“Thank you.” The tension in my entire body went lax at once.

“I’ll always love you, Ben.”

“I know.”

“If anything ever changes between you and Emmy . . .”

“It won’t. Good-bye Fiona.”

“Bye,” she murmured.

I wasn’t going to be a father. A sense of relief washed over me. Fiona was out of my life and I was free.

I dialed Emmy the moment I pulled myself together.

“Baby!” I couldn’t contain the excitement in my voice.

“Hi there. What’s going on?” she chuckled softly at my enthusiasm.

“I have some news.”

“Oh yeah? Everything okay?”

“Everything is better than okay. It’s fan-fucking-tastic, actually.”

She giggled. “Okay, so now I’m intrigued. What is it?”

“Two things actually.” I knew I was drawing this out, torturing her, but Christ, we’d waited so long to hear this news, I didn’t know how to just blurt it out. “I just talked to Fiona. I’m not the father.”

Silence.

“Emmy? Did you hear me?”

“Yes,” she whispered. I could imagine she was shaky and breathless, just like I’d been when I’d heard. “Oh my God, you don’t know what a relief this is.”

“Trust me, babe. I do.”

“Ben . . .”

“I know, baby. I know. We can finally be together.”

“I love you,” she said. I could hear the smile in her voice.

“I love you more.”

“Wait, you said you had something else to tell me.”

“Yeah, I told Fiona that I was leaving Status. As of today, it’s you and me, babe.”

“That’s wonderful, Ben. I’m proud of you.”

Hearing her say those words meant everything. After all I’d done to jeopardize things with her, apparently I was doing something right, too.

“I have news, too,” she said, her voice teasing.

“Spill it, Tennessee.”

“Guess what I’m doing right now?”

“What, baby?”

“Packing. I decided to move in.”

Damn. This day was getting better and better. “You won’t regret it. I’ll be your love slave and take care of your every need.”

“Hmm . . . I like that. Will you even go to the pharmacy and buy me tampons when I need them?”

If that’s all it took to make her happy, I’d gladly do that and more. “You know it, baby.”

I wished I’d been there to tell her in person, but she and Ellie were having a girls night tonight, and I wanted to be respectful of her time with her friend. “Can I take you out this weekend to celebrate?”

“That sounds perfect.”


Emmy

My life had turned into a damn episode of Maury. But Fiona’s plan backfired in the best way possible. Ben was not the father. After he’d called and told me, I’d collapsed into a heap on the floor, sucking in deep breaths like they were my first after being underwater too long. I hadn’t realized how tense the whole situation had made me.

I felt as though a weight had been lifted from my shoulders, from our relationship, and it was terrific. And the happiness in Ben’s voice was unmistakable, too. Thank God. Now we could finally move forward. And the icing on the cake was that he’d decided to separate from Status Models, from Fiona, and to work as a free agent. I would help him book jobs and he’d no longer be represented by her. He thought it was for the best, given all the drama over the past several months, and I couldn’t agree more.

Everything was falling into place. I felt happy and secure with my job, our relationship, and even though I felt a little bad about moving out on Ellie, she understood and was happy for me.

Just as I was stuffing the last of my clothes into a suitcase, Ellie entered my bedroom. Her face was masked in a frown. I knew she’d been upset about guys lately, but I’d never seen her so down. “Ells?”

“Honey, you need to come here.” Her tone was deadly serious and I wondered what in the world had happened as I followed her to the living room. She went to her laptop and began loading some type of video.

“What’s this?” I asked completely dumbfounded about what we were doing watching some random video.

“You might want to sit down,” she said.

I smiled uncertainly but lowered myself into a chair. “Ellie?”

Ellie pressed a button and the video began to play. My eyes struggled to comprehend the grainy images I was seeing.

I watched everything come into focus and . . . Holy Fuck! A naked couple was on the screen. He was going down on her and she was grinding against his face and moaning. The muscular back. His dark hair. There was something so familiar about it.

And then all at once I recognized him. Ben.

And the girl he was with was startlingly familiar, too.

Oh God. London.

He inserted two fingers inside her and she promptly came, calling out his name. He slid up her body and positioned himself at her entrance before pushing forward.

This wasn’t happening. This wasn’t real. No.

