It was impossible!
Bits of information pulled from all over his brain cascaded together and brought him the unavoidable truth. Bloom Capital had hired his company a year ago to scrub pictures of the CEO’s sister off the internet. Which made Cara…
“You’re Cara Bloom! That’s not the name you’re using.” His chest closed like a vise on his lungs.
She wrapped her arms around herself. “I’m using my mother’s name. Something… something happened last year, and I wanted to start over without that last name. That’s why I’m using Blease.”
Wes did his best to recover, to not let her see how thrown off he was. But the truth was he was reeling. Cara’s expression shuttered. She pushed to her feet, and he said nothing to stop her.
Heshouldsay something! Before she had retreated behind that blank expression, protecting herself, he’d seen the vulnerability on her face. But Wes was having trouble forming a coherent thought and could only stare at her speechless.
It couldn’t be her! Could it?
Cara was the girl in the pictures? His stomach rolled, disgust and anger at what had been done to her fighting for space with… pity.
It wasn’t the first time his company had been hired to remove a socialite’s indiscretion off the internet. This one had been memorable not because it had been difficult. It had actually been laughably easy. The sites that had been sharing the photos weren’t run by geniuses. The job had stuck with him because of how much they’d been paid to make it happen!
They hadn’t been given much information. Photos had been stolen and sold to a tabloid. The only daughter of a supermodel and a billionaire meant price was no object. The tabloid had removed the photos, but not before screenshots had been taken and disseminated across the web. His job had been to find the photos and erase them. He rubbed a hand across his mouth.
The client wanted the sites, most using revenge porn content, punished. Wes had attached viruses to his phishing attempts in order to corrupt their users. Jin and Nina had worried it would get him in trouble again, but he was careful. No one would trace it back to him.
“Wes?”
He jerked his eyes up to meet hers then slid to a spot by her ear.
“I told you it would change how you saw me?” Her voice was cold. “Who I was doesn’t change the person you know now. I knew I shouldn’t have told you.”
Cara’s words finally penetrated his brain, and he saw the rigidity of her body, her hands fisted at her sides, as she began to walk away.
Wes swiftly came to his feet, catching one of her fists. Their gaze locked for a timeless second, before he wrapped his arms around her and pulled her tightly against him. One hand rubbed between her shoulder blades until he felt the rigid muscles start to ease.
“I’m sorry,” he said against her hair, the familiar scent of honeysuckle tickling his nose. “I’m so sorry all that happened to you.”
Cara slowly brought her arms up and wrapped them around his waist, leaning into him.
“I’m sorry I worried you tonight,” she said, her voice muffled by his chest.
“My mother left me when I was six.”
Cara startled against him, and Wes clasped his arms tighter, feeling her heart gallop against his chest. He wasn’t sure why he told her—the shameful kernel at the center of his life.
Wes needed to tell her he knew about the pictures. That he knew what had happened to her–but he couldn’t.
He knew her secret, even if she didn’t know he knew.
Wes’s heart pounded, and he rested his chin on the top of her head. “You shared your secret with me. I want to tell you mine.”
She stilled. Wes didn’t know what to say to make her feel better about what had happened with her father, her brothers or even the stepmother still causing havoc in her life. Heneverknew the right words. But in this moment, with the darkness outside and Cara in his arms, he wanted her to know everything.
“She was fifteen when she had me. My grandparents were evangelical Christians in a small Georgia town. They were devastated that their teenage daughter had sinned, and now everyone would know. They wanted her to give me up, and she refused. At least that’s what she said. She couldn’t stay in their house though, and she moved in with the first of a series of boyfriends.”
Wes exhaled a slow breath. It was an old story, most of which he only remembered through fragments of memory mixed with what his grandparents had told him later. “None of them were good guys. She was an addict.”
Cara didn’t need to hear about the bruises on his mother’s tiny body—the tears and hiding under a bed in a stranger’s trailer.
Cara stiffened and started to pull back. He knew she would say something sweet to try to make him feel better, but he needed to get the words out. Holding her, he wasn’t afraid. Wes resumed the slow rub, up and down her back, as much to comfort him as her.
“Sometimes my grandparents would let her stay when it got really bad. They wanted to see me, so I was her leverage. She loved me, but she couldn’t even take care of herself. I don’t have a lot of clear memories of her, but I do remember her watching Star Trek. My grandparents later told me it was her favorite show—that she’d named me Wesley after one of the characters. I started watching it as a way to feel close to her.” Wes heard Cara’s slight, dismayed gasp. Even Melody didn’t know that.
