“It’s Rafe,” she said, slumping back into her chair. “He lied to me.”
“I know.”
“What?” Katie blinked at her grandmother and waited for an explanation. But the older woman just sat there in the sunlight, smiling benevolently. “How? What? How?”
Emily reached over, patted Katie’s hand, then sighed and leaned back in her chair. “I know his real name is Rafe King, if that’s what you’re talking about.”
“Well, yeah, it is.”
“Do you want tea? We should have some tea.”
“I don’t want tea,” Katie said, stopping her grandmother before the woman could get up. “I want some answers. You know about Rafe? For how long?”
She waved one hand dismissively. “Oh, I knew the minute you introduced us.”
“How?” Katie just stared at her in rapt confusion. “Do you have some kind of inner lie radar that I didn’t get?”
“No, and I don’t think I’d want it, either. Sometimes lies can be a good thing,” Emily said, her gaze locked on Katie.
“Lying is not a good thing. You’re the one who taught me that, remember?”
Again, Emily waved a hand, effectively wiping away that little nugget of so-called wisdom. “That was different. You were ten. Now you’re an adult and surely you’ve learned that sometimes a small, harmless lie is far better than a hurtful truth.”
“This lie wasn’t harmless,” Katie argued, remembering the sting of betrayal when she’d discovered Rafe’s game. “And you still haven’t told me how you knew who he was.”
“If you read popular magazines once in a while, you would have known him too,” Nana said with a huff. “There’s always one King or another’s picture in there. I recognized Rafe from a picture taken at a movie premiere.”
“A premiere.” Katie shook her head and felt her heart drop through the floor. He was used to dating actresses and going to fabulous parties. Oh, he must have gotten such a laugh from the spur-of-the-moment barbecue in her backyard.
Annoyance flickered into anger and soon that hot little bubble of fury was frothing into real rage. “I can’t believe it. He must have thought I was an idiot for not recognizing him.” She paused for a glare at her grandmother. “And why didn’t you tell me?”
“Because,” Emily said. “You needed your life shaken up a little. Besides, he’s a cutie-patootie and you can’t hang all of the Kings for what one of them did.”
“Two of them now,” Katie reminded her.
“All right, yes, Rafe’s not looking too good at the moment,” Emily admitted. “But did you give him a chance to explain?”
“Oh, he explained. I was a bet gone wrong.”
“Katie…”
She shook her head and held up both hands. “No, Nana, there’s no excuse for what he did. He lied to me and that’s it.”
“I lied to you too, sweetie,” her grandmother pointed out in a small voice.
Sighing, Katie said, “Yeah, but you didn’t do it to hurt me.”
“No, I didn’t. And maybe that wasn’t Rafe’s intention, either.”
“We’ll never know, will we?” Katie muttered, as anger seeped away into the wide black hole she seemed to be carrying around inside her these days.
“You could find out if you’d stop hiding away in your house and go see him.” Emily frowned and looked at her steadily. “Are you really going to become a hermit while he’s out having a good time?”
That caught her attention quickly enough. Rafe was having a good time? Where? And a moment later the more important question—with who?—leaped into mind.
“What do you mean?” Katie asked, voice tight.
Her nana sighed again and reached for the morning paper, still folded and unopened on the kitchen table. “Honestly, Katie, if you paid a little more attention to current events…”
“What does that have to do with anything?”
Silently, Emily discarded the news section and went straight to Lifestyles. Thumbing through it, she finally found what she was looking for and folded it back. Then she laid it down in front of Katie and stabbed a grainy black-and-white picture with her manicured nail. “It means, you can find out a lot by keeping up with gossip. Like for example…there.”
Katie looked at the picture and felt the tightening in her chest ratchet up until she couldn’t get any air in her lungs. She was light-headed. That had to be the reason her vision was narrowing until all she could see was the picture in the paper. The picture of an unsmiling Rafe in a tuxedo at a charity fundraiser, with a blond sporting boobs twice the size of Katie’s clinging to his arm.
“When was—” She broke off as she read the caption under the photo. “Two nights ago.”
“He’s not curled up in the fetal position like someone else I could mention,” Emily murmured.
“That rat. That creep.” Katie slowly rose from her chair, clutching the paper in her fists. Her gaze still locked on the picture, all she could see was Rafe’s face, glaring at the camera as if he were wishing the photographer into the darkest bowels of Hell.
“Atta girl,” her grandmother whispered.
“He told me I was important to him,” Katie said, fury coloring her voice until it quivered and shook with the force of it. “He must have been lying again. If I was so damn important, how is he out with this bimbo?”
“To be fair, we’re not sure she’s a bimbo,” Nana said.
Katie glared at her. “Whose side are you on?”
“Right.”
“Does he think I’m stupid?” Katie asked, not waiting for an answer. “Did he really believe I wouldn’t find out that less than a week after—after—that he’d be dating the rich and pointless again? Does he think I don’t read the paper?”
“Well,” Emily pointed out easily, “you don’t.”
“I will from now on,” Katie promised, giving the paper a hard shake.
“So, what’re you going to do about this?”
Katie finally lifted her gaze and looked into her grandmother’s eyes. With cold, hard determination she said simply, “I’m going to go dethrone a King.”
Rafe couldn’t settle.
He felt uncomfortable in his own skin.
Which left him nowhere to run.