Filthy Dirty Laundry Vol. 2 Read online

  Connor pats Conway's shoulders. “No, bro, too much stress. Which is why I've planned this party, to take your mind off it....”

  “I didn't even know it was my own suite!” Conway's laugh is childlike and confused. “Ha! Ha Ha!”

  “Come on in,” says Connor. “We'll take care of you, girl.”

  Something is definitely up, I think. Either Conway's drunk out of his mind, or drugged, or...something else is wrong. I've heard of fighters getting severe brain damage from their fights – could that be what's happening here? Conway is just totally crazy as a result of being conked on the head too many times and utterly reliant on his handlers to tell him what's going on? If so...that doesn't seem to jive with the “he's an abuser” theory. Conway seems kind of dazed, maybe a little dumb, but definitely not mean. Yet. After all, people can always surprise you, and it's usually a disappointing surprise.

  We enter. I can't believe how big and luxurious the suite is – it's at least twice the size of mine. The room is filled to the brink with girls. There are few men here, mostly just ladies – all models and girls who look like they could be high-class escorts. Everyone's surrounding Conway, flocking to him, flirting with him.

  Me, I go get some snacks and watch the action. I have to watch Conway like a hawk, after all: he's my subject, my story. He is sort of flirting back, but even now he seems kind of dazed, confused. Like he's not 100% all there. He seems to enjoy attention, but he's more like a puppy dog than a sleazy man. Under the table I text Johnson the room number, hoping he'll figure it out.

  “Cool guy, huh?” I turn to Connor.

  “Yeah,” Connor says. “Everyone loves him!”

  “He's a real sweetheart.”

  “The sweetest,” Connor says. “Poor kid. He's my brother, and I love him so much. And I'm happy for him. But I don't think he ever expected this level of fame. He was my dopey kid brother most of my life. Now suddenly he's famous. It's all kind of much for him, as you can see. Lucky for him he has us to look out for him!”

  My phone buzzes. It's a text from Johnson. Take it slow. Don't scare him off just yet.

  Unfortunately, as the night wears on, it seems that Conway has other plans. As the darkness appears outside my window, Conway gets more and more attentive to me, leaving behind the other girls to talk to me, ask me questions about my “vacation.” He's sweet to me, not aggressive, but all the flirty touches are there. Little touches. Light caresses. At one point, he takes me over to the other end of the room to meet the rest of his entourage – his manager Rick and his trainer Bill. He takes my hand in his, smiling raptly.

  Well, Conway's not what I expected.

  “Did you hurt your hands, Conway?” I ask. “They're all bandaged up.”

  “Yeah...just a bit...” Conway sighs. “You can call me Mitch, by the way. Yeah I get beat up a lot. Fighting for a living you know. I have to wrap up my hands for all the intense practice I do everyday. They get real sore.”

  “Sorry to hear that,” I say. “That it can be painful, I mean. I hope you're keeping busy with fun stuff as well as stress, though. Do you ever get away from practice and have fun – I mean, this party, seems like you really need it.”

  “Yeah,” Mitch says. “Sometimes. When my handler and trainer let me. I don't have a lot of free time though. Rick and Bill keeps me pretty busy. I don't even get to date. “His eyes run over my body. I recognize this look. By now it's familiar to me. “I do hope I'm not being too forward, Miss Stone...ugh, Miss Sidney, but I dare say you might be one of the prettiest girls I ever did see.”

  I'm surprised but laugh off the compliment. “I bet you say that to every girl you meet. Especially when you're trying to impress them.”

  “What's wrong with trying to impress you? I wanna impress you,” he smiles.

  “Someone as good-looking and famous as you – I bet you have loads of girlfriends already...”

  Take the bait take the bait take the bait

  “Nah,” says Mitch again.

  That can't be right. “No?” I crane my neck. “No girlfriend?”

  Mitch leans in and whispers to me. “If I could have a girlfriend right now, Sidney, I'd wanna be with you. But I'm not allowed. It would take too much time from my training...Zack would kill me.”

  “Come on,” I roll my eyes. “I've seen you in the tabloids. You're always linked to some skinny, famous blonde, someone in all the magazines...”

