Devious Lies: A Standalone Enemies-to-Lovers Romance

Part 1 –  Tacenda

/ta-‘chen-da/

1. Things that are not to be spoken about or made public
2. Things that are best left unsaid

Tacenda originates from the Latin participle taceo for ‘I am silent’. Taceo is also the verb for ‘I am still or at rest’.

Taceo reminds us silence isn’t a sign of weakness. It is a sign of rest, of certainty, of contentment.

Silence is the best response to people who don’t deserve your words.

I had a habit of touching things that didn’t belong to me.

The Stepford wives of Eastridge, North Carolina begged to sample the bad boy from the wrong side of town. If I had a dollar for every time a twenty-something trophy wife ran to me after her sixty-something husband went away “on business,” I wouldn’t be in this situation.

Sometimes, when I felt irritated with the gluttony of designer this and that, the ten hours a day I worked to repay grad school loans, and the way Ma owned one pair of worn-down, knock-off New Balances yet still spared a few bucks for the church bucket, I would indulge some Stepfords.

(Hate-fuck was the proper term, but no one had ever accused me of being proper.)

Their step-daughters, practically the same ages as them, came to me wet and willing, looking for something to brag about with their friends.

I indulged them, too, though I enjoyed them less. They sought entertainment, whereas their step-mothers sought escape. One was calculated; the other, wild.

And despite how much I loathed this town and the Midas veneer Eastridgers wore like minx on winter coats, I had never crossed the line of keeping something I’d touched. Until tonight with the ledger I just stole from my parents’ boss, Gideon Winthrop.

Gideon Winthrop: billionaire entrepreneur, the man who pretty much ran Eastridge, and a piece of shit.

Mounted on the silver-flecked marble of Gideon’s mansion, a silver statue of Dionysus rode a tiger sculpted from electrum and gold. The artist had etched the god’s cult of followers into the tiger’s legs, bearing a remarkable resemblance to Eastridge’s cult of wealth.

I had hidden behind the four-legged beast, my hands shoved into my tattered black jeans as I eavesdropped on Gideon Winthrop’s conversation with his business partner, Balthazar Van Doren.

Though they lounged in the mansion’s office, smoking overpriced cigars, Gideon’s voice boomed beyond the open door into the foyer where I leaned against the tiger’s ass. Hiding, because secrets were currency in Eastridge.

I hadn’t planned on spying during my weekly visit to my parents, but Gideon’s wife had the tendency to threaten Ma and Dad with unemployment. It would be nice to have the upper hand for once.

“Too much money is gone.” Gideon sipped his drink. “Winthrop Textiles will collapse. It may not be tomorrow or the next day, but it will happen.”

“Gideon.”

He interrupted Balthazar. “With the company folded, everyone we employ—the whole damn town—will lose their jobs. The savings they invested with us. Everything.”

Translation: my parents will be jobless, homeless, and broke.

“As long as there’s no evidence of embezzling,” Balthazar began, but I didn’t stick around to hear the rest.

Scum.

Ma and Dad devoted their entire savings to Winthrop Textiles stock. If the company collapsed, so did their futures.

I withdrew from the foyer as quietly as I had come, dipping past the kitchen and into the Winthrop’s laundry room, where Ma had left the old suit Gideon had gifted me for tonight’s cotillion.

I slipped into it, stopped by the storage room, and tucked the joint I’d confiscated last week from my brother Reed’s selfie-obsessed high school sweetheart into the outer pocket of the suitcase Gideon took on business trips. A little gift for the T.S.A. And people say I’m uncharitable.

After Gideon had finally left for his daughter’s cotillion, I didn’t think twice as I snuck into his office to search it. Eight years ago, when my family had moved into the cottage on the edge of the Winthrop estate, I had made it a point to possess every key, every password, every secret this mansion held.

Ma managed the household, while Dad maintained the grounds. Making copies of their keys had required no effort. Extracting the password to the office safe, however, meant creating a make-believe game for Reed and his best friend, Gideon’s daughter Emery, to play.

I entered the code into the safe and sifted through it. Passports, birth certificates, and social security cards. Yawn. The desk drawers held nothing interesting outside of employee files. I yanked the top one completely off of its track and felt around the hole it left.

Just as I had finished up my search, my fingers brushed against buttery leather.

After pulling off the tape, I latched onto the leather and plucked it from the cavern. Held up to the light, the journal boasted dust on its cover and nothing else. No name. No brand. No logo.

I flipped it open, taking in the rows of letters and numbers. Someone had kept meticulous records.

A ledger.

Leverage.

Proof.

Destruction.

I felt no guilt as I stole what wasn’t mine. Not when its owner wielded the power of destruction, and my parents stood in his line of fire. Dressed in Gideon’s suit, I looked like an Eastridger as I strolled out of his mansion with his ledger tucked into the inner pocket.

When Ma called, I told her nothing as she begged, “Please, Nash. Please, don’t cause a scene tonight. You’re there to drive Reed home if things get out of hand. You know how those Eastridge Prep kids are. You don’t want your brother catchin’ no trouble.”

