Tara Taylor Quinn - Her Secret Life

Or rather, he’d grown up too quickly and struggled to maintain homeostasis with a mind that didn’t quit and demons that wouldn’t let go.

“Hey, bro, not much. What’s up with you?”

He’d already glanced at his watch. “Just finished with a job. Why aren’t you in class?” Should be trigonometry. He knew Willie’s schedule down to the second.

“Yeah, well, there was a bit of a situation, bro. I was hoping maybe you could head Mom and Dad off at the pass?”

Shrugging out of his suit coat, Mike threw it on the backseat of his black BMW. “Where are you?”

“Right now?”

“Yeah, right now.” In the driver’s seat, he loosened his tie, started the car and waited for the factory-installed phone system to pick up the call.

“Right now I’m in the john.”

“What john? Where?”

“I’m at the beach, Mike. But I didn’t cut school to come here.”

“No? You just thought you had a vacation day today?”

“No.” The succinct answer, the change of tone, was a signal of its own. Turning the BMW toward the freeway heading north to Santa Raquel, Mike focused his thoughts. First things first.

“You were suspended again.”

“Yeah.”

“What for this time?”

“I told my teacher to go fuck himself.” Willie knew better than to lie to Mike. He’d give whoppers to everyone else—including their parents and school officials—but he never lied to Mike.

He always called him, too. Just not soon enough.

“Why did you do that?”

“I aced a test. He said I cheated and gave me a zero. I fail the class, I don’t graduate.”

“Did you cheat?” It wouldn’t be the first time.

“No. It was biology. I like that class.”

Though the Valentines didn’t raise any stupid kids, Willie was by far the one with the highest IQ.

“So why’d he think you cheated?” Pedal to the metal, Mike kept an eye out for cops. He did not need the time waste that would occur if he got a speeding ticket.

“Because someone else cheated off me.”

“Did you know it at the time?”

“I suspected.”

“So you made your answers accessible?”

“No. I just saw her looking over and thought she might be trying to cheat. I didn’t move to make it easier, or harder. I just kept doing what I was doing.”

Good. This one wouldn’t be too bad.

“Stay put until I get there,” he said into the phone. “And I mean put. You sit on the bench that backs up to the men’s restroom and you do not move.”

“I got it already. I wasn’t planning to go surfing, dude.”

Hanging up with Willie, he called his mother at work. After Charlie got married and then Dennis left for college, leaving only Willie at home, Darlene had gone to work full-time. She had a law degree and had worked part-time, doing research for other lawyers, but now she had her own office and a paralegal, still doing case law research for a host of firms.

He could call his father first. Matt, an architect who designed kitchens, he could be reached pretty much anytime. But when it came to Willie, Mike needed his mother to work on his father.

Besides, the school would have called her already.

“I assume you’re with him?” Darlene asked as she picked up the phone.

“I’m on my way,” Mike told her. “I was in LA.”

“I can get him.” She would. If he asked.

And Willie would cop an attitude with her. If they were lucky, he’d remain sullenly silent. If not, he’d give her a piece of his mind before she could get hers on the table.

She went too easy on him. Let him talk her down.

Both Mike and his father had told her so.

But she was a mother who understood her baby boy. She knew that his behavior stemmed from a self-hatred that tore his heart apart, and hers, as well. She couldn’t seem to get really angry with him.

His father didn’t have that problem, which made the situation that much worse. No matter how much their dad had tried to show Willie that he loved him, the boy continued to be certain that his father hated him as much as he hated himself.

For that matter, the troubled teen seemed to be pretty certain that everyone who knew him would never forgive him. Probably because he couldn’t forgive himself.

Mike knew it all. Understood it all. He just wasn’t sure how much longer he was going to be able to hold it all together for the kid.

“Just let me get you through high school,” he said aloud after hanging up from his mother. Once the boy graduated, he could leave town, and everyone who knew him, behind. Maybe in college, surrounded by strangers, he’d be able to find the sensitive, decent self that lurked somewhere inside him.

Maybe. If he’d let himself.

* * *

KACEY WAS ON edge all afternoon as she awaited Michael’s call. He’d said he was going to check out the address that morning. He’d already accessed whatever he needed from Lacey’s computer. And while he wasn’t meeting her sister at work until five, surely he had something to tell her. He was a nationally known forensic whiz when it came to computers. Something as small as a hacked email account wouldn’t stand a chance against him.

Someone was out to hurt her. She just needed to know who it was so she could figure out why and what she was going to do about it.

Luckily the set that afternoon was a diner that many of the show’s regulars frequented and she only had a couple of scenes there and just one line. Little more than a walk-on. Even better, Tom wasn’t in either of them, so no more chances for Simon and Michael to merge.

Unluckily, Michael didn’t call, text or email, in spite of the number of times she checked.

CHAPTER SIX

AS LUCK WOULD have it, Kacey was in her car, battling downtown Hollywood traffic just after six when her phone rang. Michael’s name showed up on the dash screen. Pushing the button on her steering wheel, she answered.

“Did everything go okay with Lacey?” she asked first. Her sister hadn’t texted or called to tell her Michael had been there. Not that she’d had to, but Kacey had just expected to hear.

Then again, Lacey had no idea how close Kacey and Michael had grown over the past few months. With a twinge of guilt—she and Lacey had vowed not to keep secrets from each other ever again—she listened as Michael told her he’d been in and out of her sister’s office in a matter of minutes.

“Did you get what you needed?” Looking in her rearview mirror, she switched lanes and then, when the road was clear, pulled over to a just-vacated parking spot in front of a tourist shop.

She wasn’t all that far from her Beverly Hills condo but didn’t want to have to concentrate on Michael and LA’s rush hour traffic at the same time.

“I did.”

She tried to read his tone, to know if he was being so serious because this was business or because he had bad news for her.

“Did you get the email I sent last night with the names you asked for?” She’d turned Bo down for an after-show drink and come straight home to go through emails that were well over a decade old. Reading them had made her smile. And cry a bit, too.

She and Lacey had been so incredibly close. She’d taken it all for granted. Had thought she’d never be lonely one minute in her life.

It had never even entered her mind that they’d ever be anything but famous, rich and happy.

“I saw it this morning. I haven’t been home yet to go through them.”

Because he’d been in LA. She’d been aware all morning and had purposely kept herself open for lunch in case he’d texted with news.

“Where are you now?”

It might be a nosy question, but it was one she asked often enough in the random text messages they sent back and forth.