She looked at the glossy cover and there she was. She grimaced at the headline. God only knew what lies they’d printed inside, but even if they’d only printed the truth, it was still pretty bad.
“I was going to tell you—”
“When?” He cut her off, twisting back in her direction, face flushed. “When were you going to tell me? Because we’ve been together nonstop for about a week now and it seems like this might have come up somewhere between, oh, I don’t know. Somewhere between hello and I love you.”
She should have told him sooner. She should have told him sooner. Damn it. She really should have told him sooner.
“I know. It’s just . . . it’s complicated.”
Complicated? That sounded pathetic even to her. She was shaking, and cold and clammy, but she had to pull it together. She had to make him understand how this had started with one simple falsehood and yet had somehow exploded into this mushroom cloud of events.
“Complicated,” he growled. “Yeah. I can see how confusing it might get trying to remember your own fucking name.” His voice rose with the last part, and she was almost glad. Glad to finally be getting this out in the open, to expose the wound she’d created so they might begin to move past it and heal. But how, she had no idea. She couldn’t undo anything. She could only try to fix it from this point forward.
“Grant, I’m so sorry. I just—”
He cut her off. “So where do I fit into the general spin of things?”
“The spin?”
“Yeah. Am I the brainless idiot who never recognized you, or the dedicated lover willing to call the cops on his own mother just to keep you entertained?” His eyes glittered with anger, and her heart, the one he’d touched just an hour earlier with the sweetest words, now splintered, cut by his sharp gaze.
“You’re neither. That’s not what happened. Grant, the media spins things in a hundred different ways and it’s hardly ever true. I was trying to protect you from that.”
He looked like he’d been jolted with electricity. “Protect me? Protect me by lying to me about who you are?”
“No, protect you by keeping you out of the media storm. That’s the whole reason I was hiding out. Ever since that awful video surfaced, the paparazzi have been hounding me and I was just trying to get away.”
“Get away. Right. Leaking that video didn’t have anything to do with boosting the ratings for your TV show and making you famous. Oh, and by the way, you didn’t think to mention you had a TV show? I’m a fucking cinematographer, Delaney. I know a thing or two about television.”
He said her name like it was a curse, and it stung. Agitation stuck in her throat, making her voice raspy. “Yes, you’re a cinematographer, and everything you hate about television is everything that my show represents. I admit it, Grant, that’s no excuse for me not telling you, but it is the reason I hesitated. But you have to believe I never leaked that video. I didn’t even know it existed until a few weeks ago. I’m not a fame-seeker. I’m the opposite of that, and I just wanted you to get to know the real me before you made any judgments.”
His bark of laughter was harsh, without an ounce of humor in it. “Oh, OK. In that case, I’ll just make my judgments based on what you’ve shown me yourself. No cameras, no crew. Just me and the real you. Oh, and look. You still lied. Even when it was just the two of us. You had a dozen chances to come clean, and you chose not to.”
They were standing feet apart, facing each other, but it may as well have been an ocean between them. Or a pit of fiery lava. At least if it was lava, Delaney could fling herself into it and have this all be over with. What a hot mess she’d created.
“You’re right. I should have told you sooner. I should have told you right away, but I didn’t know you at first. I didn’t expect you to be in that house and I had no idea if I could trust you. Then, once I did, I couldn’t figure out when or how to explain. I just . . .”
Her voice dwindled away, the excuses and explanations dying on her lips. How could she defend herself when she basically agreed with him?
“This was all just a little elaborate, wasn’t it?” he said, finally moving, stalking to the other side of the room. “The whole running away scam? The hiding out? The bag of money? My mother taking it must have made your day! That’s why you’ve been such a good sport about all this, isn’t it? You couldn’t have scripted a better drama. Did you rent that house from her on purpose just hoping she’d take that money?”
“What? No! Of course not. I didn’t script anything. Listen to me, Grant. I broke my show contract and left Beverly Hills because I wanted to be done with all of it, with all the trappings of celebrity and fame. I’m not interested in the spotlight, and that video humiliated me. I thought if I dropped out of sight for a while this would all just go away. But it hasn’t because we got in that stupid accident and left the car behind and got the police involved.”