Translation: Rich kids get wasted, find trouble, and the kid with the secondhand uniforms and academic scholarship takes the blame. Tale as old as time.

I could have admitted it then, told Ma about Gideon’s misdeeds.

I didn’t.

I was Sisyphus.

Crafty.

Deceitful.

A thief.

Instead of cheating death, I’d stolen from a Winthrop. The latter proved more dangerous than the former. Unlike Sisyphus, I had no intention of suffering eternal punishment for my sins.

The ledger couldn’t be heavier than a skinny mass-market paperback, but it weighed down the hidden pocket of my suit as I weaved a path through the tables in the Eastridge Junior Society’s ballroom, considering what to do with what I’d learned.

I could turn it over to the proper authorities and bring down the Winthrops, warn my parents to find new jobs and sell their Winthrop Textiles stocks, or keep the knowledge to myself.

For now, I would keep it to myself until I formed a plan.

A sea of suit-clad businessmen and manicured women—born, bred, and raised in Eastridge, North Carolina to be nothing more than trophy wives—blurred together in front of me. Not one of them piqued my interest.

Still, I ran a palm across a Stepford wife’s exposed back to distract myself from the fact that I’d taken something from the most powerful man in North Carolina—one of the most powerful men in America.

Katrina’s lips parted at my touch, and she let out a shaky exhale that had Virginia Winthrop cutting her frosty glare in my direction. From a table over, Katrina’s step-daughter Basil took a vicious stab at her white-truffle Kobe strip steak, her eyes trained on where my fingertips rubbed at Katrina’s bare back.

The steak reminded me of my little brother—glistening on the outside, full of blood, and ready to burst at the slightest cut. His on-again-off-again girlfriend, however, wouldn’t be the girl to cut him.

As soon as Reed got his head out of his ass and realized she was in love with him, Emery Winthrop would own his heart.

Girls like Basil Berkshire were pit stops. They fueled your tank and helped you along the road, but they weren’t the destination.

Girls like Emery Winthrop were the finish line, the goal you worked for, the place you strived to reach, the smile you saw when you closed your eyes and wondered why you even bothered.

Reed was fifteen. He had time to learn.

“There’s a seat at the kids’ table,” Virginia offered, a chute of Krug Brut Vintage cradled between two fingers.

She resembled the Hera statue she’d had Dad place at the center of the Winthrop’s backyard tree maze. Pale beauty frozen in a towering, too-slender frame. Virginia wore her blonde hair straightened until it mirrored frayed bamboo skewers kissing the tops of her shoulders.

The glossy strands swung as she nodded at the table her daughter sat at. The daughter she’d molded into the spitting image of her. But Emery possessed quirks that slipped past the cracks, like sunlight filtering into a prison cell through a single pinhole.

An expressive face.

Too big eyes.

A singular gray iris only noticeable up close, but I’d once overheard Virginia demand her daughter to cover it with a colored contact that matched her blue eye.

Sitting eye-level with Katrina, Virginia managed to look down her nose at her as she threw at me, “You may sit at the children’s table.”

My finger twitched, tempted to finger fuck Katrina at the “adults’ table” to provoke her because I had no doubt Virginia took part in her husband’s embezzlement. If Gideon Winthrop was the head of Winthrop Textiles, Virginia Winthrop was the neck, moving the head whichever direction she pleased.

I kept my fingers to myself as Mom’s pleas bounced around in my skull.

Don’t cause a scene.

Easier said than done.

Without another word, I pivoted and nabbed the seat between Reed and Emery’s date, Able Cartwright. Able appeared as slimy as his lawyer dad. Black, beady eyes and blond hair slicked back like he’d come from an audition for the part of the vulture in that D-grade Laurence Huntington flick.

“Little brother. Emery.” I nodded at Reed and Emery, then quirked a brow at the rest of the table, some prepubescent teens desperate to hide beneath five pounds of makeup. “Teenyboppers.”

Basil’s flushed cheeks clashed with the almost-white shade of blonde on her head. She wore enough perfume to fumigate a gymnasium. It killed my olfactory receptors as she leaned toward me and tittered into her palm.

“Oh, Nash, you’re so funny.”

I gave her my back, effectively finishing the conversation. I studied Emery, one seat over. She sat with her brows furrowed and hands on her lap, trying to unravel a Snicker’s mini without drawing attention to the contraband candy.

I wondered if she had any idea what her parents were up to.

Probably not.

Ma once told me that people are wired to do the right thing.

It’s human instinct, she’d say, for people to want to do right by others, to please others, to spread joy.

Sweet, naïve Betty Prescott.

The daughter of a pastor, she grew up spending her free time in bible study and married the altar boy. I lived in the real world, where rich assholes fucked the little guy—in the ass, without lube—and expected to be thanked after.

And Emery’s dad? He put up a good front. Charities, volunteer work, a sunny smile. I had thought Gideon was different. Look how wrong I’d been.

But Emery Winthrop… I considered what to do with the ledger in my pocket. She complicated things.

