“Fine.” Although the shake in my voice said otherwise. I put one foot in front of the other and forced myself to walk to my office.
It was fine, I told myself. I’d call him and there’d be a perfectly reasonable explanation. I tried not to think about how gorgeous Stella was, or how successful, or that she could catapult his career and make his dreams come true.
All I could think about was how young she was. Practically his age. She was America’s sweetheart, and maybe the only girl on this planet his mother would approve of.
My hands shook as I held my phone and tapped his contact name.
It rang.
And rang.
Somewhere ‘Reckless’ was playing because that was the ringtone he’d chosen for me. The fourth ring was interrupted by a click, and then his sleepy voice came through. “Hey.”
“Hey!” I overcompensated, so it came out extra bright. “Sorry. Did I wake you?”
“Yeah, but that’s okay. What’s up?”
My pulse throbbed in the side of my neck. “How was your night?”
“It was great.” He sounded marginally more alert. “She gave me all these tips and told me the stuff she wished she’d known starting out. I could have listened to her talk all night.”
I’d told him to be a sponge. To do way more listening than talking, because people just starting out were weirdly overconfident and often came off as know-it-alls.
“All night?” I tried to sound nonchalant. “I heard y’all kept the place open late.” I both did and didn’t want to know the answer, so my voice was tight. “What time did you get home?
There was a fraction of a pause, but it was a fucking dagger to my heart. That microsecond was the time it took him to craft his lie.
He sounded distant. “A little after three.” He tacked it on as if it were the perfect explanation. “We were doing shots.”
“Three,” I repeated.
“Yeah. Why?”
“I asked what time you got home,” I maintained a cool veneer, “not what time you left the bar with her, Troy.”
“What?” There was rustling on the other end. Had he bolted upright in bed? It sounded like the covers were shifting around him. “What are you talking about?”
“You spent the night at Stella’s place.” I’d naïvely hoped he’d tell me I was wrong, that it wasn’t true.
But I was met with nothing but silence.
My tone was pure bitterness. “If you need help jogging your memory, go check TMZ.”
He sounded desperate. “Okay, yeah. I went back to her place, but you need to believe me—nothing happened.”
I wasn’t Erika Graham anymore because I’d become a volcano of fury. “Are you fucking kidding me? You just lied, and now you’re asking me to believe you?”
It hurt to breathe. He was supposed to be better than Clark. Troy had told me he didn’t understand people who cheated, but . . . had it just been bullshit? I should have known better. He’d lied to his mom so many times, lying had to come easy for him now. And I hadn’t just participated in lying with him, I’d actively encouraged it.
God, I was so stupid.
“Where are you?” There was louder rustling as he scurried out of bed. “Warbler? I’m coming over.”
The agent side of me stepped in and took control. “No. We’re not discussing this while I’m at work.”
His tone was gruff. “See you in twenty minutes.”
The call disconnected before I could protest. I dropped my phone onto my desktop, clenched my fists, and paced my office. The image of him leaving Stella’s house this morning was burned into my brain, but if I needed to reference it again, the notification from TMZ was right there on my lock screen.
I had no choice but to read the article, and then critically examine both his and Stella’s posts on social media to glean all the facts I could. I needed to know in case he planned to feed me more lies.
As soon as I heard heavy footsteps marching up the front porch and the main door push open, I put on a stern expression and came out of my office.
Troy looked . . . disheveled. His t-shirt had wrinkles like he’d scooped it up off his bedroom floor and pulled it on, along with the khaki shorts he wore. His hair was wild—flattened on one side and sticking up in other places. Dark circles hung beneath his tired eyes.
Despite it, he still looked so damn good to me. This rumpled styling was caused by an urgent need to see me, and it was hard not to respond to it. But the business side of me had a very different reaction.
Charlotte lifted her head and blinked in surprise. “Oh, hey, Troy.”
He didn’t acknowledge her at all. His gaze swept the room, found me, and locked on.
I flung a finger at the door he’d just come through. “Outside with me.”