To Hate Adam Connor

When Adam sent another look at Jameson and left, I knew I was completely screwed. With just a simple kiss, he’d managed to make me forget that we weren’t alone in the room, that my ex was staring at us with the most terrible, heartbroken expression on his face.

“When did this happen, Lucy?” he asked into the silence.

There was no point in lying. “I’m not sure. Five minutes ago? A month ago?”

He walked away from me and sat down on the couch. Feeling awkward, I did the same and sat across from him.

“So you’re not pregnant.”

“No.” It was hard to gauge what he was thinking.

He linked his hands together and leaned forward, his elbows resting on his thighs. After shooting me a quick look, he sighed and admitted, “I wanted you to come with me, you know. Before I left, I thought about a thousand ways to ask you, a thousand ways that would be the right way to ask you where you’d end up saying, ‘Yes, Jameson. I want to come with you.’ But I figured you’d never say that. You’d never take a risk that big. After all, you refused to sleep in the same bed as me for months; how could you even consider moving away with me? And then I thought, maybe it shouldn’t be this hard to ask such a simple question. Maybe if it was right, if you’d wanted to come with me, you would have said something when you heard about the job offer. But you never did. So I left.”

“So you left,” I repeated his words when it became obvious he wasn’t going to continue. Maybe he was waiting for me to confirm his suspicions. I couldn’t do that. Even though I knew it would’ve made him feel better about his decisions, I couldn’t—didn’t want to lie to him. “If you’d asked, I would have come with you, Jameson.” I gave him a rueful smile. “But maybe you’re right. If it was so hard for you to ask me to come, if you had doubts about my feelings, feelings you knew were hard for me to admit, then it wouldn’t have worked out anyway.”

“I didn’t handle it well when I heard you were pregnant.”

“No, you didn’t.”

He nodded and looked out. Where had Olive and Jason disappeared to?

Then he smiled and rose up. “I’m not sure if I’m sad there is no baby or relieved.”

I pushed myself up too. “Maybe this will sound heartless to you, but I’m relieved.”

He looked surprised at my words.

“Neither one of us is ready to be a parent, Jameson. I’m not even sure if I’ll ever be.”

We shared a long moment of silence, then Jameson released a humorless laugh and rubbed his neck.

“What a mess. What a freaking mess. I thought if you ended up deciding to have the baby, I could persuade you to come to Pittsburgh with me. I thought it was a sign for me to try to ask you again…not that I did a bang-up job the first time. That’s why I came here, and not only is there no baby, you’re dating.”

“I’m not dating,” I bristled.

“What was that little show I saw then?” He gestured toward the door Adam had disappeared through.

I frowned. “It’s not like that.” But was it? What had I agreed to exactly? What did he want? Sleep in the same bed? Because even that was a big thing for me. Date? Could he even date? Be seen out in the public with me? Sex? What did ‘You’re mine then’ mean? And could you even date a movie star? How?

“I see,” Jameson murmured, and I remembered that I wasn’t alone.

Walking over to me, he put his hand on my shoulder, his eyes holding mine. That’s when I felt a trickle of emotion, something I could remember. Then without any hesitation he pushed his fingers into my hair and pressed a firm kiss on my lips. No tongue, just a last kiss filled with what ifs and apologies. It was such an unexpected move that I didn’t know how to react. He pulled back from my lips only enough that the tips of our noses were almost touching, then closed his eyes and held me to him.

“Jameson…” I whispered, putting my hand on his tattooed wrist. He let go of my hair, but didn’t back away.

“When you first told me you loved me, I felt like I’d scaled fucking mountains. He’s a lucky son of a bitch. Make him work harder; he is right, you deserve better.”

A quick kiss on my cheek, and he was gone.

Chapter Twenty-Three

Adam

That evening as I drove through the colorful city to the restaurant after getting a short text from Jason telling me where I could meet them, I was still replaying the meeting I’d had with my lawyer in my mind.

The leaked sex tape—the alleged sex tape—was apparently real. Whoever was holding the hard copy in his or her hands was trying to get the best bid for it, and to entice the parties to bid higher, they were releasing stills from the video…stills that clearly showed Adeline half-naked with a cock in her hand as she was quite literally captured swallowing it. It wasn’t the most perfect shot of her beautiful face, but it was most definitely the money shot that had all the media in a frenzy over who’d get the full video.

“We can use this,” said Laura, my lawyer. She must have seen the look on my face because she didn’t even pause before continuing. “It’s a low blow, I know, but if you’re serious about sole custody, we can use this to our advantage. Look at the time stamps; if this isn’t altered, it means she was cheating. And if it happened once, we can most likely find others. Even if there are no sex tapes, we’ll find something else. We should use this, Adam. It will make our jobs easier, trust me.”

“No. I’m not looking to drag her through the mud. She’ll have a hard enough time recovering from this enough as it is; I don’t want to dig and find something else. I’m not doing this to destroy her, Laura; I want you to keep that in mind as you proceed forward. I just want my son with me. Find another way. Dig into something else, talk to her lawyers, find another way.”

The shots weren’t altered. She had cheated on me while we were still married. I knew that for a fact because in the photos you could see her hand, and I could see a small rash on her wrist, a redness caused by an unexpected irritation from a copper bracelet she wore for a shoot. The date matched when she had that rash.

Was I surprised when I heard there was a sex tape? Can’t lie; yes, I was. Adeline…Adeline, for all her faults, had been loyal, or so I’d thought. But I was past the point of being angry about the existence of it. I couldn’t go back and change the time, change the mistakes we’d made together. It didn’t affect me anymore. She didn’t factor into my life anymore. It was her mess, and only hers. I’d already instructed everyone on my publicity team to do their best to keep me out of the whole thing. There would be no comments coming from me. No quotes.

Still, I spent the entire day ignoring every single call that came from Adeline or her assistants. My mind filled with Aiden and what this new situation would mean to him, I left my car with the valet and entered the restaurant at exactly ten past seven. I was ten minutes late thanks to LA traffic.

At first, when I didn’t see Lucy sitting next to Olive, I didn’t think anything of it, but the closer I got to their partially hidden table toward the back, the possibility of her still being with that Jameson guy dawned on me.

Had I made a mistake by leaving her with him?

Had I lost my bright light?

Jason’s head came up from Olive’s neck, and he gestured to me with his hand. Olive noticed me too and offered me a shy smile. My steps faltered before I could get to their table and ask where Lucy was because Lucy emerged from the hallway a little to the right of where her friends were sitting. She sent a beautiful, unsure smile my way.