“But you proposed to them, right?” asks Maria, a brunette who’s kept mostly to herself.
I take a sip of the beer. “To Annabel, yes.”
“I can’t believe you dated Annabel Olsen,” chirps LeAnn. “She’s the prettiest woman on the planet.”
LeAnn’s not wrong. My ex-fiancée is a supermodel who’s only grown more famous since we broke up. Hell, perhaps I give myself too much credit, but I suspect she became famous because we broke up. Not that I begrudge her any of it. The rumors are right on that account. I really did leave Annabel on our wedding day, and not a day goes by that I don’t wish I’d handled it better.
“I was twenty-three and idiotic,” I say. “Annabel and I had dated for all of two weeks before I put the ring on her finger, and it hit me there on the wedding morning when I was meeting her family for the first time that I didn’t know her. She didn’t know me. I hadn’t realized that she’d assumed we were moving back to Norway after the wedding to live near her parents; she hadn’t realized that I’d just signed a new movie deal and couldn’t do that.”
Also, everyone conveniently forgets that Annabel walked away too. In fact, she was the one who’d suggested first that we were making a mistake—but I was the one photographed speeding away in a black convertible decked out in Just Married shit…alone.
Ergo the “Runaway Groom” label, which I can’t seem to shake.
“You didn’t talk about those logistics with your fiancée before the wedding day?” asks a skeptical voice.
“Obviously not.” I turn my head to glare at Ellie, but do a double take when I see that she’s ditched the wet T-shirt and is wearing only a tiny black bikini top. I thought the wet shirt was good. This is better.
Naked would be best.
I push the thought aside. Naked Ellie isn’t in the cards for me.
“What about Valerie Blake?” one of the other women asks, referring to my second fiancée, and forcing my attention away from Ellie’s small, perfect tits. “Why didn’t you marry her?”
Because Valerie’s a raging bitch.
I don’t say this, obviously. Nobody likes a guy who trashes his ex. And the truth is, I didn’t treat Val much better than she treated me. Still, it bugs the shit out of me that I took all the heat for our non-wedding. Val and I met when filming the pilot of a crappy TV show that never got picked up. It was love at first sight—or so I thought. She was pretty and fun and didn’t take herself too seriously.
She didn’t take us too seriously either.
She’d told me the morning of our wedding that she expected us to have a discreetly open relationship—in fact, she’d been assuming we had an open relationship all along. The worst part was, she seemed shocked that I wouldn’t agree—as though she just assumed I was the sort of guy who’d welcome other men fucking my wife. Or that I’d enjoy screwing around with other women. She told me it was the way Hollywood marriages worked, and to get over myself.
I believe my exact response was, “Fuck a Hollywood marriage. I want a real marriage or no marriage at all.”
Her response? Fine. No marriage it is.
And that was that. Sort of. The trouble was, I’d already been in my tux, Val already in her designer gown. I was twenty-seven by that point, with three Killboy movies under my belt (an action series that’s my bread and butter), and just famous enough to warrant plenty of paparazzi at the wedding. They’d caught me on camera walking away from the hillside mansion we’d rented for the ceremony, and caught Val watching me from a balcony. By the next morning, I’d been labeled as the “Runaway Romeo,” her as the “Jilted Juliet.”
Valerie apparently was more concerned with her reputation than with the truth, and so she didn’t tell the media the real story. I was tempted to, definitely—especially after plenty of little old ladies came up to me on the street and swatted me with a rolled-up L.A. Times, telling me I should be ashamed of myself—but I didn’t. And the more time that passed, the less I cared.
Except I care now. My damned Runaway Groom reputation was what landed me on Jilted.
“Hello. Earth to Gage?”
I shake my head, realizing I never answered the question about Valerie aloud.
I give the women a slow grin. “Guess she wasn’t the one to tame me.”
It’s what the producers told me to say, and it works exactly as they promised. I can practically hear the women’s silent chorus of Challenge accepted.
On the other side of the pool, I see Raven waving her arm to get my attention, then she points to her watch. It’s my signal to wrap up the pool party by selecting one of the women for a stroll along the beach. Then it’ll be a meeting with the CBC team to talk about who’s going home tonight, then finally, finally a break.
I do a quick scan of the women in front of me, trying to figure out whose company I can best tolerate for the next half hour. I’m a little surprised by how much I want to choose Ellie—not because she’s easy, but because she’s the only one who makes me forget about the cameras.
Instead I select Ivy, a gorgeous pediatrician with dark brown skin and warm brown eyes. She’s on the quieter side, but not so shy that conversation will be a struggle.
The other women hide their disappointment with varying degrees of success, and I risk a quick glance at LeAnn, relieved to see that she’s arm in arm with Ellie.
I wait a second for Ellie to meet my eyes, but she doesn’t even glance back. No doubt she can’t wait to get back upstairs to pack her bags and be done with all of this.