He snorted. “Yeah, another rung on her career ladder.”
“Stop,” she snapped. “You can be mad and you can be hurt—”
“I’m not hurt,” he interrupted sharply. Jesus, that’s the last thing I need. One more person thinking he was slinking around like a lovesick swain.
“Well, she is,” Grace said firmly. “She’s dying inside.”
“Yeah, a guilty conscience can be a bitch.”
Grace gave a long-suffering sigh. “Okay, I can see this was probably a mistake. And it’s really not my place. But …”
She pulled a rolled-up magazine out of her bag and tapped it against her palm. Grace bit her lip and looked at him nervously.
His eye caught the telltale image of a high-heeled shoe on the spine of the magazine and he let out a harsh laugh. “You’ve got to be kidding me. Is that it?”
Grace gave a weak smile. “Our August issue. It won’t be out on stands for a few days, but I thought you should be the first to read it.”
The very thought made him nauseous. “So she wrote it. She actually fucking wrote it.”
He hated that the knowledge burned a hole in his gut. Hated that he’d been holding out hope that she’d cared enough about what happened
to keep it private. That deep down, she’d meant what she’d said about him being more than a story.
“She wrote about you,” Grace said softly. “But not in the way you think.”
This was bullshit. He didn’t care what kind of pretty words she used to describe her fucked-up game. His personal life was splayed all over a brainless women’s magazine, probably sandwiched between an article on Botox and one on the G-spot.
“I think you should leave,” he said, trying to keep his tone level.
Grace nodded, gathering her bag and taking another sip of her beer. “I should. But I’m leaving the magazine.”
“Great, I’ve been running low on toilet paper.”
“Don’t you dare,” she said, resting a protective hand on the glossy cover. “My best friend’s heart is between these pages. You may not owe anything to her, and I know what she did to you was wrong. But you owe it to yourself to hear her side. It may give you some peace. And need I remind you that you’re hardly an innocent party in all this? What makes what she did so different from what you did?”
I loved her. I was going to call the bet off.
Grace chugged the rest of her beer before slamming the bottle with force back on the counter and marching to the door. He didn’t see her out. He couldn’t take his eyes away from the damned magazine.
Instinct demanded that he throw it away. Even if Julie had managed to spin a pretty story and had withheld his name, it didn’t change the fact that everything they’d shared had been a sham. The article would be too.
Grabbing another beer from the fridge, he started to head toward the couch, away from the magazine. Away from all reminders of her.
Then a headline caught his eye: “Pieces of a Broken Heart.”
Surely that wasn’t her story. That couldn’t be Julie’s article. But Grace’s words echoed in his ear. She’s dying inside.
Don’t touch it, man. Do. Not. Touch. It. Mitchell reached out a hesitant hand. Fiddled with the corner of the cover.
And then he sat down and began to read.
Chapter Twenty
As if Julie needed more proof that her once cheerful, predictable life was now turned upside down, she was running.
Willingly. On a Friday night.
She should be out on the town, living it up the way Julie Greene was expected to do. It wasn’t as though she didn’t have options. Keith had called for another date. Riley and Grace had begged her to join them for dinner. Even Camille had wanted to take her for drinks to celebrate. Sales numbers for Stiletto’s August issue were in, and true to Camille’s prediction, it was one of their best-selling issues to date, even though it had been only four days since it hit the stands.