Total pages in book: 123
Estimated words: 117177 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 586(@200wpm)___ 469(@250wpm)___ 391(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 117177 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 586(@200wpm)___ 469(@250wpm)___ 391(@300wpm)
“Oh, you’re being a jealous girlfriend. But you also are so within your right to want to kill him for this.”
My heart pounded at Althea’s confirmation. What Chris had done here was shitty and wrong. I’d barely left the apartment this morning when my phone buzzed with a text from Althea with a link to an article in the same gossip rag that posted the photos of Chris and me in Central Park.
Except this time, their speculation wasn’t over me and Chris. It was over him and Darcy.
“Nothing is going on here, right?” Althea laid a comforting hand on my shoulder.
As furious as I was with Chris for lying to me about this event and the reason I couldn’t come, I knew in my gut that his duplicity wasn’t about cheating. Chris wasn’t a cheater. I refused to believe he had that level of disloyalty in him after everything we’d talked about.
“Not overtly,” I answered, holding back the sting of tears. “He told me she was at the event, that they spent some time together, but this looks like more than that, right?”
“Maybe. Maybe not. The papers will say anything.”
Splashed across several New York gossip rags this morning were photographs of Chris and Darcy at his father’s event on Saturday night. Headlines speculated Darcy had broken her engagement off for Chris and the two of them were back together. An anonymous source said they’d been spending lots of time together these past few weeks and that his relationship with me had just been a casual thing. Boy, did that burn, even if it was bullshit.
That Darcy had one arm draped around Chris’s shoulder and her other hand resting intimately on his stomach, while his hand sat low on her spine didn’t help. Their whole body language was way too cozy for my liking. I could be forgiven for thinking they’d just met on the red carpet, but there was also a photo from inside the event, and Darcy was sitting next to Chris at a table I knew as a planner would be assigned.
Like she was his date.
Was I not good enough to attend a fancy charity award ceremony?
While he’d been much more present with me lately, I thought of his preoccupied behavior before that and how his excuse that it was because of his book never really sat right.
My old insecurities started eating away at me.
“Hallie?”
I blinked owlishly up at my friend. “The papers are wrong. At least . . . they’re premature.”
Althea bit out a curse.
“It’s okay.” I reached for her hand and squeezed it. “Let’s not jump to conclusions until I talk to him. Okay, until I yell at him and then talk to him.”
* * *
By the time I got off the subway that evening, I’d worked myself into quite a furor. Chris hadn’t called all day, even though he must have been alerted to the online attention. I had six missed calls from my mom, but nothing from my boyfriend! That he was avoiding me panicked me into thinking maybe the gossip wasn’t far from the truth. I mean, Chris and Darcy had certainly looked the part of a couple.
Everyone and their grandmother seemed to think so.
It was a surprise then to find Chris in my apartment, typing away on my laptop. He lifted his head, wearing the reading glasses that made him even sexier somehow, and grinned in greeting. “Hey, gorgeous.” He got up from the couch, removing the glasses. “How has your day been?”
Because I was a masochist, I’d bought a physical copy of one of the more well-known papers. I smacked it against his chest. “You tell me!”
Chris’s eyebrows practically hit his hairline as he caught the paper. “What the . . .”
“Why didn’t you call me about this?” I slammed my purse down on my kitchen counter before opening the cupboard that housed my wineglasses. “Something to hide?”
“I didn’t call because I still can’t find my phone. I think I might have left it at your mom’s.”
I thought of those six missed calls. Maybe they were about Chris’s phone and not the articles. Or probably both. We’d had lunch with her yesterday and she’d been great. She made very few nitpicky comments about me and actually seemed to be protective of me, almost interrogating Chris. I’d expected her to be all over him and make me feel like he was too good for me. Afterward, I’d felt bad for thinking that of her because she’d been perfectly nice. That’s why I hadn’t answered her calls, because I didn’t want her to say something to me like, Well, I didn’t want to say it, but this was to be expected.
“Oh.”
“Yeah, oh. Why are you so pi— Ah, I see.”
Grabbing a bottle of wine, I tried not to slam it and the glass down on the counter as I faced him. He scowled at the half-page article on him and Darcy. The pulse in my neck throbbed, and my palms were clammy as I tried to open my bottle of wine.