Blackmailing My Playboy Ex

Everyone in oldmoney Los Angeles knew the same thing about me: I was the wife you could step on. So when Mrs.

Vandermeer slid the photograph across the card table, she was already smiling. "I had a photographer pull it just for you, darling." She tapped the ash off her cigarette. "Call it even for what I dropped at the table tonight." It was Julian.

At the races, in a suit worth more than a car, his head tipped down while another woman kissed him like she already owned him. She wasn't even the newest one.

Five years married to Julian Beaumont, and I was famous for exactly one thing: cleaning up after him. Every affair. Every photo. Every whisper.

Every woman at that table waited for me to do what I always did. Take the photo. Slip it into my bag. Smooth it over by morning and keep the marriage looking like a marriage.

They placed quiet bets on how long I'd keep doing it.

I slid it back to her instead. "It's a good shot," I said. "It should run on the front page." Chapter 1 The woman in the photo was beautiful in the obvious way.

Long legs, a dress that cost more than most people's cars, the kind of face Julian collected and discarded by the season. It had been taken at the Crestfield track. Box seats.

Julian in a suit, looking bored and expensive while she draped herself over him and he let her. At the table, the photo made the rounds.

The other wives lit up. "Isn't that Bianca Monroe?" one of them said. "The actress?" "The maneater," another corrected. "Every man she's been seen with had nine figures.

She doesn't miss." Juliet Hawthorne didn't bother lowering her voice. "She went after my brother once, you know." She examined her nails. "Everett had hotel security walk her out before she finished her pitch.

Now she's circling Julian." A shrug. "Some women just need a rich man to feel real." Mrs. Vandermeer turned to me, all false concern. "She's not in it for the gifts, sweetheart.

Girls like that come for the title. I'd watch my back, if I were you." I smiled and said nothing. Julian moved through women like weather.

There weren't enough hours in the day to guard against all of them, and I'd stopped trying a long time ago. I sent Juliet home in my car first.

She spent the whole ride furious on my behalf. "Vandermeer's still bitter her niece never landed your husband. That's why she does this.

Drags out those photos every time, like she's doing you a favor." She huffed. "But you. Today you actually pushed back. I almost fell out of my chair." I'd known Juliet for years.

Her mouth ran faster than her brain, and she'd never once bothered to hide what she was thinking. It was all right there on her face.

She'd been angry for me longer than I'd been angry for myself. "What kind of life is this?" she said, quieter now. "You're not even upset anymore. That's the part that kills me.

If I were you, I'd have divorced him a hundred times over." She nudged my knee. "Forget it. Let me set you up with my brother.

Be my sisterinlaw instead." Juliet had grown up adored. Money, doting parents, a brother who'd burn the world down for her.

She didn't understand why I stayed somewhere that kept grinding me down. She asked me what I was waiting for. My coffee had gone cold in my hands.

I heard my own voice come out soft. "I'm waiting," I said, "for the snow on the hills to melt." She blinked. Then she laughed. "You're insane.

It doesn't snow here." She didn't know there'd been snow once. She didn't know what it cost, or what it meant that I was sitting here waiting for the last of it to disappear.

After I dropped her off, the car kept climbing toward home. A few hundred yards out, my driver said it without thinking. "That looks like Mr.

Beaumont's car." Then he caught himself and cleared his throat. Up ahead, in the dark, Julian's Maybach sat pulled off to the side. Engine still running.

The whole body of it trembling, faint and steady. Like a beast crouched low in the dark, breathing. Chapter 2 I told my driver to cut the engine. I didn't get out.

I sat in the dark and waited, hands folded in my lap, and watched the other car not move. It took a long time. Long enough that my fingers went cold. Then, finally, it went still.

I got out. Walked over. The rear window was fogged from the inside, the glass gone soft and white, so I couldn't see through it. I lifted my hand and knocked.

By the time the window came down, they'd made themselves decent. Mostly. Julian didn't flinch. He didn't even have the grace to look caught.

He just glanced at the woman in his lap and said, lazy as anything, "Get off.

Can't you see my wife's here?" Bianca Monroe stayed right where she was a beat longer than she had to, arms still looped around his neck. Black satin.