“It can’t be,” I whispered. He wouldn’t. Would he? I leapt from my seat and began pacing the living room.

Ellie watched me with a worried stare.

Holy God. I felt like all the oxygen had been vacuumed from the room and my lungs were crying out for air. I curled my arms around my chest and sucked in a deep breath. Tears escaped from my eyes and rolled down my cheeks. No. God, no. This couldn’t be recent. Could it?

“Emmy,” Ellie caught me just as my legs gave out and guided me to the floor. I collapsed into a boneless heap, legs splayed and arms clutching to myself as I slowly began to rock back and forth.

“No, no, nooo . . .” I muttered quietly, snapping my eyes shut. “Turn it off.”

Ellie obeyed, leaving my side only briefly to click the pause button on her laptop.

It didn’t matter, though. The images were burned into my retinas. There’d be no unseeing the way Ben’s hips rocked into her, the way his fingers laced with hers above her head, a move he’d used on me, too. There’d be no unhearing the low growl in his throat when he entered her. Tears freely streamed down my cheeks and a silent sob broke from my chest.

Ellie sunk to the floor next to me and wrapped an arm around my shoulders. “I’m sorry. I just thought you needed to know.”

“How did you find it?” I asked, through hiccupping tears.

“It’s the top news story on every celebrity gossip site today.”

I clutched my heart, gasping for air, and prayed it didn’t give out on me completely. All the things we’d been through . . . every hurdle . . . now none of it mattered. Ben had betrayed me.

I realized Ellie was still talking about the video and I wiped away streams of tears and tried to focus on what she was saying.

“I don’t know how it got leaked, or when it’s from, but they’re saying the girl in the video is his ex . . .”

“London. I know her,” I croaked. “She was in Fiji with us . . .”An unwelcome thought slipped into my brain. Had he cheated on me when we were in Fiji?

“Yeah. London Burke. A model, apparently . . .” Ellie gave my shoulder a gentle squeeze. “Hey, you okay?” Her sympathetic look was too much. I saw in her eyes how foolish I’d been to trust Ben all these times. To give him all these second chances.

“No.” Of course I wasn’t okay. I doubted I’d ever be okay again. Ben had ruined me. Ruined me for all other men. For future trusting relationships. And my heart still yearned for him, stupidly enough.

“Vodka? Chocolate? A blowtorch to fry his balls? What do you need?”

“Nothing. I just don’t want to be alone right now.”

“You got it, babe.”

I crawled from the living room floor and onto my bed, sinking into the soft mattress. Somehow I was exhausted. Emotionally and mentally drained.

She pulled the blankets up around me and turned off the lights before crawling in beside me. Just having her weight on the mattress next to me was enough to make me not feel so alone.

“Maybe it wasn’t even him, sweetie. I mean, it looked like him, but you never know. . . .” Ellie said, softly rubbing my back.

“It was him.” I knew it with absolute certainty. I recognized everything about the possessive way he fucked, the way his body moved, his measured strokes, the strong muscles in his back. There was no trying to pretend it wasn’t him. “She called out his name, Ellie. It was him.”

God, the whole world had seen my boyfriend naked and in all his glory. Or was he my ex-boyfriend now? That realization stung more than anything. But what else was I supposed to think? He’d filmed a video with London, and even if it was in the past, he should have told me. Warned me. Prepared me. Not let me stumble across it on the Internet like everyone else.

His profession already ensured I had to share him with the world. Anyone could Google him and see him in his underwear, or in any number of provocative poses, but this was way too much to handle. I wasn’t cut out for this life. I didn’t want a boyfriend who was a celebrity, a media target, or one with so many salacious secrets. It wasn’t healthy.

The niggling feeling in my gut was back in full force. This relationship wasn’t going to work. As much as I’d try to force it, to prove to myself that Ben fit into my life, this was the universe’s way of showing me it wouldn’t ever work. I needed to cut my losses now. But first, I wanted to lose myself in grief. Slamming my eyes closed to force away the images of him with another woman, I curled into a ball and quietly sobbed. I sobbed for what I’d seen, and I sobbed for my poor smashed-up heart. It’d never recover. I knew I’d always live with Ben in there and the realization terrified me.

17