I didn’t want to look at her. It was immature and silly, but I was feeling angry with her, angry for being Juliet. For being gorgeous, for being famous. And I knew that was unfair but it was an old jealousy. Maybe it was in my DNA. I took a deep breath, reminding myself that this was my sister. I loved her. And I didn’t see her enough. “Sure.” My voice wasn’t as friendly as I’d intended it to be.
“Are you okay?” She stepped closer, dipping her head to catch my gaze.
I pasted on a smile. “Fine. What’s up?”
“Uh, well … It feels wrong misleading you,” she began.
I felt my forehead wrinkle. Misleading me? I knew there was something she was hiding. Was she going to tell me about the blackmail rumor? About whatever had her staring off into space distractedly? “What?”
“Ryan and I agreed that we should tell you the truth.”
Oh God. I braced myself. What did she mean? Were they pregnant? Had they eloped or something? I had no idea what she could be about to say. “Okay,” I said, my voice barely a whisper.
“We aren’t really together.” The words hung in the air between us while I tried to sort through them and force them to make sense. I’d just watched a video in which they were very much together.
In which his hand and her breast were definitely together.
Where their lips were so together it was stomach-turning.
I stared at her, open-mouthed. They’d been rolling around on the lawn just moments before, the photographer telling them how in love they looked, how sexy the shots were. “What?”
“We’re faking it. As a distraction for the press.”
What? I shook my head slowly, letting the words process. Confusion and relief chased each other through my mind and words flitted away, lost to the murk in my mind. Luckily, Juliet kept talking so I didn’t have to.
“Zac is blackmailing me with a video he has of us. A sex tape. He’s saying if I don’t agree to his divorce terms, then he’ll release it. My lawyers are working on it, but I’ve pretty much told them to go ahead and give him whatever he wants. The press has been all over it, talking about my shitty deal and looking for reasons why I’d agree to it. I needed a distraction. I needed something for them to focus on besides the complete train wreck that was my marriage.”
“Oh.” I tried to find other words to say, but my mind was spinning around all the information she’d just given me. My first reaction was to be hurt that she’d treated me just like the press—lied to me as if I wasn’t part of the inner circle, couldn’t be trusted. Then again, she was telling me now. And the strange complicated life my sister led was what made her feel she needed to lie to me.
“I could never live in your world,” I told her. It was true. That any of this made rational sense to her was beyond me. I could never handle having to make choices like these, having to pick which aspect of my life I wanted splashed all over the tabloids.
She winced slightly, but she brushed off my comment with a little shrug. “I needed someone to help me, and Ryan is a good guy. We worked on that movie together and I knew he might need …” she trailed off and pulled her bottom lip between her teeth. “I knew he could use the lift. It was my agent’s idea, really.”
“The lift?”
“His career’s been flagging. His last couple movies didn’t do well. He was slipping.”
“And being linked romantically to you will help him?”
She had the grace to blush, but she nodded confirmation. “My agent thinks she can get him onto the next film I’m doing—it’s a romantic suspense and they want an action lead for the romantic hero. We kind of made a deal.”
“He acts like he loves you and you get him the job that will make him a star?” I understood the idea fundamentally, but I hadn’t decided yet if it was just business, or if there was some kind of moral deficit in someone who might make a deal like that.
She sighed. “Basically. It’s just business.”
So Juliet didn’t see any moralistic side to the deal. She wasn’t worried about it beyond whatever specifics they’d agreed upon. Maybe it really wasn’t my business either.
“Man,” I breathed. Could the rules that governed behavior in Hollywood really be so different than those in the rest of the world? Still, I didn’t really blame my sister. She understood her world—that was how she’d gotten to the top. But I hated the idea of career success being based on manipulating other people’s feelings. Mine included. I was disappointed in her, and I was trying to figure out if I had any right to feel that way. I wasn’t in her shoes—in her life. “Okay,” I said. “Well, thanks for telling me, I guess.”
“Ryan didn’t want to lie to you.” She squeezed my arm and smiled. “And neither did I.” Juliet turned and headed back outside, leaving me standing there, reeling.
Ryan didn’t want to lie to you.
The power those last words had over me was frightening, and they left me shaking slightly as I repeated them in my head. Why did Ryan care what I thought? Ryan was a movie star. He was a guy who went around flirting with and touching anyone he liked because he knew the power he had over people. He was a guy who’d link himself to a starlet in a false sexual relationship just to get ahead. Didn’t that make him kind of a dirty asshole? Or was it like Juliet said—was he a nice guy? In a world where the rules were so very different, was that the kind of thing nice guys did?
Ryan didn’t want to lie to you.
Most importantly, why did Ryan feel like I needed to know the truth?
I was
