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Olivia didn’t say anything until we were safely sequestered in my flat a short time later. She’d let me cry without interfering, without telling me I’d done the right thing, without a word, and I appreciated it. The truth was, I didn’t know what to say, and I think she sensed that.

But her silence didn’t last. She was fuming, and couldn’t keep it to herself any longer.

“Fuck, Peyton,” she stormed, pacing across my small living room as I sat on the couch in a bit of a daze, watching her. “Now we’re going to have to do damage control, you know that, right? This could mean a lot of good things for you, or it could mean a lot of very, very bad things. There were enough big names at that wedding to really fuck you over.”

I knew she was right, but at the moment, I really didn’t care about my career or the fact that my pseudonym had been exposed. I cared about the shock and dismay I saw in those brown eyes right before I left. I cared that now he knew my secret and would probably never call me again. I cared that my mother had blown up any hope I’d had of being anything more than just a voice on the phone to him, as minute as the possibility of more had been. And most of all, I cared that I now fully realized that I had fallen in love with him, against my better judgment. The pain of it all burned through me and made it kind of hard to breathe.

“Are you listening to me at all?” Olivia’s voice cut through the fog in my head. “Peyton, your mother could have just cost you your career, do you understand that?”

I shoved my hair out of my face, dislodging the barrette that held it in the process, and looked up at her. Through the mist of tears that had started to sting my eyes again, I watched her face soften. She came to me and sat beside me, slipping her arm around my shoulders.

“Sorry,” she murmured, giving me a slight squeeze. “I know this is painful for you, and I really wish it wasn’t. But please understand, my job is to make sure your career stays on track, so I have to control this right now.”

I sighed and stood up. “Okay, how do we fix it?” I asked, my voice coming out raspy and hoarse. “I can’t do anything about Orlando for now, so I may as well make sure my income is still secure.”

“The easiest way I can think of is for you to announce this on your own, before it comes out from the wedding,” ‘Liv said, rising as well and resuming her pacing. “I’ll issue a press release about it, and you’ll tell the world yourself, either through a written statement, or through a talk show or something.” I froze at her last suggestion and she noticed it. “Peyton, the fact is, you may have to do a few TV appearances to make this okay. Show them what you were hiding, explain to them in your own words why you have a pen name, why such a mystique was created around Dominique. No one will be able to say it better than you can. And besides, the worst has happened, right? He knows who you are, so why let fear of discovery stop you from picking up the pieces here and keeping your career intact?”

“The very idea of going on television makes me want to puke,” I said honestly as the butterflies in my stomach tried to force their way out. “I don’t need any further embarrassment than I’ve had today. Can’t we just wait and see if this blows over? I mean, there’s a chance no one will even care that I use a pen name. Stephen King does it, the Bronte sisters did it, Agatha Christie did it, why can’t I?”

“I know you don’t like this idea, but you have a new book coming out, and if we time things just right, we may be able to boost your sales,” she continued, as though I hadn’t spoken. “We’ll stick with a press release for now, some little blurb that no one will really care about, then, when Georgie gives us a release date for your new book, we’ll publish it as Peyton Grant, and you’ll do the talk show circuit to promote it, talking about why you went back to your original name.”

“You don’t get it, do you?” I snapped, at the end of my rope. “I don’t want to go on the telly, I don’t want to talk to people about this, and I certainly don’t want to publish my next book under my real name! I want to continue to write as Dominique, I want to publish my stuff under that name, and I don’t want to go on fucking talk shows and pour my fucking heart out to some asshole who, at the end of the day, doesn’t give a flying fuck what I have to say. Lots of authors use pen names, it’s not a big deal.”

“Dominique has a very unique persona, Peyton,” Olivia said, speaking slowly, as though she were afraid to set me off again. My heart was pounding, I was breathing heavily, and my hands were balled into fists. She knew better than to push me much farther.

“So?”

“So we’ve created a whole other person with her, given her a life of her own,” she said. “The movie studio will want an explanation, to say the very least, and what about your readers? What will they think when they find out Dominique isn’t real?”

“I’m hoping my readers have lives of their own and won’t give a rat’s ass about that,” I said, forcing myself to calm down. The raw, burning hurt was still pulsing through me, but the anger was subsiding slowly. I took that as a good sign.

“You’d be surprised at how caught up in an author’s life readers can get,” Olivia said, perching delicately on my armchair, no longer pacing. “I’m hoping we can use your scars to gain the sympathy vote, to tell them why you didn’t want your true identity known. Most of your readers should understand that.”