  “It's stupid,” Mitch says. “I have a fake secret girlfriend....my manager cooked her up so it would stop all the gay rumors. I'm not gay, but since I'd never been seen with a girlfriend people were always talking...” He sighs. “Pathetic, huh. I'm famous and I have to have a fake secret girlfriend....”

  “Uh huh.”

  Okay, something is definitely UP with this story.

  “Anyway, that whole thing turned out to be a mess…”

  “How so?” My ears prick up.

  “Long story – Zack won't let me talk about it.” He turns to me so suddenly I'm surprised. “Hey, maybe you can be my secret girlfriend?”

  “What?”

  “I mean, if it's a PR thing, it might as well be someone I actually know, right.”

  “I don't even know you!”

  “I don't know my 'girlfriend' either,” says Mitch.

  Jeez, this guy has been doing a lot of some drugs lately....

  I can't believe what I'm hearing. If there wasn't a real secret girlfriend, who got beaten up – and why?

  “Come up,” Mitch takes my hand and leads me towards a private room in the suite. “I want to talk to you alone...”

  Chapter 5

  No sooner are we in the private section of Mitch's suite then he leans into me, starts kissing me. The walls are floor-to-ceiling glass and the room – which contains a private swimming pool – looks out over the neon and glitter of the Vegas skyline.

  Not that I see it. All I see is Mitch Conway's face in front of me.

  Mitch Conway is kissing me. The Mitch Conway – prize fighter – is kissing me.

  He's handsome, to be sure, but also clearly drunk out of his mind, and something's off about him – though what I'm not sure. I'm getting a weird, creepy feeling: something in the pit of my stomach. Something that makes me incredibly suspicious. Even if Mitch himself isn't the abuser that the anonymous source claimed he was, there's definitely something non-kosher going on.

  I let Mitch kiss me while I figure out what to do. It's not an unpleasant project, I must admit. Mitch is a good kisser, and despite his dopey act, I feel a buzz.

  “What's that?” Mitch laughs. “The electricity of our connection?”

  “Let me take this,” I say. “It's my boss.”

  “Wow, fancy girl,” Mitch laughs. “Working even when you're on vacation.”

  I look down to see a text from Philip.

  I'm on my way.

  Another text appears.

  Whatever you do, don't get near Conway. He's dangerous. I'll explain later. Whatever you do don't get alone with him. The tip that came into FDL magazine – I traced it. And something really suspicious is going on.

  I'll be there as soon as I can.

  I look up at Mitch's sweet face.

  Could this man really be a predator?

  I look at the door, but Mitch is standing square between me and it.

  “Come on,” he whispers, “let's have some fun.”

  Chapter 6

  I stare at Mitch Conway. Every beautiful inch of him. That blonde, pale hair with warm flecks running through it like gold harvested from a riverbed. Those bright hazel eyes with notes of chocolate, of dark fig: ripe and sensuous. Those perfectly formed lips, rose-pale and sensual. And that body – the prize body, the prize fighter body, the body every girl in Los Vegas, LA, and New York is obsessed with, the body every single girl who follows sports and plenty that don't imagine being wrapped around her frame, exploring her body, delving between her legs...

  Mitch Conway is a sensation, to be sure
. Even if he weren't the best MMA fighter on either coast, he's also drop-dead gorgeous with a Hollywood backstory to boot. Just another awkward kid in inner-city Los Vegas – stripper mom, deadbeat dad (or so the PR machine says). And then one day he gets scouted in a high school game or a street fight (again, depending on who you believe – although of course I'm partial to FDL magazine's coverage) and suddenly he's on top of the world. Millions of dollars in his bank account. Top shelf liquor and the finest drugs in his hotel suites. Every penthouse in every major world capital is ready and waiting for him.

  Once, Mitch Conway couldn't even afford dinner. He and his family lived on rice and beans or Ramen for months on end. Now, he's living large. Steak. Caviar. Lobster with a little filet mignon or wagyu beef to take home in case he fancies a midnight steak. Hotel fridges full of Cristal and Moet. He's living the high life, that's for sure.

  And he's just asked me to be his girlfriend.

  I've known him for about two hours.

  What can I say? Welcome to my life.

