CHAPTER 24

ALICIA

I was going to kill whoever it was on the other end of that line. My phone was ringing incessantly, and I tried to ignore it, but this was the third time without any break in between that it was ringing, and ignoring it was becoming impossible.

Groaning, I rolled over, and without opening my eyes, reached for the phone. After fumbling around for a second, my fingers closed around the offending object, and I blindly slid my thumb across the screen and held it to my ear. “Hello?”

“Alicia,” Gerry’s harsh voice barked, and I flinched at the loud noise. “Thank God. I’ve been trying to reach you for ten minutes now. Where are you?”

My eyes burned as I cracked them open. “Where do you think I am? It’s four-thirty in the morning. I’m in bed.”

Even though he wouldn’t have been able to tell whose bed, I was thankful that for once, I was in my own bed. I hadn’t been five hours ago. Then, I’d been in Jared’s bed. I’d come home because I needed a decent, uninterrupted night of sleep, and that wasn’t going to happen while there.

The man was insatiable. In the week since we’d agreed to exclusivity, we’d been together most nights, and concealer was no longer living up to its name when it came to the bags I had under my eyes.

Apparently though, a decent night’s sleep was still not in the cards for me. Gerry’s impatient voice came barking through the speaker again. “When was the last time you checked Insider Scoop?”

His reference to the popular celebrity gossip site confused me. Then I was scrambling out of bed, wide awake as I realized the implications of why he would be calling to ask me that at this hour. Someone in the band must have gotten up to something last night.

“What is it? I checked it before I fell asleep, and Destitute was clean.” It was the truth to some extent. I had checked my notifications from the site before I’d fallen asleep the first time while still at Jared’s, but I hadn’t checked it since.

“Well, they’re not clean anymore. Just check the site, and get to my office in an hour. Don’t say I never warned you about them, so let the games begin. This is a nightmare. I hope you’re as good at cleaning up as you are at hyping up.”

With that ominous line, the call dropped, and I flicked on lights as I hurried to my living room where my laptop was charging. I hit the button to fire it up, and while I waited, I made a very quick cup of coffee, then carried it with me to my couch.

As I might have expected from something big enough for Gerry to pull me out of bed at this time of the morning, the dull, electronic beeps of incoming notifications and emails rang out as soon as I logged on.

Hastily opening a few tabs on my browser, I thought at first that I was still dreaming, but as I rubbed the sleep from my eyes, I knew that I wasn’t. My initial thought that one of the band members had gotten up to something last night was dead wrong.

It wasn’t one of the others, it was my very own—for the moment—Jared Larsen who was blowing up the Internet this morning. A quick scan of the headline and article that had been posted on the most widely-read gossip blog in town gave me the basic details.

A woman, a Madison Green to be precise, was claiming that she was pregnant with Jared’s child. The article had been posted just under four hours ago, and it quoted Miss Green as saying, “I’ve tried to contact him to tell him that I’m having his baby, but he’s refusing to have anything to do with me. Or with his child.”

Tears stung the backs of my eyes, and a wave of nausea rolled through me. I couldn’t believe this. Making quick mental calculations, I tried to determine whether he could have knocked her up while we were already together. Since the article didn’t say how far along she was, it was entirely possible that he had, and also absolutely impossible for me to actually calculate.

As I fought to remain calm, I remembered the promise that I’d made to myself to stop assuming the worst about him and to stop chewing him out over things he hadn’t done. I allowed myself to focus on that and felt the anger and disappointment leaving my body as I gulped in a few deep breaths.

It’s going to be okay. I had to believe that.

Even if the woman was pregnant, and on the off chance that the baby was, in fact, Jared’s, I had to believe in him and that it hadn’t been conceived after we’d started sleeping together. More than that, though, I knew in my bones that he wasn’t the kind of man who would simply blow off a woman he’d impregnated.

Sure, there was no way he was going to make an honest woman out of her or anything, but he wouldn’t refuse all contact, and he definitely wouldn’t refuse to provide for his child. My shoulders squared as I absorbed all these things I knew to be true.

I had to be there for him, both as his PR agent, and if nothing else, as his friend.

