Page 67 of The Fake Out

I was kind of disgusted with myself.

But it wasn’t from Chris. It was from Piper, his publicist. And it was one sentence:

We need to talk.

TWENTY-EIGHT

At a bonfire with friends, I once had a guy ask if I had any Irish in me. I responded with no and he asked, “Would you like some?” Mind you, I was sitting on my boyfriend’s lap at the time.

He left shortly after that.

—ASHLEY H.

“We have a problem,” Piper said.

I blinked and tried to keep my attention on her, but she stood in front of an enormous stuffed moose. I mean, enormous. It had to be almost nine feet tall. How had they gotten that thing in here?

After work, I’d come right over, and had been ushered into an open living area at the Stuffed Animal House (sounded better than Creepy Taxidermy House). The room was huge with a vaulted ceiling accented with wooden beams. All dark wood and leather and so much space for critters of all kinds.

Chris nudged me with his shoulder. “Right?”

“What?”

Piper frowned. “This is serious.”

“Sorry. That moose has such sad eyes.” Like the poor guy had just wanted to decompose naturally like a dead moose should. “What’s going on?”

“One of the gossip blogs released an exclusive interview from an anonymous source who gave a tell-all about Vegas,” Piper explained, handing over her phone so I could watch.

This source was nothing more than a shadowy figure wearing a hoodie with an altered voice. He claimed to know the identity of the woman Chris was with and went on to imply the two of them were then and now “very, very, very close” and not in the brother-sister way.

“Do we know who this guy is?” I asked.

Piper’s jaw ticked. “Not a clue right now. I’m working on it.”

“You could clear this up with one statement,” Doug said. He lounged in an oversized chair covered in what I suspected was actual cowhide, an ankle resting on his knee. He had, thankfully, not been around much at all but he’d made a special trip so we could “all be on the same page.”

Ugh.

“I’m not revealing who she is, if that’s what you mean,” Chris said. I could feel how tense he was even with two feet of couch separating us.

“That’s not what I meant,” Doug continued, picking at invisible lint on his suit jacket sleeve. “I think we should go with their story. You had a little fun. Who cares? You’re a grown man. Think what it could do to your image.”

“I don’t see how that would help his image at all,” I said.

Doug shook his head in disgust. “You wouldn’t. You don’t know how these things work. But Chris here gets some notoriety and then he’s getting endorsement deals with the big companies. He’d make money, hand over fist. Instead of all this charity work or whatever the hell he wastes his time on.”

“Being bad makes him more marketable?”

“Exactly.”

I glanced at Chris, saw his jaw tighten, watched the fist resting on his knee curl. He hated this idea.

“That’s just stupid. No, absolutely not. Chris is not doing that.” I felt the weight of Chris’s gaze and wondered if I’d misread him.

Doug snorted. “It’s so very convenient that if he did do it, he wouldn’t need a fake fiancée anymore, would he? You’d be out of a job.”

I decided at that very moment that I hated Doug. I hadn’t liked him before but now we’d moved on to a different level. A level even Peter Stone had not reached. I opened my mouth to explain to him exactly where he could shove his opinion of me.