  My name is Sidney Stone, and until about two weeks ago I was just your average bottom-feeding gossip journalist in California. Like Mitch Conway, I was just an awkward kid. A J-school graduate with big dreams of cracking open corruption cases and bill-paying realities of going through celebrities' garbage and – just recently – figuring out the dog food preferences of desperate reality TV housewives. Not exactly the kind of jobs you win the Pulitzer Prize for. I was just about paying my bills, with a little help from my overdraft most months, desperate, uninsured, and sharing my one-bedroom apartment with a sexually voracious Australian actor-bartender called Kiley who couldn't stop making good-natured fun of the fact that I was a repressed virgin. Not that I blamed her. I barely dated – the only man in my life was my best friend Johnson, and there was never anything between us – and I had virtually no interest in sex. I guess I figured I was just asexual, or not wired that way, or that maybe the stereotype was true and women just didn't like sex as much as men.

  How wrong I was.

  Because two weeks ago, Philip LaFleur walked into my life. And then everything changed.

  Well, walked is something of a misnomer. Philip LaFleur didn't so much walk into my life as drive an Audi crash bang straight through it – literally. Knocked me off my bicycle and put me in the hospital for a few days, by which point it transpired that he'd just bought FDL magazine, taken over the job I'd been dying to be hired for as Celebrity Editor, transformed FDL from a glossy gossip magazine into an international hard-hitting Vanity-Fair-style publication.

  Oh yeah, and given me my first couple orgasms.

  Did I forget to mention the part where, aside from being one hell of a boss, Philip LaFleur developed an obsession with making me his...I don't know what? Lover? Mistress? Girlfriend? Where he realized that ordering me around turned him on – and when I realized that it turned me on just as much. When he realized that all he had to do is brush his fingertips along my thighs and suddenly I would be putty in his hands: ready to dress exactly the way he liked – in hot pink bodycons or newly-bought diamond gold studded mini-dresses he had delivered to my hotel suite – to let him feed me lobsters and oysters, to let him touch me in ways that make me moan and sometimes even scream.

  It's a bad idea. Scratch that: it's a terrible idea. Firstly, because Philip LaFleur is my boss. And secondly, and more importantly, because Philip LaFleur is older brother to Kendall LaFleur: my high school nemesis. My former wicked almost-stepsister – daughter of the married man my mother took up with when I was in high school – who made every day of that relationship a living hell for me. Sins of the mother and all that. It was my fault her parents weren't together, she decided, with that entirely incorrect but nonetheless totally unflappable teenage girl logic, and so she was going to take it out on me. Every ounce of her frustration. Every moment of her pain. As far as she was concerned, the hell that was being a teenage girl and a child of divorcées was a hell I had specially concocted for her with weird teenage-girl-powers, and so she was going to get her own back on me: any way it took. That would have been bad enough as a distant childhood memory, but the story gets worse (bear with me). Turns out, Philip LaFleur hired his kid sister as my colleague at the paper. Nepotism at its finest. Kendall needed something to do after her latest freshest stint at rehab, a nice CV-padding job without much work that would get Mommy and Daddy and Grandpa LaFleur off her back. And Philip needed an excuse to keep Kendall close so he could keep an eye on her and ensure she wouldn't get into trouble: something that would probably be a full-time job in itself.

  So, what does that mean for me? My boss is trying to fuck me and my co-worker is trying to kill me, and when push comes to shove they're family and I'm just the outsider. Which means that even if I didn't have the professional-ethics thing to worry about when it comes to my secret relationship with Philip, I have to worry about the fact that if Kendall gets even so much as a whiff of what's going on between me and her brother, she'll go absolutely postal. Already she had a breakdown in the office over my success with the dog-food story and ended up assaulting Johnson for trying to stick up to me. Behavior that would get her fired in any other office. But not here at FDL, where the LaFleurs have the run of the place and blood is thicker than water.

  So, you might ask, how does your weird relationship with your boss and his sister get you here, to the MGM Hotel, to the top floor and the private suite and the swimming pool, where Mitch Conway, champion MMA fighter and heartthrob extraordinaire to half the world's population of teenage girls, is asking you to be his girlfriend?

  Well, I'm asking myself that same question.

