Page 74 of Manhattan Bossholes

She sniffled as her eyes filled with fake tears.

“Maya, come on. Stop it,” I scolded her. “Don’t try that with me.”

“You leave me alone!” she cried out in an anguished but very fake voice. “You’ve broken my heart again, Vincent Forde!”

She covered her face and ran out of the room sobbing loudly, for maximum attention. It was only then that I saw the figure lurking in the shadows.

“Hey, uh, sorry. Didn’t mean to overhear.”

The guy hastily shoved his camera in his pocket. He looked familiar, but then again, nearly everyone at the party was a boldface name.

Then it hit me.

The shifty looking guy in the corner was none other than TikTok blogger Jerry Reed, who was known for gossip and so-called blind items framed in such a way that made it incredibly obvious who they were about. He also liked to do “pranks” on celebrities that actually qualified as harassment. I could almost guarantee Maya had noticed him and dialed up the fake tears and so-called heartbreak to spin the story her way. She was that calculating.

“What you overheard was a private conversation,” I said tersely.

He smiled at me and shrugged. “In a public space. And it was kind of hard to ignore, with the yelling and all.”

I wanted to storm over and crack him in the jaw, but that would only make a bad situation worse. The best thing I could do was hide my fury and hope the public would decide the story wasn’t worthy of attention.

Fuck. Who was I kidding? Playboy CEO fakes a romance with an employee and makes his gorgeous supermodel ex cry at a major launch party? The story was going to be everywhere.

“Hey, great party. Later.” Jerry flashed a peace sign at me and walked back outside.

The muscles along my shoulders tensed as I weighed what the leak was going to do to the launch. There was no doubt that the good press about Evermore was going to get lost in the coverage of what had just gone down in the empty ballroom.

I stormed back outside and nearly ran into Piper on her way in.

“Hey, I was looking for you,” she said. Her cheerful expression slid into a frown as she studied my face. “What’s wrong?”

“We need to talk. Now.”

I turned on my heel and headed through the ballroom to a more private meeting room down the hall.

“Vincent, what’s going on?” Piper asked as she jogged to keep up with me.

I waited until I shut the door behind us before I began. I couldn’t think straight, but I knew one thing: This was going to get ugly.

“What?” Piper reached out to grasp my arm. “Tell me what happened.”

I was so angry that the concern on her face barely registered. “Prepare for a Jerry Reed shitstorm. Maya just cornered me and tried to kiss me, and then basically forced me to admit that we were faking a relationship when we started dating. Jerry saw the whole thing. He might’ve recorded it, I couldn’t tell.”

“What?” Piper whispered. Her face went pale.

“Maya put on a whole contrived show of how I broke her heart, and now this scandal is going to be the focus of the Summit narrative, not Evermore. I’m going to look like a fool!”

I fumed as I considered all the ways Jerry could spin the story.

“I don’t know what to say,” Piper whispered, her expression haunted.

“Yeah, that makes two of us.” I raked my hands through my hair and sighed. “All that work…”

“Yes, but once the campaign goes live, people will focus on that,” Piper said in a hollow voice. “It’s gorgeous.”

I snorted at her. “Yeah, I’m sure you think so. I noticed you and Rodrigo couldn’t keep your hands off each other. That’s not going to help fix the narrative either. Hopefully no one got footage of you two together.”

Piper backed away from me, and her face went from pale to absolutely white. “Vincent…” her voice was a pained whisper. “Do you really think I was flirting with Rodrigo? He was telling me that he just found out his girlfriend is pregnant. We were celebrating the good news, that’s all!”