Her Secret Life

He shrugged. Work was a high to him. He was the best at what he did. “Saved me from dinner with Charlie and her brood,” he said, though, truth be told, he generally enjoyed dinner with his sister’s family. Unless she was being overprotective—which was about half the time.

Lacey was booting up her computer. “She’s got a little one Levi’s age.”

“That’s right. Bella.”

“I saw her hugging you after the Christmas pageant. I was heading over to say hi, hoping maybe you’d introduce us to your family, but you’d already left.”

He’d seen Kacey and bolted before things got awkward.

The kids weren’t in the same class, just the same grade. And he and Kacey hadn’t communicated via text or email almost every day back then. He hadn’t been aware of her plans, or even known she’d be in town unless she happened to show up at the Lemonade Stand when he was there.

Well...he’d always known about Fridays, of course, because of her class. And because, for a long time, that was when they’d meet to talk about her struggles living a cleaner lifestyle in LA. After her class. In the small private office he still kept in the rear of the computer repair shop that was on the street backing up to the Lemonade Stand. The whole block had shops with secure entrances to and from the Stand.

And was owned by the Stand’s benefactor, Brett Ackerman. All proceeds from the shops open to the public helped to support the women’s shelter. Mike had spent a lot more time there when they’d first been setting up the computer repair shop than he did now.

“Here you go,” Lacey said. “Have at it.”

He glanced at the screen. Emails were still coming in. “You want to take a look and move anything you’d rather I don’t see?”

She shook her head. “I want to know who’s using our email account. Look at anything you need to...”

He was an IT investigator. He knew the kinds of things that could be found. Not that he expected Lacey—or Jem—to have anything illegal on their machines. But...private...was conceivable.

“What about confidential work files?”

She shook her head. “Not on that machine. I log in to my work computer—”

“Which answers my next question. The two computers are connected sometimes?”

“Yes.” She was frowning.

“And do you ever email Kacey with your private account from work?”

“I don’t remember specifically doing so, but I’m sure I have. I’ve never made it a point not to.”

“Can you hide files and do whatever is necessary so I can get a look at that machine tomorrow?”

“You do investigations for the local police, don’t you?”

“I have. On occasion. They have their own IT investigators.”

“If you have clearance with them, you’ve got clearance with us. It’s a city-wide thing.”

He’d known he had clearance, just not that she wouldn’t have to go through extra red tape.

He was already sitting in her desk chair, clicking through screens.

“You’re doing that so quickly, how can you even know what’s there?”

“I’m searching for something very specific. I know where it will be...” He looked at back-door computer information all day, every day. “It’s like any foreign language.” He often told ladies at the Lemonade Stand the same thing. “Once you learn it, you don’t have to think about it. You just recognize it.”

Not that he taught computer forensics to the residents at the Stand. With them it was more basic programming for career training...

He took a couple of screen shots, emailed them to himself and then stood up. “I’m done here,” he said, as eager to be gone as he’d been to visit.

This urge he’d had to get to know Lacey a little better—more of a curiosity, really—because she and Kacey were so tightly intertwined, wasn’t good.

And he most certainly didn’t need to see where Kacey stayed when she was in town any more than he’d ever have cause to see her place in Beverly Hills.

“You want a cup of coffee?” Lacey asked. “Or a beer? Jem’ll be out in a couple of minutes and I know he’d share a beer with you. I can’t stand the stuff, so he’s always looking for an excuse to have one with someone.”

Mike was already shaking his head. “I should be getting back,” he said, filled with even more eagerness to go when he realized how tempted he was to stay.

“You sure? I baked cookies with Levi last night. There are still a bunch left.”

She’d led him to the kitchen rather than to the front door and took the lid off a cookie jar that was shaped like a teddy bear. He didn’t want to be rude.

But he couldn’t stay. Dipping his hand in the jar, he came up with a chocolate chip cookie that could rival his mother’s.

That made him think about the home-cooked dinner he’d missed at his sister’s. About the home Lacey and Jem shared. The ones both of his sisters and their husbands shared. The one his parents shared.

His younger brother Dennis stayed with Mike on the rare occasions Dennis was in town. And as soon as he graduated from college in May, he’d be back even less. Dennis wanted to be a professional fisherman and spent up to three months at a time out on one of the big boats in the middle of the ocean.

Escapism, Mike termed it.

“This is good,” he said, taking a second bite and closing his mouth so he could chew and swallow. Closing his mouth so he didn’t say something he’d regret.

Like accepting that cup of coffee. Or a beer.

He hadn’t finished his bourbon.