Lipstick smudged at one corner where he'd kissed it loose. She looked up at me through her lashes, still halfdrunk on him, and took her time sliding off his lap. Then she pouted.

At me. "Mrs. Beaumont, he's terrible," she said. "He kept saying your name on purpose. Just now." I hadn't said a word yet. Julian got there first, with a soft scoff. "Enough.

Keep it up and my wife will throw you off the hill." I looked at her. At the want in her face, the open, hungry ambition of it.

And I smiled. "Oh?" I said. "Throw her how?" A beat. "The way Everett walked her out of that hotel room?" The smile dropped off Bianca's face like something cut loose.

Inside, we sat across from each other in a living room big enough to echo.

Julian studied me, amused. "How do you know about her and Everett Hawthorne?" His head tilted. "Have you been looking into me?" I didn't answer the question.

I asked my own. "Do you really have to keep her this close?" The two of them had been all over each other out front, and the house they'd come from was his. One of his properties.

Not half a mile from the bed we were supposed to share. He raised a brow, careless. "She wanted to be near me. What was I supposed to do, bring her home?" I gave him a thin smile.

As if he'd ever once cared what it cost me to walk into a room with my chin up. I stood to go. He caught my wrist and pulled me down, into him.

His hand slid under my blouse before I could stop it, found the small constellation of needle marks scattered across my stomach, the ones from the fertility shots, and traced them like he was reading something off my skin.

His voice stayed flat. Conversational. Like we were talking about the weather. "You've turned your stomach into a pincushion, wife. All those shots.

Still nothing." A pause. "If you've got time to follow me around, you've got time to book another round of IVF." I pushed his hand off and stood. "Why would I bother?" I said. "You've got women stashed all over this city.

Plenty of them lining up to give you a baby." Something in his voice pulled tight. "Celeste.

That's enough." Then, colder: "You think you're still the girl I burned seven figures to make it snow for?" The night sat heavy over the hills. It was too quiet up there.

Quiet enough that when something inside you broke, there was no echo to catch it. Before my family fell, there'd been no shortage of men who wanted me.

Julian had simply outlasted all of them. I'd been proud then. I told him the truth. "Julian, what I want, you can't give me." I wanted to be the only one.

I wanted all of him, eyes and heart and hands. He couldn't stay faithful to save his life. What was a man like that going to give me?

He'd only laughed, unbothered. "Tell me what you want, Celeste. Say it, and it's done." The Beaumont heir was famous for it. Throwing fortunes at women like loose change.

I wanted to scare him off. So I pointed up at the cloudless July sky, at that dead summer heat, and I told him what I wanted.

Chapter 3 "Fine," I said. "I want it to snow on the hills." Seven days later, it did.

A warm summer night, the kind that sits on your skin, and snow came down over the Hollywood Hills like something out of a dream that didn't belong to this city.

It drifted across the basin, dusted the dome of the Griffith Observatory, and settled somewhere deep inside me. I found out later what it cost. A top engineering crew.

Five industrial snow machines flown in from Norway. Liquidnitrogen coolers. Environmental fines he paid without blinking.

The whole thing ran to the better part of ten million dollars. They said every flake that fell on the hills that night cost him about a hundred dollars.

Julian bought the front page of every paper in the city. He ran one line. Snow on the hills. Once in a lifetime. After we married, a lot happened between us. Good and bad.

Tender and cruel. But I held onto that night for a long time. Long enough that none of the damage that came later ever quite buried it. After the snow, I let him have me.

Two years of breaking apart and circling back. Love like an illness that wouldn't clear. Then one cold stretch where neither of us called, and I stopped waiting for him to.

That was when my family fell. My father ran our money into the ground. We owed everyone. Overnight I went from heiress to the city's favorite punchline. The bankrupt socialite.

One day he drove me out to see an old family friend, a man who'd just thrown himself a lavish sixtiethbirthday party. My father said we were going to ask for a loan.

But the whole way there, he kept coaching me. How to charm the man. How to sit, how to smile.

At one point he mentioned, light as anything, that I looked a little like the man's late wife.

The wrongness of it crawled up my spine. "Dad, stop the car." My voice climbed. "I'm not going. Take me home. I want to go home.

