“It’s . . .” Cassie hesitated, glanced at Noah Armstrong, then sighed and met Jenna’s gaze squarely. “It’s your father, Jenna. I’ve discovered something about him. Something you deserve to know, because it’s going to wreck all our lives for the next year or so.”
Jenna managed not to spray wine all over the snowy linen, but only because she snorted thirty-dollar-a-glass wine into her sinuses, instead. She blinked hard, eyes watering, wineglass frozen at her lips. When she’d regained control, Jenna carefully lowered the glass to the table and stared at her aunt, mind spinning as she tried to reassess the entire purpose for this clandestine meeting. She couldn’t even think of a rejoinder that would make sense.
“Drink that wine,” her aunt said brusquely. “You’re going to need it.”
Jenna swallowed hard, just once. Then knocked the wine back, abruptly wishing this meeting had been about her highly secret down-time trip with Carl, a trip they’d been planning for more than a year, to Victorian London, where she and her roommate planned to film the East End terror instilled by Jack the Ripper. They’d bought the tickets fourteen months previously under assumed names, using extremely well-made false identifications she and Carl had managed to buy from an underworld dealer in new identities. New York teemed with such dealers, with new identifications available for the price of a few hits of cocaine; but they’d paid top dollar, getting the best in the business, because Jenna Nicole Caddrick’s new identity had to be foolproof. Had to be, if she hoped to keep the down-time trip secret from her father. And what her father would do if he found out . . .