In the next frame, she was looking at the camera with a look of shock on her face. And in the next she’d stood up and was fixing her shirt. I felt sick. Physically ill. My stomach was turning in disgust. The shots were grainy, no doubt taken on a cell phone, but it was her. It was her curvy frame and her perfect tits, and that incredible mouth of hers. I took a deep breath. I needed to stop thinking about it before I made myself sick.
The next photo was one of her and me on the balcony of her house. It was similar to the one Quinn had texted me before, but these were less grainy, sharper, and from the angle they were taken it definitely looked like we were kissing. My heart pounded as I looked at them, at the way she was looking at me in the picture. I was uneasy about the way I was looking at her. It was as though nothing else in the universe mattered but us. If anybody got hold of it, there would be no sense in denying what was going on between us. Nobody would believe it. I cleared my throat.
“I’ll buy every copy of this. Every single fucking copy. And I’ll throw in a bonus if you give me your source.”
“Vic, you know I—”
“How long have we known each other, Q?”
He sighed, running a hand over his face. “People will want to see this. This is huge. They’re supposed to be getting a divorce, and they’ve been popping up everywhere together and now these pictures . . . this is the type of thing that breaks the Internet.”
I propped my elbows on the table and buried my face in my hands, closing my eyes to try to forget the image of her half-naked in front of another man. I needed to think of her as my client, not the woman I felt I could say anything to without second thought. Not the woman I’d had the most meaningful sex of my life with, because that’s what it was. Meaningful and hot as fuck.
“What’s going on with you and Nicole?” Quinn asked. My head snapped up. “Off the record.”
“Off the record, I want you to give me your goddamn source and help me make these pictures go away,” I said, shutting my computer. He studied me for a long moment.
“Yours or all of them?”
My eyes narrowed. “Every single one of them.”
Quinn smiled. “This one’s special.”
“Don’t start with your shit, Q. I don’t have time for it.”
“I’m not judging. She’s beautiful,” he said, raising his hands.
“Keep your fucking opinions to yourself. I’m having a hard enough time accepting that other people have seen this shit. And I don’t think you want anybody to know how much you’ve been visiting an unnamed married woman. We should probably keep that between us,” I said. “For now.”
His eyes widened, but his smile stayed intact. The reason Quinn and I got along so well is because we respected each other, and we knew not to call each other’s bluff. We were both ruthless. We’d claw the shit out of anybody who stood in our way, regardless of who it was.
“I don’t understand why you don’t come and work with me,” he said.
I chuckled at the thought, but got serious quickly. “One of us would be dead by the end of the first week. Now, give me the fucker’s name, and while you’re at it, I’m going to need a favor from a mutual friend of ours.”
NORMALLY I WASN’T one to dwell on reasons guys hadn’t called before their three-day quota, but with Victor it was all I could think about, mainly because he wasn’t the type of guy who played by any rules. I’d spoken to him just briefly after our weekend together and I’d been busy when he called, so it couldn’t even be considered a conversation. Over the weekend, half of the wardrobe on the movie set had been messed up, and luckily I was insanely busy working with two seamstresses to get caught up in making everything. Still, when I got home and soaked my hands in ice-cold water because they hurt so much from sewing non-stop, all I could think about was Victor. My phone finally rang with a call from him when I got home from work that night. I was soaking my hands in iced water, stumbling and spilling it everywhere to answer it.
“Hey,” he said, his voice making me lose my breath momentarily.
“You really stuck to the three-day rule,” I said. He was quiet for a beat.
“Sorry. I’ve been busy.”
“So have I.”
“Yeah, my mom said you left the car there until the next morning because you’d gotten out of work too late to call,” he said. “I need you to come into the office to sign the final papers so we can put this divorce behind you. Are you free tomorrow morning?” His voice was serious, all business, all Victor. I sighed.
“Sure. What time?”
“Nine?”
“I’ll be there.”
“Good,” he said, pausing to clear his throat. “And . . . you’re good? Everything is going okay?”
I made a face. He couldn’t see me, but he was acting really fucking weird. I chalked it up to his fear of everything being recorded. The guy swore he was Richard Nixon or something.
“I’m fine. See you tomorrow, Victor.”