  Yesterday, Philip got a call from an anonymous tipster. Saying that Mitch Conway wasn't the sweetheart teenage puppy-dog with fists-of-steel that everyone was making him out to be. Rather, he was a jerk and abuser: a guy who'd beaten his girlfriend – whom he'd been keeping secret from the press and the whole world – to a pulp. The only problem is: nobody could identify who exactly this mysterious girlfriend was. And there was another element to it too: a prize fight coming up with tons of money (we're talking millions) riding on the result, and Mitch Conway favored to win. Something was fishy about this story, and Philip sent me to get the inside scoop. Not reprinting gossip for page clicks, but finding out who would set up Mitch Conway – and why.

  He had me impersonate a wealthy vacationer – perfect to get in touch with Mitch, who was famous for his proclivity for beautiful model-types and vapid high-end call girls.

  Famous...but were the rumors true?

  Because the Mitch Conway I met wasn't a playboy or a sleaze at all. If anything, he was an incredibly sweet, incredibly innocent, kind of dumb (if I'm being honest) but insanely pretty kid who still wasn't quite sure how to handle himself in the public eye. He was surrounded by a team of handlers: his brother Connor, his handler Zack, his trainer Bill, who made it their job to encourage Mitch living large, and occasionally profit off it too. Those parties, the booze, the drugs, were all his family and handler's idea – Mitch just seemed to wander through that world in a daze, his head slightly addled by getting hit in it one too many times. Not exactly stereotypical girlfriend-abusing material. I'm still cynical, though – Mitch Conway's “good ole boy” demeanor could be an act.

  But Mitch has just grabbed me, kissed me, and admitted he hasn't been let near a real live girl in years. The girl he was supposed to be “secretly dating' was a PR stunt cooked up to dispel the gay rumors – rumors that while false existed because Zack and Bill wouldn't let Mitch near any humans of either gender. I guess they wanted to keep him close, keep an eye on him, make sure the gravy train was running.

  So, with typical Mitch Conway directness and a somewhat stunted logic, Mitch figures I should be his secret girlfriend instead. Sorry, “secret girlfriend.” Someone the paps can shoot, the gossip columnists can devote inches and page-clicks too. Because he's actually met me, and that's one up on the models, actresses, and high-end escorts that
Bill occasionally parades around his Hotel room.

  You kind of have to feel sorry for the guy.

  Or at least, I did. Before I got Philip's text. The one that told me that something was very, very, wrong with the source – and that I might be in danger. That under no circumstances should I be alone with Mitch Conway, because if I got too close, I was taking a serious fucking risk. Abort mission.

  Only problem is: I'm alone with Mitch Conway in his Hotel suite, and we're making out like it's no tomorrow.

  “Come on,” Conway grabs my wrist, still smiling. But his touch is tight: firm. The touch of a man who uses his hands for a living. There's no way I'd be able to fight him off if things went south.

  I'm entirely in his power.

  My heart starts to beat faster and faster in my chest.

  For the first time – I'm truly scared.

  Chapter 7

  My heart is pounding so hard it hurts. I can feel it against my chest: the familiar, the terrible feeling. Thump thump thump. I wonder that Mitch can't see it through the skin-tight gold lace dress I'm wearing. Thump thump thump.

  What have I gotten myself into? I'm in danger – that much is clear. But why? Could it be from Mitch? As I look into his sweet hazel eyes with the golden-brown caramel lining, I wonder how a man like this could ever be cruel, could ever be dangerous. He doesn't even look like a man, despite the fact that he must be around my age – twenty-three or twenty-four. He still looks like a boy: with a boy's innocence, a boy's charm. But there's something about the way he's touching me now that reveals another side to him. Mitch Conway is a fighter after all. Someone who beats other men to a pulp for a living. Someone for whom violence is an integral part of who he is, of his very identity. Physical strength – he may not look strong, but he embodies strength. How could I have been so naïve not to see that initially? As I feel the feeling of his hands on me, his skin against my own, I remember that. Was this how it was with this mysterious girlfriend, I wonder? Him grabbing her by the wrist as a preface to the ultimate violence that followed: hitting her, punching her, kicking her? My body recoils from the imagined pain; I flinch.