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“Oh,” Jill said, clucking her tongue. “Oh. That makes sense.”
“He was gutted.”
Jill felt her eyebrow arch involuntarily. “Yeah, he was really broken up.”
“What?”
Laughing, she imitated the Aussie’s last words before he’d managed to hang up. “He was so sad. Clearly.”
“He really was!”
“How about you? Were you gutted?” She hadn’t meant to say it. She hadn’t meant to break character. At least, if she did, she had meant to just come out and ask about the photos. Of all people, Jill understood the havoc a well-timed shutter click could wreak. But something in her heart had wrenched at the thought of Thad’s hands-on Rhiannon’s hips, his face buried in the curve of her neck as he danced up behind her. One more man who preferred that woman to her.
“What?”
“Oh, maybe your own affair hasn’t made it all the way back to Prague yet.”
“What?”
“I have to go, Rhiannon, but it’s rich coming from you. Really, really rich.” It was unfair, and Jill knew it, but it was also beyond her to be reasonable right then.
As Rhiannon parroted her question again, Jill hung up. “I need new friends,” she said to the telephone. “A whole new list of friends. And I want a dog.”
CHAPTERNINE
Rhiannon Charles
Rhiannon hung up the phone and turned to Rick, who was just entering the room with a towel wrapped around his waist. They had four days left in Prague, then it was back to LA where she and Thad would immediately start work on the sitcom, and start campaigning for the Emmys.
The news of the nominations seemed to have broken the curse the production struggled under, and brought its own miracle. The last two weeks of work had been seamless and even a little magical, as cast and crew threw in together, working their asses off to make up for lost time. It was exhausting and amazing, and she couldn’t remember working on anything that gave her such a sense of fulfillment. Granted, Rhiannon was looking at everything through the rose-colored glasses of a blossoming relationship, but everything did seem like it was finally making sense. Now this phone call?
“That was Jill,” Rhiannon explained. “She was… ’upset’ seems like an understatement. She was saying something about my affair?”
Rick frowned. “About us?”
“I don’t know. I don’t think so.”
He hummed and went to his laptop. He pecked around on the keyboard for a few seconds, then let out a long breath. “Fuck,” he said.
Rhiannon grabbed her robe and hurried around behind him, feeling her eyes bulge a little as she looked over his shoulder. He had opened up on a gossip blog, one of the nastier ones as she recalled, and there were photos of her with Thad from the night they had danced in the pub. The night she’d gone back to the hotel and gone to bed with Rick.
The captions were awful, calling her a starfucker and a slag, showing censored versions of the photos with Kline, and some of the photos from the damned Vanity Fair party with her dress gone sheer in the lights. Rhiannon was shocked, her mood deflating almost as quickly as it had the first time she’d seen herself naked on the cover of a tabloid. "What? We're--"
"What's next for the star of Simon Says?” Rick read aloud, switching tabs to People Magazine online.“Thad James split with his third wife, supermodel Monique Pelletier, only weeks ago.Now he's in Prague filming Circle Sky.Love life? Hot!He's been heating up the scene with a familiar face. They got rude for a sec, I'll skip that." He continued with, "Kissing, clowning, and carrying on, is this the next future ex-Mrs. James?"
"Oh god," Rhiannon groaned. “And there are all the pictures! Oh my god.”
Rick clicked through a few more links, all more of the same, until he came to one where Kline was quoted as saying, “Good for them! Thad’s one of my best friends, and Rhiannon’s a great catch.” He clucked his tongue. “At least he got that bit right.”
“Not funny, Rick. Jill believes this. How could she believe this?”
“The photos do match the captions,” Rick said carefully. “If I hadn’t been standing there myself…”
“Don’t say that.”
“Don’t say what? That a picture is worth a thousand words?”
Rhiannon covered her mouth and started to cry. It was just a stream of tears at first, but then a sob broke through and her whole body was shaking. Rick shoved the laptop aside and stood, spinning around to grab her up in his arms. “No, no, baby, don’t cry. It’s okay. This is okay. It’s just a misunderstanding.”
