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“Here?” Rhett asked, looking panicked for the first time. “Now?”
Jimmy waited a minute before he couldn’t contain his laughter anymore and flipped to the next black card on his desk. It was a picture of all three women from the previous pictures photoshopped together. “Yes! Here tonight.”
Rhett leaned back as though he was relieved and ran a hand over his jaw, grinning.
“You should have seen your face, though,” Jimmy said. “I wouldn’t do that to you, Rhett. I actually like you.”
“I used to like you,” Rhett quipped, and the audience busted up.
Jimmy looked at the camera. “That’s almost all for tonight, but stay tuned for a musical production you won’t want to miss.”
They went to commercial break, and the door to the green room flung open.
Bridget stood there with a thunderous expression. “You need to come with me now.”
I got up and followed her out of the room, Adalyn close behind me.
We filed into Rhett’s empty dressing room. Bridget closed the door and spun to face me.
“How serious is it?” I asked.
“Serious.” She pulled out her phone and started typing into it. “You’ve already signed the NDA, so if anyone asks you questions, reply withno comment.”
“They won’t be able to tell that it’s her, right?” Adalyn asked.
I agreed. “The photo was so grainy, and my face wasn’t even in the shot.”
“It’s not going to take very long for anyone to figure it out,” she said. “Nothing stays a secret for long after something like this.”
Rhett managed to bury his father’s secrets this long, but I didn’t point that out. It seemed to me that enough money could bury anything.
She turned to Adalyn. “Start looking at flights.”
My body went rigid. We had a flight to Phoenix for tomorrow. If she needed a new one, that meant someone wasn’t going to Phoenix. And that someone was probably me. “You’re sending me away? Won’t that make me look guilty?”
“It’s best for you to leave quickly so you don’t draw attention to yourself. No one else on our team has hair like yours. It’s bound to be noticed soon.”
“Myhair?” I admitted it was long and sleek and a somewhat identifiable trait, especially with the braid that reached down to my lower back in the still shot they’d captured. But I wasn’t the only person in the world with long, sleek dark hair. There was also Ariana Grande, for one.
“We need to get ahead of this. We need to make a statement, and we should probably get Karina on board.”
Karina? The woman who just wrote a how-I-was-cheated-on exposé?
“Isn’t it better for Rhett to publicly break up with her?” I asked. “Jimmy Fallon basically called him a cheater on television.”
“He didn’t go that far. He just presented a few photos and let the audience come to their own conclusions. If Rhett breaks up with Karina now, he gives credence to the allegations, which won’t look good when her article is released tomorrow.”
My world spun, and I wanted to talk to Rhett. The TV was on in his dressing room, though it was muted. Rhett was now coming back on the screen, and it looked like they were about to partake in a lip-sync battle.
I usually loved those, but I couldn’t enjoy this one.
Bridget looked as if she were mentally reciting the periodic table of elements or figuring out how to fit sixteen people into a Mini Cooper. She shook her head. “Adalyn, take her back to the hotel. I’ll bring Rhett when he’s finished here. We’ll figure out how much is generally known before we decide what to do.”
I didn’t know how I felt about becoming the subject in the room instead of the person being spoken to. Adalyn opened the door right away, and I picked up my makeup case and followed her. This was so outside my wheelhouse. I had never had to worry before about how dating a man would make his image look, and it was startlingly uncomfortable. My dating history was varied and diverse. I had dated so many men—and broken up with so many men—and never before had I been in a position where I questioned myself or the man this often.
There was a TV in the hallway, and I caught sight of Rhett looking goofy while lip-syncing. My heart squeezed in affection for him, but fear quickly chased it. What would Rhett say about the situation? What were we going to do?
Chapter Twenty-Three