Lacey grinned. Offered him another. And smiled. Her mouth...it curved just like Kacey’s did. But there the resemblance ended.

He liked Lacey and found a curious kind of peace in her company.

With Kacey, he buzzed. Like he was fully alive. Sexually, of course, that was a given, but intellectually, too.

“What?” Lacey asked.

“I didn’t say anything.”

“You’re staring at me. But don’t worry, I’m used to it. It was rude of me to say anything...” She turned her back, put the cookie jar in the corner of the counter.

“I didn’t mean to stare,” he said. “It was rude. And you have every right to say something.” He knew all about the struggles between the identical twins—about Lacey’s feeling she was always living in Kacey’s shadow, settling for second best.

Until Jem, of course. She’d been his first choice.

He could tell her all that. Tell her that he’d been noticing how, in spite of their identical appearance, she looked so different than her sister to him.

But, of course, he wouldn’t.

“I should get going,” he said instead. Way past time.

“I’m sure Kacey’s paying you, but I’d be glad to make the first installment, since she’s in LA.” Lacey reached for her purse. “I can write you a check...”

He didn’t take checks. Not personally. He had a woman who handled all of his billing. And accounts payable, too, at his suite of offices across from the new medical complex at the edge of town.

“That’s not necessary,” he said.

Lacey froze and stared up at him. “She is paying you, right? You didn’t offer to do this for free?”

As far as Mike was concerned, the question was none of her business, even if Kacey hadn’t been a friend. And her identical twin.

He said nothing.

“She isn’t. Mike, she’s trying, I swear, and she’s changing, but Kacey has no idea of the power she has to get people to do things for her. Your firm charges top dollar. I’m going to pay you...” She reached for her purse again.

“Stop,” he told her and was tempted to tell her he’d bill her.

The way she’d talked about her twin pissed him off. Or maybe it was because of the way she’d thought he was too...dense, or blind, to figure out that Kacey was working him.

If she’d been working him.

“This is between your sister and me. I didn’t get to be CEO of a successful firm by allowing beautiful women to get me to do things for them.”

Lacey’s mouth fell open. Her brow furrowed. And he had a feeling that if Jem Bridges had been present, he might have decked him for making his wife feel bad.

He wouldn’t have blamed him.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “That was uncalled for, as well. I’ll go now. See you in the morning?” He tried a grin on her. It used to be a killer with the women.

“No, I’m sorry,” she was saying, following him to the door. “I didn’t mean to imply, even for a second, that you’d fall prey to...that you were... Shit.”

“Best to quit while you’re ahead.” Jem had joined them.

“I’m making it worse,” Lacey said, grimacing as she looked between the two men. “I just... Kacey’s the sweetest, most incredible woman I know, and I don’t like her to be misjudged when she doesn’t even mean to do what she does.”

Jem’s finger covered his wife’s lips. “Believe it or not, Lacey’s the one who can go into any volatile family situation and take control,” he said to Mike. “The woman’s a marvel at mediation and tact. Just not when it comes to her sister.”

“I’m well aware of your sister’s...abilities...to allure,” Mike said, genuinely liking the couple. “I also like and respect her,” he added. “Understand that I see her in a light different than most. I see her at the Lemonade Stand giving women the ability to feel good about themselves again. She’s gentle and loving. Kind. And compassionate. There’s not an egotistical bone in her body.”

He stopped. He’d gone on far too long.

Lacey was staring at him. Openmouthed.

Jem just stood there.

“You really get her,” Lacey finally said, her voice soft.

“In Santa Raquel, at the Lemonade Stand, yes.”

“But she’s the same person...no matter where she goes. I mean, you don’t become someone different just because you get in the car and drive down the road.”

“We all have different sides,” he said, his hands in the pockets of his jeans. “I don’t need to see the other sides of your sister. I admire her work at the Stand. And I’m happy to help her find out who hacked into her email account.”

With that, he said good-night and got the hell out of there, hoping he hadn’t given away just how close he and Kacey were.

Walking backward on his words wasn’t something he did often. Or had to do.

He wasn’t sure how successful he’d been.

CHAPTER FIVE

“OH, SIMON, DARLING, I would never deliberately hurt you, you know that...” Kacey, or rather her on-screen character, Doria Endlin, gazed into the vivid blue eyes of Tom Cryder, the actor who played Simon Willfinder, Doria’s best friend.

And forgot her next line.

“Cut!”

Tom, who’d been holding her shoulder and leaning in almost close enough for their noses to touch, broke away and stood up. “What’s with you this morning, Kace? That’s the third time you’ve messed up. You never mess up.”

