The shrill ringing of my cell phone jarred me from a soundless sleep, waking me with a jolt of surprise.

“Christ. It’s too fuckin’ early,” Declan mumbled from beside me before rolling to his other side.

He wasn’t wrong about that. The clock on my bedside table showed it was barely eight in the morning. It was the day after the Seattle concert, and we’d been up way too late, both of us jazzed beyond belief after the show. It had taken hours, and tons of physical exertion, before we’d been able to work the adrenaline out of our systems and fall asleep.

“’Lo?” I answered sleepily, barely able to keep my eyes open as I collapsed back into the bed.

“Tatum Valentine!” my father boomed through the line. “Is it true?”

At my dad’s loud, livid voice, I shot up to sitting, the action stirring Declan and making him wake up too. “Dad? What’s going on? Is everything okay?”

“No, everything is not okay. Your mom’s about to lose her mind with all those vultures tramping all over the goddamn lawn. One bastard crushed her azaleas and, swear to Christ, I thought she was gonna go for the shotgun in the closet.”

“Dad. Stop,” I demanded, his belligerent early morning rantings having begun to worry me. Did he have a stroke or something? Was that why he wasn’t making a bit of sense? “Start over. Who’s in the yard crushing Mom’s azaleas?”

“Those goddamn reporters and… what do you call them, paparazzi? Or is that singular? Is the plural paparazzo, or am I mixing that up?”

“Reporters?” I squeaked loudly. At that I felt Declan move. He snatched his jeans from the night before off the floor and pulled them up, only bothering with the zipper and leaving the button to hang open. He pulled his phone from the pocket and started hitting buttons before putting it to his ear and stomping from the room.

I held the sheet to my naked chest as my father continued to rage through the line. “The reporters demanding answers to questions I know nothing about! Apparently you and that… that man are all over the TV and papers this morning. For fuck’s sake, Tate, what’s going on? Are you okay?”

“I have no clue what’s going on,” I answered, shaking my head to try and make sense of the conversation. “I only just woke up. I haven’t even turned on the TV!”

“Well don’t!” he shouted almost hysterically. “Just… just don’t, baby girl. Let his people take care of it. Doesn’t he have people for shit like this?”

“Yeah, me!” I cried. “I’m one of the ones for shit like this! Whatever this is.”

“Well let someone else pick up the torch for this round. Your mom and I are coming up. She’s determined, said you’d need your mom for this. But we won’t get in ’til late tonight. You know how she is about flying, so we have to drive.”

“Dad. Dad, just… hold on.” I pinched the bridge of my nose, trying desperately to keep up and not freak out. “We’re leaving for Europe in two days.”

“Yeah, well your mother won’t be put off until she sees you for herself. You might be a grownup, but you’re still our baby girl, and she needs to put her finger on your pulse. Don’t take that from her, sweetheart.”

“Okay,” I sighed, feeling a serious migraine coming on. “Fine. Call me when you guys hit the road.”

“We’re actually about to head out the door in the next thirty minutes.”

“All right. Just be careful, okay?”

“Will do, honey. Love you.”

“I love you too, Daddy. See you soon.”

As soon as I hung up, Declan came prowling back into the room with a face like thunder.

“What the hell is going on?” I shouted, jumping out of the bed. Too disconcerted to bother searching for clothes, I snatched my panties and his shirt from the floor and slid both on.

“Don’t freak out,” he started, holding his palms up, “but there’s a minor situation.”

“Don’t freak out?” I yelled, throwing my arms up. “Declan, whatever the fuck’s happening is bad enough that my folks are getting in their car this morning and driving fourteen hours because my mom said, according to my dad, that she needs to take my pulse! I’m already in full-blown freak-out, so you better start talking!”

“Just breathe, baby,” he attempted to soothe, coming over and rubbing his hands down my arms. “We’ll get this fixed. I called Brenda while you were talking to your dad. She’s already on it. We just have to wait this out.”

“Wait what out?” I gritted between clenched teeth.

He hesitated for a few seconds, like he was terrified to tell me. “There’s… a story floating around. And some pictures. But they’re all bullshit lies and, like I said,” he added quickly, “we’ll fix it.”

“What story.”

“Baby. You don’t—”

“What story!”

He inhaled deeply before speaking again. “Someone leaked a story about us, how we grew up together and that we dated for years. Whoever it was had some serious inside information, because they had details of that night in Australia that I don’t even remember. And….” He looked like he was going to be physically sick as he said, “There are pictures.”

My blood turned to ice. “Of that night?”

He swallowed audibly, looking anywhere but at my face. “Me and… those women. And… the coke.”

“Oh my God!” I shouted in outrage. “Someone took pictures of you that night?” It wasn’t until right then that I realized my fury wasn’t directed at Declan, but for him. I hadn’t even considered the heartbreak of that night, I was too fixated on the fact that someone who was supposed to have been there for him had betrayed him so badly. “What an asshole! When I find out who did that, I’m going to—”

“Baby,” he whispered, panic-stricken. “That’s not all.”

My stomach plummeted to the floor. “Tell me.”

