“I suspected something,” Paul admits. “We’ve been having some problems in our marriage.”
“I’m sorry,” I tell him. But I don’t have that luxury of an obvious doubt. I’d thought my relationship with Brad was fantastic. We had a very healthy sex life, and what Brad lacked in creativity, he made up for in persistence to get me where I needed to go some of the times. And even if he left me behind most of the times, we laughed, we talked, and we loved hanging out together. If there was doubt in us, I thought it was because of me.
I just don’t get it.
It takes us about forty-five minutes to make it from the Fox Theater in Westwood Village to my home in Pacific Palisades. The ride is mostly silent except for my occasional sniffles. Luckily, my neighborhood is gated and thus I won’t have to face lurking paparazzi at my house.
When the limo pulls into my driveway, Paul asks, “What are you going to do?”
I square my shoulders. “I’m going to make sure every belonging he has in my house is waiting by the curb for him after the premiere.”
Even though we aren’t technically living together, and Brad still has his own home, he’s here more often than not and has accumulated a lot of stuff.
Paul chuckles and leans toward me. His voice is low, rumbling, and…sexy?
“Want some help packing his stuff up?” he practically purrs at me.
I lean back, not mistaking anything about his offer. “No thanks. I’ve got this.”
Paul’s hand goes to my thigh, immediately slipping under the slit to touch my bare skin. “Come on, Eden. We both deserve it after the way they betrayed us.”
I wasn’t lying when I told Lilliana I could kick her ass mightily. I’ve been doing mixed martial arts for almost ten years. Before Paul can even blink, I have his hand off my thigh and twisted at the wrist so his fingertips point at his astonished face. I put slight pressure on the back of his hand, bending his palm toward his wrist, and he whimpers like a baby.
God I fucking hate this town and the people in it so much at times. No one takes fidelity seriously here.
“I’m thinking you deserved to have your wife cheat on you,” I grit out at Paul, and push down on his hand a bit more. He grimaces even as anger fills his eyes.
“Let go, bitch,” he snarls at me.
Fortuitously, my door opens and the limo driver stands there, shocked to see the positions of his passengers.
“Have a lovely evening, Paul,” I say in a voice that’s anything but grateful as I release my hold on him. “I appreciate the ride home.”
I quickly exit the limo, jogging up to my front door in my four-inch strappy Choos and unlocking it. I turn the alarm off in the entryway, closing the door and then turning the dead bolt. I then reset my alarm, as I always feel safer with it on.
My cellphone rings and I sigh, pulling it out of my clutch. Not surprising, it’s Colleen O’Hearn, my business manager. She’s the best in the business, and of course she’s already up to speed on everything that’s happened. Her network of spies is vast, but apparently not needed tonight.
“It’s all over the Internet and on a few news channels,” is how she greets me. “We need to do damage control.”
“Damage control?” I ask astounded. “He cheated on me.”
“Not the way he’s spinning it,” Colleen says gruffly. “His publicist released a quick statement right from the fucking movie theater confirming that as of tonight you two had split. He’s apparently admitted falling in love with his costar while they filmed Code Zero. He claims you repeatedly spurned him in bed, and what little you did give was not that great, thus leading him into the arms of another woman.”
“He did not say that, did he?” I practically screech in disbelief, and tears start streaming again from both hurt and anger.
“Sorry, kiddo…but you said he had erectile dysfunction. Did you think he’d let that go?”
“That’s on the news too?” I ask incredulously.
“Only from about five different smartphones where people were videotaping the entire exchange,” she says dryly. “Of course, they caught Lilliana’s dramatic faint and Brad catching her suavely in his arms, then carrying her inside the theater. The articles are calling him ‘gallant.’ He’s managed to paint himself in damn good light.”
“That…that…that asshole,” I curse, because nothing more creative is coming to mind. In fact, I can feel my entire brain starting to shut down on me. The hurt starts to overcome the anger, and my heart feels like it’s being crushed in a vise grip. I loved that asshole, but apparently he didn’t feel the same about me.
Tonight I was publicly humiliated, lost my fiancé, and I already feel the terrible weight of anxiety pressing down on my chest, wondering what tomorrow’s headlines are going to bring.
I really hate this town sometimes.
Chapter 2
I’m not a commitment type of guy…
Coop
I hang up the phone in frustration and walk over to the whiteboard on my office wall that holds the schedule of all my employees for the workweek. Using the eraser, I remove Todd Crawley’s name from tomorrow’s mulch job at the public library. With a grunt of dissatisfaction, I pencil my name in to take his place. Can’t be too mad at the dude, though. He’s got a stomach bug that’s been sweeping through our little town of Newberry, Georgia, and it’s knocked out practically every one of my staff, which includes four men and two women landscape maintenance workers.
Tossing the erasable marker onto my desk, I sit back behind it and stare at my computer. I’ve got about four more hours of work on these 3-D landscape renderings for a new client I picked up in Athens. It’s a doctor who bought a house on a small lake, and he wants to redo the entire front and backyard. It’s a huge project, with man-made structures and water features. It will come in at close to seventy-five thousand dollars for the entire thing, and while the yard maintenance part of my business yields decent money, I make my really good gravy from my design projects.
My plan had been to complete these tomorrow, as I had a meeting with the client the following day. But now that I’ll be working in Todd’s place on the mulch job, it looks like I’ll be working into the night.