If he’d asked the question a little more quietly, or sincerely, she might have answered him.

“I’m sorry,” she said, looking between Tom and the assistant director who was running the morning’s takes.

She’d like to say she felt sick. Had a headache. Or that she was upset about being hacked.

Any of those reasons would not have been false. But they weren’t what was crapping out her work—she was too professional to let such things get in her way.

No, the problem was unreal. Couldn’t be happening. She just needed a minute alone to sort through the noise in her head.

There was no way that Simon and Michael were merging in her mind. And yet, that morning, on three separate occasions, she’d gazed at Simon and seen the look in Michael’s eyes the day before when she’d told him he was beautiful.

What was up with that?

“You ready to go again or do you need a minute?” the assistant director, Sandy Paxton, asked her.

“I’m good.” She smiled at Tom. “I’m sorry,” she said, meaning it.

He nodded. And she knew his acceptance was sincere. Tom was...Tom. But they were friends. Not like they portrayed on set—nothing that close. Still, she trusted him more than a lot of people in her world.

“Let’s do this,” Tom said, grinning, and plopped down on the sofa beside her to repeat his confession that he was developing feelings for Doria—the woman he’d been best friends with since the show’s inception.

She wasn’t sure she liked where the script was heading. Doria and Simon? Didn’t fit.

But she’d been in the daytime-show business long enough to know that if your character’s script didn’t come with continued twists and turns, you’d soon be gone.

Still... Simon?

She made it through the scene—and the rest of the morning—without mishap.

* * *

TUESDAY MORNING MICHAEL wasted no time during his breakfast meeting with a detective from the LAPD who was working on a confidential case that he didn’t want some of his peers to know about. The department had allocated funds to bring Michael’s team—in this case Michael, personally—on board.

While in town he stopped by a couple of midsize firms that kept his company on retainer to monitor their systems for signs of hacking.

He had an entire database of larger corporate accounts, too. Ones that called him when they suspected suspicious activity. Some that needed him to underwrite antivirus fixes. Or override system takeovers.

And then there were the housewives who were afraid their inordinately rich husbands were cheating on them, or husbands who wanted to know what their wives were doing online. Mike didn’t cover those jobs himself. He had a staff of four highly trained and trusted employees who did most of that work.

And that morning, for a friend, he was checking out an address from which an account had been set up with a private email account.

The IP address that had posted the Photoshopped picture of Kacey came from an internet café that was known for serving great coffee. The place hosted four public computers. Users paid for computer time by the half hour. Most paid cash. The shop’s manager, upon seeing Mike’s credentials, allowed him to take a look at all four machines and copy what he needed onto a flash drive.

As he left, Mike was toying with the idea of texting Kacey to see if she had a break for lunch so he could give her an update.

The fact that all he could tell her was that he’d checked out her sister’s home computer, and had information to peruse from the computer that had been used to send out her altered photo, gave him pause.

He’d never report back to a client with so little to offer.

He wasn’t meeting with Lacey to go through her work computer until after the office closed at five, so he had some time...

Phone in hand, pretty much convinced a text wouldn’t hurt—they sent them pretty much every day anyway, though always at her instigation—Mike felt the vibration just before his phone rang.

And switched gears completely when he saw the picture that flashed up on his screen.

“What’s up?” he answered immediately, all systems on alert, as they always were where Willie was concerned. At seventeen, the baby of the family had not yet grown up.

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.

“Just stopped home to change. I’m on my way over to my folks’ house.”

She was beginning to wonder if she would ever meet them. For some reason Michael didn’t seem keen on introducing her to his family.

“For dinner?”

“Yeah.”

“You don’t sound too sure about that.”

“My kid brother got into a spot of trouble today. I promised him and Mom I’d be there to referee when Dad got home from work.”

It was more than he usually told her. She knew he had a kid brother. And that he’d gotten a tattoo on his back that Michael didn’t approve of. She didn’t know why, or even what type of tattoo it was.

“You do that often?” she asked now, picturing him as the big brother, trying to instill calm in the midst of family drama.

He’d be good at it. Lacey was, too. The best.

Kacey seemed to create the drama. Not that she meant to. Or wanted to.

“On occasion,” he said. “This time it’s for a good cause. The kid didn’t do what he’s being blamed for. Tomorrow I intend to help him prove it. I just need the old man to have faith for one night.”

Have faith. That hit home. She knew what it was like to need a family member to have faith in her when her actions hadn’t done much to inspire it.

Lacey had had faith, though. “I’m glad you’re there for him,” she said now. “He’s lucky to have you.”