“You’re not listening to me, Olivia,” I said quietly, suddenly feeling very tired. “I don’t want to show myself to the world. I don’t want anyone to see me. Going to that wedding today was the biggest mistake I’ve ever made, and I’ll be damned if I’m going to expose myself to that kind of ridicule and embarrassment again. Do what you have to do to fix this, deal with it however you want, but leave me out of it. I knew there was a reason I never leave home, and my mother today, in all her gut-wrenching, back-stabbing glory, screamed that reason right in my face. Now, to top it all off, the one man I’ve even taken an interest in since my accident will probably never speak to me again. I think I’ve dealt with enough shit for one day, so why don’t you earn your percentage and take care of everything for me. That’s what I pay you for.”

She started at me for a few seconds, and I saw the hurt flash briefly across her face. We’d been becoming friends, she’d been there when I’d needed her, and now I’d just reduced her to my employee again. I knew it wasn’t fair, I knew it was cruel, but what was said was said and I couldn’t take it back now.

“Fine,” Olivia said finally, standing and grabbing her purse off the coffee table. “I’ll go to the office right now and put out a press release. I’ll let you know later what’s going on.” She brushed past me to the door. “Have a good day, Peyton.” She closed the door behind her.

I stood there for a minute, feeling like the biggest asshole imaginable. Sherman came bouncing out of my bedroom and began rubbing his furry face against my bare leg until I picked him up. I hadn’t meant to be so awful to Olivia, especially after everything she’d done for me, but really, I felt like I was falling apart, and had enough to deal with where my own feelings were concerned. I couldn’t deal with hurting hers right now, too.

Setting Sherman back on the floor, I went into the bedroom to change and take my make-up off. I had to fight the urge to just toss my dress in the bin and forget about it, but something made me hang it in my closet instead. I pulled my hair into a ponytail, washed the make-up off my face, and put on an old, grubby tracksuit, just to make me feel like myself again.

I curled up with Sherman on my bed, and fell asleep to the sound of his rhythmic purring, but my slumber didn’t last nearly long enough. The shrill ringing of the phone blasted me awake and I groped around on my nightstand to answer it.

“Yeah?” I said, somewhat groggily, once I’d turned the phone on.

“Dominique?” Orlando’s voice was unmistakable and caused me to sit straight up in bed, dislodging a rather pissed off Sherman in the process.

“You know that’s not my name, Orlando,” I said gently, not wanting to say the wrong thing.

“Why didn’t you tell me?” He sounded so lost, so sad, not the least bit angry, but I figured when the shock wore off, that would change.

“I couldn’t,” I said, getting off my bed and going into the living room. I curled my feet under me on the couch and sat in the darkness. By the looks of the sky outside my window, I’d been asleep longer than I’d thought.

“Did you even want to?”

I hesitated, not sure what to say. “The truth is, part of me did, and part of me didn’t. Does that make any sense at all?”

“Not really,” he said on a sigh. This was as frustrating for him as it was for me.

“It’s hard to explain,” I started, wracking my brain for the best words to use. “You thought I was this wonderful person, this image, and though part of me wanted to meet you and show you who I really was, the other part was scared that the reality wouldn’t live up to the image. In case you hadn’t noticed, and in case my mother didn’t cram the knowledge down your throat like she did everyone else’s, I’m not exactly a perfect ten physically. I couldn’t bare to see you cringe away from me again.”

“Again?” He stopped me cold. “Peyton, what do you mean, ‘again?’ We’ve never met before today.”

I felt like I’d swallowed a rock. Why couldn’t I have kept my big mouth shut? That one little word had screwed me.

“We’ve met once before,” I said, so softly I’m not sure how he heard me. “At the hospital, when you were visiting your friend. I was in a wheelchair, waiting for my ride, and I dropped my bag. You picked it up and handed it to me, then practically ran away from me with a disgusted look on your face.” I took a deep breath, trying to control the shivers that were racing through me because of my nerves.

He was quiet for a minute, but I could almost hear it when the image clicked in his head and he remembered what I was talking about.

“You think I ran from you?” he whispered.

“Well, that’s pretty much what you did, yes,” I said, twisting my fingers together. “I know my scars aren’t exactly pretty, and you made that even clearer for me.”

“I’ll admit, they startled me at first,” he said slowly. “And I probably didn’t handle it very well, but I was stressed about my mate, and there you were, this woman in a wheelchair who looked like she was two seconds away from croaking at my feet. It wasn’t your scars that made me walk away, it was the enormity of the situation itself.”

“You expect me to believe that?”

“I just didn’t want to take whatever you might have been sick with up to my mate, and make him worse, is that so wrong?” He sounded annoyed now, and I braced myself for the anger that was sure to come.

In truth, I hadn’t thought about the situation that way. Of course if his friend had been treated for cancer, the man’s immune system would have been shot, so it made perfect sense that Orlando didn’t want to take whatever I’d been sick with to his friend. Despite myself, I started to believe him.

