret, and she wasn’t above a little blackmail. The fact that I’d known that about her and chosen her as the person to confide in deeply suggested that there was something wrong with me.
Either that, or some self-sabotaging part of me was hoping my secret wouldn’t stay a secret for long.
“I’d tell you to keep your voice down inside,” Campbell said as she opened the back door to her lake house. “But we could probably do some kind of ritualistic animal sacrifice in the living room and still not merit my mama’s attention.”
I didn’t know Charlotte Ames all that well, but my impression had always been that Campbell’s mother was closer to Aunt Olivia’s end of the maternal spectrum than my mom’s. Hovering was a way of life, holding one’s daughter to impossibly high standards was practically their religion, and acting the part of the perfect hostess was a darn near spiritual calling.
Over the muted sound of a television some distance away, I heard what could only be described as a belch.
