Not like this.
Not in a wig and red lips, all slender and seductive and sultry with beautiful false green eyes and an accent and walk that made him weak at the knees. The sixteen-year-old Katarina who reported him to the Whistler police, who accused him and his friends of gang rape, was a fat-ass, pimply-faced, desperate little slut of a schoolgirl. A fangirl who, according to other students at her school, had a poster of him on the inside of her locker.
Shewantedto spread her legs for him. And for half the ski team.
Jon’s cauldron of emotions sharpens to a white-hot rage.Shedid this. She spiked his drink, lured him up into that high-rise apartment,cuffed him, brought other men into the apartment, took compromising photos that she delivered to TerraWest.
How did she know about the PI?
I told her. When she was Mia. In the piano lounge—I told her I’d hired a PI to find dirt on a colleague named Ahmed Waheed.
Where had she gotten the contract he signed with Jake Preston?
I am your maid.And it strikes Jon hard—he has a copy of the contract in his home computer. Did Katarina get into that? She’s been inside their house for months. Snooping around. What else has she gotten into? She’s been Daisy’s fake friend since July. What secrets has Daisy let slip?
I’m betting Daisy has not told you about the “insurance” she keeps.
It will send you to prison, JonJon. Mark my words. There is no statute of limitations for what is contained in that “insurance.” It will destroy you. The Wentworths, too.
Jon steps over the threshold and follows his wife and his devil nemesis into the house of glass and flickering candles.
Katarina leads him and Daisy into a white living room. Beyond the glass sliding doors, he sees the greenish glow of a lit infinity pool. The surface ripples with rain and wind. A few dead leaves float on top. Fog hides the ocean that lies beyond the pool, and Jon hears the mournful moan of a foghorn coming from a hidden tanker.
He feels spacey. Disoriented. Still sick with a hangover from being drugged three nights earlier. He’s struggling to assimilate what Katarina has done to them. She must have followed him—or had him followed—from work this morning to the park. He was not able to go home and tell Daisy he’d been fired. Instead, he drove to a liquor store and bought a fifth of whisky. He walked with his drink to a bench under a large chestnut tree in the park near the beach, and he sat there, his briefcase on the bench beside him, sipping from the bottle hidden inside a brown paper bag.
A homeless drunk seated himself beside Jon with a brown bag of his own. The reeking loser actually offered Jon a sip, like they were two of a kind. Disgusted, Jon got up and moved to another bench. He sat there alone, drinking, watching the rain and the mist over the sea until it was time to go home to Rose Cottage.
When he arrived home he was unable to confess to Daisy what had happened at work. It still doesn’t feel real. Everything is twisted and upside down, he thinks as he watches Satan in her tiny top and short skirt with her red tail and horns. How could this blonde maid even look like Mia? Or sound like her? Or walk like her. At the same time he can also see it is her. But he can’t seem to discern the old, plump, teenage Katarina buried in this woman.
“Sit,” the maid says, holding her hand out to the white sofa.
Neither Jon nor Daisy sits.
“I’d listen if I were you.” Her voice turns crisp, cool, all business.
Slowly, they both take a seat, staying at the edge of the cushions. Jon can feel Daisy glancing at him. He can feel Daisy’s questions about “Mia,” about a threesome including males. He recalls the burn around his butthole. The tiny puncture mark in the crook of his arm. He’s going to throw up.
“You can call me Kat,” the devil maid says as she pours drinks into glasses in front of them. “A chilled sparkling rosé for the lady,” she says as she fills the wineglass in front of Daisy. “I know how much you need it. And for you, Jon, a Balvenie Caribbean cask fourteen-year-old.” She reaches for the whisky bottle and pours. She hands the glass to Jon with a dark smile. “I know how much you like the Balvenie, Jon.” Her smile deepens. It makes her vampire eyeteeth seem to grow.
“Kat” seats herself in a chair across from them. She sips her own drink. It appears to be a vodka martini with olives.
“Full disclosure,” she says as she sets her glass carefully on a small table at her side. “I only became Mia after I saw what Daisy had locked in her safe. It really was a point of no return, seeing that recordedfootage—thatproof—of what happened that night at the ski lodge party. Along with two nondisclosure documents, one of which will scuttle the Wentworth reputation.” She shrugs. “Maybe it’ll even drag Annabelle Wentworth into court, because to my mind, it adds up to obstruction of justice.”
“Whatproof?” Jon snaps. He turns to his wife. “What is she talking about, Daisy?”
“Who’s Mia, Jon?” Daisy’s voice is low and eerily calm. It scares him. Her complexion is going redder—two violent hot spots forming high on her cheekbones. Her blood pressure is rising, and Jon is peripherally concerned for the baby but a hell of a lot more worried by what’s coming down the pike from this Kat woman.
Daisy turns to Kat. “What do you mean, this will drag my mother into court?”
Kat crosses her stockinged legs and leans back in her chair. She reaches for her martini glass, takes another slow sip of her drink. “It seems as though you two need to process a few things. Daisy, your husband was fired this morning. He was caught stealing personnel information from TerraWest’s HR database and hiring a PI to dig up dirt on a colleague named Ahmed Waheed. The information Jon provided the PI stipulated that the PI dig for leverage around Ahmed Waheed’s race and religious affiliation. Your husband was also photographed naked with a woman named Mia and two unidentified males.” She sips again, leans forward, and puts her martini glass down.
“Jon, your wife has a phone recording of what happened in the ski lodge in Whistler when you were nineteen. It shows you spiking a sixteen-year-old girl’s drink and laughing about it with fellow team members. It shows you giving the drink to the girl, who was so excited just to meet you that night. It shows her passing out, and you and a group of guys helping this drugged girl stumble upstairs and into a bedroom. It shows you taking off her jeans, spreading her legs, and raping herwhile others cheered you on.” Kat pauses. Her gaze lasers into Jon’s. “I guess that’s why you and your friends call the drug the ‘leg spreader.’”
He swallows. He’s going so hot, so dizzy, he thinks he will faint. Jon’s gaze shoots to Daisy. “Where’d you get a recording like that? Why in the hell would you keep something like that?”
Daisy refuses to look at him. Her gaze remains riveted on the maid.
“And, Daisy,” Kat says, “I don’t suppose you told your husband how you tried to threaten and gaslight Charley Waters into getting rid of Jon’s baby? And how, when that didn’t work, you paid her a huge sum of money to kill the baby? What was it again, five hundred thousand dollars? All hers as long as she went through with the abortion, signed a gag order, and retracted her allegations of sexual assault against Jon. You in turn would ensure all stalking charges against her were dropped.”