Red hot annoyance spread through me at the lies the woman was spreading, one way or the other. I wasn’t going to allow her to paint him as the next poster child for the “worthless fathers who didn’t support their kids” list. Not on my watch. Slamming down the lid on my laptop and leaving my cooling coffee behind, I headed to my bedroom to throw on some clothes.

It was time to get to work.

An hour after my rude awakening, the early light of dawn was playing softly on the ocean beyond the windows of Gerry’s office, where Jared sat next to me listening to Gerry rant and rave.

Somehow, in the midst of all this, Jared was freshly showered, and the clean, masculine smell coming off him where he sat so close to me was distracting me from Gerry’s lecture about how many times he’d warned them about the pitfalls of their lifestyle.

Looking as unshakable and impenetrable as ever, Jared was almost bored as he listened. Clad in another of his old, iconic rock shirts, sunglasses hanging from his neckline, and a worn pair of jeans, I knew that Gerry saw him as nothing but another entitled, arrogant rock star.

“Be honest with me, Jared. Do you know this woman?”

“Now you ask me that? After making me sit through all of that?” Jared folded his arms, cocked a dark eyebrow, and smiled smugly. “Yeah, I know her. Before you ask, yes. I did sleep with her. Once.”

My stomach sank a little, and irritation flared in my belly at how smugly he said it. However, his genuine exasperation and annoyance when he continued was like a soothing balm to the stinging brought on by his admission, and the tone he’d used when making it.

“She told me she was on birth control, but I used a condom, anyway. I always wrap it before I tap it, no exceptions. I’m borderline fanatic about it. Both to avoid getting some random disease, as well as avoid having to support a strange woman’s kid for the next, what? Twenty-one years?”

Gerry ran his hands through his hair, graying at the roots—it was time for him to dye it again—as he suggested. “Maybe this one time, you forgot.”

“I didn’t forget,” Jared scoffed, dismissing the possibility outright. Having personal knowledge of how dedicated Jared was to wearing condoms, regardless of the heat of the moment or the place, I tended to agree with him.

“How do you know? Maybe you were drunk or—”

Jared held up a hand to stop him and shook his head. “No. I wasn’t. I remember this chick. We were at my place after a party at Nick’s. I wasn’t that drunk, and I specifically remember her begging me to leave the condom off. It was a bit of a fucking turn off, and it was definitely her.”

“If that’s true, then why is she coming after you?”

“I don’t know.” Jared shrugged. “She showed up at my house a couple of days later and tried to seduce me, then got all pissed when I refused her. I think this whole thing might be a shakedown by a slightly obsessed fan who may or may not still be holding a grudge.”

“Why didn’t I know about this?” I asked him, but there was no distrust or judgment in my voice.

His eyes cut to mine. It didn’t look like he was hiding anything when he answered me. “It all happened before I even met you. I think it was maybe a week or so before you came on board. By the time I met you, I didn’t think I’d ever see her again. There was never any reason to bring her up.”

“Okay,” I said.

His brow furrowed a little, but he nodded. “I’m telling you, if this woman is pregnant, the kid’s not mine,” Jared concluded, dropping his chin as if waiting for Gerry to contradict him.

I didn’t know which one of the two of us was more surprised when the contradiction didn’t come, nor did any more questions. Gerry shifted in his seat and focused his attention on me. “This is what we’re going to do. You’re going to spin it as a full-frontal assault by an obsessed stalker, and I’m going to round up Ted and his team. We’ll demand blood tests and take it from there.”

I nodded and started to rise from my seat when Gerry stopped me. “One last thing. Here’s a picture of her. Take it with you. We’ll both have to make sure that security everywhere he goes, knows that she’s not to come within spitting distance of him.”

Sliding the picture over his desk, I picked it up, and while I didn’t actually want to know what any of Jared’s previous conquests looked like, I was going to have to see this one eventually. My eyes dropped to the photograph I was holding, and to my great surprise, it wasn’t jealousy that flared in me at the sight of the undoubtedly beautiful woman I was staring at, but recognition.

I knew her from somewhere. I just couldn’t quite place her.