“Maybe.”
She elbowed him. “Are you on Tinder or something?”
He laughed. “Nope.”
“Have lots of women seen those pictures?” she asked, sounding jealous, which she didn’t have any right to be. Yet she wasn’tnotjealous. Just curious. Who did Rhys send shirtless pictures to when he wasn’t on a fake-boyfriend-on-vacation trip?
“A couple.” They stopped in front of their bungalow. “Promise you won’t laugh?”
Her eyes bulged. “Why do I need to promise that?”
“You just do.”
She crossed her heart. “Promise.”
“Vivian and Gage—”
“Who’s Gage?”
“Sorta like our number two, but he’s been undercover a lot lately. So, Viv and Gage had to build this cover story for a client. Her phone had to be filled with pictures of shirtless guys.” He shrugged. “So we all took one for the team and shot a couple pictures. Sent them to Dean, who couldn’t say a damn thing because he had done the same. They stacked the phone full of thirst traps, then never needed to use the phone anyway.”
Her mouth hung open. Rhys pressed two fingers to her chin until she snapped it shut.
“So the women who saw those photos?” Jules asked.
“Viv and Scarlett, who will probably never stop ribbing us over them.”
Jules sucked in her cheeks. “Will you send me some that no one at your office ever saw?”
Grinning, he winked. “I’ll have to do that sometime.” Rhys punched in the door code on their bungalow. “You going to send me one too?”
She wouldn’t even know how. “Guess you’ll have to find out.”
As they walked in, the air conditioning wrapped around them. She dropped her bags and kicked off her shoes. Tired, hot, and sticky, she needed a shower and probably a nap.
“I’m going to follow up with Dean,” Rhys said. “And probably learn a whole lot of nothing.”
She didn’t understand why someone had chosen her defunct honeymoon to keep harassing her. Would this have happened if she’d married Mason?
Lots of things wouldn’t have happened if she’d married Mason. Like Rhys.
Was she falling for him? With such an intense physical connection, it would seem ridiculous to say she hadn’t already started to. But Jules really didn’t trust relationships, and this one had an expiration date.
Even if it didn’t, she didn’t trust an emotion like love. Attraction made sense and wasn’t sentimental. She couldn’t confuse magnetism for more than it was. She also didn’t completely trust Rhys and hadn’t for more than a decade. But was that still true?
Well, she trusted him with the important parts, like her life. Just not her secrets. Maybe she did trust him and simply hadn’t forgiven him.
Wow, was that screwed up. Rhys hadn’t had a choice. Twenty-year-old Jules hadn’t trusted him—or understood why he’d divulged her secrets. Thirty-five-year-old Jules did. She just hadn’t realized that she had outgrown her grudge.
The realization nearly knocked her over. When had that happened?
It was probably sometime over the years, when he’d kept plenty of her secrets, like about the men she didn’t like dating, the roles that she wished she had won, the fights with her parents, and the red-carpet disasters that she would deny to her dying breath.
She trusted Rhys. And she needed to tell him that. Really, she needed to apologize for pushing against his testifying. She’d been so young, and that had seemed like the biggest deal. Little did she know that time would pass, and what was a monumental problem would be a pebble of an issue in the grand scheme of things.
“I’m going to take a shower,” she called to him as he paced while on the phone.
He nodded and continued speaking.