“I guess that makes sense,” I allowed finally. “But really, if we’d met in a coffee shop or something, and you’d seen me, fat, scarred me, waiting for you, you can’t tell me you would have gone through with our meeting. You would have run the other way, just like you did in the hospital. Admit it.”

“You don’t give me very much credit, do you, Peyton?” he snapped. “I may be surrounded by shallow pricks most of the time, but that doesn’t mean I am one. You never gave me the chance to accept you for who you are. Instead, you lied to me every time you opened your mouth, and I find that more disgusting than any stupid scars you may have.”

“I wasn’t lying, I was protecting myself,” I protested, my stomach twisting at his accusations. “You have no idea what it’s like to be deformed, to have people point and stare, and shy away from you because you’re not perfect. That’s the problem, Orlando. You are perfect, you’re one of the most beautiful men on the planet right now. Can’t you see how I might have been uncomfortable revealing all of my imperfections to you? My own mother hates me, for fuck sakes, how the hell could I expect any compassion or decency out of a total stranger?”

“Don’t get me started on your mother,” he almost growled. “That’s a whole other issue. Like I said, you didn’t give me the chance to accept you, to tell you that I don’t care about any of that stuff. I’ve done the perfect model route, remember? And do you remember how that turned out? You’re interesting to me because of what you think and say, not because I expect you to be a supermodel. It hurts that you wouldn’t trust me to not hurt you like that, that you wouldn’t open yourself to me like I so readily did to you.”

I swallowed around the lump in my throat. Maybe I’d approached this thing the wrong way. He was right, I hadn’t given him any credit, I’d just assumed he was a superficial asshole, and hadn’t given him the chance to prove otherwise. I now officially felt like a piece of shit.

“Peyton, say something,” Orlando said after a brief silence.

“Why did you call me?” I asked, needing to know why he’d bothered. “Why can’t you just leave me alone now? You found out what I was hiding, it’s done, it’s over, let’s just move on.” The words hurt me to say, but I couldn’t stop them. I waited to see how he’d respond.

“You’re always trying to push me away, aren’t you?” he said, the anger gone, the sadness back in place. “I called because I was concerned about you. What your mother did was wrong and unfair, and though I’m glad I know who you really are now, it wasn’t her place to humiliate you like that. I wanted to make sure you knew that a new name and your appearance doesn’t matter to me. You’re still the same person you were before, only with a little less pretention.”

I couldn’t help it, I laughed. “You think Dominique is pretentious, do you?” I teased, remembering Olivia telling me the same thing when I chose it.

“Come on, it makes you sound like you should be a Duchess or a princess or something,” he chuckled. “Peyton is more real, more natural, more you.”

“How do you even know who I am?” I asked, the butterflies in my stomach taking full flight at the gentleness in his voice.

“That’s the one problem I have now, isn’t it?” he said. “I don’t know what’s true and what’s not. That’s the part I don’t like about this. I want to know what’s real.”

“And what if I can’t give you that?” I said, fighting back tears. He made it sound so simple, so easy, but I knew it couldn’t be. I’d spent the last few months lying to him, and now he expected me to just open up and tell him everything. I couldn’t do it, that’s not how I was made.

“Then I guess we’re stuck, aren’t we?” He sighed softly. “Peyton, look. I’m not asking for anything that you don’t want to give me. I enjoyed talking to you, I thought we were building a friendship, I don’t want to see that go out the window because of this. If anything, it should be easier to get to know you now that I know what you’ve been hiding. And I want that chance, I really do.”

“Even after what happened last night?” I wondered why he hadn’t brought up our conversation from the night before. “Even after everything we said? I wasn’t exactly nice to you, you know.”

“I’ve been thinking about that since you left the reception,” he said, and I couldn’t read his tone. “It makes sense now, you causing a row like that. I got too close, didn’t I? I pushed too hard, and you did what you had to do to make me go away. Is that what happened?”

“It sounds horrible when you say it like that, but yes, that’s what I did,” I said, feeling somewhat relieved that he seemed to understand at least that part of me. “I thought pissing you off and making you hate me would be easier than continuing to lie to you and evading your questions. I mean, we got into some pretty personal stuff for you, but I couldn’t say anything back that was true because I couldn’t make myself open up like that.”

“Do you mind if I ask you a personal question now, since you already know all of my secrets?” I wasn’t sure whether he was teasing or not, so I braced myself for whatever might come next.

“I doubt I’ll ever know all of your secrets, Orlando,” I said lightly. “Go ahead, ask.”

“Will you tell me the truth?”

I swallowed heavily. What did I have to lose now?

“Yes, I’ll tell you the truth,” I whispered. “As best I can.”

To Be Continued…