“They said some stuff. About you and Camden—”

I didn’t even give him a chance to finish before I was out the bedroom door. I went straight for my laptop, sitting closed on the kitchen bar, and threw it open.

“Tate, don’t.”

My head whipped around in his direction, my hair flying everywhere. “They’re saying shit about me. I want to know.”

I didn’t know until I started reading, that I’d been horribly wrong about that. The story, full of ugly lies, was the first thing that popped up when I typed Declan’s name in the Google search bar. Hell, it was the number one story on every link on the first page. I didn’t bother scrolling to see just how far that went.

Clicking on the celebrity gossip site’s link, the first thing that loaded was a big picture of me and Camden hugging each other at the video shoot.

The headline was the most humiliating part.

The article went on to detail my relationship with Declan, from our teens all the way to when the band hit it big. It talked about his cheating, and included multiple pixelated pictures of him in the act with the two women. Seeing their faces again was like a wound being ripped back open. Even after all these years I never forgot what the looked like.

There were even some with black stripes covering the cocaine, but it was clear as day what Declan was doing in them.

It talked about our subsequent breakup, and personally named me as the muse for so many of Civil Corruption’s hate-fueled songs, including their latest release, “Soulless.”

They posted a photo of the band performing the song at the AMAs months back, and right beside that was one with me laughing and smiling up at Camden. Then the story went on about how I came back into rock star Declan Forrester’s life, making him believe that we could start over, when it was really just a scheme to get him back for breaking my heart a decade before.

When I started reading about how the band had wrongfully terminated their former manager, Chris Evers, because I’d come back, begging for the job, even going so far as using sex as an incentive, I felt my stomach roil violently. It claimed that the rumors being spread about him and the band’s former assistant targeting Garrett Wilder’s now-wife, Gwen, were fabrications I’d created to tarnish his name in an attempt to secure my position within the band’s inner circle.

Then there was a collage of images of me and Camden, the site claiming they had inside information that not only had I gotten an innocent man fired and blackballed in the industry, but that I was not-so-secretly sleeping with Cam behind Declan’s back to punish him for cheating in the past.

“Holy shit,” I gasped, covering my mouth to keep from getting sick once I reached the end.

“Tatum—”

“Holy shit! I can’t believe…. This is total bullshit!” I yelled, slamming my laptop shut. “How can they say this?” I demanded, whirling around on the barstool to face Declan. “They made me the bad guy! They brushed over your cheating like it was nothing more than a young kid making a tiny mistake and made me the villain! What the fuck?”

“Tate, sweetheart, you need to calm down.”

“Easy for you to say!” I snapped, jumping off the stool so I could begin pacing. “It painted you as the poor misunderstood victim who made one bad call and me as the evil, obsessed bitch hell-bent on getting back at you ten years later! They accused me of trying to humiliate Gwen, for Christ’s sake! And they totally smeared my friendship with Cam.” I raked my hands through my hair, tugging the strands so hard my scalp stung.

“The press is already eating this shit up. They’re hounding my parents. They crushed my mother’s azaleas!” I ended on a high-pitched squeak. “Oh my God! It was Chris,” I exclaimed, the puzzle pieces finally falling together. “It has to be.” I was full-on manic as I continued to ramble. “Think about it. That asshole hated me. He was always trying to get rid of me. This has his slimy name written all over it!”

“I’m going to put in a call to Ian right now. He’ll find out who leaked this goddamn story, and these pictures, and we’ll get it taken care of.”

I stopped mid-pace, spinning around to face him, suddenly furious that he wasn’t instantly agreeing with me. My emotions were all over the place, so scattered that I couldn’t think. All I could do was react. “You know I’m right,” I hissed. “It was him, Deck.”

“You probably are—”

“Probably?” I was quickly coming unraveled, and I was completely helpless to stop it.

“I’m just saying—”

“That you don’t believe me,” I cut in. I knew I was being unfair, that I was putting words in his mouth, but it was as if I’d become disconnected from my body and was hovering above, watching everything play out and unable to stop any of it.

His muscles locked tight and his jaw began ticking. “I didn’t fucking say that. I believe you. You know I do. I’m just trying to be rational here.”

I was blaming him for something that wasn’t his fault, and I knew I needed to take a step back before I did or said something I couldn’t take back.

“I need to make some phone calls. I have to try and get this taken care of before my parents get here and all hell breaks loose.”

He watched me silently for a solid minute, studying my face like he’d never seen me before. “What are you saying?”

“Please. Just give me some time, okay?”

“Tate, no.”

“Declan, please!” I snapped, a sudden rush of tears threatening to burst forth. “I just need to be by myself for a little while, okay? I need to be alone.”

I said it in such a way that he couldn’t possibly argue with me without it turning into a huge fight. He finally left a few minutes later, but not before making it known that it was the last thing he wanted to do. And once I was alone, I let the tears fall and the humiliation and anger wash over me. The happiness, the feeling of being complete that had warmed my heart for the past few days splintered into a million tiny shards, and the black hole of sadness I was so familiar with returned once more.

I should’ve known it wouldn’t last.