Not that I was particularly attached to her. I’d had maybe a handful of conversations with her over the past eight years, but I loved Reed, and Emery knew how to love Reed better than anyone else.

She’d spent her childhood sharing her lunch money with him and sitting through tutoring lessons she didn’t need. The shit school we’d transferred from had left Reed practically two grades behind. Even at seven, Emery understood the only way my brother could hire a tutor was if she pretended she was the one who needed it so her parents would pay for it.

Hurting Emery would hurt Reed. Simple math. And as jaded as I had become, as much as I hated Eastridge and the people inside this ballroom, I didn’t hate the girl who was fiercely loyal to the point of reckless, the girl with a thousand years’ worth of wisdom gained in only fifteen, the girl who loved my kid brother.

“Emery,” Basil began after I’d ignored whatever she had said. “I heard about your fail in Schnauzer’s class. Bummer.”

Schnauzer. Why did that name sound familiar?

Reed dipped close to Basil, his voice a low whisper everyone could hear. “That’s not nice, sweetheart.” His North Carolina accent was strong, and he’d somehow managed to make the situation worse.

“Do you hear that noise?” Emery tilted her head to the side. Her brows tipped together in mock concentration.

Able invaded Emery’s space. “What noise?”

“That annoying buzzing.”

“Sounds like a gnat,” I offered as I leaned over Cartwright, plucked the Snickers mini from Emery’s fingers, and popped it into my mouth.

“Nope, that’s not it.” She thanked me with a glimmer in her eyes. A fleeting salute to solidarity before they shifted to Basil. She went in for the kill. “Just Basil.”

Basil jerked forward as I realized who Schnauzer was and cut off whatever stupidity she’d intended on spewing. “Isn’t Dick Schnauzer that AP Chem teacher? The fucker who leverages blow jobs for As? And those who don’t, well…” I cocked a brow at Basil. “Hey, you got an A, right?”

Basil’s eyes turned to Reed. She waited for him to defend her. He looked between me, Basil, and Emery, a type of helpless that had me questioning if we were even related. But maybe he had a higher power looking out for him because Virginia chose that moment to intrude on our table.

Her eyes skimmed the uneaten cold fennel soups across the table like they were an affront to her skills as the chairwoman of the Eastridge Junior Society. Perhaps they were, because no sane person would look at a menu and say, “I’d love the chilled fennel soup, please.”

“Emery, honey.” She turned to her daughter and tucked a loose strand of hair behind Emery’s ear. Like a real-life sequel to Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Virginia had a team of stylists create Emery in her vision.

Before I left Eastridge for grad school, I had lived in my family’s cottage for years, from my year at Eastridge Prep to the four years I had spent commuting to a state college to save money.

Enough time for me to witness the sheer amount of hours devoted to plucking, prodding, and dyeing Emery into a body Virginia could inhabit… or whatever she had planned for her daughter. Death by Eastridge’s high society, probably.

“Yes, Mother?” Emery didn’t look at her mom with love. She looked at her with resignation. The stare you gave a cop when he pulled you over for driving five miles above the speed limit. Disdain cloaked in civility.

I swore, the only spine Reed possessed grew from years of proximity to Emery.

“Be a dear and run into the office for me?” Virginia licked her thumb and swiped at a stray hair on Emery’s forehead. “I need the tiara to crown the debutante of the year.”

Debutante of the year. As if that was a title someone wanted.

Emery’s eyes darted from Reed to Basil, so transparent I didn’t bother holding my laughter back. She leveled a scowl at me, then turned to Virginia. “Can’t you ask somebody on the wait staff to grab it?”

“Oh.” Virginia clutched at the pearls choking her neck. “Don’t be silly. As if I’d entrust a server with the code to the office’s safe.”

“But—”

“Emery, do I need to send you to Miss Chutney’s etiquette classes?”

Miss Chutney was the borderline abusive lady who’d trained Eastridge’s female population into the La-Perla-panties-up-their-asses women they were today. She didn’t leave bruises, but rumor had it, she walked around with a ruler she used to slap wrists, necks, and whatever sensitive flesh it could reach.

Able pulled out his chair. “I can grab it, Mrs. Winthrop.”

“That’s a wonderful idea!” Virginia cooed. “Able will escort you, Emery. Run along now.” Virginia’s face remained frozen, like someone had slipped plaster into her Botox.

Irritation dilated Emery’s eyes. The gray one darkened, and the blue one brightened. She muttered a few words I couldn’t make out, but they seemed angry. For a split second, I thought she would surprise me.

In fact, something in me needed her to surprise me to restore my faith in a world where people like Gideon could take advantage of the Hank and Betty Prescotts of the world.

Instead, Emery pushed her chair back and allowed Able to take her arm, as if we lived in the eighteen-hundreds and she required a damn escort to go places. The defiance in her eyes had fled.

In this moment, she looked nothing like the eight-year-old girl who punched Able in the face for stealing Reed’s lunch.

I watched with detached interest as Emery submitted to Virginia’s will.

She was just like the rest of fucking Eastridge.