Gage

I should let her go. Obviously. Not only am I showing Ellie clear favoritism, but the woman pisses me off like none other.

But she also makes me forget. She makes me forget that I’m at the center of a ridiculous farce of a TV show. Makes me forget that I’m surrounded by women who care far more about fame than they’ll ever care about me. Makes me forget my brother. Layla. The baby.

I resurface just as her foot finds the top rung of the ladder. Grabbing a handful of her soaking-wet T-shirt, I haul her back into the pool with an indelicate splash.

Her expression is murderous when she comes back up, and before I can think better of it, I reach out and rub a thumb across her cheek. “Didn’t anyone tell you to wear waterproof mascara?”

Both of her hands fly to her face, only she needs at least one to keep treading water, and she promptly starts to sink. Acting instinctively, I wrap an arm around her slim body, pulling her close. “I’ve got you.”

She responds by sweeping her arm toward me, sending a wave of water into my face as she moves once more toward the side of the pool.

But I’m right there with her, my body blocking her access to the ladder. Ellie gives me an exasperated look, one hand on the side of the pool, the other wiping the black streaks from beneath her eyes. I almost wish she wouldn’t. There’s something alluring about the imperfection, especially when paired up against the other women I’ve been stuck talking to, their perfectly styled hair, the makeup that I’m sure has been carefully selected to stay put all day.

“What are you doing?” she whispers.

I don’t know. I don’t fucking know. All I do know is that outline of her black bikini beneath the white shirt is turning me on more than the exposed flesh of the other women, and that it nearly killed me last night at dinner to ignore her completely when all I really wanted to do was figure her out—to understand why she’s so determined to leave the show as soon as possible.

I move closer to her, my lips close to her ear. “Thanks for the warning about LeAnn.”

She relaxes a little. “You’re welcome,” she says in a low voice. “But this little show’s only going to encourage her crazy plan. She’s lost your attention and she’ll want it back.”

Ellie’s right, and I’m annoyed with myself that I didn’t find time to grab one of the producers before filming started and let them know about LeAnn’s planned little stunt.

I glance up, unsurprised to see eighteen female gazes and a handful of cameras on me. Carefully ignoring the cameras, I scan until my eyes see LeAnn, who, sure enough, has a borderline crazy look in her blue eyes. She’s a pretty girl, and sort of sweet in her way, but there’s a desperation there that doesn’t bode well for any of us.

I catch her gaze and force a smile, gesturing her toward the pool. She lights up immediately.

“Good boy,” Ellie mutters under her breath, trying to move around me toward the ladder.

Instead of letting her escape, I wrap an arm around her waist and haul her back against me. “Nope. If I’m stuck in this mess, so are you.”

My arm still around her, I use my other to propel us backward in a lazy backstroke toward the shallow end, where most of the rest of the women are quickly gathering around the wide steps.

At least it would be an easy backstroke if the woman would cooperate instead of thrashing her limbs and muttering profanities. I can’t hide the grin. Ellie really doesn’t like me. Nor does she want to be here. It’s…refreshing.

Skylar, a sporty-looking woman with dark blond hair who’s less annoying than most of the rest of them, executes a perfect dive into the deep end, surfacing alongside Ellie and me with a friendly if triumphant grin.

“Hey, guys!”

“Hey,” Ellie mutters, right before digging a sharp elbow into my side. I release her, and we both can stand now that we’re in the shallow end.

I’m immediately surrounded by a dozen women all talking at once about a million topics, clearly wanting to end my alone time with Ellie in whatever way they can.

Fingers touch my shoulder, and I turn to see the hotter-than-hell Brooklyn sitting on the side of the pool. She gives me a knowing smile and extends a hand holding my sunglasses.

“Thanks,” I say with an answering smile. In addition to being gorgeous, the blonde’s normal, which is more than I can say for most of the rest of them.

As though proving my point, one of the Brittanys has wrapped herself around me, asking if I’ve ever seen her YouTube channel where she performs Broadway musicals with food puppets.

Out of the corner of my eye, I see a redheaded contestant smile sympathetically at Ellie and hand her her sunglasses. She says something to Ellie, and then they both begin moving toward the steps at the shallow end.

I watch as the redhead—damn it, what’s her name?—sits on the middle step and links arms with a still sulking LeAnn. Ellie sits on LeAnn’s other side, and I feel a rush of gratitude as I realize they’re babysitting the crazy one for a while.

It frees me up to do what the producers have instructed me to do today—pay attention to as many contestants as possible so that viewers don’t think I favor any one woman yet. I’ve been told to “keep the mystery alive” about who I care for. Not a problem. Nobody’s more in the dark about that than me.

“So, Gage…”

At the words, I turn my attention toward Jane, an aggressive woman who strikes me as the type who plans to win the competition by sheer force of will.

She smiles when I meet her eyes, although it’s not particularly friendly. She lifts her eyebrows. “We girls have all been wondering…why did you leave not one but two fiancées at the altar?”

The pool seems to go very still: the girls who were splashing each other with annoying squeals stop, and everyone else quiets down to hear my answer.

I’m not fazed—much. The producers warned me that the question would come up sooner rather than later. Hell, I wouldn’t be surprised if they’d planted the question. That is, after all, the premise of the whole show: The Runaway Groom finally finds his way to the altar.

I have no intention of marrying any of these women, but I’m also not ashamed of my past.

