Page 105 of Gilt

“Where are you staying?”

“With Josie.” It’s not exactly a lie. I haven’t brought up my fight with her to Jameson yet, so I don’t know for sure that he’ll let me stay here. If he doesn’t, I guess I’ll be begging her for forgiveness after dark.

“Emma,” she says in a warning tone.

“Call Marion if you don’t believe me,” I snap.

“Fine. Did you get your car, at least?” Trust my mother to segue into a topic that makes her look good. She’s doing damage control without knowing what caused the destruction in the first place.

“I did. It’s nice.”

“Maybe you could drive back down here and pick up your stuff,” she suggests.

“Mom,” I say slowly, wanting to catch her attention. “I won’t be coming back to Palm Springs unless Hans is out of town.” I add the qualifier because as angry as I am with her, I know it’s not her fault.

“Emma, what happened between you and Hans?” she asks in a soft voice.

And here it is. My chance to tell her the truth. But before I can, I remember Josie’s face this afternoon after she saw Anton with her mother. She’d stepped over a line, and she couldn’t turn back. If I tell my mother, I know she’ll side with me. I also know there’s a prenup, that there will be a nasty divorce, and that she’ll have her heart broken all over again. She has to suspect what kind of man she’s married to. She can’t possibly know the depths of his depravity, though, and I’m not ready to be the one to tell her. Not yet. “I saw the script for Hans’s movie.” It’s as good of a reason as any. “There’s a sex scene in there between Jameson and me.”

There’s a long pause on the other end of the line.

“Did you have sex with him that night?” she asks.

I had no idea she was capable of such directness. “No, I didn’t. I told Hans that, but he refuses to take it out.”

“Honey, you can’t make business decisions—”

Here come the apologetics. I’ve given her enough slack for the evening. “Mom, sorry, I need to go. Something’s come up.”

I hang up before she can stop me and turn the ringer off on my phone. Tonight I only want to be with Jameson. But as I round the corridor that leads to the kitchen, I realize that might be harder than I thought.

The gang’s all here.

“I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that I didn’t get an invitation,” I say to Monroe. She doesn’t even bother to answer me. I suppose the brief moment we had the other day was a fluke.

Unlike the others, Jonas has the decency to come over to me.

“Good to see you,” he says, hugging me awkwardly. It’s hard to admit there was a time when I would have bottled up that momentary contact and clung to it for months. Finally, being over Jonas, I’m having a hard time not judging how pitifully I’d acted.

I break away as soon as it’s polite. “I saw you at the hospital.”

“I’m sorry?”

“A few days ago.” I attempt to jog his memory, but he still stares at me blankly. Then again, he’s always been a bit of a beautiful nothing. Seeing him now, I can’t help but wonder what Leighton felt the need to protect him from. “Did you go to visit Leighton?”

“No.” He grabs a beer out of a six-pack on the counter. “I just got back in town.”

“You know what? Hugo mentioned that.” He’s not going to budge, so either he forgot, or he’s protecting himself as well. What does Jonas have to hide? “I guess I thought it was you.”

I’m absolutely positive that I’d spotted Jonas at Belle Pointe, but why is he covering it up? Sure, his story is that he was out of town, but I know better. I might not always be great with names or facts, but faces I’m pretty good at—especially ones I’ve nearly sucked the lips off.

“Trying to steal my girl?” Levi swaggers over and drops an arm around my shoulder with the confidence of a man who knows what’s going to greet him when he looks in the mirror. Any other time, I might be flattered by his attention, but I saw that headshot in my stepfather’s office, and I suspect Levi isn’t at Casa de West to catch up with the family.

I shrug away from him and force a small smile. “Good to see you.”

Judging from the scathing glare that Sabine, Monroe’s less nice best friend, gives me, he won’t have a hard time finding another girl to feed his ego. She saunters over and wedges herself in the space between us. If she knew I was grateful that she was acting as a buffer, she’d probably lock me in a room with him. Sabine’s bizarre need to look out for her own interests is only trumped by her uncompromising policy that the rest of humanity remains below her.

I take my chances anyway, knowing how much it will irk her, and lean to whisper in her ear. “Thanks. I couldn’t get away from him to find my boyfriend.”