A California Christmas (Silver Springs #7) - Brenda Novak Page 0,36
I wasn’t good in bed anyway—you name it.” She carried her cup to the table and sat down. “He hurled every hurtful thing he could at me. Then, as if that wasn’t bad enough, I came out from work one day to find a dog pile in the driver’s seat of my car.”
Dallas had already started to make his own omelet. “You’ve got to be kidding me.”
“No.”
“And you think it was him?”
“Had to be. I almost always lock my car, but I was running late that morning, the parking lot was fenced and we had a security guard at the door of the building, so I didn’t bother digging out my key fob.”
He hesitated while chopping more onion. “But the security guard didn’t see anything?”
“No. That’s another reason I think it had to be Ethan. The security guard would recognize Ethan’s car, so I doubt he’d bother to watch him from the moment he parked to the moment he walked into the building. It would be easy for Ethan to leave that ‘smelly bomb’ for me as he passed my car.”
Dallas dabbed the last of the bacon with a paper towel. “Does Ethan have a dog?”
“No. Which is why he claimed it couldn’t be him. But when the dog pile thing happened, he was pretty angry. The day before, I refused to let him come over, and I saw this weird look in his eye. It was like he suddenly hated me. He was embarrassed that I would break up with him, didn’t want anyone to think he couldn’t have me or any other woman he wanted, but I’d had enough. By then I’d realized he’s not a nice person.” She finally took a bite of her omelet and chewed slowly before saying with complete conviction, “I know in my gut that it was him.”
Dallas used a spatula to turn his own omelet. “How long after that dog shit incident did the video show up online?”
“It was the very next day. What he’d done hadn’t hurt me enough. He was looking for something else.”
“How did you find out that he’d posted the video?”
She swallowed what was in her mouth. “Oh God, it was horrible. I was in the middle of getting a pedicure, just hoping to relax for thirty minutes and forget about the messy breakup, how awkward it was going to be to see Ethan every morning and deliver the news without every viewer we had reading in our body language that we suddenly couldn’t stand each other. I was also worried about how we were going to keep our little problem from coming to the attention of Heidi and others at the studio. And on top of that, my mother was falling apart because she’d just learned my father had moved in with another woman. So there I was, closing my eyes and thinking I had a much-needed chance to recoup, when the woman next to me started whispering loudly to her neighbor on the other side. They’d say something to each other, crane their necks to get a better look at me, then nod and whisper some more. Finally, I said, ‘Excuse me. Is there something wrong?’”
He lifted his omelet out of the pan and onto a plate. “Did they tell you?”
She frowned as she stared at the bite she held on her fork, her mind obviously back in that nail salon. “The woman closest to me said, ‘Aren’t you Emery Bliss?’”
“You must’ve thought they recognized you from seeing you on TV,” he said as he brought his plate to the table.
“I did. I was sort of flattered,” she said, looking slightly embarrassed. “But then the other woman said, ‘Is that really you in that steamy video online?’ I told them that I wasn’t in any steamy video, that I was a news anchor and they must’ve confused me with someone else. Then she and her friend started laughing. They left it at that, but kept shooting each other these side-eye looks as though the joke was on me. And it was. Right about then my phone started to blow up. I was getting calls and texts from almost everyone I knew—‘Oh my God! What’s going on? Have you seen it?’”
“That must’ve made you sick to your stomach.”
“It did. I’ll never forget what it felt like to click on that first link and see myself naked.” She closed her eyes and shook her head. “I felt like throwing up. And so many people on Facebook and Instagram