I unwind Brittany’s arms from my waist and casually move backward until I can hoist myself up onto the side of the pool beside Brooklyn.

“Well,” I say, nodding in thanks as someone hands me a beer, “the truth is, I never should have been engaged to either woman in the first place.”

“But you proposed to them, right?” asks Maria, a brunette who’s kept mostly to herself.

I take a sip of the beer. “To Annabel, yes.”

“I can’t believe you dated Annabel Olsen,” chirps LeAnn. “She’s the prettiest woman on the planet.”

LeAnn’s not wrong. My ex-fiancée is a supermodel who’s only grown more famous since we broke up. Hell, perhaps I give myself too much credit, but I suspect she became famous because we broke up. Not that I begrudge her any of it. The rumors are right on that account. I really did leave Annabel on our wedding day, and not a day goes by that I don’t wish I’d handled it better.

“I was twenty-three and idiotic,” I say. “Annabel and I had dated for all of two weeks before I put the ring on her finger, and it hit me there on the wedding morning when I was meeting her family for the first time that I didn’t know her. She didn’t know me. I hadn’t realized that she’d assumed we were moving back to Norway after the wedding to live near her parents; she hadn’t realized that I’d just signed a new movie deal and couldn’t do that.”

Also, everyone conveniently forgets that Annabel walked away too. In fact, she was the one who’d suggested first that we were making a mistake—but I was the one photographed speeding away in a black convertible decked out in Just Married shit…alone.

Ergo the “Runaway Groom” label, which I can’t seem to shake.

“You didn’t talk about those logistics with your fiancée before the wedding day?” asks a skeptical voice.

“Obviously not.” I turn my head to glare at Ellie, but do a double take when I see that she’s ditched the wet T-shirt and is wearing only a tiny black bikini top. I thought the wet shirt was good. This is better.

Naked would be best.

I push the thought aside. Naked Ellie isn’t in the cards for me.

“What about Valerie Blake?” one of the other women asks, referring to my second fiancée, and forcing my attention away from Ellie’s small, perfect tits. “Why didn’t you marry her?”

Because Valerie’s a raging bitch.

I don’t say this, obviously. Nobody likes a guy who trashes his ex. And the truth is, I didn’t treat Val much better than she treated me. Still, it bugs the shit out of me that I took all the heat for our non-wedding. Val and I met when filming the pilot of a crappy TV show that never got picked up. It was love at first sight—or so I thought. She was pretty and fun and didn’t take herself too seriously.

She didn’t take us too seriously either.

She’d told me the morning of our wedding that she expected us to have a discreetly open relationship—in fact, she’d been assuming we had an open relationship all along. The worst part was, she seemed shocked that I wouldn’t agree—as though she just assumed I was the sort of guy who’d welcome other men fucking my wife. Or that I’d enjoy screwing around with other women. She told me it was the way Hollywood marriages worked, and to get over myself.

I believe my exact response was, “Fuck a Hollywood marriage. I want a real marriage or no marriage at all.”

Her response? Fine. No marriage it is.

And that was that. Sort of. The trouble was, I’d already been in my tux, Val already in her designer gown. I was twenty-seven by that point, with three Killboy movies under my belt (an action series that’s my bread and butter), and just famous enough to warrant plenty of paparazzi at the wedding. They’d caught me on camera walking away from the hillside mansion we’d rented for the ceremony, and caught Val watching me from a balcony. By the next morning, I’d been labeled as the “Runaway Romeo,” her as the “Jilted Juliet.”

Valerie apparently was more concerned with her reputation than with the truth, and so she didn’t tell the media the real story. I was tempted to, definitely—especially after plenty of little old ladies came up to me on the street and swatted me with a rolled-up L.A. Times, telling me I should be ashamed of myself—but I didn’t. And the more time that passed, the less I cared.

Except I care now. My damned Runaway Groom reputation was what landed me on Jilted.

“Hello. Earth to Gage?”

I shake my head, realizing I never answered the question about Valerie aloud.

I give the women a slow grin. “Guess she wasn’t the one to tame me.”

It’s what the producers told me to say, and it works exactly as they promised. I can practically hear the women’s silent chorus of Challenge accepted.

On the other side of the pool, I see Raven waving her arm to get my attention, then she points to her watch. It’s my signal to wrap up the pool party by selecting one of the women for a stroll along the beach. Then it’ll be a meeting with the CBC team to talk about who’s going home tonight, then finally, finally a break.

I do a quick scan of the women in front of me, trying to figure out whose company I can best tolerate for the next half hour. I’m a little surprised by how much I want to choose Ellie—not because she’s easy, but because she’s the only one who makes me forget about the cameras.

Instead I select Ivy, a gorgeous pediatrician with dark brown skin and warm brown eyes. She’s on the quieter side, but not so shy that conversation will be a struggle.

The other women hide their disappointment with varying degrees of success, and I risk a quick glance at LeAnn, relieved to see that she’s arm in arm with Ellie.

I wait a second for Ellie to meet my eyes, but she doesn’t even glance back. No doubt she can’t wait to get back upstairs to pack her bags and be done with all of this.

Ivy approaches me with an expectant smile, and I grin at her, extending my hand, which she accepts readily.

I lead her down the steps toward the private beach, the cameras dogging our every step, and I wonder just how the hell I’m going to survive another month of this.