I'm not doing this." He braked two hundred yards from the gates. It was March, and a thick fog had rolled in low over the city. I got out and started walking back.

My father came after me and dropped to his knees in the middle of the road, in all that fog, tears streaking his face. Begging me to do this one thing. "I'm sorry, baby. I am.

But I've got nothing left. The banks are calling every single day." His voice cracked. "You just have to say yes to him. Be his.

The debt clears overnight, and we all get a second chance." My legs went weak. "Dad, I'm your daughter." The words came out wet. "I'm not a thing you sell to cover what you owe." He grabbed my hands. "They're going to take all of it.

The house, everything. Do you want to stand there and watch them haul your father off with nothing left? Watch this whole family go under?" My tears broke loose.

I made my hands into fists. And I turned myself back around, toward those gates. I thought, right then, that my whole world was about to come apart in that fog.

Then a Bugatti came screaming up the road behind me. It tore through the mist and stopped hard at my side. Julian climbed out like something the night had conjured.

He looked at me, steady. "Celeste. Nod right now, and I'll marry you tomorrow." Maybe it was the fog.

It blurred whatever was in his eyes, the truth and the resolve and the doubt, until none of it reached me. I was past caring.

Through the blur of tears, I nodded, fast, over and over. He didn't have a ring in his hand. He had a way out, for me and for what was left of my family. That was five years ago.

Last night I knocked on a foggedup car window and found him with her.

This morning the photo from the races ran after all, the one I'd slid back across the table and told Vandermeer to put on the front page. The whole city woke up to the headline.

Chapter 4 EXCLUSIVE: The Fairy Tale's Over. Beaumont Heir Caught Devouring a Starlet While His Wife Waits at Home. I read the whole thing.

Then I picked the check up off the nightstand. Julian had left it there before he went out, the way he always did.

Every time there was a new woman, a check turned up at home, just enough to cover a quarter's interest on my family's debt. Add this one to the rest, and it was finally enough.

Enough to clear what my family owed. Enough, too, to settle what I owed them for raising me. The snow on the hills had finally melted.

Forty floors up, in the corner office at Beaumont Group, the whole wall was glass, and the Pacific ran out flat and bright to the edge of the world.

Garrett Pierce dropped the tabloid on the table. "You could at least be discreet. Leave her a little dignity." He paused. "Corner an animal long enough and it bites.

You're not worried she files one day?" Julian sat with one leg crossed over the other and didn't so much as frown.

He glanced at the headline, and his mouth curled, bored. "Divorce?" he said. "She won't." The Beaumont fortune had been locked in a trust for years.

His mother had made Celeste sign a prenup before the wedding. Walk away, and she walked away with nothing. Not a cent.

Even if she could stomach giving up the name, her own family would haul her back into line. They needed him too much. That was the whole arrangement.

It was why he'd never had to watch himself. However loud he played it out there, she had no ground to stand on. She swallowed it, every time. This would be no different.

Garrett shrugged, unconvinced. "She's a beautiful woman.

Prenup or not, she could land someone else in this circle." Julian flicked ash off his cigarette and smiled, cold. "And who in this city would dare take what's mine?" The words were barely out when a knock came at the door.

His assistant stepped in and held out a document, careful. "Mr. Beaumont. This came from the family court." His fingers jerked.

The lit end of the cigarette grazed the back of his hand and left a small red welt. He didn't feel it.

Garrett watched him open the file, and the grin spread slow across his face. "Well," he said. "Looks like your rabbit finally bit." Julian didn't answer.

He frowned and told him to get out, and Garrett gathered his jacket and left in no particular hurry, still smiling. The door clicked shut. Julian crushed the cigarette out.

He sat there and looked at the petition. The word divorce in plain black type, her name printed underneath it. She wasn't his first affair.

She wasn't the first time the cameras had caught him. He had no idea what had gotten into her. He sat through the most important meeting of his quarter and didn't hear a word of it.

The moment it ended, he drove up to the house on the hill. The housekeeper told him Celeste had left that morning and hadn't come back. So he called her.

The line connected, and his voice came out low. "Where are you?" Chapter 5